Tag Archives: Better Than Dead

Contents Vol. 3 No. 4

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Four of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

In this issue of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine, Colin Deerwood’s long running 40’s pulp detective serial, Better Than Dead, Phyllis Huldarsdottir’s steampunk Cheése Stands Alone, and Pierre Anton Taylor’s crime fighting Just Coincidence, combine to give the reader their dime’s worth of Serial Pulp Fiction!

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial, Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations. Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above.

If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the links below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Three, Number 4

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from monthly issues to once every forty-five days. Thus Volume Three will consist of eight issues (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

“Lackland Ask is the name. ‘Lack’ to my friends, ‘Don’t’ to those who think they’re funny. You might have seen my portrait on the cover of Black Mask, the crime fiction magazine. This is my story. It starts with a blonde. This kind of story always starts with a blonde.” Thus begins the seemingly non-stop, endless narrative of Better Than Dead in which women are not the only trouble although most of it, told with the wit and street savvy of Runyon and Parker.

Better Than Dead—26

In March of 1892, a Scotsman by the name of Arthur C. “Artie” Doyle was hanged by the neck until dead after being found guilty of a string of grisly murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel. At that moment, history veered off its presumed course and headed in a direction all its own in which the Great War never happened because the Kaiser was afraid of offending his grandmother, Queen Victoria, whose life has been prolonged by the wonders of biology. Her reign, known as the Pax Victoriana has lasted 180 years maintaining as many Victorian airs as possible while making accommodations to rapid advances in bio technology. Cheése Stands Alone poses a steampunk question, can Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) find her father, the antigovernment turncoat and radical, Commodore Jack “Wild Goose” Cheése. And furthermore, will her quest take her around the globe and through alternate world histories in the requisite 80 days or is it the beginning of a lifelong journey?

Cheése Stands Alone IX

In Just Coincidence, a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father. A personal coincidence brings together dark prince and dark knight joined in a fateful and tragic quest for justice.

Act Two, Scene 2, Part 1

Better Than Dead—26

June 6, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionA Detective Story, Better Than Dead, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Lackland Ask, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

by Colin Deerwood

The phone was ringing in the hall. Ringing. I could hear it. Ringing. I could see it. Ringing. In my mind’s eye. Ringing. In a smokey pool hall. Ringing. Why wasn’t anyone answering the ringing? I would have answered but the room I was in had no doors, just four walls of cheap wallpaper and scratched up wainscotting. The ringing wouldn’t let up. The smoke was making my eyes weep blood. I had to force them open to the faintest slits. That’s when it hit me like a bucket of cold water. The bucket of cold water.

Standing over me with an empty bucket and an impish grin was the moonshiner’s daughter. “You set yourself on fire!” She said it like it was a joke.

I felt like a joke. The slant rays of light through the window of the cabin sparked the dust motes and the smoke and filled the empty jar on the table like the ghost of what it once contained. I looked down at myself covered in wet, the blanket as well, and the ragged smoking black hole the now soggy cigarette had burned through it.

The light was hurting my eyes worse than before and now I had a brutal headache to go along with it. I glanced up at Marie out of the side of my eye. She seemed to be gloating.

“Where were you yesterday when I needed you?”

She desperately wanted to be needed. “No! What are you talking about?”

“You were supposed to keep a lookout so nobody’d sneak up on me.”

“What?”

“Yesterday I got a visit from Constable Thorndyke. You coulda warned me.”

She shook her shoulders with a shiver. “Oh, Thorny. He’s a snake.” And she made a face like she’d tasted something unpleasant. “”He likes to make like he’s your uncle or some other relative and tell you what to do, especially with girls. The boys he just puts them in jail if he catches them, but the girls, he takes out for long drives on deserted back roads in his jalopy and talks about the Lord and how we’re supposed to all act like young ladies.”

I pulled myself upright and wiped some water off my scraggly beard. “You’ve gone on a ride with Thorny?” I didn’t want to sound too paternal.

She shook her head. “No, Thorny wouldn’t dare cause he knows what pa would do to him. But some girls I know, older girls, they told me. Said they’d rather go to jail than go on ‘the ride’ with Thorny. He made their skin crawl.”

I grunted in acknowledgement that I understood. “Where were you, anyway?”

“I was at the Odeon in Grover City with my friend, Irma. We spent the day there. First for lunch at the Downtown Diner, and then a double feature. Two Clark Gable movies. I’d seen one of them before, but that Gable, he’s so dashing, Though I don’t think he’s that good of a singer. And Claudette Colbert is just too brassy. I don’t know what he sees in her,” she said wistfully. “There’s a change of feature tomorrow with a new William Powell movie. I like him too, especially when he’s acting with Myrna Loy. He seems very charming. Even as a private eye.”

I nodded and groaned as any movement of my head made it throb. I could have said that’s what I am, a private eye, but then she might have got the wrong idea from the movies. Hollywood never gets it right. They always give the shamus a conscience, noble principle. You can’t have any of that if you’re going to be a private investigator and expect to survive. When you’re a bottom feeder, high falutin ideals just get in the way of doing the job. I knew that. I had gone soft on Rebecca and that got me nothing but grief.

I staggered to my feet and she reached out to help me. I pushed her away. I was a little unsteady but I managed. I knew what I had to do and soon. I lurched for the door and mumbled “gotta see a troll about a hole” and stumbled off the porch and in the direction of the lopsided closet off to the side of the cabin.

“”Don’t fall in!” she called after me brightly.

I hadn’t really wanted to think about it. What Thorny had said on the way back from the graveyard. We’d been stopped by the roadblock. Thorny knew the deputy, a young lug with a square head and eyes that wouldn’t stay still. A girl had gone missing, the daughter of Judge Chandler. She didn’t return home after a shopping trip to Grover City. It had been two days now. They had the dogs out searching the lower shore of Middle Lake near the dump.

The deputy had eyed me suspiciously. Maybe it was the dark glasses, or the beard that was growing unevenly along the ridge of my jaw. Thorny had laughed when he caught the drift of the deputy’s gaze. “This here’s one of the Ask cousins from out in the Midwest. If you know the Asks you’d say they all had that same family resemblance. This one here is the near spitting image of old Ned Ask who didn’t look like any of them either. You might remember him from when you was a young hellion.”

The young deputy had nodded his head, grinning. “The fisherman! With the old Indian motor bike!”

Right about then a rickety Model T sputtered up behind Thorny’s Ford and the deputy waved us through after saying he was pleased to meet me.

I didn’t think too much about being mistaken for old Ned but Thorny’s remark struck a nerve. And it bothered me all the way back to Little Lake.

The grease monkey who pumped my gas at the livery in Ridley had thought I looked like my old man’s younger brother. Marie and her father had remarked on the closeness. And now Thorny. Only Ruthie hadn’t said anything, maybe because she’d known all along and wasn’t surprised that I looked like Ned.

It got me to thinking and when I’m thinking I like to do it with a drink for company as it helps provide a different point of view on what I might be thinking about. I dipped into old Ned’s cache of everclear and settled in to a bit of hard thinking and hard drinking which maybe I shouldn’t have been doing especially when I was thinking about things that maybe I shouldn’t have been thinking about. But those thoughts just kept crawling back into my head and I had to drink more to blot them out. The more I drank, the tighter the circles my thinking made until I got so dizzy I passed out.

All of that thinking drink gushed out of me like a fire hydrant into the hole at my feet.

If I was any good at math I might have put two and two together. I’d soaked my head in the lake trying to wash out the ache. I’d changed into an old pair of trousers I’d cut off at the knees as a swimsuit from the pile of musty old clothes in Granny’s bedroom. I ran my shirt under the pump and wrung it out. I spot cleaned my jacket and trousers and set them and the shirt out to dry on a big boulder by the lake.

Then I crept over to the chicken coop on Crazy Wilson’s property and swiped a couple of fresh eggs Marie had left out with the idea that I could collect them. She’d offered them when she heard me complain about how I was getting tired of canned beans, burnt rice, and lake trout. She also showed me how to avoid the booby traps her pa had set up around the property. If any one of them were triggered, he was sure to shoot, she’d warned.

I lit a fire in the outdoor stone fireplace and greased up a flat skillet and fried up the eggs. They hit the spot and satisfied my empty belly but my throbbing head was making me wobbly and I knew that there was but one solution. Hair of the dog. Unfortunately, using hair of the dog to cure the hangover has a lot in common with being in debt to a loan shark: you’ll never pay it off.

The first sip went down hard and I felt my gut riding the elevator up to the top floor. The second taste wet my whistle with only a slight shudder. By the third lip smacking swallow, my headache and I were on more friendly terms.

My eyes still burned but I could see clearly what my next step was going to be. I had to get over to the courthouse in Grover City where the birth records were kept at the County Recorder’s Office. Once I got the certificate I was going to use it to apply for a passport under the name of Jerome Paulsen and take myself some place south of the border where Kovic, the cops, the feds, the diamond dealers, the draft board, or the Thieves Of Bombay would never find me. I figured that if I went in asking for the document looking like a mug, the clerk might be a little suspicious. I had to look legit, like that was my job, that I did it all the time. I worked for a law firm in the city if they thought to ask. But if they’re like most government clerks, they almost never do. Unless they stepped on the cat’s tail that morning and spilled their entire cup of hot coffee over themselves.

I had just stretched out in the shade of the porch, counting my chickens before they hatched, mainly about how much money I could get for Ted’s art piece if Alice found a buyer, when I heard a high whistle pretending to be a bird. That was Marie’s warning signal. I looked up to see her at the edge of the thicket between the properties pointing to the path leading up to Little Road. And then I heard the voices. I spun around just in time to see a slim young boy in a pair of swimming trunks, towel draped around his neck, and lugging a large wicker picnic basket. Right behind, a little girl in a summer dress and bare feet came running after him. And behind her, the other twin with their mother, Ruthie. I should have known. She’d probably sent Thorny out to reconnoiter the lay of the land as it were. Bringing up the rear, a large gunny sack over one shoulder and murder in her eyes, was the cook.

Ruthie was wearing a long sleeved robe, a large woven purse slung over one arm, open toe sandals, a floppy straw hat, and white frame sunglasses. She stopped in her tracks and placed a hand on her hip when she saw me. I felt like a bug under a magnifying glass or maybe a mouse who had just wandered into the cat’s path. Either way, the only word I could think of was “uh-oh.”

She smiled to show me she was pleased with what she saw or was it just to show me her teeth, a row of tiny uniform bone grinders.

“Surprise! We thought we’d come and use the lake. Hope you don’t mind.”

They’d all gathered around the front porch looking at me expectantly. Ruthie cocked an appraising eyebrow. “Who do you think you are, Tarzan?”

“Yeah, that’s me, Tarzan. I got tired of the jungle and thought I’d try out the pines and the lake.”

“Tarzan doesn’t have a beard,” Ruthie’s boy chimed in.

“Have you ever seen Tarzan shave? Maybe he has a barber. Runs down to the local village and has the witch doctor scrape a machete across his chin.”

“I don’t think he wears dark glasses.” This was the older girl, well on her way to being just like her mother.”

I had to shrug. “I don’t understand why. As lord of the jungle he’s certainly entitled to.”

“That’s quite a swim suit. Make it yourself?” Ruthie said with a mocking grin.

I laughed because I probably did look a sight, a ragged fringe of threads dangling around my knees. “I found an old pair of trousers in Granny’s room. I had to use the axe to chop them off at the knees.”

“Granny’s room,” Ruthie looked past me at the doorway. “That was the forbidden inner sanctum. If you got caught in there you’d get the switch.”

“Telling us we weren’t allowed to go in there was like telling us we had no choice but to try.”

“I snuck in there one time with Cole Turner, my older cousin. He said he wanted to show me something. Everybody talked on how Granny must have had jewels or gold hidden in there that she kept so secret.”

I’d heard that rumor and once asked my mother about it. She assured me that there was no truth to it. Granny was just guarding her privacy. “Are you sure it was him going to show you something?”

Ruthie caught what I was hinting and narrowed her eyes at me, and then glanced over at her kids. “What are you standing around for? Go jump in the lake!” And as an afterthought, asked me, “How’s the water?”

“Wet.” The kids hadn’t waited for my answer and were already running down to the boat dock.

“Very funny. You should be on the radio. Like Jack Benny.”

“Maybe I should have my own show. A quiz show. I’d call it Ask Me Anything. With your host, Lackland ‘Lucky’ Ask!” I gave a dim smile.

“People still call you Lucky? That was Granny’s nickname for you.”

“No one in recent memory. And for obvious reasons. Granny hated the name Lackland which is a family name on my mother’s side. She couldn’t understand why anyone would be named ‘no land.’”

“Well, she was right, it is an odd name.” And peering into the dimness beyond the door. “You sleeping in her room?” she asked with a wicked smile.

I don’t know why I blushed but I did. And I almost never stutter. “No, no. I sleep on the, the cot by the door.”

“Why, Lack, are you still afraid to get caught in Granny’s room? By her ghost?”

Of course I wasn’t, but that was Ruthie, always looking for a way to make fun of someone. “I go in there all the time!” I insisted a little too vehemently. “That’s where I got these trousers. Not much in there but an old musty rat eaten mattress and boxes and drawers full of old clothes.”

Ruthie brushed past me and stepped into the cabin. “You know, Tarzan doesn’t wear pants, just some little old leather mud flap.”

The cooked dropped one of the pans she had hauled in the gunny sack and the clatter distracted me. Much about Ruthie the few summers I’d spent at Little Lake was coming back to me. Besides being a bully to the younger kids, she liked to dare you to do something stupid and then fink on you when you did. “Ruthie made me do it” was the common excuse although it didn’t save you from getting the switch or the belt.

“Well, if you don’t mind I’ll just go into Granny’s room and change into my bathing suit.” And she stalked to the back of the cabin.

The cook was struggling with the pump handle and I walked over to help her. “The handle’s stiff at first. It just needs a few good pumps.”

“I’ve heard that said.” She gave me a leery side glance.

“Let me help you with that.”

She shook her head. “I don’t need you interfering with my business.” And with the tilt of her round chin. “You gonna be busy yourself here before too long.”

I was wondering what she meant by that when I heard my name called.

“Like I said, I can do that myself. You got other things to tend to.”

Ruthie called out my name again, this time adding, “I want to show you something!”

I glanced at the jar of clear liquid sitting on the edge of the porch and decided that if I was going to responded to Ruthie’s summons, I was going to need another pull.

“I found something you might want to see!” was the siren’s call beckoning me to my doom.

Next Time: Lady In The Lake

Contents Vol. 3 No. 3

April 10, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, A Serial Fiction Magazine, Better Than Dead, Cheese Stands Alone, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Dime Pulp, Hard Boiled Fiction, Hard Boiled Myths, Just Coincidence, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Three of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

In this issue of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine, Colin Deerwood’s long running 40’s pulp detective serial, Better Than Dead, hapless city rat Lackland Ask, hiding out from the mob in the country, runs into more trouble from a shotgun toting moonshiner and his star struck daughter, and has to wonder why everyone keeps mistaking him for a dead man.

In Lydia Cheése’s post axial shift world, the reader enters an unfamiliar historical realm peopled by historically familiar names. In Phyllis Huldarsdottir’s Cheése Stands Alone, biology takes the lead as the premier science and physics is just something engineers do. The world is steam powered and airships are the primary mode of intercontinental transport. The Pax Victoriana has lasted 180 years thanks to the machinations of the Admiralty and its intelligence network, IOTA.

In Act Two, Scene 1, part 3, of Pierre Anton Taylor’s Just Coincidence, a classic tale of vengeance gone wrong with overtones and correspondences from popular illustrated hero literature, Wayne Bruce is made an offer he shouldn’t refuse and meets his nemesis, Joe Kerr, in person for the first time. His response to being targeted in a drive-by is swift and original.

If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the links below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Three, Number 3

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

Better Than Dead—25

Cheése Stands Alone VIII

Act Two, Scene I, Part 3

Better Than Dead—25

April 10, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction"Brother can you spare a dime?", A Detective Story, Better Than Dead, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Fedoras and Flatfoots, Little Lake, Pulp Fiction, The Hideaway, The Moonshiner's DaughterNuallain House, Publishers

by Colin Deerwood

“Don’t shoot!” I called out. I didn’t raise my hands lest the Scout toppled over. Besides I was getting tired of having people poke guns at me,

The man in the peaked hat with the insignia above the bill grinned at first like he’d just won something. Then he looked at the gun in his hand like he didn’t know how it got there. Feeling foolish, he got angry at having been caught out.

“You should know better than to sneak up on a man from behind like that!” He thumbed the badge pinned to his shirt pocket that looked like it might have come as a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, “I’m an officer of the law! And I got every right to shoot you where you stand!” He holstered his revolver like it was a bother and gave me a squint from under a hedge of eyebrow. He had a nose that sat on his face like a large pickled strawberry. What passed for a moustache hovered crookedly over a mouth of bad teeth.

“What seems to be the problem, Sheriff? Have I broken the law?” I asked, pretending not to notice the patch of wet that had bloomed at the front of his trousers.

“This here is my jurisdiction.” He touched the butt of the gun with a finger.

He raised what little chin he had for a try at a haughty glare. “Well, tresspassin’ for one. And who’s to say you are the owner of that there motor-sickle. It might not belong to you.” He rested his hand on the butt of his revolver.

“I’m not trespassing, Sheriff, I got permission to be here seeing as how I’m related to the old gal who used to own this cabin.”

“That so. What’d her name be then?”

He had me there. All I ever called her was granny. But then I remembered a little game she played with us when we were kids and we wanted a sweet from her. “You ask nice,” she’d say, “cause that’s my name.”

“We only called her granny because it would have been disrespectful to call her by her given name, and of course she wasn’t my real granny, more of a great aunt a couple times removed. But if I recall, seems someone referred to her as Eunice.”

He nodded like I’d passed a test. “I ain’t the Sherrif. The name’s Thorndyke, Alvin Thorndyke. I’m the Constable from over in Ridley.”

“A little out of your jurisdiction, ain’t you, Chief?” I offered and watched the slow coloring of his wan cheeks.

“This here is my jurisdiction.” He touched the butt of the gun with a finger. “I’m looking out for a friend. Don’t want no hobo settin’ up camp out here.”

“I’m not hobo, Marshal, you can ask my cousin, Ruthie Walker. She knows I’m staying here at the Ask family cabin, doing some cleaning up and repairs since nobody’s been out here since Uncle Ned passed.” I lowered my eyes, solemn like. “And Ruthie knows I borrowed old Ned’s Indian to get around.”

I could almost hear the gears turning under his hat. “What d’you say your name was?”

I figured him for a blowhard with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. I ignored him while I parked the motorcycle and undid the saddlebags to take them inside the cabin. When I turned to face him, he was giving me that suspicious look again.

“I didn’t say, but you just reminded me of something. Maybe you can help me.”

The constable wasn’t too certain how to take the request and cocked his head to one side. “How so?”

“Well, I’ve been meaning to pay my respects to granny and Uncle Ned but I realized that I don’t know where the cemetery is that they’re buried in. Now I suppose I could ask Cousin Ruthie but I don’t want to bother her more than I have to, she seems to have a lot on her hands with them youngsters. Can you direct me?”

It was like I pulled his earlobe and a light came on. He gave me a grin that I was sure I didn’t want to see too often. “That’s right Christian of you, son. Not only can I show you, but I can take you there!”

And that’s how I ended up in Thorny’s jalopy heading back toward Ridley.

You didn’t have to be a detective to figure Thorny out, he gave the store away whether he realized it or not. First he warned me about my neighbor, a trigger happy moonshiner, said to have killed a man or two in the wild wooly days before repeal. And his daughter was man crazy, headed for perdition if she didn’t change her ways. Nothing a good husband couldn’t fix.

He gave me the lowdown on the farmer who had the stand down on Lake Road. The raggedy scarecrow of a man was known as Three-Fingers McKay. He’d lost them in a fight at a roadhouse near Grover City. “He was a lowdown drunk until he found Jesus and the Widow Larson who lost her man over there where we dint got no business being.” He shook his head. “Sad story,” and then glared at me with a sidelong glance.

“I would have joined up myself but as I was sole support of my dear widowed mother, rest her soul, I was given a deferment. In thanks to the Lord for saving me from almost certain death in the mud of a foreign land, I served him as a chaplain over at the county jail, the youngest man to hold that post in the history of the State.

“I also worked as a youth councilor at one of the all-girl summer camps they have around here. That was the toughest work I’ve ever done. You get that many young gals together at one time and you end up with packs of she-wolves, circling each other, looking to dig their claws into each other. It was enough to make your hair stand on end. It was my saving grace and blessing when my cousin, Sylvester Boone, became president of the town council after being the constable for many years and passed the post on to me. I was probably around your age, and I have to say, I have served proudly upholding law and order for the citizens of Ridley.

“And let me tell you, it hasn’t been an easy job, especially the way things are in this country right now. I’ve had to deal with my share of hobos and drifters. My words to them when I catch them, don’t let the sun go down before you’re gone. I got enough to do with the ruffians and layabouts who belong here.” He frowned at me and nodded. “Your cousins, I’m sorry to say, among them. That bunch went wild after the old gal died. . .’scuse, I meant to say, the Widow Ask, and her son Ned, well, the heart went out of him about then, too. He’d had a tough lot what with the war. All he cared about was fishing and drinking, and that consarned motor sickle. Didn’t matter no how to him that his nieces and nephews was raising holy hell with their drunken carrying on, almost burned the house down around them. Those boys, they were always in fights, especially with any boys who came around to see their girl cousins. Even when they’d been invited.

“County Sheriff, wonder what he’s up to?” he asked himself as the large dark Dodge sped past, the man in uniform at the wheel glancing briefly at them.

“And they let that wonderful apple orchard the widow had go to seed. I can’t count the times I pinched apples from those trees. And of course the cider she sold around town was loved by all. I just felt it was my duty to do something about it. After a while those boys got tired of spending their nights in the pokey with the town drunks. They got the message. They were better off being some place not in my jurisdiction. Some of them try to squirrel back, but I catch ‘em.” He smiled at the thought of that.

“And the girls, most ‘er gone or married. The big city attracts them like moths, they think they can do better. But I seen some come back, too, worse for the wear, and by then what man is gonna to want ‘em? Except for Missus Walker. She was the one who cared for the Widow toward the end. There was a will. She was very generous. Maybe too generous. And Missus Walker inherited the house. I look in on her now and then. She’s had some hard luck. One husband left, part because of the goings on at the Ask house and part because there was no work for a man in these parts unless you want to be a busboy or dishwasher. And you have to know that Paul and Polly are a handful without a strong man to put his foot down. Except for the father of little Angel, but he’s a waiter at one of the resorts in Big Lake. Man can’t raise a family on what they pay, and from what I’ve heard, he likes to play the odds.” He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and shook his fist like he was holding dice. “Can’t say she didn’t pick a good looking one, but something about him bothers me.” And put a finger to the side of his nose.

A large powerhouse hove into view. I could tell by the headlight arrangement and the twin spots that it was official. Only the government could afford that much chrome. It was speeding headlong toward us, crowding the centerline of the narrow country road.

It caught Thorny by surprise. He grunted in alarm and steered for the shoulder of the road. “County Sheriff, wonder what he’s up to?” he asked himself as the large dark Dodge sped past, the man in uniform at the wheel glancing briefly at him.

“Yep, he’s in a hurry to get somewhere. Wonder if he’s late.” I offered.

Thorny looked at me like I was an idiot which I figured was to my advantage.

“No, something is going on.” He looked over his shoulder and was about to pull out onto the road when another patrol car hove into view and passed at high speed. “Now I’m positive. Probably something to do with that missing gal.”

“A girl is missing?” I thought of Rebecca. It was still eating me alive.

“Oh, probably just some youngster has run away with big ideas in her head. Or,” he considered the possibility, “got knocked up by some summer vacationer. Happens all the time. And they come back, dragging their bastards with them in the walk of shame.”

I could see that Thorny could be a self-righteous ass but I kept that to myself.

A mile or so down the road he pointed at a hillock topped with a few large oaks and a wrought iron arch over a gravel track.

“Coming up on it here,” he steered onto a driveway where a sign announced Morton Heights Cemetery, All Denominations, 1832.

The road led up to beneath the oaks. Thorny knew the way up through the rows of burial plots, some more elaborate than others. Granny’s larger stone held court over all of the dead relatives of which there were more than I realized. Ned’s stone was the freshest, least weathered. The dates said he was only eighteen years older than me.

My old man hated his youngest brother. Not in so many words but through his arrogance toward him, resentful because he was his mother’s favorite. I’d overheard him telling my mother that his brother was illegitimate. I didn’t understand at the time, only that granny had done something with someone other than grandpa who might as well have been a faded picture behind glass on the wall for all that I remembered of him. I remember my mother defending Ned and the beginning of an argument, one of many, where my old man would win by a knock out.

Otherwise I could have cared less for the dirt encased bones beneath my feet. I was at the cemetery for an entirely different reason. I’d given it some serious thought. If I was going to vanish, I was going to need a different identity. Lackland Ask was going to have to disappear and in his place would have to be a verifiable person, someone with a birth certificate and a death certificate. Someone my age who had died young enough so that no one could tell the difference. That had been my plan all along. Thorny had just provided the opportunity and was familiar enough with the populace to provide some background if need be. Still being there did have its effect and I removed my dark glasses and rubbed my eyes.

Thorny cleared his throat. “Mighty fine woman,” he said huskily, and I knew he meant it. “I get choked up myself at the thought of these good people. I can tell by your eyes going red. No need to be ashamed.”

I didn’t want to tell him that my eyes had been watering and red for nearly wo weeks and the dark glasses were the only thing that kept them from brimming with tears in bright daylight. I walked away from the family site and lit up a cigarette, glancing at the headstones, many dating from the last century, none in an age range to be of any use to me. I’d figured my idea to be a bust as Thorny joined me at his ragtop and started to get in the driver’s seat. On the downside of the hill were a couple dozen dingy headstones in overgrown plots.

“Who is buried down there?” I asked as I stepped down the hill and into the first row of graves.

He followed to the edge of the gravel patch. “Them’s paupers graves, some of them from the influenza.”

I stood in front of a row of five headstones. The large one inscribed with the name Jedediah Paulson had lived forty years, and his loving wife, Sara, five years less, and their three children, all had died within the same year. The youngest was my age. He was nine when he died.

Thorny stepped down next to me. “Paulson. I remember about them. Cousin Sylvester said they was found in their little shack out by the rail line, all dead. Said it was the Spanish flu though I can’t tell you why they called it that, maybe that’s where it come from. They were pretty far gone when someone come up on them.” He shook his head and walked away. “Sad story.”

I took the note of the name, Jerome Paulson, born nineteen and eleven.

At one point in the sober drive back to Little Lake, Thorny turned to me and said, “I know your name ain’t Dick Sales.” He laughed like he knew a secret when he said it.

“I don’t think I ever said it was.”

“I know your real name. Sam Carter.” There was a hint of triumph in his revelation. And he revealed his source. “Paul told me. He heard you tell his mother. A fine lad, that boy. He has my ear.”

I was about to set him straight when I saw the dark car parked partially blocking the road ahead. I didn’t have to say it. Thorny said it for me. “Roadblock.”

I needed a roadblock like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Next Time: The Missing Girls

Contents Vol. 3 No. 2

February 19, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, A Serial Fiction Magazine, Better Than Dead, Cheese Stands Alone, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Dime Pulp, Hard Boiled Fiction, Hard Boiled Myths, Just Coincidence, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Two of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

In Act Two, Scene 1, part 2, of Pierre Anton Taylor’s Just Coincidence, a classic tale of vengeance gone wrong with overtones and correspondences from popular illustrated hero literature, Wayne Bruce is made an offer he shouldn’t refuse and meets his nemesis in person for the first time.

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations of Volume Two’s 10 issues, and ready for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above.

If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the links below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Three, Number 2

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

Better Than Dead—24

Cheése Stands Alone VII

Act Two, Scene I, Part 2

Better Than Dead—24

February 19, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction"Brother can you spare a dime?", A Detective Story, Better Than Dead, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Fedoras and Flatfoots, Hard Boiled Fiction, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

by Colin Deerwood

She was all over me like butter on scotch. I knew my next move would decide if I was going to be staring down the double barrel of a shotgun or not. I was torn by the urge to pull her in close or pushing her away. I looked at that young face and I saw Rebecca, innocence yet passion.

“Listen,” I said “you. . . .”

She was passing her young lips all over my face and my neck, whispering in my ear, “Oh, Ned, Ned, I knew you’d come back to me!”

So that was it. “Ok, kid, you gotta calm down. You got me mixed up with someone else.” I held her by by the shoulders and pushed her away. “I’m not Ned. And if I do look like him, it’s just the family resemblance.”

“Oh no, Ned, you’ve come back just like you said you would!”

“Ok, let’s get one thing straight. I ain’t no ghost and I’m certainly not Uncle Ned back from the dead.”

She tried to put her arms around my neck and I held her wrists.

“But you look so much like the picture of him when he was younger and I think it looks just like you do right now except you’re not wearing a uniform. And he told me that if he could be that young again he would come and get me and take me away with him! And that’s just what he, you did!”

Now I knew I was dealing with nutty and the only way to deal with nutty is to be nutty right back. “Sorry to disappoint you, Marie. I’m not Ned and I can’t be Ned for you either.”

She gave me a fierce pout and was about to answer me back.

“Let me explain why.” I put on my most serious and somber air. “You see I just lost a loved one, a girl, in fact, just a little older than you.”

“Was she your girlfriend?!” she demanded.

“Well, I was hoping to make her my girlfriend but then she died.”

Her mouth went sad but her eyes were smiling. “Oh,” she muttered, “I’m sorry.” And then, “What did she look like?”

“She looked like a movie star.”

Her eyes brightened. “Oh, which one, which one?”

Now she had me. I’d been to a lot of movies but I could never remember any of the names of the dames. “What’s her name, the blonde with the grapefruit?”

“Oh I know, Jean Harlow!”

“Yeah, but more of a brunette and kinda classy.”

“Mina Loy?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Carole Lombard?” She narrowed her eyes in frustration. “Katherine Hepburn!”

“Yeah, that’s it, but younger.”

I watched her picture the face of the actress. “What was her name?”

I was surprised that it was difficult to speak it. “Becky, Rebecca.” And the ledge four stories up where she took her fall was still very clear.

I got a look of sympathy. “How did she die?”

It took me a bit to form the words. “She fell. From a building.”

“Oh, a suicide.”

“No, she and I were running away from a gang of crooks when the radio bomb blew up and she lost her footing trying to reach the fire escape.”

By the look in her eyes, she was stunned by disbelief.

“You see, I’m a newspaper reporter and I was investigating a mob boss who turned out to belong to the Black Hand. Becky was a cub reporter following me around cause I was supposed to be showing her the ropes, but we got too close to the bad guys. And she died. It happened just a few days ago, not more than a week. And that’s why I’m up here. The cops are after me because they want to know what I uncovered. The mob is after me to keep me from revealing what I uncovered. And then there’s the Thieves of Bombay out for revenge.”

I might have overdone it. Her eyes were shining.

“I don’t care if you’re Ned or not, I’m in love with you!” she said advancing with a youthful ardor.

“Once when I was swimming naked like I do on a full moon night because I read about a movie star who did that, he saw me. And when he stood up to walk away, I saw that he had a stiffy.

I heard it, and she heard it too, a shuffling and heavy breathing. I thought maybe it was the bear and turned in that direction and when I turned back, she was gone. Then I saw him, lumbering up the path, red faced beneath the ragged straw hat. He was carrying a shotgun. He nodded to me as I stepped out onto the porch.

“Ifn I believed in ghosts I‘d say you was one. Marie said you was. I knowed him after he come back from the war n he looked a lot like you do now. You’re family I take it.” When I nodded, wary of the shotgun resting across his forearm, “Abner Wilson. I got the big cabin over yonder.” He cocked his head in the direction I made a note to avoid in the future. “Ned and me was fishing and drinking partners. He supplied the fish and I supplied the drink. It was a good trade. You fish?”

“I’ve been known to.”

“You don’t look like no country boy except for the dings on your face. You ain’t showing any laboring muscle. City boy?” He sent a squirt of tobacco juice into the berry bramble.

“I’m Stan Gardner,” I said, “I was a reporter working on a story about the mob and I got too close. That’s why the knuckle prints.” That got his interest.

“So this is your hideaway? That mean the gov’mint gonna come snooping around?”

“They won’t if nobody tells them I’m here.”

“You sure you ain’t a revenuer?”

“Do I look like one?”

“No, can’t say as you do.” Old Wilson glared with a squint eye. “You look like trouble. Stay offn my property.” He shifted the shotgun to the ready. “And stay away from my daughter.”

I found his daughter after the moonshiner had slouched away through the thicket separating the properties. She was propped up quite comfortably on granny’s bed reading movie magazines.

“Where’d you find those?” I asked flipping through the dusty stack at her side. There were copies of Screen Star, Film Fun, and Star Brite along with some more risqué covers and content from Gay Parisienne, Spicy, and Smart Set.

She looked up from her magazine, smiling mischievously. “Under the bed. Ned used to get them for me. Well, not all of them.” She flicked the cover of a Spicy with a particularly racy cover. “He would read me stories of Hollywood and all the movie stars. And after a while I caught on how to read and could read them by myself and he said he was real proud of me. Even the teacher over at the school was surprised I could figure out how to read and knew so much about Hollywood which she said was the den of devils but I didn’t believe her because if these are pictures of devils I want one and I want to be one.” She held up a full page spread of Hollywood dollies.

“Wait a minute. You and Ned were. . . ?”

“Intimate? Not once. He wouldn’t allow it. I read all about it in one of his magazines, all the different kinds of kisses, like the soul kiss and the vacuum kiss, the eyelash kiss, the nip, the taxi kiss, and there’s this book called the camera suiter with pictures of how to hold someone when you’re in love with them and. . . .”

“Ok, ok, I think I heard enough. So Ned never tried anything, you know, with his. . . ?”

“Once when I was swimming naked like I do on a full moon night because I read about a movie star who did that, he saw me. And when he stood up to walk away, I saw that he had a stiffy. I thought it was funny because I thought only the boys at school got them. And they’re always after me to touch them, but I won’t ever. Ned told me not to touch their toads, he called them that, cause I’d get warts on my hands and I want my hands to be perfect and white as a Hollywood starlet.”

The sirens were sounding in my head and I don’t mean the ones sitting on rocks calling out to sailors that my old man told me about. These were police sirens, tornado warning sirens, air raid sirens, draw bridge sirens, man overboard ship sirens all telling me one thing. I was looking at trouble. That was the last thing I needed. And the way she was looking at me spelled my doom.

“You’re going to get me killed. You heard your old man. He’d shoot me if he knew you were here.”

She pouted and gave me a sorrowful look. “But Ned. . . .”

“I’m not Ned and you know it!” It came out harsh and she drew back alarmed. I’d scared her. And I realized then that she could be a better ally than an adversary. “Listen, Marie, maybe you can help me.” That brightened her up. “There are some real bad men who would like nothing better than to get their hands on me. I need someone who knows their way around Little Lake, someone who knows hiding places in case they come looking for me, someone to keep their eyes and ears open so someone don’t come sneaking up on me.”

Her eyes opened almost as wide as her pert little mouth and she nodded her head vigorously. “Oh, yes, yes, I can do that, Ned, er, I mean. . . ?”

“You can call me Stan for now. When I get to know you better, I’ll tell you my real name.” I held out my hand because I could tell she wanted to throw her arms around me to seal our compact. “Shake?”

I could have passed a hand over my brow to signify that I dodged a close one. Now she was all smiles as she paused at the door to the cabin. “You can count on me, Stan. And don’t worry about pa, by the time the sun goes down he’s usually drunker than a skunk on sour mash. And that shotgun ain’t loaded. It’s mostly for show when summer folk takes a wrong turn and wander onto his property..”

He had a smile like a mouthful of soda crackers. They turned to crumbs and he had to swallow them dry when he saw me. I saw him first, coming up behind him snooping around the cabin.

Earlier that day I’d set out with my list of items I’d need if I wanted to eat more than fish and drink moonshine, not that I objected to either of them. I fired up the Scout and rode down to the farm stand and picked up a sack of potatoes and a sack of onions, the foundation of any hearty meal. The farmer wanted two bits for a half dozen eggs. I might have paid that if he made me an omelet and served it to me on a silver platter. He was a thin rail topped by a bushy beard under a floppy felt hat. Under the overalls the sleeves of his long undershirt didn’t reach his wrists and he was missing two fingers on his left hand, pinky and ring. He’d given me the hard eye when I rode up. Maybe it was the sunglasses. I’d taken to wearing them as my eyes were sensitive to the bright country sunshine and the dark lenses helped ease the watery squint. I probably looked like a mobster or a Hollywood movie star to him. His scarecrow of a wife could only gape a toothless stare. The early corn was cheap and I picked up half a dozen ears for a nickel.

I had to go into Big Lake and the mercantile store to pick up canned goods including a couple bricks of spam and a two pound can of Hillsborough coffee. I ducked into the pharmacy and soda shop next door with a handful of nickels and found the bank of phonebooths at the back. I pulled the door shut, deposited a nickel and gave the operator the number to the shared phone by Alice’s studio. The operator instructed me to deposit two more nickels because it was a long distance call.

The phone rang about five times before a gruff voice answered. “Ya!”

“Hey Linkov!” I shouted into the handset, “Get Alice on the horn! It’s me, Lackland Ask!”

I heard him grumble something and then a loud knock and him shouting, “Alice! You have telephone!”

The operator had me deposit another slug before Alice answered. She was happy and happy to hear from me. I didn’t want to waste another dime and got straight to the point. Had she found anyone interested in buying Ted’s art piece?

But she was bubbling with her own news. First of all she was moving up to the loft that her friend Lee had occupied, and where Rebecca and I had spent the night, and who was going to move in with her boyfriend in a larger loft on Ninth Street. And the attack on her had come with a silver lining. An art dealer had read the story about her being a victim of a violent crime in the paper. Now he was working with an uptown art gallery to get her a show of her own. He’d even sold a few of her watercolors to some rich swells so all of a sudden she had money and prospects for more.

Right about then the operator said I needed to deposit another nickel if I wanted to continue the call. “What about the art piece!” I shouted casting a glance through the glass of the booth door to see if anyone had heard me.

Alice said knew a retired doctor from New Jersey who might be interested and that she was in touch with him to make arrangements. I had just enough time give her the address in Ridley, Stan Gardner, care of Ruth Walker, before my supply of nickels ran out.

Herr Moustache’s army was advancing on Paris, Mister Loony was raising a fuss in North Africa, and Union Jack was in tatters. I didn’t even bother to read what Uncle Joe was up to because it all added up to war, and the battle field is no place for a coward like me.

I was about to clamber back on the old Indian when I caught a whiff of what was being wafted out of the exhaust fan at the Sleepy Waters Café across the street. It made my stomach rumble and I thought, what the heck, I’d just splurged six bits on a long distance call, I might as well treat myself to something that wasn’t fish or moldy preserves.

The sign on the window said Breakfast All Day Every Day. I caught a look at myself in the glass door going in. I was past needing a shave, hair mussed from the ride, and dark glasses I probably looked like a fugitive in some B movie.

But the waitress greeted me friendly enough and showed me to a booth and handed me a menu. “Are you with the movie people staying over at the Big Lake Lodge?” She took my hesitance as confirmation. She beamed a big smile, “Don’t worry I won’t tell anyone. One of the actresses was in here the other day and said their being here was all hush-hush.”

She set a cup of steaming java in front of me while I examined the menu. I had a choice of stewed prunes, apple sauce, or figs with toast and coffee for two bits which seemed a mite high for such a light repast. Or I could get one egg and two strips of bacon or a slice of ham, toast and coffee included, for the same price. Two eggs any style with a compliment of toast and coffee, the same. If I really wanted to splurge I could get a full portion of ham and eggs or bacon, potatoes, fried any style, marmalade on my toast, and coffee for just shy of four bits. I let my eyes wander down to the bottom of the menu and knew right away that the next item of half a dozen eggs, ham steak, potatoes, half a loaf of bread, toasted, and all the coffee I could drink bumping two whole dollars was beyond my budget.

When the waitress came by again I ordered the number 4. She refilled my cup and handed me a copy of the daily blat. “Coming right up,” she said, “You can read the funny papers while you’re waiting.”

To get to the latest in the lives of Maggie and Jiggs, Dagwood and Blondie, and Popeye and Olive Oyl, I had to cross a minefield of depressing headlines. Herr Moustache’s army was advancing on Paris, Mister Loony was raising a fuss in North Africa, and Union Jack was in tatters. I didn’t even bother to read what Uncle Joe was up to because it all added up to war, and the battle field is no place for a coward like me. To top it off, the local Army Corps had to recruit a hundred thousand men by the end of August otherwise the government was going to institute the draft. My appetite was spoiled even before I got to Joe Palooka and Kobby Walsh.

Beside the prospect of being drafted, the death of Becky, the cops and the mob being after me, not to mention the Thieves of Bombay, a trigger happy moonshining neighbor and his star struck oversexed teenage daughter were occupying my mind on my return to Little Lake so I didn’t think too much of the battered ‘31 Ford ragtop parked off to the side where Little Road goes from two ruts to one rut. And when I pushed the bike down the grade toward the cabin, I spotted him, a pear-shaped man with a peaked cap sporting some official insignia, a loose fitting green shirt with a badge clinging to the front pocket, and a wide belt and holster holding up a pair of oversized herringbone trousers. I was almost up on him when he must have heard me, whirling around and clutching at the pistol in the holster before pointing it at me. If I’d been given a guess, I’d say I had just met Thorny.

Next Time: The Graveyard

Contents Vol. 3 No. 1

January 7, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, A Serial Fiction Magazine, Better Than Dead, Cheese Stands Alone, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Dime Pulp, Hard Boiled Fiction, Hard Boiled Myths, Just Coincidence, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

Welcome to Volume Three, Number One of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

In the first issue of 2023, Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine celebrates Colin Deerwood’s long running 40’s pulp detective serial, Better Than Dead, at the beginning of its third year! According to author Deerwood, he had not started out to write a serial fiction but was merely writing descriptions of the actions portrayed on the covers of old pulp magazines. “They began as sketches, no more than a couple of paragraphs,” he said in a recent interview, “With few exceptions, never longer than a page.” Deerwood would be the first to admit that what had started out as an idle exercise has taken on a life of its own.

For Phyllis Hularsdottir, Cheése Stands Alone was a chance to make imaginative use of her degree in the Psychology of Speculative History and her interest in the multiverse theory of cosmology. “I wanted to posit a shift in the science world at a point in history where biology takes the lead as the premier science and physics is just something engineers do,” she replied recently to a query. In Lydia Cheése’s post axial shift world, the reader enters an unfamiliar historical realm peopled by historically familiar names.

Pierre Anton Taylor, known around the office as ‘Pete,’ revealed at a recent writers meeting that he thought that the post-war pulp heroes were unrealistic and had gotten too big for their spandex. “There is never a good reason for revenge, no matter what ghosts are haunting you.” His Just Coincidence is a classic tale of just such vengeance gone wrong with overtones and correspondences from popular illustrated hero literature.

Patton D’Arque made his debut in Dime Pulp with his two-part short story, Gone Missing (Dime Pulp, Vol. 1, Nos 2,3) about a couple of grumpy and dangerous ex-cops turned investigators. He returns with the conclusion of his two part short story, Polka Dot Dress, a tale of conspiracy, assassination, hypnosis, and a mysterious woman in a polka dot dress. “I had no idea how it was going to end until I got there because I actually thought I was going someplace else with it,” he wrote in a recent email. But as a famous poet once said, “Speculation is the brain’s bread and butter.”

FYI: Dime Pulp Yearbook 21 contains the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, available for perusal in their entirety. If you missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial, clicking on the link at the beginning of this paragraph or on the menu bar above is a good way to catch up. Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring all the fantastic serial stories from Volume 2 in their entirety, will be available before too long.

If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the links below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Three, Number 1

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from monthly issues to about once every forty-five days. Thus Volume Three will consist of eight issues (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

Better Than Dead—23

The violent event that occurred more than half a century ago is brought into focus in an assisted living home for an elderly woman whose memory of that time is blocked much to the frustration of an academic researcher and her partner who who see the old woman as the key to uncovering who was behind the conspiracy that changed the course of history.

Polka Dot Dress II

Cheése Stands Alone VI

Act Two, Scene 1, Part 1

Better Than Dead—23

January 7, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction"Brother can you spare a dime?", A Detective Story, Better Than Dead, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Fedoras and Flatfoots, Hard Boiled Fiction, Lackland Ask, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

by Colin Deerwood

I felt like a house had fallen on me. A dead house by the stink. And by the taste, like I had a mouth full of rotten eggs. It took a few tries to crack open an eye. I slammed it shut immediately. The light was too bright and heavy, and the weight of it hurt my head which seemed larger than I remembered it. I didn’t remember being a pretzel either but my arms and legs told me otherwise. My groan sounded faraway but maybe that was because of the ringing in my ears. I put my hands over my face and tried the eyes again, and encountered the same blast of white light and the space it occupied. I managed to get myself upright and sitting once I untangled my legs from under me and slowly pieced together what I was seeing.

I was in the cabin on Little Lake. Uncle Ned’s Indian was parked in the middle of the floor, the bright light streaming in through the one window casting unflattering rays on the rest of the tumbledown cobwebbed furnishings. I felt like I had broken my back on what could have been a bed of nails but was actually a crude cot that was much harder. The reason I hadn’t felt anything until I opened my eyes was on the floor next to the bed, a half pint of Uncle Ned’s high-octane joy juice.

The stink got my attention again and made me gag. I bolted to my feet and yanked open the door only to be blinded by the intense brightness of an otherwise welcoming morning. I stumbled up to the pump platform, shading my eyes while little birds made annoying high pitched squeaks like they were either happy to see me or happy to torture me, and tried my luck.

I almost broke my arm trying to bring the pump handle down. It was frozen. I tried again as if the first time hadn’t hurt enough. This time I wrenched my back. I sat down on the pump platform and looked out over the dark blue scintillating waters of Little Lake. It was like an apparition, a story book picture, and of the times I’d visited as a kid, I don’t think I ever saw it that way.

What made it worse was that she was a beaut, blond hair cascading down to her shoulders and a figure like a young sapling, a shapely young sapling.

The sun had been up for a while judging from the slant of rays through the trees, but there was an after the rain freshness to the air. In the distance swimmers frolicked on a float set out from the shore near a collection of green and white summer cabins. A green canoe creased the waves paddled by two women with a third in a large sunhat lounging between them, dragging a hand in the water. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a hangover. And the sounds of joyful shrieks and laughter of bathers on the docks of the resort around the bow of the lake reached me like a long ago memory of my own delight at being here.

I grabbed a tin pot from the clutter among the washtubs and picked my way carefully down the overgrown path to the dilapidated dock at water’s edge. I’d watched granny do it before. Sometimes the pump needed priming.

I bent over the lapping waters and reached down, got a handful of water and threw it on my face. The shock of the cold wet helped a little. I cleared more of the tadpole scum from the surface and dipped in the pot, filling it to the top and straightened up to get my bearings. That’s when I saw her.

I’d caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. About fifty yards down the shore a sleek silhouette emerged and pulled itself effortlessly up to the top of the large boulder. She shook her hair out of a bathing cap, water dripping off of her in sheets and extended both arms out from her body, arching her back, resembling a little T.

And T always stands for trouble as far as I’m concerned. Just what I’d come up to the country to avoid. What made it worse was that she was a beaut, blond hair cascading down to her shoulders and a figure like a young sapling, a shapely young sapling.

I may have been hungover and groggy but my better instincts kicked in. I held my breath until she turned and walked up the cut in the bank and disappeared behind a stand of birch trees. My luck with women hadn’t been all that great of late. Now not only did I have the thought of Becky gnawing at me and pointing an accusing finger of guilt, but I had a water nymph tormenting me with the prospect of moonlight swims. My goose was cook. I could almost taste the sauce.

I didn’t have a man named Friday, but I went about fixing up the place like a man on a desert island anyway.

The pump wasn’t broke, just dry from lack of use. It took a couple pots of water poured down the gullet but I got it to squeak, working the handle slowly down and up and down until I heard the slurp of the uptake and a spurt of rusty water sloshed out into the trough. A couple more hearty pumps and it gushed out clear and cold onto my upturned face and mouth and splashing across my chest. It was a tasty quenching drink with a mineral tang that I remembered fondly, and it revived me.

If I was going to live in the cabin I was going to have to get rid of the rotting stench of the dead. My nose told me that the stink was strongest near the stove and the chimney pipe up through the roof. And as I suspected whatever it was, possum or coon, had crawled up in there, got stuck and died. I shucked my soggy clothes and borrowed the greasy coveralls hanging on a hook on the wall near the toolbox. They fit loosely. Ned was a bigger man. Dismantling the stovepipe was nasty work but I got it done and dumped the remains in the heap behind the cabin. By then I realized that I was famished and set about devouring much of the grub the cook had packed for me.

I watched the sunlight play over the expanse of Little Lake from the front porch of the cabin and knew that I had to put Becky’s death aside and concentrating on my plan. It had been a good idea to drop out of sight as quickly as I did. It might look like I’d been knocked off and was feeding the eels at the bottom of the East River. But I couldn’t count on it for certain. I had to get as far away as possible from the cops and the mob as I could and stay there. The threats to my life from the Thieves of Bombay were not something I was too concerned about yet. The news of an upcoming draft, on the other hand, made me nervous.

The bruises on my face were starting to fade but dark enough around the eyes to resemble a black mask like on some pulp magazine character.

The fly in my ointment was my lack of the do-re-mi. My broken C note would eventually play out to its last nickel and I’d end up sawing a violin on a street corner. My best bet to get some traveling cash was the art piece that Ted had left me. If Alice could find a buyer then I’d have enough money to leave all my troubles behind. Now that the diamonds and Rebecca were out of the picture, my plans of expanding my confidential investigation business and going upscale were nothing more than coal dust.

For the time being I had to make like a hermit hiding in a cave, not get friendly with anyone, especially nubile young girls and their shotgun toting fathers, and stay out of sight. But it wasn’t in my nature to skulk around in the shadows—except when I was on a case, of course. I had to keep busy.

I set about taking inventory of the old cabin and figuring out how I could make it livable. The cobwebs met the old broom as did the floor. Granny’s room, the forbidding sanctum, smelled moldy and I figure that it was probably due to a leak in the roof. The water stains along the far wall confirmed my suspicion. Otherwise, it was just a jumble of old furniture and boxes full of musty old clothes. A bedframe held a lumpy feather mattress that the mice had chewed through. A set of drawers had a mottled discolored mirror propped above it. I opened the only other window in the cabin and let in some air and light. A shaded kerosene lamp sat in front of the mirror and when I reached for it I gave a start. The face in the mirror was mine but I almost didn’t recognize it, smudged with soot, hair uncombed and standing straight up. The bruises on my face were starting to fade but dark enough around the eyes to resemble a black mask like on some pulp magazine character.

I took my time rooting around, getting a feel for what was there and might come in handy, accompanied by the pleasant memories of the previous stays of my younger days. I visited the outhouse, the door hanging on one hinge and not offering much privacy. I knocked down an old hornet’s nest above the plank seat and swept away a thicket of spiderwebs and egg sacs. Mice had nibbled most of what was left of an old Sears Roebucks catalogue. The old red lime bucket was still there, the lime as solid as a rock with the large kitchen ladle lodged in it. The memory came to me of Ruthie showing the younger boys how girls pee and how it seemed pretty disgusting and shocking at the time and someone had gone to tattle to one of the adults and how Ruthie got in trouble for it but it was one of the most talked about events that summer.

And that reminded me that there was a root cellar set in the downslope of the cabin’s foundation. The rough wooden double doors were still intact. When I yanked them open, I heard something scuttle away. Critters were living in there, maybe relatives of whatever it was that had died in the stove pipe. There were shelves set against the back and the gleam of glass, a wooden egg box with something growing out of it and a huddle of burlap bags with tiny pale sprouts poking through. The glass on closer inspection were mason jars. Some appeared to be empty and others were dark and mottled, green and white. I pulled a few out to get a better idea of what had been tucked away all this time. Much of it looked like it might have gone bad, some were preserves, loganberry jam I guessed as that was granny’s specialty. And to my surprise, the empty jars were not empty but contained a clear liquid. A twist of the lid and a sniff told me I’d stumbled on Uncle Ned’s emergency supply. As if I needed any more trouble.

A pair of old dungarees chopped off just above the knees made passable swim shorts if I was of a mind to engage in bathing frolic. Mainly I’d just jump in the lake to cool off after I’d swung the axe and made myself a nice pile of fire wood to feed to the stove. The early summer heat was sweltering, thunderstorms booming regularly on the horizon. By the time evening arrived so had the mosquitoes, but it was also the best time for fishing. I braved a few evenings to be able to feast on lake trout. No one had fished off the end of the old dock in a while and they and the insects were biting. Good as it is, fish will only do you for so long and I had a craving for some variety. I knew to stay away from the berry patch after I’d stepped in what a bear had left there. I had to take in supplies and that meant the farm stand down Lake Road or firing up the Indian to go into Big Lake and the Big Lake Market.

I was sitting at the table with a stub of pencil making up a list when I heard a tapping on the door frame and got an eyeful of trouble.

I had figured right, she was the girl I’d seen swimming the morning after I got here, the moonshiner’s daughter.

She stood about five foot four, her blonde hair tied up in pigtails that dangled down to just below the collarbone, a pert little nose and pouty lips, and a playful sparkle to her predatory blue eyes. The rest of her looked like it belonged on a pinup calendar: a pair of overalls, patched at the knees, over a thin undershirt. Barefooted, all that was missing was a piece of straw to chew on and a come hither look. I had to blink. She was a stunner.

While I untied my tongue to find something to say, even “hello” or “come in,” she stepped into the cabin and glanced around like she’d been there before. “You look just like him.” It wasn’t an unpleasant voice, young, in the upper register. Lips set serious, she said, “Except younger.”

When I didn’t respond, she offered, “Ned, old Ned. And a little worse for the wear.” She meant the bruises on my face.

“Maybe, I’m his ghost.” I thought I’d be cute.

She shook her pigtails and threw me a smile that hurt. “No, I saw you use the outhouse and I don’t think ghosts do that.”

“You’ve been spying on me?” I tried to sound grave although I was amused.

“This old cabin been almost abandoned after old Ned died. Maybe once in a while some of the cousins will come up and get drunk and even that don’t seem to happen as much anymore. I used to come round when I was younger, when Ned was up fishing and trading pa fresh caught for shine.”

I had figured right, she was the girl I’d seen swimming the morning after I got here, the moonshiner’s daughter. It was like a bomb with a lit fuse had just stepped into my life. And for obvious reasons, I didn’t want to stand up and shake her hand..

She smiled at my discomfort. “My name’s Marie. I live on the property over yonder. My pa is Abner Wilson though most know him as Crazy Man Wilson on account he’ll shoot at you if you come round uninvited. But as long as I can recall, he ain’t never shot nobody, scared them mostly.” She went on like she’d missed talking to anyone who’d listen. “If you’re one of the cousins, I ain’t ever seen a one of them look as much like the old man as you do. And you got his old Indian setting on the porch. He never lent his cycle to nobody, let alone let them ride it.” She cast a wistful gaze in the direction of the porch. “’Cept maybe for me. He would let me ride it on the old dam road out over by Middle Lake. Ride fast enough and the skeeters won’t get ya, he’d say.” She gave a nervous little laugh, worried that she might have said too much.

“Yeah, I’m one of the cousins.” I remembered the alias I’d given Ruthie, “Stan Gardner. Ruthie’s the one let me borrow the motorcycle. Me and her used to vacation up here when we were kids. Probably about your age. How old are you?”

I could tell by the way she shifted her eyes she was going to lie.

“Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in another month.” And when I didn’t respond. “Honest.”

“So Marie, is this just a neighborly visit or did you come by to borrow a cup of sugar?”

Next Time: Hiding Out At Little Lake

Contents Vol. 2 No. 10

November 15, 2022Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, A Serial Fiction Magazine, Better Than Dead, Cheese Stands Alone, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Dime Pulp, Hard Boiled Fiction, Hard Boiled Myths, Just Coincidence, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

Welcome to Volume Two, Number Ten of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Issue Ten of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine, continues its crime spree with two new pulp fiction serializations, Cheése Stands Alone, a steampunk adventure by Phyllis Haldursdottir, and Just Coincidence, Pierre Anton Taylor’s play of brooding vengeance, as well as the continuing serialization of Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, by Colin Deerwood. And last but not least, Patton D’Arque returns with Polka Dot Dress, a dark tale of a lost memory whose recovery could point to a deadly conspiracy put into play half a century ago.

If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the links below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Two, Number 10

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from monthly issues to once every forty-five days. Thus Issue Ten will be the last issue of Volume Two for the year 2022. Volume Three will consist of eight issues, the first of which will post at the beginning of 2023 (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

Better Than Dead—22

Polka Dot Dress I

Cheése Stands Alone V

Act One, Scene 5

Better Than Dead—22

November 15, 2022Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, Better Than Dead, can you spare a dime?” 1940, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Fedoras and Flatfoots, Hard Boiled Fiction, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

by Colin Deerwood

The cook handed me the steaming java and looked me up and down in the daylight spreading through the kitchen window. “You ain’t like the other ones, but I doubt miz Ruth knows the difference. You don’t want to be here when Thorny come around. You smart to get out to Lil Lake, far enough he won’t pay no mind when he finds out another man been here.”

“Thorny? Who’s Thorny?”

“The Constable.”

Just about then Ruthie sauntered through the door tightening the sash on her bathrobe giving me the lowered sultry lashes and then flashing a mind-your-own-business frown at the cook.

Before she could say good morning, I said, “Hey Ruthie, I noticed Uncle Ned’s old motorcycle under the tarp in the shed. Do you know if that old Indian is still working?”

She sipped at the cup the cook had handed her and slid in the chair across the table from me. “Whadya want with that old thing?”

“Well, if I’m going to be staying out at Little Lake I’m gonna need some way of getting around. That would save me walking the five miles just to get a soda pop or scare up some grub.”

“He was always taking that thing apart and putting back together again. If he wasn’t tying fly, or drinking, always a lot of that.” A little cloud crossed her brow. “Funny. Old Ned sure liked the fishing up at Little Lake. That’s where he spent most of the summers toward the end.”

“Moonshiner on the property next to yourn was probably a good part of it, too, I’d say,” the cook interjected.

“Oh, Crazy Wilson, he doesn’t believe repeal happened. He and Ned had a deal, fish for hootch. You’ll have to watch out for him if you’re out there.”

The cook nodded emphatically, “Shoot you soon as look at you.”

“Ok, I’ll remember that.” I stood up and pushed back the chair to go see if the old Indian would kick over.

Ruthie fixed me with a regretful gaze that I wasn’t going to stick around to chat and sigh. “He also has a daughter who lives out there sometimes. She’s just a little older than Paul.”

“All the more reason to watch where you step,” the old cook said, “Might be a bear trap. Lose your leg.”

A quick once over told me that Uncle Ned and his old Indian Scout had had two things in common, they were both battered and well oiled. The tires were in need of some air, and something had been nibbling the edges of the leather seat. I rolled the motorcycle out into the backyard with a little effort. I throttled up and gave it a kick. I got a chuckle from the pistons. At least they weren’t frozen or screaming. Now that I had its attention, I gave it another go and it sputtered like it might do better next time. I goosed the gas and it caught with a loud shot and then a roar. But it didn’t last long, a cough and a shudder, and it was dead. I knew I would have to be poking around in places I wasn’t too comfortable in. But other than that, the motorcycle had definite possibilities.

I rummaged around in the shed and uncovered a pair of saddlebags that fit over the rear wheel. They were outfitted to carry fishing gear, one rod still attached under canvas straps. In one of the pockets I found the tire pump and a repair tin. And a half pint of clear liquid. I unscrewed the top and took a whiff. I drew my head back in a hurry. It hadn’t gone bad, it had started bad.

Uncle Ned, a bachelor all his life, kept his space orderly for the things that meant something to him, mostly fishing, his machine, and his booze. The tools I was going to need were rolled up neatly in a canvas tool bag. I figured I could poke and prod the best I knew how, and if worse came to worse, the Ridley Livery advertised a mechanic.

I spent a couple of hours fiddling with the iron pony, taking one thing off and putting another thing on, I’d spent enough time in the old neighborhood watching curbside mechanics make a machine behave. It is slow, methodical work, and I finally got it running, roughly, but running.

When I was about done and admiring my work, cook came down to the shed and handed me a bag. “Preserves, apple butter, pickles, cow’s tongue, and such until you get yourself set up out there. After a while you be eating fish and berries.” She smiled a wide smile, “Just like a bear.”

I pulled up to the pump in front of Ridley Livery and shut the engine off. A lanky gent in blue coveralls squeezed through the gap in the barn door wiping his hands on a greasy rag and sauntered over, eying me and eyeing the motorcycle.

“Gimme fifty cents worth, Ace.” I dismounted and moved the goggles up onto my forehead, thinking again as I had when I’d first found them in a pocket of the saddle bag, the guys that had attacked Alice had worn similar pairs, and the crew that shot up Rabbi Joe’s place, they had, too, and that made me think of Becky, and thinking of Becky only made me hurt.

“This old Indian is Ned’s, ain’t it.” He unscrewed the gas cap and inserted the pump nozzle. “You buy it?” and he gave me the skeptical eye.

Adjusting the strap holding my satchel in place, I met his eye. “Just borrowing. Ruthie Walker is my cousin, you can ask her.” I fished out the change and handed it to him. “Heading up to Little Lake.”

“Yeah, Ned liked to go up to the cabin.” He held up a finger as if a thought had just struck him “You look something like him, but younger. My pop has pictures of a fishing trip up in Canada, of him and Ned. You’re an Ask, then?”

I put a finger to my lips, “Yeah, but keep it on the QT. I got in a bit of trouble and now I need to lie low.”

He drew his head back a bit. “You don’t say?” And squinted an eye again, “Rob a bank?”

I laughed, “Naw, nothing like that. I was having some fun with this young gal and her husband didn’t appreciate it.”

“That why you look like a raccoon?”

“It coulda been worse if she hadn’t beaned him with a frying pan.”

I’d impressed him, “Now that’s something!”

“So if anybody gets to wondering, just tell them my name is uh. . .Dick Sales.”

“Dick.. .Sales,” he repeated and nodded not knowing what to think. He pointed at the motorcycle. “Sounded kinda rough when you pulled up. Ned always had it purring like a pussy cat. Start ‘er up, might just be a valve adjustment. It can be tricky.”

I did as he said and he reached under the tank and fiddled with something and the rough sputter of the engine turned to a throaty growl. He stood up, proud of himself, “That should do it. You tell Ruthie Walker if she ever wants to sell this old Scout, I’ll give her a fair price for it.”

“Why don’t you tell her yourself? She lives right down the road.”

He shook his head. “No, Thorny found out I’d been round to see her, I’d get nothing but grief.”

Thorny again. I thanked him and handed him another two bits for his trouble. I got some advice in exchange.

“Stay wide of the Wilsons. He’s the old coot with the still and the shotgun, ready to shoot, on the property next to Ned’s family cabin .”

“So I’ve heard. Thanks for the tip.”

“Oh, the old guy ain’t so bad so longs you don’t set foot on his property. It’s his daughter you got to watch out for.”

“His daughter? I heard she was just a kid.”

“Not any more. One day she was just this skinny little tomboy and the next thing you know she’s fully equipped and anxious to put it in gear. Only problem is that Crazy Wilson’s property line goes all around her. You set foot or any other part of yourself on her and you got a problem that’s more than just a angry husband.”

About half a mile out of town a large billboard advertising Big Lake Resorts, Sandy Beaches, Motor Boating, Shoreline Cabins, Fine Dining, Night Club Entertainment punctuated with a martini glass and a large arrow pointed the way. On a post nearby a smaller white plank shaped like an arrow with a crudely printed Little Lake indicated the rough dirt road branching off.

The road was familiar in that I recognized the climb toward the rolling hills across the wide open farmland dotted on either side by towering elms or stately oaks. Wild grasses and cattails, pollywogs and frogs ran wild in the ditches I liked to remember. Fields of young corn and rows of walnut trees glimmered in the sunlight. Towering white clouds edged with gray on the horizon added to the mugginess. I noticed a few flashes of lightning in the direction I was headed and figured the chances of my getting wet were pretty good. I had to get out of the open before the storm reached me. I gunned the Scout and it leapt forward like a good pony.

By the time I reached where the road butted into Lake Rd and Little Rd, I could smell the rain in the air and my skin was itchy with sweat. Both roads followed the lake shore around where the summer cabins were located in groves of sycamores and birch and the scattering of pines and firs. No one lived at the far end of the lake where the dam marked the beginning of the wide mosquito marsh and swamp known as Middle Lake.

Lake Rd was a well-travelled double track with only a stubble of weeds growing up the center. It got a lot more use because most of the summer cabins were on east side of the lake, and that down the road a bit a farmer had a stand selling local produce to the summer vacationers. Little Rd was rougher and overgrown, the double rut not as clearly visible. Granny’s cabin was off Little Rd, about a mile down.

Thunder was rolling overhead as I set off and a large raindrop splashed on my cheek. About the time the overgrown ruts had turned into a single trail, the clouds let loose and I was drenched to the skin in less than a minute. The dirt track had turned to mud just as quickly. I had to dismount and push the motorcycle ahead of me. It felt was like I was swimming underwater through the white haze of heavy downpour. I could barely see two feet ahead of me but I trudged blindly forward. At that point I realized that I had no idea where I was or how far down the road it was to the entrance of Granny’s property.

Eventually I saw a parting in the weeds alongside the road and realized that it was a narrow dirt scar of a clearing crossed with a gushing rivulet wending its way down to the lake. I set out to follow it. The white of the streaming rain changed to a few shades darker as immense black clouds moved overhead. The stands of trees and clutter of underbrush added their own shadows and limited my vision even more. In my memory the track to Granny’s cabin took a similar turn and I was looking for the shelter of the shanty around the next bend. Just then a flash of lightning lit up the entire understory of whipped and moaning trees and illuminated for just a brief second a sign that had been tacked to a tree. It was immediately imprinted on my brain.

NO ???? I WILL SHOOT U.

I believed every word and did an about face back toward the road. I had to assume that it was Wilson’s place so Granny’s couldn’t be much further. The intensity of the rain slowly changed to a steady insistent pelting instead of the sheets of white water disgorged from buckets of clouds. I plodded through the mud until I found a less obvious track through the undergrowth but one that now was much more familiar and lifted my spirits so that I found the extra energy to slog through the stream cutting grooves in the path to the lake and the cabin. Partway down I found the proof positive that I was on the right path. There was the little sign that Granny had Ned carve for her. It read ASK N U (picture of a shell) B (picture of a wishing well plus a comb). Granny always loved her word puzzles and rebuses.

Another flash of lightning revealed the old cabin as clear as if it were daylight and the thunder let out with an earsplitting bang before rolling away in a series of less loud concussions. I could smell the fried air as I hurried the motorcycle onto the shelter of the tiny front veranda. I stood there for a minute catching my breath and watching the rain wildly leaping off the eaves. The accompanying wind battered the tarpaper sides of the small cabin, blowing swirls of tree debris in every direction. Then the chill of being soaked through caught up with me and I pushed open the door to the shelter of the cabin.

Something had died. Not recently. But the stink of decay took up a lot of the air I was breathing. I had to step back out onto the porch. I left the door open and the stench streaked out like a flock of smelly ghosts in need of laundering. I waited a while, gazing through the steady rain to where I could see the dark waters of the lake agitated with tiny whitecaps. I would have to move everything into the cabin as day got darker I realized, including the Scout. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and carefully extracted my half pack of Luckies praying they weren’t soaked. I was in luck, the pack was wet but the inside foil had managed to keep them pretty dry. I fired up my trusty Ronson and filled my mouth with smoke. I figure that a nose full of tobacco smoke might help with some of the reek.

The Scout was a tight fit getting in through the narrow door. The one double window, given the circumstances, was letting in as much light as it could,. Most of it fell on a tabletop covered by a ratty oilcloth and barely illuminating a variety of indistinguishable objects. The corners were deep in shadows. I switched on the headlight and that helped some. I could make out what looked like a cot against one wall. Across from it was the shape of an old tin stove with the pipe snaking up and through the roof.

I steered the handlebars in a wide arc, memory filling in what I couldn’t completely make out. The narrow ladder I remembered led to the loft where us kids used to sleep, packed together on thin mattresses. Granny had her room at the far back and the dark rectangle of the doorway reminded me that we were not allowed in there. If we did get to curious, there was always a switch to remedy that. I felt a kind of excitement course through me, like the kind I used to feel when I was a kid. When I was going to do something daring. Or foolish. Or dangerous. And I could feel myself smiling.

Looking behind me at the back of the door, it was where I thought it would be, the old kerosene lamp, hung on a nail next to a greasy leather apron. It was what us kids used to call the “outhouse lantern” in case it was the middle of the night and more than the spirit was moving you to unload your bad conscious and you didn’t want to be stepping on anything that might be out there crawling around in the dark. Mostly it was the adults that used it, the kids were no strangers to wetting the bed. And to my unbelievable luck, there was a handful of wood matches in the apron pocket, just like they’d always been. I carried the lantern over to the table and held it up to my ear. I heard a faint slosh. I lifted the glass chimney and sniffed the wick. There were enough fumes that it might catch. I scratched a match on the window sill and it burst to life like a sulfur flare. I rolled the flame carefully along the wick, adjusting the length. The flame leapt alive just as the match was about to burn my fingers. I lowered the chimney and the dark cabin held a warm amber light.

I didn’t waste any time reorienting myself and getting a better idea of my situation, memory now rushing in to fill in the gaps. The old footlocker that Uncle Ned had brought home from when he served in the Great War and in which he kept his tools, an axe and a couple of types of saws, among other things was where it always was behind the door. And the red kerosene can with the capped spout at the top. A good shake revealed that it would refill the lamp a couple times or more. Leaning on the wall next to it was the old portable stove with its legs folded up. I remembered that the well and the pump were on the up side of the cabin along with the washtubs, and on the down side, the rickety old outhouse. I was in no hurry to use it, not with the rain still pouring down and the thunder rolling through the clouds. I was looking out the window in the direction of the outhouse, outside now much darker and shadowed than when I had arrived. I heard another loud crack and immediately fingers of lightning crackled up from the ground on a further shore of the lake. I’d forgotten how spectacular they could be. I figured the way things were going I’d soon see another one.

That wasn’t what surprised me. The next lightning strike was right outside the window, multiple tines of blinding light illuminating the entire landscape, outhouse and all. I jumped back instinctively. In the dark the lamp had illuminated my reflection on the warped glass pane, but as the white flash of electricity lit up the outside, I saw a face staring back at me, and it was not mine. And just like that it was gone. The face of a young girl. My mind leapt to the only person it could be, the person who had been on my mind almost constantly the last few days. It was Rebecca.

But it wasn’t. I raced out the door and around the side of the cabin where the warm glow of the lamp shined out onto the empty blackness of rainswept trees. I could have sworn it was her. My mind was playing tricks on me and I hadn’t even had a drink. But I knew where I could get one. I took the half pint of everclear out of the saddle bag and gave it another sniff. It wasn’t nearly as bad as whatever it was that had died. It even had a smell you could get used to, the tang of oblivion.

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Four of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Next Time: Lady In The Lake

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Three of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Next Time: The Missing Girls

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Two of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Next Time: The Graveyard

Welcome to Volume Three, Number One of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Next Time: Hiding Out At Little Lake

Welcome to Volume Two, Number Ten of Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Next Time: Lady On The Lake

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Four of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Three of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Two of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Welcome to Volume Three, Number One of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Welcome to Volume Two, Number Ten of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.