The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror by Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Darrell Schweitzer [Schweitzer, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: fantasy, horror, weird tales, magic, sword and sorcery
ISBN: 9781434443144
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

ONE OF THE SECRET MASTERS

When we were both freshmen in high school, Frank Bellini had all the answers, and I believed everything he said. Einstein was wrong, and you really could go faster than light. Frank said so. Time machines were possible too. “Because time is relative!” he shouted again and again in the long and roundabout schoolyard argument we had over that one, the both of us equally passionate and equally ignorant of what such terms actually meant. But he won that one too, because he was Frank.

Later, when he was old enough to drive, it was the magic carburetor treatment which could give you two hundred miles to the gallon, and, of course, the gas pill, both of which had been suppressed (and here the dark theme entered our discourse) by the oil companies and the government. Frank was on to the extracurricular activities of the CIA. Once I asked him why they didn’t silence him, if he knew so much, but he just hit me and wouldn’t talk to me for a week.

He commanded authority. At fourteen he was already over six feet tall, all arms and legs but somehow massive, with a dark face like the business end of a hatchet and bushy eyebrows over dark, penetrating eyes.

But it was more than sheer I-can-beat-you-up size. He was smart, articulate, forceful, imposing.

By the time we got to college, the relative sizes had evened out a little bit, I had acquired what I thought was an intellectual swagger of my own, and doubt began to creep in. My friends and I baited him, demanding news of the Conspiracy of the Week.

“It’s the right-wing Texas oil billionaires,” he’d explain. “We’re in Vietnam because they own Lyndon Johnson.”

“And the Trilateral Commission?”

“Them too.”

“Kennedys and Rockefellers?”

“They decide who gets to be a Kennedy or Rockefeller. It’s all genetic engineering.”

“They?”

Nonplussed, he produced his secret identity card, showing him to be a high-ranking operative of the Technological Hierarchy to Enslave Mankind, otherwise known as T.H.E.M. “Whenever you hear that ‘They’ are behind something, that’s because they are.” And he smiled slyly, hinting at unfathomable depths of conspiracies within conspiracies, and no one could answer him back.

That was what made him so fascinating. He was always in control, either toying with you (“The Bavarian Illuminati killed JFK, you know…”) or just peeling you off from reality like a stamp from an envelope.

Once he led me into the cavernous cellars below Mendel Hall, the main science building on the Villanova campus. Where he went, I followed, even as we passed old radiation-warning signs (“There used to be an atomic pile down here, during the Fifties…”) and went through several doors marked RESTRICTED AREA and DO NOT ENTER. Somehow, Frank’s presence overruled all restrictions.

We hid behind a pile of boxes as a security guard went by, then descended a long, spiral staircase. A trapdoor led to a metal ladder. Down we climbed in almost total darkness, and groped our way along a dusty tunnel amid what felt

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