Far Fetched Fables No. 60 John R. Fultz

Story: “The Key to Your Heart is Made of Brass” by John R. Fultz

Wake up. Something is wrong.

Greasy orange light smears the dark. Only one of your optical lenses is functional. The walls are slabs of corroded metal with rust patterns like dumb staring phantoms. You lie awkwardly across the oily flagstones of an alley where curtains of black chains obscure the night. Bronze lanterns hang from those chains, but most of them are dead. Lightless. Like your left optical.

Struggling to hands and knees, you realize your porcelain face has been shattered. White shards gleam on the alley floor between puddles of greenish scum. You lift a gloved hand to explore your ruined visage; the upper left side took the brunt of the blow. Your fingers brush across the silver skull beneath the missing porcelain.

This won’t do at all. To be seen without one’s face. It could damage your reputation.

It might even be illegal.

John R. Fultz lives in the North Bay area of California, but grew up in Kentucky. His latest novel, The Testament of Tall Eagle, arrives in June 2015 from Ragnarok Publications. John’s Books of the Shaper trilogy includes Seven Princes, Seven Kings, and Seven Sorcerers (Orbit Books). His first short story collection is The Revelations of Zang, a series of interrelated tales born in the pages of Weird Tales and Black Gate. John’s work has also appeared in Year’s Best Weird Fiction (Vol. 1), That Is Not Dead, Shattered Shields, Lightspeed: Year One, Way of the Wizard, Cthulhu’s Reign, The Book of Cthulhu II, and other fine publications.

Learn more about him at johnrfultz.com, or find him on Twitter as @JohnRFultz.

About the Narrator:

Eric Luke is the screenwriter of the Joe Dante film Explorers, which is currently in development as a remake, the comic books Ghost and Wonder Woman, and wrote and directed the Not Quite Human films for Disney TV. His current project Interference, a meta horror audiobook about an audiobook… that kills, is available free on iTunes and at Quillhammer.com.

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