The Ladies of Horror
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What it all Hinges Upon
by Donna J. W. Munro

Since ancient times, man has sought the center. Navels of the world were worshipped in places like Delphi, where important men came to decided their fates based on the whispered hallucinations of prophetesses chained to the center of their world.

There are pits in South America and volcanic mountains in the far east that have come to be known as the beating heart of earth. The human sacrifices and material goods poured into those depths by frightened humans so numerous, yet uncountable because of the nature of such places. Untouched. Beyond our understanding.

What draws us to those places?

As an archeologist, I’ve sought such understanding my whole academic life. I started this occupation as a stone cold cynic. A atheist with enough knowledge about ancient worship and the frameworks of religiousity that I’d be vaccinated against any local nonsense. Science alone would satisfy me. Facts were my object of affection.

“Dr. Harden, I’ve found something on the GPR.”

I glanced over at my inter’s screen and saw a strange shape dominated the image. Without the definition usually evident on the radar screen, it looked more like an astronomer’s rendering of a supernova, pulsing with light and energy on what should have been a relatively static image. I pushed her aside and fiddled with the program to see if the settings were correct.

No problem with the setting, cables, connections. Then I went to the external radar unit to check its components. As far as I could see, everything was perfect. It shouldn’t be sending such strange images.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” I told her.

“Grid it. It’s not that deep,” I said, knowing that I ought to do a whole more observation before we put spade to soil. That I might be wrecking the strata and causing myself all sorts of paperwork nightmares for later when the local government’s pissy auditors came after the dig’s licenses. It didn’t matter. My gut told me that we could be done by then. That if what we uncovered was important, they’d forgive us.

What really mattered was that beating energy buried just a couple of feet down. I smelled treasure and nothing was going to keep me from unearthing it today.

We gridded and stared in on the shaving away the layers of dirt. We had undergrads sifting the pails of dirt we brought up, but with the grid only ten by ten, there was very little for them to do other than watch as the more experienced team pulled at the secrets shaddowed in the dirt. They were as professional as one might hope during a university dig in the hallowed land where once the Venus of Willendorf had lain, awaiting discovery.

The rational part of me was oh so proud.

But rationality wasn’t guiding the spade and picks in my hands. I moved with a practiced ease that hid how little I cared about the fragmentary bits surround the object peeking out from the loose black soil. From the patina, I knew the bronze had to be at least three thousand years old, but it ought to be deeper if it was that old.

Behind me, my grad students sighed and delivered the sad news, archeologically. “The piece Dr. Harden unearthed is clearly not of this time or place. Perhaps it was stolen from a burial or some other site. Only lab analysis can tell us…”

I tuned them out. In my hands, the item unfolded into two joined halves. Delicately worked curves and deft pin in knuckle joining that still swung open and closed fascinated me. I knew from my own studies that hinges like this one had first been used only two thousand years ago in Turkey. They were a luxury of metal invention that hadn’t existed before. But this piece, strata evidence or no, had to be older.

It told me it was.

I carried the item back to my tent, shooing away all of the others to work purposely in the grid.

I held the hinge, listening to the tale it told. Every swirl spoke of the thousands of miles it had traveled, the hands that had carried it to each exquisite door in every palace it had adorned. It vibrated with the weight of its mission and in my hand it told me the story of my own future.

That night, I tucked it in bottom of my suitcase and caught a flight to D.C., leaving my students stranded. They’d survive, the hinge told me.

On the red-eye flight, I dreamed vivid touches of skin to metal and the words woven with ecstasy. I’d scaled my consciousness and kissed heaven’s face. I was prophet, walking in the steps of conquerors awaiting fate to fell them. I was judge, delivering the last breath of life to an aged empire.

The hinge pivot life to death, the holy instrument of judgement. Like Excalibur, it was wielded to save mankind… but the hinge was a scale’s balance, not a sword.

I knew finally what to do.

My life—discovery, family, tenure, bills––fell away as I left the airport. I held the hinge in my hands and it weighed as much as the world.

At the conqueror’s palace, I passed the gates invisible to the guards and the agents who watched. That the famous house was occupied by one the hinge would undo thrilled the part of me that used to care about historical things. But the newer me understood the White House to be a shadow construction built by an infant empire.

It would be nothing, soon enough.

I stood at the door so often featured on the news, now quiet because the President was at play golfing or eating. Whatever it was that such men do.

The hinge sang to me as I pressed the door, all the weight of time and justice in my fists. My blood lubricated the locks. My flesh paid the bone price that the elder forces of earth always required. The portal opened and I released the hinge from my boney clutch.

It sighed its pleasure at my devotion and promised my name would life in the swirls and ridges of filigree. It attached to the door of power as it had with Napoleon and Hitler, Alexander and Atilla. Answers to all my historical questions appeared in my mind as I sunk, cell by cell, into the wood of the threshold the hinge attached itself to.

The navels of the world bring power, strength, and growth and are paid with energy. But only the hinge took power, strength, and expansion away. Since strong men first shut the doors against their supplicants, the hinge had shut the door on their evil.

Hail the hinge and its makers, I thought as my life flowed away. And the door began to swing shut once again.

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!