"Sense of Space" - February 6, 2025
Revenge can be quite simple if you know the right weakness...
Every Thursday, Silver Gecko Publishing highlights one of my stories, either a work of short fiction, a novel, or an audiobook. This week’s selection is the short story “Sense of Space,” from the anthology COSMIC TALES, available on Kindle, and in paperback.
My father was deathly afraid of heights.
He was so afraid of heights that he almost had to ask the ride attendant at Kings Island Amusement Park to let him off the Ferris Wheel he was riding with my sister back in the 70s. It was a crippling fear for him.
Phobias are powerful things, and they can put a person into a real panicked state. Having seen their effects first hand, my twisted little mind has always wondered if it was possible to get away with murder if you simply convince someone they are a victim of their phobias without actually putting them in danger..
-Kevin Carr
Click here to buy my books on Amazon.
Click here to buy my audiobooks on Audible.
Click here to follow me on TikTok.
Illustration by Pexels (@Pexels) from Pixabay
Sense of Space by Kevin Carr
Garret’s eyes stung. The pain started in the back of his head, radiating from the base of his brain. Feeling consciousness crawl back into him, Garret tried to open his eyes. Twin blades pierced his skull, and he squeezed his eyelids shut again. Too bright!
Garret was aware that he lay on his back on a hard, cold slab of metal. A low-pitched hum filled the air.
Where the hell am I? Garret reached an arm up to his face and buried his eyes in the crook of his elbow. He forced himself to sit up, swinging his legs over the edge of the slab. Only when his feet hit the floor did he realize he was wearing no shoes.
His head swooned.
Garret drew in a deep breath and reached out with his free hand to steady himself against the wall beside the slab. He slowly removed his other arm from his eyes and tried to open them again. This time, he ignored the pain.
The lights in the room were dim, but they still stung.
Christ! What the hell’s wrong with me? Was I drugged?
Taking several deep breaths, Garret tried to clear his head. The piercing pain made it difficult, but he forced himself to concentrate.
All right. Two questions: Where am I? And how did I get here? Garret thought back, searching for his most recent memory. Out of the fog, a scene emerged – him at his apartment on Fourth Street. He had been planning his next murder.
Garret had not picked the victim yet. She would be a surprise, yet he knew where he would find her – as a lone traveler in a remote fueling station. It had been six weeks since his last one, and he had started to get anxious.
The memory of the last one – a young brunette he had taken in her own home. She was so sweet. Yet, it was fading – becoming less vivid. When he turned out the lights in the apartment, Garret could think of nothing else. He had begun to lose sleep. Only the act of planning for the next victim calmed him for a short while. But eventually, when he began to lose sleep again, he knew he would have to act.
And the cycle would start again.
Garret remembered hearing the phone ring. It had broken his train of thought, and he swore as he crossed the apartment to pick up the receiver.
“What the hell do you want!” he yelled into the phone. Garret could remember no voice on the other end. Only a high-pitched whine... then nothing.
Could it have come through the phone? Garret thought. He was pretty sure that he was not drugged physically. He always made his own food out of cans he opened himself. That was the best defense against germs. He had heard of sonic frequencies that could render someone unconscious. They were developed for the military, but Garret knew that civilians could probably get a hold of them if they really wanted it.
That’s what it was, Garret thought, rubbing his eyes. Had to have been over the phone. No other drug he knew of would produce such a pain. And he had tried practically every drug that was available when he had been in college.
Garret tried to stand. His knees buckled, forcing him to sit back down on the slab. Pretty certain that he had figured out how he came to be here, Garret concentrated his thoughts to where, exactly, here was.
Still trying to blink away the pain, he surveyed the room. The walls and the floor all shared the same dull gray finish. The room itself was small – about five paces by three paces.
Thank God! Garret thought.
He stood up, this time retaining his balance, and walked along the perimeter, tapping the wall and listening for hollow spots. The whole place seemed quite solid, which relieved him.
Could be worse, he thought with a wry grin. Could be in the middle of an open field. Or worse yet, the top of a mountain.
Not that Garret was pleased with the fact that he had obviously been kidnapped, but he welcomed the enclosed space. Ever since his late teens, he had been tremendously agoraphobic.
It happened on a trip back from a college summer vacation at Cydonia on Mars. He studied ancient archeology and was visiting the pyramid site.
Something malfunctioned on the shuttle back to Earth. When Garret was rescued five days later, they told him he was one of the lucky ones. Most of the other six hundred passengers had not made it to the life-support capsules before a nuclear reaction shattered the walls of the vessel.
Garret did not see it that way. The capsule saved his life and carried him far from the explosion, but the wait practically killed him. For five days, Garret stared through the thin plastic of the capsule at the vast expanse of space: the maddening void.
With the knowledge that only a thin polymer layer protected him from the harsh vacuum of space, Garret had lived those five days in terror. Ever since his return, open spaces sent him into a frenzy.
Over the ensuing years, Garret had learned to live with his handicap. He could still travel across land or sea, just as long as he was in a car or a sealed boat. However, all flight horrified him. He was unable to stomach even short plane rides, so interplanetary flights were completely out of the question.
In a society so reliant on interplanetary commerce, it posed a slight problem, but Garret had always found a way around it.
Garret looked up to the ceiling of his strange cell. Two sets of fluorescent lamps flickered behind panels of glass, surrounded by panels of white, foamy material. On the wall across from the slab was a video monitor.
Suddenly, the screen came to life. A speaker beside the monitor spat out a burst of static. Garret maneuvered himself back to the slab and sat down.
Good, he thought. Now I might get some answers.
A face filled the screen – a face that Garret vaguely recognized. Yet, he could not place it specifically.
It was a man, about 30 with thin-rimmed glasses. Garret seemed to remember seeing the face before in a picture, not in person.
“Hello,” the man spoke.
Garret nodded, then winced at the pain in his skull.
“The pain should fade in about a quarter hour,” the man said. “You have been rendered unconscious with sonic application, which can cause headaches, dizziness, and mild nausea. Any discomfort you have is strictly temporary.”
Hah, Garret thought. I knew it.
The man did not wait for him to respond. “My name is Brad Cullen,” he continued. “You have been detained on seven charges of murder.”
Garret’s eyes widened. He leaned forward and examined the man.
Oh shit, he thought. This is not good.
Having been arrested before on minor violations, Garret was aware of the current policy not to have anyone but a defendant’s counsel reveal his full identity. Usually this was done to protect the innocent guards and participants in case a criminal wanted to seek them out after a trail.
This Brad Cullen, Garret was sure, was not a lawyer. Usually attorneys conducted business in person. If other parties were revealing themselves to him, it was for one of two reasons: that they didn’t think he did anything wrong, or that they knew he would never be set free.
Knowing his luck, Garret figured it was the latter.
“I’d like to speak to a lawyer,” Garret said.
“You’ll have time to speak to a lawyer later,” Cullen sneered. “One of the murders of which you are accused involved the daughter of Gabriel Houston, the curator of the Tranquility Bay Museum.”
“And...?”
“And he lives off-world on the lunar surface. In the Armstrong colony.”
Garret nodded. He had heard of the colonies, which had started a few years after his experience in the escape capsule. Groups of naturalists lived there, attempting to terraform a portion of the planet or moon. The experiments were always enormous flops. Terraformed ecosystems inevitably collapsed and left the group living under a dome and walking about in spacesuits until they gave up and returned, dejected, to Earth. Artificial environments were pretty, and they were interesting subjects of research papers, but they were far too complex to sustain in a limited area.
“The laws that govern the Armstrong colony,” Cullen continued, “are explicit in their prosecution schedule. They require justice within two weeks of capture. Terran laws are much more fluid and can be tried up to years after apprehension.”
Garret leaned back and gripped the sides of the slab.
“What the hell are you saying?” he gasped, looking around to the four walls.
“The mayor of the Armstrong colony has demanded you be tried under lunar law for Janine Houston’s murder. You are accused of murdering her while she was visiting her mother in Cincinnati, Earthside.”
“Are you saying that I’m being extradited?”
Brad Cullen nodded solemnly.
Garret suddenly rose to his feet. His eyes swept around the room. “When do we take off! I can’t go to the moon!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Cullen said. “We must comply. You have to be present at lunar trials.”
“No!” Garret said, scurrying around to the corners or the room, searching frantically along the gray walls for an exit. “Order a physician to do an examination. I am medically and psychologically restricted! I can’t go to the moon! I can’t travel! I can’t fly! You’ve gotta let me stay on Earth!”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Cullen said. “But that would be impossible. We departed two hours ago and are due in to Armstrong spaceport shortly.”
Garret froze…