The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 Read Online Free PDF Page A

kneeled before him, pulled the loose strap on his sandal and snugged it in place, lowered herself to her hands and knees and kissed his feet. “Until the morrow,” she said.
    “Is that how it works?” he asked. “Every day? We have to go through this every single day for the cosmos to work? Is that the way I wanted it? Is that the way I set it up? Why? Why did I do it this way? It makes no sense.”
    “Exactly,” said the woman, waving to him as the door slid shut between them.
    “Wait! I have one last question. How long is a day? How long—”
    But it was too late. She was gone. How frustrating! He was already beginning to forget.
    He turned around to face the cosmos.
    Strange , he thought. Wasn’t there a sign here just a moment ago? Something about a job interview?
    Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 1
Copyright © 2013 by Nick DiChario. All rights reserved.

Will  * You*   Volunteer to Kill Wendy?

by Eric Cline
    I t’s been a long time since anyone reported on a good locked-room mystery. They used to be huge. Sometimes they were just about jewel theft, stuff like that. But mostly they were about murder. They went something like this:
    The servants heard shouting from Mr. Clanton’s study, some sort of struggle … then deadly silence. They tried the door; it was locked. The police were summoned. They broke down the door. Inside, the master of the house, Mr. Clanton, was sprawled dead in his leather chair. A thin trail of blood came out of his left ear. A glass of water, tinged with red, sat on his desk. Scrawled pages in his own handwriting showed desperate attempts to reconcile doomed finances.
    Detective Bartholomew was in command. He verified that the first uniformed officers had secured the crime scene and had let no one in (or out). The door had been locked from the inside. There was no outside window. The floor was solid hardwood, with no trapdoors or any of that.
    The victim had been stabbed through the ear, but there was no murder weapon. The detective ordered the room resealed after the body and other evidence were removed, and had a guard placed day and night at the door.
    The glass was tested. It was water with a trace of the victim’s brain cells mixed in. The killer had apparently cleaned off the murder weapon by swirling it around in the glass.
    Bartholomew looked into Clanton’s background. The dead man had once romanced a lady acrobat at a circus, but she left him. Later, she was found stabbed to death. Clanton had no alibi, but he did have expensive lawyers, and no charges were ever filed.
    Finally, after 48 hours, Detective Bartholomew went back into the sealed room. He rapped on the heavy desk and said, “Please come out.” From a false compartment in the huge desk, the dwarf emerged. He was Igor, the circus performer who had fallen in love with the lady acrobat.
    He had sneaked into the house with an icicle frozen in a thermos. He surprised Clanton and, after a brief struggle, drove the sharp ice into his brain. Then, he simply left the icicle in the empty water glass to melt. By the time police were summoned and broke down the door, it was a glass of water.
    Igor had barely squeezed himself into the huge desk, with a small supply of food and water, and the thermos for a toilet, and had waited for the crime scene to be released.
    But he hadn’t counted on the brilliance of … Detective Bartholomew!
    Not so good, is it? Pretty frigging retro, eh? The circus dwarf thing alone would be a no-no today. But, once upon a time, the pulp magazines were cluttered with such stories.
    What a lot of people don’t know is that the locked-room mysteries were based on a series of killings involving my organization. Justified killings, I hasten to add. Sometimes, it was a clean kill. Sometimes, when things went wrong, it was a locked-room mystery. But unlike the ones in pulp magazines, these were never really solved. How could they be, when the victim was actually the perpetrator, and the supposed