Hugh J. O'Donnell

The Moon Door was a rumor spread among mystics and conspiracy theorists, not a subject for a tenured archaeologist to pursue.
Supposedly, hidden deep within an ancient ruin somewhere, but nobody knew just where, was a door through which always shone a full moon, no matter the time of day or date.
The story was always tangled with other tales. Ancient aliens, lost technology, and Atlantis figured heavily in most versions. She dismissed those accounts in her secret research. Someday she would find it, the last door back to Faerie.
The one they’d left open for her: Her way home.

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The rogue burst into the paladin’s cell during his morning prayers.
“We need your help,” she said, panting.
“Why?” he asked cautiously.
“We may have stolen a goat.”
“So go and return it, or make restitution to the owner.”
“That’s the problem. It wasn’t me this time. It was the wizard. He-” She was interrupted by a yell that seemed to shake the heavens themselves. He glanced out the window and saw a giant, glowing goat chewing on a tree.
“You have some pull with the gods, right?”
The paladin sighed. It was going to be one of those mornings.

The cult stood in the surf and prayed with their leader. He stood on a rock, well out of the spray, and commanded the sea. With his saffron robes of office and perfectly coiffed mustache, he looked the part.
“Soon, my brothers! See the lights on the horizon? They are coming for us! I promised you a miracle, and it is coming!”
Earlier that day, he had gone up to the lighthouse and knocked out the light. It takes a lot of work to successfully predict the future, but the investment was worth it.
Now his ship would come in.

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Miki and George sat on the balcony and watched the lanterns.
As the last light of dusk faded, they appeared across the city, transforming the sun-bleached concrete into a sea of tiny lights. They were simple things; just candles and paper rising towards the heavens.
George tried to grab one as it floated past, but a passing air current pushed it out of his reach, and he was left with nothing but the smell of smoke.
“Hey Miki, what are they doing all this for?” he asked.
“Why do the humans do anything?” The other cat asked. “To amuse us.”

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The astronomer clicked on the first of the latest batch of hi-res photos from the new space telescope.
“Huh,” he said.
His colleague wheeled her chair over. The best science came from ‘huh,’ not ‘eureka.’
“What is it?”
“Does this nebula look like a demon to you?”
She could see it. “You’ve got the horns there, and those three bright stars could be eyes, and that long plume there is very arm-like. Maybe we’ll call it the Demon Nebula.”
“Or the Pareidolia Nebula,” he joked. The second picture came up.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Is it waving at us?”

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She sneaked into the Evacuation Zone every day after school, looking for secrets. She wore her mask and gloves to protect herself from the supposedly poisoned air. But a forest had grown up in the twenty years since the fateful siren, and none of the wildlife looked sick or suffering to her.
The zone was like an open-air museum, with houses frozen in time. Inside, books lay open, and plates, their contents long since eaten by feral cats, sat hastily abandoned.
She explored the Evacuation Zone whenever she could, searching for the truth. Someday, she would find the hidden truth.

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When we landed on the planet’s surface, we abandoned the generation ships that brought us here. They had served their purpose, and we were more interested in exploring the virgin wilderness of our new home.
They told us the planet was uninhabited. There isn’t supposed to be any intelligent life here. This world is ours now.
And yet, for the last three nights, I’ve seen a flickering light, like a campfire, shining from one of the massive engines on the Demeter.
Tonight, a friend and I will climb the massive, cliff-like side of the ship and find out for ourselves.

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Every night, the sage had the same dream. A pair of ravens fought over a dead tree, while the sky above was rent by a devastating thunderstorm. Every morning, he dutifully transcribed all he could remember. He could spot a prophecy, and this one was obvious.
The gods warned of civil war, to the ruin of all. But he was no politician. Still, he wrote letters to sew peace between the royal houses.
He did not expect a pair of armies to appear outside his hermitage, determined to keep him out of their business.
Sometimes, the gods can be subtle.

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He’d never been able to explain what the machine was for.
The form had obsessed him, a massive assembly of gears and plates haunting his mind like cobwebs in a haunted house.
But he was never able to make it work. He locked it in a shed and forgot it.
Years later, his granddaughter rediscovered the machine while exploring. The shed door had long ago disintegrated around the padlock, and she slipped inside. She found it hanging in the hot, dusty darkness and fell in love.
At last, the inventor knew what the machine was for. It was for her.

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When the rest of the crew was asleep, she would sneak down to the test chamber and run her own experiment. The instrument was beautiful in and of itself; a keyboard and resonating chamber leading out into the dark water.
The scientists were studying wild cetacean communication frequencies. They would play a single note and log the subjects’ responses. 
The scientist didn’t understand. Whales didn’t communicate. They sang. So she took their million-dollar keyboard and played music. She started with simple melodies and built into complex improvisations as the creatures responded.
During the day, they communicated.
At night, they jammed.

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