Alice hunts quantum vampires while her friend Jack, a dime store magician, tries to glue together a mysterious girl from various magazine clippings. Can he fix a magic trick gone wrong long ago?
Paul Jessup wrote a a great story about magic, ghosts and vampires without any faux gothic aspirations or Buffy stand-ins. Instead we get quantum physics, beat rhythms and a reference to a Jim Carrey movie (at least that’s what the magazine cut-outs reminded me of). Good stuff.
I’m not sure I understood the story’s ending correctly. I can think of at least two possible interpretations and that’s without having even seen the Alfred Hitchcock presents episode which inspired this story, so I might be missing bits of context. But like with A Word without Ghosts recently, you can sense logic behind the lack of logic, as there are hidden mechanisms to be found behind every magic trick.
In a room full of clockwork animals, the clockwork chickadee bears a deep hatred for its arrogant sparrow counterpart. Alone amongst the animals, the sparrow can fly from a wind-up engine in the chandelier. But Chickadee is determined to bring him down to earth.
This is a fun little steampunk parable whose apparent moral lesson (pride comes before the fall) is somewhat subverted by the cold, calculated nature of Chickadee’s schemes.
