Selina Rosen's stories have appeared in several magazines and anthologies including Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, the two new Thieves' World anthologies, and HelixOnLine. Some of her fourteen published novels include Queen of Denial, Chains of Freedom, Strange Robby, Fire & Ice, Bad Lands (with Laura J. Underwood), and Sword Masters. She owns Yard Dog Press and created their Bubbas of the Apocalypse universe.
Selantra sat poised on the seat of power—her ergonomic chair in her home office in Matawan, New Jersey.
"Curses," she hissed as she saw the E-mail. "How stupid can you get! The message specifically says send it to ten friends but not the person who sent it to you." It was the second one she'd gotten back since she'd sent it out yesterday afternoon. This meant she had to find yet ten more people to send it to and hope that none of those idiots sent it back. "They're ruining my spell. I'm running out of friends to send it to," she grumbled.
Selantra looked at the clock and scowled. She couldn't put it off any longer; she had to get ready. "But soon all will bow to my will." She laughed manically, pressed the Send button, stood up and went to get dressed for work.
Tamara just wanted to get through her E-mail so she could get back to work on her book. She deleted all the unwanted spam, answered a couple of fan letters, and then started answering the E-mail from friends and relatives which she had let stack up over the last few days. Why? Because all she wanted to do was work on her book.
She opened the E-mail from her mother-in-law Sara—to whom she had given the Native American name Woman Who Fills World With Spam. Tamara cringed: A chain letter! There was a picture of a woman playing a lute in a field of flowers and there was some weird written language coming from the strings. Under that was a poem all about self-empowerment, mostly just like all the other chain crap that idiots insisted on sending her.
Of course Robert would have a fit if she told him his mother was a moron, and the truth was that she liked her mother-in-law. In fact, right then better than she liked her husband. But anyone who sent one of these things to a friend was in Tamara's opinion a total idiot.
A poem filled with love and self-empowerment or some sappy-assed story of human kindness was always followed with: "Send this message to ten friends in ten minutes and something amazing will happen today. Send it to twenty friends in ten minutes and have good luck for a year. Send it to fifty friends in ten minutes and have good luck for life. If you let the message end with you doom and despair will fall upon you and you will have bad luck for two years."
This one was no different.
"Just what I need," Tamara said with a sigh. 2007 had sucked. Her main publisher went under and she'd had to rush to sign with someone else at half what she was used to getting just to stay in the game. Her adult son got a divorce. Her best friend died of cancer. Bush was still president. She had high hopes that 2008 would be the start of a long cycle of good luck. She normally wasn't superstitious, or at least she liked to believe she had outgrown all that. Over the last eight years she hadn't had much of anything but bad luck—and maybe, just maybe, it was because she just kept deleting these stupid-assed things.
She sure as hell couldn't make herself send it on to ten friends. She didn't understand the people who felt compelled to forward this crap. The fact that they did it meant that they believed it was true. If they believed it was true then they were either A) demanding that you bend to their will and send it on or B) sending you a damned curse—and what sort of friend sends their "loved ones" a curse?
What sort of mother-in-law sent her suddenly underemployed daughter-in-law a two-year curse on the second day of the new year?
She deleted the damn thing, inwardly seething, and wishing that the person who started the damn chain letter in the first place would grow a giant boil on their ass. Then she felt better.
Just five days after starting the chain letter Selantra started to feel the power growing within her. When she got up that morning she felt younger and the air smelled sweeter.
When she pulled into the parking lot at the office her favorite parking spot was empty. When she walked into the employee lounge Tom handed her a cup of coffee just the way she liked it and told her to take it easy that she was working too hard and making them all look bad.
When she sat down at her cubicle to work she had a new chair. The old one that hurt her back and had been repaired with duct tape was gone and in its place was sitting a brand new ergonomic chair like the one she had at home only in her favorite shade of purple. It broke about fifteen office codes.
"Surprise," her boss said at her shoulder.
"Thanks," Selantra said.
"No problem, Sally, you deserve it. I've overlooked how important you are to this office for too long." He walked away and she smiled. It was working. She wasn't important to the company. All she did was type up reports and she certainly didn't work as hard as most of the other employees did. The spell was working; it was changing people's perception of her.
Selantra—for that was the name she'd given herself, Sally was just the drone who worked for the advertising firm in cubicle seventeen—had figured out that the true route to absolute power was not to actually change, but to make people change their perceptions of you. And she'd found the perfect tool. She sat down in her new chair with her perfect cup of coffee and patted her monitor.
A few minutes later, as she was typing up the first report of the day, she felt it: a sudden loss of power that made her cringe. Someone had deleted without sending, but more than that they had deleted with animosity, even hatred. There had been power behind their keystroke and a will to destroy whoever had started the chain mail. It took her till noon to fully recover. Most people didn't seem to mind the possibility of cursing their friends as long as they thought they might actually get some good luck, and they sure didn't want any bad luck. So they just kept pressing that Send key and every time they did, Selantra's power grew. Most people rationalized sending the curse on by saying that all their friends had to do was send it on to ten people and then they'd have good luck, too.
The sheep didn't know that there was no luck for them, good or bad. They couldn't read those words coming out of the lute, didn't know their magic meaning, and probably wouldn't have cared if they did. They'd still send it on and every person who believed in it enough to send it on made Selantra stronger. The few who deleted it could not possibly contend with the thousands who would send it on and soon, very soon, Selantra would be queen of all she surveyed.
She didn't give another thought to the person who had deleted with such malice. The bad feeling passed and her day just got progressively better.
In the weeks that passed her power grew in leaps and bounds. She was given a promotion at work to be an advertising executive even though she knew not one damn thing about it. And even when she screwed everything up they praised her. When she went to the mall someone always let her have a parking place close to the door. When she shopped, if she grabbed something on sale at the same time someone else did, the other person apologized and let her have it. When she went to Starbucks they made her mocha latte with foam perfectly and she never had to repeat her order. Not once.
Hell, the kid that mowed her lawn even did it just when it needed it, not because she called to tell him the city was going to fine her if he didn't. Though she doubted at this point the city would have bitched at her anyway.
Her mother called and spent thirty minutes apologizing for all the horrible things she'd said and done to Selantra over the course of her life.
Then there was that fateful day when, without being told to do so, everyone stopped calling her Sally and started to call her Selantra. If this kept up she had no doubt that soon she would be Queen of the World. It was amazing how nice people treated you when they perceived that you were important.
She saw no end in sight. The E-mail would keep circulating, going round and round and round again and making her constantly stronger.
Selantra'd had a hard day getting everything she wanted, so she lay back on her bed. As she started to drift off to sleep she started to think about how she would rule the world, what she would change, whom she might choose to be her boy toy. She chuckled. Why stop at just one? She could have anyone she wanted, as many as she wanted. Nothing could stop her.
Tamara had been working on the book all day, about fifteen hours, interrupted only by her husband coming home to bitch that she hadn't done a damn thing all day. She had mostly ignored him, told him to heat up the chicken casserole from the night before and kept writing. Now she wasn't really tired but she knew she had to quit writing because when she looked up to see what she had just typed it said: "Jamie caught gerferkle in his galingle and slide down the janket."
She decided to check her E-mail to wind down from the day. Her friend Katy wanted to know if she could meet her for lunch. "Sorry, Katy, it's 11:45 at night so a little late for lunch. How about tomorrow?" She added a little laughing emoticon at the end.
She checked the rest of her E-mail. There was a lot of spam but not one fan letter, which was distressing. She wasn't a big star, far from it, but she had a small, loyal fan club and she usually got mail from at least one of them a day. She needed that encouragement because she had never gotten any from her family. They thought her writing was a hobby. In fact, her kids made a point of telling her they didn't like to read. Her husband considered her writing to be nothing more than a manifestation of her obsessive compulsive disorder. Oh he had more than supported her writing when it had been bringing in good money. Now that it wasn't bringing in what he considered to be even decent money he constantly told her it was a huge waste of time.
Their marriage was in trouble. She knew it, he knew it; hell, she was sure everyone did. Things had been mostly bad for them for seven years. Going through bad things together didn't necessarily bring a couple close together, not when they both handled stress and loss in different ways. When her publisher had gone under last year, taking her career with it, things had deteriorated between them to the point that they hardly spoke at all these days except to argue.
This was probably why she was in no hurry to go to bed. She could either sleep with him, just the thought of which sent a cold shiver down her spine. Or she could curl up on the couch and then have to explain why she had done so in the morning.
She pressed Send and then Receive and was almost relieved to see she had a new message until she opened it and saw what it was. Her friend Amy, who she hadn't seen or heard from in weeks, had sent her that same damn chain letter her mother-in-law had. Tamara was livid. While she didn't dare tell her mother-in-law what she thought of these things, she was more than capable of telling Amy. She hit Reply sending the chain mail back to Amy with this message:
Amy,
Sending some stupid-assed chain letter is not the same as writing, calling or coming by.
Never, ever, ever, send me any of this crap again!
Did you ever have good luck after sending one of these things?
I've had lots of bad luck for years now. I don't think it's because idiots keep sending me this crap, but who knows? Maybe it is.
I think the morons who start this crap deserve to die a slow and painful death, death by crabs or some such thing. I don't know what they get from wasting their time this way but I hope whatever it is it's worth all the grief they cause.
Yes, I am this mad. It's late, I've had a hell of a day, and this was the last thing I needed. You're sending this thing all over and you don't even know what it says.
Tamara
Tamara didn't care if Amy never talked to her again. If she sent her another one of these things she was going to have to hunt her down and kill her, so it was just as well. Feeling better than she had in a while she shut her computer down for the night and crawled off to sleep on the couch.
Selantra woke with a scream and a strange crawling sensation on her skin. She ran to the bathroom and threw up, then she just lay on the floor trying to get the world to quit spinning. She felt her power being drained and she was so weak she couldn't get up.
Someone powerful was deleting without sending. No! This was worse than before. They'd done something else, but Selantra couldn't be sure what. All she could be sure of was that whatever it was, it was causing her physical pain and draining away the power that had been building up. She started to panic, but then as she lay there, the power started to come back. About an hour later she was able to get up and stumble to her bed where she slept and woke up so filled with power she almost forgot what had happened.
Almost.
"Selantra Dupree, what a joke." Tamara laughed without joy as she changed the channel.
"Are you kidding, Tamara? She's a genius," Katy said, grabbing the remote away and turning the channel back so that she could watch the idiot girl from Matawan speak.
"There will be more parking at the malls," Selantra was saying. "No more handicapped spots means more and better parking for everyone. Let's face it, the handicapped mostly don't work so they can afford to waste their time parking further away and hey, they're on wheels so it's not like they have to walk like the rest of us."
"She's brilliant," Katy said.
"She's a freakin' moron," Tamara said in disbelief. "Don't tell me you voted for that thing?"
"Sure I did," Katy said excitedly. "She's going to be the greatest congresswoman ever."
"Whatever." Tamara got up from the couch. She couldn't afford to argue with Katy because she had nowhere else to go. She'd moved in with her friend three months ago when she'd finally gotten fed up and decided it was time for her and Robert to split the sheets.
Last week the divorce was final but she wouldn't have enough money to get her own place till the house sold. She didn't think that would be happening any time soon; the housing market was in the toilet. The advance she'd received on the book she'd just turned in was half of what she was used to getting. If she didn't watch every penny she spent she wasn't even going to be able to pay Katy what she owed her for her part of the rent.
She felt defeated and displaced. Tamara couldn't even afford to have an opinion. Watching the idiot girl talking on the idiot box was more than she could take, so she walked to her room and shut the door.
A forty-seven year old woman with everything she owned stuffed into a ten by twelve room. It was pathetic. She was sharing an apartment and subsequently a bathroom with a thirty-five year old woman who hadn't dated in twelve years and who obviously used the shower massage as a surrogate man. Katy was often in there for hours at a time, forcing Tamara to take a trip to the Quik Pik a half-mile away just to use the toilet. It was pathetic and embarrassing.
She was angry and bitter and at the very end of her rope. Her kids didn't even offer to help. She had an ex-husband she was glad to be rid of and who was glad to be rid of her, but who really felt he deserved to have everything they'd worked together to acquire since she was the one who wanted out. Truth was—and she knew it—Robert was in no hurry to sell the house he was living in and it would have been a chore even if the housing market were good.
She couldn't get a decent advance and there were no more royalty checks because her old publishing house had gone under and declared bankruptcy. She was going to have to get a "real" job. A frightening prospect since at her age and having been out of the job market for close to twenty years she'd be lucky to get a job flipping burgers or as a door greeter.
She'd sold a couple of short stories and knew she'd sell more but that was never steady income and at best it might pay a couple of bills.
Some pretty twenty-something moron who cared about nothing as much as making things easier for people who already had it easy had just been elected to congress, and Tamara would have had trouble getting arrested in this screwed-up country.
She switched on her computer and called up her E-mail. There was lots of it, mostly spam which she just deleted. She'd tried spam filters, but they had wound up keeping out stuff she wanted and still let spam in, so what was the point?
Her agent had sent her a copy of a review of her new book. It was half-assed, though he of course thought it was a good review because he was a moron.
In fact, lately Tamara was more and more sure that everyone she knew or ever came into contact with was a complete and utter idiot.
She was sure it was mostly her point of view. She just needed something good to happen to counterbalance all the utter crap she'd been put through. She needed the equivalent of a circus coming to town in her brain to wipe out all the bile of the last few years.
If she could just totally lash out at any of the people who were responsible for how she felt that would help. She couldn't of course because she was pretty sure that everyone close to her was about ten minutes from checking her into the Ha Ha Hilton as it was. Besides she couldn't afford to blow up at her ex, or Katy, or her publisher or her agent or a dozen other people she'd like to rip a new one because they held all the cards and she had nothing, zilch, nada.
She'd had to bite her tongue so much this past year she had permanent scarring.
There was an E-mail from one of her fans, Bertha from Pennsylvania. She always had such nice things to say about Tamara's work she was sure this would cheer her right up. But when she opened it, it was that damn chain letter again, the one with the two-year curse that she hated so much. She started to delete it and then she noticed the woman in the picture and stopped. She ran in the living room and grabbed a newspaper.
"What's up?" Katy asked.
"Same, same," Tamara droned idiotically and ran back into her hole with the paper. She flipped it open to the article about their new congresswoman and she held the picture up to the one on the screen. There was no doubt; there was a strong resemblance. She grabbed her glasses—the ones she only wore when all the words ran together on her monitor—and put them on. What language was that? What music was the lute playing? She had no idea and neither did all the idiots who just kept sending it out over and over again. If it had gotten to her three times already, how many times had it been around? How many people had just sent this right on without having any idea what it said, or if it said anything at all?
She blew up the letters on her computer, and when she did the words vanished like smoke. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She tried the process again and again the words turned to smoke.
Tamara tried to remember if she'd had anything to drink. She hadn't, so then she wondered if maybe she ought to go get something.
Then it all made perfect sense. Sure lots of total dumb asses wound up in congress spouting utter crap, but not poor, unknown dumb asses. This Selantra Dupree had done a spell.
Tamara herself was no stranger to spell craft. She'd played with magic as a teenager, and like so many dabblers had gotten out the first time she did something she couldn't explain away. As she got older and wiser she'd studied the craft again but mostly as a visitor, not as a practitioner. That didn't mean she didn't know magic when she saw it.
Or maybe everything that had happened to her in the last few years had just driven her completely mad and she was lashing out at something she hated because everything else seemed out of her grasp.
It wasn't hard to find Congresswoman Dupree's E-mail address. She forwarded the chain mail to her and typed, "Congratulations on your congressional seat," in the subject line, knowing that it was very hard for anyone not to open something that might be praise. Then she wrote with a fervor she hadn't felt in months.
It's a great idea, feeding off people's gullibility to build your power. Nothing quite as strong as people's belief is there? All those people, millions of them, believing they are going to have good luck or avoid bad luck by sending it on, each picking at least ten friends they don't mind risking to the "curse" to forward the message to. And every day it's more people and more power. And I know how to take it all away; it's almost too easy.
Tamara hit Send.
Selantra's inauguration party—held in the lavish Gold Hotel Ballroom—was just starting to wind down when the pains started. They went from her stomach to her brain and back again. She excused herself quickly and practically ran to her hotel room where she threw up for ten minutes. Feeling dizzy she rinsed her mouth, washed her face, and stumbled to her bed expecting the pains would stop and her strength would come back tenfold as it had the last two times. This time was different. She continued to feel weaker and weaker and the pains kept coming. Finally she forced herself up and crawled to her computer to see if she could figure out what was going on.
She used her magic to get past the mass of E-mails from well-wishers and find the letter from Tamara Black. Her fingers trembled as she opened the E-mail. She had just finished reading Tamara's message when another wave of pain went through her body.
She quickly wrote back, "What the hell are you doing to me?"
Tamara's answer was quick. "I encoded your message so that no one could open it, and then I sent it to everyone on my list with the message to send it back to me. When they do, I delete it. Every time I delete a message I get stronger and you get weaker. I will keep doing it till there is nothing left of you but a greasy spot."
As another pain shot through her body Selantra asked, "What exactly will it take to get you to stop? What is it you want?"
Tamara sat signing book after book, smiling and talking to her fans. Her cell phone rang and when she saw who it was she sighed. "Wait a minute, I have to take this. It's the president . . . again." She snapped the phone open, stood and walked away from the signing table.
"What?" she demanded.
"We don't want global warming, right?"
"How can you be such a smart witch and know nothing about the environment or politics?" Tamara asked in a harsh whisper.
"I just want to be in control. I don't really care about anything else, remember?"
"Like most politicians," Tamara muttered.
"Global warming, yes or no?" Selantra hissed.
"No we don't want global warming. Sign the air purity bill."
"All right, thanks."
Tamara shut her phone and looked at the long line of adoring fans that snaked out the door of the bookstore and through the mall. She supposed she should have thwarted Selantra's plan to take over the world, but then she'd still be stuck in Katy's apartment waiting for Robert to sell the house.