Short stories from books or newly created

Jack

James Redpath

Doctor Leopold

Doctor Furniss

Penruddock

The Germ Growers

Name in the Smoke

Shadows at Penruddock

The Red Sickness

The Germ Growers
By Robert Potter
1892
Name in the Smoke
What if a map remembered terror?
In a dim Gippsland hotel, Bob heard a bushman describe Kimberley, and the talk struck him like cold water.
Jack was already watching Bob across the smoke, his brows drawn tight, as if the same buried place had opened in both minds.
They left the room, crossed the dark scrub, and walked the moonlit beach without a word.
Near the surf, Bob said the gold seekers were close to a place they had never named aloud.
Jack answered that silence had been safer, and the sea kept thundering as it carried Bob back to another coast.
Shadows at Penruddock
That same sea had pounded below Penruddock, where Bob first learned that a handsome face could feel wrong.
James Redpath charmed strangers at first, but dogs shrank from him, doors closed behind him, and Bob once saw pleasure flash across his face at another's pain.
One cloudless noon, after James Redpath walked inland, two shaped shadows slid over the grass like boats on invisible wheels.
Bob sprang up, but the sky was empty, and the fishermen below kept pulling their nets as if nothing had passed.
James Redpath was never seen in Penruddock again.
Before the whispers could settle, a new terror entered Penruddock, and even his vanishing seemed to fade inside it.
The Red Sickness
That terror came as the red sickness, moving from cottage to cottage until Penruddock shut its doors.
Doctor Leopold and Doctor Furniss burned bedding, sealed the valley, and fought the fever almost alone while the village kept away.
When the deaths finally slowed, Doctor Leopold told Doctor Furniss that hidden enemies might cultivate disease the way men breed dogs.
Doctor Furniss looked hard at the brook, and even the picnic sunlight seemed to lose its color.
That night Bob dreamed of invisible cars crossing a bright sky and dropping sickness over sleeping roofs.
Back on the beach, Jack told Bob to write it at last, and the waves sounded less like fear than warning.

Germ Growers - Story Book

THE_GERM_GROWERS..pdf

Germ Growers

Germ Growers
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Germ Growers - Short Movie

Robert

Leopold

Furniss

Gippsland

Kimberley

What Crosses a Cloudless Sky

The Name in the Lamplight

The Man No One Liked

The Day the Shadows Came

Leopold by the Brook

Write It Anyway

What Crosses a Cloudless Sky
By Robert Potter
1892
The Name in the Lamplight
What crosses a cloudless sky?
In a dim hotel at Gippsland, Robert and Jack heard a bushman describe the country near Kimberley, and both men went still.
The room was smoky and half lit, but that one place name struck both men with the same hard chill.
They said nothing before the others, but moonlight found them walking side by side through scrub toward the long empty beach.
There, with the surf thundering in the dark, each knew the same memory had risen in the other like a hand from deep water.
The sound of the sea pulled Robert back to a rough coast where vanished men were already part of village gossip.
The Man No One Liked
On that other shore, the wind off Penruddock carried salt, superstition, and the old tale of charming men who disappeared.
In Penruddock, old women repeated the story with lowered voices as if listening ears might draw the vanished back.
Robert listened harder than the grown people did, because every version ended with the same cold absence.
Then James Redpath began walking with him, handsome at first glance, but watched by dogs, children, and girls with the same recoil.
One afternoon Robert saw James Redpath draw a fishing rod's wire across another walker's leg, and pleasure flickered across his face.
From then on, Robert avoided him, yet dread followed James Redpath like a second shadow.
The Day the Shadows Came
That word stayed with him, because months later a second shadow slid over the cliff grass at noon.
James Redpath had passed him only hours before, walking inland with a careless nod.
Then two sharp shapes crossed a cloudless sky, too solid for clouds and too swift for any bird Robert knew.
Robert leapt up, heart hammering, and in that bright ordinary day he knew James Redpath would never be seen again.
He searched the bright horizon for some shape or craft, and found only fishing boats and empty air.
By evening, talk of a lost man had already begun, and another terror was climbing the hill toward Penruddock.
The Red Sickness
That terror arrived as a sickness marked in red, moving from cottage to cottage until the village stopped breathing freely.
The red stain bloomed first on necks and shoulders, and the sight of it turned rumor into panic.
People fled the valley paths, shops emptied early, and every new knock at a door sounded like a sentence.
Two young doctors, Leopold and Furniss, burned infected huts, raised a quarantine fence, and carried the sick into a ruined stone house.
Fire, lime, and stubborn courage slowly beat the disease back, though graves still filled the churchyard before the panic eased.
When sunlight and music finally returned at a village picnic, Robert followed Leopold toward a brook and overheard the thought that changed everything.
Leopold by the Brook
Beside the running water, Leopold spoke softly, as if the brook itself might carry dangerous words away.
He said the red sickness had not risen by chance, but had been cultivated like a breed made savage on purpose.
Furniss laughed first, then listened, because Leopold was comparing good dogs and ruined dogs to harmless germs turned murderous.
He believed enemies beyond ordinary human knowledge were breeding plagues from nature itself, and fighting mankind with invisible tools.
Robert stood very still, hearing the leaves tremble while the doctor's calm voice made the world feel newly dangerous.
That night Robert dreamed of unseen cars crossing the stars and casting pestilence over sleeping roofs.
Write It Anyway
The roofs were far away again when the surf returned, and Robert faced Jack on the moonlit beach at Gippsland.
Jack understood without more explanation that the gold talk had brushed the edge of the same hidden country near Kimberley.
Robert said no one would believe such things spoken aloud, because disbelief could sound too much like sanity.
Jack told him to write it anyway, and to leave the impossible on the page until time caught up.
Neither man tried to sound brave, and that honesty held them steadier than comfort could.
They walked home with their pipes unlit, while the sea kept speaking into the dark like a witness that never slept.

The Germ Growers - Story Book

The Germ Growers
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The Germ Growers - Short Movie

Edgar

John Carter

Dejah Thoris

Tars Tarkas

Woola

Hudson

Mars

Arizona

Zodanga

Helium

The Man Who Never Aged

The Unaging Guest

The Cave and the Red Star

A Stranger on Mars

The Princess in Chains

War for Zodanga

The Door Between Worlds

The Man Who Never Aged
By Edgar Rice Burroughs
1917
The Unaging Guest
What kind of man never ages?
Edgar remembered John Carter as a laughing Virginia soldier whose face looked unchanged after fifteen long lost years.
When nights turned quiet, John Carter stood above the Hudson with his arms lifted toward Mars, as if listening for an answer.
Then a telegram summoned Edgar back, and John Carter was found lying in the snow below the bluff, still warm and strangely unmarked at dawn.
Inside the safe waited a will, a sealed manuscript, and one impossible command that his body must rest in an open stone tomb.
The tomb door locked from the inside, and the manuscript promised that death was only the beginning of another world.
The Cave and the Red Star
Inside that sealed manuscript, gunfire cracked across the lonely Arizona hills.
John Carter rode after a missing partner, found a raider camp, and escaped into a cave as dawn bled red over stone.
A strange vapor pinned him motionless while frightened riders stared into the dark and fled from something unseen behind him.
When moonlight reached the cave, John Carter saw his own body lying on the floor.
Naked and shaking, John Carter stepped outside, fixed his gaze on Mars, and felt the red world pull him through the freezing dark.
When his eyes opened again, the sky had changed and gravity had loosened its ancient grip on him.
A Stranger on Mars
That loosened weight became a shock when John Carter bounded high above the yellow moss and broken ruins of Mars.
Glass domes held strange eggs, and towering green riders closed around him on eight legged mounts with spears ready for capture.
John Carter leaped beyond their reach, and that impossible jump bought him a place as curiosity instead of prey.
Among the green warriors, Tars Tarkas watched with hard eyes that sometimes softened for a heartbeat before he hid the feeling again.
A loyal hound named Woola chose John Carter, and the savage camp slowly made room for the stranger beside its fires.
Then another captive arrived, and the whole dead city seemed to hold its breath for her.
The Princess in Chains
The still air broke when Dejah Thoris was dragged from a fallen ship and thrown before the green chiefs in chains.
John Carter struck down a warrior who humiliated her, and the shock of that choice changed everything between them.
Under cold moons, Dejah Thoris taught him the customs of her world, while her guarded glances slowly turned warm and unafraid.
When John Carter confessed his love, Dejah Thoris answered with her hands trembling against his chest and her breath catching.
Their escape shattered on the desert, and green raiders took John Carter while Dejah Thoris vanished toward uncertain safety in the hills.
In chains and darkness, one hope still burned brighter than pain.
War for Zodanga
That hope led John Carter through an enemy arena, across empty wastes, and at last into the heart of Zodanga itself.
There he learned that Dejah Thoris would be forced to marry the prince who besieged Helium and mocked her grief.
John Carter found Tars Tarkas again, forged an alliance with the green hordes, and marched on the city by night.
Windows shattered, warships burned, and John Carter cut Dejah Thoris free as chaos swallowed the throne room whole.
With green riders above and Helium below, the siege broke and the lovers finally claimed each other before a cheering city.
Joy had barely found its voice when all of Mars began to choke.
The Door Between Worlds
As Mars gasped for air, John Carter hurled a one man flier toward the silent atmosphere plant through thinning dusk.
He opened the impossible locks by memory alone and sent life rushing back across a dying world.
Then darkness took him, and he woke in an Arizona cave beneath a cold familiar moon.
Years later, Edgar unsealed the manuscript and understood why John Carter had stared so long at the red star.
From his window above the Hudson, Edgar imagined Dejah Thoris waiting somewhere beyond that crimson light with Woola close beside her.
The red planet kept burning like a home that refused to forget him.

A Princess Of Mars - Story Book

edgar-rice-burroughs_a-princess-of-mars.pdf

A Princess Of Mars

A Princess Of Mars
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A Princess Of Mars - Short Movie

The Island Of Doctor Moreau

The Island Of Doctor Moreau
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The Island Of Doctor Moreau - Short Movie

The_island_of_Doctor_Moreau.pdf

Prendick

Montgomery

Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau

Too Late at Sea

The Floating Cage

The Locked Compound

The House of Pain

Fire on the Beach

After the Island

The Island of Doctor Moreau
By H. G. Wells
1896
Too Late at Sea
What happens when rescue arrives one hour too late?
Prendick lay half dead in a dinghy, lips split by salt, while a distant sail climbed from the horizon.
Two companions had already vanished beneath the boat, and the empty sea kept their secret.
The sun above him looked fixed, and every swallow of breath felt borrowed.
When the schooner finally reached him, a red haired face leaned over the rail, and strange dark eyes watched from behind it.
The man beside his bunk called himself Montgomery, but he would not say where the ship was bound.
He woke in a filthy cabin to barking dogs, heavy chains, and the sense that rescue had delivered him somewhere worse.
The Floating Cage
By dawn the barking had faces, and the deck looked like a floating cage.
Dogs strained at the mast, a puma paced in iron, and a dark faced servant shrank from every sailor's stare.
Nothing aboard felt like trade, and every crate seemed to hide a secret.
Montgomery, the pale doctor who had revived Prendick, answered every question with half truths and a tired smile.
When the drunken captain struck the servant and swore he would throw everyone overboard, Montgomery's jaw hardened, and Prendick saw old hatred there.
That night a nameless island rose from the dark, marked only by stars and a thin line of smoke.
The Locked Compound
The smoke turned to heat and stone by morning.
Prendick was nearly left adrift again before a broad white haired man allowed him ashore with visible reluctance.
The broad man introduced himself as Moreau only after he had refused a single friendly answer.
Inside the walled compound, doors locked behind him one by one, while the caged puma shook the air.
Then the locked room gave him the one sound he could not deny, a human scream.
The name Moreau surfaced from an old scandal he had once heard, and the antiseptic smell suddenly made terrible sense.
Prendick stared at the barred window and understood that curiosity had carried him into a laboratory.
The House of Pain
That sharp antiseptic smell followed him into dusk.
In the forest he found beast shaped people chanting rules like prayer, swaying around a fire and calling themselves men.
Their faces were wrong in different ways, yet each one carried a terrible echo of something human.
When they cornered him at the shore, he chose the sea until Moreau calmly declared that the creatures were animals remade by surgery.
Back in the lamplight, Moreau spoke without shame and called his years of cutting a triumph of science.
Prendick listened with the revolver in both hands, and the island changed from a mystery into a machine for pain.
Before dawn the explanation had done something worse than frighten him, because it had emptied the island of mercy.
Fire on the Beach
Mercy ended with a scream at sunrise.
The puma burst from the laboratory, struck Prendick aside, and vanished into the jungle with Moreau running after it.
The jungle answered with shots, then silence, then distant animal voices.
By afternoon Moreau lay dead in the canes, beaten down by the creature he had tried to perfect.
Montgomery stared at the body like a man whose last wall had fallen, then drank with the beast folk and burned the only boats.
By the next sunrise the enclosure was a furnace, Montgomery lay dying in the sand, and Prendick stood alone with fire behind him and monsters ahead.
After the Island
Smoke drifted over the beach for days while Prendick ruled the beast folk with a whip, a lie, and a loaded stare.
But the law kept fraying, and each month their speech bent lower, their backs curved deeper, and the animal pushed through the human mask.
Even the loyal ones looked back at the forest when dusk arrived.
He built one raft that collapsed, then found a drifting boat crewed only by corpses and pushed to sea before the pack reached him.
Men finally hauled him aboard, yet safety brought no peace, because every crowded street now seemed full of faces waiting to slip.
Under open stars he could still breathe, but among people his hands remembered the island and never unclenched.

The Island Of Doctor Moreau - Story Book

Professor Gazen

Nasmyth Carmichael

Miss Carmichael

Alumion

Venus

Mercury

Earth

Womla

London

Where Venus Waited

The Signal on Mars

Carmichael's Secret

Leaving Earth

The Flower Ceremony

The Grotto Promise

Mercury's Shadow

Home Again

Where Venus Waited
By John Munro
1897
The Signal on Mars
What if Mars answered?
One night, a writer read of a strange light on the red planet and ran to Professor Gazen.
At the telescope, the dark rim of Mars suddenly kindled, then shifted from green to gold to blue.
Professor Gazen stopped joking and wrote down each change with a shaking hand.
The light looked less like weather and more like a mind tapping on a locked door.
If someone could speak across that darkness, someone might cross it too.
Before dawn, the mystery had already become a dare.
Carmichael's Secret
That same spark led him to a lonely cottage where Nasmyth Carmichael waited beside a sealed metal box.
Miss Carmichael opened the door, calm and watchful, while her father spoke like a man guarding fire.
Then the little box lifted from his hands and glided through the workshop as if gravity had forgotten it.
Under a glass bell, even the vacuum could not stop it.
Professor Gazen tested the machine, found no trick in it, and watched his own doubt give way.
Within weeks, a larger vessel stood ready in the dark garden, pointed toward the stars.
Leaving Earth
From that dark garden, the ship rose without thunder and carried them over London like a secret thought.
The river shone black below, the bridges burned with light, and the city roared like a sea.
Then the clouds swallowed everything, and the ship burst out into still blue darkness crowded with stars.
Venus waited ahead, bright as a promise, while Earth behind them shrank toward loneliness.
One man nearly died when the thin upper air stole his breath before anyone noticed.
When he woke, the blue world was already fading, and another was growing vast.
The Flower Ceremony
That growing world opened into Womla, a hidden crater of lakes, blossoms, and people who knelt in song.
Days later, on a sacred island, the strangers watched a young priestess step from a temple at sunrise.
She waded among white lilies, raised one shining bloom, and the whole shore answered with music.
When Alumion turned from the barge and smiled straight toward him, the noise of the world fell away.
Professor Gazen admired the ritual, but the traveler could only stand still, as if named by light.
From that hour, every path in Womla seemed to lead toward her.
The Grotto Promise
That light drew him to a hidden grotto where Alumion bathed at sunset beside a sacred spring.
She heard his warning, laughed at his fear of the cave, and spoke to him as if she had always known him.
On the next evening, he offered flowers, confessed his love, and saw her eyes soften with the same answer.
Inside the glowing cave, they shared sacred water while Siloo, her jeweled serpent guardian, watched from the dark.
He called it marriage, but before dawn his friends carried him away, believing Venus had charmed him into madness.
When he woke on Mercury, love had become exile.
Mercury's Shadow
Exile turned savage when a winged beast swept down over Mercury and lifted Miss Carmichael from the cliff.
Professor Gazen ran like a man on fire, and the ship plunged after the creature into a valley of ancient nightmares.
They reached the cave in time, fired together, and pulled her back alive from the slope below.
Then the engines jammed in the furnace heat, Nasmyth Carmichael collapsed, and the silent ship drifted toward the sun.
For one frozen stretch of time, even Professor Gazen could offer only the shape of their doom.
Then Miss Carmichael cooled the locked mechanism with oxygen, and the ship shuddered back to life.
Home Again
That shudder became relief as Earth returned under them with rain, fields, barking dogs, and lamplight.
Professor Gazen found love waiting beside him, and soon he and Miss Carmichael were promised to each other.
Nasmyth Carmichael kept his engine secret, fearing that lesser hearts would carry greed from Earth to gentler worlds.
The traveler walked London again, yet the streets felt small after Womla and its endless, fragrant dawn.
One victory at chess paid his expenses, but no earthly wager could measure what he had lost.
When the wedding bells were done, his course was already set for Venus, where Alumion still waited like a star.

A Trip To Venus - Story Book

A_Trip_to_Venus-_A_Novel_-_John_Munro.txt

A Trip To Venus

A Trip To Venus
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A Trip To Venus - Short Movie

Short Stories

Germ Growers - Story Book

Germ Growers - Short Movie

Transcript

The Germ Growers - Story Book

The Germ Growers - Short Movie

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A Princess Of Mars - Story Book

A Princess Of Mars - Short Movie

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The Island Of Doctor Moreau - Short Movie

Transcript

The Island Of Doctor Moreau - Story Book

A Trip To Venus - Story Book

A Trip To Venus - Short Movie

Transcript