Gary Allen

Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-06-02 13:40:54 -

The Last Undertaker
I The fog came down on Whitechapel like a shroud, thick and suffocating, and Thomas Mourne felt it in his knees before he heard the bell. He was at his bench, carving a new lid for a child's coffin—no, not a child's, he corrected himself, the boy had been thirty-two, a dockworker crushed between barrels of rum at Wapping. Thirty-two and with three daughters. Thomas always made the coffins to...

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Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-05-31 06:49:47 -

The Night Walker's Eyes
I. The morning I found Shadow, the sky was the colour of a bruised plum, heavy and swollen with rain that never fell. Her collar lay in the mud beside the old stone wall at the foot of Arthur Seat, the silver tag bent nearly in two, the leather strap torn as though by teeth far larger than any dog should fear. I knelt there for a long time, pressing my palms into the wet earth until the cold...

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Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-06-04 11:39:17 -

The corner of seventh
The thing about Brooklyn is that nobody notices when it ends. Not because it ends loudly. Because it ends the way a neighborhood ends when the rent goes up too high and the bodega becomes a boutique and the bodega guy moves to Queens and the street where you grew up has a new name that nobody uses. Quietly. Systematically. Without anyone throwing a punch. Eliot Rosenberg lived on the corner of...

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Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-06-01 05:46:59 -

The Golden Exchange
The ticker tape never stopped talking. That was the first thing Vincent Moretti learned on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: the machine had opinions, and they came in the form of punched paper ribbons that fell like confetti from the ceiling of a cathedral built for a new god. He was nineteen, Irish-Italian from Hester Street, with ink on his fingers and a photographic memory that made...

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Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-05-24 08:24:12 -

THE QUIET END
Frank O'Malley woke at six in the morning. It was not an alarm clock that woke him. It was the habit of waking at six, established twelve years ago in a base camp in the Ho Chi Minh Trail and never broken, even after he broke everything else. He lay in the dark. The apartment was small—one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen that was really just a corner with a stove and a refrigerator the size of...

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Gary Allen added blog Literature
2026-06-01 06:43:24 -

The Boiler Room Chronicles
I’ve spent forty years in the belly of New York. Down here, the city isn't made of skyscrapers and dreams; it's made of steam pipes, dripping condensate, and the rhythmic thumping of the Great Boiler. I’m Old Sam, and I’m the man who keeps the heat moving. If I stop, the Upper East Side freezes in ten minutes. I’ve seen them all come through the service hatch. The "Seekers." They usually arrive...

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Gary Allen added blog Literature
2026-05-26 17:27:19 -

The Application for Sunrise
In the City of Protocol, the sun did not rise because of celestial mechanics; it rose because a form was filed in triplicate and approved by the Department of Solar Logistics. Kevin was a man of precision. He wore a grey suit, carried a grey briefcase, and lived in a grey apartment. His life was a series of approved requests until the day the Protocol Office informed him that his wife's...

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Gary Allen added blog Literature
2026-05-30 23:52:47 -

Sample V-02: The Solar Altruist
(Jazz Age Idealism) The skyline of 1924 New York was a jagged symphony of steel and ambition, a city that never slept because it was too terrified of the silence. Arthur lived in the spaces between the noise—a quiet archivist with a heart that beat in time with the poetry of a bygone era. And then there was Evelyn. Evelyn was a creature of light and laughter, a flapper who danced on the edge of...

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Gary Allen added blog Literature
2026-06-02 18:20:59 -

The Sacred Sphere
New York in the twenties was a city of gold leaf and hollow hearts. It was a place where the champagne flowed like rivers and the jazz played so loud it drowned out the sound of people breaking. Julian was a ghost in this machine. Born to a family of laundresses in the tenements of the Lower East Side, he spent his days in a haze of steam and soap, but his soul lived in the rhythm of the ball....

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Gary Allen added blog Literature
2026-05-25 01:08:47 -

The Root of All Sins
The Blackwood Estate didn't just decay; it festered. The mansion was a skeletal ruin of grey stone and rotting mahogany, perched on a cliff overlooking the swampy lowlands of Louisiana. Julian had returned to the estate not out of love, but because the lawyers told him he was the last of the line. In the center of the overgrown courtyard lay the "Chronos Grove." It was a collection of twisted,...

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Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-05-28 07:57:46 -

The Stellar Commonwealth
The signal arrived on a Tuesday in October, 1924. Richard Sloan was alone in his private observatory atop a Manhattan townhouse that smelled of old books and pipe tobacco, and he was not looking for signals when he found one. He was looking for something else entirely—a gravitational anomaly in the outer reaches of the galactic disk that had appeared in the latest survey data from Mount Wilson....

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Gary Allen added blog Games
2026-05-26 15:18:29 -

The First Migratory Bird
Dr. Julian Ashford's hands did not shake. They had stopped shaking three years ago, in a field hospital outside Verdun, when the morphine ran out and he had to operate on a boy of nineteen with a shell fragment in his abdomen and a mother's voice echoing in his head in a language his mother didn't even speak. His hands were steady now. Surgeon's hands. Precise. Scarred. The kind of hands that...

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