The story is about a powerful, and less than scrupulous magician who lives in Zurich Switzerland about the turn of the 16th century. His name is Paracelsus.  In this story the Patriarch of House Voluva, a family of metal crafters, wants Paracelsus to send him back in time to correct an error which has left House Voluva without an heir. Paracelsus tells him that the deed is dangerous and very expensive.  Voluva decides that the deed is worth the risk and the money.  There is some gore in the story because it concerns blood magic which is explained in the short prologue, but the gore is handled clinically rather than having the blood splashed around like paint.

Entropy

“Paracelsus, I have heard rumors that you are able to control time.”

The man sitting before me, Herr Dietrich Voluva, was completely covered with an expensive cloak and hood. No part of his body showed. Even his hands were covered with fine silk gloves. He sat hunched and his voice crackled like that of an old man, but I knew he was not elderly.

“Under certain conditions, I have some control of time,” I said. “But it is very difficult—and very expensive.”

“Expense is not a worry. I have plenty of wealth. What I do not have is an heir to carry the name Voluva down the ages.”

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G. Lloyd and his buddy Big Dave have a way of stumbling into things.  Sitting in a desert bar they decided to go see what all the talk about Extra Terrestrial Aliens and Area 51, the super-secret Air Force base in the Nevada Desert, was all about.

Illegal Aliens

Big Dave and I tended to change bars every so often.  We’d get bored or something would happen and we’d get eighty-sixed or the bar would suddenly disappear like The Hole in the Wall or Mickey’s Mouse Hole, but mostly we would just go looking for adventure at different places, which was how we ended up at the Windy City Saloon out in Mojave.

I had found the Windy City on a trip through the city of Mojave during a time I lived at Edwards Air Force Base with my wife Master Sergeant Michele Helm. That was about the same time I first met Big Dave Dodge at the Hole in the Wall Bar which was out in the desert from Edwards.

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The wind is seldom still in the Mojave Desert. Stories about how strong the wind gets are legend, and some of the greatest tellers of those tales hang out in a joint called The Windy City Saloon located at a wide place in the road called Mojave.

The Winds of the Great Mojave

The wind doesn’t always blow in southern California’s Antelope Valley but it blows often enough that most of the trees lean, having been blown sideways since they were sprouts.  Very often the wind rolls in from the nearby Mojave Desert and when the hot dry Mojave wind blows it stirs speculation in romantic hearts as to where that wind comes from.  Of course there are all the scientific answers—uneven heating of the ground; rotation of the planet; seasonal considerations—but romantic hearts know that those are only facts not reasons.

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Tiburcio Vasquez, a storied bandito of old California, left a treasure behind when he suffered “the drop” at the end of his career. He also left many descendants and one of those is in possession of the treasure Grandpa Tiburcio left behind.

Tiburcio’s Treasure

The Hole in the Wall bar was misnamed because there was no “wall.”  It was just a dry-brown, ghost town-looking shack so far out in southern California’s Antelope valley—a desert valley where there have been no antelopes in living memory—that I was always amazed it even had running water and electric lights.  The shack sorta stuck up out of the creosote bushes in the bottom of this low place that might have been a volcanic crater a couple billion years ago.  You could see the lights of the place for miles if the night was moonless.  There was only one road (unpaved) leading to it, and it was made out of dust so gritty-fine it could blast the chrome off a truck bumper with just the slightest encouragement of a breeze.

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