NEW STORY: The Black Pyramid Incident
A madman claims to create a portal between a small American town and Paris – using the Eiffel Tower.
To achieve this, he buys the Eiffel Tower and adorns its top with an upside-down black pyramid. He then builds a perfect replica of the construction in the US.
By entering the pyramid in one tower, you will exit the pyramid in the other.
A paranormal investigator is called to see if the claim is true.
Below is an afterword. Although it has no direct spoilers, I suggest reading this only after finishing the story.
I conceived The Black Pyramid Incident in a fairly short amount of time. The main motivation was to create something with a solution so outrageous it would make my friend Zep raise an eyebrow. I don’t know how successful I was in the goal – Zep generally has a pretty high tolerance for the ridiculous in general – but the rest of my beta-readers seemed to agree it went beyond their own levels of expectation.
The main idea came from a misunderstanding on my part. Years ago, I had read about Soji Shimada’s The Crystal Pyramid in this blog post. For some reason, thinking about it later, I was convinced that the crime of that book featured a murder in a glass pyramid someone had built on top of the Eiffel Tower.
This was, obviously, not the case.
But hey – the image of a pyramid on the Eiffel Tower is kind of cool, isn’t it?
The main challenge was figuring out what the point of such a construction would’ve been.
One of the ideas I had was that the pyramid was upside-down because it was meant to serve as an elaborate signal reflector. The idea was that a murderer who lives on an isolated station on the Moon projected his form to a murder scene by bouncing his signal off several disconnected satellites and the pyramid.
Somehow, it didn’t feel impressive enough, though.
The solution for the actual idea – the teleportation between two sides of the world – went through several iterations, and some of them made their way into the story as false solutions.
As ridiculous as it might’ve turned out in the end, I hope you like the story!