Toby Boy's Blog: Prince of Middlemass - Posts Tagged "ongoing-series"

This is an excerpt from the upcoming book 'Don't Scare Me' (sequel to the break-out thriller, King of Middlemass). Toby Boy subject to change, all rights reserved.



KLONDIKE SWIM

Annette had once craved the intrigue and machinations of a debutante for herself. Yet it was another woman’s wish that the girl should spread her wings and fly. So it was a mean thing, after setting foot upon the road, to feel the constant cold shoulder—like a torrent borne against her. She remembered the woman’s many kindnesses, and even her well-meaning cruelties. These had shaped Annette. She imagined her mother-figure having been treated even more shabbily than she herself, and all over what? Something as coarse as money. It was times like these when Annette remembered revenge. Success would be a fine revenge—the top of the pyramid, the coldest of the cold, the cruelest of the cruel. But revenge was also revenge.

The terrace of the Providence Hotel was a stone bowl overlooking the winter strand, lined with women plucked from colonial portraiture postures rigid, faces painted with certainty, stoles of sable sweeping the flagstones. Their voices were a low hum of judgment, waiting with eyes as sharp as oyster knives.

But Annette’s arrival silenced their hum. Her gaze swept over the terrace, noting the pursed lips and narrowed eyes, before drifting to the sea-dark strand below. There he was. Next, she selected her steps—toe-heel, toe-heel—passing the brazier fires and wine-glass stares with the breezy disinterest perfected only by someone who knew precisely how much she was being watched. She stopped at the terrace’s lip. above the hotel’s east-facing foundation where gigantic castle stone met the winter mud and the mud met the sea.

She leaned scandalously over the stone fence. “Ooo,” she crooned, loud enough for anyone. “That one’s my one. Riv! Make a muscle, honey.” Below, in the bitter wind of the icy swim, Rivers stood among the pale and the persecuted—retiree torsos drawn like uncooked poultry. But Rivers, resplendent in the Riviera swimwear Annette had chosen (to break hearts, not records,) needed only to flex. His bicep wound itself up like an invitation. Light caught on his shoulder and etched geometry into his skin.

There was no mistaking whom she had meant. But even if she hadn’t said it, one would have known. 

She wore a white arctic minx hat, decadent and high-crowned, like a pale blaze of cloud atop her head. Below it, a bombastic jacket in crushed rose hovered above the thigh as if cut by a seamstress with an old grudge against mortal men. Then bare, gleaming skin for winter, followed by deerskin boots, the rich color of heartwood, laced up the calves with something more than functionality in mind. 

She placed a hand on her hip with the casual nonchalance of a sculptor claiming credit for a marble Adonis. 

A few older matrons instinctively recoiled. One or two held their breath in genuine awe. But a chorus of mumbled disapproval rose, a venomous discord straight out of a Greek tragedy, if the chorus were harpies with powdered faces and pearl chokers.

“That’s vulgar,” hissed one, her tone low but slicing.

“She’s not even registered,” said another, her voice a scalpel cutting through the murmurs with practiced disdain.

“Those hunting leathers are not… APPropriate” murmured a third, failing to find a word that could contain Annette’s audacity.

And from the back, a voice sharp with memory: “It’s her mother all over again.”

The outrage was palpable, a current of resentment pulsing through the terrace like a storm over the sea. Annette had composed the moment deliberately, staged it with the precision of a playwright, and now it gleamed, ready to be sealed in the lacquer of her memory, forever.

It would have remained a fleeting scandal—quickly forgotten—except that the doors to the veranda groaned open again and the rumored pair arrived, trailing a social apocalypse in their wake.

Maddie and Boone stepped onto the terrace like forked thunderbolts. Maddie, her white-blonde curl pinned in an elegant chignon, wore her own crushed-rose jacket and deerskin boots, her obvious poise a ready rebuke to anyone who might stand in her way. Boone, properly groomed and statesmanlike, carried the quiet authority of his ancestry. The matrons’ gazes flickered between Annette’s brazen display and the new arrivals, their disapproval fermenting into something ugly, something that clawed at the edges of decorum itself.

Annette’s upper lip curved into a faint smile.

Rivers had placed fourth, narrowly beaten by a grandfather from the Baltic provinces whose mechanical stroke defied both age and science. By the time Rivers emerged from the surf, slow currents of white steam wisping from his shoulders, Annette was already there, hugging a towel around him like a coronation. Boone, with the polish of a burgeoning statesman, landed a boot on the stamped muddy sand. He extended a hand. "Well swum, Rivers," he said, his voice carrying that timbre, genuine in its admiration yet laced with the awareness of a wider audience. Maddie, her camera out, raised it with a quick, practiced motion and clicked—not posed, not framed, just so. The shutter's snap cut through the wind, capturing the moment: Rivers' damp hair plastered to his forehead, Annette's arm draped over his shoulder, Boone's handshake firm and fraternal. In that instant, amid the congratulations- 

"Impressive endurance," Boone added; 

"You looked like Poseidon out there," Maddie teased with a slow-blink. 

And so, the day’s true victory was etched in the camaraderie of their little gang against the impending chill. 

From up on the terrace, among the goings-on, a gray-haired woman in a fox pelt collar leaned over the stony edge. Her voice drifted down like ash. “Such a spectacle,” she said, addressing Boone alone. “But visiting hours at Providence are well over. Those not enrolled ought to be gathering themselves up.”

Annette didn’t flinch. Rivers, the surf and wind still in his ears, did not catch the insult directly, but he clocked its aim and he felt the young woman against him.

“It’s always been the policy,” another called down—a raspy man with only his forehead and eyes visible above the balustrade. “Those without membership privileges always vacate after scheduled events.”

It was true enough. The Hotel Providence was not a hotel in the common sense. It was a private club. One could not simply walk in. One had to be on the list—a list as mysterious as everything else in Roanoke. Its members paid their quarterly dues whether they stayed or not. The rooms never crowded, the staff never hurried, and their silence was as dependable as a wine cellar.

And then: the page-boy. A slight figure in brassy shoes, he picked his way across the muddy strand clutching an envelope as if it were radioactive. He bowed deeply before Annette. “For Miss Annette,” he murmured.

She took it and cracked the seal, her eyes scanning the parchment. “I think it’s an invitation,” she whispered, pulling Rivers close.

Boone cleared his throat the way men do when they’ve decided not to interrupt, and then interrupted. “Just a moment, if you please,” he called, too formal to fight and too vague to obey.

Above, the matrons bristled. Below, Annette refused to yield.

The murmurs swelled again. “The policy stands,” snapped the fox-pelted woman. “Non-members must depart—now.”

Boone looked to Rivers for an out. Rivers only shrugged. “We think it’s an invitation.”

Maddie sidled in on Annette’s other side. “What is it, sweetheart?”

Annette’s eyes widened. “Oh, Riv! I think this must be from Bee. You see? Beatrice Francesca.”

Rivers could not remember who Beatrice Francesca was. But he recognized a coup when he saw one.

The terrace tribunals simmered. “We really would prefer not to call the usher,” said the fox-pelted woman, in a tone suggesting she very much hoped that someone else would.

“It sets the wrong precedent,” muttered the papery man.

Maddie stepped forward, plucked the envelope, and scanned it. “Oh. Darling, it’s gold.” She handed it back like a birthright. “It’s a gold invitation, Annette. It’s the kind they send when they want everyone to see who got it.”

The terrace hushed.

Still, the page-boy lingered.

Spotting him,  Annette added, “Accommodation is now… how you say—expected and required.”

Rivers gestured at his Italian swim trunks. “These don’t really have pockets,” he explained. “Design-wise.”

Miss Maddie shrugged. Boone was only too happy to intervene. To grasp hands.

Annette held the envelope aloft. “Upstairs,” she announced for all the bastards in all the cheap seats to hear, “I’ve been invited upstairs.”

Upstairs

The penthouse suite of the Providence Hotel was an empty cathedral—an interior of impossible scale and solemnity. The ceiling rose in a black dome ribbed with ironwork, more like an observatory turned inward than anything meant for hospitality. The marble floor gleamed under the flickering firelight, save for a single, unrolled Persian carpet—worn thin at its center—upon which stood a tall, high-backed chair of carved elm, tufted in oxblood velvet. A wide, open-mouthed hearth dominated the far wall, its brick maw lined with wrought-iron spikes that jutted upward like broken teeth. From within, a fire cracked and danced, casting spasms of orange light across the domed ceiling as if to animate the room in breathing shadows.

In the chair sat a diminutive girl—no more than fifteen by appearance, though her posture made her older. Blonde ringlets fell perfectly down the sides of her face, unmussed and deliberate, framing a countenance that seemed both childlike and etched. She was dressed as if for a holiday excursion in another century: a gray traveling coat cut short to accommodate lace cuffs, black stockings, and a miniature top hat fixed with ribbon beneath her chin, the kind of affectation one might see in a painting, or an inherited photograph no one ever explains. She balanced on her knees a leather-bound tome the size of a butcher’s ledger.

Somewhere a door opened with a hush and a click. “Hello?” called Annette, her voice softened by the enormous silence. The door closed again with a finality not unlike the turning of a self-locking vault.

Annette’s heeled boots tapped across the marble—steady, echoing, assured. She paced forward from the edge of the antechamber’s gloom, stepping out from behind the silhouette like an ingenue whose arrival had been much ballyhooed and tantalized over. A sliver of ashen light seeped in through a bay window, where the low winter sky pressed its remaining light against the glass in a kind of permanent winter dusk. Her white-blonde bob was unshadowed now—her extravagant hat having been removed somewhere below—and her crushed-rose jacket had been left open, revealing the pristine white of her blouse and skirt beneath. Her figure, tall, deliberate, and no longer careless was cut stark against the room’s aged grandeur.

“Bee!” she exclaimed with that old recognition as her eyes lit upon the girl in the chair.

At this, the girl snapped shut the book with both hands, the sound heavy and blunt like a closing doctrine. She slid the tome to one side and stood, though she barely reached Annette’s shoulder. Her face was pale, round, and slightly hollowed beneath the cheekbones. Whatever warmth had once lived there had been replaced by a kind of studied politeness. Annette moved in for a hug, arms outstretched with schoolgirl fondness, but the girl intercepted her with a two-handed clasp instead—both of Annette’s hands now held in both of hers, as if initiating a solemn pact.

“Beatrice Francesca,” said Annette, smiling with effort, “you look just the same as ever. Exactly the same.”

And it was true. Beatrice looked untouched by time. Not ageless—there was something too knowing in the gaze—but rather perfectly preserved, like a figure trapped in amber. Beatrice looked up at her, the way one might look up at a taller, luckier cousin. Her mouth twitched, not quite with envy, but with something adjacent. “And you, Annette,” she said, her voice sugar-dipped and very dry at the same time. “Aren’t you womanly though?”

Annette, who knew how to navigate compliments that carried knives, answered with a gentle murmur and a tilted head, smoothing the air like a ribbon drawing taut. “Your invitation came at a welcome time,” she said, letting warmth do the work of distraction. “Why did you want to see me, old girl?”

Still holding her hands, Beatrice gave a slight tremble. Her voice rose theatrically, pitched toward unseen balconies.

“Oh, Miss Annette,” she cried. “You must never forgive me. No matter what I say, you simply mustn’t.”

Annette matched the energy with dutiful sisterliness, tilting her chin and drawing a commensurate frown. “Well of course I forgive you, dear,” she said. “Now tell big sister what it’s all about.”

At that, Beatrice released her hands, turned her back, and took a few steps toward the fireplace. The firelight clung to her figure in a way that made her seem almost translucent, like a glass candle-holder. She placed her hands behind her back, composed herself, then turned again, her expression fixed. “I might as well tell you,” she said. “I already had a clatch of constables up here. Before you.”

Annette blinked.

“They came because I sent for them in a private dispatch,” Beatrice continued. “But when they heard my request, they soon discovered reasons to be elsewhere. They were my last chance, or so I thought. And then—just as I stepped onto the terrace for air—I looked down…” She paused, letting her eyes settle on the bay window as if seeing it all again. “There you were. Toweling off your hunky Mister Rivers.” She said it like a name she’d read but never spoken aloud. “And then I remembered. You both were the most recent Queen and King of Festival, is it not so?”

“Well, yes,” said Annette, suddenly remembering the consequences of Festival weekend. There had been danger, there was a fire, there was the small matter of stolen purses and commensurate documents. Annette checked her breathing and muted her expression. “But why should that matter?”

Beatrice smiled. This time it reached both of her eyes. “Because, Miss Annette,” she said, her voice soft now, almost reverent, “I am now the mistress of Solstice Court.”

Beatrice Francesca moved slowly toward the hearth again, as if the fire might illuminate her plea. The light cast up the side of her face in streaks, her childish features mottled by adult unease. She did not return to the high-back chair. She placed one gloved hand on a wrought-iron poker, leaning onto it with the tiredness of someone who had not slept.

“Miss Annette,” she said, drawing out the syllables, “do you want to hear something curious?”

Annette inclined her head. She had learned that strange girls often had strange things to say, and that most of it could be survived with charm.

Beatrice didn’t meet her eyes. She reached into a slim rectangular pocket and withdrew a small scroll bound with a lavender ribbon, slightly frayed. She thumbed her thumb against it. “A list of names was given to me,” Beatrice went on, “the lawyers compiled it. They told me to choose who I wanted, as if I would know.”

Annette raised an eyebrow.

Beatrice looked up now, eyes bright with that same theatricality from before, though now it glinted like desperation.

“One of the names was Mister Rivers. Only, he was listed as... ‘The Kid Constable.’”

Annette blinked. Her mouth parted slightly, “He does not care much for that title anymore,” she said.

“No,” Beatrice agreed. “But it’s a part of his record now. Names don’t vanish just because you want them to.” She let that hang a moment, then abruptly dropped the scroll into the fire. Her posture shifted. Her voice grew quicker. “Everything changed once they named me inheritor,” she said. “At first it was easy, telegrams or boring old letters from lawyers. But not even a week after the announcement, things began to go wrong.”

Annette deduced that this was no time to interrupt, ‘Bee’ was on a tear.

“Milk turned to cheese overnight,” Beatrice said. “I don’t mean spoiled, I mean... fully congealed. Bottles in the pantry never even opened.” She held up a finger, counting off. “Backwards writing appeared on mirrors and windows. Not once. Dozens of times. And someone stuffed the chimneys,” Beatrice added. “All of them. With acorns. Hundreds of them. When the fire was lit, it rained smoke and nutmeat and this bitter, bitter stench.”

That one caught Annette. “Acorns.” She pressed a finger to her lips. This encounter had ceased to be charming.

“When that didn't drive me out, the real dangers began. Doors that shouldn't be opened... fires that start by themselves. I’m not afraid for myself, of course,” Beatrice continued, stepping forward again. “But for the innocent people. And I have only mentioned the physical signs. There is more at work. There is always more.” She paused. Then, with exquisite slowness, she removed a single gold pin from the lapel of her coat—an enameled key, small but intricately worked—and held it out, flat in her palm. “I want to make an official request,” she said. “In the name of peace and tradition. Miss Annette. Mister Rivers. My Queen. My King. I would like you to track down the source of these disturbances. Identify it. Capture it, if you can. No, you must.”

Annette did not move to take the pin-key. She was watching Bee’s face now with studied precision.

Beatrice smiled faintly, as if that scrutiny were expected. “I will sponsor you both. Of course. You’ll be enrolled—formally—into the Providence Hotel. Membership. Keys. Quarters, if you like them. And you will be welcome guests at Solstice Court. Not as socialites. Not as spectators. As protectors. Just as it was done a century ago.”

Annette stepped slowly toward the fireplace. She stared at the flames, watching them fracture against the iron teeth of the hearth. She didn’t answer immediately. "I’ll need to smoke on it, dear," she said. But her eyes never lifted from the flames, where all the while the edges of the lavender-bound scroll blackened and curled and burned.

Hi, do you know me? I’m Toby Boy—thriller author, online presence, and unapologetic mash-up enthusiast. It’s my rare pleasure to introduce a special Halloween adventure, starring characters from our upcoming Book 4. As fate (and the calendar) would have it, there are a handful of nights each year when two brothers set aside their differences for the sake of pure imagination. Tonight is one of those nights. So please enjoy Part 1 of *All Souls Night*.

All Souls Night


Dried blue roses were suspended in resin vases in the three corners of the parlor on the first floor of the manor. There could not be a fourth vase, because there was not a fourth corner. It was a narrow room with thick drapes like stage curtains, and behind a wooden screen stood a dumbwaiter that only arrived at the upstairs landing, and a doorway to the old dining room where a fourth corner might have been. Now the whole chamber was commandeered, turned over to private rule, and reconfigured around a large, dark-wood dining table. This too was an exact square. The table had had its legs unscrewed one by one, muscled into place with great difficulty, and then reassembled. All around were signs of long-term occupation: the curling edges of maps had been tacked to the walls, the little clay womb of a round pig sat squatly on the crowded table and promised its future promise. Every make and era of lantern had been hung from the low-hanging chandelier.
Spritely presided from the dining room’s final armchair, his stacked commonplace books arranged like a wobbly ziggurat on the cushions beside him. He held a brass twelve-sider and two ivory sixers.
—The road sloped hard downward, red mud turned dry, flaking from the wheel-well wheels of the wagons. The caravan snaked over the switchback trail. The city’s spires, drenched with morning sun, were still barely visible through the smoke-haze. Dust climbed up the calves of the escort riders. Somewhere in the high crags, a goblin whistle cracked the silence.
Farrow’s character—Maximus Lancewell, by name and by trade—charged ahead on foot. He wore a red cape gilded at the edges, a bandana knotted beneath curls that might have been called a mullet, and a trusty gladius already in hand. There was flair in his every motion that built up as he charged.
Cherie’s character was long-legged, like a gigantic doe running on the wind, her skirt short and fluttering. Her name was Freya Vanferno, with hair longer than a waterfall, trailing behind her like a comet.
Fire-darts spun their heavy tails in the air, as wagons rattled into a new velocity. Horses raised their high-pitched alarm.
Maximus Lancewell lifted his blade with panache and shouted back to the teamsters, “Run on ahead! On, and on to the city!”
Neither the drivers nor the horses asked for the message to be repeated. The caravan burst forward, hooves pounding, canvas snapping in the chaos. One driver glanced back to see the two escorts—the dashing boy and the enchanted girl—make a final stand, blades drawn, framed by the rising dust. Beyond the crest of the hill, a flank of goblins sprang up in a row. Lancewell ran through their chief with his gladius, but many more were already at hand.
The truth wore a different mask.
When the last wagon rounded the bend and the city gates groaned open to accept them, Maximus Lancewell lowered his blade and reached out a hand—not to fight, but to help the goblin rise. The creature groaned morbidly, lolling its eyes and swinging its hands limply.
“I think they’re gone by now, you scene-hog,” commented the young hero.
“How ignorant,” the goblin muttered. His face was like dried fruit in the sun. “I have been plying my craft since the olden times.”
“I told you to ham it up. Not to let loose with pyrotechnics and your squad of scarecrows,” exclaimed the hero, gesturing at the row.
“They’ll tell the story for years. Saved by heroes.” The goblin dabbed its fingertips onto the pooling jelly-jam where the gladius had pierced his shirt. He then sampled it with his tongue and decided, though it was a little tart, that it was not half-bad.
Freya Vanferno poked at the nearest goblin scarecrow with her trusty, stout wand–not much more than a child’s tunic thrown over a dress-makers rig.
The goblin finally dusted himself off and stared. Then said: “There’s no need to disguise yourself in front of us. Your bandana. Your cape. Not even your gleaming short sword. None of that is the real you, dark lord.”
Farrow bristled, wondering why a fictional character could see through his disguise. “Spritely… I mean, ‘Reader’—why does this goblin know who I am?”
Spritely raised an eyebrow and paged through his most current commonplace book. The sound of paper scraping over paper. Then he found the relevant lines. “...Goblins are named after the word ‘Gob,’ for mouth,” Spritely read, his finger tracing the spidery ink. “Goblins say things. Their aim is to talk and talk until, inevitably, they hit their mark. So either he made a guess, or heard a rumor.”
Farrow shifted forward on his cushioned stool. It squeaked softly under him, a broken whimper of upholstery. His onyx sixer lay in front of him, cold and smooth like something from an underground stream. He undulated his fingers above it, not quite touching, letting it rock back and forth. His gaze had gone unfocused, staring into somewhere past the veil.
“Your friend—Pyroclast the beastman—told us who you really are,” hissed the goblin, clicking each syllable like a predator enjoying the sound of its own teeth. “He is insane, of course. But he knows much that is hidden.”

Maximus Lancewell, put away his blade, then tilted his head. “Ah. And where is Pyroclast these days?”

“He’s gotten himself captured again,” the goblin noted with a shrug.

There were cages hanging from iron rings like long-forgotten windchimes out along the Old Telling Road. No wagon or cart went that way anymore. The cages dangled over dry ravines. No birds sang. Each cage cast a long and twitching shadow over the weeds and crumbling mile-markers. The wind made a moaning choir of the metal bars.

“I see,” said the hero. He reached for a suede pouch in his tunic and drew forth a modest handful of minor, uncut gems—cloudy citrine, greenish garnet, a flawed ruby. “I brought the usual,” he said, dropping the pouch into the goblin’s bony hands.

The goblin weighed it, then inhaled deeply through his gills or scars or whatever had once been a nose. “This is only part of the bargain,” it rasped. “Remember me the second half.”

Maximus nodded solemnly. “If, in my travels, I should meet another of your kind, I will tell them that Gob still lives in the stony hills. Find the obsidian vein and follow it for three days; down to the forgotten pools.”

The goblin’s lips parted in a terrible smile, as unto a gate of bone; a massive vault of fangs, cracked and yellowing, arranged like a mausoleum staircase. The creature was aged, beyond sentiment. “I have not seen others of my kind since I was a cub,” it said softly. “I no longer hold out much hope. But I carry on in the knowledge that—when my time comes, and I face the pillar of fire—a dark lord will stand up for me.”

Silence fell in the parlor.

Cherie broke it. “Oh,” she said brightly, with a lilt in her voice like a girl skipping past a graveyard, “he’s a sad little bumpkin after all, isn’t he, brothers?”

They arrived at a place where paths met amidst stands of sword-grass as tall as trees. In the nearest cage humming to itself, legs hanging through the bars like laundry. There sat a beastman with matted fur and wine-colored eyes. He licked his teeth and acknowledged the visitors. There was no fur on the creature's forearms or hands as if it had pulled something out of a fire. The exposed skin was bright white and engraved in patterns.

“Help,” the beastman called out mockingly. “I’ve gotten myself caught again.”

Maximus Lancewell groaned and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Pyroclast,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Cherie’s character breathed through her nose and aimed her stout brass wand toward the cage. “Better get him down before someone starts asking questions…”

The other cages creaked in the wind, and the city walls still smoked in the distance.
“Help,” the beastman called out, mockingly at first. “I’ve gotten myself caught again.”
Maximus Lancewell groaned and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Pyroclast,” he said, flatly.
Freya Vanferno exhaled and raised her stout brass wand, narrowing her eyes at the hanging cage. “Better get him down before someone starts asking questions…”
Around them, the other cages creaked softly in the wind, their occupants long vanished or remembered only in whispers. The iron rigs swayed on their chains, casting long vertical shadows across the forgotten roadside. Above distant city walls smoke from a dozen chimneys started to puff as the last meal of the day hit the skillet.
“Don’t,” Pyroclast said, suddenly serious. “Not the blaze, please. Besides, I can’t be trusted with freedom.”
He gripped the bars of his cage tightly and looked down at Maximus. “Seven leagues from here in a neighboring county, there is an estate. Something untoward is about to transpire there, and I fear for the children.”
Maximus blinked, reacting with old Pyroclast-flavored suspicion to the abrupt shift. “What does that have to do with you?”
“I remember,” Pyroclast said, before tilting into the other side of the cage and saying. “I forget.”
Freya tilted her head. “What is he talking about now?”
Pyroclast didn’t answer right away. He looked at Maximus Lancewell, and spoke with grave purpose.
“Adventurers,” he said. “We have accomplished much together. My warnings have never led you astray.”
The wind stirred. The cage gave a low creak of fatigued metal.
Pyroclast looked down at his hands—his claws—and tested to see if they still obeyed him. He paused, as though he meant to say more. But the silence lingered longer than his breath, and he bowed his head. He looked out past the hills, toward the low line of trees that bordered a neighboring estate. “We are asking… for help.”
“You accept?” Spritely asked in his capacity as Reader. “But this is a dangerous quest. You will need more players if you hope to survive.”