Kip Manley's Blog, page 4

Dazzle (Act II)

The only light from the desk lamp kicked over, the only sound a single distant plop of water dropping and she jerks the gun in her hand jabbing back the way she’s come, ahead again, shadows blotting the enormous close-up photo of a hamburger behind her, weird crawling nets of shadow from the long black mane that snakes about the mask she’s wearing.

Around the corner the light cut off the counter there the menu boards above it blank and dark and the blank blackness of the kitchen yawning beyond. Not quite blank. Gun over the counter wavering tilting she works her wrist resettles her fingers hefts the sheathed sword slung from her shoulder. Tips back the mask, blinking. Free hand up against the harsh light streaming behind her. Somewhere at the back of the kitchen a suggestion of light low on the floor faintly sketches the barest edges of ovens and grills, the hooded bay of the fryer.

Another plop of water. She jumps.

She steps through the gap at one end of the counter fully into shadow now she’s pulling out her phone, thumbing it on, holding it up, faint haze of light from its screen enough just to show where she’s putting her feet. The light ahead is brighter now than what seeps from the phone, enough to pick out the shapes of itself, splashes and splatters, a bit on the floor there, a swipe of it along the edge of something, again a plop of water, a sink there at the back of the kitchen. She stops. Looks down. Her foot tangled in, in cloth, glossy black, a glimmer, spangles. She scoops it up. A vest, heavy with gold embroidery.

Summer is icumen in

Well, sort of: even as the season out there wanes, and pumpkin spices ever so slightly begin to waft, we’re on the verge of launching the third season of the epic: Summer. —The first draft of no. 46 should be done this month, which means revisions and finalizations of no. 45 might begin this month, as well; I am confident if not certain that it will be released in October: the first novelette in vol. 5, The Greene Chapel; the beginning of, well, Summer.

Dazzle (Act I)

The hat in his hands a soft pale grey, its absurdly high crown punched in on one side. The brim of it wide. Gold dust shivers away as he turns it over, sparks that flash and fall to the pavement. “Easy enough,” he says. “He got struck a mortal blow, and a gallowglas on the field.” He hands it to Luys beside him, tall and broad in a brown shortwaisted jacket. “Jo?” says Luys, but the Duke’s limping away down the street, cane-tip tocking loudly in the hush.

“Leo?” says Jessie, there by the reddish-brown car, slewed to a stop in the middle of the street.

“She didn’t do that,” says the Duke, turning, pointing up to the old green house on the corner behind them, dark, lower windows boarded front door ajar, big columns of its shallow porch once white now grimy, scored, stripped, all behind a forbidding tangle of bare branches, a narrow garden overgrowing a low stone wall, threatening the sidewalk. “Get Sweetloaf on the horn. Tell him, have him pull everyone in. Batten the gates, bolt the hatches, hunker on down. I’m gonna see what Goodfellow knows.” He limps on, out across the empty, rain-wet intersection, camel-colored topcoat blown out in the glaring haze of pinkish-orange streetlight. “I’ll just be a moment.” Cater-corned from the old green house a big white ramshackle house, its windows all alight with flickering, winking Christmas lights and candles.

Dazzle (Opening)

A glass of water, a glass of dark red wine on the formica table between them. “I know what this must look like,” says the woman who picks up the glass of wine. Cradles it in both hands elbows on the table. She doesn’t take a sip. She’s draped in a brown and yellow striped serape and her hair is short and black in the dim light.

“What’s that,” says the woman across from her, a hazy cloud of curls the color of clotted cream tied in a thick spray of a tail at the back of her head. A sheepskin jacket slung over the back of her chair. They’re up by the front windows, high dark narrow panes behind a slender wrought iron grill. The woman in the serape says, “When one person asks the other person out to a public place to talk about something important so the other person won’t make a scene when they get dumped or whatever, that’s not–” She sips her wine then, cupping the glass in both hands. “I’m not kicking you out. I’m not asking you to leave.” Another sip. “But it’s unfair. It’s unfair to me, it’s unfair to Jason and Grace, it’s certainly not something we can ask them to–”

“What is.”

Carol sets her glass back on the table. “I found your dope.”

“Dope.”

“Your drugs, Mar, I found your damn drugs when I was cleaning up the–”

“I don’t have drugs.”

“Don’t!” Carol’s hands clench on the table, “try to, brazen your way out of this, okay? Don’t tell me it’s just glitter. Glitter doesn’t numb your gums.”

Marfisa drinks down half her water in a couple of deep slow swallows. “I don’t have drugs,” she says.

Deliverance (Closing)

The house is full of leaves, piled in corners, drifted against the walls, orange and dead dry brown maple and oak, yellow alder and locust, dull silvered myrtle, crunching underfoot. In the parlor the sofa’s collapsed to one side, stuffing sprung from old stained cushions. Splintered wooden frames and broken glass scored with dust sprinkled over moldering rugs. Canvases black with smoke glower from the walls above, nothing but a hand, a bit of shirt, the edge of a face, an eye to be made out through the murk. In one hand the figure holds a sheathed sword, gripped about its fitted throat of beaten metal. In the other a flat black pistol, pointed with jerks to the side, the front, the side again. “Mooncalfe?” she says, her voice muffled by a mask, a blocky skull that swallows half her head. The rustle of the stiff black mane that floats behind is louder almost than the crackle of her footsteps. “Ysabel? Anyone?”

More leaves in the hallway beyond, and a hole in the floor, a rusted pipe thrust up at an angle. She edges around it, gun pointed ahead, then back across her body, then ahead again. In the kitchen the linoleum peeling up, torn away from the mottled subflooring in great swathes. The refrigerator door hangs open. It’s dark inside. The stove an avocado-colored thing, orange with rust and black with ancient grease. Beyond the house opens up in a big back room, the far wall lined with French doors, panes empty in the gloom. Somewhere far off a floor or two away a creak, a groan, a long slow settling fall of something, paper, cloth. There’s someone sitting before that blank black glass.

“Majesty?” says Jo.

Deliverance (Act IV)

The light is thicker now, the clouds a blank grey haze tinted with a wash of blue hung high above. It isn’t raining anymore. The sign over the storefront she’s walking past says 4 Wheel Parts Performance Center. The next sign down is orange and says Aaron Motel in white and yellow letters. Color TV, Air Conditioning. Wifi and Phone. Weekly Rates. Micro Refrig. Slung from one hand a paper bag, a briefcase the other, sword in its sheath laid flat like a furled umbrella through the handles. Smoke streams back like a banner from the cigarette in her mouth.

Into the motel parking lot, past a couple of pickups, a purple minivan with a set of stickers in the back window, white cartoon stick figures of a zombie family, a mother zombie and a father zombie and two zombie kids and a dog chewing on the leg of one of the kids. The motel’s a single storey, long and low, another set of units detached at the back of the lot. Red doors, curtained windows, dark maw of an air conditioning unit beneath each window, over and over and over again. She’s checking numbers on the doors, crosses over, steps up on the sidewalk by the one that says 109. Sets the bag down, shifts the briefcase from the one hand to the other. A last drag on the cigarette and she flicks it away. She knocks.

A minute or two before the door’s jerked open, a burst of music, skittering percussion and keyboards, thumping bass, “What?” snarls a big man in cargo shorts and a big black T-shirt printed with the image of a thickset man in a dark hoodie backlit by blue-white fog. Ghost Dog, it says. The Way of the Samurai. He squints. “Shit, Jo? Damn. You doing pretty well.”

“Can I come in?” says Jo. Night is cool, a voice is singing. Night is calm. Nothing’s missing, nothing’s wrong.

Deliverance (Act III)

Against the mirror shoulders pressed to shoulders looking over at himself in the mirror opposite, a big guy in a black suit, the knot of his skinny black tie lost somewhere under a beard the color of mahogany furniture, shoulders back against his shoulders looking over at himself in the mirror further back, a stainless steel thermos in his hands, leaning back against himself in the mirror after that, looking over at himself through black sunglasses, one lens written over with spidery white words. Down the hall the ding of an elevator. He tips his head to one side, the other, working his neck.

She wears blue and yellow running shoes, dark stockings, a pink skirt and jacket under a tan raincoat, one hand dragging a pink rolling backpack by its extended plastic handle, the other gripping a net sack bulging with miniature gumball machines. She doesn’t even look at the thing he’s studiously avoiding there in the middle of that low and narrow room, the great block of crumpled chrome-plated steel higher than her head, a statue planted on the dull brown carpet, dividing the room into two narrow aisles on either side of itself and all its reflections full of weird shadows, too-bright ripples of cold yellow light, the shapeless shifting blobs and pink and tan, black and rich dark brown.

She stops, suddenly. Shifts to toe a rumple of black pants, black jacket, white shirt inside the jacket, skinny black tie still looped under the collar. Black shoes gleaming, thin black socks slopped out of them. She turns, slowly, looks back at him against the mirror in his black suit, and he lifts a hand, fingers crooked, a gentle wave, move along, move along. She shrugs, hoists the backpack, steps over the empty suit, past the reflection of the little naked guy, and trundles on down the hall out of the narrow room.

Deliverance (Act II)

“You’re waiting for something,” says Kerr.

“Yeah,” says Becker. “Breakfast.”

“It’ll come, it’ll come,” says Kerr. His elbows on the blue-checked tablecloth, his chin in his hand. “Take off your hat, stay awhile.” Gold watch heavy about his wrist, dark hair slicked straight back. Becker takes off his trilby, bends down to tuck it under his chair. Sits up, one arm hooked over the back of it, fingers laced together in his lap. Still in his heavy raincoat, unzipped over a soft flannel shirt, a plaid of indigos and old reds. “And I have to ask myself,” says Kerr, “why you didn’t go to hang it up,” looking over at the wall of coat hooks weighted with coats and jackets and hats and scarves. “Is it you’re prone to absent-mindedness?”

“Maybe I just didn’t want to get up,” says Becker.

“Maybe you just didn’t want to deal with all that.” Kerr’s looking again at the wall of coats, at the people crowded beneath in yet more raingear, sitting on the benches, standing as much out of the way as they can, waiting for tables. “Keep everything close, contained. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. One foot always out the door.”

“You’re reading a lot into how I took off my hat,” says Becker.

“You can read a lot by how much somebody does almost anything,” says Kerr, as a waiter sidles up to the table, sets a cup of coffee by Kerr, an empty cup and a little glass pot of steeping tea by Becker. “Trick is whether it’s by, or into.” Kerr pours cream into his coffee, scoops up some packets of sugar. “You’re still hourly, aren’t you. What is it, fifteen? Sixteen?” He rips open three or four at once and empties them into his cup.

“I get production bonuses,” says Becker.

“Sure you do,” says Kerr, stirring his coffee.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of forebears)

In the September 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, there is a review column written by the science fiction author, editor, and critic Algirdas Jonas “Algis” Budrys. Budrys offers a brief summary of the “tried and true elements” of urban fantasy:

the desuetudinous old rooming house and its counterculturish residents, the bit of old wilderness rising atop its mysterious hill in the midst of the city, and the strangely haunted, bookish protagonist who gradually realizes the horrible history of the place where he lives.

Deliverance (Act I)

Naked he sits upright in the big white bed, back against the pillows, idly scratching his thick-furred crotch. “You left,” he says. His feet tangled in the white sheets. “You took the covers.”

“Get up,” says Jessie, unwinding the comforter, dumping it on the foot of the bed. She ducks into the closet to one side of the alcove. He yawns, stretches, sweeps back his thick dark hair, gathering it into a stubbly little tail. Pulls on a pair of baggy black jeans, wiggles into a tight T-shirt printed with some baroque siege engine. Yawns again. “What was that all about,” he says.

“You have to go,” says Jessie, buttoning up a grey chauffeur’s jacket, her yellow hair swept back under a grey chauffeur’s cap.

“No time for coffee, I take it,” he says, rubbing his darkly stubbled cheek. “Walk you to my coat?”

She’s sitting on the foot of the bed, “I have to,” she says, “please, just, I have to drive him somewhere,” working a thick black sock up one leg. “It’s kind of an emergency.” Up over her knee. He kneels there before her as she’s bunching up the other sock. “You’re driving him?” he says. His hand on her bare thigh.

“He’s very particular,” she says, “about what I wear,” her breath catching as his fingers slip up under the skirt of her jacket, “when I drive,” and then he kisses her, straightening as she leans back, arcing over her, following her down.

“Jessie!” roars the Duke, somewhere a room or two away. She pushes him off, over, sits up, “Go,” she says, “you have to go.” Pulls the other sock up her other leg. “Please,” she says, as he sits up beside her. “Come back. Tonight.”

“Of course,” he says, and he kisses her again.