Rick Wayne's Blog, page 80

Sexual Surrealism and the Compellingly Repellent Art of Dave Cooper

The Comics Journal recently posted their review of Dave Cooper’s new book, “Mudbite,” which they described as “abject fantasias of intense sexual anxiety rendered in Cooper’s compellingly repellent style.” I think that about sums it up.

I’m fascinated by Cooper because he’s part of a new wave of artists who don’t inhabit a singular defined space. Cooper isn’t a “comic artist” as that phrase is usually applied. He doesn’t make either serials or graphic novels. His books are sexual surrealism stretched in time.

Nor is he a “fine artist” who slums it to make comic books. Just as Ta-Nehisi Coates used his recent MacArthur Fellowship not to write a sequel to “Between My Country and Me,” but instead to take a run on Black Panther, so Cooper not only produces comics, but also showcases paintings in galleries and it’s that depth of style — where his comics are not slimmer versions of his art but but fully realized and executed visions themselves — that makes his work so compelling.

From the review: “Eddy Table is the obvious common denominator, but Cooper’s foils dominate here. These foils are giantesses, wobbly women of Amazonian proportions that readily recall R. Crumb’s phantasies or Otto Dix’s muses.” (See also Namio Harukawa, from an earlier post on this blog.)

“And yet the setting is all Eddy. Indeed, there’s no real separating the material world from the mental milieux in Mudbite. Cooper’s primary stage is the psychosphere. We’re in Eddy’s head the whole time, and Cooper uses this setting to show not only how our dreams can tip into nightmares, but also how our nightmares can enthrall us. We like to poke around in that horror sometimes, even as other impulses prompt us to flee.”

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More of Cooper’s art:

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It whispered something to me

Pringles started barking in the middle of the night. She does that sometimes when I forget to let her out before bed. She doesn’t have much of a bark because she’s such a little dog. She scratched at the back door and yipped. Dad was sleeping hard. He was snoring. I think he drank a lot of wine after he saw my drawings. I heard him open another bottle. So I got up and walked down to the kitchen and let her out. Because I had brought her home and Dad said she was my responsibility. It was cold, so I shut the door behind her and went to get a glass of juice. I got a cup and opened the fridge and when I closed it I dropped the carton on the floor. It splattered, but I didn’t care.

It was my secret. It was swarming outside the kitchen window. Like a bunch of giant black cockroaches.

I was right. It had come back. Only it had grown. It was too big for Pete’s cage, that was for sure. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I think it wanted to come in. But it couldn’t. Like something was blocking it from me. From my nightmares.

And then I wondered how long had it been since I had one. Since the day Mr. A. Tranjay came.

I watched those giant roaches swirl over the window and I was glad I was inside and the door was closed. But then I heard Pringles barking at it outside. She was barking and barking. Then she yelped. She was such a little dog.

I shoved my bare feet into my boots and grabbed my heavy coat with the furry hood and ran out the door. I thought maybe I could talk to it. Like I’d done before, when it was smaller. Well, we didn’t talk really. We just had an understanding. That’s what my dad would say. I understood what it needed, and it understood I would feed it, but only if it let Emerald go. It was a deal. Only I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, even my dad, or it would go back and hurt her again.

It was a lot smaller then. I think it could hurt me now.

It was quiet outside. I was about to call for Pringles when I heard her bark from inside the hollow. It looked so dark in the trees at night, even though most of the trunks were skinny and they weren’t that close together. I shivered and ran back for my gloves and hat and scarf, then I grabbed Pete’s cage from the side of the garage and walked into the hollow. Everything was still. I could see my breath in the light from the moon. I could hear the leaves crunch under my feet. It smelled crisp, like maybe it was going to snow, even though Dad said spring break was soon and we might go see Mom.

I don’t know how long I walked. I called for Pringles a couple times. I was almost to the basement when it found me. Leeches dropped from the trees. They landed on me. On my hair. On my arm. Even on my neck. I could feel them, cold and slimy. They were bright white with circles of black teeth. They wriggled and squirmed, little mouths trying to get a grip. Trying to feed on me. But not on blood. Something else.

“No!” I dropped Pete’s cage and shook and swatted and shivered. “This isn’t what we said. No!” I ran to get away. But the leeches kept falling. “Leave me alone!”

I almost tripped once, but I kept going. But then my shoulder hit a tree and I fell on my knees. The leeches covered me. I screamed. And I shouldn’t have done that because they were going to get into my mouth. And then it would be over. Like how it got inside Emerald.

But they didn’t get me. I screamed and my mouth was open but they didn’t get me. The leeches scurried away.

I heard a gallop on heavy ground. I looked up at the stag standing over me. I turned. My secret had disappeared into the hollow. I fell. Maybe I cried a little. But not like a little kid. I know I was shaking. I know now I should have gone home, but then I was too afraid. It was dark and my secret was still out there somewhere. Hurting people. I couldn’t get up.

The stag walked through the clearing. It strutted and grunted in a circle around me. It dragged its hooves across the ground, exposing dirt. It shook its giant antlers. After it did that a few times, it dropped to the leaves and lowered its head like it was ready for sleep. Its body wrapped around mine. I was so tired. I didn’t think I could make it home. I just wanted to rest. I felt safe there. And as I laid back, it whispered something to me. And I agreed.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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The Nordic Folklore and Fairy Tale Art of John Bauer

‘Look at them,’ mother Troll said. ‘Look at my sons! You won’t find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon’ (1915, watercolor)

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From Wikipedia:

John Albert Bauer (4 June 1882 – 20 November 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator. His work is concerned with landscape and mythology, but he also composed portraits. He is best known for his illustrations of early editions of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), an anthology of Swedish folklore and fairy tales.

Bauer was born and raised in Jönköping. At 16 he moved to Stockholm to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. While there he received his first commissions to illustrate stories in books and magazines, and met the artist Ester Ellqvist, whom he married in 1906. He traveled throughout Lappland, Germany and Italy early in his career, and these cultures deeply informed his work. He painted and illustrated in a romantic nationalistic style, in part influenced by the Italian Renaissance and Sami cultures. Most of his works are watercolors or prints in monochrome or muted colours; he also produced oil paintings and frescos. His illustrations and paintings broadened the understanding and appreciation of Swedish folklore, fairy tales and landscape.

When Bauer was 36, he, Ester and their son, Bengt, drowned in a shipwreck on Lake Vättern.

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Kamishibai: Japanese Paper Theater – the precursor to manga and anime

I recently found this kamishibai 紙芝居 scene from 1950s Japan. Children crowd around a storyteller as he flips the art and tells a story, a direct precursor to what would become manga and television animation. The storyteller rolled his card from neighborhood to neighborhood, stopping in parks and on street corners. He couldn’t charge admission of course, but he sold the children cheap candy and snacks.

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You can read more about it and see some examples of the art at the link below, which just happens to be the first post I made on this blog — way back in 2013. Back then, I’m not sure anyone ever read it.

The Magical Woodland Illustrations of Alexandra Dvornikova

I’ve used several of these as title images, so it’s only fair Ms. Dvornikova, an artist from St. Petersburg, Russia, gets a post to herself. It looks like she has a book out now, too. Check it out.

Links below.

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She can be found at Tumblr and also at her Society6 store.

That’s when I saw the stag

The day Mr. A. Tranjay came was the same day I saw the stag. That’s what they’re called. I looked it up. A male deer with antlers. It was in the hollow. I was looking for a place to hide the raven’s collection. I had put it all in a white plastic bag I got at the convenience store on Newcombe Street. The twine and the little twirly shell and everything. Everything except the Frisbee ring, which I think my dad threw away. I ate a chocolate bar and walked to the clearing in the middle of the hollow. I could hear the big freeway in the distance. And the rustle of the leaves.

I stopped at the ring of downed trees, like a deer blind, and stared at the little flat triangular opening near the ground. It was pitch black. There was a room down there, I think. Underground. Inside the stone foundation was a bunch of fallen branches on top of a long piece of sheet metal. It was all rusted and reddish-brown. It had collapsed and left only the little opening. It was big enough for me but I don’t think my dad could get in. So that was a good place to hide it. No one would find it on accident and take it away. I tossed the bag into the hole without putting my hand in and ran back to my house. The trees rose up like stilts. I had seen stilts at my school. A show came and we got out of class and everyone went to the auditorium. Men and women were on stilts and they did tricks.

That’s when I saw the stag. It was dead. There were only bones. I had seen a cow skull before but not a whole animal skeleton. I didn’t remember ever seeing it in the hollow before. I saw the rib cage first. It was propped against a tree. It looked like it had fallen sideways against the trunk as it died. There were brown leaves all around. They were everywhere. And a few patches of snow. I wondered what killed it. I could see every rib. There were so many, all lined up neat and curving together, protecting the heart that had once beat inside. But now it was empty. Greenish-white moss hung down from its spine into the space between the ribs.

My eyes followed the antlers. I hadn’t noticed them at first because the head and neck were pointed to the ground, so the antlers looked like low branches of the tree, but they weren’t. It was a big rack, like a pile of spears. It was so big. They had some moss, too.

The skull moved. I stepped back and snapped a twig. I thought I had disturbed something by walking so close. But I hadn’t. The antlers rose up—straight up—as the spine bent and lifted the head from the ground. The hanging moss shook. I heard bones click against each other. The stag stood up. It took just a second. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I didn’t even want to believe it. But there it was. It was so big, bigger than my dad and my old teacher, Mr. Keany, who used to play basketball. I thought maybe it was a ghost and it was going to hurt me, but it didn’t. It just turned to me and stood, like it was expecting me to do something. I was shaking. I was glad I had gone to the bathroom before I went into the hollow so there wasn’t any pee left in me.

Then it bellowed. It lifted its head and opened its mouth and grunted through bare teeth, like my dad when he wants to get up, but way louder. It sounded like a big mountain horn. Three huge bellows, head raised, mouth open, one after the next. I ran then. I ran home and didn’t stop until I got to my dad. He was making dinner. He asked me what was wrong. He said I looked like something had scared me. He asked me over and over what it was. I think he was scared because I was so scared. He was always so worried after “the incident.” That’s what he called it. And the nightmares. I wanted to tell him, but I knew what he’d say. So I sat at the table in my jacket and gloves and had dinner. I was shaking. But then I stopped. We had soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I didn’t eat the crusts. I don’t like the crusts.

After school the next day, I went to the library. I wondered if the stag had something to do with my secret. And I knew that everything anybody knew was on the internet, and that if anybody knew something, it was there. It was good that our new town was so small and everything was close. Philly was so much bigger. Dad never would have let me go to the library by myself.

I walked home down Newcombe Street because that went under the big freeway, where all the high school kids got together and did graffiti, and then curved around the hollow to our road. I liked that way because I passed the convenience store and there’s candy. But that meant I also had to walk past a street where some mean kids sometimes called me names. I could cut through the hollow, but there was a fence that ran along the curb, and it was too big for me to climb. I tried once. We were at the bus stop and they were picking on a kindergartner named Trevor because he didn’t say his S’s right and I told them to stop and so they started making fun of my dad’s eye. But I was happy because after that they left Trevor alone.

I was passing that road when I saw the police cars. Two of them. And an ambulance. They were parked on the street in front of a pale green house with brick on the front. Lights were flashing. A few of the neighbor people were standing around. I walked by and heard them talking. I saw the mom and dad come out of the house. The mom was holding a little girl. She was wearing a pink princess dress like I saw in the toy store once. There was lace at the bottom. And the top was shiny. Her eyes were open but she was dead inside. Gone. Forever, even. I think. The adults were silent. People covered their mouths or shook their heads. But everyone was silent as they put the little girl in the ambulance and drove to the hospital.

I saw her face. I saw her eyes. Black and empty like the little hole in the hollow. And I knew what happened. Because I had seen that before.

I had to find it. Soon. I thought maybe it would look for Pete the parakeet’s cage, like maybe it thought that was home since it stayed there so long. Pete’s cage was a big square thing with metal wires and an orange plastic bottom. I had set it outside the garage facing the hollow. I went right there when I got home, but it was empty. Mr. A. Tranjay was in the garage. He’d turned it into a workshop. It looked like the science room at school, with a microscope and everything. He had a bottle from the lot. It was filled with something black, like liquid midnight. There was a knife and a wood block on the work bench. He’d been carving it. It looked like a flute.

I poked my head around the door to see if my secret was curled up in the corner. Mr. A. Tranjay looked sick. He was thin. He looked too thin, like the people on TV who have the cancer. Or AIDS. We learned about that in school, where your body can’t stop you from getting sick.

I thought he might notice me, but he didn’t.

At the library I had found a website that talked about animals and stuff. I had printed some pages and I had them on the kitchen table while my dad made dinner. It sizzled. And it smelled like fish. I don’t like fish. It was dark outside. He had a glass of wine. I must have been scowling because my dad asked me what I was reading.

“Just some stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“What’s a second sight?” I asked.

“What?” My dad scowled with me. He wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder and walked over to me. He picked up the pages. He read the title, which was printed in small letters at the top. His eyes moved back and forth when he read because of his lazy eye. “The Port Manteau Guide to Animal Spirits and Totems.” He looked at me. “Where did you get this?”

“From the computer. At the library.”

My dad looked skeptical. He scratched his beard. I knew what that meant.

He flipped to the next page and read. “The Stag stands at the gate between the tangible world and the realm of the Others, which aboriginal peoples have called The Dreaming. As such, it imparts special sensitivity to prophecy and intuition and enhances our innate second sight. It often appears at the start of a spiritual or cross-dimensional journey.” He turned to me again. “Do you know what cross-dimensional means?”

I shook my head. But I thought I knew what spiritual was. That was what they wanted you to buy at church.

Dad kept reading. “The Stag is a powerful ward and grants special protection in times of transition. It is a masculine spirit and often conveys confidence or power. Since male deer use their antlers to advertise potency and fertility, antlers were believed to impart magical prowess, grace, and strength and were often worn as crowns by early kings before smelting technology allowed the casting of precious metals. They are still used by magicians and witches, both good and evil.

“The Stag is the most ancient of the shamanic totems, appearing in mankind’s earliest cave art, and is associated with death and resurrection—the ultimate cross-dimensional journey—since the antlers are shed each season and regrown in a repetition of the annual cycle celebrated by the deaths-and-resurrections of Osiris, Dionysus, and Christ. Due to its antiquity, the Stag’s appearance is unerringly significant and typically heralds a significant passing.” He stopped at that word and looked at me again. “Why are you reading this?”

I shrugged.

My dad rubbed the bridge of his nose with his eyes shut. “I thought we talked about this.”

I looked at the pages with a blank face. I thought maybe if I acted innocent I would be in less trouble. Dad was already upset about the raven’s collection. He knew I hadn’t told the truth. And he was upset I had run home scared the other day and didn’t say why.

“Didn’t we?”

I didn’t say.

“Ólafur, answer me.”

“Whaaat?”

“Didn’t we talk about this? About ghosts and evil spirits and about how you were going to do what the doctor said and not think about those things and if they came up what were you supposed to do?”

“But this is different. There’s a stag in—”

“Ólafur!” my dad yelled. Then he caught himself. “Son, please answer the question. What were you supposed to do?”

“Tell someone.”

“Tell who?”

“An adult.”

“That’s right. And did you tell an adult about this?”

Of course not.

“I just did,” I argued.

My dad sighed and crinkled the papers and threw them in the trash. Then he smelled his fish burning. “Shit!” He glanced at me. “I mean, crap.”

He poked at the pan with the spatula. There was smoke. And a long silence. He drank from his wine glass.

“Are you done with your homework?”

I shook my head. But that was a lie.

“Then you need to eat and go finish. But we’re not done talking about this.”

I nodded.

After dinner, I sat in my bed near the window to the back yard and pretended to do homework, but really I was just drawing pictures of my secret. I knew that’s what had scared the little girl with the pink dress. I could see her limp arms hanging over her mom’s back. And her eyes. I knew she was so scared the only thing she could do was hide inside herself. Maybe forever. Like my friend Emerald. But I hoped she would come back.

I had to find it. I had to put it back in Pete’s cage.

And now there was a stag.

Dad was worried about me. I knew that’s what dads did and he would feel like he was doing a bad job if he didn’t worry so much. But it made everything so much harder.

It was cold by the window and my breath had covered a small patch of window in fog.

And I saw.

There were marks on my window. They showed up in the fog from my breath. Like finger-smears. Someone had traced a symbol on the glass. It swooped and curled.

I leaned closer and blew again, like my teacher did when she cleaned her glasses. It looked like a sideways hooked cross with a circle at one end. And there was part of another above it. A different one.

I stared at my window. I slid back closer to my pillow.

“Dad!” I called as I walked to my open door. “I finished my homework. I’m gonna take a bath.”

“Okay!” he called back.

It was just the two of us in the house so I had a fancy room with a wood floor and my own bathroom. I had my own bathroom in Philly, too. Sort of. It was in the hall and it was mine but my parents used it too sometimes. And guests. But at our new house it was only for me.

I closed my bedroom door and left the bathroom door open. I tuned on the hot water. I let it run and run. It took longer than I thought to get to the window. But after a while, a thin fog—a lot more than I could do with my breath—spread from the bottom corner up and over the glass of the window.

There were lots of symbols. Six at least.

I was looking at them when I heard Dad’s footsteps on the stairs.

“Ólafur?” he called.

He must have heard the water running. I hadn’t thought about that. I ran to my bedroom and swung the door open and stripped my clothes as I hopped on one leg to the bathroom. I put the stopper down and climbed in, but there was only enough water to cover my feet.

I was sitting there shivering—Dad said it was a drafty house—as he walked into the bathroom.

He stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“Taking a bath,” I said.

“Why was the water running so long?”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot?”

I nodded. I don’t think he believed me.

“Well, finish up. It’s time for bed.”

He walked toward the bedroom door. Then he stopped. I thought he saw the symbols. He would think I had made them. He would be angry. Because of “the incident.” And the nightmares. And the stag. And everything.

He walked to my bed and then I couldn’t see him. As the hot water came up to my belly button, I saw him walk out with papers in his hand.

He took all my drawings.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

I have a secret I can’t tell anybody

My name is Ólafur Strákurson. I’m 8. I have a secret I can’t tell anybody. Not even my dad. He’s an importer. When I was little I asked what he did and he told me it’s kind of like being a smuggler, or a pirate, except he doesn’t steal anything.

My secret kills people. It kills them inside their heads. But it stopped because I agreed to feed it. We made a deal. Sort of. But I can’t talk about that. I promised I wouldn’t tell.

Mom and Dad are getting divorced. Dad says it’s because Mom was unfaithful and that I’m old enough now that I should know what that means. He grew a beard, like the wizards and stuff in the books he reads. He has a lazy eye. That’s what everyone calls it. It points a different way from his other eye. It’s from when he was my age and one of the neighbor kids locked him in the basement. They knocked him down the stairs and he was stuck there until Grandma came. I think something else happened, too, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. I heard him tell Mom once that there was a thing down there with him, and he had seen it out of the corner of his eye and that’s why it went funny. She told him it wasn’t funny and he shouldn’t ever tell anyone else about it or she’d leave.

One of my pets left once. I have a lot of pets. They get soooo loud when the doorbell rings. Dad says I’m not allowed to bring home any more. Even if they’re really scared. I asked what if they were hurt and he said to tell him and we’d talk about it. I have three dogs and two cats and a turtle named Speedy. I had a bird, too, a parakeet, but it died. And I had another bird once but that wasn’t a pet. It was just hurt and I hid it in the garage at our old house so my dad wouldn’t know. I let it rest and I fed it bugs from under the rocks in my mom’s garden and then one day it flew away while I was at school. It was a raven. I think. I wasn’t sure because it was white instead of black. And it was bigger than a crow. It left me things. It brought me a real shiny bottle cap once. And a seashell. One of those kinds that curl around and around. But it wasn’t a big one. It left them on the windowsill at our old house. I don’t think it knows where to find me here. I never knew its name, but my parakeet’s name was Pete because that’s a good name for a parakeet.

Then there’s Sudoku. She’s a terrier. And my cats, Ribbon and Betsy. Betsy’s missing most of her tail. And my other dogs. Wilson is the big one and Pringles is the little one. I wanted to call her Ancestral because I like that word, but Dad said I couldn’t do that because it wasn’t a name. I learned it at school when we were talking about family jeans. Wilson is part shepherd. We think. But he has longer hair. He’s a mutt. He has a spot on his side where there isn’t as much fur. That’s because it never grew back from the infection he had when I found him. Some people had hurt him and he ran away. That’s what he told me.

I had another dog named Careless who never paid attention to anything or anyone, even my dad, but I lost her ’cuz I left the door open. Mom used to get mad at me all the time for leaving the door open. I forget to close it sometimes. I would come home from school and take my coat off and put it on the railing by the stairs and set my bag on the ground by my shoes and pet my dogs and forget to close the door. I left the door open and Careless ran away. We looked for three days. We looked everywhere. Even my mean neighbor Mrs. Kalinga helped. That was at my old house. I’m glad she’s not my neighbor anymore. Please don’t tell her I said that.

Anyway, that’s how I found it. My secret. It was coiled like a snake under a boat trailer. Or maybe a giant worm, with segments and stuff. Except it isn’t a worm. When I leaned down and saw it, it contracted like it was hiding. I saw its eyes. They were like open mouths. But I’m not supposed to tell you that. It reached out for me with its mouth-eyes and I ran.

Two days later my friend Emerald was missing. And that’s why we had to move.

I heard my dad talking about it on the phone with my Uncle Oliver—he lives in New York—and about how Mom had lots of stress because of everything that happened. I asked my dad if it was my fault Mom left, and he said no, and I should never think that, and that Mom loved me and wanted me to go with her but Dad wouldn’t let her because of how she is. I miss my mom. Sometimes my dad does, too, even though she makes him mad.

Dad and Uncle Oliver talked on the phone a long time about Mom and the new house, but mostly they talked about the lot. For an auction. Not an empty yard. The lot was locked with a bunch of junk in the little garage—not the new garage that faces the street but the old one in the back yard next to the hollow. I don’t know why people call it a hollow, but they do. It’s like a little forest. There’s no road or path or anything. There are houses on one side and Newcombe Street on another and if you walk all the way to the back there’s the big highway, but you can’t get to it because there’s a fence and the highway is up the slope so you can’t even see the cars. But you can hear them pass. And you can feel the wind from the big trucks. I stand there sometimes. In the hollow. With the trees. There are lots of places to hide where the older kids can’t find me.

Something used to be in the hollow. Like a building. Or maybe a house. There’s a little bit left inside a big ring of downed trees, stacked one on top of the other, with all these branches that reach out like spikes. There’s a little stone wall in there, like an old foundation. The stones on one side are black like maybe there was a fire. And there’s an opening. A tree fell over it and all kinds of leaves and stuff gathered on top, so it looks like an animal den, but it’s not. I think maybe there’s more underground. Like a basement. But other than that, there’s nothing in the hollow but trees. All the leaves have fallen ’cuz it’s not quite spring yet. And there’s still some snow back there that hasn’t melted. It crunches when you walk on it. Dad said I should be careful because there might be snakes, but I don’t think there are bad snakes in Pennsylvania. Just bad things that look like snakes. When they don’t look like worms or rats or cockroaches.

It attacked my friend Emerald and now she’s dead inside. In her head.

One day some security guys came and took the lot out of the old garage and put it in an armored truck. It’s worth a lot of money. Maybe that’s why they call it a lot. After it was gone, Dad wasn’t using the garage so it was a good place to hide my secret. In Pete’s old birdcage. Then my Uncle Oliver called to say he was sending someone to help with the lot because there are some people who want to take it away, I think. They’re maybe afraid my dad made it up, or stole it. Like a pirate. Dad said the man who was coming to work for us was from a different country, and that he was famous, and that I should be on my best behavior.

Before the man came, my dad cleaned out the garage. He used to work in an office, but at our new house he works from home. So he’s always there, even when I get home from school. He keeps saying he likes it. Every day he says it at least twice. He cleaned out the garage while I was gone. When I got home, it was already empty. Except for a stack of old doors leaning against the wall. But the corner was empty. And the bird cage. I came home from school and went right to the back to check on my secret. I stood in the door and saw the freshly swept floor. I stared at the empty cage.

I wondered if my dad had seen it.

I wondered if it had hurt him.

I wondered where it was.

“What is all this stuff?”

My dad came around the side of the house where the workers had torn up the grass and left all the stacks of lumber and tiles and things. He saw me standing in the door to the old garage. Dad said the old garage was behind the house because that’s where people put garages in the old days. It looked too small to hold a car, so I don’t know what it was for. He was wearing his plaid work shirt and some heavy gloves. He set a white plastic bucket on the grass. He had the big broom in his other hand.

I looked at all the stuff inside the bucket. “I need it.”

“It’s trash.”

It was the white raven’s collection. Everything it had left on the window sill at our old house. Even the little Frisbee. It wasn’t a full-size one. It was kid’s size. It was yellow and the middle had cracked and broken away so all that was left was a ring. I knew it was trash, but I think the raven thought it was pretty.

“Ólafur?”

My dad stood straight and looked down at me with his eyes that didn’t line up right. My friends say it’s weird. I don’t like when they say that. It’s always been that way. That’s just how my dad is.

“What is this?”

“Just stuff.”

He set the big broom against the window of the garage. The white paint was cracked. The window was dirty. There were leaves all over the grass. They blew into the yard from the hollow. We had to rake the yard all the time. Dad said no one had told us that when we bought the house and we’d have to put up a fence.

He reached inside the bucket and pulled out the shiny bottle cap. Then the little roll of twine. Then a little rubber spider. “Why do you have it?”

He held it out in his hand to me as if I hadn’t seen it before. There was more in the bucket. There was a hook and a few plastic clips and some other things. I think the raven was thanking me. I thought maybe it was giving me stuff to make a nest. It seemed rude to throw it away.

I shrugged.

I think my dad could tell I wasn’t being honest. He gave me that look and turned his hand over the bucket. The bottle cap bounced as it landed inside. He picked out the little hollow Frisbee. He held it out like he didn’t understand.

I shrugged again.

“Go dump the bucket in the trash.” My dad reached for the broom.

“I can’t,” I said.

He waited for me to explain.

I wanted to tell him. But I knew what he would say.

The doorbell rang. We couldn’t hear it from the back yard, but we heard the dogs barking. All at once.

My dad set the broom against the garage window again. “That will be him.” He pointed to the bucket. “Dump that in the trash and come meet our guest.”

He had the hollow Frisbee in his hand and walked into the house with it. He was going to throw it away. I knew.

I waited until he was gone, then I carried the white bucket across the lawn to the hollow. I found a place with a lot of leaves behind one of the big trees. I cleared a space, then dumped the raven’s collection on the ground and scraped the leaves back over it. Then I ran the bucket to the side of the house by the lumber and went inside.

It was my dad’s lawyer lady. And a man. He was the strangest man I’d ever seen. He had no hair. And his skin was an unusual color. Not white. Not black. And not like Asian or Mexican. It was like the earth. And his hands had tattoos. He seemed like maybe he was sick. He was too skinny. And I heard him cough. But the strangest thing about him was his name. They just used the first letter. Mister A. Tranjay. That’s what they said. Mr. A. Tranjay this and Mr. A. Tranjay that. He didn’t even look at me. Most people smile or said hi. But not Mr. A. Tranjay. It was like I was a ghost. Or he was.

We were all seated around the dining table. The worker guys hadn’t finished the new floor yet. They’d only done a little in one corner. The rest was all rough and scraped. And I could see the inside of the wall. There was pink insulation and wires. And the house smelled of old wood. We were renovating. My dad served his guests coffee. He had a glass of wine for himself. He sat next to his lawyer lady. They were across from Mr. A. Tranjay. The old brass chandelier was overhead. I sat at the end of the table. My feet dangled and I swung them back and forth.

“When Oliver suggested you, we were very excited. We think your work is very exciting.”

My dad pulled his sweater down again. It was tight over his growing belly. His clothes were getting too small. I thought maybe they were shrinking since he was doing the laundry now and not Mom.

“I always liked the way you described the Bistro. Futurist interpretations of the proto-civilized diet. Fantastic. It’s a terrible shame what happened.”

“Yes.”

Mr. A. Tranjay didn’t say any more. I liked his voice. It sounded like the wind blowing through hollow wood. I kept staring at his palms. There were symbols on them. It looked like a couple were missing. He kept one hand under the table. I think so no one would see it shaking.

“I don’t think either of us”—Dad looked to his lawyer lady and then back to Mr. A. Tranjay—“believe you would burn your own restaurant down.” My dad kept trying to make conversation. That’s what adults say when they want to talk and no one else does. “I remember reading about how you served hákarl once. I was very impressed. Not many people have heard of it, let alone had the balls to charge others a few grand for a taste!” He laughed and rubbed his beard. I think it was an adult joke. “My family is from Iceland. Well, we’re from Philadelphia, but Ólafur’s great-grandparents were from the old country.”

There was some quiet and my dad’s lawyer lady filled it. She wore blue and white. With pearls. “The last Cirque seemed to a lot of people like an attempt to turn everyone away. To just kill the series dead.”

Mr. A. Tranjay coughed. “If so, it was a poor attempt.”

My dad scowled. “Why do you say that?”

“Because that was fifteen years ago and people still talk about it.”

“What was the last dish going to be?” the lawyer lady asked. I didn’t know her name. “After the Cheeto-crusted Spam?”

“I’m sure you can find the answer on the internet.” Mr. A. Tranjay’s voice was quiet, almost hoarse. I thought maybe he had a cold.

“People seem to think it was going to be human brain,” she said.

My dad glanced at me and then back. He forced a chuckle. “Isn’t cannibalism illegal?”

“Not the eating,” the lawyer lady said. “Just the procuring.”

I didn’t get it.

Mr. A. Tranjay was silent.

The lawyer lady pulled out her phone and tapped on the screen. “In 2012, a 22-year-old Japanese artist, who had recently undergone elective surgery to remove his manhood, scrotum and all, cooked it and served it to six paying guests.”

“Oh, geez!” Dad stood up and shooed me out of the room. “Come on. Let’s go. Out with you.”

Mr. A. Tranjay nodded at the woman as I walked past. I heard them talking as my dad sat me in the living room and turned on the television.

“And within weeks,” Mr. A. Tranjay said, “he was arrested on some very creative charges.”

Dad handed me the controller for the new game system he had gotten me. After “the incident.” That’s what he called it. I turned it on, but I could still hear. The lawyer lady kept talking. I think she liked to talk, maybe almost as much as my dad liked to drink wine. I couldn’t see her, though. I could only see Mr. A. Tranjay.

“You were called as an expert witness for the defense,” she said.

“Yes.”

I played SkyCraft. It’s this cool game where you have to design paper airplanes to fly through all these obstacles and things. Each level was different, and you had to trade your points for different kinds of paper or different kinds of folds, like turned-up wings and stuff, so that the plane you built would fly the right way after it went through the loop and hit the blast of air, and then land on the target. I was on level twelve.

“Two years ago you co-authored a paper with a team of Israeli geneticists in which you claim a species of hallucinogenic wheat rot was likely responsible for the prophecies in the Book of Daniel.”

“The climate of the period”—Mr. A. Tranjay coughed, and his voice shook after—“and the method of storage make it the only plausible explanation. But I understand the skepticism. It’s considerably more convincing when experienced directly.”

“Are you suggesting the anthropological community should consume a hallucinogen?”

“Several, if they wish to have any hope of understanding the past—as it was lived.”

I fell down a bottomless pit. Well, my plane did. The screen went blank for a moment and I saw my face. It twisted like a ghost. I could feel a nightmare coming.

“No,” I whispered.

It wasn’t supposed to happen in the daytime. When adults were around. We agreed. I shook my head and turned to see if anyone saw.

Mr. A. Tranjay was looking right at me from the other room. He was looking right in my eyes, like he wanted to ask me a question. Then he turned back.

“You want to know whether or not I am qualified,” he said.

“There is no question of your qualifications, sir. Anyone who’s ever paid more than a few dollars for a hamburger has heard your name.”

“My tact, then.”

The lawyer lady sounded like my old neighbor Mrs. Kalinga. “The lot in question has been valued between two and twelve million dollars.”

I pinched myself hard. Sometimes that makes it stop. Mr. A. Tranjay kept clenching his fist under the table. We were both fighting something.

“If authentic,” he said.

“And if your analysis is sound,” she retorted. “Understand that whether or not this matter, and thus my client, remain out of court, let alone whether he sees a dime of that money, will depend entirely on how your results are presented: factually and with a dignity appropriate to a concern of this magnitude, or accompanied with a side of pan-fried scrotum.”

“No, no. Not fried. That was his mistake. It is a tough leather. Better to serve it broiled, and well-seasoned.”

“We can still say no.” She had turned to my dad. “We can refuse. The Board—”

Dad interrupted. “Has ultimate say.” I couldn’t see him or his lawyer lady.

“We can challenge,” she argued.

“Judy, I already have a contentious divorce and a horde of creditors breathing down my neck demanding the lot be insured, immediately. I’m not going to sue my own Board of Directors on top of that.”

“But why him?” She pointed. I could see her finger. She had a big ring.

“He comes highly recommended.”

“By whom?”

“By someone close to me. And he was among the least expensive of all the prospects.” Then my dad raised his voice as if cutting off her objection. “And that’s all I’m going to say.”

The woman threw something onto the table. I couldn’t see. Her phone maybe.

My dad was trying to console her. I knew that voice. He used it with Mom all the time. “The only question is whether or not Mr. Étranger’s credentials will satisfy the underwriters.”

“Of course they will. Are you kidding? I feel like I’m in an old cartoon every time I meet with the insurance guys. They get dollar signs floating up from their eyes. You want to hire—in secret—the world’s most outrageous chef, fresh off the highly mysterious arson of his notorious restaurant, to verify—in secret—the biggest culinary discovery so far this century. When it all comes out, we’ll have press in every newspaper in the world. Much of it will be negative, but it won’t matter. People love drama. The price-per-bottle is going to go through the roof.”

“Then why can I see the veins on your forehead?”

“I’m not just your attorney, Tim. I’m your friend. With Faustino gone, you’re the sole legal owner of the lot, but it’s being held in escrow, which means you’ll be the last person to get paid. The people closest to the buyer get paid first, and so on, all the way on down. It’s a world of middlemen, and the bigger the money, the longer it takes to move, and the longer it takes to move, the less you’ll see of it. Your soon-to-be-ex-wife will want her share, and she can keep this tied up in court for a long, long time. Since the lot was acquired while you were married, her lawyers will ask for half of whatever you expect to make regardless of whether you’ve been paid. And if they think you’ve low-balled the price in order to stiff her out of the fair market value of the asset, they can demand more than half.”

“That’s insane.”

“That’s the law. It happens with houses all the time. What matters is the appraised value at the time of settlement. I don’t think you realize just how little you stand to gain from all of this. And how much fighting to keep any of it is going to dominate your life—our lives—probably for the next several years. Are you certain you want to rest all of that on the shoulders of a man who charged his guests $8,000 for three ounces of rotted Greenland shark?”

There was silence. My dad was thinking.

I got up and walked back into the dining room. The nightmare had stopped. I sat down in the chair next to Mr. A. Tranjay. He gave me a little smile. I liked him.

My dad looked at me. “Yes,” he told her.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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The eternal foe

01Nov

I removed the pendant from my neck in the elevator and put it around hers. I think she recognized it. She looked up at me without fear for the first time. There was no warmth or engagement. She was still detached from every one and every thing. I couldn’t tell if that was her natural state or a defense mechanism to cope with the trauma. At the very least, she was clearly no longer in immediate terror. But still, when I reached toward her back to comfort her, she stepped away.

The elevator opened and we walked past the pair of security guards and across the columned hall to the street. I felt eyes on me. I didn’t know if that meant electronic surveillance or other means entirely, but I knew I was being watched as surely as I knew I was walking and breathing and fleeing without a plan. I hadn’t expected to survive. I certainly hadn’t expected to become responsible for an innocent life.

I didn’t believe for a second that this was the end of it, that they were just going to let us go. They’d gone to great lengths to see me cut loose, and to set me against the chef. One of dozens, apparently. But I was the one who struck true. I was the weapon. And now that I’d succeeded, I was a loose end. I’d lost my job after months of inconclusive therapy. If I was found dead with a suicide note expressing guilt over the Cormack affair, it wouldn’t raise too many alarms—except maybe with Hammond.

He’d do something stupid, I knew, like risk his family, his wife and girls, trying to find justice for me. I couldn’t let that happen.

But right then, Alexa was my first priority. I needed to get her somewhere safe, which meant out of town. She was near-catatonic in the car. She just sat in the back, immobile, like her mind was gone. I wondered what had happened to her. Seven years she’d been missing. It took some coaxing to get her out of the car again, that was sure. I think being inside a solid, enclosed space was somewhat comforting for her then, like a den. I reached in to reassure her it was safe, and she scrambled back on the seat and swatted at me in the air. Eventually, I think the prospect of being alone scared her more than anything. I went to my trunk and found my heavy metal roadside flashlight, first aid kit, and emergency blanket. I was out of her sight for several moments, and when I shut the trunk and came back around, she was sitting on the edge of the seat, feet on the curb. She still wouldn’t let me touch her, but it seemed like she didn’t want me too far away either.

I started walking and she followed some distance behind—although she left the rear door of the car wide open. In that neighborhood, there was no guarantee the vehicle would still be there five minutes later. But since I had little choice, I led her across the weedy lot and around to the back of the brick church assembly. I lifted the slanted doors, which shed flecks of paint, and left them open for her.

“Hello?” I called as I walked down the steps.

The lights were off and it was dark, but then, it was still a couple hours before sunrise, so what did I expect? I clicked the flashlight and pointed it at the floor as I walked around the boiler room.

“Hello?” I called again. “Anyone here?”

I didn’t smell shit anymore. But I smelled something else.

The beam from the flashlight hit the grate of the metal cage, which cast large shadows on the back wall. Only small squares of light made it through, and they moved about as I stepped. The dancing of the shadow made it difficult to see, more even than if I’d had no light at all, and it wasn’t until I was at the gate that my eyes made sense of the scene. I dropped the blanket and first aid kit, which broke open on the floor.

I heard footsteps on crackling paint.

“Don’t come in!” I called back. “Alexa, wait there! Do you hear? Just wait there.”

The gate was unlocked—it had been forced—and I pushed into the storage room. The witch doctor was strung from the back wall, arms out, head slumped, like some live reenactment of the Crucifixion. With the beam from my flashlight squarely on him, I could see the wet blood on his dark skin and red smears on his clothes.

“Alexa, stay back!” I called.

I set the flashlight on the table, beam up. It reflected dimly off the brown pipes and wood joists in the ceiling. I stepped closer to feel for a pulse and tripped over a box on the ground and landed hard on my palms. I stood and reached for my friend, but both his wrists and neck were too high. His chest wasn’t moving.

I was standing there, looking at the cords that dangled him from the pipes in the ceiling, when the beam of light started moving behind me. I turned. Alexa held it. She swung two-handed and whacked me hard across the temple. The second blow, the one to the back of my head, came when I was on my hands and knees.

 

 

 

There was a Lord of Shadows. He existed. He existed the way money existed, or tyranny. He existed because people believed he existed, just as paper money has value because people believe it does. He existed in the minds of his devout. He existed in the acts they carried out in his name. They’d even built him a throne—a throne of martyrs from which to rule the world, a throne for all to see. And in that way, his power was indestructible. For he was the ultimate adversary: one who could never be found, never confronted, never defeated.

The eternal foe.

 

 

 

I was sideways on old concrete. My hands and feet were bound together behind me and attached to each other via nylon rope that stretched over my butt to my feet. The knots were strong, but the line was slack. I was inside a circle splattered on the concrete—a circle of blood. There were marks spaced around the outside, like the numbers of a clock. There was an identical circle next to me which overlapped the first, like a Venn diagram, leaving a foot-wide arc of space inside both. The witch doctor’s corpse was now headless and slumped in the corner. The wound was jagged, and curls of skin hung off what was left of his neck.

Help was out of the question. That much was certain. No one knew about that place, not even Hammond. That was the whole reason I’d picked it. It was a long-forgotten hole.

My flashlight was on the workbench, pointed toward the hall, but it was no longer the only source of illumination. A couple dozen irregular candles—some small, some quite large—lit the room in flickering yellow. They rested on the floor in no discernible pattern, except that none disturbed the circles in the center, for which space had been cleared. The card table was overturned in the hall. The cot and mattress leaned against the wall, covering one of the windows. My talisman hung from one of the cot’s legs.

She saw that I was awake. She saw me looking at it.

“You thought it would keep you safe.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t have any more effect on me than it does you.”

It wasn’t Alexa’s voice. It couldn’t have been. It was older, and there was a slight Caribbean twang.

“You’re human,” I said.

“I was. Once.”

She was crouched on the floor in the adjacent circle with her back to me. She was naked except for her cotton panties. She was working on something, cleaning it perhaps. Her arms were covered in blood up to her elbows, and there was quite a bit of splatter over the rest of her. Candlelit shadows danced across her back.

She turned then, and over Alexa’s face and shoulders I could see a swirl of vapor—another face and torso, vaguely African in appearance, with bare breasts and long hair in braided in beads. There was a blood-covered skull in hers hands, bits of sticky red flesh still clinging to it. She set it on the ground between us, directly in the center of the overlap. As Alexa moved, her smoky inhabitant moved with her.

I took a deep breath. I fought the urge to tug at my bonds. It’s natural. Your body wants to rebel, to straighten, to stand. I forced myself to stay in that terrible backward U shape and focus on what I knew.

An exorcism is like a hostage negotiation.

“You have a name?” I asked.

She smiled at me. She stood and moved to the workbench. As she stepped out of the circle, I could no longer see the smoke. Alexa removed a long bloody knife from the bench and set it on the floor between two candles. The blade was pointed at my back.

“Josephine,” she said.

“You killed them, didn’t you?” I accused. “The best people on the planet. You killed them all.”

“Some of them, yes.” She nodded. The accent was gone. It had disappeared with the smoke. “And some of the worst, too. Others did the rest.”

“The worst? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She stood at the bench with her back to me, making more preparations that I couldn’t see from the floor.

“That woman you found,” she said in Alexa’s young voice.

“You killed Dr. Massey?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. With that mark on her tongue, Amber wouldn’t have been able to reveal anything to the chef even if she’d wanted. He would’ve known that the moment he discovered it. I suspect he let her go on the hope that she’d lead him to the Lord of Shadows. Once freed, she knew they’d come for her. Or suspected. That’s why she was hiding in that derelict house, and why she’d spray-painted sigils of protection on the sides, disguising it with bits of graffiti between so anyone passing would assume it was gang signs.

The warlocks, the Shadowlords, sent their assassin, the last person anyone would suspect: an innocent-looking young woman with a mental handicap. The perfect killer. Even I hadn’t contemplated it.

“That’s how you got close to them,” I said. “That’s why you took her. Because she’s special.”

“Retarded, you mean? Yes. And a powerful medium as well. Mediums are easy to take. They’re sensitive. Their spirits are already wide open. To receive. And a retarded child has no defense.”

She leaned down to me. Her fingers were soaked and dribbling blood, like she’d just dunked her left hand in a tub of it. As she passed through the blood circle, the smoky apparition appeared again. She put her wet hand to my forehead. She was close to me and I could see the wisps of a face.

“What happened to you?” I breathed.

She drew something on my face, marks of some kind.

“I made a fair bargain.” She drew a mark to the left of the first, then made lines on my cheeks. “With a man who no longer wanted his heart. He asked for nothing in return. He just wanted it gone. He could no longer bear the weight it carried. So I took it.”

She finished her work and stood. She lit a short bundle of dried herbs in one of the candles. It didn’t so much burn as smoke like incense.

“But the shaman . . .” She spat the word. “He said it was wrong.”

Étranger.

“But it was fair!” She walked, bundle in hand, to the adjacent circle and crouched down. “He came for the heart. But I had already made a bargain. He didn’t like that. He got angry. And I had no choice but to escape into the flames, to become this . . . thing.”

She began to shake the bundle back and forth over the blood-wet skull and over me. She was mumbling to herself with her eyes closed.

I watched the smoking bundle rise and fall. “What are you doing?”

“They promised me a body. They bartered fair.”

A body. They promised her a body. So that was it.

Me.

She wasn’t going to possess me, like she had with Alexa. A possession could be driven out. She was going to become me. That’s what the circles were for, and the candles and the rest.

No more loose end.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“It’s too late,” she retorted. “I already did the work. Fair and square. Now I collect my fee.”

And just like, that Alexa’s mostly naked body slumped to the floor and the smoky apparition floated about with the incense. It wound through the air to the witch doctor’s skull, resting in the overlap between the circles, and I understood. As long as she was inside the conjuring circle, her spirit would remain patent. It wouldn’t dissipate. But neither could she escape. She couldn’t cross the boundary. Not without a host.

The smoke gathered completely inside the skull. I could see it swirling behind the eye sockets and floating in and out of the nasal cavity. There, it was wholly inside both circles. It could pass either way.

Wisps emerged and moved toward me.

“No . . .”

I pulled hard against my bonds, over and over. The slack line went taut and I realized: Josephine had left that rope long for a reason. I suspect she needed that. I suspect she needed some way to free herself after the transfer, a way to inch my body like a caterpillar to the knife she’d left by the candles and cut herself free.

My nose caught a whiff of the vapor. It wasn’t smoke. It smelled of breath and memories. I pulled and pulled and pulled.

The rope that connected my hands to my feet behind me served as an anchor and was just long enough to allow me a few hard tugs. The nylon dug into my skin. It burned. I could feel the thinner skin on the back of my hand stretch like elastic and tear. I screamed as the smoke entered my eyes and nose and ears and mouth. But I’d already felt the pain of skin torn free, some weeks before. I knew it hurt. It hurt like a motherfucker. But I also knew I’d survive. I yanked hard with one more primal yell. I didn’t so much move my limp arm as launch it, bloody and burning, into the air, right as my mind was snuffed like a candle.

 

 

 

He said he gave me everything I needed.

In a box of risotto.

What I got was a message from the other side. A warning.

Beware the wolf with three eyes.

Well, they already have two, right? And the third eye is what sees beyond. It’s the eye of the spirit self, like on Hindu statuary and all that New Age spiritual crap. In the forehead. Right where the old woman in the vision touched me with the midnight blue dye.

And the wolf is the hunter who takes down the lamb. The lamb is innocence. Peace. The symbol of renewal and salvation.

In all of this, there was only ever one hunter.

Me.

And that was the message. The wolf with three eyes was that part of me. The night stalker. The dark part of my soul that I pretended wasn’t there. I kept it away from Freddie and Craig and Kinney, that’s for sure, the way a lover hides an infidelity. I kept it away from them by pretending it was false. And in pretending to be ignorant of it, I let it be used.

That’s how evil grows. When we’re convinced of our own righteousness. When we believe our extremes are justified. When we believe we’re the good guy—even when we’re not. Because we’re stopping the really bad things. So a little sin is okay.

“Beware the wolf with three eyes” was a warning from the other side, from the ghost walkers, the spirits-shamans of old, not to trade salvation for vengeance. Not to become the dire hunter. Because courage alone is tyranny.

I remembered a line from one of the books I’d read:

And I had become as a blade without a wise hand to guide it.

But here’s the thing. “Beware” doesn’t mean run from. It means “Be aware of.” “Watch out for.” Maybe even “Use with caution.”

So that’s what I did.

The conjuring circles were beyond my skill. But not Josephine’s. She’d done a good job, too—far better than the old witch doctor had done with the ghoul. I couldn’t have made those circles or traced those runes. But I could use them, same as her.

I threw my limp arm like a Hail Mary pass. My mind went dark just as my torn hand landed on the skull and knocked it away.

With my hand and blood at the center, I summoned an apparition of my own.

I think it had been following me. On the other side. I think it had been following me since I was 13. It must have been pacing back and forth like a caged animal, waiting for the door to open, because I felt it burst from the circle like it had been running at full speed down a long hall.

A spectral wolf.

Its head was the size of a washing machine. Its coat, mottled gray. An ethereal beast, just like the voodoo priestess trying to become me. I couldn’t touch her. Even if my hands had been freed, they would’ve been useless. They would’ve passed through the vapor. But not the wolf’s teeth, for it was made of the same stuff. My totem hit Josephine’s spirit so hard it broke her from my body in a burst of smoke. It locked her in those powerful jaws. It impaled her on its teeth. Then it shook. Back and forth. Growling. As it twisted around the room, passing through metal and brick alike as if none of it were real. I heard screaming. Terrible, awful screaming.

And then, just like that, they were gone.

My eyes opened.

The room was quiet. I heard breathing. Mine. And someone else’s.

Alexa.

My free hand was shaking so badly and was so numb with pain that it was nearly useless, but one free elbow gave me enough leverage to reach the knife and cut myself loose. I struggled to my feet, almost falling twice, and ran to the prone girl resting sideways on the floor. I shook her and called her name. I called over and over. I called her back from wherever her mind went. But I couldn’t hear my voice. I was screaming, but inside that conjuring circle, it went not into the room but into the other place. I called her name over and over.

She coughed.

She opened her eyes.

“Alexa . . .”

I didn’t wait for daylight. I just drove.

 

 

 

Undated

It’s been months.

Shit.

Months . . .

I don’t want to go into everything that’s happened. There’s no point. There were some bad decisions on my part. Some drinking. Some other stuff. Guess I’m not as strong as I thought.

I took Alexa to Craig’s house. I had to tell her that her brother was dead. That was fun. And that her sister-in-law was missing, almost certainly dead as well. I didn’t tell her what year it was. I figured that was a shock that could be saved for later. And I didn’t tell her what her body had been doing without her. That’s not anything she ever needed to know. I didn’t tell Hammond either. I didn’t tell him where I’d found her and he didn’t ask. I think things were dawning on him then—that maybe there was more going on in the world than he’d been led to believe. I understood what he was feeling, the uncertainty and confusion. When something like that hits you, your first response isn’t to run out and learn everything you can. Not at first. It’s to shrink back to what you know. Only later do we poke our heads, like an animal from its burrow.

I’m not sure what the authorities will do with her, if they’ll let her stay with the Hammonds or not. She has a mental handicap, but she’s not a minor anymore. I expect her case will become a bureaucrat’s wet dream before it’s all resolved. But at least she’s in a good place—as good a place as there is in this world. In a home, with a family.

After that, I disappeared, if only to protect my own family. I was homeless for a while. Out West. That was an adventure. Everyone thinks the street people are crazy. And they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. There’s plenty in the big city that feeds off the homeless, lemme tell you. And I don’t mean preys on them. I don’t mean gobbles them up. I mean feeds. Like a parasite. And I got to see it.

Vampires aren’t like in the movies. They don’t give soliloquies in dark dungeons. They don’t sulk like teenagers. They don’t reduce a body to its corpse. Usually. That only raises questions.

They’re psychopaths. Sophisticated. Charming. Manipulative. They don’t want to kill you. They want to feed on you, week after week, for as long as they can. It’s so scary to see up close. And I don’t mean the groping and fevered slurping. I don’t mean when two or three are feeding on the same person at one time.

Fucking leeches.

No. It’s how they prey. The easy lies. The feigned innocence. Like a pedophile. They feed on hopes and dreams as much as blood. They love their victims. Even as they’re killing them, they adore them for what they give and promise them everything. They stroke them and look longingly into their eyes. And some poor soul feels needed. And their life just fades away. And the cause of death is “renal failure” or “drug overdose” or “unspecified anemia associated with malnutrition.”

Never vampirism.

You know someone who was a victim. I guarantee it. Your teenager who cuts herself, maybe. Maybe she cuts herself because the secret boyfriend she met on the internet asks her to.

I made sure they’d remember I wasn’t ever on the fucking menu.

Ever.

I even helped some folks get free.

Turns out, the chef was right. I’m good at that.

But it’s a lonely world to live in. More even than before. I mean, you can’t exactly chat about this stuff at a dinner party. Not seriously. Not without seeming completely insane.

“Sorry to hear about your intestinal ailments, Joe. Did you know that some kinds of lesser devils can possess specific organs in your body? That might not be Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Just sayin’. Try drinking a tincture of red wine and deadly nightshade, to get it drunk—they love that shit—then spin a silver dollar on a string in front of your eyes, back and forth, to disorient it and it’ll probably stumble away.”

Ha.

So you sit there at the party and don’t say anything. Because that’s what you’re thinking. Because you just don’t live in the same world as your friends anymore. And the people you share this new world with, well, they’re a buncha fucking A-holes.

I kept my head shaved. And I got a tattoo. High up, on the crown of my forehead. A simple lens shape—sideways, with an empty circle in the center. Because now my eyes are open. All three of them. I finally learned what the chef was trying to tell me that day I broke the seal on his sanctum. Probably the most valuable lesson of my life. Courage alone isn’t enough. It has to be tempered by the other attributes of the saint: wisdom and compassion and the rest.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no saint. I never will be. Odds are, neither will you. But I don’t think the Divine expect that—or whoever it is that’s out there on our side. The patient ones. The wise. The bearers of light. I don’t think they expect perfection. They don’t expect any of us to save the world. But they expect each of us to do our part. It’s not always clear what that is, but I guarantee you it’s something more nothing. It’s something more than good intentions. You can’t just be against things, even evil ones. You can’t just go around smiting the wicked. That doesn’t do anything but make them more wicked. You have to nurture them. You have to nurture the good

And that’s hard. Damned hard.

But you can do it. We all can, every day, in ways big and small. You don’t need spells or magic weapons. You don’t even have to be a saint. You just have to do something more than nothing. You just have to start. You have to. We all do. Because now it really is up to all of us. To be better. We can’t look to someone else to save us. Because there isn’t anyone. All the saints are dead.

And the darkness is rising.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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I was alone

01Nov

I passed the last of the costumed revelers on my way downtown. Most of them were drunk or recovering from drink and they yelled to each other and laughed loudly. The financial district, however, was largely deserted except for the handful of late night workers handling overseas markets— or trying to salvage their careers. Windows of the skyscrapers overhead were only sporadically lit. It was chilly, and the streets were wet from an earlier rain.

The foyer of the building was all marble, swirling in off-white and blue-green, like the color of dollars. I remember stepping in and realizing how much cathedrals, mausoleums, and old banks all looked alike. Couldn’t be a coincidence. Big columns ran down both sides of the hall. There was a row of four elevators at the back, just to the left of a little guard desk. Two rent-a-cops sat behind it, bored out of their wits.

One of them stood when he saw me. “Good evening, Detective.”

I’d burned all of my clothes from the adventure at the John D and changed into cargo pants, boots, and a heavy sweater. I had a gun strapped to my back underneath it.

“Do I know you?”

“They’re expecting you.”

He motioned to the elevators, one of which opened as if on cue. I stepped in cautiously. The button for the top floor had already been pressed. There was a camera in the ceiling. Someone somewhere was watching.

The doors closed and I rode to the top in silence. There wasn’t even any elevator music. There was only a soft ding at the top as the doors opened. The corridor was dimly lit and plushly carpeted. To my left, discordant chamber music emanated from the other side of a set of heavy drapes. About a dozen guys waited in the foyer, in front of the coat check. They were all in fancy suits with dark red vests. They were all armed, too. I could tell by the bulge of their coats.

A dozen.

Not even on my best day.

But they didn’t move. Except for one. He walked to the drapes and parted them. The music got louder and I saw one sliver of a beautiful view of the city. The ballroom windows faced north, back up the full length of Manhattan. Best skyline in the world.

“Good evening, Detective,” the man said. “Please go right in.”

I looked at the guards sitting in waiting chairs and leaning against the wall. They looked back. I stepped forward through the drapes, which hung not from the door but from the high ceiling. They covered the entire back wall. There was a giant crystal chandelier overhead, only dimly lit.  Revelers filled the long hall, but it wasn’t crowded. Many of them were costumed. Some wore those masks like the doctors had during the black plague, faces covered in hooked beaks. There was lots of chatter. They were celebrating something, although it got much quieter when they saw me.

High-backed chairs were place tastefully about in a staggered pattern such that one wouldn’t have to directly face another. Next to each was an elevated chafing dish that released wisps of smoke. An assistant chief of police sat in the chair nearest me. His pants were on the carpet around his ankles and he was having his dick sucked by a naked woman young enough to be his daughter.

“Detective,” he said, eyes rolling back in pleasure. “I’m glad . . . Oh. To see you’ve redeemed yourself. Although . . . ohhh . . . I admit I was looking forward. Ah. To bringing formal charges against you. Ahh. On Monday.”

“Charges? For?”

He tossed a hand into the air nonchalantly and let it fall. “Oh, something or other. It would’ve hardly mattered.”

I felt a little woozy then. The smoke from the chafing dishes had some kind of drug in it. I could smell it—that and the sweet odor of burnt flesh. I covered my mouth. I shook my head to clear it.

“Yessss . . .” he said. “Wonderful feeling, isn’t it?”

I turned away from him, forearm over my mouth, and saw the wall of beating hearts. Pairs of bubbling tubes fed and drained each organ. There were so many. And you could feel them. Shaking your chest with their beats. The collection filled the wall evenly from floor to ceiling. Each was individually illuminated inside an oblong crystal container: delicate decanter glass, rounded but irregularly shaped. Each was unique, as were the hearts inside. I never knew there was so much variation. I always thought human hearts were more or less the same. But they’re not. Some are larger. Some are darker. And some are stronger.

In the middle of the wide room, directly under the chandelier and directly over the giant pentagram knit into the dark carpet, a circle of high-backed chairs surrounded a young girl. She was standing, as if on display. Her dark hair hung in front of her face, which was turned in shame. Her nearly-naked body shivered from cold and fear. She wore a sports bra and matching panties, both sullied. The bra had a little pink flower in the center. Her arms were pressed to her side and she leaned slightly as if trying to slide away. There stacks of money on small side tables next the chairs, yuan and euros and dollars. At first, I thought they were auctioning her or something. But it was worse than that. So much worse.

It was a game. Next to her in the ring was a well-suited man holding a hand cannon, a shiny fifty-caliber revolver. They were playing roulette. They were gambling on which spin of the cylinder would blow her head clean off. Win or lose, one fat ante bought you a ringside seat to the action, close enough to feel the splatter. Like at Sea World.

I wondered what they did to the body after. While it was still warm.

The man with the gun was immobile. He’d turned his mascaraed eyes to me—as had the revelers in all the corners—but he didn’t move, and there was nothing to reveal his thoughts except the bulge in his tailored pants. Motherfucker had an erection.

I recognized some of the people in the chairs, men and women both. They were important. Mayors and talk show hosts and social media tycoons. They looked back at me without shame or fear. And why would they? I could’ve stormed in with an entire film crew in tow. What difference would it have made? They controlled everything. They had everything. And they wanted more.

I hoped Étranger would come bursting through the doors behind me then, tattooed palms filled with mighty magicks, and send them all to hell.

But he didn’t come.

No one came.

It was just me.

I was alone.

A light clicked on at the far end of the room, and I saw a chair. A throne. It was raised on a multi-leveled dais. It was bigger than the one at Étranger’s. Much bigger. The back fanned outward like a peacock’s tail. It was made of shining white bones. Human bones. Martyrs. So many of them.

Hands, clawing to be free.

Spines, twisted and broken.

Long bones, studded with nail heads.

And at the base, skulls. Jawless. Empty. Hollow. Yet still silently screaming. They were turned every which way as if pressed together by the sheer weight of he who sits.

But no one sat.

The throne was empty.

“We thought it might be you.”

A man stepped from the mostly silent crowd. Even the music had stopped. Everyone was watching me.

He saw the confusion on my face.

“Did you think you were the only one?”

I didn’t recognize him. He was older, mid 60s maybe, and well groomed. A rich man, it seemed, although I’m not sure I could’ve picked him out of a lineup of rich men. They all look the same.

A woman got up from the roulette game. She was in a beautiful designer dress, bone white.

“We set a dozen people against him,” she explained. “But most didn’t last. You were the most tenacious. The most fearless. The most reckless. You should be congratulated.”

I looked to the empty throne rising over the hall.

“Where’s the Lord of Shadows?”

Everyone laughed. It rose and fell softly like the chatter of birds.

“Right there.” The woman pointed to the empty throne. “You may kneel before him.”

Another man stepped forward, to my left and a little behind. He removed a white cushioned mask that looked like it had been made from the padded cell of a sanitarium. The mouth was pulled taut to one side, as if it had been hooked and dragged. It was awful. His face was dark complected and he spoke with a European accent.

“It was important that you act of your own free will. If we had cursed or enchanted you in any way, the wizard’s lapdog would have smelled it.”

I looked at the crowd. “Celebrating?”

“Indeed,” the older man, the one closest me, spoke again. “Today is a day of celebration. For there was only ever one. And now he’s gone. Thanks to you.”

I swallowed a lump.

He turned and raised his hand and the curtain on the wall parted and revealed a large screen. The already dim lights all but faded. Images appeared. Local news. Live coverage.

Bistro Indigenes was on fire. The whole building was engulfed in flames, consumed by bright orange pillars spiraling fifty feet into the sky. Firemen were battling the inferno on three sides, but they were only trying to contain it, to keep it from spreading. Everything inside was destroyed, or would be very soon. The art. The artifacts.

The chair.

I stared in silence as a perky bilingual commentator did her best to sound grave. Sports scores scrolled across the bottom.

“He was too well protected,” the woman in the dress explained. “The marks on his palms. His dog, the man Dench. A man without a heart is a man who cannot be corrupted. And the woman he keeps with him. Nearly two-and-a-half centuries old. Cursed with immortality. Not an easy woman to get around.”

“No, we never had to destroy him,” the man with the accent explained. “As with a dike, we needed only to poke a hole. The entire world would rush in to finish the job.”

I lowered my head. In my mind, I saw cracks in a window.

I’d been a weapon.

So fucking clever. Say the magic word, right?

Standing before the door on the roof of the sanctum, no one had yet said “please” in the man’s native tongue. It isn’t French. He wasn’t taken to France until later. It isn’t Portuguese, either, which is what they speak in Brazil. It isn’t anything anyone speaks anymore. It’s a tribal-specific dialect of a dead language, indigenous to the Amazon and only described in a single obscure monograph by husband-and-wife anthropologists Monsieur et Madame Étranger-sur-whatever. They described it at length. It doesn’t mean “please” like we would mean. It means something like “let us be brothers.”

I pulled my gun and pointed it at the older man, the one who was first to speak.

They all laughed again, longer this time. The chatter filled the room up to its height, where wasps were buzzing. Thousands.

“How do you think magic works?” he asked. “You think you pull that trigger and the bullet passes through me?” He shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. Only technology is so crude. One day, one of the acolytes of The Machine will invent a way to do that, I’m sure—become intangible to bullets—and you all will think you’re soooo clever.

“But tell me, which is more powerful: the abortive ability to let bullets pass”—buttons fell as he pulled open his expensive shirt—“or the aura that simply ensures none are fired at all?”

The skin of his white-haired chest was burned. Swollen and scarred with runes. Different than the chef’s. Harder. Angled. Hidden under clothing and forged in pain. I had learned enough to know that was probably significant.

I kept the gun level and released the safety.

“Do it,” he said, stepping closer.

When I didn’t respond immediately, he grabbed the barrel of the gun and thrust it at his heart.

“Here!” he said. “Right here. Don’t shoot me in the head. There’s some chance I might survive as a vegetable. Shoot me in the heart. Blow it out my chest. Then I will be sure to die, and my lords will greet me.”

I felt the trigger once. Then twice.

He smiled. “But first, perhaps you should take another look in the ring.”

I turned and recognized her immediately. The girl in the sullied underpants. She still had her arms curled around her half-naked body, but I could see her face then. She was older, and heavier, which made sense I suppose, but it was definitely her. Alexa. She was terrified. She didn’t recognize me, of course. How could she? We had never actually met.

I went to her immediately, but as soon as I crossed the circle in the carpet, I felt sick. I stumbled.

My audience moved, and fearing I was about to be overtaken, I planted my feet and raised my gun defiantly as I tried to get control of my body. I wanted to vomit. It was violently rising inside me, like a bubbling lake.

Then, standing there inside the giant pentagram-filled circle, gun swinging around, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Out the windows. In the distance. Past the lights and skyscrapers, there was a ring around the city—a green aurora that shifted and shimmered. It was enormous, miles and miles across.

I looked down. I didn’t see dark carpet. I saw a tunnel to a dark place. It was as wide as the aurora and so very, very deep. I had a sense of distance like I’d never had before. The human brain, you know, it does okay with numbers up to a point—a hundred or even a thousand. We can hold the total of that in our minds at one time. But once you get up to a million or billion or quadrillion, the numbers become abstract. We don’t have a sense of how far away the sun sits, 93 million miles from us, the same way we have a sense of the space between where we are and the nearest grocery store.

I had a sense then of distance beyond the human scale. And of beasts at the far end of it who were closing that distance at unbelievable speed. Six giants, all tentacles and wings.

The same ones I had seen in my dreams as a child.

They were coming. And an army followed.

In my distraction, the silent crowd closed, and I sprang to Alexa and took her arm. I held my gun aloft and swung it around.

“Stay back!”

But no one had moved. It had been an illusion. Or my head spinning from the nausea.

“Take the child,” the woman said with a wave, “if that is what you wish. She was nothing but a little light entertainment before dinner.”

“Consider her a parting gift,” the man with the accent added. “Take her and leave with our benediction.”

“But leave you will, Detective,” the old man said. “Your usefulness has ended.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

[image error]

Time to end it

31Oct

I set the effigy of wire and straw on the pavement in front of the John D. Bailey Center for Palliative Care and reached in my pocket for my lighter. The “John D,” as it was known, was built in the 60s to be something of an urban fortress of public safety. A striated-brick block jutted from the ground floor into the U-shaped visitor’s parking lot where I stood. A pair of outer doors marked ‘Exit’ and ‘Enter’ led to separate entryways beyond with a heavy wall between. Even if you crashed into it with a truck, all that brick would make sure you never breached the inner doors.

They relied on that. Electronic surveillance was minimal. White-boxed cameras perched like gargoyles over the front and rear doors of the building as well as both side exits, but that was pretty much it. If—hypothetically speaking—someone were to drop a footstool at the corner of the building, where a pair of rectangular sodium lamps jutted from both sides, and if that person were reasonably athletic, they could easily jump from the stool, grab one of the lamps with gloved hands, and pull themselves onto the first-floor roof, all without appearing on a single camera.

Of course, that person would still need some way into the building. All of the ground floor windows were barred. Even the window-mounted AC units were in solid metal cages. Both employees and visitors had to be buzzed into the building—although to be compliant with the fire code, occupants could of course buzz themselves out in case of emergency via the big red buttons on the wall near the exits. That meant someone could rush out of the building very easily—to see what was creating the giant blaze in the parking lot, for example—simply by hitting the red button and pushing through the exit.

But outside of all that, the most important thing to know about the John D was that its doors were pretty much like those of any hospital: they swung shut very slowly so as to leave time for long stretchers and the shuffling feet of the sick and elderly, of which there were quite a few inside. If someone did some rushing out, the inner door, normally locked, would take several long seconds to close.

I crouched on the roof over the exit until an orderly, or maybe a male nurse, ran into the visitor’s lot to examine my burning effigy, now a spiraling column of flame. It was just after 1 a.m. and the lot was completely empty. He passed through the outer door and I hopped down from my perch and made it to the inner door in four strides, slipping my gloved fingers between it and the frame at the last moment. The orderly outside saw me, of course, so I slipped in quickly and slammed the door shut by leaning back with my butt, trapping him outside.

As he ran around to the entrance, hoping to be buzzed back in, the skinny night nurse with the dead eyes, the one sitting behind the desk, grabbed a fat syringe, held it like a dagger, and started toward me like this was all part of normal life after midnight at the John D. She didn’t shout or anything, despite that I was dressed head-to-toe in black, including ski mask and hood.

I had already pulled the first Molotov from my backpack, and I lit the cloth with a Zippo from my pocket. She was halfway to me when I tossed it underhanded into the air. It spun end over end and crashed at her feet, shattering and engulfing her in a swooping dress of flame. Tellingly, she never screamed. Her arm flailed about, but not so much from pain as confusion. I pulled my gun from the holster on my belt and shot her cleanly through the head. Her body dropped with a thud.

I lit the second Molotov a moment later and tossed it underhanded over the desk and into the nurse’s station, where it smashed on the floor of the records room. The color-tabbed paper files caught fire immediately, and in two seconds, tips of the flames were scraping the ceiling. The fire alarm was triggered, sirens sounded, and flood lights above each exit illuminated the dim halls in sideways beams. The orderly outside was banging on the locked entrance, demanding to be let in.

I pulled a pay-by-minute phone from my back pocket, already keyed to 911, and hit the dial button. I tossed it onto one of the seats in the waiting area and moved toward the hall, gun in hand. Smoke from the fire was already moving over the ceiling, and I kept to a crouch.

A man came through the haze. I had plenty of warning since it was backlit by the flood lights in the hall behind. He was nothing but a silhouette and didn’t make any noise as he came at me, not even a shout of surprise, but since I had to be sure before putting a bullet in his skull, I went down and shot him in the knee. He made no sound as his leg gave way and he collapsed forward in front of me. I shot him in the head on the way down.

Behind me, barely audible over the roar of the flames, I could hear a loud voice calling out from the other end of the phone, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Almost immediately, another man burst through the smoke. My gun swung around, and he jumped back, arms raised.

“I’m human! I’m human!” he called.

I motioned with the barrel to the front door and he slid past me, arms up, like I was contaminated by disease and he didn’t want to be within three feet of me. Then he hit the button and ran out. His colleague, the man I’d tricked, was still by the entrance and cursed in frustration before running back around to the exit.

I made my way past the restrooms and toward the patient suites at the back, keeping low to avoid the smoke. Foam paneling in the ceiling over the blaze had disintegrated in the heat and filled the air with choking particulates. I hugged the left wall, facing right, and made sure the hall was clear. Patient rooms stretched all the way to the illuminated exit sign at the end. There were small dark lights over every door, painted with the room number. All of them were lit, which cast a violet glow over everything, like a blacklight.

I moved to the right wall and swung left, keeping my gun raised. Without warning, a man grabbed me from behind. I hadn’t seen him, which suggested he’d slipped out of the office door in behind me, or maybe one of the restrooms. He was unnaturally strong, and even though he held me with just one hand, my first attempt to pull free failed miserably. In that moment, he swung a fat hypodermic needle around toward my chest. It hit the pendant hanging from my neck and broke in two. I twisted in rather than out, twisting to face him and shoving my gun under his chin. I pulled the trigger and the splatter hit the ceiling. I felt blood hit my clothes. It was cool, like tapwater.

I checked the halls again immediately, dropping to my knees to lower my profile, as the body behind me slid slowly down the wall, leaving a bloody wake. The fire was growing rapidly, and I began to worry that I might have given my colleagues in emergency services too much credit.

Since I didn’t see my quarry on the ground floor, I crossed the hall to the enclosed stairwell near the back exit and pulled the fire alarm, just to be sure. A stuttering klaxons continued to blare as I walked swiftly but carefully to the second floor, making sure to clear my corners as I went. I leaned out from the stairs and quickly ducked back in. Seeing nothing but an empty hall lit by the flood lamps at both ends and the blacklights over the doors, I repeated my performance from before, hugging the left wall and clearing the right wing, then swinging around and turning left.

That’s when I saw her. She was standing in the hall in a nightgown, tangles of white hair in her face, waiting. Her wheelchair was sideways on the floor behind her. Her arthritic hands made loose fists. She was backlit by the floodlight at the end of the hall, and I couldn’t see her face.

I stepped into the open and put my gun back in my holster. No one in any of the rooms was stirring, but I could hear sirens in the distance, finally. Not police. My colleagues in the NYFD would be first on the scene.

The blacklights over the doors in the hall were lit all the way down, presumably in response to the fire, and it made the pale wildflowers on her nightgown seem to glow. And her yellow teeth too, which revealed her sneer.

I was no match for a witch of her age and skill, I knew. But then, I’d learned a few things from my encounter with the chef.

We squared off like gunfighters. Granny Tuesday’s fingers twitched as if in anticipation of what they were going to do to me. I slipped a hand into my open bag, which hung loose off one shoulder.

“Granny,” I said in terse greeting.

“Told you what you are, did he?”

I nodded. I moved slowly toward her, hand in my bag.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “I was hoping to be rid of one of ya, at least.”

As I approached, I caught sight of the patients in their rooms out of the corners of my eyes. Every one of them looked as if death might find them at any moment—indeed, that their presence there, in the house that Granny built, was all that kept it away. They laid catatonic with their mouths open and their shriveled lips curled over their teeth. Most had plastic oxygen masks over their faces and tubes running from their arms.

The fire trucks were out front of the building now. I could see red flashers reflected in the blinds of the rooms to my right. Wouldn’t be long.

“This how you hang on, Granny? Stealing the last bit of life from folks who have nothing left?”

“Someone may as well get some use of it,” she said, fingers twitching again. “They certainly aren’t. Modern medicine takes everything from them and calls it livin’.”

I was very aware of how close I was getting. I knew that’s what she wanted, for me to get close so she could spring whatever trap she had prepared.

“You set me up,” I accused calmly, not more than ten feet from her.

She nodded, hands still in loose fists, eyes not moving from me.

Don’t ever bargain with a witch, even to avoid disaster. I’d learned that lesson well enough. Nellie Noll was truthful about the origin of John Blymire’s predicament, as far as anyone knew, but she neglected to mention that his spiteful neighbor, Nelson Rehmeyer, had gotten that old German spell book from her. It’s widely speculated that on the night of the assault, she entered the house after the three attackers had fled and snuffed the burning man with a wave of her hand and retrieved her book from its secret resting place—behind a loose stone in the mantle.

Granny’s hands jerked hard, like she was moving to pull an invisible gun, and I tossed an item from my bag like it was a grenade. As it left my hand, I flipped the metal toggle to released the padlock and the carrion ghoul’s smoky form trailed the peglike spirit totem as it flew through the air—right toward the aged woman with the arthritic hands. Granny’s eyes went wide and instantly she stopped whatever spell she had been casting and turned circles in the air with one hand while drawing runes with the other. It was quite a feat to watch, especially considering how difficult it is for most folks to pat their head and rub their stomachs at the same time. It underscored just how outmatched I was.

Her left hand kept turning wide circles as the totem hit the squeaky-clean floor and slid close to her slippered feet. She must have finished tracing the binding runes then because she flat-palmed the space in the center of the circle and pushed down to the totem. She was just closing the padlock again I stepped close enough to attack. I swiped with a knife. She raised her arms defensively, and it cut across them, slicing her gown and the skin underneath. But she hardly seemed to notice. Her hands turned again as she spoke strange words—words I didn’t recognize and couldn’t repeat if I tried. Instantly, it felt like someone’s hand reached through me, through my intestines—which, as odd as it felt, was only the second-weirdest sensation of the evening. Half a second later, I felt that phantom hand grab my spine, just above my pelvis, and pull.

Hard.

I fell face forward as the ligaments in my spine stretched and I screamed. Something was trying to yank my spine out my back, as if to rip both it and my skull free of my body and whip them about in a frenzy. And it would’ve, too, if one of Granny’s deftly spinning arms didn’t crack—audibly—just below the shoulder, and then fall limp.

Now it was her turn to scream. She clutched her elbow to support her dangling arm and fell to her knees. For a moment, neither of us did anything but pant in pain. Whether it was because I was younger or just that much more pissed off, I stood first, a bit wobbly. I showed her the wax voodoo doll in my wand. It was missing one of its stubby arms. I had snapped it off.

When it comes to voodoo dolls, hair works. So do very personal possessions, like a keepsake from childhood. But nothing works quite as well as blood. The effect is temporary, and there’s a reason why people do little more than stab the dolls with needles. Distance is a factor. You can only do so much from far away. But I was standing right next to the woman. I’d wiped my knife through a crease in the doll, sealing it shut. I hadn’t intended to snap the arm off, to be honest, but given the amount of pain I was in, I no longer cared for subtlety.

Granny’s was on her knees. Her left arm dangled. She opened her mouth to speak words I knew shouldn’t be spoken and I jabbed the tip of my thumb so hard into the doll’s neck that the soft wax spread under the crease of my glove. She fell to the ground choking and gagging. Her eyes bulged from her head while her tongue squirmed like a snake with its head cut off—and I wondered if maybe it was.

A hard sound echoed up the stairwell behind me. I heard heavy pounding on the front doors. The firemen downstairs were battering their way into the building.

I lifted my thumb from the doll and Granny gasped loudly before coughing over and over between huge, gulping breaths.

“How’s that feel?” I asked

“Fuck yo—”

I pressed again. Again she started gagging and choking.

I let go and knelt over her.

“Where is he, Granny? Where’s he hiding?”

“You don’t know wha—”

I snapped a wax leg off the doll. Granny shrieked with such air and volume that it even surprised me, and I moved back. She clutched her leg. I’d heard it snap.

Her body shook in heaves, and she alternated between holding her breath from the pain and gasping for much-needed breath.

“Wrong answer,” I said. “Where’s the Lord of Shadows?”

The firemen broke into the building. I heard the shatter echo up the hall. A moment later, the klaxons ceased and I heard water and footsteps.

“Where?” I urged.

“Feol ulgaith—”

I snapped the other leg. Her eyes widened. Her mouth parted. But she wasn’t able to scream this time. She was in too much pain. Her lips quivered in a silent ‘O.’

I stood and took a deep breath. I heard shouting at the stairs. I pulled my gun and put it to the doll’s head.

“What happens if I blow your head off, Granny? I honestly don’t know. Does your mind go? Does it ever come back?”

“Downtown!” she screamed, as if pushing the word over a cliff, before holding her breath again from the pain.

She took two more panting breaths, holding each for a moment before attempting another. Her shaking body was bordering on convulsion. She was going into shock.

I wasn’t sure she was going to survive.

I cocked the gun.

“O—Omin,” she stuttered. “Omin! Top floor. Downtown. Wall Street!” she screamed. “That’s where they are. They’re all there!”

“HEY!” A fireman in bulky gear stepped into the hall behind me.

I snatched the locked totem from the ground and ran for the end of the hall. I fixed my bag on my back and shot the window four times without stopping.

I’d tried Muay Thai. And CrossFit. And Rugby. Maybe it was time for a little Parkour. I dove through the glass.

By the time the man with the ax and heavy oxygen tank on his back checked the old woman on the floor and chugged his way to the shattered window, I’d reached the ground, covered the gap to the fence, and was climbing over it, my face obscured by the hood and ski mask.

I didn’t know whether Granny would survive. But honestly I wouldn’t put anything past the old bird. The important thing was that the John D was going to be swarming with cops and firemen. With any luck, the right folks would ask how it was two men and one woman who were thought to have died months or perhaps even years before were lying in that hall with their heads blown off. And of course all of the patients would have to be moved to new facilities. Questions would inevitably arise. With the John D’s records burned, people would have to do something more than stamp a file and validate whatever paper lies had sustained the place all that time. Someone would have to go out and talk to real people, which is always your best shot at the truth.

Maybe Livonia Tuesday would make it through all that. Certainly, as I’d left her, she looked more like the victim than the perpetrator. Maybe that and her gray hair and homespun manner would be enough. But either way, she’d be off my back for a few months, at least.

An hour after crawling down from the window, I was sitting in my car at the end of an industrial pier. The door was open and my feet were on cracked asphalt. I’d wiped the gun clean again, just to be sure, wrapped it in a towel, and thrown it into the East River. My bag and clothes were burning in a rusted steel drum nearby. There was an irregular breeze coming off the water, and with each gust, the embers in the drum flared and I felt the heat.

Time to end it.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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