Rick Wayne's Blog, page 81

The pulsing breath of the sky

30Oct

Five years ago, a Jewish mystic living in Denmark was found impaled on the struts of a medieval spire. It was not clear how she had gotten there since all points of access to the roof were locked and sealed. She seems to have been propelled with force, however, since a couple of her limbs had been literally ripped free of her body. They were never recovered. It was assumed they had been taken by animals.

Three years ago, a lifelong aid worker then living in Ethiopia, near the Somali border, was found murdered in her simple flat—hacked to pieces. Some of her body parts seem to have been taken as trophies. The local government blamed Somali mercenaries since the pallets of aid supplies were raided, although it was never clear if that had happened before she was killed or after.

Two years ago, a Shinto priestess—one of a very few number of women given the honor in Japan—was cut to pieces by her brother with a katana after an argument over money. He claims to have no memory of the attack, nor of dumping her bits into a nearby river.

Last year, a local community organizer right here in New York, Alonso White, walked into the offices of a capital investment firm and blew himself to pieces, despite having no signs of suicide or anger or depression. In fact, his family said he seemed excited about an upcoming run for city council. The damage to his body was so extensive that not all of him could be recovered. The medical examiner estimated that up to seven pounds of body weight were missing, although that was a guess since he had disappeared several days before and may not have been eating.

A little over six years ago, while walking in the mountains near his monastery in Tibet, a twelve-year-old boy was set upon by a bear, or maybe a snow leopard, and torn limb from limb. The reason the local authorities were certain it was an animal, and therefore not murder, was because of the complete savagery of the attack, and that no footprints were found, and that the weapon was “clawlike,” and that some of his long bones were missing. He was supposedly the fourteenth reincarnation of the Great Lama Something-something Rinpoche. There’s a picture of him I found online. It had been cropped and used at his funeral since it had been taken the day before his death. He was smiling and happy in his red robes, surrounded by local villagers, who had come to ask his blessing. One of them, off to the left, wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at him, blankly.  She was young, had clear signs of Down’s, and was a spitting image of Alexa Sacchi. Her skin was well-tanned and a little darker than I remember from the pictures I saw, but there was the same dark wavy hair, the same roundish face.

There used to be saints in the world. Not even so long ago, if you think about it—people like Mandela, who rotted in prison for three decades. And when he got out, not only pardoned his jailers but forgave them. The racists. The men of apartheid.

These days it’s quaint to believe in saints. No sooner do you suggest one than someone stands up to correct you. We’re told a saint isn’t simply a superior human but a flawless one. And what human is flawless? The earnest and well-intended people of this world did to compassion what they did to science and reason. They said truth was infallible, so if science was ever wrong, then it must not be true. And if any flawed thing is just as good as any other flawed thing, we may as well believe whatever we want. We may as well be whatever we want. They couldn’t convince us to choose evil, not openly. They tried in the last century with Hitler and Franco and Stalin and Mao. So they convinced us there was no such thing. If evil isn’t real, then neither is good. It’s just us and our shabby choices, where we tell ourselves we’re no worse than anyone and no one is better than us. It sounds so just and fair. Endless servings of equal pie for all.

So we killed the saints. They didn’t die by our hand, but they may as well have. Because we didn’t just stand by and let it happen. We shouted them down. How dare anyone challenge us to choose what’s right? Who are they but flawed humans, same as anyone? Better someone hang them and be done with it.

But only a saint can perform a miracle. And a world without saints is a world without miracles. And a world without miracles is a dire place where the only things that happen are possible.

I opened the fridge and stared at the box.

He said everything I needed to know was in a box of risotto. I unhooked the lid. It didn’t look like much—gruel, really—but I gotta hand it to the man. It was fucking delicious—earthy and salty and a tiny bit sweet. But not candy sweet. More like maple syrup. Or maybe teriyaki sauce. I just wanted a taste and ended up eating the whole damned thing.

An hour later I was squatting in the corner, shivering and sweating like a pig. I was in someone’s house. I didn’t know whose. I could see Alexa, almost as if through the walls. I knew exactly where she was, and I knew she was watching me. Waiting. But I couldn’t get to her. There was nothing stopping me. I just couldn’t get there. I moved forward through the house, up the stairs or down the hall, knowing that was the right way to go, but I could never make any progress. I wanted to hit something. I was so angry. So frustrated. She was right there! Looking at me even! With a calm smile that begged me to join her. There was nothing stopping me. Why couldn’t I get there? I got mad at my legs, at my feet. Only when I looked down to curse at them, they were folded underneath me. I was sitting cross-legged before an old woman in a desert. And by old I mean like the mountains and the stars. She had a sparse beard, like the fuzz on a wrinkly fruit. I heard the throb of drums and felt the pulsing breath of the sky.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

For eons.

Clouds ran like water.

And over it all, that deep hum of a bullroarer spinning for all time, like the wristwatch on the arm of eternity.

The old woman dipped a finger into a bowl of blue dye and reached out to touch my forehead.

Beware the wolf with three eyes.

And then I woke. I was in my room looking up at the drab ceiling. My alarm was next to me. But I could see the wolf. Clearly. It was so big. A giant. Its head hung over me. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t snarling.

It was waiting. For something.

For me.

Then, in the fur above its two piercing eyes, a third opened.

And I saw the stars.

I sat up. I was drenched in sweat. I looked at my alarm clock. It had only been a couple hours, but my stomach burned with hunger. I had wet myself. I had vomited. At least once. The room stank of it.

I reached for my phone, but it was dead, and I realized it hadn’t been a few hours. It had been twenty-seven. That bastard chef, the old shaman, had served me a hallucinogenic mushroom risotto. Sent me on a vision quest. And I’d been tripping for nearly a day.

I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and washed away the vomit and looked at myself in the mirror. I recognized her. That woman looking back. But she wasn’t the same.

I grabbed my razor, the one I used on my legs, and shaved my head in a hurry, as if my hair were polluted with sin. I cut myself several times, and when it was all done, I stared at the blood.

I felt different.

Awoken.

 

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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Have you come to kill me?

29Oct

I waited another two hours after the lights went off before entering through the sewer. I cut the city padlock on the gate and looped the chain around a hook. I hung the broken lock through one of the links. Down a short arched passage was a four-foot-high concrete slab. Atop and at the back was a bolt-studded iron door with no handle. There were no lights down there, especially at that hour, so everything had to be illuminated by the beam emanating from the LED lamp at the crown of my forehead. I adjusted it upward before attempting the jump.

The iron door took some tugging. I eventually got it open, but only by dragging it hard across the concrete, which made a loud grinding noise that could’ve woken the entire block. The vertical shaft on the other side enclosed a mechanical lift, the kind that used to be common in the days before electric motors. A pair of long chain loops dangled. Pulling them turned a crank connected to gears that lifted the metal grate vertically along the pitted track to the top—albeit very slowly, and only with the assistance of counterweights.

I looked up the shaft, but not before moving the beam of my headlamp oblique to it, just in case there was anyone at the top. The bolted, crisscrossing metal braces that secured the vertical track were all covered with a thin layer of dark brown rust, but they otherwise seemed as sturdy as the day they were installed. They didn’t so much as budge when I shook them. But rather than risk the noise of the rattling chains, I turned off my head lamp and used the gear holes of the track like a ladder. I slipped my gloved hands inside and lifted myself up one step at a time.

I’d like to say that, as I ascended that shaft, I was as confident as I’d been walking into that fifth floor apartment several weeks before with only my wits and a necklace to save me. But that would’ve been a lie. Down in that dark hole, my heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I had to stop several times to make sure I wasn’t making noise that I just couldn’t hear. I had absolutely no idea what I would encounter at the top, nor even the category of fates that awaited me if I failed in my mission.

But climb I did, past the ground floor exit—which had been walled off decades ago, by the looks of it—up, up, and up, one careful pull at a time, arms stuck into over-sized gear holes, until at last I emerged through a false brick wall, which slid effortlessly and appeared to be a very recent addition. I got the impression that shaft had once been the primary means of moving things up and down the building and that it was only the later occupants, having no use for such a clunky device, who walled it off in lieu of tearing it down. Doing so would surely have taken a good chunk of the building with it, given how sturdily it was built. The crisscrossing girders were affixed solidly to the walls and never even jiggled even as they bore my full weight. But then, it was built to carry loads an order of magnitude heavier than me.

The room into which I stepped was completely dark but had the open stillness that suggested great size. I risked using the headlamp again but kept the beam pointed toward the ground on the lowest setting.

“Whoa . . .”

There was a full fucking tree in there. Alive.

I looked up at it. And then saw in shadow what covered the wall behind.

I cursed under my breath.

To start, I had severely underestimated the size of the man’s library. But more than that, it was completely empty. Shelf after shelf was completely barren.

Was he expecting me?

I drew my gun. The room was big and dark and filled with so many odd things, if a man were hiding in there, I’d never have known it. I could feel my heart beating and hear my breath in my ears. I adjusted my fingers around my gun, which felt a bit slippery in my wet palms.

Under the empty shelves was a row of arched brick nooks that looked like they had been erected around the same time as the mechanical lift. Each was sealed with a gate, but not, it seemed, to keep people from stealing the objects inside. It seemed more like it was a prison—keeping the objects in. The central arch was covered by a folding screen, and I stepped toward it slowly, moving around the tree in a wide arc. I felt the talisman around my neck, just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally dropped it on the climb.

The screen had a peaceful scene, some kind of Asian design. A little bird sat on a branch sprouting tiny pink blossoms. I moved it out of the way with the barrel of my gun. I raised my lamp.

The beam illuminated a skull. But it wasn’t a skeleton. It was a chair. A bone chair. It was locked behind the gate, chained crosswise, and bolted to the floor.

I stared into the hollow sockets of the single skull in the back, nestled between the undulating rows of vertebrae. Human vertebrae. The empty sockets stared right back.

“Have you come to kill me?”

That voice!

It resounded through the darkness like an alpine horn. I spun with gun raised as the lights rose slowly, soft and warm—glowing panels behind the shelves—and Etude Étranger appeared from the shadows wearing the craziest outfit I’ve ever seen. His face was covered in a wooden tribal mask, similar to what I’d seen at Dr. Caldwell’s, but unpainted and in an entirely different style. Draped over his shoulders was a brightly feathered garb, like a heavy parka. He grasped a drum in one hand. His other was clenched into a fist, which he threw toward the floor before I could set my feet.

The room shook violently and I stumbled. The building rocked back and forth as from an earthquake and I was jostled about. My feet shuffled as I tried to keep my balance. My sweaty hand clenched. It was automatic, a subconscious desire to hold onto something steady. And I pulled the trigger. Since I wasn’t aiming at anything, the shot went wide and pierced one of the large windows behind the chef. His arm went up and the room dropped four feet, just like in the apartment with the witch doctor, and I fell to my ass. My gun bounced free.

I looked to it several feet away. I looked to my adversary. But he had his back to me then. He had turned for the window.

That was then I realized nothing in the room had been disturbed. None of the artifacts in the glass cases had fallen. The leaves of the tree were silent. The half-finished glass of water on the counter was as still as an alpine lake. And yet, I had definitely felt the room shaking. It hadn’t been me. Nothing had gripped me. I had been free to move and had even stutter-stepped back and forth as I tried to keep my balance.

The chef lifted his mask halfway off his head and shuffled to the window in his parka to peer through the tiny hole in the glass. He had plush house slippers on his feet, as if he’d just retired for his evening pipe.

With his attention momentarily distracted, I drew the wand with the splinter-frayed end. I thrust it toward him and one of the sinks in the circular counter behind me exploded in water, as if a pipe burst. I immediately dropped the wand and held up the talisman, hoping whatever magic it contained was enough to keep his spells at bay, for a moment at least, while I attempted a retreat. I pulled it free from my neck and thrust it before me with such force that the pendant swung hard back and forth, knocking against my fingers.

“So,” he said with his back to me. “You have not come to kill me.” He dropped his drum and pulled his mask off his head and touched the hole in the glass with one finger.

My heart was pounding in my chest. My skin felt cold. For a moment I thought it was shock, but then I saw my breath billow from my mouth.

“Nonononono.”

I was only halfway to my feet. I scrambled back until my back hit the gate that held the chair. I tried to shake the vision from my head, but it was too late. To my left, where the stacked-stone doors had stood, there was now a line of birch trees, the entrance to a thick grove, branches capped in snow. Snow was everywhere. I was sitting in it. The chef was standing in it. It appeared as if he and I and the big tree and few random furnishings from his sanctum had been suddenly transported to the wilds of Alaska. I could see mountains in the deep distance, little more than a jagged gray horizon.

I heard the wasps before I saw them. A faint but insistent hum, somewhere between a buzz and a rattle, rose from the shadows of the grove. There were thousands, maybe more, infesting the trees. I saw paper nests in the branches and winged insects crawling from holes they’d burrowed in the trunks. Green leaves were falling to the snow, one every few moments, as if chewed off at the stem.

To my right was a long, sloping embankment that ended at a distant rise. Perched at the top of it, so far away that I could’ve blocked the sight of him with half my thumb, was the giant wolf. His tail was up and one paw was raised, as if he had stopped in mid-flight to see if he were being followed. I could see the trail of his footprints in the snow as they dashed from the grove and up the shallow slope. He just stood there, watching me.

“He calls to you,” the chef said.

The bright colors of his parka seemed to glow against the pale bleakness of the snow. His gaze fell on the distant rise, on the wolf.

“You can see that?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, turning to me. “My eyes have been opened, as yours must be.”

I heard the rustle of the wasps in the trees. Two more leaves fell. I looked back to the wolf. It was waiting.

The chef took a few steps through the snow in his house slippers. I could hear it crunch under his feet. He lifted the heavy parka over his head. The bright feathers rustled loudly and he dropped it to the ground. I could see his breath. And my own.

“He calls to you,” he said again, “but you do not answer.”

I felt warmth behind me which quickly turned to heat. And not the pleasant kind. I turned and what I saw made me scramble back toward the chef in the slushy, melting snow.

A horizon of fire—mirrored above and below as if one burning lake hung inverted over another. Something was in the gap beyond it. Something . . . terrible. Not terrible like the acts of a serial killer. Terrible like the voice that drives him to do it. And laughs.

And then it was over, as if the visions of ice and fire canceled each other out, and once again I was on the floor in the chef’s sanctum.

A green leaf fell. But not in my vision. It broke free from the big tree and landed on the floor several feet from me. It was weak and wilted like three-day-old lettuce.

Man, there was so much to see when that place was lit. Not just the wall of books or those big stacked-stone doors but the vaulted ceiling and the stained glass and the gilding and all of it. I was facing the chair, and I saw where the chains that ran through the metal loops in the stone slab glowed a faint red, as if the chair had been rocking back and forth with such speed and friction that they were heated like an oven coil.

I looked at the yellowed bones studded with irregular nails. “What is it?” I asked

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like a throne.”

It was awful. And magnificent.

“And so it is. That is the throne of Bolochai,also known as Amaimon, prince of devils. Say the name.”

“Bolochai,” I answered without thought. I turned to him. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

He had moved behind the circular counter. His feathered parks was on the floor. I had been staring at the chair long enough that he’d wiped up most of the water from the exploding sink. I saw the wet kitchen towel crumbled on the counter top. He was grinding fresh spices with a mortar and pestle. I could smell them. Like the earth. He didn’t look up. Fucker was so calm. Like we hadn’t just been trying to kill each other moments before.

“No,” he said, almost pleasantly. “But I wanted him to hear you say that.” He turned to the chair. “He is very arrogant. Hence the throne.”

The chef dumped the powdered spice into a stainless steel bowl as I rose on shaky legs and stood, perfectly still, like I was standing on a landmine. He sprinkled multicolored peppercorns into the ceramic mortar. They clinked as they fell.

“The chains that hold the chair,” he explained as he worked, “are bolted to the ground in six places, which form the hexagram. Two chains, each forming a triangle, facing each other. One to summon and one to bind.”

I heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of his grinding.

“How did you manage that?”

I stepped to the gate. It was electric. Standing so close to it. I could feel the heat coming off the chains, which were dark again but still smoking hot.

“I didn’t. In the sixteenth century, Amaimon possessed the niece of the king of Poland. A spoiled girl with a wicked heart. After the death of her husband, she made easy prey. For decades, he lived in her castle slaughtering her maids and bathing in their blood, or drinking it outright.”

“The Bathory legend.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“It was popular with some girls at my school.”

He frowned. “That’s unfortunate. There was unimaginable depravity. The draining of children until their eyes were hollow and their hearts stopped beating in their chests. Amaimon preferred a warm bath.”

He mixed the freshly ground pepper with some cut mushrooms and lit a second burner. I haven’t ever seen mushrooms like that before, dark and shriveled, almost like prunes.

“With his family and thence his own throne under threat, the king ordered the demon removed, but inside his keep, Amaimon was too powerful. He needed to be lured away under his own will.

“History records that the Polish saint Stanislaus Kostka, whose father was Lord Zakroczym, senator under the king, died at the age of eighteen in a monastery in Italy. He was canonized merely for being a pious youth. A bit odd, wouldn’t you say?” He glanced to me for the briefest of moments before turning to his work. He seemed like he was having fun.

I shrugged.

“In truth, Saint Kostka’s death was faked and he was inducted into a secret order. In 1607, after a long career battling the occult forces set loose by overzealous Protestant Reformers—who often failed to realize that gold-crusted altars often hid dark secrets inside—Kostka led a team of warrior-monks onto a lower plane, what you might call a hell, and stole Amaimon’s throne. Kostka himself died in the raid, a sacrifice so that his acolytes might escape.”

“Did they?”

“Oh, yes. The remaining paladins used the stolen throne and a young nun—exceptionally beautiful, of course, and a holy virgin—to lure the narcissistic demon from his keep. They dressed her as a peasant girl and tore open her breast. But the paladins were wise. They were a diversion only. They knew the demon would not expect an attack at the hands of young girl. And it was she who rose up when his back was turned, with training and courage and faith. She imprisoned him, sacrificing herself to lock him inside. She asked nothing in return.”

I looked at it again. I swear it looked back. Right at me. To my soul. It was watching us. It almost seemed pleased. I think it liked being talked about.

“So why do you have it? If he’s that dangerous?”

“He is sometimes useful. He shows me things. Retrieves them. Like a dog.”

I glanced between them, the demon and the sorcerer. “You’re antagonizing him.”

“Impossible. Demons are always angry. It is the defining characteristic of a sentient malevolence, born of cataclysm.” He added a bowl of stock to his cooking mixture and then dry rice, a little at a time. Every few moments he would stir. He was so patient. “But my use of the chair comes at great cost. A single misstep would free him. After centuries of confinement at the hands of those he refused to serve, I cannot imagine the suffering he would wreak in recompense.”

“Couldn’t you just trap him again?”

The chef kept stirring, slowly, and he kept a steady voice.

“Only a saint can perform a miracle, like the young nun whose thankless sacrifice history has not even bothered to record. Someone with proper training in the rites. Someone whose heart is armored by a pure love—such as faith, which is love of the divine. Someone ready to sacrifice themselves without hesitation, as she did, in order that people she’d never met and who would never know her name might be free from evil.” The chef held up his tattooed hand with all five fingers spread. He lowered them one at a time as he spoke. “Knowledge. Love. Courage. Wisdom. And above all, Compassion. These are the characteristics of the saint, who alone accomplishes the impossible. They can overthrow empires without shedding a drop of blood, or ascend to the moon and bring pieces of it back again.”

I stood close to the counter and watched him work. He was so calm. So patient. So completely, utterly not threatening.

“You’re not the Lord of Shadows,” I said softly.

He laughed. It sounded almost like a wheeze.

“Is that what you were told? Of course. For each characteristic of the saint, there is an opposite, of which the Lord of Shadows is master. Opposing courage is not timidity but false righteousness, just as the opposite of knowledge is not falsehood but—”

“Deception,” I said

I lowered my head.

Two more leaves fell. They were coming faster now.

He poured liquid from a bowl into a pot on a burner. “Most servants of the dark believe they are superior. But their leaders know the truth: that the darkness is the absence of light and just vulnerable, that it only takes one act of sacrifice to expel this evil. They’ve tried, many times they’ve tried, to cover this world in their shroud. And each time a saint has stood to oppose them, often defeating them with the simplest of kindnesses.

“But the enemy is neither silly nor stupid. They have learned from past mistakes. This time they did not wait for battle. This time they prepared the way. In secret. It is their hope that without a saint to guide us, all will fall into darkness.

“I know not what lies led you here,” my host told me, “but I would guess the answers you seek lie in the demise of the saints. And that is where you should look.”

He was stirring the liquid and adding whitish-brown grains—rice or maybe pasta.

“I hope you are hungry,” he said.

I snorted at the ridiculousness of it. I broke into his home to find his book and take his power, to destroy him if I had to, and now he was making me dinner.

I sat down on the stool. There was a metal disk, like a manhole cover, in the floor of the circular work area. It was half-covered in fallen leaves. I’m certain it opened to the big hearth in the kitchen of the restaurant. If he stoked a bonfire below, the tips of it would just reach that opening. I looked up at the stained glass dome in the ceiling directly above it. The segments around the circle, like the divisions of an astrological calendar, depicted seemingly mythological scenes I didn’t recognize.

Fire below. Heavens above. Mirrored glass facing out to the world, covered in powerful wards. Books to the rear, holding knowledge, holding down the chair. If you sat on it, the inward-facing mirror at the front would be completely obscured by the trunk of the tree, which was in the center of everything. Stone doors to the east. Secret door to the west.

I was inside a veritable magico-spiritual fortress.

I turned to the small round hole I’d made in the window. A feathering of small cracks surrounded it. A larger one, shaped like a hook, had already grown from one side.

“I’m famished,” I said.

I watched him work as another pair of leaves fell from the tree.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You are hungry.”

“No.” I shut my eyes at the ridiculousness. “Why are you helping me? Now?”

“Ah.” He nodded. Then he contemplated his words. “Tell me, Detective. If you were being pursued by your enemies, and you came upon an accident on the side of the road where people were badly injured, would you turn and keep running?”

He added more grains and some of the spice mixture and kept stirring. It smelled really good.

“Are you saying I’m hurt?”

“No, it is not a wound. It is a calling. Quite literally. It usually begins around puberty, occasionally later. And only very occasionally earlier.”

“A calling?”

He nodded.

I thought about the video of me, the seizures. I thought about my year in the hospital and the effect it had on my family. On my life.

“That makes it sound so benign,” I said under my breath. “I had a complete psychotic break. My parents barely talked to me after that. They still don’t.”

“The trauma is necessary.”

“Necessary?“ I stood. “I was thirteen! Do you have any idea—” I stopped.

I looked at his bald head. At his tattooed palms. At the garb of feathers and the mask and drum on the floor.

“It is necessary,” he said, “to sever the connections to your first life so that you may be born into your second. Had the call not been suppressed, you would have been led through. You would have been led home.”

“Led? By who?”

“An elder. A guru or guide. Had the sickness been allowed to progress, ripples would have been cast and someone would have come, the same way the sound of a car crash brings people from their homes. It never happens otherwise. But I understand your skepticism. Your case in particular is quite difficult.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“In general, there are three types of calling. Healer is most common—a witch doctor or medicine man, someone sent to salve the physical and spiritual insults to the community. After that are the mediums, or conjurers, who can barter with the spirits, or move them by force, and who can contact the ancestors to enlist their advice and aid. It is not unusual, however, for a single individual to serve both functions.

“But nature always seeks a balance,” he said, “the way a rock always falls. There is no guiding intelligence for this—at least not as you would think of it. It’s rather like a pendulum or gyroscope righting itself after a perturbation. It is the natural flow of energy toward the center.

“Humans are a species, a social species. And we are part of nature, whether we admit that or not. When we are perturbed, when a catastrophe—a war or a famine or a plague—leaves the community especially vulnerable, when they are wounded and beset, a third calling emerges, not to heal the sick but the village itself, not to barter with the spirits but to battle them, as immune cells rush to the site of an infection. A defender. A spirit-warrior whose purpose is to confront the dark in times of spiritual sickness, and to beat it back, not for any individual but so the whole community may heal.”

He looked up from his stove then. He looked squarely at me. But his hand never stopped stirring.

“You think it’s an accident that you became a police officer? Or that you were drawn to matters occult? You think that’s happenstance, that it’s simply how things worked out and that if your life were rewound to do over, things could have been otherwise?”

He stared at me from under his bare head for the longest time, waiting for an answer.

I didn’t have one.

“But all balances can be upset,” he warned, eyes turning back to his pot. “Even mine.”

Another leaf broke from its branch and fell twisting to the floor.

“You are called down a path you cannot see. A new being struggles to be. The flesh over your eyes must be torn away, and too the hair from your head, and you must be born again. Nothing less can save you.”

I watched the mixture thicken as he stirred. He added crumbles of hard cheese and dried green flakes and little brown ones and kept stirring. It was hypnotic.

“Last year,” I said. Then I stopped.

He waited a cool minute.

“Last year, it happened again. First time in thirty years.”

“I see.” He frowned. “They gave you pills.”

I reached into my bag and took them out to show him, but he snatched them from me before I could object and tore off the cap and dumped them down the disposal.

“Hey! That was $300 worth of medicine.”

He resumed his stirring. “For some, probably so.”

I looked at the rubber-lined drain in the sink.

“Last year, you say? In autumn?”

“Yeah. Why?”

He nodded weakly as if all made sense.

“A portal was opened then. To a dark place. The call would have been louder then. Like a shriek.”

“A man was hurt because of it,” I said softly. “His family ruined.”

He began scooping the thick mixture into a flap-topped box he pulled from under the counter. I was pretty sure it was a take-out container from his restaurant.

“The burden you carry is larger than you know. Don’t add to it that which is not yours. Do not blame yourself for the darkness born that day.” He sealed the container and handed it to me. “For that burden is mine.”

I took it.

“Everything you seek, all your answers, can be found within.”

The box was warm. Steam escaped from the gap between the interlocking lids. The Bistro Indigenes logo was printed on the side.

“In a mushroom risotto?”

I heard a faint clink then, as if someone had blown on a wind chime just enough to make one bell brush its neighbor. I turned and saw the crack in the window had opened into a wide C. It was no more than a foot tall, but it cut through one of the handwritten symbols cleanly. I looked at the others, stretching the full length of the space and around to the far wall.

The chef walked around the counter to get a closer look at the glass. He saw my face.

“Do not blame yourself,” he said softly. “An attack was always bound to come.”

Then he raised his hands to the stacked-stone doors, which swung outward silently as if heeding his gesture.

I stood from my stool as he retrieved my gun and handed it to me. Two more leaves fell from the big tree.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked.

“I do not know,” was all he said.

And that was 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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Science Fiction: The Stars My Destination

“The Stars My Destination,” second in my five-book formal tour of the history of science fiction, is a work of extremes, which makes it hard to say anything balanced about it. What it does well, it does very well. The rest is flat pulp, the equivalent of an off-brand cola. But since Bester doesn’t dawdle, the flat bits never last very long — none of it lasts very long — and so pushing through does not require a Herculean effort, as with some modern writers.

In that way, “The Stars My Destination” reminded me a lot of my first book, FANTASMAGORIA — which is fitting considering that the latter is an homage to mid-century pulp. Both books have unsympathetic protagonists. Both feature a radioactive man (which I thought was a fun coincidence). And both are “overly paced,” where almost every chapter offers some kind of twist or escape.

This is both a benefit and an affliction. While superficially exciting, it’s very difficult to fill a novel with one dramatic escape after another. By necessity, some of them end up beggaring belief, or being outright silly. Take the escape from the underground prison. Although the final flight from the guards was salvaged somewhat by the revelation at the end of the burning man, the whole bit before that, with the phantom echo and Foyle meeting the unfortunately named Jisbella and how they fall in love over the space of three paragraphs, not to mention Foyle crashing through the place to find her, struck me as horribly forced. (So much so, I assumed it was a setup to make him think he escaped and so lead Jisbella to the PyrE.)

Same for Foyle’s escape from the commandos, who we were told not only had equivalent technology but superior numbers and training. By the time the burning man saved Foyle for the umpteenth time on the Spanish Steps, it was all getting a bit tedious, and the dramatic twist with Olivia at the end was such a limp-wristed sucker punch that I almost lol’d. Not only did it land softly, it came out of nowhere and made no sense. What was she doing out there exactly? And why? From then on, for the last forty pages or so, I was reading simply to see how it ended.

But as I said, it was a very uneven book. At other points, the reverse was true. Foyle’s escape from the asteroid with the inert lead safe, for example, where he abandons Jisbella to their pursuers, rang very true, not only to the characters but to the physics of motion in space, which was still new to the public when the book was written (in the 1950s). Similarly, the tragedy of Foyle’s introduction was brilliant. In a handful of pages, Bester creates a stark yet believable motivation, where Foyle, the archetypal mediocre man, is existing aboard the wreck of the Nomad, not through any great will but simply through a kind of undead monotony, a repetition of behaviors designed to keep him alive but with no thought or purpose. When that’s broken by the chance of rescue, the incomprehensible inhumanity of his abandonment makes him reject humanity altogether and turn into the tiger.

In that way, the infamous rape scene, which apparently bothers some people, seemed to me to fit the character entirely. Foyle is man reduced to animal. (Could the tattoo make that any clearer?) Bester even portrays the proper motivation for a sexual assault: power rather than sex. I’m not saying its inclusion made this a “good” book. In fact, it made me dislike Foyle so much that I didn’t much care what happened to him. I’m simply saying it didn’t feel out of place in the story. It was appropriately horrific.

The more damning problem was how the breakneck pace kept us from the more brilliant parts of the fictional world. I wanted to know more about the science cult on the junk asteroid, for example. Their Biblical reverence for the Word of science with no appreciation for the meaning is a witty and incisive critique, not just of religion but popular scientism as well. And “Quant Suff!” has to be one of the cleverest replacements for Amen I’ve ever seen! Had Foyle been allowed to recuperate there for any length of time, not only would we have gotten to see more of that culture, his later return would have been that much more dramatic.

But more than anything, the biggest limitation of the book by far is that it’s pitched as the greatest single sci-fi novel of all time. (That didn’t come from any of you. I got a number of recommendations, including this one, and I researched them on my own before making my five selections.) The blurb from the publisher, the quotes from other authors on the cover, blog posts on the internet, and the essay by Neil Gaiman at the beginning all billed “The Stars My Destination” as a modern masterpiece.

It might have been at the time. I’ll say that again lest someone reading too quickly not stop to contemplate the importance of that admission. It very well might have been a masterpiece at the time. But if so, it hasn’t aged well, a fact made clear to me by having just read “War with the Newts,” which is older still and hasn’t aged a day. The latter really is a modern classic, and I now count it as one of my favorite books of all time. That’s a hard act to follow, especially given that “The Stars My Destination” gets top billing.

I can’t help but wonder if new generations of sci-fi fans continue to read this book for the same reason the literati keep reading “Moby Dick.” Like “The Stars My Destination,” “Moby Dick” is very uneven. It remains the only fiction I’ve ever read with a pencil in hand for underlining, as I do for all nonfiction, because some of Melville’s passages are utterly brilliant. Sadly, those are islands in an ocean of gray-sky words, and despite at least two attempts, I’ve never been able to finish the book.

But smart people continue to read “Moby Dick” because they’re supposed to read it, because if they don’t, they’re considered to have incomplete knowledge of the canon, and a canon — ANY canon, be it of literature or Doctor Who episodes — functions as a holy writ and so has more to do with indoctrination and inculcation into the elect than any inherent merit. You have to read “The Stars My Destination” to prove you’re properly knowledgeable, to prove you’re “one of us,” and so be allowed to proffer opinions on the rest of the genre in the same way that a graduate of divinity school, having studied a complementary canon, is deemed worthy to minister to a flock and to write sermons on things.

In exactly that way, “The Stars My Destination” was a homework assignment for me. I chose it specifically because it was billed as part of the sci-fi canon, where the whole point of my little self-directed course is the application of lessons to my own craft. Sadly, all the lessons of “The Stars My Destination” are ones I already learned by writing FANTASMAGORIA, to which many of the same criticisms apply. However, reading the one did improve my love for the other. If something like “The Stars My Destination” can be considered canon of the genre, the holiest of the holy, then surely my own book, with all the same warts, is something to be proud of.

What do people do?

28Oct

She had company. I could see through the second-floor window. I couldn’t tell who was there, but there were definitely two shadows, both female from the looks of it. I was across the street under a tree that was still clinging obstinately to the last of its leaves. It was raining, but not very hard—just enough to make everything damp, just enough to loosen you up to let the cold in. I pulled the flaps of my gray jacket around me tighter.

One car passed, then another. A men exited the building behind me and cursed the rain. He scurried off without an umbrella. It went from dusk to dark.

I turned back to the window and saw the shadows stand and move close to each other—a kiss or a hug—and then move away. I turned my eyes to the bedroom, which had a small balcony that faced the street, but the curtain stayed dark.

In the last few weeks, I’d called her twice, left one message, and sent a single text. I figured that was enough and let it go. Then earlier that day I got a cryptic email. I figured that was enough with the electronic communication and stopped by as soon as I could, only to find her entertaining.

I saw a petite brunette with dark, cropped hair and too much eyeliner walk into the small lobby. Kinney followed her down the stairs in a long, thin wrap. The couple said goodbye and the brunette walked down the sidewalk without noticing me.

Kinney stood in the doorway, holding it open. The bright light from the entryway cast her entirely in silhouette. But I could tell she was looking right at me.

“You may as well come in,” she called.

I walked across the street.

“I saw you had company. I didn’t want to bother you.”

She held the door open for me without ceremony. “You could’ve just left.”

“I just wanted to talk,” I said.

“Uh huh.” She started up the stairs.

I followed. “She’s cute.”

“She’s bi.”

“Seriously?”

“I think she prefers men,” she said from the top.

“Then why are you seeing her?” I immediately regretted asking. It was none of my business.

“That’s none of your business,” she said, holding her front door open.

Her place was exactly the same, minus a new framed print hanging between the two front windows. I didn’t recognize the artist, but it was colorful, like the rest of the place.

I took off my coat as she shut the door.

“You know where it goes,” she said, walking past me to the kitchen.

There was soft music playing, which she stopped.

“Your brother called me the other day.”

“Freddie?”

I pulled a hanger from the closet, which was stuffed with jackets and heavy coats of every color, including one of mine, which was wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic and hanging all the way against the wall on the right.

“I thought his name was Martin,” she called.

“That’s his middle name.”

I shut the closet and hung my wet coat from the door knob.

She waited for a moment. “You’re not gonna ask me why he called?”

“I know why he called.”

I sat on a stool at the bar that separated the kitchen from the living area. She opened a bottle of champagne. The cork popped.

“Always the detective.”

She never liked that about me.

Well, that wasn’t true. She thought it was sexy at first. What she didn’t like is that I couldn’t turn it off.

There were a lot of things I couldn’t turn off, like how I felt about her.

“You look good, Kinn.”

She did. Her hair had the same permanent frizz that parted oddly and always hung in front of her eyes. She had a narrow jaw and barely any chin, which framed her face exactly how her perfectly round glasses framed her eyes. She wore her long fashionable wrap over snug but casual clothes.

“Don’t.” She held up a finger. “You’re only in here because your brother said you were in trouble and you needed help.” She poured the rest of a bottle of red wine into her glass.

That explained the email.

“I’m not sure I believed it actually,” she admitted with a hint of regret. “Not until I saw you in the shadows. Like a stalker.”

“Sorry . . . I know I shouldn’t even be bothering you with this. I’m probably the last person you want to see.”

She looked at me blankly. “I’m not going to respond to that.”

I looked down at the counter.

Wow, that didn’t take long.

“Sorry.” I looked up again.

“That’s two sorries.” She handed me the bottle of champagne and stood by the counter at a formal distance.

“Okay, how about this? Thanks for letting me in. It’s really good to see you. And I don’t mean anything by that,” I added quickly. “It’s just, it’s nice to see a friendly face.”

“So what happened?”

“Suspended.”

She squinted in confusion.

“Technically, it’s temporary. But odds are it’ll be permanent before too long.”

She stepped closer. She paused, like she was worried about transgressing a boundary. Then she hugged me.

I hugged back.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She sat on the stool next to mine. “You’re job is everything to you.” She said it like she spoke from personal experience. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do.”

She pulled back and I rested my hand on the neck of the champagne bottle. I ran my thumb over the gold foil.

“I don’t suppose you’d be up for a few drinks where we talk about absolutely anything else?”

She reached over the counter for her glass and held it up. I touched the bottle to it with a clink and toasted her health.

“You do look very nice, by the way,” I said. “I’m not just saying that.”

She scrunched her nose. “You really think so?”

I took a swig. “For a middle aged dyke, totally.”

She smiled mid-sip. “Bitch,” she breathed into her glass.

And just like that, her eyes were warm again.

I could see myself flirting, almost as if watching through a two-way mirror. I knew I shouldn’t. But it felt like I was observer more than participant. It was always like that with Kinney. We had connected below the level of the brain, somewhere between the heart and the loins, and I never felt in control of myself around her. I never felt safe, like being with her was circling the edge of a hole, and if I fell in, I’d never get out.

Thing is, part of me really wanted to fall.

She finished her glass and opened another bottle. We moved to the couch and talked long enough to finish both. It wasn’t long before my lips here on hers. We hung like that for too long, waiting to see what the other would do.

I felt her breasts. She kissed me more. I slipped my hand between her thighs. We pulled each other’s clothes off and rubbed our bodies together and moved to the bed. I took my time. We hadn’t had breakup sex, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get the chance again. I made it count.

I woke up a few hours later when a car honked on the street outside. I pulled my slacks over my bare ass. I had no idea where I’d left my panties. I got my coat from the hanger and pulled it over my shirtless skin and sat on the balcony watching the rain, which had started falling in earnest sometime while I was asleep. I really wanted a cigar. But Kinney didn’t smoke and didn’t like me to. Just one more thing we’d argued about. So I sat with my back pressed to the brick while the splatter from the bouncing drops slowly drenched my cold feet and the cuffs of my slacks. As I stared at the ripples on the concrete, a pattern started to emerge, as if the balcony floor were vibrating to some imperceptible sound that could be revealed only by falling water. And it shifted, too, like a kaleidoscope. But there was a definite center, almost like a tunnel or gateway around which tribal bands turned.

I shut my eyes.

I could never say for sure that I’d been cursed. I could never say for sure that if I hadn’t been, the forensics guys would’ve found something else entirely on that VHS tape—something, say, related to the disappearance of Alexa Sacchi, as everyone had expected. I could never say that the outcome of my committee hearing would have been any different.

But that’s how it works.

Sitting there on that balcony with cold, wet feet, trying not to look at the kaleidoscopic pattern in the puddle, I realized how Kent Cormack must have felt in the days before the shooting, when he was feeling the heat. Hammond had said he needed more guys that night. He was right, and we both knew why. We’d all heard the same rumors: that Cormack had been covering up for the Salvadorans, that he knew he was approaching indictment and had orchestrated the raid on his accomplices as a means of casting doubt on himself, and that he had intended to get shot—albeit not in the head—to create a plausible defense. If he was guilty of collusion, his lawyers would argue, why would he have undertaken a dangerous raid to bring the murderers he was supposedly abetting to justice, thereby getting shot in the process? It wouldn’t have convinced anyone on the force. But then, it didn’t have to. It only had to convince a jury.

The problem was always time. When heat comes, as it had now for me, you have to move fast. For his plan to work, Cormack needed the gang to sacrifice a few small fish so the bigger ones could get away. I’m sure he agreed to keep quiet in return. I also wouldn’t have been surprised if the gang also agreed to plant evidence around the house, supplied by Cormack, that cast suspicion on a different officer—maybe even someone like me. Anything to create a reasonable doubt.

But then, I’m sure neither Cormack nor his accomplices intended to stick to the bargain. I expect they had both tried to double-cross the other. Cormack was shot all right, but with the intent to kill. He wore a vest that saved his life. The only reason no one had yet gone back to finish the job was because he’d been under guard in the hospital and IA was still watching his house. I suspect the danger of a reprisal by the gang, more than finances, was the motivation to get his family out of town in a hurry.

I just hoped they’d leave his daughter alone. Brooke. I gave her my card. All I could do was hope she’d call if something happened. She’d given me an absolutely vital piece of information about her dad. There was no doubt in my mind that he, or perhaps his wife, had sent the VHS tape. A little revenge on the woman they blamed for the accident. I don’t think they expected it would have the effect it did. I think it was just an attempt to cause me some discomfort, digging up the ghosts of my past. Every officer has them. Cormack would’ve known that. And he had plenty of time on his hands to pursue a vendetta.

But now I had a wizard on my ass—or sorcerer, I guess. And a powerful one at that. I didn’t know how much time I had, but it wasn’t more than weeks, and probably just days.

Days.

I heard her voice behind me.

“You okay?”

I opened my eyes and looked down at the puddle of ripples, but the pattern was gone.

I turned to face her. “Yeah. I’m good. I didn’t want to wake you.”

She leaned against the metal door frame. She rested her head against it and studied me for a long, cool moment.

“You can’t stay, can you?” she said, more to herself than to me.

“I can stay,” I countered.

“I don’t mean until morning.” She smiled bittersweetly. “And I don’t mean with me.”

I squinted. “I don’t understand.”

“This is how you get. When you’re on a hunt.”

“A hunt?”

She nodded. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me. Or anyone. It’s just how you are. When it’s all over, you come back and you’re here. Mentally. Emotionally. For awhile. But sooner or later, you pick up another scent and off you go. I thought it was me for the longest time. That you just didn’t like me enough to stay. But that’s not it. It’s just how you are.”

I looked at the rain.

What do people do?

Just let shit go, I guess. Go home to their families. Do what they can during business hours and let the world sort itself out.

Kinney saw my face. She smiled with pressed lips and went back to bed.

She wasn’t angry, I knew. She was disappointed. She was remembering how things were and realizing that she wouldn’t wake up tomorrow and find them any different, even though she wanted to.

We can afford those fantasies when we’re young. Kinn and I weren’t young anymore.

I went inside and dropped my coat on the floor and laid down next to her under the covers. She shivered and recoiled.

“Jesus, your feet are like ice. Aren’t you cold?”

She was warm and I rubbed her hair and held on. She didn’t say anything. She wanted to ask what was on my mind, but she also didn’t. It was our last night together and we both knew it.

“I was thinking about this time when I was a patrolman,” I said.

She was facing away from me, but I could see the corner of her mouth turn up into a smile.

“What?” I asked.

She turned and propped her head up on the pillow with her hand. “You always use the masculine with me.”

“Really?” I laid back and looked up at the ceiling. I almost said sorry.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“I stopped this guy in a blue Chevelle with a pair of white racing stripes. Nice car. Must have spent a lot of time on it. Bout the same age as me at the time. Mid-20s maybe. He was driving a little erratically and I flagged him down. Had another guy with him and a girl in the back. Makeup. Real thin. Big hair.

“I approached the vehicle cautiously, like I’d been trained. I ran his license and insurance. I ran his tag. Everything checked out. He didn’t appear any more stiff than most folks when they get pulled over. He answered my questions straight up. Even called me ma’am. I let him and his friends go with a warning. I got the impression they were having fun. Goofing off a little too much, maybe. I’d done my bit for highway safety. Big fuckin’ deal.

“I go to walk back to my squad car and I heard the Chevelle’s engine start and I lifted my head to the little back window because I got the sense the girl was looking at me, watching me leave, and so I was just gonna nod, but I remember thinking how the guys always said I looked like such a bitch all the time. So I made it a point to smile. Like, ‘Have a nice day,’ you know?

“The car pulled away as she smiled back. It’s automatic, right? Whether you mean to or not, someone smiles at you and unless you’re just right pissed off, you smile out of habit or just to be polite or whatever. I got to my car and I sat down and strapped in and reported the stop to central and started filling out the last of the paperwork and I saw that smile in my head.

“‘Pretty girl,’ I thought. Teeth a little uneven. But then not everyone can afford braces.

“Then I realized, they weren’t just a little uneven. She was missing a tooth. And I don’t mean it got knocked out whatever.” I flashed mine.

She reached out and touched it.

“I think it was a baby tooth. She had a lot of make-up. And I guess maybe I didn’t look that hard. You know me. Some girls really care about that shit, but I was too busy watching the two guys in the front. I’d been told over and over at the academy that you can never be sure on a stop like that when someone is gonna pull a gun or whatever. One second it’s just another routine—one out of so many you couldn’t even keep track. Two seconds later, you’re bleeding on the ground. And the girl was all the way in the back. Skinny thing. ‘Not a threat.’ That’s all I remember thinking. ‘Not a threat.’

“But afterward, I’m sitting in my patrol car wondering how old she was. And I’m picturing her face and that reflexive flash of a smile. Like a kid. And I’m thinking she can’t be older than twelve.

“Now, she coulda been the guy’s sister. Or niece. Or cousin. Or the babysitter. Or whatever. I don’t know. But I shoulda asked. I shoulda looked at his reaction. I shoulda glanced at the friend. If I wasn’t sure about their response, I shoulda politely asked a couple follow-ups while I pretended to write the ticket. Coulda shoulda woulda, right?

“It’s shit like that that teaches you how to be a cop. A real one. That’s the day I learned that if you can’t worry more about the girl in the car than yourself, then you shouldn’t be on the job.

“Anyway, years go by. I made detective. I never thought about that day again. So many worse things had happened, I had no reason. Until I ran into him. The driver. At the courthouse. In the hall. As I’m walking out of a routine probation hearing, there he is. He was a little older. And thinner, actually. But it was him. No question. Turns out he’d had a hard stretch at Attica. Prison is hard on pedos. It’s probably the only time the sheer brutality of the place finds a positive outlet.

“And here he was getting out. Served a year. He claimed he never touched the girl—a different one. Not the one in the Chevelle. He claimed it was all the friend. And the D.A. couldn’t prove otherwise. Not from the physical evidence. Not from the girl’s statement. Not from her parents or anyone else. The friend got fifteen long. This dude got three years for felony child endangerment and was out after fourteen months.

“And in those fourteen months, he was raped. Repeatedly.”

Her lips pursed.

“Fuck . . .” I ran my hands through my hair. “I don’t know if he deserved that. I don’t know if anyone deserves that. All I know is, I shouldn’t have been so worried that day.” I looked at her. “I shouldn’t have been afraid.”

I sat up. Our fingers touched gently. The tip of mine traced the tip of hers.

“Is that what’s bothering you?” she asked. “Regret?”

I shook my head. “I thought somebody had asked for my help. Somebody like that. Somebody who couldn’t look out for herself. Someone I couldn’t help before. Someone I thought was dead.” I looked out the window. The lights of the city were blurred by the drops on the glass. “Turns out it was just some guy trying to fuck with me.”

“But?” she asked after a moment.

“But I have this terrible feeling. I have this terrible, terrible feeling like she really is out there somewhere. And she’s in trouble.”

 

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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It wasn’t enough

25Oct

I dodged calls from Hammond, and from my brother Fred. I can only imagine the one called the other. I went to Sully’s, my favorite dive bar, the kind of place that didn’t care if you broke the city’s no-smoking ordnance, and sat in a booth at the back with a cigar. It was the middle of the afternoon so the place was nearly empty. Not that you could tell the time of day. Sully’s was old school. No windows. A holdover from the days when you didn’t want your churchgoing neighbors to know you were backsliding. It was just as dim in the afternoon as it was at night. A permanent smoky dusk.

I lit my cigar slowly and sipped Ouzo, with a grimace, from a tiny glass. I don’t like Ouzo, which was my way of limiting how much I drank. I lifted my box of tricks from the floor and opened it. I took out the round ampules of holy water, tied together on the same length of cord like a string of grenades, and set it on one side of the table. I took out the giant salamander claw, dried and crisp, and dangled it in front of me on the string tied to one end. I set it by the ampules. I took out the Coptic cross and the shiny bezoars and the tarnished silver coins and the rest of it. Soon, it was empty.

I looked at it all. I moved the wax voodoo doll I’d confiscated from a homeless man in Midtown to one side. I put the broken wand next to it—one half, tapered at the tip, opposite end splintered and frayed like a cut rope. Then I removed the talisman from around my neck and set it between.

That was it. That was all I had. The rest of it was either a fraud, a mystery, or nothing with a chance of helping in a battle against a wizard.

I took another drag from my cigar.

It wasn’t enough.

I put the rest of it back in the box and closed it. I put the talisman back around my neck and slipped the wand into the left pocket of my jacket and the wax figure in the right. I finished my Ouzo in one gulp, coughed once, and dropped the cigar into the glass. I left a twenty on the table—surcharge for the municipal violation—and waved to Sully and walked out, box under my arm.

Ever notice how there are some places that just can’t seem to support a business? Places where one restaurant after another opens and then goes out of business? No matter what the owners try, nothing seems to work. That’s what a curse looks like. It’s what happens if you’re not paid up to your local witch. Or at least, that’s what I learned from the story of John Blymire of York County, Pennsylvania. Blymire suffered years of unexplained illness and repeated turns of bad luck. Eventually, his health and finances deteriorated to the point that his future looked both short and grim. Racked with a debilitating cough and unable to find work, he slipped deeper and deeper into a depression, often not leaving his rural farmhouse for days. He lost weight. He didn’t shave or cut his hair, which made him quite the spectacle. But it wasn’t until an old lover paid a visit and mentioned curses that John seriously considered the possibility.

York County is old Dutch country. To this day, barns and farmhouses there bear stars and circles on their flanks—hex signs to ward off black magic and foul spirits. Way back when, everybody knew there were witches in the dells. None of the surviving accounts detail what he paid for her services, but we know Blymire paid a visit to one—Nellie Noll, known locally as the River Witch of Marietta. John left his house at sundown and made his way up the dirt wash to the dry embankment where Nellie lived, in a shady grove under the roots of a willow tree. He knocked on the wood three and three and three times and turned once in a circle, and a door opened.

After tasting a bit of his blood, which she spat in disgust, Nellie Noll told the bearded, wild-haired, cough-ridden Blymire that he was indeed cursed. She casted tiny bird bones from a wooden cup like dice and said the culprit was none other than his rural neighbor, Nelson Rehmeyer, with whom John had had repeated conflict. The pair had argued about everything, it seemed—politics and religion and the best way to bring in the harvest and water rights and the proper border of their land, but mostly about the old lover who’d since become Nelson’s betrothed. Nellie explained that Rehmeyer had acquired a copy of an old German spell book, “The Long Hidden Friend,” and he was using it to hex Blymire, whom she said was dying as if by slow poison.

The solution, she counseled, was simple. Blymire merely had to find the book, the source of his neighbor’s spells, and bury it in secret, preferably at midnight, with a lock of the man’s hair closed inside.

Blymire wasted no time. After cutting his hair and beard, he went to town and recruited the help of a young friend, Wilbert Hess, aged 18, and within days, the pair visited Nelson Rehmeyer in his home and attempted to procure the book by argument and coercion. When Rehmeyer turned them away with a shotgun, the pair recruited another accomplice, the sickly John Curry, aged 14, who was also believed to have been cursed, and on the night of November 28th, the three men broke into Rehmeyer’s home just before midnight, tied the man to a chair, and searched from basement to attic.

They were unable to find the book. Rehmeyer, it seemed, had taken the wise precaution of hiding it, and hiding it well. He admitted as much to his assailants after bragging that Blymire’s predicament was due payment for years of insult. Enraged, Blymire struck the man and demanded to know the location of “The Long Hidden Friend.” When Rehmeyer refused, Blymire hit him again. And again. And again. And kept hitting, releasing years of anger and frustration. Lost crops. Failed ventures. Cold nights and dinners of stale bread.

Eventually, at 12:01—when the clock on the mantle stopped—Nelson Rehmeyer died suddenly as a result of his injuries. Fearing there would now be no way to lift the curse, Blymire frantically doused the body with kerosene from a lamp on the mantle and then lit it in the hope that burning the man and his house would take the book with it—or at the very least hide the evidence of the crime.

It did not. For as soon as the flames took and the three men fled, the fire mysteriously went out just as fast as it had started, leaving a beaten, partially charred corpse and the entire wooden house completely intact, where it still stands today. The body was found, and after a brief investigation by the sheriff, the three accomplices, who’d made little secret of their schemes, were arrested and charged. The curse, it seemed, had worked its awful magic and John Blymire was convicted of murder and died in prison.

All of this, by the way, took place in 1928, the same year Albert Fish murdered and ate ten-year-old Grace Budd in nearby New York City. It was also the year a Civil War-era prison in Brooklyn was bought and converted into a slaughterhouse. The company managed to survive the Great Depression but not the rise of the supermarket. It went out out business in the late 60s, and the lot was abandoned, becoming just another bit of urban rot that spread through the city in the stagflation of the 1970s.

It wasn’t until booming property values triggered a wave of urban renewal that the space was bought again and converted—first, into upscale shopping, and then into a restaurant, which closed a few years later when the owner died suddenly, aged 46. The unit was then purchased by one Etude Étranger. The chef converted the upper floors to a workshop and opened his bistro on the ground floor, where it remains.

After 9/11, the structural plans for various historic landmarks around the city were removed from public view, accessible only by permit. The idea was to make it difficult for any would-be terrorists to pack one of the city’s many abandoned underground spaces with explosives, Guy Fawkes-style. But those plans are available to police officers, provided they have justification—such as a warrant application to search just such a landmark as part of a murder investigation.

The original building had a well for sewage, a well that had to be bypassed when the modern sewer system was built. There’s grate access in the tunnels below the street. Beyond that, there’s a short brick passage and a door—a metal door studded in bolt heads, like something left from the original prison. It’s sealed of course. There’s not even a handle on the outside. But Granny Tuesday gave me instructions: say the magic word.

 

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]

What kind of monsters?

24Oct

My dress shoes click-clacked on the courthouse floor as I walked to the stairs and up to the third floor. I exited the open stairwell and fought the urge to wipe the lipstick off my face with the back of my hand.

I turned a corner and stopped in the middle of the hall. Sitting alone on a bench across from Conference 5C was none other Granny Tuesday, as if she were a witness for the prosecution. She was sitting by herself—scrawny legs, arthritic hands in her lap. She didn’t notice me, or if she did, she didn’t show it. She was too busy looking doe-eyed and innocent at a uniformed officer, an African-American woman who cooed over her like she was a child.

“Oh, yes, dearie,” Granny said. “I’m fine. I’m just resting these old legs before heading home.”

The officer smiled warmly and leaned to grasp Granny’s hand in friendly parting. I passed her in the hall and sat on the other side of Granny’s bench.

“A warrant,” Granny cackled quietly to herself.

“You say something?”

“A warrant,” she jeered me, louder. “You been walkin’ between worlds so long, I think you’re all kinds a’ turned around. You’re lucky you was only thrown out. Next time you’re liable to have an accident on the way over and wind up in a coma.”

“Like all those people who live with you at the John D?”

She looked me up and down. Her eyes lingered on the lipstick. “What you all dressed up fer? Looks like you came from a funeral.”

“Not from,” I said. “You don’t know?”

She shook her head.

“Then how’d you know I’d be here?”

“Oh, a little birdie told me. You paid me such a nice visit the other day, I thought I’d return the favor, see if you’d found John Blymire yet.”

“That’s very sweet of you, Granny, but I’m a little busy.” I looked at my watch. Ten minutes to 1:00.

“I et him,” she said.

I paused.

“Your little bird. I roasted him on a spit and et him up.”

As a pair of officers passed consoling a grieving family. I didn’t recognize anyone. Down the hall, court was just getting out. Lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, and all their hangers-on walked out in a bustle and headed for the stairs. One side was very unhappy. I couldn’t tell which.

“That was a nice trick with the totem,” she added, her voice near a whisper.

“You didn’t think I’d actually give you back something that powerful, did you?”

“The thought crossed my mind, both ways. But don’t you worry. I’m gonna get you back fer it. Today, in fact.”

“Eating my friend wasn’t enough?”

“You have no idea,” she said, smiling at me.

“You gonna fight me, Granny? Right here in the courthouse?”

“Not at all. In fact, I’m gonna give you exactly what you want.”

“And what’s that?”

“The truth.”

“That what the oracles told you to do?”

She nodded.

“You always do what the oracles say?”

“Yup. Lucky for you, too. I told you before there was a fella come to see me. Lotsa letters after his name. You find him?”

I shook my head. “Seems the good doctor’s gone missing. Left his wife and kid earlier this year. After his mother died.”

“So why aren’t folks out looking for him? If he disappeared?”

“Seems he was acting strange,” I said. “Quit his job. Told everyone he was leaving. I gathered things had been tough with the wife. And he didn’t have any other family. Brother died young. Father died in prison.”

“So a man completely disappears and no one says a word. Why do you think that is?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. “Tell me. What would you do if you had a terrible secret to keep and someone in your organization got too close to the truth?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean would it make more sense to kill them? Or discredit them instead? Make it look like they were crazy.

“I heard tell of a Chinese girl,” she said, “this past summer. An artifact came to her. An artifact he wanted. But it weren’t something he could just take. No, sir. Not without consequences. It had to be given to him. Freely. Which that young girl did. Ran to him, in fact, as if he was the safest man on the planet, and handed what he wanted right over to her like it was her own idea to do it. But that weren’t the end. Then she turned right around and let him stab her in the heart with it.”

“What?” I turned.

Granny nodded. “It’s true. Consult the spirits if you don’t believe me. Although something tells me you may not know the right ones, seeing as how you’re talking to birds.”

“Why would anyone let someone else stab them in the heart?”

“Why would a man quit his job, leave his wife and child, and then just disappear? Why are you sittin’ here about to have your life turned upside down for no good reason?” Granny waggled her hand in front of the door across the hall. “Just days after you showed up at the Lord of Shadows’ door, warrant in hand. You think all that’s a coincidence?”

“This conference was scheduled over a week ago,” I objected.

“So it was,” she said flatly. “So it was.”

There was a noise and Granny looked across the hall at the door to Conference Room 5C, which opened. A well-dressed Lt. Shawna Miller greeted me with a nod of her head.

“They’re ready for you,” she said.

I stood and stepped toward the door, which the lieutenant held open.

“There’s another way in,” Granny said. “If you know the magic word.”

Miller looked confusedly at the old woman. Then to me as the door shut. “Friend of yours?”

“Just some crazy old bitty,” I said.

I looked around the room. There were five in all, counting Miller. I didn’t recognize all of the others. Most were standing and talking, as if they’d just broke for a short recess.

I was directed to sit at a table facing the committee members. Lt. Miller retrieved her files from one of the other tables and sat down next to me, presumably for support. I got the sense she didn’t have to do that. I’m not sure if it was a good sign or not.

Captain Morrison checked his watch before calling everyone to order. “We should probably get started.”

Caleb Morrison was a black man in his late 60s and the only one in formal uniform. He adjusted the pair of bifocals that hung from the end of his nose and poked at the stack of papers in front of him. In the far corner behind me was a TV on a rolling stand. I wouldn’t have noticed it except for the fact that it was attached to a VCR. How often do you see those anymore?

I crossed my hands neatly on the table and waited for them to come to order.

The door opened behind me. I turned to see Dr. More returning with a cup of vending machine coffee. He was wearing his wire-frame glasses. He didn’t look at me. He took the last open spot and stirred his coffee with the plastic straw bobbing in it.

“For the record,” Capt. Morrison began, speaking to me, “Dr. Caldwell has been filling in for Dr. More, who is on sabbatical. Indonesia, is it?”

“I believe so,” the doc said with a nod.

I stared.

I looked around the room. I looked to Lt. Miller.

“What is it?” she whispered.

I looked at the doc again. He was reading a report from his stack of files and sipping the coffee. He was definitely the man I knew as Dr. More. I’d been seeing him every other week for months. But everyone around the table seemed completely convinced that the captain was right and the man’s name was Caldwell.

For a moment I thought Shawna was in on it—whatever it was—but then I remembered she had never actually met the man. She’d only read his reports. She’d have no idea.

I looked to her again. Was I supposed to object? Was I supposed to stand up and proclaim like a crazy person this this was all wrong, that the person before me was not someone named Caldwell but in fact the errant Dr. More?

If so, he didn’t seem to expect it. He wasn’t even looking at me. For the moment, no one was.

“Harriet?” Lt. Miller whispered.

“Detective Chase,” Capt. Morrison addressed me formally, “I see you elected not to bring counsel. Is that correct?”

I was still staring at Dr. Caldwell—or whoever he was.

“Yes, sir.”

Caldwell looked up then. His eyes were blank, devoid of recognition. But there was something menacing about them all the same.

The captain went on. “In that case, do you have any opening remarks before the committee discusses its findings with you?”

“No, sir.”

Morrison nodded to one of the people I didn’t know, a bureaucrat-librarian type in a well-ironed skirt and two-inch pumps. She was sitting on the end near the TV. She got up and rolled it to the center of the room. Not everyone could see, but I could.

Lt. Miller explained. “Harriet, Forensics was able to reconstitute the crumpled tape that was mailed to you.”

I sat up. I pulled my hands from the table and put them in my lap.

“They were also able to get a match on the pinprick blood splatter.”

“Is it Alexa’s?” I asked.

“No.” She seemed hesitant to say. “It’s yours.”

“Mine?” I asked, wide-eyed.

I looked to Dr. More—or Caldwell or whoever he was. He was judging my reaction, same as everyone else in the room.

“Are we sure? How would my blood get on a VHS tape?”

Capt. Morrison nodded again, and the librarian hit play.

The screen jumped with repeated bouts of lined static like you get from magnetic tapes. Then an image appeared—an off-white hospital room. There was a male doctor in a tie and several nurses, both male and female, in scrubs. Sitting on a chair in the middle of all of them, wearing nothing but a flower-print hospital gown, was me. Only I was young. Thirteen or so from the looks of it. My sandy hair was a longer than I remembered wearing it. It hung just past my jaw. It was wavier then.

“What is this?” I asked.

But I knew what it was. Footage from the year I spent in the care of the white coats.

“Are you still having the visions?” the doctor on the tape asked calmly. He looked Filipino.

I nodded. My bare toes squirmed on the floor and climbed over each other.

“What do you see?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“The wolf with three eyes?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

God, I sounded so young!

“What else?” he asked.

“Just stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Monsters.”

“What kind of monsters? What do they look like?”

“Big.”

“How big? Like a bear?”

I shook my head.

“Bigger?” he asked. “Like a truck?”

I shook my head again.

“Big like a dinosaur?”

“Bigger,” I said.

“Bigger than a dinosaur?”

“Bigger than mountains,” I said softly.

“And what do these monsters do?”

“Eat people,” I said, eyes on the floor. “Chew them up. And make them do bad things.”

“And how many monsters are there?”

I glanced up at him. “Six.”

“Six monsters,” he repeated. “Bigger than mountains.”

I nodded.

“And what about the wolf? What does he do?”

“She wants me to follow.”

“Follow? Follow where?”

I shrugged. “Far away.”

“To escape the monsters?”

“No.” I shook my head vigorously and looked up again. “To fight them.” My child-self held his gaze this time.

“The wolf wants you to go fight the monsters?”

I nodded.

“And how will you do that if they’re bigger than mountains?”

I shrugged and looked down again, apparently disappointed by the response.

“I have to learn.”

“And that’s where the wolf wants to take you? To learn?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

“Harriet . . .” He paused. “Do you think the monsters are real?”

I looked up again, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think they’re real? The way I’m real and you’re real and nurse Bethan is real?”

I stared at him with such an odd look. Anger. Doubt. Fear. Resentment. All in a jumble.

“No,” I said.

“Is that the truth?”

I didn’t answer.

He unfolded a paper. There was some writing in pencil, but it was messy and I couldn’t tell what it was. I had no recollection of it. I had no recollection of any of it.

“What about this?” he asked.

“That’s mine,” I stood from my chair.

So did two of the nurses.

“You can’t just go into my room!” I yelled. “That’s not fair. That’s mine. You can’t just take my things.”

“Why was it hidden in a book?” he asked calmly.

I was still on my feet. I took a step forward and the nurses seemed to brace themselves.

“You can’t do that,” I said. “You can’t just take my things. That’s not right!”

“Harriet, calm down.”

“No!” I took another step. My fists clenched. “It’s not right. It’s not. You can’t just steal things all the time. I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth.”

“I believe you’re—”

“No! You think I made it all up. But I didn’t. It’s real. The wolf is real. The monsters are real. They’re coming!” I was getting louder. And my face was turning red. “They’re coming. We have to stop them. You can’t keep me here. It’s not right.”

I was clenching my fists so hard that my fingernails, which were trimmed, cut into the skin of my hand. I looked down at my hands. Not on the video. I looked down at my adult hands. There were a couple tiny slit scars on the palms. I had no recollection of how I got them.

“It’s not right! Let me go.” My younger self started toward the doctor, fists raised, and the nurses came and grabbed me. There was an awkward struggle. To their credit, they were trying not to hurt me, but I wasn’t making it easy. I kicked and flailed and yelled “Let me go!” over and over.

Almost instantly, I started convulsing.

“Seizure!” one of the male nurses yelled. He ran to a medicine cart off to the side.

My fists clenched on and off as the nurses lifted my head and tried to lay me straight on the ground. My hand went up and scratched the face of one of the women. She let go and turned away. I had drawn blood. Three tiny cuts near the corner of her right eye.

My entire body was locked in spasms. My eyes rolled back into my head.

Then I started screaming gibberish. Not like baby sounds. It sounded organized, like words, but in no language I recognized.

The needle hit and I shut down instantly, like they’d flipped the switch on my brain.

“What did you do?” the doctor yelled at the nurse. He ran over to me in a panic. “What did you do? Jesus, how much did you—”

The tape stopped in another burst of static.

And that was it.

Captain Morrison cleared his throat. “Detective Chase, you should know that after reviewing this tape, which Lt. Miller tells us was mailed anonymously, it’s Dr. Caldwell’s opinion that you may have been given an obscenely high dose of anti-psychotic medicine as a child, and that that may explain a number of aspects of your mental health history. We’ll be handing this over to the Department of Health, who have the appropriate resources to conduct an investigation and bring any charges, should you wish them to do so. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“However, the question before us today is, what impact does this have on your ability to enforce the law? Unfortunately . . .” He took off his glasses. “The reality is not very good. The District Attorney’s office should have no difficulty securing convictions on your arrests where there’s ample physical evidence, but as you well know, Detective, police officers are often called to give testimony at trial, and that puts us in a pickle. When this gets around—and it will get around—any defense counsel worth his salt will have no trouble . . . Well, I think you know where I’m going. If these episodes had stayed in your past, we’d be having a different conversation today. But they haven’t. It seems they’ve returned, quite seriously, in fact.”

That’s why they yanked the search warrant. It wasn’t that the search was invalid. It was that I was. The department wanted to leave itself the option of executing the warrant with “competent” staff un tainted staff, at some point in the future.

Not that it would ever come to that.

“So,” Morrison went on, “it is my duty to inform you that it is the decision of this committee to place you on immediate suspension of duty pending a full review by the promotions board. I must emphasize that this is not a permanent decision, and that you will be given full opportunity to defend yourself at formal proceedings.”

He sighed. He seemed genuinely saddened.

“I realize this is something no officer wants to hear. And I take no pleasure in saying it. However, I must ask you to surrender your badge before leaving these chambers today.”

 

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]

The wolf with three eyes

22Oct

“I said, he’s not here,” the nurse stressed.

I motioned back to the narrow waiting room, whose handful of occupants were watching me out of the corners of their eyes like school kids afraid to be called on in class. “So none of these patients are his?”

“Dr. Caldwell has taken Dr. More’s patients while he’s on sabbatical.”

She was around 60 and work no makeup. Her hair was parted in the middle and fell below her ears in curves. There were three thin, parallel scars on the side of her face near her right eye.

“Funny, he never mentioned a sabbatical. That kind of thing takes some planning, doesn’t it? Seems to me a professional psychologist might let his patients know if he were planning an extended absence.”

“All his patients were made aware. Perhaps he told you and you didn’t listen.” The implication was that I still wasn’t.

“I’m sure I would’ve remembered,” I said.

“Then you’ll have to take that up with Dr. More when he gets back.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Your questions have been patiently answered, Detective. This is harassment.” She picked up the receiver to the phone like she was going to dial 911 or something. “Please leave.”

“If he’s not here, then you won’t mind me looking in his office.” I started around the desk.

She replaced the phone quickly and stepped in front of me. “This is private property. You can’t just walk in.” She pointed to one of the younger assistant nurses, who was staring at the confrontation in disbelief. “Kay, please dial the police and tell them we’re being harassed.”

The young woman picked up the phone but hesitated.

“You keep using that word,” I said to my adversary. “Is it supposed to scare me? What’s wrong with a quick peek? If you have nothing to hide, I mean.”

She crossed her arms and planted herself.

I turned to the younger colleague. “Well? What are you waiting for? Call.”

The elder nurse sighed and turned for the door to Dr. More’s office. It was already shut. She pulled a mass of keys from the waist of her scrubs and locked it. I caught the sign on the next door down. It said DR. ALAN CALDWELL, same last name as the couple who moved into More’s house, according to the neighbor.

I walked forward and opened it over the nurse’s objection.

The interior was more or less the same as More’s: a nice glass-topped desk, some chairs, fancy framed degrees with giant matte borders, a sofa to one side, a credenza at the back. There were tribal masks on the wall, and when I turned my head to look, I caught a glimpse of a wasp. It crawled through the eye of a faded Balinese mask and disappeared.

The nurse moved me back and shut the door. She shouted something. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw her lips move. I saw her brow crease in anger. And then I saw her breath.

“Shit.”

I looked around the waiting room at the shocked faces, staring at me in confusion and fear. I looked at the pair of uniformed security guards who walked. as if in slow motion, through the office door. I couldn’t hear any of them. The whole room was silent. But their breath puffed from their mouths like they were standing in the dead of winter. I could see it billow from their nostrils like steam.

I started shivering. I could see my own breath, too.

“No . . .”

I could feel it coming. I could feel it out there. Waiting.

The dire hunter.

I pulled free of the first guard’s grasp and stormed through the door, room still shrouded in silence. I skipped the elevator and went right to the stairs. I made it two flights before I was shivering so bad that I couldn’t walk. It was like I’d been sleeping in snow. I was chilled to the core. I fell back against the block wall and slid down until I was sitting with my back to the corner of the stairwell landing, shaking. Teeth chattering. I couldn’t hear it, but I could feel them rattling against each other.

I stared ahead at a tree line. White-barked birch trees with bands of black stood in an irregular row, marking the boundary of the forest. The interior was dark. It was nighttime. The only light was the moon reflected on the snow. I was squatting in a clearing, staring at the silent forest. Everything was still. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. I squinted into the darkness, between the branches. It was in there. I knew it. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew it was in there, looking back at me. The wolf with three eyes. I knew it had been stalking me through the still forest. I couldn’t see it. But I knew. I caught glimpses of its footprints in the snow from where it had walked out of the clearing and into the forest, which was still lush, despite being under a blanket. Here it was seemingly the dead of winter, yet none of the leaves on the trees have fallen. In fact, they were still green as spring. The branches were topped in puffy white, but the leaves were full. It was quite a sight—incongruous and beautiful. I think it meant it’s not too late.

But not too late for what?

 

 

 

 

23Oct

When you have a potentially dangerous suspect, there’s always a bit of a judgment call on whether it’s better to talk to them first or go right for a warrant. As far as I knew, this guy Étranger had no idea who I was or what we were after. It was probably our only advantage. Once we questioned him, we’d be giving that up.

The problem is, most judges, and therefore most DAs, want to see good evidence that a warrant is—well, warranted. It’s embarrassing for everyone, and a waste of a lot of time and money, to charge into somebody’s house or business only to find they had a verifiable alibi the whole time. But here the question of an alibi was moot. No statement by the suspect could contradict the photographic evidence, which linked him to two missing persons on the very dates of their disappearance. Any reasonable person would call that grounds for suspicion.

It would have been a slam dunk if not for the fact that the chef’s face was obscured in all of the security footage. Hammond and I knew a judge would want to see positive evidence—maybe not definitive proof, but certainly probable cause—that the man on both tapes was not only the same man but also our guy.

Enter forensics. It’s a fascinating discipline. People really specialize. There are guys who know all about carpets, for example. They can look at some fibers under a microscope and tell you not only how old they are, but who the manufacturer was and at what retail outlets they were sold. You might think a fiber is a fiber is a fiber, or that all of them are round like a hair, but it’s not so. Some have a diamond-shaped cross-section, others a cross. And even the simple round ones have larger and smaller diameters. Some carpets use all one type, others weave a specific ratio of different shapes and widths. Then there are the dyes—not just the color and chemical makeup, but how long the fibers were steeped and so how deeply the dye penetrated.

All that to say, there’s a gal who specializes in forensic fashion. And after looking at the security footage and the color pictures I’d snapped of the chef leaving the restaurant, she told me that his coat is a Chinese adaptation of a Tibetan chuba, that the Chinese stopped making them centuries ago, and that that one is not only really old, it’s almost certainly one of a kind. Something about the fraying, apparently. And the buttons. Definitely custom. And definitely enough for a judge to feel confident that the bald man in all the pictures, including the ones I’d taken, was the same.

I turned to Hammond. “You ready?”

He nodded and we got out of the car, which was the cue for the others to do the same. Three squad cars emptied and ten uniformed officers followed Hammond and I across the street to the bistro. He held up the folded warrant and directed two patrolmen to stay by the side exit and make sure no one left with anything. Another pair went around to check the back. We walked into the restaurant and I explained to the hostess that we had a warrant to search the loft above, as well as the offices and work space of the restaurant, and she needed to unlock the side door immediately.

People are usually a little flustered in those kinds of situations, for obvious reasons. But she didn’t flinch, like this wasn’t the first time they’d been searched. Or even the second. Without a word, she led us around to the side and opened the door.

My phone rang as I followed Hammond up the stairs to the loft. I ignored it. He stopped abruptly at the giant head with stitched-closed eyes and I stepped around him into the apartment. The high brick walls displayed a menagerie of tasteless art.

“Search this room,” I ordered one of the patrolmen.

I went right for the double doors on the opposite of the room, but they opened on their own. The chef stepped out, bald head and all. I saw a hall on the other side.

“Can I help you?”

“Please step aside.” I moved toward the space behind him.

He politely held out his hand to stop me. “May I see some identification?”

I held up my badge.

“The police?” he asked, as if surprised.

“Would you please wait downstairs, sir?”

“Of course. But first may I see the warrant?”

I pointed him to Detective Hammond, who was answering his phone. I had the sense that the chef was stalling, like he was delaying me just enough for something to happen. I moved him to the side with both hands. He didn’t resist.

I strode down the hall toward a pair of block stone doors. I put my hand out to open them, but there were no handles. I pushed. They didn’t budge. I pushed harder.

I turned back to the chef, who was waiting for my colleague to finish what looked to be an urgent call. “Sir, I’m gonna need you to open these doors.”

“Of course,” he said and started toward me. “May I ask what this is about?”

Fucker was so calm. That’s when I noticed the tattoos on his palms, like some kind of gang ritual.

“Just please open the doors.”

“Of course,” he repeated. He raised his palms like he was going to start an incantation.

“Wait!” Hammond called.

We both turned to see him walking down the hall. He handed his phone to me.

I listened patiently as Lt. Miller explained the situation. My face started getting red.

“Change of plans,” Hammond said to the others. “Let’s go. Everybody out.”

I hung up. I lingered.

“Hari!” Hammond said. “You heard the lieutenant. Let’s go.”

“Where’s Alexa?” I asked him.

The chef looked at me, expressionless. “I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.”

“I’m going to find her,” I said.

He nodded once, emphatically. “Of that, I am certain.”

“I’m gonna finder her,” I repeated.

Hammond grabbed me and pulled me out the door.

 

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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Why you shouldn’t sweat “hurtful” reviews

People will sometimes get REALLY upset with an author for non-literary reasons — i.e. their politics or their point of view on some issue of fandom. Those folks will sometimes leave negative reviews to try to “hurt” the author.

Of course, reading a book and simply not liking it, even having a strong negative reaction to it, is totally fair. Makes sense you wouldn’t risk your time on another work by the same person. I’m talking here about someone who hasn’t read the author’s books — probably hasn’t read any book, at least in a while — nevertheless leaving an angry review, typically with LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS!!!! with the idea that other people will see it and decide not to buy, and then the author will be really sorry.

This almost always backfires because of the psychology of product reviews. Research shows that people tend not to choose a product because of the positive reviews. Positive reviews may help make the case, but people choose the product based on popularity and features. (More on that below.) After identifying a product they think they might like, they look to the negative reviews to talk them out of it, to make the contrary case. If the negative reviews don’t do that, there’s a good chance that person will buy the book or toaster or whatever — as long as they don’t find a different product that seems a better fit to their perceived needs.

Unlike with toasters or computers, which have more objective criteria, enjoyment of fiction is subjective, and I think readers understand that intuitively. If a book has no negative reviews, something seems “off,” as if the book has been reviewed only by the author’s friends and family. This is why I tell authors not to sweat a bad review or two and why I tell readers to be honest. If one of my books was a two- or three-star story to you, say that. You aren’t going to hurt my feelings. (You’re not individually that important!)

If a potential reader looks at the negative reviews and what they find is some moron TYPING IN ALL CAPS, they pretty much just roll their eyes. Because of the way people use product reviews, over-the-top angry ones actually help the author make a sale by failing to talk a potential reader out of it — by suggesting the positive reviews have more merit since the negative ones were clearly written by cretins. If you really want to “hurt” an author, you actually have to read their book(s) and spend time writing thoughtful critical reviews — i.e. give potential readers something of genuine value that aids the decision not to buy. But that of course takes time. And intelligence.

Even then, they will run up against the issue of popularity. Research also shows that the total number of reviews matters more than aggregate star rating. I’ve said it before many times. I will say it again. Above a certain floor, total number of reviews matters more than the star rating. A 3.5-star book with 1,500 reviews is more likely to be purchased than a 4.5-star book with 150 reviews. This is because people understand enjoyment is subjective and they are generally risk averse (even though they will all claim to be open-minded and experimental). It’s the McDonald’s effect. Readers will opt for the surer thing, even where there’s a high chance the book is merely decent but not amazing.

Popularity always trumps quality because quality is subjective and people feel they have a high chance of enjoying a book that lots of other people have already enjoyed, versus taking a risk on a book that relatively few people have. It’s why in every generation there are a handful of mega-rich authors whose every work is a best-seller and an ocean of undiscovered ones. It’s just how readers are, how we ALL are.

In that regard, adding another review, even a critical or angry one, is always somewhat positive — which is another reason not to fret about what you say in a review or to feel like you have to inflate your star rating because you’re friends with the author. Provided a book has a critical mass (about 30, but of course more is always better), any additional review is helpful in that the counter goes up by one.

In other words, the same effect that makes it so difficult for authors to break in also has a buffering effect that makes it equally hard to “eject” us from the market altogether. So to my fellow authors I say, don’t sweat those assholes. Really. They can’t hurt you.

The first trick you learn

19Oct

Other that a few wisps of cotton, it was blue skies as far as the eye could see, and even bluer ocean. It was a little bit warmer than it had been, but the wind coming off the waves more than compensated and the beach was mostly empty. In fact, there was only a single couple walking on the sand. I sat on a slat-wood bench, one of a long row of them that looked out over the railing toward the water. Although the beach was mostly deserted, there were quite a few people on the boardwalk behind me. It wasn’t a summer crowd, but there were more than I expected for a brisk October day. Not many were sitting, though. It was too chilly for that. But as long as you kept moving—walking or riding a bike—the sun made for a pleasant afternoon.

I’d parked at the nearest precinct and walked down, so it was a good twenty minutes before my body cooled off enough that I felt the chill. I pulled my coat tighter and lamented the fact that it was both illegal to smoke there and too windy anyway. That’s how I sat, my butt slowly chilling on the cold wood slats, for the better part of an hour, before I saw her. She was sitting further down the boardwalk on the same row of benches, a good three hundred yards from me. I got up casually and strolled with the pedestrians, dodging the occasional biker. As I got closer, I could see her two orderlies-cum-bodyguards waiting on the opposite side of the boardwalk, near the stairs to the parking lot. One of them stood next to a wheelchair. They were motionless and their frosted eyes stared ahead like zombies.

I sat down on the far side of the same bench.

“Oh, Christ,” she cursed with a scowl.

She was knitting, and she set her needles in her lap and clutched her hands together like she was ready to give me a Captain Kirk karate chop.

“What do you want?” She spat on the boardwalk in my general direction.

I looked down. A gust of wind had blown and knocked her spittle to the ground within an inch of my shoe.

“Hiya, Granny.”

The first time I saw her, she was wearing a worn calico dress, scuffed faint brown at the sides from years of wiping her hands. And of course those heavy unlaced boots. I was hiding behind a stack of boxes on a pallet inside a meat distribution depot. Beyond the plastic flap behind me was a room full of dangling pigs and the corpse of something I’m not even sure I could describe. The fluorescent lights above us reflected off the pale green walls and gave everything a sickly, depleted color, like the whole world was battling some horrible infection. Her two goons had a Lebanese man in a dirty white smock on his knees in front of her. She had his tongue in her hand. She hadn’t cut it. There was no blood. She’d simply reached in and taken it out, and it squirmed in her palm like a giant bumpy leech. The man before her grunted and groaned incoherently, all shock and vowels.

“Detective Chase,” she muttered. “The fly in my ointment. Or is it on my windshield? I can never remember which.”

“Nice to see you, too, Gran. How long’s it been? Couple months?”

“Has it?” She picked up her needles again and resumed knitting. “Doesn’t seem that long. Not long enough.”

She was in worse shape than the last at our last encounter. She was frail. Her white hair seemed a little thinner. She didn’t even bother to pin it back anymore, and tangled tufts of it moved with the breeze. She wore a flower-print smock over a farm dress with a modern winter coat pulled over both, the kind with a line of fake fur around the hood. She had dirty work boots on her feet. The laces weren’t tied. Except for the lack of a shopping cart, she almost looked like a bag lady.

“Yeah, I missed you, too,” I said, turning from the waves to smile at her. “What’cha makin’?”

I couldn’t make it out, but knowing the old witch, it wasn’t a wee doily.

She kept her eyes on her work. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t. A little birdie told me I should come at the turn of the tide, when Fate hangs in the balance.”

She snorted in disgust. “Word on the street is you had a run-in with a particularly nasty ghoul recently and that it got it’s pound of flesh.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t a pound. Just an ounce or two. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that, now would you?”

She kept knitting.

“Thought so. Fucker was too old and powerful to be free range. What happened? That old witch doctor refuse your protection?”

She nodded without turning from her work. Her hands shook. “He ’shore did. And just look. He darn near lost his life, too. Just think what woulda happened if you hadn’t showed up outta the blue like that. So, where’s he hiding? With that little bird you know?”

I shrugged.

She studied me with an odd look—a mix of curiosity, amusement, and disgust. “Seems to me there’s been a few incidents like that these last couple years. You sure you’re alright, Detective?”

“Worried about my health, Granny?”

“It’s a dangerous line of work, what you do—the kinda life that takes a toll.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m just getting warmed up. There was a helluva learning curve there for awhile, but now I’m hitting my stride.”

“Maybe. But I have to tell ya. There are some real terrors out there. There are things buried under this city that you don’t know—can’t contemplate, even—and will never see coming.”

“That a threat?”

She shook her head slowly. “Just a fact, Detective. Just a fact.”

We sat for a minute, neither of us caring to speak. I tried to make sense of the crescent shape she worked back and forth with her needles, but it meant nothing to me. I couldn’t even tell if it was the same thing she’d been working on before I sat down, or if my presence had prompted her to make a change. Either way, I figured the longer I sat there, the more I put myself as risk of winding up in the garden.

She sighed in frustration and dropped her needles in her lap again and clutched her shaking hands. She stared at the water. Then she lifted an arthritic finger to her face and pulled down the lower lid of her left eye. She kept the other eye closed as she scanned the people around us, up and down the boardwalk. When she was done, she let go and blinked several times.

“The old Evil Eye,” she explained. “One of the first tricks you learn.”

“That so?”

“Everyone thinks its power is sending evil—curses and all that—but for me the real value was always seeing it.” She pointed. “The bearded fella leaning against the railing down the way, the one in the striped jacket with the plump face and the big smile.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s a doting husband and father of three. He tests software and likes to set fires. He’s razed several old buildings and fantasizes about burnin’ folks alive. He’s already torched the family pet—told the kids it ran away—and he has detailed but unfulfilled plans for a few folks at the office. He dreams about watching their skin bubble and flake and fly into the air with the heat.”

Granny pointed past me. “That there nigger woman, the one reading poetry, she’s a liar and a thief. Shoplifting mostly, but she’s taken from her employer and gotten someone else fired for it. Justified, in her mind, ’cuz she thinks life’s unfair.”

“Isn’t it?”

“And then there’s her,” Granny said, watching a young woman with cut bangs as she walked toward us along the railing. “She had sex with her sister’s husband two nights before the wedding. That was several years ago now, but she likes to think about it still while pleasuring herself. Ain’t that somethin’? The best sex ’a her life was that which secretly humiliated her big sister.”

“And what about me?” I asked.

Granny smiled at me. “You got more black in your heart than anyone here.”

“Except you.”

She cackled just as the young woman started past her. She looked upset. Her eyes were cast down and she had a powder blue coat pulled over some kind of green-and-black server’s uniform.

“You always wear a little blue, don’t you?” Granny said to her out of nowhere.

The woman stopped in surprise, but her face melted when she saw who spoke. Granny Tuesday dressed a little like the old grandmother from The Beverly Hillbillies, except without the glasses. She looked harmless, especially with those gnarled hands, like the roots of the crooked tree that grows at the crossroads of life and death. Random strangers could never have any idea what she was capable of.

But I did.

“How did you know?” the young woman asked.

Granny lifted an arthritic finger to frame the girl’s chin. “Because it makes your skin glow.”

The woman flushed red before resuming her walk. I watched her pass. Her eyes were on the ocean now and not the boardwalk.

“You see what I did there?” Granny asked.

“I don’t need a lesson in magic.”

“I just made her feel good. With nothing but words.” The old woman’s fingers followed the breath from her mouth. “So tell me, what’s the spell that will make you go away?”

She went back to her knitting.

“Information.”

“Information is expensive.”

I took wrapped the plastic bag from inside my coat and set it on the bench next to me. Inside was the chain-wrapped wooden figurine, the spirit totem that I’d taken off the old witch doctor.

She scowled in suspicion.

I had the two pictures, the black and white stills I’d printed with Hammond a few days before, folded in my jacket pocket. I took them out and handed them across the space between us.

“I don’t suppose you recognize this man?”

She took them. I watched her face as she pulled open the folds. Her reaction wasn’t what I expected. Her lips pursed. Her expression faded quickly, but it was more than just surprise. I think I saw a little fear.

But she covered it quick. “What’s it to you?” She folded the papers again and handed them back.

I didn’t take them. “I’m told you’re familiar with that particular gentleman.”

I knew better than to take anything Granny handed me, even if it had only left my hands moments before.

“Who said such a thing? Anson? That old fool needs to mind his business and leave me to mine less’n he wakes up one day—”

“Fuck with him and you fuck with me,” I said. “Anson was his usual helpful self. I twisted his arm. You wanna take revenge on someone, you take it on me.”

She kept knitting. “You should go home, Detective. This isn’t some wayward ghoul. You’re in far over your head.”

“That’s what Anson said.”

She smiled. Genuinely. Broadly. And with more delight than I’d ever seen on that grisly old face. It stretched the deep wrinkles of her cheeks,and I could see where she was missing a tooth. I had never noticed that. In fact, she was missing the same tooth I was missing. I tongued the gap instinctively.

“I just might be rid a’ you sooner than I expected,” she said. She folded up the tangled skein of her knitting in her apron as if she was done with it. “And here I thought the Three Sisters were gonna reject my offering. But just lookee here. A turn of Fate. My day’s looking up already.”

“That why a couple of your zombies were at The Barrows the other day? To pick up those antique needles?”

“The Sisters have always smiled on my kind. We pay them the right honors.”

“Did you know they still burn witches in India?” I asked. “I read about it online the other day. One of my colleagues sent me the article. As a kind of joke. There’s actually a government department there responsible for convincing people not to burn witches. Of course, there’s only so much they can do, particularly out in the rural areas. The sad part is that the mobs don’t always get it right. Victims don’t always die. Sometimes they just end up horribly disfigured.”

She smiled again, ruefully this time. “Maybe not all of us pay the proper respects.”

“What do you know about him?” I nodded to papers on the bench jumping in the breeze.

“Plenty more than you would believe, that’s for sure.”

“Prove it.”

“Proof?” she scoffed. “Where’s the fun in proof?” She was enjoying herself. She raised a hand and the two orderlies at the back started across the boardwalk. “There was a young man that came to see me awhile back,” she said. “Doctor fella. Named Alexander. Lotsa letters after his name. You might wanna find out what happened to him.”

The first orderly came up behind her with the wheelchair, and Granny pushed herself up from the bench.

“You have a last name?”

“That were his last name. Didn’t right catch what he was called, but I think he was working for the city.”

She nodded to the orderly, who started pulling her backward and around the bench. She’d left the folded papers on the bench, and a gust came and blew them away. I watched them whip across the boardwalk and disappear. Granny looked at the first orderly and nodded at the plastic-wrapped figurine. He reached for it. I put my hand out to stop him.

“This is worth more than half of a bystander’s name,” I said.

“Don’t you worry,” she said. “I’ll be in touch. If you’re going after the Lord of Shadows, there’s a few oracles I’ll need to consult first, just to make sure some of what you’re stirring doesn’t splash on me, so to speak.”

I didn’t move.

She got very serious then. “My word,” she said.

I retracted my hand and the second orderly took the totem. His colleague started rolling Granny away. I stood and watched her retreat as the wind suddenly started gusting—hard. A passing jogger lost her balance and almost fell. I had to brace myself momentarily on the bench.

“In the meantime,” Granny called as the wind subsided, “talk to John Blymire!”

 

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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Shame on you

Since last Friday, when I saw a thread on Twitter that I wish I could’ve bleached from my eyeballs, I’ve run into this idea several times that it’s wrong to consume “problematic” media and you shouldn’t do it, and if you did it, you should feel bad about it. In general, I’ve noticed, this line of thinking has two paranoiac strains, both self-centered identity crises: fear of ostracism and fear of contagion.

The first mostly applies to living creators, where for example we’re not supposed to watch The Usual Suspects because Kevin Spacey is in it, and he’s been accused of a very nasty sexual assault. Watching the movie puts pennies in the man’s pocket, after all, and we don’t want to support that kind of thing.

I don’t get the connection. If no one ever streamed, rented, or purchased that film again, it’s not like he would starve. (Are we trying to kill him, to stone the evil from our midst like an Old Testament mob?) Human beings are not little nation-states that can be deprived into submission with economic embargo. If Kevin Spacey is genuinely prone to committing sexual assaults — and he may very well be — then he’s going to do them, rich or poor. If deprivation equals prevention, then prisons ought to stop all crime.

On the other hand, if you really stop to think about it, the stress of losing his fortune might drive Mr. Spacey to commit more assaults. Perhaps the best thing to do is to make sure he and Aziz Ansari and Harvey Weinstein are all rich and comfortable so that they’re less likely to do bad things — that is, if deprivation of money really has anything to do with it.

No, no, I am told. Money is not the point. Money is just the mechanism. The point is to punish these men, to let them know their behavior is unacceptable.

Well, setting aside the very big question of whose job it is to police other people’s behavior, how is your economic finger wag transmitted to them exactly? Surely they need to be aware of it for it to have any effect. How would Kevin Spacey know that tonight, sitting in front of your television, you’ve decided you’re NOT going to watch The Usual Suspects — not because seeing him play Verbal Kint is uncomfortable but solely as punishment?

He’s not. Nor is he likely to see your pronouncement on social media of the same. But then, that’s not the point, is it? The point of conspicuous behavior is to let the people around you know that you’re one of the good guys, that you care about sexual assaults and by golly you’re not going to tolerate that kind of thing, and no one else should either, and if we all got together and stopped watching Kevin Spacey movies, then he’s sure to get the message, and the studios, too, and then we’d be getting somewhere!

This of course transmits the finger wag from Kevin Spacey to the entire world, because if not watching The Usual Suspects sends a message, then surely watching it does the opposite, which is to say makes every single viewer complicit in a sexual assault.

Hopefully the misstep is clear to you.

Certainly lots of people in Hollywood and elsewhere seem to be getting blacklisted. We’ll see if it lasts. To the degree it leads even indirectly to genuine social change, maybe it’s not a bad thing. But that’s really the question. After all, it’s one thing to decide for yourself that you’re never going to watch another Kevin Spacey film. Fine. Totally your choice and no one should shame you for that. But it’s another thing entirely to suggest that anyone who doesn’t do the same is permissive of sexual assault and therefore part of the problem and worthy of guilt and public shame.

Let’s be clear. I’m not suggesting anyone feel sorry for Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein or whoever. At all. You’re free to react to them however you want. If you don’t want to watch The Usual Suspects, don’t. I think it’s perfectly reasonable that some of these accusations make people feel uncomfortable.

The question is, do you have legitimate reason to make other people feel guilty about it if they do? Is it wrong to rent or even simply to watch The Avengers, or Firefly, because they were directed by Joss Whedon, whose ex-wife has now accused him of emotional abuse? Does the one follow from the other?

I think we get closer to an answer when we consider the second fear — of contagion — which is where this line of thinking is applied to creators long dead, creators who can’t possibly benefit economically from your consumption of their work nor even be aware of any collective finger wagging.

Normal Mailer, for example, who makes most critics’ lists of the best writers of the 20th century, stabbed his second wife (of six). He was having a party at his home, got drunk, and turned belligerent. He had a fight on the street with one of his guests and went back upstairs where he had an altercation with his wife before stabbing her twice with a pen knife. Guests took her to the hospital over his drunk objections that they should just let her die.

Perhaps worse than the crime was the conspiracy of silence afterwards, where the New York literary circle closed ranks around him. This included prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem, who came out publicly in support of Mailer’s run for mayor of New York several years after the assault. (He lost.)

I don’t get how not reading “Barbary Coast” makes any of that stop. And shouldn’t we also boycott Steinem for supporting a known domestic abuser? Mailer didn’t just hit his wife. He stabbed her. Twice! And how far back in time are we applying contemporary moral standards? To the turn of the last century? To ancient times? The lesbian poet Sappho was complicit in a society built on widespread slavery. Why does she get a pass?

And do these moral standards apply to creative works other than narrative fiction? Degas seems to have had a thing for underage girls. Should we burn all his paintings? It’s generally understood that artists have tended toward some very despicable habits. What will remain in our museums when all that’s allowed is wholesome female-, child-, LGBTQ-, and POC-friendly content made by morally upright allies?

If a college student is assigned one of Mailer’s books as part of a class on 20th century American literature, is he going to be infected by it? Is he going to walk away with a greater tolerance for domestic abuse? And if not, why would anyone else? Are we really suggesting that certain books should not be read and certain movies not be watched and certain paintings not be displayed because people just can’t handle them? Are we saying that art and literature are in fact dangerous to the Utopian social order?

Some people seem to think so, even if they wouldn’t put it in those words.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/dec/06/new-york-metropolitan-museum-art-refuses-remove-girl-balthasar-klossowski-voyeurism-complaint

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/misguided-campaign-remove-thomas-hart-benton-mural-180967080/

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/07/18/books/underneath-orientalist-kimono/