The first installment in this serialized story can be read here.
Whatever happened down the street had a sound that scraped against the soul, even for this blighted patch of the city. More than my exposed skin prickled in the charged rain, thick with the scent of ozone and something fouler. Even a magically-disinclined Hollow like me didn’t need a gifted psychic to tell them that shriek was tied to the recent bagboy, not someone thrilled to be boosting a sports car. For one thing, no rubber burned to drown out the wee-hour drone. For another, the sound was less ‘joyride’ and more ‘soul-flaying’. Had that same sound clawed its way out of some window over The Red Door down in The Tenderloin District, my assessment might have shifted. I might have even paused long enough to offer a slow, dark clap of appreciation.
But, as Lady Luck would have it, the scene did not include either prop: red door or tenderloin, and I did not need to go much further than the first alley before I found the twisted grotesquerie that had been a man just a few razor-sharp minutes beforehand.
The rain was relentless, washing the soot from the brick and giving the dead bagboy a freshly-scrubbed look, though the iron railroad spikes didn’t leave much doubt about the finality of his condition. Whoever did this wasn’t taking chances with a little magic. Cold iron, driven home through the chest, pins the vic and keeps a Resonnate — a Rezzer — as dead as a doornail. It screws up the magical flow, turning them into a functional Hollow while the metal’s touching them. I figured it’d be just as effective on a true Hollow, too, but I wasn’t about to volunteer for the experiment to find out.
Thick black blood, slow and viscous, bled from the twin punctures, painting the pavement around his splayed legs. The current state of my medical degree is filed under ‘none of your business,’ but even a blind gumshoe could see those spikes had checked him out permanently. If the poor sap had crawled another yard, his life’s fluid would’ve stayed a respectful pool. But Rhea “The Rook” Roarke’s, our infamous grift-witch of The Gill, curse on the plumbing thinned the black accumulation of blood to a slick crimson and sent it down the concrete gutter, hurrying toward the dark maw of the rain sewer at the alley’s end.
A copper coin, scarred with veins of green verdigris, was jammed into the bagboy’s gaping maw. The sickly green seemed to bubble and brew in the static rain, an acid touch on the already cooling flesh. The scent of rot was sharp, though only a handful of minutes had passed since the scream that drew me. His jaw gave way, bouncing off a spike of cold iron before landing wetly in his lap. The coin followed, but the threaded green—the poison—kept spreading in a spiderweb from where it had grown, consuming the flesh as the freed copper coin boiled in his lap.
Acting quickly, I scooped the cool, verdigris-stained copper coin from the violently dissolving remains of the attaché’s previous carrier with the blackbox I carried in my coat.The chaotic, foaming action continued along the emerald veins weaving a spiderweb growing across his body even as the coin’s activity settled to a slow effervescent fizz. I slammed the obsidian-black lid of the secure blackbox shut, sealing the acrid vapor and coppery tang.
A private investigator worth their salt, Rezzer or Hollow, would never be caught without their blackbox. These indispensable boxes can be purchased from most trinket shops, varying in both materials and size. Their prices range from “my, that’s pricey” to “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” In my case, I had to choose between blackbox or eviction. The pocket-sized bog oak blackbox won out and I slept at the office for a few months. It was a bargain, though, worth every pinched nickel and more.
I cautiously raised the corner of the bagboy’s coat and searched his pockets, hoping to find something as to his identity. A slot pull yielded a pair of cherries, and I discovered an ID card on my decaying recently-made acquaintance. However, the green corrosion had already begun to obscure his details, partially etching away the information where the protective glassine coating was fractured like sun-baked earth. The veins of green managed to bypass the document’s coating in those fissures, dissolving blocks of what could have been useful information. Exposure to The Rook’s static rain finished the job the corrosion had started, and everything fell into a wet mess on the asphalt, looking less like identification and more like cast off tissues in the rain with every moment.
The stasis deadlight on the attaché case was already flickering, a sickly green pulsing against the worn leather. It was a neon sign in the supernatural underworld, broadcasting a message I was not too keen to pick up on: the contents were more powerful magic than my pay grade, a whole lot more. The fetish’s charge was waning, and fast. I was already starting to feel the chaotic energy inside fighting containment as a low, ominous hum that vibrated through the handle and up my arm.
This wasn’t a job for a street-level gumshoe like me. This was something that should be nestled deep in a protected vault, not riding shotgun in a beat-up sedan through the dreary streets of the The Gills. I needed to get it to a hex-wright, a professional capable of establishing a proper stasis field — and I needed to do it quick.
Every flicker of that deadlight was a tax, a relentless drain on the emergency wards the fetish layered over the case. At this burn rate, the cost of maintaining containment would be astronomical. I’d be burning through all my recently acquired rent money — in a matter of hours, not months. My recently acquired financial cushion promising to keep the landlord’s enforcers off my back until the next lunar cycle, was dissolving like sugar in static rain.
The clock was ticking, and it wasn’t the kind you could simply rewind and try again. This was a supernatural countdown, and when the light went out for good, the thing inside would go live. And when that happened, the problems I had with my rent would be the least of my worries.
Distant sirens, a lonely wail in the grimy air, meant someone in The Gills had taken a serious dislike to the sound of my bagboy’s momentary musical. I could have walked away, just left the frost-encrusted case for the flatfoots to find, and kept the unmarked cash with none the wiser. But curiosity — a nasty little habit I’d picked up from the alley cats — had won out, sealing my fate with a cold, metallic click.
I pulled a fade to black and slipped into the early morning shadows. I had an unscheduled visit with my favorite hex-wright to attend. The city hadn’t woken up yet, still slick and silent under the streetlights, but I knew the darkness was already full of things that preferred it that way. I was just another one of them, hunting for a scrap of truth in a world built on magic and lies.
Postmortem:
As mentioned previously, rather than an emphasis on flash fiction, I am letting a story breathe for as much as it needs to breathe when they feel longer than my previous arbitrary limit of <2000 words prompts. I am leaning towards publishing more bite-sized chunks (of around 1000-1500 words) for these longer tales that come out of AI-suggested prompts — in my brainstorming session alone, I quickly realized this tale was not one that could be wrangled into such a short session, but I liked the direction it was heading and wanted to pursue it.
In episode two (Case File #2), I tried to spend more time working on my editing and storytelling over pounding it out. Hopefully an improvement in writing quality is apparent as a result. Oh, I know it is still pure pulp fiction, but my hope is that this is higher grade pulp than the first episode. I may return to that episode eventually to clean it up with a little more TLC like I did for this one.
Hopefully the cornball humor of mine isn’t too groanworthy. All apologies if you facepalm and it leaves a lasting red mark on your forehead. If you’re enjoying this tale, please let me know in the comments. Reader enjoyment is worth far more than any cash I could earn, although you are more than welcome to throw money at me if you have some to spare.
Thanks again for reading if you made it this far.
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