This is a serialized story. Start here for the first episode.
“Jesus, Viv. You don’t have to be some bitchy dame about it. Sure sure, I’ll help you out. Always have, haven’t I?” he grumbled, grinding his cigarette in a graveyard of butts in the overflowing ashtray. He muttered something low and ugly and, with a wave of his hand, coaxed the frost to slink back into the frost-encrusted case like a beaten dog.
“First things first,” he added, his voice a low gravel. “Let’s get that little bit of nasty into containment.”
Kogan walked over to the middle of his workshop, the ring of keys clacking a dead sound against his hip, like wooden teeth. Taking the ring from his belt, he found the key he was looking for and bent over the padlocked trap door in the floor. A mumbled incantation and some practiced finger gymnastics — the kind popular among Rezzers everywhere — and the key slid home. A twist, the lock removed, more finger work, and he wrestled the latch open, flipping the trap door back with a heavy thud.
He pressed an adjacent foot pedal with his workboot. The resulting clamor of chains and gears was a maniacal melody, followed by the emergence of an iron rig, a girth as wide as a large elm, which stopped with a final, echoing clang against the roof of his workshop. The rig was lined with multiple cages, each made of fine-wrought iron etched with protective runes and a magical script that looked like a bad dream made visible.
Kogan used another key to unlock one of the cage doors along the shaft’s length. With a wiggle of his fingers the door sighed open.
He pulled on a pair of thick, industrial leather gloves and carried the attaché over to the cage. A frosty fog trailed behind it as he set it inside. If I didn’t know better, there seemed to be an anxious crackling coming from the case, as if it knew what was coming and wanted nothing to do with it.
And there’s always the possibility that I actually don’t know better.
All of the rituals I had just witnessed were then performed in reverse, sending the iron rig underground and locked up tight in the belly of Kogan’s workshop. The earth seemed to sigh with relief, a sound swallowed by the oppressive silence that followed.
“Secure reflective oubliette,” Kogan grumbled, the words thick with stale smoke and sleepless nights. “Mirrors and rune-etched glass in a cast iron shaft with some null fields like barbed wire stitched into everything. Costly as hell, but nice to have around when you need one.”
“You need something like that often in your line of work, Kogan?”
He nodded slowly, the motion a tired confirmation of a grim truth. “You’d be surprised at how often a hole like that comes in handy. Keeps the bad things from looking back.” He took a drag, the tip glowing like a malevolent eye in the dim light.
“So,” he said, the gruff voice sandpaper against the uncomfortable silence. “Do you mind telling me how this little problem of ours came into our possession?”
I didn’t mind. I needed to unburden myself, shed some of the grime this case was accumulating. I told him everything that mattered, every twist and turn from the moment that nervous little bagboy had almost dumped his attaché into my coffee at Cookie’s Cafe. Everything, that is, except for the envelope of cold, hard cash left with me. For some reason, that little detail seemed best kept between me and the shadows.
He added his cigarette to the growing body of butts in the ashtray. I thought about asking him if he wanted to maybe dump it out so he could start a new cemetery plot of spent cigarettes, but he spoke before I could ask.
“Lemme see that coin,” he said, his voice gravelly as he pulled out a silvered tray and placed it upon the scarred bench.
I took out my blackbox, the bog oak suddenly heavy, and slid it open. The copper coin rattled across the mirrored surface as it spilled out, a dull echo in the quiet room. After it came to rest, Kogan poked at it with one of his tools. Nothing happened. Aside from the pitting across its surface, it seemed none the worse for wear — not even a ghost of green to hint at the rot it had held less than an hour before.
Kogan grunted, the sound a low complaint in his chest. “It’s as I thought. Whoever minted this didn’t want to show their hand or let the corruption get the attention of the boys in blue. They wanted it to go silent before anyone with a badge and a brain could arrive to see how their little charm worked its magic.”
“Except for me,” I added, the smoke in the air clinging to my words. “I’m guessing they counted on me following our friend here and seeing exactly how their slick coin works.”
He nodded, a slow, grudging motion. “I’m not gonna bet against you on that particular.”
“You got any idea on how I might ID our guy? Find out who he was and why he was carrying the case?”
“With your bagboy’s identification taking a one-way trip into the gutter and down the drain? Chances are slim to none with it mingling with the city’s bottom-feeders in The Choke by now. A dead end, then. I’m not sure what you expect me to do to help, Locke. I work reclamations, not miracles. This whole thing smells like cheap gin and trouble, and I’ve got enough of both already.”
I peeled back the edge of Cookie’s towel to reveal the slimy, half-digested remains of my glove. “The thing is, when things went green, they tried to take a piece of me with it. A little souvenir. I was hoping you might be able to work some magic with the scraps. A little something to chew on, right?”
His eyes narrowed at the corroded leather remnant of my glove. A low sound, somewhere between a satisfied grunt and a dark grumble, rumbled up from his chest.
Kogan, all angles and bad light, picked it up with a pair of long iron tongs and dropped my ruined glove into the belly of a glass retort sitting on a nearby workbench.
“Palingenesis,” he muttered, the word a rasp in his throat. He uncorked a bottle of something that smelled like a swimming pool on fire, like chlorine and bad luck. “We burn the vessel to release the memory. You owe me for the silver, Locke. Nitrate isn’t cheap.”
“Put it on my tab.” It was a line I’d used a thousand times, knowing full well I might never close it out.
Kogan’s response was a sound like a wet cough, a cynical little snort. He looked at me with the dead eyes of a man who’d seen too many tabs opened and too few closed, clearly no more convinced I was good for it than the next down-on-his-luck investigator to walk through his door.
He poured the silver solution. The reaction was instant. The glove didn’t burn; it screamed—a soundless shriek of tortured leather. A thick, white vapor erupted, swirling, trapped inside the glass neck of the retort like a soul trying to claw its way out. I leaned in, the sickly-sweet smell of the vapor clinging to the back of my throat. I watched the smoke churn. It didn’t drift; it spun, tightening, knitting itself together until a rectangular specter hung suspended in the gray fog.
The ghost of our dead bagboy’s identification papers. Rendered in smoke and tarnished silver vapor. The details were a blur, frustratingly lost in the swirling mist, but one thing was legible enough. Clear as a bullet hole in a clean white wall.
Martin Dredge.
The dead man had a name. And I had a lead.
And right behind his name, a second shape was forming in the smoke — a dark, hollow void that the vapor couldn’t touch, like a hole ripped in the reality of the room.
The smoke solidified into a man hanging, his silhouette twisted in the agonizing posture of the Hanged Man, but instead of a rope, his ankle was crushed in the iron jaws of a heavy vice. The smell of hot metal and something foul — burnt flesh, maybe — came off the image.
“Aww shit,” Kogan’s voice scraped out, a gravelly whisper tasting of stale whiskey and sudden dread. “The Foundry’s tagged your boy Martin. I’d imagine they’ll be sending someone ‘round to collect on his tab from you before I ever see my first dime.”
episode post-mortem:
This weekend allowed me to get a little ahead of the episodes instead of just trying to keep my head above water with the ideas swimming around in my head. My guess is that this story will have around 10-12 episodes in total before it is done, which will make it a “novelette” of roughly 18-20k words by the end (assuming episodes continue to be 1000-1500 words long). Printed? Around 75 pages at approximately 300 words/page. Not that any publisher is knocking down my door for this bit of occult noir pulp, but it is a detail worthy of consideration for the metrics elements.
I’ve roughed out a general sequence of events through episode 7 and I think I know what the Foundry is up to. The story has its own ideas, however, and I am not the navigator, just the guy sailing the ship from the helm. I’m just as interested as anyone else (those who are invested) as to what happens by the end.
This experiment with my return to episodic fiction is giving me a few nebulous ideas about how to continue writing in this vein that I might pursue in the future. You’ve been warned; escape before you can no longer run. Yes, pulp. Yes, likely New Weird or Gothic Horror inspired. Possibly “seasons”/story arcs (similar to television or, more accurately, radio dramas or graphic novel series).
Now, if I could just find a couple more people to read my tripe… World Domination!
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