Hemlock: Shadow Pages

  HEMLOCK: SHADOW PAGES

  By Sean-Michael Argo

  Copyright 2012

  INTRODUCTION

  This book is intended to be part paranormal detective story, part supernatural romance, and part mythpunk flash fiction anthology. This is a story presented from multiple perspectives across several timelines, with a first person narrative style in tribute to hardboiled fiction and film noir. Pour a stiff drink, put on some Sinatra, and enjoy the show.

  Dedicated to Bekah Kelso

  the real Sultry Siren

  Without whom

  this world would be empty

  And all the blood

  would be for nothing

  “You are the myth that holds fast the twilight. Your stories are the brick of its buildings, your blood is the power in its wires, and your tears are the rain that washes clean its grimy streets.”

  --- The Nightmare Man aka “The Gambler”

  WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  My name is Adrian Hemlock, the gonzo journalist of the Twilight City.

  I’ve worked the beat for years, and I’ve had my share of scoops, at least enough to win a few awards and keep the rent paid. I’ve only had to kill four people through the entirety of my career, and one of them I didn’t even shoot in the back. The Editor keeps giving me good assignments. There’s a bar downtown that serves up a drink called “Hemlock”, named after me. Bourbon and razor blades, always goes down smooth. After you’ve spent as many years on the job as I have, you end up with a scoop that eclipses everything else you’ve done, the bit of journalism that defines your legacy. We call it the “shadow pages”, and what you hold are mine.

  A journalist in the Twilight City is something of an investigative reporter, a writer, a private detective, and an information broker. We are intelligence and analysis on demand. We know what you were doing on that dark and stormy night, and I wrote an incredible piece on the whole thing.

  We are the wardens to the flow of information within the city. Sure, we publish an actual newspaper. The rag is called “The Twilight Times”, a slim volume that is printed on the daily. It only has a sliver of the actual dirt we collect on this city, though so much of our journalism is purchased and published privately. You want to know the scoop? Talk to the Editor, if you’ve got what it takes.

  This is journalism I did for myself, and it was too juicy for the daily edition, too priceless for the Editor to sell to any single person, and to personal to be presented anywhere but here. People say that the day a journalist lets the job get personal is the day they get retired, and if you knew the Editor you would know how permanent that sort of thing is.

  So to keep my skin from being taken in strips and used to print the weekly edition, I’ve made a compromise, these are my shadow pages after all, and I want to be around to enjoy my legacy, at least for a little while. The Editor and I have collaborated to bring you this literary publication, so that at least some of the cash you paid for these pages will find its way into my pockets, and I might just live long enough to spend it. As far as what you owe the Editor, she will be in touch.

  RUMORS, TRUTH, AND LIES

  The twilight journalist is an empowered storyteller. You are not just the protagonist in your own story, but also a supporting character, perhaps even the antagonist, in someone else’s story. The empowered storyteller knows this, sees it clearly, and with imagination wielded by magical will, can contribute to and capture the unfolding of the stories. To fully appreciate the subjects, you must take a moment to get to know the observer. What follows are a few glimpses into my world, my day-to-day profession, and a sliver of my own story.

  ----- Adrian Hemlock

  Being a journalist in this city is tough, and not just for the obvious reasons. You never quite know who, or what, you might be dealing with. For example, as I write these words I am in a quaint little coffeehouse enjoying something entirely too sweet and I notice a…. Something… enter the shop. It looks like a male in his mid-thirties, dark features that make me think ancient near eastern, and those shark eyes usually only reserved for madmen and well, sharks. As I stare dumbly the man sits down at my table. He pushes a refill of my exact drink across the small table into my shocked yet open grasp. He takes the disposable lid from his own cup, blows at the froth there, and says “Take this to your editor. I have a confession to make.” He slips a wax-sealed envelope across the table, takes a sip from his drink, and leaves the shop. I passed the envelope on to my editor, dutifully unopened. I never found out what it said, as my editor burned himself alive in his office that very same day. Two days later She took up the job, and that office still sometimes smells like cooked meat.

  It is easy to forget how beautiful the dawn can be. So often do we miss this simple miracle, distracted as we are by the demands of our post-modern lives. I marvel at times, that such a thing can bring me the aching peace that it does. Long nights working the beat, late mornings jump-started with coffee and cigarettes. There is a road, narrow and unpaved, that I found back when I was in school. The dawn seems to last forever there.

  Trade jobs for a day with Mitch the meat-peddling street vendor. Now that guy has stories to tell. Everybody has to eat, well, at least most of us. Any journalist worth a nickel knows that street vendors are one of the best sources of solid dirt on just about any goings on in the city. Mitch is one of those guys who is unphased by everything. Then again, you can’t be a street vendor in this city and have a weak stomach, not to mention actually eat the food. Fine source and usually only for the price of buying a meal and a decent tip. Tips for tips… I’ll take that, with extra garlic.

  People are as cunning as they are resilient, especially on the Avenue of Bronze, where the illegal slave trade that doesn’t exist thrives quite nicely. I am generally a man who strives for freedom from oppression, though as a journalist it pays to change your appearance from time to time. So I drop by the Bronze to swap faces with some unfortunate soul about once every six months. I’d feel better about it if the folks wearing my old face didn’t keep getting assassinated.

  Even in the twilight city there is government, the men and women operating from the long shadows cast by the multiverse barely contained within these city streets. They are the adjusters, playmakers, and influence peddlers. Long shadows, in the journalist slang. They seem to have no real agenda beyond keeping the metaphorical wheel spinning. Just as much agents of chaos as they are servants of order. Many claim that these long shadows are the ones who provided the Nightmare Man with a copy of the cursed play “Epoch”, which brought him into the fullness of his power. And yet these same long shadows are said to have set Mr. Shift on his collision course with the Gambler by opening the way for Samara Tate to find this city, and taking steps to ensure that the two of them met that night in the speakeasy.

  Keep it spicy. Bland food has its place, because sometimes you want the comfort foods, and if you will look most comfort foods are pretty bland. You want to keep it spicy, be it life, food, love, art, music, and magick. The world is full of spices, flavors, varying heats and rewards. Plenty of options, if you’ll just reach out and take them. Experiment, feel the burn, find your favorite, find the worst. See what’s what. Habanero is great once you can get past the pain and actually taste it, and the food cart on 65th and Annunciation has a dark blue dipping sauce that will literally shake your soul. Just gotta work at it. Push yourself, and all the world is yours.

  Let me tell you about Jack Swift, the most dangerous man you’ll never meet. He was one of the Nightmare Man’s pet killers, but since those old bad days he’s been keeping himself busy working for the other side. There are lots of other sides, one for every ambitious chummer with a fistful of cash. Jack is a younger loo
king man, with hard black eyes and bare feet. He carries a switchblade he took from the Nightengale once her wings were clipped, and word on the street is that he hums her tunes while perpetually sharpening its edge. They say he only takes jobs that pit him against the worst sorts of folk, and that he eats their trigger fingers when he’s done. Personally I’ve never even met the guy, and I’ve met everyone, though I have seen more than a few cagey bruisers with missing pointers.

  Magic and Vice. Those are the twin life-bloods of the city, and desire is the heart that pumps it. The Gambler was His street name for a reason, he’d tapped into that hurricane of mojo, and he had a plan. Truth be told some whisper that even His own death was a part of the plan. Some things out there in the city I could live the rest of my life happily ignorant of, but hey, I’d rather see the axe falling than get caught by surprise and die a chump.

  You hear all sorts of things working a beat in this city. Slakemoths have been seen on rooftops, and people are missing. People are always missing. Yoga is actually a torture dance ritual that invites “them” into your body. Have you ever tried yoga? It is torture. When you are a journalist everyone has a tip for you, a bit of news, some factoid they want to sell. I’ve heard it all, and most of it is bullshit. But I’ll tell you one thing I do know to be true, the reflections we see in the mirror do not have good intentions.

  The curry house on 2nd and Blake is one of the best in town. Small, dirty, cheap, and fantastic. My favorite thing about it is that when I dine there I can see I microcosm of the city within. Patrons from all cultures, races, walks of life, even species (if you consider vampires, demons, faeries, and worse to be species) come here to feed. The music never gets old, changing style from song to song. Information flows, alliances built and destroyed, fortunes lost and won. Oh, did I mention that it was a casino? Pretty much every dive in this town has gambling of some kind. Something about having a touch of magic in them seems to make folks crave a good wager. Me, I stick to baccarat and the red curry.

  No one knows how old the city is, or how vast its borders, nor can anyone keep an accurate census or map for more than a few weeks. Some people say it’s the only twilight city, the one place where all the cracks in the world fall to congeal. The man from the future meets with the man from the past. Mystic and fringe scientist share a stiff drink and talk shop. Here reality and illusion are two sides of the same coin, and coin can buy anything you can imagine here.

  The in-between places, that’s where the story lives. A glance, the light caress of a hand upon my arm, the hastily scribbled note that falls ever so carefully from a silk-gloved hand. My life is lived here, in the grey in-between. A twilight world in a city of the same.

  I work the beat, but not like you think. This city moves to a rhythm, as broken and twisted as the bass-line that permeates the music emanating from every wine-sink and gin-joint around. You’ve got to become a silence in the cacophony, the eye of the storm, and then with a clarity that threatens to burn out the senses, its there. I can feel it, and when it comes I throw on my walking shoes and go where it leads me. A mad dash down a dark alley, a casual stroll through abandoned ruins, a hard swing in the glitz of a jazz house. I follow their rhythm, I open myself to the wonder and the terror. The story wants to be found, wants to dance, and I am its eager partner, no matter what the cost. As a true journalist, you are a slave to the dance, and if not then you’re a two-bit hack who needs to get the fuck off my page.

  MY GONZO KIT

  My job takes me to all sorts of places, and most of them aren’t for tourists. I rub shoulders with politicians, brawlers, bootleggers, prostitutes, and even a lawyer or two. When you are a journalist the real trick to surviving a scoop is having the right hardware, being skilled in its use, and knowing when to whip it out. For your education I’m including a list of what I typically carry during any given day on the beat.

  Notebook & Pencil – good old fashioned spiral bound lined white paper, only difference between mine and yours is that I’ve got a dozen runes inked into the front and back covers, to keep out prying eyes and give a nasty shock to anybody who touches it but me

  Magick Glasses – if I tell you what they do you’d never look me in the eyes again, which honestly chummer you shouldn’t be doing to anyone in this city, hazardous to your health and your immortal soul

  44 Magnum – snub nose, 6 shots, double-action, hollow point rounds, and since I don’t use it all that much I don’t mind spending the extra cash to have a death rune etched into each shell

  Kevlar Vest – the flak plate was replaced with The Devil tarot card, because despite whatever you think you know, tarot cards are better armor than any piece of metal, if you give them the proper incentive

  Business Card – it turns black if the person I hand it to means me harm

  And like any good professional in the field I have several addictions, chief among them glamour, jazz, tequila, and sex with fallen angel prostitutes.

  THE GRIMOIRE OF MR SHIFT

  The Twilight City lies between the angles of our perceptions, its urban landscape a divine obscenity reflecting our scrutiny. A place where reality and fantasy are as indistinguishable as the dream from the dreamer. Upon these streets my friend lived his life and met his end, known by most as Mr. Shift. A protector. A drunk. A lover. A grifter. The best man I ever knew, dead and forgotten by all but myself these many long years. But the City remembers. It still whispers of Samara Tate, the woman he loved, whose name was stolen from his lips and whose song echoes in the speakeasies she once haunted. The Nightmare Man is gone, but the world still nurses the wounds that are the signs of his passage. This book is what remains of my own time with him. A haphazard collection of tales told over cheap bourbon and cobbled together from the scant stack of notebooks I was able to rescue from his burning flat. The story is as incomplete as the man himself, though his essence is as revealed in the telling of it as his worth is wrought in his struggles. This is a literary snapshot of Mr. Shift, caught in motion for the briefest of moments, a twilight creature in its element.

  A heart beats in this city, pulsing inside the streets, vibrating through the walls of the alley as I pick my way through the trash and the sleeping vagrants. I feel its rhythms change to match my own, even as I adjust my step in line with the cadence of the dying rain against the pavement. Its passion is betrayed in the burning eyes of would-be sorcerer kings. Its resilience is reflected in the practiced lipstick smile of a streetwalker. Its strength rumbles underfoot as the subway train ferries souls across a river Styx made of track and stone. Its malice stares out at me from eyes yellow and inhuman, before disappearing once again into the crowd, leaving behind only the cloying scent of cinnamon and burning meat. A heart beats in this city, a dark heart inside all of us.

  The rain has soaked me through to the bone, and I start to shiver. Not from the cold, but because I know what's waiting for me inside. The burned out husk of the jazz club leers at me from across the street, its face half hidden in the shadows of dead streetlights and the flickering neon signs of the buildings adjacent. Can't stand out here all night, got to face this, so I dash across the pavement. Vaulting the fence is no sweat, and soon I'm in the alley. My footsteps find a rhythm as I move through the maze of garbage, the crunch of broken glass under my heel like the staccato slaps on her stand-up bass. I come to the side door, where three years ago people lined up all the way back into the street just to hear her. My blasting rod pops the door off its hinges and flings it back into the alley. No point in playing it soft, they've got to know I'd come back here eventually. I duck and roll like a cheap action hero and come up slinging, two of them go to pieces, their fedoras falling like feathers as their bones explode from the inside out, and the third stumbles through the swinging doors into the main venue. I follow swiftly, and am ready to drop him, when her voice stops me cold. She's on the stage, the bass in her hands and the microphone to her perfect lips. The house is packed and the lights are dim, a thin smoky haze rests just at wa
ist level. They created this slice of history to send a message, put killers in my path to get my attention. I remember tonight, and how after her everything changed. I have a guess who set this up, but why not kill me? What does he want me to see? The sax player has just started his walk, and she's keeping pace on the upright. Her eyes are closed when she starts to sing. She's both above and under the gun.

  For many years I toiled at the foot of the Master. Studied the subtle nuances of the Craft, learned to speak the Words, and opened myself to the Mysteries. Is it the nature of students that they rebel against the teacher? Or am I just one of those types that can’t seem to get along with anyone? I figure a little bit of both. Near the end of my tenure there was a disagreement with another petitioner, and needless to say he found it very hard to use the Words while swallowing his own teeth. I didn’t even wait for the inevitable reprimand, I was done with that place. I packed my suitcase, pulled on the coat and hat that had become a symbol of my defiance long before the training had begun, and I walked out. That night, as I was nursing something powerful out of a brown paper bag and trying to figure out how much worse I could screw up my life, the Master appeared. He quietly walked up to me, the light rain seeming to alter its fall so as not to land upon him, and lifted the bottle from my hands. I’m standing there in shock, my jaw dropping to my chest as he leans up against the wall and takes a long pull from the bottle. He hands it back and I stand there with him, leaning against a wall in the twilight city, sharing a bottle of rotgut and watching the lowest of the low go about their sad lives. I’m buzzing hard when he stands up and looks at me, right in the eye, his face betraying no effect of what had to have been half a bottle. You are feral boy, he says to me, and the taste of this world for you is naught but ash, a wolf in the darkest of winters. Then he walks away into the night. To this day, years later, I still can’t tell if he was giving me advice or just spinning a few words together so I wouldn’t notice he’d drunk half my booze.