by N. P. Martin
“Don’t make me regret letting you go. If I find out you tricked me, or had anything to do with that woman’s murder, I’ll hunt you down and kill you. You can bank on that.”
My smile widened. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
4
Forgotten
FAT DROPLETS OF rain fell from the night sky and made a faint crackling sound on the roof of the 1967 Cadillac Eldorado I was driving through the congested streets of Blackham City. The windshield wipers squeaked loudly over the glass as they worked in vain to clear the water pouring down the windshield and the exhaust occasionally blew out as I drove, as it was wanton to do.
It was October, so it wasn’t that cold yet in the city, which was just as well, for the heating system in the car was busted. Come December, driving for me would feel like sitting in a fridge with wheels on, since I’d probably just keep forgetting to get the heating fixed as I always seemed to. Someday the old beast would break down altogether and refuse to start back up again, hating me for neglecting it so much. Cars have feelings thanks to the psychic energy pumped out by their owners, turning the hunk of metal from a thing into an entity of sorts. You ever seen the movie Christine? It’s kinda like that.
And it’s not just cars which are given life by their owners. Any object that is poured over enough, loved or hated enough, will eventually come alive in a sense. I once had to save a woman from her favorite vibrator when her Rampant Rabbit got a little too rampant and wanted to insert itself into any orifice it could find, no matter whose orifice it was. The priest that was called before me had a bit of a shock when he walked into the room where the vibrator was kept locked up. The rubbery thing came flying at the poor priest like a vibrating missile and tried to insert itself up his ass. I dare say it wasn’t the first time the priest had had something poke at his ass like that (this priest in particular was known for his lustful ways, so much so he was nicknamed the Randy Bishop by his congregation, even though he wasn’t a bishop, but apparently he liked to dress up as one sometimes), but he was having none of it nonetheless, and soon scampered in horror. When I turned up, the spirit infused vibrator propelled itself at my ass as well. Several times actually, before I finally got a hold of the squirming length of rubber and performed an exorcism on it (as technically it was possessed by a spirit of sorts, a spirit that could be banished elsewhere). Yes, that’s right. I performed an exorcism on a dildo. One of the joys of being a Mage for hire. You frequently end up in the most unusual and bizarre situations. I can only imagine the amount of time that woman must have spent with her Rampant Rabbit in order for it to become so animated and so singularly driven by blind lust. She must have really loved that thing.
I finally pulled the car up outside the brownstone building I lived in on Poker Street, a not quite affluent part of East Oakdale, but respectable nonetheless. The brownstone (or the Sanctum as I preferred to call it, since that is what it was) actually belonged to my Uncle Raymond, who bought the place over fifty years before. I’d been living in it, on and off, for quite a while. Rent free of course. Family rates and all that. My uncle spent most of his time in Ireland in those days anyway (which is where I’m originally from myself).
The rain was still pelting down as I bounced out of the car and bounded up the steps to the front door of the Sanctum. Then I said a few words under my breath and concentrated my magick towards the heavy, reinforced door. A few seconds later, three different locks clicked one after the other from top to bottom and then the door thunked open. No front door keys for this Mage. I’d probably loss them anyway, as I had a habit of doing with keys and much else besides. Today, for instance, I appeared to have lost my entire identity in the world, which took things to new heights, even for me.
Stepping inside the Sanctum, I closed the door behind me and each of the three locks reengaged by themselves. Security was important to me, as you can probably tell. There was just way too much dangerous stuff in the house, and given the break-ins that always occurred in my neighborhood, I refused to take any chances. Besides opportunistic burglars who might have helped themselves if given the chance, the city was also full of magick-aware people (occult practitioners, other Mages, Finders and two-bit hedge magicians) who would think nothing of breaking into a known Mage’s house and stealing his stuff for their own gain. Some of the items contained within the rooms of the Sanctum had the power to cause major chaos and damage in the wrong hands, so you couldn’t blame me for being so security conscious.
Besides the magickally sealed front door, the house was also equipped with an alarm system of sorts. If anyone but me entered the house, I got hit with a vision in my head of the person or persons, no matter where I was.
For extra insurance, the Sanctum also had a backup security system in the form of Blaez, a Garra Wolf that I rescued from the clutches of a slave trader in the great city of Babylon in the Axius Dimension. The slave trader—an odious buffoon by the name of Toadious Brigstock—was someone I was chasing at the time, for he was abducting people from Earth and then taking them to Babylon to sell as slaves. A client’s daughter was taken, so I went after Brigstock to get the girl back. In the process, I found Blaez chained up in the back of the slave trader’s house. Brigstock used to use the wolf to round up his slaves and keep them in line like some sort of sick sheep herder, but at some point, Blaez refused to cooperate anymore (perhaps sensing the wrongness of what he was being asked to do) and so Brigstock chained the poor animal up. Being a sucker for animals (and people for that matter) in need, I broke Blaez free and he followed me and the girl I rescued back to Earth. That was over ten years ago. Blaez had been my faithful companion ever since.
Walking down the hallway and into the living room, I dropped my coat over the back of a chair piled high with fairly new books (most of them on some aspect of the occult or magick because I liked to see if there was much truth in them, which there often wasn’t, but I read them anyway to reassure myself that real magick wasn’t making it too far into the world of the Sleepwalkers).
I found Blaez lying in the corner of the large room in his usual spot when I wasn’t around. It’s like he was waiting vigilantly for some intruder to pounce on, which he had done in the past, almost killing the first poor sod who ever tried to break into the Sanctum. Afterwards, I had words with the Garra Wolf and told him to tone down his response next time. Now, if Blaez has cause to confront any intruders or unwelcome guests, he mostly just scares them away, perhaps leaving them with a few teeth marks somewhere as a deterrent never to come back.
The big Garra Wolf (named after Garra, the Babylonian Goddess of Fire) stood up and came padding over to me as I crouched down to pet his thick black mane. Blaez was slightly bigger than your average Earth wolf. A magnificent beast and my most faithful companion (next to Leona, of course, but we won’t go there at the minute). “Glad to see you still know who I am,” I said to Blaez as he rubbed his big head against mine, his fiery yellow eyes—containing an intelligence and depth of understanding that never ceases to amaze me—looking deep into mine as he pushed his snout into my face, rubbing it affectionately against me as he made small but friendly growling noises in the back of his throat.
Obviously, the spell I was blasted with (indirectly it now seemed) didn’t extend to the animals in my life, just the people. Although in saying that, I still had no idea of the spells full extent. Many spells had delayed effects, or effects that were unknown until it was too late, so I reminded myself to do some knowledge gathering as soon as possible, lest I be taken by surprise by some horrible side effect.
I headed into the kitchen. “You hungry, Blaez?” I asked the wolf, who followed me into the spacious kitchen. Dishes were piled up around the sink which I hadn’t a chance to clean up yet and the place still smelled of the Chinese food I ordered in the night before (from Freddy Wong’s around the corner, my favorite Pixiu slash chef in the whole city). I opened the fridge and took out a plate with a large T-bone steak on it. The steak looked good, I
have to say, but it did nothing to stimulate my own appetite. All I wanted was a drink. So after putting the plate on the floor so Blaez could have his dinner, I went to one of the kitchen cupboards and took out a bottle of Glenfiddich and a relatively clean glass, taking both back into the living room and sitting down in an old antique armchair that I often found myself sleeping in instead of my bed upstairs.
As I relaxed into the familiar contours of the chair, I poured myself a measure of the whiskey and sat drinking for a while, staring around the room at nothing, the rain outside pelting off the big bay window to the side of me. It was hard to relax or enjoy my drink with thoughts of my predicament dominating inside my head. The worst part was the not knowing. How far did the spell I was blasted with extend? Did everyone I ever knew now see me as a complete stranger?
In an attempt to find out, I got up and retrieved a small leather-bound book from the mantelpiece above the fireplace. The scruffy black book was my book of contacts, gathered up over many years of being in Blackham. I did have a smart phone, of course, and a laptop, but I was, and always would be, decidedly old school, and therefore I preferred to keep my most important information on paper or in my head. Magick was usually all the technology I needed.
There were hundreds of names in the contact book, but I picked out the number for the person who had known me the second longest (my Uncle being the first), Mitsuo Sanaka, my long time mentor. Even though I had a physic link with the man, I decided to call him instead. If I was a stranger to him then and he found me inside his head, things could have gotten ugly quite quickly.
“Hello?” said a quietly deep voice after a few rings. “Who is this?”
“It’s me,” I said, awaiting his response to see if he recognized my voice.
“Me?”
I sighed, knowing where things were going. “August Creed? Your long time student?”
Sanaka went silent and for a moment, I thought he was going to acknowledge who I was, but he ended up saying, “I don’t know any August Creed,” in his at times infuriatingly calm voice. “Don’t call me again, please.”
“He hung up on me. Goddamn it.” I looked at Blaez who was now lying in the middle of the living room floor on an old Persian style rug, next to a pile of old vinyl records (only a few of which have magickal properties, the rest only there for my enjoyment). “If Sanaka doesn’t bloody know me anymore, then who does?”
The wolf stared back at me with its deep yellow eyes and made a mewling sort of noise.
“Exactly, Blaez. Let’s try a few more people before I go all in with the despair, shall we?”
I chose another contact from the black book. The infamous John Constantine. Maybe the old dog still remembered me. “Constantine,” I said when he answered, using the tone of someone who knew the irascible Mage well. “How you doing?”
“Who the ‘ell is this?” Constantine asked.
“It’s Creed. August Creed. We—”
“Creed? I don’t know any Creed, mate.”
I cursed silently. “We met in London years ago, John. The kid from Ireland, dark hair, good looking.” I gave a chuckle. “You warned me to forget about magick, have a normal life. I didn’t listen. You introduced me to the Astral Plane, gave me exorcism tips, showed me the best bars in London.”
Constantine went silent for a moment, during which I heard the unmistakable chatter of a pub in the background. For a moment, I got my hopes up, thinking he finally recognized me, but alas, that wasn’t the case. “Nah, sorry mate,” Constantine said eventually. “Don’t know ya. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m kinda in the middle of something ‘ere, so piss off and leave me alone, will ya.”
Sighing again, I said, “Sure, John. Bye.”
After that, I tried a few more contacts from the book. Every person I called had never heard of me. Frustrated, I tossed the phone away where it landed with a clacking sound on the floor (I’m a chronic phone abuser). Then I got up and went to the large dresser in the room, pulled open one of the drawers and lifted out a stack of photographs. Family stuff mostly, pictures of my parents, my sister and brother when they were all still alive. I should have been in those photos as well. I wasn’t. I rifled through more drawers, looking for identity papers and a passport that should have been there but weren’t. Exasperated, I eventually stopped rifling, taking the hint.
“Well, Blaez,” I said, leaning against the dresser with my arms folded. “It’s official. I’ve been erased.” I shook my head. “Question is, how the hell do I get unerased?”
The mewling noise from Baez’s mouth said he didn’t know.
5
A Friendly Call
MAYBE YOU HAVEN'T guessed yet, but I'm older than I look. A fair bit older, in fact (I'll not tell you exactly how old, for I'm sure you will work that out for yourself at some point). Despite my age, however, I still didn’t look a day over twenty-nine, maybe thirty if I had a particularly nasty hangover (which could be all too often). Thanks to the wonders of magick, I didn’t age the way most people did (just one of the benefits of being a Mage). That's not to say my life was all sparkly stars and rainbows. Far from it. I mean, look at the situation I was in. No one in the world bloody knew who I was anymore, and for someone who had been around for as long as I had been, that was a lot of people.
So when I woke up the day after being spell-blasted, I did so to a heavy sense of existential loneliness. It was a cold feeling, knowing that I was all alone in the world, with nary a fucking soul to comfort me.
Except maybe Leona. Despite being a stranger to her as much as I was to everyone else, thanks to our run-in the day before at the building where the woman was murdered, Leona now knew me better than anyone else on the planet. It remained to be seen whether that meant she would give me the time of day next time we spoke.
To test the waters, I decided to call her up after making myself coffee in the kitchen, noticing as I did so that Blaez wasn't around, which meant the wolf had turned himself invisible and had gone strolling around the city as he liked to do sometimes. Either that, or he was lying in some other part of the house somewhere. No doubt he would turn up again in his own time.
"Leona," I said when she answered my call, my voice groggy after the whiskey the night before. "How are you this fine morning?”
"You," she said, sounding like she had been up for hours, as I knew she had been. She worked out every day before breakfast. Kettlebells and heavy bag training, followed by stretching. “How’d you get my number?”
“I told you I already had it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did. What do you want?”
“What’s your progress on the case?” I asked
“None of your damn business,” she replied.
Normally she wasn't quite so curt with me when I asked her about Division business, which the murdered girl had no doubt become. At that point, she didn't know or trust me enough to be so forthcoming with such information, however. Which was also exactly how she was when we first met a few years before. She was hostile and guarded, as was her nature when it came to people she didn’t know or trust. “Come on, Leona. Don’t be like that. I’m going need your help on this.”
“On this? You say that like it's your case or something. It isn’t.”
"Oh, yes it is, don't even go there. I've been made into God's lonely man here. No one fucking knows me anymore. Not a single soul, apart from Blaez that is."
“Blaez?”
“My Garra Wolf. You two get on. You both have the same predatory instincts and intolerance for fools.”
“Fools like you, you mean?”
“Yeah, very funny. And harsh, I gotta say. This is no joke, you know.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“So why are you refusing to help me then?”
“Because despite what you say, I could never see us being friends, or, God forbid, sleeping together.”
“Well, we were friends, Leona, and more,” I said, getting a little cranky now. I needed more c
offee. “What can I say, I grew on you like moss on a stone."
“Moss on a stone? You’re so weird.”
"Yeah, and so are you. Trust me, sweetheart, we were pretty good together, considering. And I know you have no other friends. You need me."
“Firstly, I don’t need anyone. And secondly, don’t ever call me sweetheart again.”
“Or let me guess, you’ll cut my balls off?”
“Yeah,” she said, after a moment's hesitation.
“You know why you hesitated there? Because you were actually going to say that. You said the same thing to me the first time I ever called you sweetheart. It's like I said, I know you, Leona Lawson."
"Why would I tolerate a pain in the ass like you anyhow?”
"Because," I told her, "you have affection for me. We get on. It might not seem that way now, but we do, trust me. What if I name your favorite film, will that help?"
"That would just be a cheap parlor trick, but go on."
"It's The Matrix. You have the hots for Keanu Reeves."
"Un-uh."
"Don't un-uh me. This isn't a game show. Admit it."
“I’m going now.”
I sighed, defeated. I’d forgotten what a brick wall she was. “Fine. Enjoy your morning Cappuccino-to-go at Barney’s.”
“How did…you’re beginning to creep me out now. You better not be fucking stalking me.”
"Just call me if you find anything out, will you? I'll do the same. We'll keep each other in the loop like we used to."
“Goodbye, Creed.” She hung up the phone.
"At least she used my name," I said hopefully to Blaez, who had just walked into the kitchen. "That's progress, right?"
The big wolf stared at me, then walked over, his claws clacking on the hardwood floor. Then he pressed his head against my leg and made a growling noise. Crouching down, I put my arms around his thick neck and gave him a squeeze. “At least I have you, Blaez, eh?” Blaez pulled away then and wandered off into the living room where he would most likely lie for the rest of the day before prowling the streets in invisibility mode when darkness fell that evening. “I’ll take that as a yes, then. Good wolf.”
