by Damon Suede
“This morning is the first fucking time you’ve left your house in nine days.” Kurt wiped his face.
“Are you spying on me?”
“Jesus H. Christmas.” A Gucci briefcase sat propped against the door behind his leg. “I’m trying to have a conversation with you. I’ve been trying to talk—”
Trip ignored the little bastard. For once, being taller than someone let him feel confident. Kurt might be in better shape and make a fuck of a lot more money, but he came up to Trip’s shoulder. The primitive pleasure of shouldering an adversary out of the way surged in Trip’s chest. His keys clinked in his hand and he opted to just climb the stairs.
Kurt scuffed out of the way and bent to pick up his sleek briefcase.
“Piss off, Bogusz. I don’t need any grief. Silas and I are done, anyways.” He jammed his key in the lock.
“I don’t need to stalk people, Drip. You do understand that, yes?” He sipped the coffee again. “Mind-boggling. Gimme five minutes. I’ll pay for your time.” Kurt rooted in his pockets.
Trip turned. “What?” He couldn’t believe the arrogance.
“I’ll pay you to listen for five minutes.” He scraped bills out of his wallet. A couple of hundreds that fluttered in the wind, eager to blow away.
“What are you, Lex Luthor?” Trip stood on the threshold and stared down at the Kurt’s stubborn face and the folded cash in his hand.
“I’m serious.”
Trip didn’t answer, but he didn’t close the door. Out of the swirling air, the foyer seemed unnaturally quiet. He trudged up the crooked red stairs to his front door one flight up. Kurt climbed the steps behind him. He unlocked and entered his apartment but didn’t bother to invite Kurt in.
Trip dropped his backpack before he turned.
“I see why he digs you.” Kurt scanned the space with a vague smile on his face. He tossed the money on the kitchen counter. “You have a real gift for being a pain in the ass.” A snicker. “Evil twin.”
Trip tried to suss the angle. Ugh. Kurt probably needed some shitty concept art or a poster drawn. “Five minutes.” Nothing he could say would matter, and much as Trip hated to admit it, he could use that cash on the counter. He’d forgotten what it was like to be an out-of-work illustrator. “How did you know about the New York Times?”
“A little bird.” Kurt took another mouthful of coffee. “Rey Arzeno paints for us. He clocked your name.”
Trip didn’t nod, or smile, or whatever it was he’d normally do with a person he didn’t loathe. “Tick tock.”
“May I sit down?”
“Are you tired?”
Kurt drained the coffee and set the cup on the table. “I had a gander at your graphic novel. Scratch.”
“That’s impossible.”
He sighed. “You mean you didn’t draw the book? Or you mean that I don’t have eyes?” Blink blink. He picked up a Guy Fawkes mask from the shelves and pursed his lips at it.
“It’s dead.”
“As in, you tried to kill it.” Kurt held the mask up a moment, next to his face. “A masked man once said that ideas are bulletproof.”
Trip’s eyes bulged in irritation. “It’s not published. Never will be. It was a shitty idea anyways.”
Kurt replaced the mask on the shelf. “For someone who keeps fucking up so spectacularly, you sure are certain about everything.” He rummaged for something in his briefcase.
Thwap.
A new black ITOYA portfolio, eleven by seventeen, slapped onto the drafting table in front of Trip.
Kurt creased his forehead dispassionately. “Helluva hallucination.” His face stayed neutral as a balance sheet.
Confused, Trip spun the portfolio to face him before he flipped open the leatherette.
Scratch.
Puckish eyes teased him from inside a clear plastic sleeve, now lovingly colored in ripe jewel tones. Silas stared back at him and reached out. Well, not Silas-Silas, but the orchid-silver demon-Silas he’d penciled and inked for the cover of issue one… beautiful as a prisoner’s dream.
“Fucking ferocious,” Kurt said, and Trip didn’t bother to agree.
Every muscle, every hair, every glint in the cover urged the reader to take his hand, to surrender and slip inside.
Got an Itch?
Trip shook his head. Somehow, the double-size page had been printed in full musky color. Someone had painted his pencils and inks till they blazed and flexed under his scrutiny.
Dolores!
He knew her work so well, and she surely knew his. Without any guidance from him, Dolores had breathed life into his inked panels: the burnished skin and the forsythia glitter of the feral glare. The pale violet of the exposed nipple and the downy sweep of forearm and the faint blue of blood thrumming under the sinful skin: seductive and savage.
“Who wouldn’t pay to fuck that?” Kurt frowned appreciatively.
“I haven’t”—a garbage-strewn alley in olive-grays and browns. The slutty curse-thugs. The subterranean passage lit by pitchforks. Extreme close-up of the Judge’s knotty knuckles as he held his massive gavel—“seen these….” Dolores had painted the crepe-y translucency of the scarred skin so faithfully he could taste the brimstone.
You have been judged!
“Yet.” A page of narrow panels showing the library and zooming in on the cursed book. “How did… you…?” In Chicago, he’d sacrificed all this to slave in the Fox mines, drawing sexless dolls for Cliff. Now he didn’t even have that excuse. “I haven’t… seen these colored.”
“Artists.” Kurt snorted. “Ridiculous.”
Next painting, Scratch’s muscular frame perched on a ledge like a bird of prey, guarding his lover, licked by moonlight. He could hear the husky voice calling him into the dark: Dreamer.
All of Scratch 1: Horn Gate was here, carefully assembled in the protective sleeves.
Trip pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes as if they might pop out of his skull. “Bullshit. This project is dead and buried. You should know; you watched me dig the fucking grave in Chicago.”
“Ah-ah-ahh.” Kurt wagged his finger. “Ideas are bulletproof.”
“I don’t understand.” Trip flicked through the later pages: the rescue, the seduction, the abduction. He wanted to linger but needed answers too.
Kurt ran his finger along the edge of a bookshelf.
“You’ve had this and didn’t show me.” Trip frowned. “Took your fucking time. What do you want?”
“The early bird may get the worm, but the second rat gets the cheese.”
Trip flipped the polyglass page, knowing what came next.
Kurt tapped the table as if hypnotized. “Ah. This one.”
There it was, as he’d imagined it: Scratch opening the Horn Gate. His double-page splash showed an enormous ring woven out of antlers and cinders. Inside the spiky, spiraling portal, Scratch cradled his bruised mortal lover as they escaped into their hellish happily ever after.
Fool.
“Mmph.” Plip. A drop fell from his chin and hit the plastic. He smeared it away surreptitiously.
“Exactly.” Kurt nodded once. “Everyone I’ve shown it to has had the same reaction. To your artwork. The concept. Even the title.”
“Scratch.” Trip touched Silas’s face and discovered Kurt scowling at him.
“Off the charts.” Kurt drummed his fingers next to the portfolio. “I have two manga companies in a bidding war before I’ve even licensed the damn thing.”
He wiped his eye. “You have no right.”
“And did I claim otherwise, Mr. Spector?” Eye roll. “Lucky that you’re so goddamn talented, because you can be unbelievably dim.”
Trip pawed through the protective vinyl sleeves, drunk on Dolores’s careful painting, and then returned to the Horn Gate and the two men standing before it. Without meaning to, he’d given Scratch’s transformed lover his own body. He wished Silas was here to savor these with him. His guilt strangled his pleasure in the pages. “Why
would you waste money paying for colors?” These pages would have cost upward of two or three grand.
“I wouldn’t.”
“Then—”
“Our mutual acquaintance.” Kurt squinted in brittle impatience. “Obviously.”
“No.” Trip shut his mouth. “Why would Silas do that?”
“May I speak frankly?” Kurt braced his hands on the table. “You’re a totally unworthy opponent. By some undead miracle, you managed to find my best friend in a bush and rug-pull his entire life. You made him happy. He made you smart. But somehow you fucked that up so spectacularly that you have no job, no book, no man, and no options.” For all the bile in his words, Kurt’s face remained dispassionate. “Every fucking door slammed and locked in your own face, by your own hand. And a stomach full of swallowed keys.”
Trip laughed without pleasure. “Right. You’re right.” He coughed and wagged his head.
“This isn’t charity. I can’t stand your ass, but—” Kurt shrugged one shoulder. “—I respect your work.” He waved a casual hand at the gigantic handmade comic on the table. “Silas paid for that dame in South America to sprinkle her Photoshop pussy-pudding over these. He brought me the book because he had a hunch that we might be able to do some business.”
“What business? You make video games.”
“Obviously. Games need stories and heroes. Entire franchises have grown up around a single hook or playstyle. T-Wrecks started as a children’s book. Chopping Mall happened when I predicted linear shooters had run dry and binge players wanted gore in their sandboxes. We evolve.”
Trip hesitated in confusion. “You want to buy Scratch for a game?” He remembered Rina laughing at him on this holy floor. “It’s a romance. It’s an erotic paranormal romance.”
Kurt grinned at that, steepling his fingers under his bearded chin. “Mmh.”
Trip scoffed, “No killing or shooting. There’s not even much combat. Hero’s almost naked most of the time and seduces anything on two legs.”
“I give you….” Kurt reached into the glossy briefcase and tossed a small black claw on the table between them: three spindly plastic fingers rounded into bulbous tips. “The Talon.”
“Scratch doesn’t have chicken claws.” Trip shrugged.
“Not costume.” Kurt held up a scolding finger. “No. No. It’s a prototype. An accessory for all major platforms.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Surprise.” Kurt sighed, impatient. “It’s a wireless game controller unlike anything currently in development or production.”
Trip picked up the little gizmo, which weighed more than he’d expected. The surface felt slightly squishy, and the fanned prongs could be bent into position. “A joystick?”
“For your heart.” Kurt tapped his temple. “Short arm is an ear piece, second’s a microphone and photodetector, and the longest rests against the carotid artery.” He tapped his throat under his jawline. “Measures pulse, temperature, humidity, position, conductivity, and biometrics and a bunch of other stuff you don’t need to understand and probably couldn’t.”
Trip held it up to his right ear but didn’t actually attach it. “For games.”
“Think of it as an emotional joystick. It uses a player’s hormonal and mental state to direct actions on-screen. Coolest tech ever.” Kurt’s grin took ten years off him.
“That’s… unreal.” Trip turned it over. The longest claw sported a flat angled pad a little wider at the tip, almost like a tongue.
“Only a prototype at this point. My team needs to recode the driver, playtest, and we got a shitload of research coming in from Cambridge. My lead programmer wants to take point, and I mean to let him. Which means I need a unique game, pronto.”
“And your game needs a hero.” Trip looked at Scratch, who looked back with pitiless eyes from the oversized Horn Gate cover.
“A hero that seduces his audience. A story that isn’t slaughtermatic. Love and death. An emotional rollercoaster without rails. Maybe some diabolical puzzles and some gothic horror. Think about it: we ditch violence, what do we need?”
“Fucking…”
“Ding-ding.” Kurt tapped his nose. “Sex.”
“…hell.” Trip covered his open mouth with his hand. The idea seemed crazy and possible at the same time, as if he’d pivoted and walked through a brick wall.
Like chess: you have to move.
“Listen, 80 percent of gamers are male because 95 percent of games depend on primeval fight-or-flight code hardwired into XY primates.” Kurt cracked his knuckles. “The Sims shook the snow globe, epic best seller with ladies. Get me? There’s this whole audience itching for a new type of game. Something subtler and more cooperative. Complex characters. A provocative journey.”
“A romance.”
“Gold star, Spector.” Kurt sniffed. “My craziest programmer brings me this wacky-ass technology, but we got no game to drive it. I’ve spent four months combing through pitches. Rut city. Rehashes and retreads.”
“You wanna use Scratch to launch this… Talon.” Trip held it up and spun the little claw. “For a video game.” Trip felt like he was trying to have a conversation underwater… at night… in Korean.
“Gah. Yes! You really aren’t bright. Well, eventually we can pitch it as a movie, too, but Hollywood is in the shitter at the moment. A title like this will be a fucking rainmaker for us. Build a massive audience way faster. I mean, duh? C’mon: Scratch, the interactive incubus?” Kurt crossed his arms so tightly his elbows almost met. “It’s like Scooby-Doo with boners.”
Trip stared at the hypnotic colors of his filthiest fantasies smeared on Bristol boards by Dolores. Maybe they’d hire her as well. He regarded his shoes, feeling like a nine-year-old. He thought of Max. More like a four-year-old. “You can’t show that.”
“Fuck can’t.” Kurt jerked a thumb at the superhero posters on Trip’s wall. “Unbored Games already shows people getting blown up and butchered at strip malls. Nudity even! Miss Demeanor takes place in a leper colony bordello.” He took a breath.
Trip wished he could ask someone. Silas. “What’s your nefarious plan?”
“You let me ride you, and I’ll do the same, Speck.” Kurt sat back. “’S’not Hollywood, but you give us a shot, and that horny son of a bitch will be in millions of living rooms within three years. We’d license the graphic novel, the character, the name. Granted, you’d lose out on a movie deal… for a while.”
What movie deal? “The comic doesn’t exist.” Silas had done this for him, and for the book. Maybe there was still a chance.
“Yeah, you screwed that pooch, but a printed comic only costs, what, eighty grand? A hundred? I spend that on three TV spots. Truth is, the cost of your graphic novel would be absorbed by the marketing budget. How long is each issue?”
“I’d only finished the first—”
Kurt studied the cracked ceiling as if it were an abacus. “Fine. So we’d commission a, say… twelve-issue arc to start? Maybe through Image or IDW, so we keep control. Build up interest in your li’l devil while Ziggy debugs that bendy bastard.” He thrust his chin at the Talon. “That’s my blockbuster.”
Trip’s entire body hung breathless as if waiting for a sneeze that wouldn’t come. “And Silas has discussed all this with you.”
“No. He leaps first, then looks. He has hunches. Instincts. Faith.” Kurt rocked back, and his face hardened. “You’re like me, aren’t you. You want proof. You want to be paid every time. Silas makes his monsters for joy. ’Cause it’s fun.” He sneered jokingly. “Dolt. But it’s why I love him.”
What?
“Probably why you love him.” Kurt frowned.
Trip looked down at the portfolio, but he saw Silas beaming at him while they drew each other. Silas sketching the Judge, then holding him after. Silas made up as Scratch in Chicago. Silas crushed when Trip had rained poison down on all his best intentions.
“No one’s making you walk through the door, Spector. No on
e’s taking this damn project away from you or selling you up the river. He’s not your shitty parents or exes or whoever the hell has left you so gun-shy and fun phobic.” Kurt pushed a box of tissues across the table at him.
Trip realized what Silas had tried to give him. He realized how much his betrayal at C2E2 must have cost. What had he done? Unable to stop himself, he gasped and sat down before his knees turned to noodles.
Kurt pondered him, tipped his head to the side as if he was contemplating a roach crawling across bone china. “For the record, you treated him like complete shit.”
Trip nodded.
“Thing is, Goolsby’s gotten so good at reading between the lines that he stopped reading the lines. He trusted you.”
“I didn’t know.” Trip’s heart jerked back and forth in his chest like a trapped squirrel. “Any of it.”
“No kidding, jackass! Even after that, he just handed a brave new world to you. That’s the master plan. You wanna ditch, just pay him back the three grand for the colors. No harm, no foul. And fuck you for being an idiot. Fuck you for hurting my friend.”
“That’s not what—”
“I think he’s retarded to want anyone, let alone you, but he does.”
Trip opened his mouth to protest and realized he could not. He stared toward the window at the blustery daylight, wishing he could thank Silas for saving his life before he’d set about destroying it. “He always wants to play with his toys.”
“And you want to protect them.”
Trip shrugged, feeling stupid.
“Me? I’d rather pay for what I get. I think all this monogamy shit is for suckers.” Kurt shook his gray-flecked head, looking older than he could possibly be. “But if you want to play in his sandbox, you can’t handle your heart like a packaged action figure and never use it.”
Trip sniffed. “Mint-on-card.”
“Whatever. They’re called action figures for a fucking reason.”
Trip rose. “Have….” He closed the portfolio under Kurt’s ruthless scrutiny. “Have you ever said something you couldn’t unsay?”
