I think it’s the flattery that really did it. ‘I just loved them, Daddy! So did everyone else!’
How does one combat it? No wonder my old man always tried to give my sisters whatever they wanted while I got hand-me-downs. I was outclassed! Outgunned! Fears or not, I was never so cute!
Instead of yelling at each other in the typical teenager versus parent deathmatch, we talked about the tapes like adults. I explained I was a lot angrier with the world back then, that it was before her mom and I got things together and before I became a father, especially before I worked some facts out in my head about my own childhood. And she understood all of it.
‘If anything they make me love you more’. Well . . . again . . . how does a father fight back against it?
To my surprise, she wanted to know what happened next. There were rumors at the Institution among the students, passed down whispers from parents to oldest brother to youngest sister. No one knew what the truth of the story was, but it sounded even better than the first tapes had been. Like the tapes were some television show and she wanted the next season to come out already.
I gave in, big wimp that I am, and started to tell her about my old shop right then. Only she shushed me.
‘No, Daddy, I want more tapes just like these! Other people want to know too!’
‘That was a long time ago,’ I told her. ‘They won’t be the same. I’m not the same person’.
‘Couldn’t you try to remember?’
And here I am. Telling you this little intro as I try to remember. The twenty-one-year-old man, just graduated from the Institution . . . the Asylum I suppose he would call it, was much closer to the school boy than I am to him. Seven years fresh in the mind versus twenty years which seem so long ago. So small and innocent.
I’ve changed.
More than you can ever imagine.
You’ll notice I haven’t said ‘fuck’ once so far. Having kids will teach you to watch your mouth a lot quicker than even Ceinwyn’s papercuts. I’m different now. I’ve traded anger for silence. Hunches and guesses for certainty before I act. I faked being a respectable man for so long I eventually stopped faking and just became.
He had yet to have three children, a wife, even a pair of dogs. He hadn’t started wars and ended many more of them. He hadn’t saved the world and then broken it yet again in the same week.
He knew nothing about what the Mancy could really do. He had no idea of the terrors waiting for us all, of death and loss and of even worse. He was a little foul-mouthed fool and he had it easy. Even talking about my upbringing with my parents is child’s play compared to what will come in these new tapes.
But I do have some advantages. I’ve had kids. I’ve learned how to narrate a bedtime story. Welcome to the most fucked up bedtime story you’re ever going to hear.
[CLICK]
January 2018
If September in Fresno is a hellhole, then January is just depressing.
Fresno is always depressing, a mass of consumerism, a growing tumor in the middle of a fertile crescent that can out-produce all the other fertile crescents that have come before. The land around it feeds millions with its rich earth—there’s colors, of fruits and vegetables and cotton and nuts, so much green you see it in your dreams—but inside the asphalt and concrete maze there’s nothing but shades of gray, the splash of tan to occasionally spice it up. Tract-homes, shopping malls, sidewalks and street lamps. Nothing to do, no way to escape it. Just living the same schedule day after day and trying to make yourself forget you’re trapped in your little cage you pay to be trapped in and pay to improve, got yourself a refinanced loan to redo the kitchen on. You might not own it, but hey, bitch is pretty with those granite countertops.
That’s Fresno.
In January the highs hit low fifties if you’re especially lucky, mostly its forties day in and out, but it’s not the temperature that’s depressing. Not the people covered up head-to-toe, not the dead trees and yellow grasses. It’s that there is more gray than ever before. Gray clouds hold from horizon to horizon and they don’t even care enough about you to piss some rain on top of your drooping head. They just linger, blotting out the sun and stars. Most days you judge the time by what cloud looks like it’s a little brighter than the others. That’s your best bet for where the sun is at.
And the Fog. Capitalize the word. The Fog. I’m convinced it’s a living god. People in the other parts of the United States think they know fog, but they don’t. They know mist. They know haze. They know the Fog’s little brothers. Fresno fog is so thick some days you’re lucky to see the house next to yours when you wake up in the morning. It lingers just like the clouds, holding from what passes for dusk till well towards noon. Hours and hours, blinded, a whole city living and functioning on sounds, eyes trying to pierce into the gray wall. A city of half-a-million people cut off from each other, alone. Exposed. Easy prey . . . just like the hunters like it.
In one part of Fresno, a commercial district among many commercial districts, there was a store pretending to be something it wasn’t. That particular district was known for its small shops, its artsy cliental, and for a burger joint that had been open for over sixty years and was good enough to fight off fast-food chains. The shop fit right in . . . unless you knew better.
Sometimes to know a secret, you need to know a secret exists in the first place.
King Henry’s Hidden Treasures. It was on the sign, a sign personally painted by the owner using toxic lead-based paints but not painted with a brush. Another way is quicker.
To the many old ladies and middle-aged mothers who wandered in, it was an antique store. It was run by a nice young man who owned the place, just him, six days a week, ten to five, don’t go around lunch, he takes an hour off. He tries his best to help you but he really doesn’t understand anything about antiques, so be sure you know what you’re buying and research it ahead of time. No impulse buys, girls!
His language was coarse, even vulgar, and he had to stop himself from uttering a curse word every sentence when the old ladies brought their grandchildren with them. He was good with the children however, better than most expected when they first got a look at him. He had a rack of comics and candy machines at the front of the store, and would often slip in a free comic—just for them—into grandma’s bags when she wasn’t looking, with an accompanying conspiratorial wink.
He wasn’t tall, short actually, with close-cut brown hair and common brown eyes. Not handsome, but men don’t need to be handsome to be attractive. His arms were well-muscled, his shoulders and chest stocky for as short as he was. There were scars on his face and hands, especially around his knuckles. He wore odd clothes, jeans and tennis-shoes but over a white shirt he wore a brown coat of thick fabric, even in the summer when the temperature was over one-hundred and his AC ran full blast. He never took the brown coat off; it hung, unbuttoned, always.
There was a leashed quality about him, like he held back a great many parts of himself. Smiles were tight, eyes were hooded. What he showed was the edge of anger, and many women wondered how much more was buried beneath and what had created it and—if these women were young and hadn’t learned better—maybe if they could fix it.
His name was King Henry Price and he’d flashed his driver’s license more than a few times to prove it to his customers.
His shop was a normal antique store. It had old books and records, old furniture, clocks and gadgets, glassware and utensils. His biggest section was his teapots. Women loved teapots. It wasn’t a busy store, one or two customers at a time and the customers preferred to be left alone. King Henry spent all his time at his register, doodling and drawing, running figures and making strange diagrams the ladies couldn’t understand. It was a normal antique store.
But then . . . that’s all bullshit.
First of all . . . fuck teapots.
Second of all . . . I give the kids a free comic because what kind of horrible grandma takes their poor kid into an antique store? T
hey deserve something for the psychological damage that’s being done. A free comic is the least I can do.
Third . . . it was an Artificer shop. The only free-owned Artificer shop, unconnected with the Guild of Artificers, in the entire United States. The price I paid to get freedom was to give it up. Ceinwyn Dale owned my soul since I was fourteen, now she owned my future as well.
My future
was worth about a million dollars, that’s what I owed her for paying the upfront of building and stocking the place. I told myself I’d actually pay her off one day. That I wasn’t just kidding myself with this experiment outside the Guild structure. That I’d show those cocksuckers they were wrong.
I’d been graduated from the Asylum for about a year and a half, the shop had been running for a full year, and I still bled cash every month. The antiques selling like deep-fried crap didn’t help, but they weren’t my big problem.
The problem is: anima is expensive.
The Asylum pumped out hundreds of mancers a year, but anima’s still worth its weight in gold. Anima, vials to hold the anima, materials for the artifacts, designing the artifacts, experimentations to make sure the artifacts did what they were supposed to do—it all costs a ton in cash.
And then when I finally had myself something to sell . . . either for cash or a straight-up anima trade, I had to find a mancer willing to cross the Guild. The Guild agreed to let me do my own thing when I told them to back off shortly after graduating but they didn’t agree they wouldn’t bury me in shit. Even in the normal world, people don’t like crossing a union picket-line; now imagine that the picket-line is set up by another corporation and the other corporation is the only game in town. You going to bet on little ol’ King Henry Price all alone or on Wal-Mart’s huge stores with a billion Chinese kids behind them pumping out product?
A year in and I had eight loyal customers, all of them under thirty save for Ceinwyn. I’d gone to school with four of them. That left three I’d actually won over.
Only because the Guild wouldn’t make them what they wanted. That’s the thing with the Guild. It ain’t flexible. It makes what it makes and it has always made it for hundreds of years. And it’s going to cost. Well . . . at least until I try to sell something similar, then there’s a blowout sale. Guild cocksuckers know the game, let me tell you.
Only they have a weakness.
That’s my one out. My one advantage. I could experiment. I could make something new. It’s the reason why I was doing it. The status quo’s going to blow a hole in the world’s gut, so someone has to change the way things work. That’s me. No, sir, I’m not vain or nothing . . . no delusions of grandeur on my part. I just know the Price that’s coming due. Someone better start trying to pay the bitch back early before we go bankrupt, so why not me?
[CLICK]
It was your usual gray day in January when the so-called exploits of King Henry Price began. I met with my most loyal customer over an experimentation we had conceived between the pair of us. A lot of hard work looking like it might finally pay off some. It was later in the afternoon, the Fog held at bay by pieces of sun escaping from the layer of cloud. Even that wasn’t a relief. The light was so weak it was just sad, like a retarded kid raising his hand to answer a question. You knew the happy wasn’t going to last long.
Two old ladies were in the shop—one at my clock wall and another trying to break a ninety-year-old school-desk by swinging the hatch up and down, up and down, the non-lubricated metal squeaking in protest. Getting louder and louder each swing. No means no, lady. If I fiddled with a woman screaming like that, I’d be in jail.
When my real customer came in, the old ladies marked the door opening and closing—a different noise than the desk, something more like a swoosh. Their eyes went wide at the sight of him, their hands reflexively finding their purses to make sure they were zipped shut. Racist little old ladies I’ll tell ya, probably still used the word ‘colored’ if not worse.
My customer is black, about six-foot-four and weighed three-hundred pounds. Not muscle . . . you don’t get much muscle sitting on a couch playing video games and they were T-Bone’s primary pastime. T-Bone. Guy hated when I called him that shit, but how could I not tease him with it? It’s so opposite from his actual makeup. He was so middle class he couldn’t even pretend to be gangster. His parents wouldn’t even let him watch those movies growing up.
Tyson Bonnie . . . as he told the story . . . was born to a teenage unwed mother and placed under adoption to a pair of mid-30s professionals who had tried plenty but couldn’t have kids themselves. This is how he ended up with a white mother who’s a registered nurse and an Asian father who’s an accountant . . . and not even a mob accountant, not even a scumbag corporate accountant, a family accountant. Before the Asylum got their claws in Tyson Bonnie he was spoiled upper-middle class—real middle class, not the fake, on paper kind the politicians made up to cook the stats—going to the best school a shithole like Fresno could offer. At fourteen, a smiling woman came for him and Tyson Bonnie’s old life ended.
Now he’s the only other Ultra in Fresno besides me. When the pool of your peers is so small, you don’t have any choice but to be friends. Sure, there were other mancers; Intras doing their thing, but it’s not the same.
We were at the Asylum together, but our paths never crossed that I noticed. He’s four years older than me, which means he was well into his graduate work by the time I became particularly infamous. An electromancer, a Stormcaller. Electro-anima and someone who knows a thing or two about currents and batteries . . .
Which led us to the box I pulled up from under my register and put on the countertop. “T-Bone,” I greeted.
“King Henry, how many times do I have to tell you to stop?” he asked from far above me. Just once I’d like to be friends with someone who’s shorter than me.
The old ladies left without buying anything while I honorably distracted the big black guy that so didn’t care about them. “How many times I got to ask you to come by after hours when I’m actually doing Mancy stuff?”
He glanced around the empty store, raised too middle class to realize he caused it. “Yup, you’re real busy. Want me to come back in an hour when things quiet down?”
I flipped the box lid open. I hadn’t made the box. Bought it at a dollar-store for cheap. Thousands of dollars worth of anima construction protected by a dollar box. I liked that.
Inside was a place for two rings among cheap fabric stapled to the wood. One ring was already missing—it sat on my right ring finger.
It felt heavier than a normal ring and wasn’t a perfect loop. I’d thought about silver, but went with copper, which is cheaper and less likely to be stolen. The copper was coated with an insulation rubber beside the skin to protect against feedback current. The face of the ring was a large circle, a line of copper carefully manipulated into my initials. KHP. T-Bone’s was simply TB. Guess that made him unhealthy.
He picked his up, looking at it, studying the initials, then weighing it in his palm. Damn thing looked small against so much palm. “It works?”
“Just like you came up with and I designed.”
“Not off Mancy?”
“The Mancy is just the containment. Think of it as a reactor.”
“But just electricity? Not electro-anima?”
“Shit, T-Bone, you’re talking about step number one-hundred and five, we’re on two.”
“I know . . . I just . . . get into this stuff. It’s the coolest part of my week talking theory with someone who understands it.” He put on the ring, flashing his hand into a fist that didn’t look like it had a lot of practice being in the shape. “And stop calling me that.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I put the box back under the counter. “Takes about two hours to full charge using static electricity, quicker if you find a piece of carpet and start rubbing your arm against it. Theoretically you could attach it to a power-pad but I wouldn’t recommend it—too much power too quick might blow the cont
ainment field.”
“Wow, King Henry,” T-Bone said, his face all lit up as he swung a lazy punch across his chest that was far too much arm and not enough body torque. “This is awesome. It’s just how I imagined it.”
“Speaking of that, satisfy some curiosity on this . . . how did you imagine it?”
A brief bit of embarrassment crossed his lit up face, his forehead crinkling. “Stole it from a fantasy novel.”
“Shit . . .”
“I know, you hate the things.”
I shook my head. Hated them? Nope, I was jealous that the douchebags had it so easy with their ‘magic’. The Mancy’s a long way from some gay wand flipping and twirling. “Next, you’ll want me to make you a lightsaber.”
His eyes got bright with crazy dreams. “Could you?”
“Get the fuck out of my store,” I told him. If I ever did make something even resembling a laser sword, Tyson Bonnie was the last person I was trusting with it. He’s mean with a Wii U remote, but he’d cut his arm off in five seconds with anything real.
“Okay,” T-Bone agreed, “no more sci-fi stuff, we stick to real theory. But it did work this time.”
“It did,” I said, wondering privately what robe-wearing-fruit out there in bookland had a magic punching ring. “Worked wonders.”
“What’s the power level on it?” he asked.
“Bit more than a taser. It will put a man down good, as for a Were or something else? Not like I can test it.”
I’d worked for weeks on the damn thing figuring it out. Burned through enough anima to wear both T-Bone and myself ragged. But in the end I created something that hadn’t existed before. Every time I did it I felt a little relief from my worries. The cocksucking Guild of Artificers didn’t have a damn thing like these rings. Let them try to make them. They’d probably start with a pure electro-anima version before they even realized what I’d done. Then they’d be stumped for months.
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady Page 3
