by J. M. Frey
A shiver passes over his shoulders, and after a moment of looking around for a throw blanket, or considering getting up to go put on another pair of socks, Elgar realizes that he isn’t actually cold. It’s just that it’s so . . . not quiet, that isn’t the word he’s searching for. Because Jackson is snoring upstairs, and Riletti has the television on. But . . . Linux isn’t here, fighting for space on his shoulders, and Juan isn’t in the other room pretending not to be mother-henning, and it’s . . . wrong.
Quiet, but not in noise level. In people. In the right people.
In . . . in attention, if he’s going to be honest with himself. Which he’s been trying to do a lot more. It made finishing the Shuttleborn trilogy harder, because he kept second-guessing his choices, asking why the things that felt natural to him did, and were they actually natural, and could they be harmful, and . . . all that. He tries in his daily life, too. Because Juan would look at him all disappointed-like. And Lucy would smack him. And Forsyth would tut.
And . . . and he has a granddaughter now. Sort of. He owes it to Alis to . . . try to do better.
He doesn’t really need the help, but he’s curious about her opinion and, to be honest, he’s . . . feeling a little lonely. He’s used to being the focus of the room. Wherever he goes—conventions, meetings, networking events—all eyes turn to him when he walks in, and it’s always for his attention that people are vying. To be in the same room with someone else and to be so thoroughly ignored in favor of the television is . . . frustrating.
It’s a calculated risk, inviting her help, and okay, maybe he is showing off a little, but he wants her to like him. He doesn’t want her pity, because she has to protect him; he wants her interest because he’s interesting. If his mere presence isn’t enough, then the sneak peeks and tidbits he can entice her with will have to do. He wants to fall into the personality of Convention-Elgar, where everything rolls off his back and he is charming and gregarious. Convention-Elgar wouldn’t be scared of men on benches and bloody threats in his pantry. Convention-Elgar wouldn’t be concerned about a room full of the wrong kind of silence.
How’s that for insight? he huffs at himself.
So he licks his lips, screws up his courage, and says: “Hey, Riletti.”
“Yeah?” she asks, immediately sitting up and turning off the TV. Her free hand hovers at her hip, and Elgar realizes that she’s waiting for him to say that he saw something, or that something’s bothering him. She isn’t ignoring him, she’s bored.
“I . . . I wanted to say thank you, you know, to you. And to your partner. For being here.”
“It’s what we do, sir,” she says with a smile.
“I know that, but all the same. The detective is right, I wouldn’t have wanted to stay at home alone tonight.”
“I get that.”
“Do you have someone I’m keeping you from?” Elgar asks, and then catches sight of her ring. “A husband?”
Riletti cuts him a side-eye. “A wife, actually.”
“Oh,” Elgar mumbles, feeling his face go red. “Sorry.”
“Hey, it’s fine. I don’t have a dyke haircut, so everyone assumes I’m straight. Stereotypes; am I right?”
“Right,” he says, then clamps down on the ridiculous urge to tell her that he knows other gay people, like Juan. Why would she care? Lots of people all over the world know more than one queer person. It’s not like they’re rare or anything. “Look, uh, you look bored. If I swear you to secrecy, will you help me with something?”
Riletti’s glare softens. “Sure.”
Elgar heaves himself to his feet and trundles over to the sofa with his laptop. He sets it on the coffee table and, with a wave of his hand, invites Riletti to sit beside him and look at the screen.
“What’s this?” she asks, eyes darting back and forth between the two windows Elgar’s set up on the desktop side by side: one filled with the head shots, the other a browser with thirty different IMDB tabs open.
Elgar points at the head shot of a very muscley hunk, with bright blue eyes and an infectious puppy-dog smile, but dark hair. “If he was blond, do you think he could play Kintyre?”
“Maybe. He might be too old, though. He would need—wait. Wait!” Riletti hisses. “Are you . . . are you telling me that . . . ? Oh my god!”
“Shhh,” Elgar laughs. “This is supposed to be a secret. Don’t wake your partner.”
“Oh my god!” Riletti says again. “The rumors are true!”
They spend the next few hours going over the head shots and watching the self-tapes, compiling a careful email to the casting team, and by the time they’re finished, Elgar is yawning.
“That is so cool,” Riletti says, falling back against the sofa. Her hair, which she had loosened during their argument over why Elgar was taking so long to choose the perfect Forsyth Turn (“It doesn’t matter this much, does it? Why are you tying yourself up in knots? We only see Forsyth for like, a chapter in the first book, right? Oh, and I guess in book four? Three? Which is it?”), puffs around her shoulders like a capelet.
“It is cool,” Elgar agrees, though he feels a little empty and selfish for doing so. He realizes he has just successfully manipulated this woman into spending hours with him to keep him company, to keep him entertained. Though, he supposes that’s what real friendships and dating are like, not that he’s had much experience with either. Only, he wouldn’t have had to use the bait of forbidden knowledge to tempt them into spending time with him.
“Thanks for asking me to help.”
“Thanks for helping,” Elgar says. “I think I’m going to turn in.”
“Sure,” Riletti says. “I’ll be out here if you need me, and I’ll be waking Jackson to swap in an hour.”
“Okay.” Elgar packs up his laptop, and then brandishes a teasing finger at her. “Now, no texting your, uh, wife about what just happened. No leaks allowed.”
“Cross my heart,” Riletti promises. And she really seems to mean it.
Forsyth
Several days pass in research for me, and in a sort of holding-pattern stasis for Pip. She is scared, but she will not admit to being so. She cuddles Alis, goes to work, attends the gym and her martial arts classes, and comes home. We eat, we watch television, we talk, but neither of us really says anything. Because we are unsure. We are waiting. And in the meantime, because our misfortunes must always come in groups, Alis has not one but three new teeth coming in. She spends much time clutching her cheeks and muttering to Library about how stupid and ineffective her parents are, while I corral my Turnish temper. Between my intensive focus, Pip’s fear, and Alis’s misery, nobody is getting as much sleep as they ought to, and everyone is weary and listless and cranky.
A full week after Alis’s birthday party, she wakes us just an hour or so after dawn with her shrieks. Pip rolls over into my shoulder and mutters: “If you make a joke about her being my daughter after the sun is up, I will punch you in the nose.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I return, heaving myself up. Pip pats my rear end as I shuffle out the door toward the nursery, and I can’t help but snort. Ah, yes, the loving affection of the sleep-deprived.
Alis is standing, holding the edge of her crib, and sobbing miserably. She is flushed and angry at her inability to communicate and her parents’ obvious deficiency. I scoop her up and bring her to my office, where, in my haze last night, I for some reason left the little tube of pain-numbing gel that we rub on Alis’s gums. I distinctly recall Sheriff Pointe using whiskey for this task, but Pip tells me that getting children drunk enough to pass out and forget their pain is frowned upon in the Overrealm.
It doesn’t mean that it isn’t an appealing alternative.
Alis quiets down after a few moments, sniffling miserably and burrowing into my shoulder as I spin us in slow circles in my office chair. On the fifth or sixth revolution, I am finally awake enough to realize that there is a small red icon flashing in the middle of my main monitor. After a frustrating span wh
ere diving into the deep files and illegal monitoring software that the law-abiding citizens of the Internet don’t believe exist yielded nothing but ill-defined results, Finnar has at last found something.
Frowning, I flick my mouse with my elbow on my way by, waking up the screens. Then I put down my foot, hard, and jerk us to a stop.
“That unbelievable, selfish bastard,” I hiss, forcing myself to reread the title of the report Finnar has turned up.
Alis whines once in my grasp.
“Sorry, sweeting,” I say, standing and walking her into our bedroom. “Cuddle with your mama for a bit. Your da needs to call your Uncle Gar Gar and scream at him.”
Pip struggles upright, eyes bleary as she leans back against the headboard and lets Alis climb into her lap. “What’d he do this time?”
“The fool man has been in protective custody for a week. And he has told neither of us.”
“A week?” Pip repeats, suddenly coming awake. “Why?”
“Apparently, he is being threatened. I have not read the whole report yet, but I assure you that I will be calling him immediately after I have. I only know because Finnar—my program, that is—caught his name in a document stating that he is to be released back into his home later this morning.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” Pip asks.
“That is something I am looking forward to asking him,” I mutter. “Please excuse me.”
“Yeah, none of us are getting any sleep now, are we, kiddo?” Pip asks Alis as she slides them both out of bed. “Might as well put on some coffee.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’d appreciate that very much.”
Pip leans up to kiss my cheek. “Who says I’m making it for you?”
“Tease,” I say to her, smacking her own arse lightly as she walks by.
“Always. Come on, baby girl. Breakfast.”
“Bah bah Mama bu,” Alis comments.
“Bah-rec-fast,” I encourage, and Alis scowls at me over her mother’s shoulder as they descend the stairs. “Oh, very well, I give up. Speak like a backwater Bynnebakker blacksmith for the rest of your life, see if I care, my sweeting.”
I return to my office and set about the task of discovering who is threatening Elgar, and why, and what has happened to make the authorities believe he is safer in protective custody than in his own home. A secondary problem begins to tickle at the back of my mind as I delve into the deep dark recesses of the Internet, bypassing the security barriers surrounding sensitive information, and it is this: how do I confront Elgar for failing to confide in me?
The very first person he should have told he was being threatened is me, and I—
Oh.
Oh, foolish Forsyth. Sometimes you really are abysmally slow.
Elgar had, in his way, already told me. “Were you the only ones who came through?” he had asked, and in my overconfidence, I assumed he was being paranoid. But Pip’s strange fits had already begun, even then, and I should have pieced this clue in amid the others his call offered.
Instead, I had rebuffed him.
As our familiarity grows, Elgar has begun to treat me more like a human being and less like an exotic creature to interrogate and study, and I have begun to see him as less a fickle, cruel god and more as the desperately lonely man he is. All the same, it would please us all if his next work was less . . . well, less.
Though, Pip and I are unconvinced that Elgar actually is working on something new. He completed the first drafts of his debut science fiction trilogy well before he met me. But since shaking my hand that first time, Elgar seems, well . . . terrified to put pen to paper. Or fingers to keys, as the case may be. A small, vicious, vindictive part of myself is pleased to hear it. I would not wish the backstory-building pain that seems to be a requirement for fictional characters in the Overrealm to be visited upon anyone else, no matter if they are aware of it or not.
However, there’s also no evidence to suggest that any of the other fictional characters Elgar has created—for he wrote a goodly amount of short fiction before his career ignited with The Tales of Kintyre Turn—are alive and aware in the way that I, and those from my realm, are. As best as we can guess, magic exists in my realm only because Elgar Reed accidentally and completely unknowingly wrote a system of magic into being that was so perfect, so literary, that it began to exist. No other author’s works deals in Words and Deal-Makers, and that, it seems, has made the difference between awareness and simply remaining fiction for my fellow creations.
I am unique in the universe.
And if I am not, I have found no evidence that any other characters have slipped their pages to live amongst their creators in the Overrealm. As much as it is a popular narrative trope, especially in children’s literature, it simply is not true. So, if the problem is not magical, then it must be mundane. It must be a person.
And a person, I can track.
Several frustrating hours, and two trips downstairs for coffee later, I must admit to myself that what I thought was my first real lead was in fact nothing at all. Finnar reports too many instances to comb through when I leave the parameters broad, and too few when I make them more specific. Finnar, it seems, has found nothing. I begin to think that this is less because there is nothing to find, however, and more because whoever has done it has found a way to do so completely unseen. Not for the first time do I wish Elgar had let me install security cameras inside his home, as I have done in ours.
The problem, of course, with being a hacker is that if a thing does not exist in the realm of the digital, then I cannot access it. I cannot overhear conversations that happen in rooms that are not bugged, or where a laptop is not already open with the web-camera exposed.
I can turn on the camera and microphone without anyone knowing, but Elgar has, it seems, elected to keep his laptop shut and off for now. Elgar has a habit of leaving his smartphone in his pocket, prefers not to use it at all if he can help it, and like many men of his generation in the Overrealm, he simply does not turn it on if he doesn’t intend to use it. Which means I cannot use its camera to track what is happening around him, only its GPS.
And his assistant Juan does not seem to be doing anything untoward, from what I’ve observed of his digital life. He has no photos of roommates or romantic partners on his phone, no one who could easily access his files or technology, and nothing telling in any of his chat and text logs. His texts speak briefly of a new boyfriend, but nothing more than that. No spats, no overheard vengeful plots. If he is facilitating this stalker, it is not on any of the devices I know to be his. The most questionable of his activities is an absurd amount of time spent in fan fiction archives and online RPG forums, but who am I to judge a man who enjoys spending his free time in fictional worlds?
And of course, I cannot track the flow of information if one is simply verbally passing it on. It’s possible that someone close to Elgar might be . . . but I vetted Juan myself, and according to what I’ve been able to find in the Seattle Police Department records, the people assigned to work on his case and protect him are all equally reliable and honest.
So how is whoever doing this, well, doing this?
Unless it’s not a person at all.
Another fearful thought adds to the ball of consideration at the back of my mind, the pieces twisting, reforming, slotting together and breaking apart again. The clues aren’t all there yet, though, and like the fictional Sherlock Holmes, whom I’ve come to admire (if I were to wish to meet any other fictional creation, it would be him or Spock), I do not like to theorize before I have all the facts.
When I extract and open the crime scene photos of a break-in at Elgar’s house, I expect nasty slurs painted on a wall, or shattered crockery, or stolen goods. I am so unprepared for what meets me that it takes me an embarrassingly long time to parse what I am seeing.
Blood, that is certain. Blood, splattered and splashed on a white wall. Sprayed over canned goods, and unopened jars, and foodstuff boxes, and white wire shelving. Ah,
his pantry closet, my brain tells me, even as the rest of it is trying to understand the other bright splotches of color in the frame. It doesn’t help that the series of photographs were harshly lit, the whites too white, the shadows too deep. And then I see it.
I feel my gorge rise and swallow hastily. I resume parsing the pictures, all the air suddenly rushing out of my lungs, leaving me gasping.
The photographs of what has happened in Elgar’s home are horrifying. I consider not showing Pip. But I know she would rather be in the loop than out of it, and it makes no sense to keep this secret from my wife when, historically, doing so has not proven to be the wise choice. It is always better to have her mind on the case alongside mine—and she will not be angry with me for keeping yet another thing from her again. We have, the both of us, had enough of Turnish tempers and betrayed feelings.
I come downstairs in a rage and hand Pip my tablet, onto which I’ve transferred the photos.
“Freckles?” Pip asks, looking up from where she is grading papers on the kitchen table.
“This was left in his house,” I say. “I warn you, those photographs are revolting.”
“More disturbing than a Red Cap slaughter?” Pip asks.
“Possibly,” I allow. “Will you look?”
She nods silently and flicks on the tablet. Then she drops it on the table top in shock. Alis, seated in her high chair, building some sort of tower out of building blocks on the tray, knocks it over when she is startled by Pip’s outburst.
“Mama!” she scolds Pip, and then utterly ignores us in favor of recreating the structure.
“Holy fuck,” Pip whispers, eyes wide and caught on the image of a tangle of flesh, and gore, and vegetation. “That’s ivy.”
“It is.”
She taps the screen hesitantly with one plum-colored nail. “Is that . . . human . . . ?”
“No,” I say, and it is a relief to be able to report this at least. “Porcine, according to the laboratory reports attached to the photos.”
She wraps her arms around her stomach and shudders all over. “Jesus. Who did this?”
