The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  It made Joy furious with herself, that there was a part of her own mind that was like this, that collaborated with the sexist victim-blaming of her enemies, a treacherous fifth column trying to take her down. Joy drew energy from that rage. She was not going to let those bastards beat her. She would not give them the satisfaction.

  A few days later, Joy resumed her job hunt, though it had become an exercise in rote repetition. Getting angry could break her funk, at least temporarily, but it did nothing to change the world around her. It couldn’t take her off the blacklist or do a thing to improve her job prospects. There weren’t many publications left that she hadn’t already applied to, and the ones left were a motley assortment of specialist publications.

  Joy didn’t have much confidence in getting any of the positions, but she felt compelled to make the effort in the hopes that her resume would hit the desk of some editor who wasn’t invited to the same parties as all the other cool kids. It turned out that those editors really did exist. They sent back rejection letters telling her she was overqualified.

  Apparently there was still something of a labor surplus in Dodona, with the war over and so many soldiers finishing up their tours of duty. Every new position that opened up was met by a swarm of applications, at least according to one recruiter. That made her feel a little better about her difficulties, but it didn’t make her job hunt any easier, even when she broadened her search to include stopgap measures like waiting tables. Again, she was informed of her overqualifications, like she hadn’t been aware of them when she’d applied.

  Joy’s only other marketable skill was translating, which she’d looked into. The problem was that the big companies doing most of the hiring for Xiaish speakers mainly produced pro-Kallistrate propaganda for distribution into the occupied Albion-Xia territories. And that… being part of that—the suspension of democracy that appeared to be spreading world-wide, the idea of working to promote that—it made her feel ill. That had to be an absolute last resort. She’d tried looking in the other direction, maybe find a job at a Xia advocacy organization, but most of them had been aligned with Steve Huang’s Tranquility party, and had their assets frozen by the State.

  The rejection routine had become so ingrained into her that she’d already begun tossing her letter from the Gazette into the trash before the fact that it wasn’t a rejection registered in her brain. It wasn’t a real employment offer, either. But it was an opportunity to make some money working freelance, and that was something. Joy had been dipping into her savings to make last month’s rent, and she didn’t have a huge savings buffer to begin with.

  She’d practically raced down to the office of the Dodona Gazette to meet with editor-in-chief Garai Sekibo to learn more. Once the interview started, she realized how rash she’d been. She couldn’t even remember where she’d seen the listing for the Gazette position and found herself drawing a mental blank as to exactly what type of paper the Gazette was. She’d never heard of it, and was surprised when Garai informed her of how large their readership was. She’d also realized that she still hadn’t figured out a decent way to explain how she’d left her last job, but Garai didn’t bother to ask. He spent most of his time talking about the Dodona Gazette and how great an independent press was. The big newspapers claimed to be “objective,” but this only meant they were blind to their own irrational biases.

  Joy found herself nodding in agreement. Yes, she’d just recently figured that out herself. Blind to their own biases? Most definitely true.

  Everything went well. Garai was likable, intelligent, and fun to listen to, with a nice musical Axum accent. Garai spoke multiple languages, like her, although the only two they had in common were Kallish and Wuyu Xiaish.

  Garai sent her off with a promise to contact her again when he had a good story for her. Joy walked out feeling like a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It wasn’t a full job, but she’d be making money doing journalism again, and that was something.

  Her good mood lasted until she decided to pick up a copy of the Gazette to get a sense of its standards. The top story was about some explorer, a Dr. Brandt (who she’d never heard of before) trying to fund an expedition to “Naraka, the world of Hollow Vei.” What? Joy felt her spirits sinking with each sentence she read. According to the article, the planet Vei wasn’t a solid sphere beneath their feet, as most scientists believed, but a hollow shell, with secret civilizations of ancient humans and strange creatures living on that inner surface.

  This land was known as Naraka, and was lit by a “Dark Sun”—this was the secret opposite of the regular, bright sun of Yuyi that most people knew. Instead, the Dark Sun, known as “Iyuy”—and that was so painfully stupid that Joy had to quit reading.

  Really, just on a linguistic level, that was such nonsense… What kind of newspaper was this? Joy read further, finding stories of ghosts, spirits, fairies, mysterious visitors from other planets, mixed with salacious gossip about popular singers or stage celebrities, scandals of fallen aristocrats and socialites from the nouveau riche classes of industrialists and trading companies, topped off with two pages containing daily horoscopes from five completely different (and incompatible) cultural traditions.

  So here it was: the final humiliation. This was the only paper still willing to talk to her: a sleazy tabloid. That’s what she’d been reduced to now. This is what all her hard work and dreams had led to. This is what all her grinding and late night college study sessions had earned her. This.

  She spent the next few days sitting alone in her room, hoping each day that the mail would bring a response from a publication that wasn’t the Gazette, and trying to work out a better option for making rent money other than accepting Garai’s offer. But no other offers came, nor did any brilliant money-making ideas, and so began Joy’s career as a freelance reporter for the most ridiculous tabloid in Nokomis.

  Well, if it was any consolation, it didn’t look like she’d be working here much longer.

  Chapter 12

  Workin' for The Man

  Top of her class at Rouvas, and look at her now—couldn’t even hack it at tabloid journalism. Just one more failure to add to the pile.

  Couldn’t hack it? The thought lit a spark of anger somewhere in her guts. It gave her energy, so she fanned at it. There were few things Joy hated more than being told she couldn’t do something, even if she was the person doing the telling. But the assignment really was impossible, or, if not impossible, so dependent on blind luck that it might as well be.

  Firstly, the Red Specter had to really exist. If he wasn’t real, she’d fail. Secondly, one of Garai’s witness list would’ve had to have actually seen him, and have useful enough info to track him down. If they were all delusional or lying for attention, she’d fail. And finally, even if he was real, (which was super-dubious, but let’s just entertain the possibility) and even if she managed to gather enough info to track him down, she still had to convince him to agree to an interview. And if the Red Specter was a real person, he’d obviously taken pains to keep his presence so secret that his very existence couldn’t be confirmed. Why would someone like that ever agree to an interview with a newspaper? Of course they wouldn’t.

  It was impossible. It really was! No matter how she turned it over in her mind, she still got the same result. Nobody could do this. She was being set up for failure!

  Joy felt a surge of rage, which she released in the form of a kick directed at the break room trashcan, a corrugated tin monstrosity nearly as big as she was. It made a noise like a thunderclap and began to tip over. Joy had to lunge to catch it and prevent a major gross garbage spill. Joy had been up and pacing around like a madwoman without realizing it. Sheepishly, Joy dragged the can back into its proper place and pushed at its sides until the dent she’d put in it popped out, with another loud bang that reverberated throughout the office.

  Joy sat back down. Fortunately, nobody came to investigate the noise. She breathed a sigh of relief. Her temper boiled
over so easily nowadays. She didn’t used to be like that. At least, she didn’t think she’d been. She couldn’t indulge in temper tantrums right now. She needed to be able to think.

  Set up for failure—why would Garai do something like that? If he didn’t think she could cut it at the Gazette, he could have just said he wasn’t giving her any more assignments. Why put her through this, then? To jerk her around? For why—laughs? Would Garai do that? Was that consistent behavior for the man, based on what she’d observed while working for him?

  No, that didn’t fit. Granted, she might be projecting more decency on him than he deserved, like she’d done with Flynn back at the Journal, but she couldn’t let that experience poison her against every other boss she’d have in the future. Her gut said that wasting her time with a prank assignment wasn’t something that Garai would do.

  So, let’s go with this assumption: if her assignment was real, then it couldn’t be impossible. And if that was the case, then there must be something she wasn’t considering. What had Garai been telling her about all her previous stories? It was that she kept failing to tell their readers what they wanted to hear.

  Well… okay, but was it her fault that the facts of her stories didn’t line up with their wishes? A reporter’s job is to report the truth, not make things up…

  Something in Joy’s brain clicked into place, and everything made perfect sense. Make things up. That was the whole point of the assignment. To see if she could do that. Garai didn’t really expect her to be able to track down and interview a modern folktale. He expected her to pretend that she had and submit the results. This was a test to see if she could write fiction.

  Of course. It was so obvious that it was painful. Granted, it would have been even more obvious if Garai had come out and said that outright, but she supposed that was part of the test here.

  But any satisfaction she might’ve had from solving the puzzle was short-lived. There’d been a reason her work at the Gazette was so half-assed. She still wanted to be a real reporter. She hadn’t given up on those dreams. But that wasn’t happening in Dodona, because of the whisper campaign against her. She was going to have to move to some other city to escape it. But she couldn’t move to another city before securing a job there. To do that, she’d need to travel for interviews. That meant travel costs: train tickets, hotels, food money, etc. And she’d need enough to support herself like that for at least a week, maybe even a month. And she was flat broke. She needed to work to get a job.

  But she also needed to impress her new prospective employers with her current work. And she didn’t want to attach her name to garbage tabloid journalism. If any legitimate paper saw her name attached to the dreck that passed for “news” in the Gazette, they’d want nothing to do with her, and rightly so. Yet working for the Gazette was her best opportunity to save up enough to get to an interview in the first place.

  So she’d tried to walk a tightrope with her Gazette stories, of producing stories that fit within the Gazette’s standards, without outright violating any standards for real journalism. So, even if her future employers found out about her tabloid stint, she’d still be able to defend her work. She’d be able to sit up straight, look them in the eye, and say, “Yes, the Gazette is crap, but my reporting wasn’t.”

  In short, she’d been trying to work for a tabloid without really working for one, and Garai was telling her that, no, she didn’t get to do that. If she wanted to keep getting money from the Gazette, she was going to start producing “proper” tabloid stories. She had to pick one or the other.

  And she really wanted to pick “other,” but what would she do then? She’d hoarded up enough non-perishable food in her apartment so that she wouldn’t starve right away, but that wouldn’t do her any good if she got kicked out for not paying rent, and Dodona rent wasn’t cheap.

  She could just bite the bullet and translate propaganda. It probably paid okay… but that still felt worse than working for the Gazette, if for no other reason than she’d sort of stumbled into the Gazette by accident. She could plead a case of semi-ignorance to her conscience, which wasn’t a great case, but it was better than the alternative.

  Were there any other options? The only thing she could think of was maybe just going home to her parents, but the thought of it made her feel a bit ill. Her parents already had enough to deal with. She, Dean, Kane, and June had all gotten full-ride scholarships for their military service, but that didn’t cover every expense, and it left three more children to put through college, and they’d have fierce competition for full-ride academic scholarships, plus they had Grandma Eu-Meh living with them, and all her medical problems—Joy didn’t want to be another burden to them. She was the eldest. She was supposed to set an example for the rest of her siblings. She’d been the first of her children to finish college. They’d been so proud. She hadn’t even told them about getting fired. She couldn’t bear to—she didn’t even know how she’d explain it. And then to come home, in utter defeat, after all that…

  Joy slumped back in her chair and stared at the grungy, faded paint on the break room cabinets, her thoughts stuck in a loop. Finally, she reached her decision. She wasn’t going to trouble her parents like that. So she was just going to have to suck it up and do some fake journalism. Just… for a few months. Get it over quickly, save up, start over in a different city, try to put this behind her. She didn’t have to put the Gazette on her resume or mention it in interviews. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come back to haunt her later, and if it did, she could deal with it then. That was her best option for right now. Which meant that it was time to write a spooky ghost story.

  Part III

  Legwork

  Chapter 13

  The Archives

  So, how was she going to do this? Well, she was still going to have to go out and interview the people on Garai’s list. That was a requirement from Garai. Because people like to see their name in the paper. And then make up some bullshit. But it couldn’t be any old bullshit; it had to be bullshit that lined up with her reader’s expectations. And she had no idea what that was.

  She knew enough about the Red Specter to recognize the name and his outfit: the distinctive gas-mask with the red skull painted on it, and a dark grey trench-coat. Beyond that, nothing.

  She had to get familiar enough with the character to make sure her Red Specter talked and acted like the one in her readership’s collective imagination. And what would the basis for that be? Was it the one in the comic strip? She was pretty sure that was the most popular version. And, most importantly, that would be the version she had easy access to. The comic ran in the Gazette, and she had free access to the Gazette’s archives. So her first task was to go read some superhero comics.

  The Gazette’s Archives were up on the second floor, a surprisingly large room stacked with years of the Gazette’s back issues. Most major newspapers had archives, but Joy had been surprised that a tabloid would care about such things, or would bother with the expense. Who needed a comprehensive historical record of gossip and nonsense? Apparently Garai did.

  Joy wasn’t sure if it was because he thought the Gazette would be really important for future generations or if it was just a prestige thing—real newspapers had archives, so the Gazette would too. Or something like that. Which meant that any article Joy wrote for the Gazette would likely be preserved for all eternity. Wasn’t that wonderful?

  Joy strode past row after row of dull gray heavy-duty steel shelves until she found the current month. The past two-and-a-half weeks’ issues lay flat on the shelves, unfolded, in a neat stack, with today’s issue on top, July seventeenth. Thick leather-bound monthly compilations of the Gazette filled the shelves to the left and above the half-finished July stack, with empty space to the right and below for future volumes. A grand testament to idiocy. Be a shame if something, like maybe a huge fire, were to get started in here and burn it all to ashes, wouldn’t it? Joy chuckled to herself, savoring the fantasy of stacks of garbage journalism
wreathed in flames—a proper trash fire that’d be.

  It would solve her future reputation problem, though. Just one little lit match as a goodbye, after she’d secured a new job, and nobody would be able to prove she’d ever written for a tabloid.

  Joy felt a wave of horror at what was going through her own brain. That was awful. It was arson! Garai didn’t deserve that. It was wrong. And… and what if the fire got out of control? It could burn down the whole building. There were at least a few offices in here that had nothing to do with the Gazette. Other people would be out of their jobs. They needed to work as much as she did. And if she got caught somehow? Oh, she thought “tabloid journalist” might look bad on her resume? How would that compare to “arsonist,” huh? That wasn’t her. That wasn’t who she was. Knock it off, brain.

  She grabbed the bound volumes from the last two months and stacked all the loose papers on top—two and a half months’ worth of story. She decided to carry it out to the hallway, where the morning sun streaming through the large windows gave her much better light to read by. She found the Red Specter comic on the inside of the back page.

  Joy gave it a quick glance, and couldn’t really tell what was going on. It seemed to be the continuation of a longer ongoing storyline. Joy started skipping and skimming backwards through the Gazette issues to find the start of the story, and she got a better idea of how the comic worked. Monday through Saturday the strip was in black and white, and occupied the upper third of a page, but on Sunday, it bloomed into vivid colors, and took over the entire page. Well, it was a neat use of the color press.