by J M Guillen
For a long moment, I felt Simon muse. We were still intimate after all, and his thoughts were mine. He wrestled, and his thoughts warred in his mind. He could easily have stepped back upstairs and used the playing card that he so often relied upon whenever he needed to manipulate the thoughts and memories of others.
he will know eventually, I reasoned, if the plans you have shared with me hold true.
“Yes.” He nodded slowly. “Thank you for your counsel.”
“What?” Aiden stared. “Do you have some kind of head trauma?”
“No. I suppose you deserve to know exactly what that was.”
“I do not have time for monsters to fall out of the sky,” Aiden retorted crossly. “Sky monsters were never part of our arrangement!”
“Let’s close up shop.” Simon smiled. “I’ll clean up this,” he gestured at the charred thing on the street, “mess.”
“And then?” Aiden asked.
“And then we talk.”
6
“Holy shit!” I leaned away from Alicia and shook my head wildly to clear it. “That’s absolutely insane!”
“Abriel agrees with you,” Alicia said and her whitened eyes sparkled. “As it happens, she often thinks of the choices Simon makes as more than a little reckless.” She paused. “Also, she cautions you on your course language.”
“Weird.” I stuck out my tongue at her, then sighed. “This is a whole chunk of a lot to take in.”
“It is. I have to be careful with you.”
“With me?”
“We are bound to the meat in our heads in ways Abriel isn’t,” Alicia said. “She can process knowledge a lot faster than we can. It would be easy to wear you out.”
“I feel a bit worn out right now, to be honest.”
“It’s good you told me. Abriel can change the method by which you process these memories, if required. They won’t be as specific or crystal clear, but you will have a general knowledge of them.”
“That sounds like what I need.” I shifted in place and stretched my legs out.
“There are two more memories you likely should possess in entirety. However, I’ll give you the…” She seemed to think for a moment. “The Cliff’s Notes version of the middle bit.”
“That sounds great. I’m certain we can go over these things more thoroughly if we need to later on.”
“Whenever the Masked Brava desires.” She stretched forward, and her fingers brushed the edge of my face.
My friend’s eyes burned with the radiance of the fallen snow.
***
“Abriel, come.”
It was as if every time he spoke my Name, he cherished it. When he said it, each syllable was a symphony, each sound relished, as if Simon enjoyed a fine vintage of wine.
Simply hearing it felt like a chorus of beatific joy that pulsed in my body and sang in my soul. Never had I known as much wonder, as much simple happiness, as I did in the moments when Simon called to me.
i am here, simon. I spun around his head and delighted in the sensation of the air, the sounds of the mortal world.
“Who are you talking to?” Aiden sat across from Simon, in a booth that looked as if it had seen better days.
“No one.” Simon looked directly at me and winked.
“I just watched you wink. At nothing.”
“Remember things for me, sweet one. This may be an important night.”
your will is mine, as always.
“My business partner is a crazy person.” Aiden hung his head between his hands.
“So, things ain’t exactly what you might’ve thunk.” Simon sat with Aiden in a nearly abandoned little diner and sipped at a cup of coffee. “Might be the world’s a mite larger than you supposed.”
***
At those words, I startled just a touch from my reverie. When I heard them, I couldn’t help but think of Garrett.
“Liz, you’re a big girl. I bet you’ve already heard the whole ‘the world is larger than you believe’ spiel.” It rotated its right wrist as it spoke. “Let me ask you, did that propaganda come from one particular person? Someone who went on to show you how wide the world is? Or do you have other people’s perspectives too?”
“Liz, are you alright?” Alicia regarded me, somewhat disconcerted.
“No,” I stated. “I mean, yes. Everything is fine.” Fine enough for now.
“If you say so.” Alicia reached forward again and touched my face.
***
“You’re fucking right!” Aiden’s hands trembled. “Do you make a habit of keeping horrifying monsters in our store? Stuffed away in a storage closet, maybe?”
“Not a habit, no.” Simon gave him a lazy smile. “However, I am a man who dallies with secrets ‘best left undisturbed,’” he drawled and lent his voice a rumbling gravitas.
“This is bullshit.” Aiden shook his head, then took a long swallow of coffee. “Things like that aren’t real. Monsters that fall out of the sky are great for the drive-in theater, but dangerous for a game store in downtown Manhattan.”
“I am sorry.” Simon set his cup down. “You should know I never intended for you to get caught up in my little side business.”
“Oh!” Aiden leaned back in his chair and put his hand to his forehead. “You planned on secretly endangering our customers with fucking chimpanzee demons.”
“Do you remember this?” As he spoke, Simon reached into one of the pockets of his long coat. He pulled out a familiar playing card—the ace of spades.
“A card?” Aiden wrinkled his nose in the exact same way his daughter did when she was perplexed.
“You do.” Simon spun the card deftly in one hand as he spoke in a soft monotone. “You remember what happened the last time you saw this exact playing card. You remember what we were talking about, and you remember what I did.”
“I…” Aiden’s eyes grew wide, wide as pie plates.
“Yes?”
“You hypnotized me.” His voice held awe but also anger. “You fucking hypnotized me!”
“Not… exactly.” Simon waved one hand. “The reason I bring this to your attention is because I’d like you to know that, regardless of how you may feel right now, you have a very important choice in front of you.”
“What’s that?” Aiden leaned back in the booth and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I can tell you everything.” Simon leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I can tell you all I know about the world hidden around us and the entirety of my experiences with the strange things that haunt New York. It’s a big choice, Aiden.” Simon cleared his throat. “Some things, once you understand them, once you see simply them, they change you. That’s not a threat, it’s a simple fact.”
“Okay, what’s my other choice?”
“I play my high card again.” He raised one eyebrow. “I can make you forget all about this. You won’t know anything.”
“I doubt very seriously that I’m going to forget this,” he snarled. “I watched a fucking angel descend from the heavens and smite Koko the horror-ape!”
“I understand why you feel that way,” Simon empathized. “Yet the fact remains. You didn’t remember a thing about my secret trap door until this evening. I promise you, if it’s what you want, I can put you right back in Knucklebones, no harm done. I’ll make up a story about what broke the window and get the insurance guys out in the next day or two.” He shrugged. “It’s easy, Aiden.”
“I suppose it would be.” Aiden finished his coffee and set the cup on the table with an audible clack. “I mean, you’ve already fucked around with my head once before, so why shouldn’t I believe you’d do it again?”
Pain flashed across Simon’s face. “I have done it before, and I will do it now. If that’s what you want.” Simon’s words presented no threat, simply a logical statement of the facts.
“I should have known this partnership was too good to be true,” Aiden groaned as he leaned forward and slumped into the table.
; “I’ve dealt with these kinds of things for most of my life, Aiden.” Simon arched one eyebrow. “So far, every single time I’ve been discovered, I pulled my little card trick.” Simon set the card on the table between the two of them.
“So it’s not just me you’ve been an asshole to.”
“I make the choices I do because most people, when presented with the truth about their world, don’t want to know it. Most people are children.”
“Well…” Aiden almost chuckled. “I suppose that’s true enough.”
“You have a child. Do you let her make all the choices for herself? Or sometimes do you decide things might be a little bit too dangerous for her, that she’s too young?”
“That’s hardly fair.” Aiden glared at Simon and a slight scowl pulled at the edge of his boyish face. “You’re talking about a parent and a child, comparing protecting my kid to hypnotizing other adults against their will.”
“My reckoning is that most people aren’t adults.” Simon cocked his head to one side. “How many of those ape-creatures did you see today?”
“The only one there.” Even as he spoke, Aiden seemed to have a thought. “Unless…” His eyes grew wide. “You’ve already used that card on me once today? Because there were more of those things?”
“Oh, there were more. I didn’t use my little trick on you, however. Most ’a them never made it out of the attic.”
“The attic?” Aiden leaned forward, incredulity splashed across his face. “Simon, how many of those things were inside my place of business?”
sixteen. I handily supplied, certain Simon hadn’t kept track.
“Over forty,” Simon lied with a straight face.
simon! I exclaimed, horrified.
“Over forty.” Aiden appeared as if he might faint. “And you… you took care of all of them? By yourself?”
“I obviously had help. You met one of my friends earlier today.”
“Right.”
“So imagine this had happened in the middle of the day.” Simon leaned back in his chair. “How many New Yorkers do you think I should’a allowed to keep their memory of that event? Am I being an ‘asshole’ by protecting people from what I do?” Simon made air quotes with his fingers. “Should I simply allow mundane humanity to experience otherworldly terrors without intervention?”
“Maybe not,” Aiden groused.
“Maybe not.” Simon’s tone dripped with more than a hint of condescension. “So do you agree with me that most of humanity is a distant fucking throw from being able to comprehend things like this?
language, I sniffed, still a touch surly over the untruth he had spoken.
“Yeah.” Aiden spoke softly, seeming to gnaw on the idea. Then he nodded slightly more vigorously. “Yes. We can agree on that much.”
“Can we further agree that perhaps, in many cases, I’m actually looking out for people? I mean, think about it logically for just five minutes.”
“No, I see it.” He shook his head and took a moment to stare out the window. “You weren’t wrong for comparing it to how I might parent my daughter.”
“So.” Simon leaned back in his chair again, a whisper of satisfaction on his face. “If I deem it necessary to use my little sleight-of-hand trick to make people forget awful things, you agree that sometimes it might be required.”
“Sometimes at least.” Aiden nodded more vigorously. “Sure.”
“And a few moments ago, when I told you I was willing to talk to you about it… When I said I would let you in on everything…” Simon scratched at his scruffy beard. “What does that mean I think about you?”
“Oh.” Aiden seemed a touch disconcerted. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“If, when dealing with every other person, I assume I am the one who has to be the adult, then what does it mean that I do not treat you that way?”
“That you… think more of me than you do most people.” Aiden shook his head, stunned.
“Do you want me to show you the world behind the world?” Simon leaned across the table, his voice soft. “You want to see the things that live in the shadows of our city?”
For what felt like an eternal moment, Aiden just stared. A disbelieving, stubborn expression sat on his face.
“I will.” Simon shrugged. “But I don’t have to. If you say the word, it’s back to sleep.”
“No.” Aiden shook his head. “I don’t like the way you handled this, and I don’t like feeling manipulated, but I suppose I understand.” Halfway through his sentence, a thought occurred to him.
“What is it?”
“Elizabeth is out of this. If you’re so damn skilled at making certain people are protected from… from awful things, then you protect her. This isn’t negotiable. I don’t want my eight-year-old child to have to deal with things like this.”
“I promise to keep your eight-year-old child as far away from this as possible.” Simon nodded firmly.
I couldn’t believe that Aiden didn’t see the subtle wording Simon had used.
“In fact,” Simon went on before I could protest, “I think it might be best if Liz didn’t see me anymore. Perhaps when she’s in the store, I remain in the attic.”
“Elizabeth, not Liz.” Aiden shook his head. “I hate that nickname.”
“Is that it then? You want to know, and you want me to keep your eight-year-old daughter as far away from these things as possible?”
“That’s it.” Aiden’s voice sounded a touch hopeless. “God have mercy on me.”
For a long moment, Simon only looked at Aiden, searching. Then, he extended his hand.
“I’m… certain he will.” Simon seemed anything but certain. “Let’s get back to the store. There are some things I want to show you.”
Aiden took his hand, and the men shook.
7
Like a thunderstorm, rapid images shuffled through my mind, a movie fast-forwarded at twelve times the normal speed. Even though it was impossible for me to pick out specific details of what Abriel had seen, as the images flickered by I knew what had happened in them, in an abstract kind of way.
It felt like someone fanning one of those cartoon flipbooks that everyone made in the third grade.
I watched as Simon took my father back to the store. He introduced Aiden to Abriel, and took him to the attic. They had a humorous moment where my father literally couldn’t climb up the ladder. Even though Simon had informed him about the trickery he had worked, he had never undone his clever little suggestion.
Once he did, the two went upstairs.
The memories flickered by even faster, shadows cast on the far wall of my imagination. I watched the two of them grow close and become the kind of friends that many men never have. As they explored the shadows of New York City together, Simon grew softer. His focus shifted away from the despair wrought by the Silent Gentlemen. With the help of my father, he began to see that many people dealt with the horrific things from behind reality, and he had the power to do something about it.
At the same time, my father grew harder. He became a person capable of doing what had to be done to protect the innocent from the uncanny entities that dwelt in the shadows.
I couldn’t help but think about my own training. How Simon and I had done almost the exact same thing, only in Syracuse.
I watched as the pair uncovered a warren of shape-shifting fiends that dwelt in an abandoned building on the far side of Central Park. I remembered how there had been an unliving shade that had haunted a lonely portion of the subway until the two had put the spirit to rest. I remembered a statuette, over near the Japanese society, possessed by a four-armed wolf horror from beyond reality.
I remembered these things and so many more:
A boy had lived over in Queens who could speak to the dead. Problem was, once he spoke to them, they didn’t exactly want to go back to being one hundred percent dead.
A murderer considered Staten Island to be his own personal hunting ground. By the time Dad and Si
mon caught up with him, he had killed seven people. The man had conducted rituals near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and believed he summoned a succubus of some kind, who would grant him unearthly power along with all kinds of earthly delights.
In Chinatown, a small cult called “The Hidden Road” believed that the end of the world was on the way. They conducted ritual slayings in order to appease the harbingers of the apocalypse.
Stories piled upon stories. As the years passed, the men began to invest in more weaponry than just Simon’s bizarre, arcane detritus. Guns. Swords. Fucking grenades.
Not that they had been weaponless before. My mentor didn’t exactly teach my father how to create magical trinkets, but he didn’t seem to mind lending them out.
I relaxed into the reverie, and watched with fascination as my father became a man I’d never known existed. He’d started out as someone who had a simple penchant for fantasy stories and tabletop games.
But later, in ways I never realized, he became a true hero.
When my mother fell sick, it practically destroyed him. He blamed himself and continually wondered if, somehow, he had brought home some contagion he’d picked up on his adventures.
Simon told him it was foolish, but Dad wouldn’t stop punishing himself.
I’d understood so little about my own family.
I’d never known my mother had insisted on the divorce to protect my father from watching her waste away.
In response, he delved deeper and deeper into the uncanny world, seeking a cure that never came.
He became a man obsessed. He stopped caring about the good work he’d done, stopped tending to the store.
All that mattered was his fruitless search, his hopeless cause.
***
“Abriel,” Simon quietly whispered. “Come on now, we have work to do.”
Oh, the sweetness of that one word! Every time Simon called me, it was as if the man sang, as if the beauty of the light within me shone through him. I knew what I was; I knew what he was.