by Angel Wedge
“It works,” I stared in surprise, and it was taking a few minutes to figure out what had happened. “The river Lethe.” Traditionally, the waters of the mythical river were supposed to wash away the memories of anyone who tasted it.
“Suitably diluted of course,” he explained, “Wouldn’t want to cost you more than a few minutes of your life. So, what can I get you next?”
“Can you…” just as I was going to ask for something truly frivolous, another idea came to mind. “The fountain… there’s legends of a fountain whose waters make you live forever, right?” At that, one of the regulars turned his head to look at me for a moment. I got the impression of a heavy set man with a grizzled beard, but he turned back to his drink and his friends when he saw me looking. It was the first time any of them had paid me any attention, so maybe it was the first thing he’d heard that was out of the ordinary for this place.
“With whiskey again?” he didn’t seem to be at all surprised by the request.
I nodded, and he walked to the back of the bar to mix my drink. I think it was the most polite service I’d ever received in a bar, and I knew that quite apart from the special drinks, I’d be glad to come back here.
“That’ll be eternal servitude,” he pushed the glass across the bar, quoting the price as naturally as he had the four ninety five for the stranger’s drink, “You wouldn’t believe how much help I need to organise the stockroom.” I wanted to protest, but I knew it would be futile as he opened his mouth again and opened his eyes too, “And your soul.”
* * *
Artifact NEC-20021b-7-224
“It’s some kind of medieval torture implement?” Rick looked out of the corner of his eye at the strange assemblage of steel. The handle, he could work out. You turn it and something goes round inside, though he couldn’t quite figure out what the overlaid blades were supposed to do.
“Looks more like a drill to me,” Stacey poked the end opposite the handle, “Maybe this is what they used to have before power tools.”
“So what’s the clamp for? A drill needs to move, you push the bit into something.”
“Well, I don’t know! Honestly, Rick, you’re the DIY guru. If anyone should know what this is, it’s you.” She pouted petulantly, as oblivious as her new partner to the streams of malignant magical energy flowing into the device as she spoke.
Rick examined it again. He was only 22 – a remarkably young recruit to the Bureau Of Occult/Paranormal Equipment Disposal – but he’d still had cause to use a mechanical drill when working with his grandpa as a child, and he was pretty sure this wasn’t one. What it actually was, he couldn’t say.
“I take it you’re not much of a cook, then?” Malcolm was the senior officer at this storage facility, testing his new agents to see if they had what it takes to work here. He was kind of amused to see which item they’d pick to analyse; but even more amused when the lid came off and they started to make guesses.
“Yeah, I can cook myself!” Stacey was immediately on the defensive, “I make dinner for my boyfriend almost every night! That’s sexist, that is, I could sue you!” She swore under her breath, and Malcolm waited for her to calm down before continuing.
“I didn’t say anything about sex, and if you have to be so confrontational, can you take it outside in future? I don’t want you getting negative vibes all over this stuff, it’s worse than second hand smoke.” Stacey fumed, but couldn’t see anything to disagree with, so the boss continued, “This is a mincer. A lot less elegant than a modern one, but you put meat in the top, and it comes out here as mince.”
“Well, of course!” Stacey blustered, trying not to give away that she thought of mince as something that comes in packets from the supermarket. Like sausages, she’d never really wondered what part of an animal it came out of. “Why didn’t you get that, Rick?”
As they still seemed a little confused, Malcolm quickly set up the cursed artifact and fed some chunks of pork leg into the hopper. Glistening pink mince accumulated in a bowl beneath it.
“So what’s magical about it?” Stacey was the first to ask.
“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to work out,” Malcolm pointed out, “This is your examination after all.”
“Does it suck your soul energy when you turn the handle?”
“You just saw me work it. What do you think?”
“Oh yeah. Maybe it–”
“Does it suck your fingers into the hopper and keep going by itself?”
“No, but good guess.”
“Does it make the meat poisonous, or cursed or something?”
“No. If you tested it, you’d find it’s perfectly safe to eat, although I wo–”
“Cool!” Malcolm couldn’t believe his eyes as Stacey helped herself to a chunk of wobbly pink meat.
“Stacey,” Rick looked down his nose at her, “I think he meant it’s as safe as raw meat ever is. You still need to cook it.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll cook the rest of it then. Is that okay?” The two men shrugged, wondering how she’d ever got into this unit.
“Actually,” Malcolm continued, “what I was going to say is that I wouldn’t recommend eating it, even if you do cook it.”
“Well why didn’t you say so? Anyway, you said it’s safe, and it is absolutely delicious. I need to try this again, I never had pork so good. Why wouldn’t you eat it, if it doesn’t hurt you?”
“Well, the main reason is that this mincer is enchanted to turn any meat into human flesh. Great for some rituals, not so good in the kitchen.”
So Rick completed his inter-department transfer papers to the background sound of someone noisily making herself throw up outside. He hadn’t really passed the test, but he hadn’t screwed up either. And Malcolm was pretty sure he’d do better, once he was assigned to a different partner.
* * *
Unlocked
Darryl finally got fed up of the old garden shed after he caught his shoulder on a stray nail while taking out the trash. It had been there as long as he’d lived here, and he’d never liked it. It wasn’t what you’d think of as a garden shed; no quaint wood-plank construction here. The structure was ugly sun-bleached concrete, its surface pitted and scarred but still structurally intact. All along Lanchester Road were tiny houses for people struggling on minimum wage, so there wasn’t much of a yard to start with. The shed took up nearly a half of the space Darryl had for his vegetable patch, and the path running the length of the long thin patch of land was probably another third of what was left.
Since he’d moved in, he had wanted to either use the shed or have it torn down. They’d told him that as he was in the ground floor flat, he’d have the use of the yard, which he naturally assumed included the shed too; it had only been after he signed the contract that he found out differently. So for twelve years, he’d struggled to drag the bins out past the tiny grey building once a week, and otherwise tried to ignore it. Now, wrestling with the bin on an uneven part of the path, he’d leaned a little too close to it and the head of a long-rusted nail from the piece of cheap plywood nailed over a window had caught him hard enough to draw blood.
“I’m the one who always takes the bins out,” he moaned to his upstairs neighbour, Mr Leroy, “I’ve got the yard, why don’t I get the shed?”
“I don’t know, young man,” Leroy’s voice droned on, every syllable taking more than a second to emerge, “I always thought it was yours. Do the Alfressons maybe use it for extra storage?” Darryl muttered that he wasn’t sure. He’d thought the voice had sounded more like Leroy’s when he heard someone banging around in there on a late evening soon after he arrived.
So he went upstairs to the attic rooms, a one bedroom apartment that somehow managed to house both Mr and Mrs Alfresson and their three cats. He asked about the shed, and whether they really needed it. He was less certain now; with their cramped living arrangements they could probably make good use of some extra storage space, and he’d heard the silver-haired grandma bemoaning u
ngrateful kids and the bankruptcy of a pension fund a few times.
“Oh, no dearie, we thought it went with the downstairs flat,” and that was that, except for the offer of a small slice of cake and tea in paper-thin china cups that had just the faintest trace of gold leaf visible in one or two places around the rim.
So next, Darryl went to ask the neighbours at number 194. The concrete box straddled the border of the two properties, leaving a space just wide enough for each to have a pathway and a gate onto the back alley. Between the two gates, there were designated spaces for the houses’ bins (though these could only be left out on the day they were due to be collected, so as not to prevent the residents who had garages from driving up the alley), and the door into the shed itself. It looked like there had been two doors once upon a time, but the one on number 194’s side of the property boundary had two pieces of chipboard nailed to the frame, in much the same style as the windows. He’d assumed that meant they didn’t use their half, but if they’d been knocked through inside it was possible the whole structure belonged to the guys next door.
“I was wondering,” Darryl tried to be as polite as possible with a neighbour who was an inch taller than him but nearly twice as broad across the shoulders, “Do you know who owns the shed at the back of our houses? It seems nobody at our place knows.”
“Nah,” the man’s voice was about as close as you could get to an uninterested yawn while still being comprehensible, “It’d be nice if we had keys, I think us all could keep some stuff there, but I think the ground floor guy in 192 got the only one.” Darryl thanked him and walked away. He’d asked the landlord too, but they couldn’t give him any more information. It seemed nobody knew about the mysterious shed. He would have assumed it was abandoned, and just tried to claim it, if he hadn’t heard voices in there a few times before now.
The door was cheap timber, once painted white but now nearly all the wood was visible. However many years of sunlight had rendered it almost the same colour in any case. The lock was a simple padlock, rusted to the extent that there was no maker’s name visible on it now. With that much corrosion, Darryl wouldn’t have been surprised if he could simply pull it off the hasp. He’d looked at it and thought that plenty of times before, but now he’d asked everyone who might have a legitimate claim on the shed he couldn’t think of any reason not to give it a try. He grabbed the lock and put all of his weight on it. The rough surface of rusted metal dug into his palm, but it didn’t budge.
Next he tried wedging a sturdy pole, a metal shovel handle, into the lock’s shackle in the hope of getting some leverage. This approach earned him an electric shock, probably from static that had built up on the lock somehow, but no other result. The door was a lot tougher than it looked. His next option was to pry free the boards over first the window into his yard, and then the other door at the back. In both cases he found the same obstruction: A wooden frame, to which the chipboard had been nailed, behind which was more solid concrete. He couldn’t see any reason to build a shed like that, but it looked like the odd concrete box didn’t actually have any access other than the single door.
Darryl was a resourceful young man. He tried using a bolt cutter on both the hasp and the lock’s shackle, but couldn’t get any purchase. He tried a hammer to break the lock off, but only managed to get more shocks. So then he decided that the best course of action would be to wait until he heard someone in there again. If someone from down the street had seen an unlocked shed and decided to put a padlock on it, he could be pretty sure that neither he nor his impoverished neighbours would forgive them. He might be waiting a long time, but he didn’t know what else he could do.
It was three years later, he was pulling weeds up from his little vegetable plot. He didn’t really have green fingers, but growing a couple of radishes and a couple of onions reduced the amount of his limited budget that would have to go on supermarket vegetables. He heard footsteps on the gravel in the alley; and then the echoey clanking of someone handling the padlock. Darryl quickly stood up and moved to the end of the path, then peered out into the alley. The lock on his gate had been broken years before, so he was sure he didn’t make any sound.
The man at the shed door was a stranger, looking around cautiously. Darryl ducked back, just hoping he hadn’t been seen. Then he knew this guy was up to no good. Why would you be so furtive, if you had a right to be there? He was well above average height, and not an ounce of fat on him. Not that he was a beanpole, he was probably like two hundred pounds, but every line of his body was pure muscle. The guy was pale too, rare in a neighbourhood of so many half-race kids, and with hair so blond it was almost white. Darryl didn’t know all his neighbours; that was for middle-class people, not an area where so many people had sauntered over to the wrong side of the law through no fault of their own and didn’t want to be known. But he could be sure that if this guy had ever set foot on this street before, he would have heard about it. Designer denim, perfect skin, and muscles that said he spent hours in the gym rather than working; the stranger wasn’t from around here.
Mr Muscles lifted the lock, stared at it for a few moments. He didn’t have a key, then. Not whoever had been using the shed for the last few years, but an opportunist thief. Darryl decided he might as well wait and see what happened. If the guy managed to break in, it would be easy enough to call the police and then he wouldn’t have any trouble dumping whatever was in there. If not, he could just wait until someone with a key came around. The guy looked around again, looked across the doorway, looked up and down the alley. Then he looked at the graffiti on the opposite wall, and read one word out loud. Darryl had never really paid attention, he was too old to care much about the local gangs unless they bothered him, but that set of white-painted letters didn’t make anything even close to a word. It was a demonstration of supremely flexible vocal chords that the guy could even pronounce it.
There was a click, and the lock was open.
Darryl walked closer once the guy was out of sight, totally confused by what he’d just witnessed. It was a voice controlled lock? But with so much rust on the surface, it had to be at least a decade old. That just didn’t make sense, but he was totally sure the pale stranger hadn’t had any kind of key, or even a pair of hairpins.
What he saw through the doorway took his breath away. He’d been expecting some boxes of old junk, maybe a lawnmower or something (which he automatically expected to find in a shed even though nobody round here had space for a lawn). He wasn’t expecting to see rows of shelves, stocked with such a wide variety of items that appeared both expensive and new. He certainly wasn’t expecting the shed to seem larger than the entire yard, larger than his house even. He hadn’t expected it to be illuminated by row upon row of neon lights hanging from a ceiling a dozen yards overhead, or for a significant proportion of its contents to be what appeared to be weapons. Swords, lances, and halberds neatly arranged in a rack, and between them many tiny shelves held shotguns, ammunition and even hand grenades.
“Back off,” the stranger glared as they met in the doorway, “This isn’t your business.” He was carrying a backpack now, a suede satchel he hadn’t had before, and there was a rifle slung on a strap around his neck.
“What… what is this?” Darryl knew that his best chance at survival lay with silence, but his mouth had uttered the words before he even realised.
“I’m a good judge of character,” the stranger said, looking him up and down, “You seem like an honest guy, and I could use an extra pair of hands. So yeah, it’s a store room. We call them White Boxes, they’re all over the country, and most times the locals don’t even notice. Checking out the place is the first test to become one of us. But we don’t have time for explanations now. Do you trust your government?” Darryl started nodding almost by reflex, then changed his mind and realised that if they were hiding this kind of thing on his doorstep they didn’t deserve any kind of trust. He shook his head vigorously, and the stranger continued, “Yes then no, good
answer. Trust nobody, not even us. That’s why every box has its key hidden nearby, and there’s no central index of all of them. If there’s a list, it can be compromised by the enemy. Now, grab a weapon, whatever you know how to use. Silver bullets are on aisle nine, plated blades are probably in the back corner. Don’t forget to lock up after you.”
His head spinning with all the new information, Darryl finally entered his shed. He didn’t know what he was getting into, but he was certain this would make him feel alive in the way that a zero-hour shelf stacking job never could. He had no regrets.
* * *
Concerto
Alain first found the concert hall when roaming the town. His dad was drunk again, and Alain was old enough now to be a valid target if he made noise or fidgeted or anything else that would annoy the old man. On those days, he wandered the streets and hung around in shops, sometimes meeting up with his friends if they were out. He didn’t want to prompt any confrontation if he could avoid it, because while he was bigger than he used to be he still only came up to his dad’s elbow height.
It was rare for Dad to be that drunk before lunch, though. The interesting parts of town were pretty quiet, so he ended up taking a different walk. Through one of the parks, behind the community football field, he walked through the woods. He was surrounded by trees, but the overall impression was of space; light streaming through everywhere it got a chance. And then beyond the woods, the running boy found something he would never have expected.
An open field, from which all the surrounding buildings were hidden. There were woods on two sides, and just a rise in the ground hiding anything in the other directions. The grass came to his mid thighs, and even though it was nearly noon there was enough dew left to make his trousers damp. And right there, in the middle of the field, was a piano.