Supernatural Tales 15

by Walter, Adam

  One particular piece of paper caught my attention. It was an envelope, pinned to the corkboard but partially obscured by a red-reminder from the telephone company held up by the same pin. I unpinned the bill, and the envelope, and re-pinned the bill to the corkboard. I held a white A4 windowed letter addressed to Carla. It was unopened. At the top of the envelope, above the window, partially obscured by the stamps and the postmark, was the name of the organisation that had sent it.

  In ornate blue writing it said: The Tassenmere Project.

  To Pass the Night

  by Mark Patrick Lynch

  For as long as I’ve known him the only currency Jed Carnegie has never been short of is story. While he can pull his pockets inside out and there’ll be nothing to show but the lining of his nice trousers, he’s not without means. All he needs is breath and opportunity. I never figured motive a consideration.

  “Hey,” he’ll say to the blonde girl behind the hotel counter, “let me tell you about the most extraordinary thing I ever saw…”

  And before you know it, zing!, the blonde’s laughing her cute nose off and the passing bellhop’s levered the manager out of his cubby-hole to come hear just the greatest story. Drinks in the bar follow, it gets late, and suddenly a room’s scrambled together for Jed free of charge. Everyone in the building has a better night for him being there. The busy street outside hushes, the rain falls like the verses of a lullaby. Take a moment to check and you’ll see that even the cats are smiling.

  Substitute the hotel room for almost anything you can imagine and you’ve an idea how Jed conducts his life. He’s talked himself countless free lunches, the most exquisite fountain pen you ever saw, and rooming in the seafront house he caretakes for a pair of gay bankers who spend eleven months out of twelve in Zurich. Even the clothes on his back came out of a doozy of a tale he spun to an exclusive gentlemen’s tailor.

  It’s not a way I could live, and that’s one of the reasons Jed and I aren’t sleeping together anymore. The stress over where I'd find my next meal would nuke me three weeks into any kind of crazy life we might make. I like a monthly cheque with my name on it, one that’s large enough to buy me Sandytreats every once in a while. Singing for breakfast, lunch, and supper is not a part of who I am.

  But Jed and I go back to something sweet, and throughout our brief relationship there wasn’t a moment he didn’t turn the world to glass and show me its hidden workings – all through the simple device of a well-observed phrase and funny sentence.

  Listen. Ever lie on your back and have the sky flip upside down in your head, so it feels like you’re about to fall off the earth and drop through clouds into eggshell blue forever? That’s what one of Jed’s tales can do to you.

  While we’re no longer together in a physical sense, we’re still close. We know if ever we’re in trouble or need someone to whine to about how unfair life can be, all we have to do is pick up the phone and start talking, or else come knock on the door, where there’ll be a sympathetic ear and a warm cup of coffee at the ready.

  Which is how in the late hours of Sunday night we came to be sitting in my rooms overlooking the harbour, nursing steaming mugs of Hawaii blend and smoking a brand of French cigarettes I’d never heard of before. When Jed arrived as pale as an ejected sheet of cartridge paper, his normally exuberant face hollow and ill, he waved a flush of those cigarette packs at me like admission tickets and didn’t need to say a word. I pulled him into my apartment, hugged him tight, and led him to the sofa. Then went straight to work at the percolator.

  I was thinking it was something terrible like a bad medical diagnosis. All the names of the long and complicated diseases a person can get dropping into my head as if they were flying bombs, detonating alongside the short and terrifying syllables of illnesses already scattered around like landmines.

  Please make it something we can tread through safely, I was praying. Something simple and not terminal. A broken heart. A jealous lover seeking retribution over a stolen partner. Even a gambling debt that needed paying before some heavy with a bent nose came around knocking for collection.

  Anything I could try to repair or nurse him over.

  Jed’s silver Zippo sat between us on the coffee table, catching the low illumination of the lamps. I reached for it now as we took it in turns to light new cigarettes. Jed hadn’t said anything about what was bothering him yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he got to it. And sure enough, after some amiable chitchat skirting the things that really mattered, more coffee and smokes later, we were there.

  “He’s found me again, Sandy.”

  “He has? Okay. So who’s found you, Jed?”

  Jed sighed, nervously blowing a stream of blue smoke into the air, where it swirled about in layers so my ceiling looked like it was decorated in stale marble cake. It wasn’t hard to weigh the fear in his eyes, catch the jumpiness in his blood tonight. If I tell you Jed’s the kind of guy who’ll leave home in the morning and walk through Baghdad without even a ten dollar bill hidden in his socks for emergencies, you’ll understand why I was worried about seeing him so frightened. Whoever the guy who’d found him happened to be, he wasn’t good news.

  “It’s a long story, Sandy.”

  “And that’s ever stopped you before?”

  He smiled, the first sign of anything light touching his face since I’d hauled him in from the hallway a hundred years ago. Now my clock was showing an hour I didn’t normally recognise except in the afternoons and my eyes were prickling with tiredness and cigarette smoke.

  “Ah God… Sandy, Sandy, Sandy.”

  Jed cupped his nearly empty coffee mug as if for warmth or courage.

  He looked drawn out and exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept for days. I waited. He fell back into the cushions, tension leaving him like a balloon that’s lost its air.

  He looked up at me from beneath a crinkled brow.

  “You know, I’ve never told anyone this before.”

  “Someone but me hears it and I want them to be the second person you tell it to, Jed. Seriously.”

  “And you think they’ll believe me?”

  “Tell me it’s true and I promise I’ll do my best to.”

  “We’ll need more coffee.”

  I scooted to go make some.

  When I got back with a couple of steaming mugs, Jed stubbed out his cigarette. And with none of the bravado he usually flourished at such times, he launched into his story, stumbling and tripping over words in a way I’d never known in him before.

  He spoke. I listened. The night outside shifted and turned, the waves rose and fell, the harbour lights bobbed.

  And I tried to believe him; honestly, I did.

  “So what you’re saying, you’re the descendent of Scheherazade. This girl who told a different story each night to the King of Persia, in order to save from getting sent to the executioners by him? And she did this, like, for—”

  “For countless nights. Until the King recognised his own inadequacies mirrored in the actions of the people in her stories, realised what an idiot he was being. Her stories were kind of like parables, and she’d lull him to sleep on the back of them, before he’d chance to have his way with her. It’s what we now know as the Tales of the Arabian Nights. At least, that’s how it’s been remembered. It’s not quite as simple as the book says, though, but it’s got the gist right. I have her blood in my veins. This young storyteller who became the Queen of Persia. It’s a part of me, who I am. Why I can’t hold down a job, have to trade stories for everything I’ve ever owned.”

  He picked up his coffee and grimaced when he found it was cold, returned it to the table.

  “It’s like some sort of curse, Sandy. As if my DNA won’t let anything else work for me. I try hold down a steady job, I get sick. Or something comes along that makes it impossible for me to keep at it. Bad luck after bad luck. Like with my book.”

  Jed had written a children’s book, a collection of funny and enchanting short st
ories that should have been on the same shelf as Dandelion Wine or Tom Sawyer but which sold about six copies and got remaindered to death.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Jed, it’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s just that... Look, I think you believe that you’re descended from her—”

  “I am.”

  “—I mean, truly believe that. But that doesn’t prove you are.”

  He shook out his wrist and the big watch he wore, raised his eyebrows at the time. Some of his nervousness returned.

  “Sandy, my mother told me the story because it was handed down to her. My whole family, you look back at them the best you can, the ones you know about, they’re all the same. Not grafters, not con artists, but itinerant storytellers, every one. And they do okay, you know? Unless they try settle down, make something practical out of their lives. The second they try a career that doesn’t involve talking donkeys out of hind legs, their whole world collapses.”

  Hearing him talking like this surprised me. “You never mentioned your family to me before.”

  “Why would I?”

  “I thought there might be issues.”

  He laughed at that. “Oh yeah, there’re issues all right.”

  “So what’s this to do with this guy who’s found you? What’s it to him?”

  “He’s not strictly a guy.”

  My turn to raise my eyebrows.

  “No, nothing like that. Sandy, he’s a djinn.”

  “A what?”

  “Djinn. A genie, I guess you could say.”

  “As in genie in a magic lamp?”

  “This one, he’s more like from a bottle of Scotch. Imagine a pissed-off version of something out of Aladdin, Robin Williams running crazy and stomping out chaos everywhere he does. All disguised in a slick suit and expensive haircut.”

  I took a long drag on my French cigarette while I thought about it a moment.

  “Okay, Jed, so say I believe this – and I’m not saying you’re lying – what’s it to do with you? Why’s he looking for you of all people?”

  Jed searched the table for a new pack of cigarettes. We’d gone through more than is good for anyone; even the guys in the cancer ward’s terminal lounge would have blanched at our excesses. I flipped the Zippo for him and he leaned forward and carried the cigarette in his lips to the flame, inhaled deeply, releasing thin blue streamers like rocket exhaust through his nostrils, and then he set off.

  “Every few generations one of us, one of my family, gets to tell this demon a story. Goes back to Persia, something that happened after Scheherazade became Queen. Her sister Dunyazade was jealous of her now famous and royal sibling, and through that jealousy was tricked into releasing an ancient djinn from his prison. The only way to stop the djinn rampaging and destroying all the minarets in Persia and beyond was to put him to sleep with a story, so he could dream without fear of the nightmares that’d haunted him when he’d been stoppered up in his lamp – or bottle or whatever.” Jed spread his hands, letting me anticipate the next bit.

  “And of course the only person who had the skills for this was Scheherazade?”

  “Right. She was old by this time, and had wisdom enough to know the right kind of story to keep a demon soundly asleep. But the tale she told dissolved like snow in the desert when she spoke it, and she knew she hadn’t strength to hunt out another. Knowing that the djinn would awake one day, she charged her kin with learning the ways of the storyteller, in case the djinn needed subduing again. And for generations after, that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s my inheritance, the thing my family’s been charged to do for thousands of years.”

  Maybe my confusion had spread to my face, because Jed explained.

  “A lullaby, Sandy. I have to tell a monster a lullaby. Something to rock him to sleep, so that he dreams sweetly for, oh, eighty or a hundred years or whatever. So that he doesn’t have nightmares and set off earthquakes and tsunamis all over the place, bring down the flaming hoards of vengeful angels on top of us or makes the sun go out.”

  His cigarette trembled in his hand.

  “Jed, look, this is—”

  “You want to know how he’s real, how come I know that? Because he found me when I was ten years old, just after my mother died. And he’s been walking the world since. When he saw me, saw I couldn’t tell him any kind of a story to save my own life back then, let alone half the world’s, he said he’d wait, come back and find me when I had a few years on me. So he could get his sleep and the dreams he yearns for. But he told me he wouldn’t wait any longer than he needed to.” Jed rubbed his eyes, tired. “Jesus. I thought I’d have longer than this.”

  “And he’s back now, Jed, expecting you’re ready?”

  He nodded, the haunted look returned.

  “But Sandy, all I know, the rest of my family, the ones who told him his story in the past, they were old. I mean, seriously old. In their seventies at least. They knew more about how to tell a tale than I do. They were poets, could wrap their tongues around all sorts of things. I’ve read about them. My great-grandfather, he rode rolling stock, hopped the trains in the depression. He was some kind of king of the hobos. And in his court, which I’ve always pictured on the back of a freight train, he told the djinn a tale to sweeten him to sleep. That’s the last he was heard of, him and the djinn. Except now the djinn’s back for me. And Sandy, I don’t know what I’m going to tell him. Don’t have a clue.”

  He was crying, tears sliding down his cheeks. No question at all that he believed everything he’d told me.

  I tried to persuade Jed to sleep in my place for the day, stay low if he was worried this djinn was going to find him. I didn’t know how much I believed there was an actual magical demon out of middle-eastern folklore stalking the streets of town, but Jed was shaken up by it enough that I was concerned for him. I wanted him where I could satisfy myself he was safe.

  But Jed said no and tucked away his Zippo and what was left of the French cigarettes, kissed me and thanked me for the night. He wiped his face, hiked up his jacket, and I never saw him again.

  What good our talk did, if any at all, I don’t know. But when he left, some hours after sunrise, when the light played its magic on the water after dawn, he seemed calmer. I thought he was going to be okay. But now I wonder if he felt resigned to a fate as strictly predetermined as the perfect narrative he was hunting.

  “Jed. Stay.”

  “I can’t.”

  Our last words.

  And then he was gone, leaving me without a clue what to think.

  All of which brings me around to this. I saw a man in the street yesterday, a week after Jed left my apartment. At first there was no reason why he should catch my eye, stand out in any way. After all, lots of men inveigle themselves into my hopes or wishes for them.

  But there was something other about this man. He was dark, with wiry hair, searching blue eyes that contrasted oddly with the burnished glint of his skin. He wore a black business suit and seemed untroubled to be standing so perfectly still on such a busy thoroughfare, pretty much like a crazy man might stand in the centre of a crowd fleeing for their lives, unafraid of the jaws of the chasing lion.

  I watched him for a while, my heart suddenly anxious and pounding quickly, and eventually he moved his head, passing his gaze over me, and then was gone. He simply turned around and was swallowed by everyone else, swept away hidden in anonymity. But not before he yawned and I glimpsed the yellow, hooked teeth of a beast, with monstrous incisors and the unmistakable debris of freshly chewed meat littering his gums. For a moment I was terrified he was standing behind me, could swear I felt his breath on my neck. But when I spun around there was nothing, except perhaps a vague scent, something sweet and spicy and warm, like it belonged in the desert. Where he went, I have no idea. If he sleeps or walks the earth still, I don’t know that either.

  All I can tell you is that I suspect he was in search of the curr
ency I always thought my friend Jed Carnegie never seemed short of. I just pray that in this case Jed had enough to satisfy him. Because at night my mind won’t stop racing and tries to piece together the various bits of Jed’s story with what I saw on the street and find a rational explanation for it all. Failing every time.

  So I wait through the long dark hours for the quakes to shake my feet and the skyscrapers to topple and fall for fear he did not.

  Dark Wind Through Brightest Wing

  by Adam Walter

  There once was an old and wealthy landowner whose estate lay in the fertile hill country with one side giving onto the wide river where its diverse crops issued forth into the greater world. The landowner, Saul Timmenson by name, was a hard and at times even cruel man who cared only for those things he owned free of any debt to another and for his authority to say to a man “do this” and have it done.

  Saul had so little tenderness in his heart that when his wife died at a young age and left him with three small boys, he imagined that his sons were forever allied in spirit to their mother, that they were devoted entirely to her memory and felt for him merely resentment. His belief was so absolute that it lent the pernicious idea substance, driving a wedge for all time between him and his children.

  And when the old man lay on his deathbed, a terrible anger rose up in Saul at the thought of his lands falling into the possession of his three sons. This rage was a dark, vicious thing that had waited, long and patiently, for its hour of release.

  When late one spring it became clear that Saul was near death, John, his eldest, sent word to the other sons where they lived in the east. John was a big man, muscular and quiet, a farmer who worked his own fields just to the south of his father’s lands and lived with his wife and children in a cottage less than an hour’s ride from the old family home.

  Benjamin, who arrived first in response to John’s call, was the youngest of the three and a physician. He immediately assumed care of the old man. Saul had demanded this, knowing how much easier it would be to bully his son than the fat, talkative country doctor who had been making regular visits to the Timmenson house for many years, all the while partaking liberally of Saul’s beef and bread and drinking his tea during the day and his liquor at night.