Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black)

by R. M. Ridley

  Jonathan took a sip of his tea and added, “Hell, even the horoscope had been automatically downloaded from some online site. So, I got nowhere.”

  Jonathan noticed Bao emerge from the kitchen with his order of Singapore noodles. His stomach growled and he began to suspect it may be formulating plans of jettisoning from his body just to get the food all that much sooner.

  “Drink your tea, Wendell. Try to relax. We are going to figure what’s behind this. We just have to come at it from every possible angle.”

  Bao placed the giant plate of richly aromatic noodles before Jonathan and turned to Wendell.

  “Would you like anything, sir?”

  Wendell shook his head and mumbled, “No, thank you.”

  “Eat, Wendell. There’s nothing to be gained by not eating. I need you healthy and alert.”

  “I really don’t feel—”

  “He’ll have the dumplings, Bao,” Jonathan said, cutting Wendell off. “No one can resist your dumplings. Put them on my tab.”

  “I couldn’t make you pay,” Wendell protested.

  Bao, knowing Jonathan too well, ignored Wendell’s objection and headed back for the kitchen, writing on his order pad.

  “Don’t worry about paying for the dumplings; they’ll be part of the expenses I’m going to bill you for after this is all dealt with anyway. Right now, just worry about eating them.”

  Wendell acquiesced with a slow nod and lifted the mug of tea to his lips.

  Jonathan didn’t stand on ceremony, or try pretending to be polite. He dug into his plate of Singapore noodles with the gusto of a starving dog. He had been waiting for this order since Wendell had knocked on his office door and refused to risk fate by not eating now.

  After swallowing his third giant mouthful, Jonathan sipped from his tea and finally broke the silence slumbering between him and his client.

  “All right, Wendell. As it stands, I got nothing. So, we need to go back to basics.”

  Wendell nodded, and Jonathan began to think the motion might just be Wendell’s default reaction to someone talking to him.

  “Look, there is a reason this is happening. Now seeing as I can’t trace the magic, let’s go for the person behind it.”

  Jonathan took another forkful of food, allowing Wendell time to process the idea that there really was a ‘someone’ behind this.

  “To do this to you, the party involved would definitely be upset, but odds are they don’t actually want to harm you. I don’t think anyone able to do this—however they are doing it,” Jonathan added, jabbing his fork into the pile of noodles, “would bother with psychological torture before actually killing you.

  “So, we’re looking for someone in your life who’s upset enough to mess with you, happy to cause your life to fall into shambles, but not a homicidal manic.”

  Jonathan took a moment to eat another mouthful of his belated lunch, hoping something would pop into his client’s mind. When it became clear nothing had, he went on.

  “We need to be looking at all possibilities here: ex-girlfriends, co-workers—maybe ones passed over for promotion either by you or in favor of you, maybe ex-employees you fired or whose job you now hold. Maybe you inherited money someone else thought should go to them, even?

  “It may not seem like much and the person doing this may, outwardly, act as though everything is just fine. To you they may appear normal, while inside they are a mass of seething, hungry leeches feeding on an anger which has culminated in this act against you.”

  Jonathan stuffed more noodles into his mouth. He had stumbled on to a possible, though very unlikely, scenario. If someone with latent psychic powers retained a hatred for Wendell, they might be the cause of his problems.

  If, in the deep recess of this individual’s subconscious, they wished Wendell dead, while on a more conscious level shied from such thoughts, the dichotomy of emotion could be manifesting as the threats.

  The buried psychic power linked with the repressed desire could affect things around Wendell while leaving no residual energy or traces of magic.

  The theory was more than just a long shot, however; it equaled hitting a marble from a hundred miles away with a BB gun. In all his years, he had never found actual proof of psychic powers.

  Every time Jonathan had been involved with investigating a ‘psychic,’ the individuals in question were actually using arcane-based powers. In the majority of the cases, the ‘psychic’ turned out to be a witch who had no idea what they were really doing.

  Even being theoretically possible, manipulating the physical world to such an extent would take a psionic strength that Jonathan had never even read about.

  “Sorry,” Wendell said, and Jonathan knew by paying attention to his own thoughts, instead of his client’s, that he had just missed something.

  Jonathan had many bad habits, some of which he tried to lose. The difficulty, however, lay in the amount of time he spent alone.

  “I’m sorry, Wendell, I got lost in a train of thought,” Jonathan admitted. “Just entertaining a plausible explanation. Well, maybe not plausible. Feasible would be a better term for it. Let me stew it over for a while, though. Right now, if I let it out of my head, and expose it to the light of reality, I fear it will burn away completely.”

  Jonathan waved his hand to dispel the confusion his own words created. “Anyway, I missed what you said, so if you wouldn’t mind?”

  Wendell lowered his head and frowned a little, but said, “Of course. However, all I said was that I couldn’t think of anyone that fit any of those descriptions. I haven’t been promoted in over five years, and any long term romantic relationships have been brought to a close by the woman involved; not by me.”

  Jonathan added, ‘jilted woman,’ as a maybe to his mental list.

  He knew women just well enough to know that even if they ended the relationship, it didn’t mean it wasn’t the guy’s fault it failed.

  There could be a woman out there still in love with Wendell, yet hating the poor shmuck for not doing whatever she had expected him to do. Jonathan would check into that one deeper. He earmarked it in his brain and set it aside.

  Wendell continued. “The last thing I inherited was a nice urn filled with my mother’s remains and her silverware—which I’ve never used.”

  With the mention of remains, Jonathan put down his fork and, leaning on the table, asked, “Wendell, have you experienced any feelings of cold, or do the hairs on the back of your neck keep standing up?”

  Not all ghosts manifest with a temperature differential, so it failed as a surefire way to identify a spectral presence in his life, but the possibility of Wendell being haunted, quite possibly by his mother, remained quite real. Those sorts of relationships can be very strained, dysfunctional, and turbulent.

  “Uh, cold?”

  “Yes, a chill—not necessarily when you were getting the predictions, but any unexplained chills?”

  “Not, uh . . .” Wendell hesitated.

  Jonathan felt his pulse speed up, but then Wendell shook his head.

  “No, not as I could say so. Why?”

  “Sometimes hauntings manifest as temperature drops.”

  “You think . . .” Wendell looked into his mug of tea. “You think I may be haunted?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Jonathan admitted, although if he were honest with himself, it didn’t seem likely.

  Jonathan had been able to see ghosts his whole life and he had seen nothing while Wendell had used the Magic 8-ball.

  “Look, Wendell, I’m stumped. Nothing’s making sense here, a ghost being able to do this is theoretically possible, so I’m just grabbing at anything that might fit, any ‘could be’ as it were. A haunting is possible.”

  As Bao arrived to deliver Wendell’s dumplings, Jonathan took the moment to once more quell the beast growling in his gut.

  Wendell regarded the plate before him with something akin to dismay. After a moment, he gave a barely discernible shrug, picked up his kn
ife and fork, cut into a dumpling, and inserted a piece between his lips.

  A moment later, as Jonathan had predicted, Wendell began eating heartily, which took one worry about his current client off Jonathan’s shoulders.

  Both of them ate in silence for several minutes until Wendell paused and, placing the speared third of a dumpling back on the plate, looked at Jonathan.

  “You think it’s my mother, don’t you?”

  “Pardon?” Jonathan queried in an attempt to perhaps discourage Wendell from going down that thought path, or at least buy more time to come up with a good way to respond.

  “You asked about the cold, the haunting, after I told you I had inherited my mother’s ashes, see?”

  “Yeah, it’s true. I did.”

  Jonathan took a sip of his now-cold tea, but Wendell wasn’t so easily dissuaded from the line of questioning. Clearly some mommy issues there, and Jonathan couldn’t see a way around the topic, especially if he wanted to get to the bottom of this.

  “Yes. All right, Wendell, that was where my thinking left me. It’s possible—”

  “I loved my mother and she loved me. I tended to her in her last days, see? I scattered her ashes over the river from her favorite spot, the spot where she and my father used to go all the time when they dated. I sprinkled her ashes there as she wanted, just like she’d done for my father.”

  “Damn,” Jonathan despondently cursed before he topped up his tea.

  “Damn what?” Wendell inquired hesitantly.

  “It’s highly improbable your mother’s haunting you if you’ve scattered her ashes, especially if you dumped them into running water. It is possible but unlikely.” He ran his hand through his hair. “But still, damn—that’s one more off the list of possible causes for these threats, or taunts, or whatever they are.” Jonathan stabbed at his noodles, annoyed by the lack of leads or answers he had.

  Usually he had something to run down, some clue or sign, but Wendell’s case had left him barking up empty trees everywhere he turned. Every time he thought he’d caught a glimpse of the perpetrator, it turned out to be nothing but the flicker of light as bird shit landed on his shades.

  They finished the meal in silence and Bao took their plates away. At Jonathan’s request, he brought another small pot of fresh tea to the table with the bill and, as always, cellophane-encased fortune cookies.

  Jonathan refilled each of their cups, picked up the bill, and slid one of the cookies towards Wendell.

  He hadn’t thought about the action; it was just an automatic gesture. If he had thought about it, Jonathan would have chosen the same course of action. He just would have been better prepared for the outcome.

  Jonathan ripped the plastic from off his own cookie, broke it in two, and pulled the two pieces apart, popping the half that didn’t contain the paper fortune into his mouth. He chewed the lightly almond-flavored dessert and then took a sip of his tea.

  He took out his wallet and, as he rummaged for cash, asked Wendell if he had ever participated in a séance, performed a tarot reading, played on a Ouija board, or even attended a psychic fair.

  When Wendell didn’t answer, Jonathan glanced up and the look on his client’s face stopped him cold.

  Wendell held the cookie in his hand, but to look at his face you would have thought it a writhing asp. He seemed to neither possess the power to peel the wrapper from the cookie, nor the fortitude to fling it from him.

  Wendell’s eyes betrayed the strain under which his soul labored.

  The man had been happy living his mundane and boring life. He’d had routines, schedules, and known quantities. All of it had changed overnight and his mind had dealt with as much as it was willing to process.

  By opening the cookie—a cheap confectionary and staple of North American culture—and finding another fortune of death, tailored specifically for him, Wendell would be pushed beyond the rational.

  He had come to the point where, with one action, there would be no returning to his old life. This was the metaphorical straw. The humane act would have been to take the thing away, but Jonathan didn’t. What mattered at this junction was the outcome, not the procedure.

  “Open it, Wendell. Get it over with.”

  Lamenting his fate with a single sigh, Wendell’s shoulders sagged further, something Jonathan hadn’t thought possible.

  Wendell pulled the plastic wrapper apart and shook the fortune cookie onto his hand.

  He stared at it for a moment before closing his hand around it, crumbling the confectionary coating. Opening his hand, Wendell allowed the cookie pieces to fall onto his saucer and, without reading it, passed the slip of paper to Jonathan.

  He accepted the fortune, but saw, even having forgone reading the message, just anticipating its content had Wendell shaken up. The man’s eyes had once more gained the lost look that haunted them when he first came to Jonathan’s office.

  Jonathan schooled his face to show no reaction as he lowered his eyes to read the message. Printed on the strip of paper was the statement: ‘Even the most resolute man reaches the end of their journey—yours is near.’

  Jonathan put the paper on the tabletop where it curled in on itself. He picked up the half of his cookie from which the end of his fortune poked provocatively.

  Jonathan tugged the paper free and pushed the uneaten portion aside, no longer interested in its sweetness. His fortune read: ‘A strong person understands how to withstand substantial loss.’

  For a moment, Jonathan accepted the possibility that this fortune, too, had somehow been tailored for him alone. He wondered if whatever had affected the fortune in Wendell’s cookie had also impacted those around it.

  Usually what he got in a fortune cookie from The Lucky Monkey amounted to no more than the standard drivel like: ‘Success is a journey, not a destination,’ or ‘Your ideals are well within your reach,’ and even ‘All will go well with your new project.’ The fortune in his hand now felt more personalized, more real.

  But then, Jonathan told himself, it could be a fluke . . . nothing more than being too keyed to the interpretations, more hyper-attuned to the situation.

  His rational voice pointed out that his earlier introspection, added to Wendell’s prediction, had simply skewed his perspective.

  Difficult to tell for certain, either way. He had to file the question away for the moment as something to mull over later, when he was alone.

  “Stay here; finish your tea. I’ll be right back.”

  Jonathan crossed the room to where Bao stood talking with an elderly couple settling their bill. He hung back a few paces until the couple had exited and then approached the front counter.

  In a lowered voice he asked, “Bao, did you start using a new company for your fortune cookies?”

  “No, same cheap crap like always. Bland taste and pointless predictions just like what westerners expect. I don’t want to confuse or distance customers.”

  “Crap,” he muttered.

  “Why? What is wrong?”

  “My client is having some . . . issues, regarding predictions and he just got a cookie with an unfortunate message. I guess I hoped something was different with your order this time.”

  Bao stood up straight, his lips came together in a thin line, and he headed towards Wendell’s seat. Glancing back at Jonathan, he gestured and said, “Come. Come. Show me fortune.”

  Jonathan followed with a sigh—he hated distressing Bao. Wendell stared into the container of tea clasped in his long-fingered hand and Bao gave him a start when he spoke.

  “Most sincere apology, sir. Mr. Alvey says you got bad fortune.”

  “It’s not your fault, I’m quite sure,” Wendell said, looking at Bao. “I wouldn’t get worked up over it, see? I’m sure Mr. Alvey would say the same thing. Right, Mr. Alvey?”

  “I agree the likelihood of it being your fault is miniscule, Bao. My client is having trouble with this sort of thing in general, which is why he has become my client.”

 
“Show me—show me fortune,” Bao insisted as his English started to break apart under the duress and his accent thickened with worry.

  Regretting having involved Bao in the matter, Jonathan picked up the small strip of paper from Wendell’s cookie and passed it over.

  Bao nearly had an apoplexy. He began to apologize profusely, moved on to state that the meal was on the house, and then swore he had no idea how such a terrible thing could have happened.

  Jonathan wasn’t going to nay-say a free meal. It wouldn’t be the first one he’d had from The Lucky Monkey. He ordered from them no less than once a day, often more, and had for years. The only time he ate any other food, really, was during the occasional times when he placed himself under the care of the good people at St. Dymphna’s.

  Ever since he had first been admitted, involuntarily as a ward of the court, Jonathan looked upon St. Dymphna’s Institute of Mental Health Facilitators as a retreat of sorts.

  Manipulating a system like that was actually quite easy, with a real and serious reason to do so and the reason isn’t an actual mental condition.

  Having finally been deemed safe to both society and himself, he had been released, time served, from his first significant stint in that facility without any hard feelings towards the institution or those who worked in it.

  He had even retained his ability to enjoy Jell-o, just about the only thing St. Dym’s seemed to think of as dessert.

  After his initial stay, Jonathan used it as a way to drop off the face of the earth when such an action became necessary. If he needed a place to get away from being chased by a herd of nightmares, or an angry chthonic cult, or even the day to day drudgery of doing nothing, St. Dym’s was the place.

  He had been contemplating whether or not he would need such an escape just the other day, after he had sent those corporate zombies to a restful death and had been forced to wonder just how upset the company behind them might be.

  St. Dym’s also served as the only place he could go when he found himself drained dry and tapped to the very core of his bones after too many nights summoning up the power to fuel spells and enchantments.