Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black)

by R. M. Ridley

It was his sanctuary. The one place he could regain a balance with an addiction that left him cradled in warm pudding while sharks tore chunks from his flesh.

  For him it remained the quiet space where he could battle with a need deeper than breathing, fucking, and smoking combined. A place to face himself, while riding a lustful high that should be reserved for ancient gods with hidden faces and bloody hands.

  The changing of Bao’s speech cadence brought Jonathan back to the here and now. It seemed offering a free meal and his most sincere, heartfelt apologies wasn’t going far enough for the restaurant owner regarding this matter.

  He swore to them both separately and together that he would stop his business transactions with the particular company who had supplied him with those cookies. He said he would find another supplier—one who took the job seriously and was staffed by solemn, dedicated people.

  Jonathan couldn’t let Bao carry on any further.

  Not only was his distress and attempts at unwarranted reconciliation beginning to make his other customers worried, Jonathan knew damn well the cookie manufacturer had nothing to do with Wendell getting his fortune. He knew that fortune had not only never been shipped from any cookie company, it had also never even been received by Bao’s restaurant.

  Jonathan assured Bao switching companies was unnecessary, but only defused the situation by quickly and quietly explaining the issue that had brought Wendell Courtney to Jonathan.

  Bao, being a clever devil, immediately told Jonathan he must follow him to check the other cookies. He said perhaps it would help Jonathan solve Wendell’s problem.

  Jonathan thanked Bao and, making sure his client would be all right alone for a couple moments more, followed the restaurant owner.

  Bao led him past the swinging door and into the secret, steaming world of the kitchen, where he showed Jonathan the bin full of fortune cookies.

  Jonathan took one look at the pile and knew he’d find nothing irregular there. Instinct, mixed with the magic eating away at his self-control, was enough to know it.

  Jonathan also knew Bao, though, and Bao would worry until assured that the rest of his customers would only get the banal predictions they were supposed to.

  Jonathan sighed. One day, and he’d already had to twice rip the scab off the wound that was his addiction. This case was going to be a bitch.

  First, he grabbed a random cookie from the bin, tore off its wrapper, and broke it open. Jonathan tugged out the slip of paper and after reading ‘Happiness was the best gift one could give,’ he passed it to Bao.

  The older man hummed, nodded almost sagely, then looked to Jonathan, apparently to see why he hadn’t started doing his thing yet.

  Realizing he wasn’t going to be getting out of it, Jonathan began to rub his ring and middle finger against each other. He decided on a Mayan incantation to show the presence of ill omens and evil intent.

  As he summoned, the ripe and pulsing life of pure energy rushed through his veins. His mind expanded in a whirlwind of sparks and his flesh sung in unison with a universe hidden in ultra-violet. The power of the White Dragon thrummed in him.

  A garish, viscous orange liquid began to seep out of the pores of Jonathan’s fingers and wrap itself around their length. The stuff then began to flow and swirl, like a length of rapids in miniature. He dipped his fingers into the container of cookies, glad of the individual wrappers, and began to slowly turn the contents widdershins.

  After a moment or two, the orange slowly lost its vivid color and faded, an ember turning to ash. Only a few flakes of what looked like copper dust remained in the end.

  “Nothing there,” Jonathan informed Bao. “Just give the container a shake and the flakes will fall to the bottom. They’re not harmful, taste vaguely like flowers actually.”

  “I have tasted some unpleasant flowers, Mr. Alvey.”

  “I was thinking roses, but . . .” He shrugged.

  “But no other customer will get cookie with fortune like your friend?”

  “He’s a client. But no, no one else will get anything but the usual.”

  “Thank you,” Bao said and then looked askance at the fortune cookies. “Sorry it did not help.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll figure this out, Bao.”

  The older man nodded as though Jonathan’s statement was a given.

  Jonathan went back out through the swinging doors with the steam of the kitchen clinging tenaciously to him. He sat down across from his client once again.

  Wendell questioned the outcome of the excursion with a single raised eyebrow. Jonathan merely shook his head slightly.

  The sigh Wendell gave in response bothered him. Jonathan didn’t like his clients to feel out of luck, or options. Although Jonathan steeped in frustration, he wasn’t out of hope yet. He had over forty-eight hours to find answers, assuming the threat was actually real.

  It still remained quite possible the whole thing was a hoax, a sick joke, or cruel retribution for an unknown slight. Should that be the case, then he had even longer to track down the sick individual who thought carrying out the concept had been a good idea.

  Jonathan still hadn’t made up his mind as to just which it was: real threat or simple mind tamper. He didn’t have enough information to know so far, but either way, Jonathan wasn’t willing to fret about his client’s safety just yet.

  If real . . . well, if real, Jonathan had one good day to stop whatever was behind it. If worse came to worst, he would take Wendell to a random hotel, get a room on a upper level floor where they could watch over-priced movies and eat food pre-purchased from the Lucky Monkey.

  He would keep Wendell from the windows and cover the place in wards and sigils of safety and obfuscation. They would simply sit tight until the ill-fated day had slid into the next.

  An end game solution wasn’t going to give his client the help he needed right now, however.

  Jonathan didn’t know what to do with, or for, Wendell’s current problem. He could see no real need to have him watched at this stage, nor could Jonathan think of any reason to make the man hang around. He just didn’t need him for anything at this point in the game.

  However, the whole ‘death threat’ deal made it seem in poor taste to simply brush his client off. Even Jonathan could figure that one out, and he knew he wasn’t the most compassionate or empathetic of creatures.

  He wasn’t in a good place and everything tasted like ash, until he finally had Bao bring him some saké. After a couple shots to fight back the need having risen from just one spell, to bring his mind back to earth, and to ease the aching in his bones from having hauled the energy through himself, he could think again. The Dragon Black still held him in its teeth, but he could work.

  He considered other questions to ask his client and alternate ways to approach them. Eventually, he regained his equilibrium and began to press Wendell for details he hoped might later in the investigation reveal themselves to be important.

  That killed twenty minutes.

  Finally, he could do nothing more for his client except send him home with instructions to get as much rest as he could. Jonathan told Wendell to pick up some sort of sleeping aid on his way home, if he thought he would need it.

  “Sleeping pills, booze . . . whatever is going to work for you, Wendell. It won’t do anyone any good if you’re up all night worrying, stressing yourself out. The human body needs rest. So, whatever it takes, get it.

  “I’ll call you in the morning, but not too early, so don’t get yourself worked up if it’s after ten and there’s no word from me yet.”

  After Wendell left, and he had made sure Bao was all right, Jonathan decided to go home.

  A light fog caressed the buildings and abandoned street, transforming the grit and brick into ethereal mirages. Jonathan had often found, however, ethereal was a whitewash word thrown on something awful, flesh eating, and multi-limbed to make it good for bedtime stories.

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and stood in the doorwa
y a moment. He scanned the dark, obscured spaces between the buildings, the cars parked on the road, and the windows—both those glowing against the murky night and those dark, empty spaces like the picked-clean sockets of a head left for crows to squabble over.

  When paranoia and precaution had been satisfied, and Jonathan was assured no one watched him, he made his way down the street towards his apartment.

  He lived in what had once been a multi-floored warehouse at the end of the block. The third-floor apartment featured a single wall of windows providing a view down on the street which he now walked.

  Jonathan had chosen the place because of that important aspect. He could watch his office from his apartment and decide if he actually felt like going to work.

  If one or more individuals of indiscernible species had gone into the office building, but hadn’t come out again, he would instead decide to spend such a day at the auto salvage yard his friend, Ralph Madden, owned.

  Jonathan made enemies. It was part and parcel of the private investigator business. When you held the dubious position of being the only private dick and practitioner in the city, the number of enemies tended to rise dramatically, as did the dangers that came your way.

  Jonathan knew no other way, though. He’d been what he was for too long to stop. Even if he retired from the business, he couldn’t stop. The enemies he had made wouldn’t forget he had shafted, screwed, and sold them out, just because he hung up his hat for good.

  And saying you were no longer a practitioner amounted to saying you were no longer a butcher just because you washed the blood from your hands. Once you started using, once you saw the world for what it was and knew the things that went bump in the night also slithered, bit, and conjured, it made it rather hard to take a desk job at the local public works department.

  The use of magic was a drug.

  If you pulled energy from within—or someplace deeper—cascading it through yourself, used your own atoms as both power source and conduit, there was no way it could not change you.

  Channeling such energy through your physical body actually changed the chemical balance in your brain. New proteins were built. Synapses fired differently. Peculiar compounds formed. Brain waves became altered. Once they changed, they never reverted back. No methadone existed for magic. Once you used, you walked a razor-fine line of abuse or abused.

  The Dragon Black ate you up inside and then replaced what had been there with something else. Eventually, nothing of the original you resided in the flesh, only the thing that got drawn along with the magic summoned by, and through, you.

  If you were one of the lucky ones, you died a slow, wasting death from the final stages of your very self being replaced. If not, then you became something inhuman. Something housed in flesh, moved not by a soul but the energy which had fed your magic. Powerful but brittle.

  The first time Jonathan had seen for himself one of these things for himself, it had scared the shit out of him. He had checked in to St. Dym’s the next day and had gone straight in their care. It had lasted just shy of three weeks. The longest he had ever gone clean before or since.

  The next time he’d faced one of the abominations, he had killed it.

  Jonathan held no illusions; he knew how it would end for him. This wasn’t like smoking where you pushed the reality of the coffin nail and the scary big C behind a curtain and said ‘not me.’

  He used and thus would be used up—end of story. All he could do was try to stay on top of it for as long as he might. Walk the line and hope not to fall. He’d already made Ralph promise to finish him off in the end—no matter what form that end took.

  Late at night, when haunted by visions of the last moments of his father’s life, Jonathan would hope he would be allowed a slow painful death. Sometimes, when he felt optimistic, he thought maybe the job would catch up with him before the using did.

  He entered his dark apartment but didn’t bother with the lights for the same reason he had walked and left the car in front of the office building, so he didn’t alert anyone to his presence. Better to let someone—a couple zombie thugs for example—think he remained in the office working late, than know where he called home.

  There was just enough light, even with the fog, from the bank of windows for him to navigate his Spartan space. Jonathan thought briefly about calling his friend, Mary, to ask about the tarot cards displayed in the fortune machine, but only briefly.

  He grabbed a few beers from the fridge and set all but one on the floor beside him, as he settled into his chair facing the windows. He opened the first beer and looked at the thickening fog.

  “Wendell. What the hell have you done?”

  Jonathan woke at nine-thirty the following morning. He would have just rolled over and buried his head under the covers, if it weren’t for the fact that he had a client.

  A client for whom, though he had spent hours working the case, he’d accomplished nothing for except feed him dinner and give him the advice to get plastered.

  Jonathan’s bones felt like they were filled with broken glass syringes and a cold sweat filmed his skin —he felt like a dead fish’s eye.

  He clearly should have drunk more.

  After getting out of bed and finding trousers and a shirt, Jonathan went into the kitchen and took the last bottle of beer from the fridge. He spun the top into the sink and wandered to the front window. A thin layer of snow had dusted everything during the few hours he had slept. The street showed nothing more than puddles now, and on the sidewalk most of the snow had been trampled to extinction.

  Jonathan shuddered. Every year, for the last five, he had hoped global warming would finally do something in his favor and make this year the one he didn’t have to contend with frozen bits of dirt drifting down from the toxin-laden skies.

  Heaving a sigh, Jonathan turned away from the window and drank his breakfast. He’d stayed up for quite a while thinking about Wendell’s problem, trying to figure out the what and how, which eluded his powers of investigation. He had finally gone to bed with a spinning head, which had nothing to do with the beers and everything to do with his lack of answers.

  He had promised Wendell he would phone, but he couldn’t recall why now that morning had arrived. Jonathan had meant it as a reassurance to his client—he didn’t feel very reassuring. Admitting to the poor guy that he still hadn’t found a clue didn’t seem helpful, and the only other thing floating in his head—‘Keep calm and carry on’—proved to be of little help.

  Jonathan downed the last of the beer and set the bottle on the counter. He took his coat from the kitchen island where he’d tossed it the night before and left the apartment.

  The day was calm and, without the wind of the day before, warmer, but it didn’t make Jonathan any happier to see the white dust everywhere. He made his way to his office building thinking of what he could say to Wendell when he called.

  In his distraction over Wendell’s peculiar predicament, Jonathan got caught unaware. His mind, running over and over what few facts he had regarding the case, led him to slip up.

  When he swung open his office door, he suddenly remembered the one reason to lock it behind him—if he found it unlocked when he arrived, he’d know it had been tampered with.

  Two strong grips locked themselves on his upper arms as soon as he entered. Jonathan found himself lifted from the ground, his feet dangling uselessly.

  Truthfully, a couple things came to mind, but kicking a zombie, especially ones as barely reanimated as these two, was an exercise in futility. It would be a better use of one’s time to try and convince a statue to move out of your way by reasoning with it, than to inflict pain on reanimated flesh.

  It wasn’t the zombies he found interesting in this situation, however.

  The man who resembled a weasel wearing a tacky suit seemed the more likely threat. Hell, the horrible, light blue suit itself constituted a threat. Jonathan assumed his moment of discomfort had been brought to him courtesy of his involvement
with Wendell. He looked forward to finally gaining some insight. Unfortunately, his hopes dashed against the rock of reality as soon as the man, who looked like he’d raided a Southern evangelist’s closet, spoke.

  “Mr. Alvey, my company doesn’t appreciate the destruction of its property.”

  Oh crap, Jonathan thought. Apatedyne. Again. But he smiled all the same and said, “Well, then, perhaps you should have ensorcered them better. It seems they mistook your order to deliver pamphlets as an order to deliver punches. A slip of the tongue in the original resurrection cerem—”

  A gut-busting blow to his stomach from the zombie holding his right arm stopped Jonathan from finishing his witty comeback.

  “Apatedyne has sent me here to inform you that, not only do you owe us for three of our ‘second life’ employees, but we feel the potential monies we will no longer receive from certain parties should also be reimbursed.”

  “You know what they say about water and stones,” Jonathan managed to cough out.

  “Oh, I don’t think you understand, Mr. Alvey. We will get the money from you. And should you think about trying to cast a spell to aid you at this moment, my associates will crush just enough of your ribs to be sure you live, but extremely painfully.”

  “Right. I’ll be sure to remember that.”

  “Now, let’s discuss payment plans.”

  “Sure.”

  “We were thinking,” said the weasel, opening up a leather-bound ledger, “four hundred a week, for the next year, should bring us all a satisfactory end to this unfortunate incident.”

  Jonathan couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You possess a most remarkable sense of humor, Mr. Alvey.”

  “Yeah, you could say that. But I think your joke was really funny.”

  The punch this time came from the ‘second life’ employee on his left.

  Jonathan wondered how many more he could take before something really did rupture. At least they weren’t punching his kidneys. He hated pissing blood.

  “We expect the first payment at the end of the week and will send someone around to collect it. I advise you be here. You wouldn’t want me and my associates to come down for another little talk, now, would you?”