Even then he knew that that didn't quite sum up his understanding of what had happened.
His reaction hadn't just been instinctual.
It had been inhuman.
How would he react to say, a baby crying; or even just annoying chatter on the subway. On one level the thought terrified him, and for this he was glad. On another he was curious. He justified this by asking himself how he could not be, given his new situation. Then it hit him. What had triggered off this entire train of thought. He had been seeing sound! And no matter how else he looked at it, this in itself amazed him.
So had it worked?
Increased agility, eyes a different colour with the ability to see sounds as colour. He thought that the answer was yes. But how did he morph? To change from man to wolf?
That was the question.
He had assumed that it would come quite naturally.
He would have to see the mystic. He would know what to do. Looking at the mess strewn about his apartment he was about to put it out of his mind until later was halfway through the process of putting on his leather coat when he spotted the feather. He was drawn to it immediately, again instinctively, without any rational argument to back up this sudden overpowering fascination.
After a half a minute or so of frantic rummaging through messily arranged clothes in his wooden chest of drawers, he came across a silk handkerchief. He wrapped the feather in this, then for extra measure he placed it in a square wet proof zip-lock bag and placed it at the top of his charcoal grey satchel. That done he snatched the keys from the lock, then stepped out into his buildings staircase, slamming the door behind him. He gave it a quick shove to make sure that it was all secured, then headed for the one place where he knew he could get answers.
Or, at the very least the one place where someone could take him to a place where he could get answers.
The harsh wind of before still remained as did the rain. It felt like a volley of needles upon Marcus’s reddening face, tiny implements of pain which dissolved into the overall wetness upon contact. He turned the collar of his leather jacket upwards, yet the lapels fell short of covering his face and were a poor defence against the natural onslaught which continued as he made his way across the deserted road and onto another sidewalk.
Yellowing light, emitted by overhead street lamps, highlighted his presence at intermittent intervals as he passed below, and he mused upon the cracked paving stones with their marks of discarded gum and cigarette ends. Certainly isn’t the Hollywood walk of fame, he thought to himself.
The mystic lived only a few blocks on the north side however his new found instinct told him he would find her elsewhere, in the British bar some of the yanks liked to frequent, even if she wasn't one of them. Marcus rounded the corner and entered the bar, pub, it’s a pub to these Brits, even if we are in the states.
Marcus entered the Old Salt Public house.
The warm air from the open fire, and heat from bodies pressed tightly together, alongside the old skool blues radiating from the jukebox and the jovial sounds the patrons were making, gave Marcus a sudden sense of well being.
Marcus pushed his way through the throng of drinkers and finally, after many polite excuse-me’s and some apologetic toe stepping he managed his way to the bar, indicating his want for a drink with the brandishing of a bank note.
A pot bellied man, with a receding hairline and smile on his face made his way over. "What’ll be Marcus?" the barman asked a cheery twinkle in his eye.
"Is she in residence tonight, Colin?"
"In her usual spot, although I can see why you had to ask. Can’t see a bloody thing in here with all these drunks crowding out the place," replied Colin, his east London drawl as strong as ever. "Anyway, what’s it to be?"
"A whiskey straight, no ice, and whatever the lady’s having," said Marcus
"The lady’s is a glass of the wine. Red. How do you say that in your native tongue, Marcus?"
"Vin rouge, Colin," replied Marcus.
His French accent had become slightly Americanized since his time in the states; however it was with the smoothness of the French that the words now slipped from his tongue.
He paid for the drinks and again attempted his way through the crowd of drunken revellers, nodding his acquaintance at a few familiar faces as he made his way to the small alcove in the far corner of the room.
"I come bearing gifts." Marcus said to the green eyed girl, who looked up from the day’s newspaper.
"Well, well, well. Seems someone found what he was looking for, eh Marcus?" Faith Emerald practically purred at the Frenchman.
"You can tell? Is it that..."
"Obvious? No, of course not. Did Colin just ask you if you were now a werewolf? No, only to me and I suppose John will know straight away. He’ll be able to answer your other question too."
"How to change? I suppose that’s bloody obvious too?"
"No, actually. I don’t have a clue in Dizor."
"Where the bloody hell is this Dizor anyway?"
"My birthplace actually."
"Oh. Mon due. My apologies."
"Jeez, I’ll never get used to the way you frogs speak," replied Faith before taking a long swallow of her wine. "Marcus, you cheapskate. You could have sprung for something better than the house red."
"Faith, I am of the opinion that as a frog as you so eloquently put it, my taste and judgement of wines exceeds yours so I am in a better position to judge the quality of wines, and were you to drink in an establishment of higher quality you would also find yourself drinking a higher quality of wine. I can however purchase you something different, if that is what the lady desires. Unlike you yanks we frogs have that common decency," said Marcus, a brief look of offence crossing his face, which disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
"Forget it Frenchman, my taste buds will cope with the onslaught. Let’s drink up and go see John."
Marcus watched Faith down her drink, and then eyed his own sitting untouched on the table. Yes, common decency. And a damned sight more patience to boot, he thought to himself.
On the walk to Faith’s, the pair again took up the conversation of the moment. The previous rain had relented, and they jointly dodged puddles as they talked.
"She’s out you know. It happened today."
"She woke from the sleep?"
"Yeah, the drug induced coma. I felt it when she woke up. It won’t be long before we find her."
Marcus was silent for a moment as they rounded a corner.
"How can you be so sure?"
"Look," said Faith.
Up the alleyway lay a dead body, Candy’s first victim since leaving the institution.
"This was her?" marvelled Marcus.
He was already frightened of meeting Candy.
"I know it was. Just like I know my pussy."
"Damn. She doesn’t waste much time."
"She hasn’t spoken to me in about a year, Marc. What do you think she’s going to say when we find her? John says it’ll be fine. But the last time she threatened me."
"A lot can change in a year Faith. Don’t worry."
However, staring at the body, Marcus was worried.
Meanwhile ten blocks away, Candy rounded the corner. It was a long shot that the woman would be there again. But long shots had paid off in the past. She entered the bar.
A new barman stood behind the bar.
Despite her so called fame she felt sure no one here would recognize her. Except hopefully one person. And there she was. Sitting in the corner of the bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Candy noticed for the first time how beautiful the woman actually was.
She took a seat and signalled the barman over.
He approached and Candy sat and wondered what she would like to drink. She had not imbibed alcohol once since her incarceration and she could not decide what she would like.
"Do you do cocktails?"
"Yup. Sure do."
Candy turned to the lady that
sat beside her.
"It's been a long time for me since I had a drink. Can you recommend any thing?"
"Your first drink in nearly two years. I'd go for a tequila sunrise."
Candy smiled at the man and gave the thumbs up sign and the barman nodded and went to fetch the drink. Candy shouted after him to make it two.
"Hello, Candy."
"Hello. Since you got me started do you mind?" Candy indicated the deck of cigarettes that sat atop the table.
"No. Please. I see it worked then."
Candy lit her cig then smiled. "Yeah, I guess you were right. How did you know?"
"I saw it all. Unfolding in front of my eyes. My natural talent works strangely in your dimension."
"What do you mean 'in my dimension'?"
"I'm Dizorian. It's-"
"What is your name?" asked Candy interrupting, completely transfixed.
The woman had the most beautiful green eyes she had ever seen. The only other person who had similar eyes was. . .
"I know what you‘re thinking. She gets them from me. I am Jan; Faith's Mother. I have been... writing about you."
"You said I would be saved. I guess you were right about that? Is there a reason that you're involved with all this. That I'm involved with all this?"
Jan looked down at her drink, then taking a deep breath she began to speak. "Yes. I lost someone once. I lost her to a great evil. Can you imagine loving someone, I mean truly loving and being in love with someone and not being with them for an hour or you want their attention and they're tired and you give them a bit of space to sleep so you don’t see them. I pretend it’s like that. Otherwise I would die. And then it hits me and a bit of me does die. And I cry. And I curse Reckwick. I am sure it was he who killed her, who stole her from me. And Faith Emerald, our daughter. And so I write about you, one day hoping to write the document of his death."
"Can I see what you have written?"
"Of course. I carry them around. This is the L.A DOCUMENTS; I named them after this strange and curious place I find myself in. In truth I almost fell in love with you and at least lust with you. You seemed in these documents, and in my visions, the heroine of some twisted televised drama, the documents like the subtitles."
Candy took the document and looked.
...L.A DOCUMENT 206 #
...Candy should have been a writer. She believes in freedom. And I think she has suffered quite badly in sensing the other side of things, that all isn’t always good just because a life is interesting. She would wonder if she were freer, merely because of the knowledge she possessed, yet said killing was the only true freedom left. There she could change a story for good. Take control. It was a definite, and that’s what she liked...
"Where was I when you wrote that?" asked Candy.
"When you killed the woman in that bathroom."
"Have you ever killed anyone?"
"Many people. In my world it’s more common."
"What happened to your partner? To Faith's mother?"
"She was named after her mother you know. But what happened to her mother. That is a sad story. Do you want to hear it over a few more drinks?"
CHAPTER FOUR
ASTRAL TRAVELING AND THE BIRTH OF THE GREEN EYED GIRL
She is aware of the silence in the room as she wipes the sleep from her eyes.
It had been a cheap clock, all she could afford, and for the first time since buying it she remembers how much she has missed the quietude in the room. The ticking has obviously bothered her on a level she hasn’t been aware of.
Yet on another level she knows this has been her reason for buying the clock in the first place, a way of punishing herself for her lack of achievements, each tocking of the clock symbolic of her life ticking away, slipping through the cracks in time like sand through a comb.
And now the clock has stopped.
What can it mean, she ponders. Can it be a sign that her sanity is to be restored, albeit briefly?
She slips out of bed, neglecting to switch on the lions foot lamp that perches proudly on the Formica unit beside her bed; however through more muscle memory than anything else she picks up the fourteen Lucky Strikes in their dented packet and walks through the open doorway, through the hall and into the kitchen, guided by the light from the sky vent which casts ephemeral shadows that dance menacingly around her varying footsteps, whereby she braces herself for the inevitable electric brightness before flicking the light switch.
The resulting darkness is a surprising if tepid anticlimax.
The fuse has blown.
"Ninth wonder my ass," Faith mumbles to herself as she mounts the step ladder to the fuse switches. She flicks the switch and is rewarded with a warm glow from the kitchen, where she makes her way for the second time since waking.
She switches on the kettle then thinks better of it and unscrews the gin from its resting place on the counter and pours herself a large measure, too large to measure by any metric sense of measurement.
Dangerous to be so inaccurate, she thinks to herself, and with total disregard for her own warning she downs the contents of the glass, pours another tranquil measure, and takes a seat at the table.
She has much in common with the gin, she muses.
Both possess an intrinsic bitterness that has taken time to distil, has fermented into that bitterness with age.
Faith empathizes with the gin.
She can relate.
The telephone begins to ring, and Faith snatches up the receiver and cradles it to her ear.
She does not give the caller time to speak.
"Hello, this is Faith and I’d like to say something."
There is silence at the other end of the line.
Faith continues. She has had something on her mind since waking and now she has found an outlet. "A breath of silence takes years to perfect, yet once you’ve found it, one has a new found respect for the power of speech. The dying mind seeks so easily to find failure in its words, the shadows of doubt that creep knowingly into the human psyche, it’s paranoia that betrays our every fear. The Native Americans would call it the great fear, a manifest delusion to right all the wrongs of happiness and keep us in our place; God for one more breath of perfect silence, to hear the sound of eternity as it gives lung filling life… what the fuck do you want?"
The voice on the other end comes back cool as ice.
"Faith. It’s time to kill."
This is Tony’s voice, a fellow soul surfer.
Together they are astral traveller, seekers of new dimensions and their favourite world is one where killing is the norm. Faith sticks a Lucky in the corner of her mouth and strikes a match, inhaling deeply on the smoke.
"Cool," she replies, "see you on the other side."
Faith is a demon bopper, a thrill kill cultess, who views murder a darkened sinful religion of fragmented mayhem.
"Murder," she will often say to Tony, "is a dirty word, yet a common enough occurrence."
Faith stalks with a feline attitude towards the fridge, opens the salad drawer and removes three vials filled with Ketamine, DMT and LSD respectively. She seductively reaches for a fresh hypodermic from the kitchen drawer and draws exact measured doses of each of her beloved psychedelic keys into the syringe before gracefully manoeuvring herself into the bedroom.
Faith is a chemical genius. Only she knows the exact formula of these chemicals to get her where she wants to go and has so far she has only sold Tony her readymade recipe.
The needle is a sharp metallic pain to her nerves as she pierces skin and she draws back on the plunger and at the first sign of red, detonates the psychedelic mix into her bloodstream, counts to three and closes her eyes…
And she is gone.
It is a relief again to see those acid lights as she traverses the valleys of her heart, glowing chambers where broken dreams of yesterday mingle with telepathic intuition in discordant harmony.
She has arrived. A world where she is free. A society of psychic th
rill seekers, acid junkie dealers who take and sell chemicals found mostly in the brains of their latest victim.
Serotonin is the most popular of the new street drugs. It trades under the name Manx II. Faith doesn’t need this shit. Blissful apathy is for amateurs. Faith prefers the insane psychosis of a dopamine trip.
Still, more than this she craves the glint of cold steel and the rainbow reflections that twinkle on the blade, mirrored from the neon skies above. Yet, most of all she adores the ruby tear drops that gather and drip from the sharpened point of her silver knife as it’s withdrawn, spilling like black thrills into the puddles of her victim’s blood.
Faith loves that shit. It turns her on. She gets wet just thinking about it. A voice resounds, echoing in the catacombs of her mind. Faith loves telepathy. It feels personal; intimate. This is Jan’s voice, Jan, her partner in crime. In this world Jan’s name means society/telepathy. To be named after a society’s way of communication! Faith really digs this!
Jan is a native here; however Faith is only a visitor and can only partially translate the meanings of most words. Yet this is the way with telepathy, an obscure understanding of feelings that somehow crystallize into a perceptive clarity.
Faith understands Jan though. Loud and clear!
"Victim on the street!" Jan says with her thought-voice.
Faith smiles back sweetly through her own telepathic voice and nods her agreement and both the femme fatales produce their murderous devices of intent, Faith, her beloved silver knife and Jan her razor sharp cleaver.
The girl’s link hands in a loving embrace of warm flesh, palms clasped with the full firmness of shared desire, and run full tilt towards the edge of the skyscraper rooftop, leaping with boundless energy over the edge. They fall freely like wingless angels of sin and laugh as if children as they negotiate their speedy descent towards the prey on the street below, a serotonin junkie who is none the wiser to his fate.
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