Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle

by English, Ben

  Heat washing off the furnace dried her perspiration quickly.

  The man’s smile grew. He paused a moment and seemed about to speak, recognition evident in his face and posture, but then just chuckled and shifted his grip on the sledge. As he returned to work, the man grinned at her almost sheepishly and raised his eyebrows, as if possessing a special secret he wanted to share with her, a mysterious truth. Affection and tenderness shone in his eyes every time he looked up. Again she thought of her grandfather; though she knew the smith couldn’t be Max, she had the feeling she should recognize him, that she did know him, and that their relationship was somehow more precious and infinite, and—familial than she was capable of comprehending.

  And she could almost remember it.

  The smith returned fully to his anvil, driving and folding the iron into an ever smoother, more resilient form. He turned the metal and renewed the pressure, intensity creasing his face. Pounding. Battering. Hammering his own strength down into the metal with every resonant stroke.

  Mercedes drew closer to the singing steel.

  “Careful,” said the titanic blacksmith, pausing. “It’s going to get much hotter before he’s ready.” He rolled his shoulders and turned back to the steel.

  Mercedes abruptly awoke, rolling into motion, astonished to find herself in bed. “Jack,” she said, startling herself further.

  Her silk sheets lay in disarray, twisted by her dream of the night run, kicked from her. Back in her Studio City bungalow. Her arms were still warm, as if actual heat had washed off the furnace onto her skin.

  The night around her held pure with silence. The dim darkness beyond the three walls of glass was quiet, cool. It was the time of night Mercedes usually loved best. No birds, no breeze, nothing to mar the stillness before the new day was born. There was something almost holy in these calm hours.

  She folded her arms over her knees and sat like that for a long minute, thoughts awhirl. The dream had been so vivid. She hadn’t had a dream that sharp and clear since—well, in years. Bizarre. Eerie.

  Jack?

  Good thing sleepwalking hadn’t been a part of her imagined run. Mercedes couldn’t imagine what the neighbors would think of her dashing around the block in her underwear. Then again, it was California.

  Softly, not wanting to break the quiet of the night, but also partly because she wanted to keep the dream as intact as she could, Mercedes slid out of bed and walked to the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of water.

  But— “‘Jack’?” she said, rubbing her arms. A car passed by out in the street, and from the darkness she watched it flicker past her wrought-iron gate.

  Still several hours until dawn.

  As she walked down the hall to her darkroom, Mercedes tried a yawn. No good. She’d be lucky to fall asleep again before the paperboy came, and she wasn’t going to spend a couple hours tossing and turning, pretending to rest. Working on the pictures of the baby eagles would help shake off the weird dream.

  Since her first day at college—almost since her first real camera—Mercedes hadn’t used a photo-processing company. Under the amber light in her darkroom, she could make magic. The slow, sometimes painstaking process of developing her own pictures always made her think of alchemy, conjuration, creation. She loved the esoteric equipment, the chemicals, and the sheer ritual of making a picture.

  Three of the prints of the eagles feeding were amazing, and amazingly flawed. Sunlight falling through the tops of the trees had cast uneven shadows over the birds, and the part of the nest on the left-hand side of the picture was overexposed, not too murky to be distinguished but enough to throw the picture out of balance. Mercedes frowned and crumpled the prints into the waste can. Returning to the enlarger, she prepared to re-expose a sheet of paper to a negative. The negative was still in the negative holder, set to the correct focus. She put a sheet of eight-by-ten-inch printing paper into an easel, and checked the timer on the enlarger lamp. This portion of the spell was always accomplished through trial-and-error, determining the exact amount of time necessary to achieve the proper contrasts of lights and darks and density of detail. Light shining from the enlarger lamp through the negative would paint the picture onto the printing paper. The timer had been set for twenty three seconds, just right for most of the picture but enough to overexpose the left-hand side.

  Mercedes again set the timer for twenty three seconds and activated the lamp, but this time, when the timer reached seventeen seconds, she slowly waved her left hand between the paper and the negative, preventing the enlarger lamp from projecting onto the left-hand side of the print for the final five seconds. By lessening the exposure over that area, she was able to bring out the detail, almost beckoning it out of the paper. The gesture of an alchemist.

  When the sheet was fully exposed, Mercedes set it into the developing tray and watched the image reveal itself. Then she transferred the print to a tray filled with stopping solution. She gently moved the print in the solution, careful to rotate it from top to bottom to make sure the chemicals touched it evenly. Finally, she shifted the print to a tray filled with chemicals that fixed the image on the paper, making it permanent. Again she gingerly rotated the print, then placed it in a tray filled with slowly running water that would rinse the chemicals from it.

  It worked. Mercedes realized she was smiling. Technically it was a good shot. Crisp. Composed well, yet there was something else. They’d made a picture together, she and the mother eagle. The mother gently coaxed her babies to take the strip of meat, held daintily in her fiercely hooked beak. Under the curve of her wings the baby eagles, jostling, straining to stand on tiny legs, demanded life. This was more than mere existence. The picture seethed and beat with something elemental.

  Mercedes found it hard to look away. At last she washed her hands and wrists, then padded down the hall to her office.

  She tried another yawn.

  In contrast to the overstuffed style and form of her bedroom, Mercedes always picked very spartan furniture for her office—it wasn’t an uncomfortable room, but she felt the less distraction she had about while doing the paperwork, the better. A few tiny art prints, a bird-of-paradise plant, and a palm-sized glass globe of the world, which she rolled into her hand as she sat at her desk and woke up her computer.

  There was an email from Eric and Sara Jensen, excited about the pictures and their forthcoming thesis. They wanted her opinion about some of the text they’d written to accompany the pictures.

  She hadn’t known that golden eagles usually mate for the first time when relatively young, at around four years old, and paired with the same mate for their entire fifteen- to twenty-year lifespan. Mercedes thought about the mother eagle, and the wild, warrior expression in the creature’s eyes. She found herself wondering what sorts of things attracted one eagle to another.

  Mercedes looked through half-a-dozen invoices, checking dates and payments, then logged into her bank account. Everything was fine, set to go smoothly next month when she moved the last of the paperwork needed to completely regain her last name. By mid-summer—near the end of celebrity wedding season--she’d be sending out invoices with her own name--Mercedes Adams--on the letterhead. The next few months would be a lot of work, and maybe she could go ahead and hire a fourth photographer. There were two kids she had in mind, both recent grads from UCLA who had great eyes for shadows and light. Better, she had to admit, than she'd had a few years ago, right out of school. Why not hire both and take a little break?

  She sat back, wrapped her hand around the frosted globe, and smiled. A few birds were stirring in the trees outside her window. Dawn still hours away. When the stores opened she could do some shopping for her next shoot.

  What was a dream, anyway? Fantasy? Fear? A psychic tease--or scraps of self-doubt, wrapped in something familiar and intimate, say, a memory? This last explanation made sense. The subconscious demands order, meaning. Mercedes worked very hard to keep an even tenor to her li
fe, a routine, a dependable arrangement. Who’s to say her subconscious wasn’t engaging in a little housekeeping, tidying up bits and pieces of misfit information? Groping to find order in barely perceived sensory data. Sure. That feeling of heat on her arm as she drew close to the fire? Nothing. Dreams mean nothing.

  Tell that to Joseph in Egypt.

  What did Thoreau write? She affected a British accent, purely for the fact that it made her sound more intelligent than she knew she deserved. "Dreams are the touchstones of our characters." There, that was profound. Mercedes firmly believed all dead intellectuals sounded most credible when quoted out loud in BBC English.

  But this dream, in particular, meant nothing. She might still be half-asleep, the way it hung before her mind’s eye.

  Jack.

  She found herself surfing over to the Internet Movie Database and typing his name into the site search engine.

  It was her favorite site to check out basic movie info—Mercedes often clicked through to Amazon (usually to buy the book the movie was based on, get right to the source of the goodness). The section on actors was sparse, giving basic info like date of birth (which in this case she knew already), a list of movie titles and television appearances, and occasionally a snippet of biographical data.

  As far as she knew Mercedes had seen all of Jack’s movies, some on cable, though the only one she’d ever bought for her own collection was one of his first, a Dean Koontz miniseries called Strange Highways. She’d caught the beginning on TV with no idea who was in it, and Jack had scared the hell out of her. The sight of his familiar face was chilling, but the performance! He played the part of the protagonist’s older brother, a local sports hero, the laureled golden boy—and thorough psychopath.

  She shivered.

  She knew where he drew the character from.

  Before he could be typecast, Jack appeared as the comic relief character in a Kenneth Branagh film called Storming the Castle, and then as the romantic lead in Xanthippe, an independent film that had done well in broad release for reasons Mercedes never understood.

  According to the bio she’d read on a fan’s website, it was around this time Jack had been taken aside by John Cusack and Kelsey Grammer, of all people, and counseled against trading his soul to Hollywood. Five of Jack’s movies released the same year; playing a young Jack Ryan in Without Remorse, (in her opinion, coming off more believable than Harrison Ford had as a mature Ryan—Mercedes had inherited the Tom Clancy books from her father), another Koontz miniseries and two movies opposite Bruce Willis and Daryn Tufts where all three had played wildly different characters.

  Jack fit in everywhere, but managed to stand out at the same time.

  His first starring role—and the last time Mercedes had seen a movie in a real theater—was in The Walking Drum, a historical Celtic story set around the turn of the first Millennium. Directed by Ridley Scott from an original novel by Louis L’Amour, it had been a monstrous success, one of those films to come along unexpectedly and do better business every succeeding week it stayed in theaters. Tired Hollywood had surprised everyone with Drum; it was widely thought that swashbuckling adventure movies were a dead franchise. It was a star-maker, a breakout. Mercedes decided she really liked it after her third screening.

  During breaks in filming, Jack occasionally wrote pieces for Premier and Variety. Rumor was Jack had helped tighten Drum’s screenplay, and that rumor led to others, one fingering him for being the adventure novelist Fletcher Engstrom.

  Mercedes had to laugh. During the brief media flurry, Engstrom himself had emerged a few days later from his apartment outside Farmington, New Mexico, blinking and looking concerned for the cameras. Entertainment Tonight had exposed the odd little man, a chemist by vocation, who had written a string of fair-to-decent thrillers and a few sweaty bodice rippers.

  Problem was, Engstrom had been writing for years before Jack Flynn stood before a camera, and the shiny, coiffed network spokesface had a hard time drawing enough sound bites from the chubby closet-writer to fill a 2-minute segment.

  Sales of Engstrom’s books rocketed, the world went on, and by the time attention turned back to Jack Flynn, he was gone. Vanished into vacation. He’d never been sought so fiercely before, and at the time his publicist explained that Flynn had simply done what he did several times a year, gotten an itch to travel and look around. His last words in front of a camera, it would turn out for several months, had been, “I think I’ll round up some old friends and hit the beach.”

  The Flynn disappearance was a minor thing as far as Hollywood was concerned, and in a day was quickly swallowed up in the headlines by the outbreak of another conflict in Iran and the failed peacekeeping mission headed by the European Union.

  And there was his picture, top of the web page. He’d aged well; lines appeared down either side of his face when he smiled. The sadness in his eyes could be a photographer’s trick.

  There was even a quote by an actress, a glittery, fluttery thing barely out of her teens, who’d described Jack as “a man in a world full of boys. He’s got a craziness to him you wouldn’t expect.” The backstory went on to describe the shoot they’d been on together: she’d fumbled a valuable prop, some kind of antique watch, off a 30-ft pier into the South China Sea. Before the watch hit the water, Jack was in the air, diving after it. Mercedes forced her way through the puff journalism.

  There was the inevitable comparison of Jack to any one of a dozen “rugged, old-fashioned movie stars. If this was the '50s, he might have changed his name to Rock. This is a man who doesn’t own a hair dryer."

  Mercedes skimmed the list of Jack’s other television and movie appearances, paused for a moment over a review of his latest, Caesar Whispered, then stopped herself. Frowning, Mercedes pushed herself back in her chair until she could rest her feet on the keyboard, and smirked. She’d joined the ranks of wackos and weirdos who stayed up all night worshipping the virtual world, sitting in their underwear and stuffing their brains to overflowing with nonsense. Jack’s life should be his own, and she felt guilty enough for the time she’d spent ogling him across the ‘Net.

  The trees outside postured in the wind, and their posing shadows swam on the walls of her office. In a few minutes the sun would be up in earnest and she’d be back to a much harder world, where she was a grownup and couldn’t pretend to be a kid in front of a movie screen, with a mouth full of popcorn and a head full of lunacy. A world, honestly, that she enjoyed more most of the time, where meaning and purpose could be found, where friendships for her were few but real.

  “Jack,” she said, trying to force a note of disgust into her voice, and failing. “Jack,” she said again, softer, as she tossed the glass world into the air. The crystal caught the day’s first light, and sent whorls and points of brilliance through the room.

  The phone rang suddenly, and she hiccuped, plucking the crystal out of the air with one hand while the other groped for the phone. “Jack?—I mean, hello?”

  It was her cousin, Irene. She was hoarse, insistent. “I need you. I need what you can do. Do you feel up to a double murder?”

  Epilogue Part One

  Paris

  4AM

  Alonzo leaned his elbows against the bridge, patiently staring at the widening ripples beneath him. The Seine murmured quietly by, whispering to him in the voices of ghosts, in snatches of an old, old song he was supposed to remember. It always went like this, he reflected. Hours and hours of waiting–and for a woman, nonetheless. He slid closer to the leering statue that shared his vigil.

  She would come. He suspected that she thought she loved him, and so he would wait.

  The sun had yet to touch the eastern horizon when he saw Eliane stroll around the corner. She was wearing her blue cardigan and the Detroit Tigers baseball cap he’d given her. Joining him on the bridge, she snuggled close.

  “Ow! Watch that rib, darling,” he murmured. “How did it go after I left yesterday? Any luck in the flower business?”


  Eliane shrugged. “Enough to pay for us to see a movie tonight. Is that American-style enough for a date?” She was laughing behind her eyes, he could tell.

  “Only if I buy us breakfast first! Have you ever eaten at the Jules Verne restaurant, in the Eiffel Tower?”

  “Oh, non, non. C’est impossible!” She blushed. “They do not serve breakfast, and also, you need reservations for at least three months in advance.”

  “Well, see, Eliane, I’ve got this friend . . .”

  As they stepped off the bridge, Alonzo paused and turned one last time, looking across the Seine and up, up into the darkness gathering over the city. Against the angular line of night stood the gargoyles as they had for ages, as they would for ages to come, watching, waiting. As if ready to burst into ferocious action. One of them moved.

  It was Jack.

  The story continues in Jack Be Nimble: Tyro.

  Ready for more? Visit www.BenEnglishAuthor.com.

  Acknowledgements & End Notes

  Thank you for buying and reading this book. I sincerely hope you had a blast reading it & would be thrilled to hear from you about your experience! I hope you’ll consider visiting my website at www.BenEnglishAuthor.com and connecting with me through Twitter, Facebook, carrier pigeon, owl post, Patronus messenger charm, message in a bottle-tossed-in-a-wormhole, whatever. Twitter’s fine. Would be a huge honor to hear from you.

  A quick note regarding the technology mentioned in the book: While the events of JBN: Gargoyle obviously take place a few years in the future (after the coronation of William Wales to the British throne and the peaceful democratization of Cuba, for instance.), you need to know that all the tech in the book is either real or within the easy reach of likelihood, given a year or two of applied science. I’ve worked among the mad genius-nerds of Silicon Valley long enough to experience many amazing technologies that either haven’t yet been fully developed or merely lie within reach but down the road not taken. Humans are amazing. Get this: a hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Patent Office was ready to close its doors, believing at the time that everything necessary and possible had already been invented—but look at us now. Imagine what we’ll see tomorrow.