by J. R. Rain
Blazing suddenly out of the darkness like a flaming meteor, it caught up with him on the other side of the trees in a meadow lined with rows of fallow vegetable patches. Its skin and claws and talons were made of stone, and the young man never stood a chance. Shrieking, he was torn from limb to limb. The creature was a firestarter; flames sparked and raced along its stoney flesh and ignited patches of the grass nearby as it writhed in a killing frenzy, ripping the flesh from the man’s bones and devouring the organs.
A dark figure dropped from a tree nearby and, moving with an unnatural speed, emerged from the swirling fog in mere seconds, cutting the fire-creature’s throat from behind with an obsidian knife.
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” simpered the newcomer. “Here, pussy, pussy…”
Except killing a Jaguar Baby, as the creature was called, is rarely so easy a matter. It roared and turned, flailing its arms, spattering huge jets of bright blood over its attacker. The two struggled, the man—as quick and strong as the monster, and seemingly practiced in dealing with its kind. With three more deft strokes of the blade, he cut the Jaguar Baby’s tongue out, then one after the other, its paws, stuffing these into the gaping wound of its lower face. The Jaguar Baby collapsed and thrashed in the wet winter grass, then was still. Even now, it was not dead. To kill it, the man knew, would require dragging it over the hill and through the woods to the Potomac, then immersing the corpse in its waters. He had minutes, perhaps half an hour, before the thing woke again and reconstituted itself. Well before then, fires might suddenly explode to life and rage nearby.
Deprived of the supernatural agency that had summoned it, the fog began to thin and retreat, its tendrils wreathing the ground. Soon the security cameras would start working again, and a patrol wouldn’t be far behind. The man glanced down at his ruined, blood-soaked business suit, then cast a single longing glance through the trees in the direction of George Washington’s tomb and sighed. He and the dead man, Deion Braundmeier, had been interrupted attempting to steal the first president’s body from its crypt at Mount Vernon. Now the man, whose name was Crawley, would have to scrap the plan and concentrate on getting away. Where there was one Jaguar Baby, there were generally others; they were a gregarious breed.
He produced a folded plastic Target shopping bag from his jacket pocket, and began to delicately gather up the bloody remains of Braundmeier into it. An eyeball. A portion of the palate with a few teeth. A blackened length of esophagus and what appeared to be pieces of kidney. Another eyeball. A singed fragment of skull.
“Alas, poor Braundmeier. I knew him, Horatio…” Crawley hadn’t started the young man on the treatment yet, but it was faintly possible that under the right conditions he might be able to revive him someday. That, after all, had been his intention with the embalmed and long-dead body of George Washington. Crawley looked up at the sound of howling nearby, then moved briskly away carrying the shopping bag. Time was short. The fourth of July was only months away, and Crawley would now need a new assistant. He would have to notify the General Services Administration tomorrow.
Of course, the way it moved, all he could do was hope the basic bureaucracy wouldn’t prove a greater impediment to his plans than the blasted Jaguar Baby.
Pests, Brags, Tote-guts―Mummified zombies, usually former lobbyists, reporters, or unsuccessful candidates for political office, who follow their victims around continually talking, boasting, or begging favors. There are always a few of these at any DC gathering or bar. ―From The Federal Bestiary (www.magic.us.gov).
t was hate at first sight. That much was obvious from their body language. The two new hires sat uncomfortably on the hard wooden chairs in front of Jefferson Davis Crawley’s cluttered desk, hating everything: hating Washington DC and the weather outside; hating the gray government building and the crowded dusty office they were stuck in, and hating Crawley himself. But most of all, they hated each other.
He smiled. The scenario was perfect.
“Mr. Di Angelo, Miss Farah, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Department.” The capital D was audible. “You’ll find us a bit crowded for space here, I’m afraid; our work isn’t a top priority with the powers that be right now. But we’ve had our successes, as you’ll soon be finding out. With any luck.” He steepled his fingers and pursed his lips.
Jefferson Davis Crawley was a huge man who appeared to be in his late fifties, now running to fat, with thin, graying hair. His fingers resembled well-manicured sausages. His shabby, too-tight pinstripe suit was flecked with dandruff near the shoulders. He had the manner and mellow voice of a stage impresario and spoke with a British intonation, if not an actual accent. He struck everyone who met him as being hopelessly old-fashioned, almost a relic from another century; this he knew and so exaggerated his mannerisms…
“I’m afraid you’ll be sharing an office,” he said. “Sharing a desk, in fact.”
“We’ll be sitting at the same desk?” The young woman, Jasmine Farah, sounded genteelly scandalized.
Crawley pursed his lips even more tightly, until they resembled a giant strawberry. This, though his new employees had no way of knowing it, indicated he was suppressing laughter. “I’m afraid so. As you can see, we’re a bit crowded for space here. And of course, I can’t really make the case for a second desk, since the two of you will be competing for a single position.”
“We will?” Now it was the young man’s turn to look astonished. Whether or not he was outraged, like the young woman so obviously was, was hard to tell. Rocco Di Angelo had light brown hair, grey-blue eyes and the baby-faced, slightly stupid look of a former high school football player from Western Pennsylvania. Which, as Crawley had already noted from his file, Di Angelo was.
“Why yes—I thought you knew. Both of you are here for a probationary period of six months. Then, one candidate will be selected, and the desk will be his. Or hers. Strictly on the basis of merit, of course.”
Farah and Di Angelo stared at each other disdainfully for a moment, and the young woman made a nasty noise. Replacing Braundmeier was turning out to be a lot more fun than Crawley had anticipated.
Jasmine Farah presented herself exactly like what she was; a Lebanese-American beauty pageant queen from Savannah, Georgia, with a Master’s Degree in Geopolitical Studies. She was pushy and ambitious and had large, liquid chocolate eyes, a perfect tan, and frosted honey-colored hair to match. Both she and Di Angelo had initially passed their examinations and group interviews at the State Department and CIA partly on the strength of their shaky Arabic. That—and their new boss’ intuition about them—was what had landed them down here in this little hellhole.
“Any questions before you get to work?”
The two candidates glanced at each other again.
“Yes,” said Di Angelo. “What kind of work will we be doing, exactly?”
Crawley sat back in his chair and spread his fingers across his ample, vested belly. “Oh, didn’t anyone tell you?” he asked innocently. “This is the Department of Magic.”
Neither said a word to this. Fascinating, thought Crawley after the two left his office, baffled and biting their tongues. The air still seemed to vibrate with their frustration. There was magical potential there, yet each was apparently completely ignorant of it. Had he ever been that young and naïve?
Crawley pushed down a pang of regret that he’d have so little time to train them properly before they moved on, like so many of the others had—those who hadn’t resigned outright and gone into hiding. He sighed and reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, where he kept a bottle of Longrow single malt whiskey. He was tired of attending funerals.
Especially his own.
“Magic?” hissed Jasmine Farah almost the moment she and Di Angelo were alone together in the room they would, according to Crawley, be sharing for the next six months. She was furious. “He really said ‘magic’, right? I mean he didn’t say ‘Department of Metrics’ or ‘Department of’, I dunno, ‘Mad Libs’ or whate
ver?”
“I heard magic, too.”
He rummaged around, trying to excavate a second chair buried under an avalanche of old books and papers.
Farah had marched around the desk first and imperiously grabbed the chair behind it, muttering, “Can you believe this place? There’s not even a workstation in here.”
A black telephone that looked like a prop from an old war movie was the only object on the desk.
“There’s no such thing as magic,” she said with finality.
Di Angelo shrugged at her.
“Huh? Seriously? You believe in magic?”
“Let’s just say I’m open-minded on the subject. A job’s a job in this economy.” He dumped a stack of old books onto the cracked linoleum floor. Their titles all seemed to be about urban planning and economics. The Solar City in Times of Precession was one. The Rise of the Subterranean Urban Umbra was another. Most of the loose papers were maps, some yellow and crumbling with age. Like the furniture. The chair, once excavated, turned out to be constructed of plain wood, heavily polished but chipped and peeling. He dragged it over to the desk and sat opposite Jasmine Farah. Her chair was equally ancient but had wooden arms and a black metal wheelbase; it creaked annoyingly every time she shifted position.
Everything about the room was dusty and old and creaking. And spooky.
“Well, don’t look so worried, this stupid job is all yours.” Farah kept her iPhone in her left hand at all times, even while they’d been in Crawley’s office, glancing down at it every few minutes to check her messages. Now she stabbed it with a scarlet-tipped finger. “I am so outta here. I’m calling my Placement Officer.”
One of the modern Federal employee recruitment system’s many peculiarities includes the assignment of a Placement Officer to prospective applicants once they pass their basic qualification tests. This person’s job is to ‘broker’ the new recruits into various departments. An applicant can hope for a career in Commerce or Transportation downtown, for example, but might be shunted around until they end up in a satellite agency of Health and Human Services buried far off in the Virginia or Maryland suburbs. In any case, applicants get stuck with a PO no matter what.
“Mind giving me a little privacy here?” she snapped at Di Angelo.
He got up and waited in the hall outside for five minutes. When he came back in, she was still on the phone but set it aside long enough to tell him, “That bitch of a PO said no,” before resuming her conversation. This ended with a “Love you, too”, then she got off. “My fiancé.”
“Lucky guy,” he said drily. “When’s the wedding?”
“June. In Atlanta.”
He did the math; that was about five months from now, which meant the job was probably his then anyway. He didn’t see Jasmine Farah ever coming back from the honeymoon.
An antique-grilled speaker mounted high on the wall beside the transom suddenly squawked to life, startling them both, and Crawley’s voice blared from it. “Just a reminder that it’s now noon and therefore legally lunch hour. May I recommend the inter-departmental cafeteria across the street in the State Department Annex?”
“Jesus, you don’t think he’s been listening to us the whole time?” Farah muttered when the crackling stopped.
Di Angelo shrugged again.
When he made this gesture, even his eyebrows seemed to shrug, too. Which made him the stupidest and most irritating person she’d ever been around. At least since she’d moved to DC. She abruptly stood and picked up her bag. A Prada.
“Fuck this! I’ll grab a cab and go eat someplace with real food. That is my chair, so don’t even think about it!” Her voice sounded just like Scarlett O’Hara’s in Gone With the Wind; she’d even made two syllables out of the word “fuck.”
“That is mah chay-yuh,” he said out loud after she left, and laughed. Then he started digging through the stacks of books on the floor.
She was an hour late coming back from lunch. Crawley, who’d departed around the time she had, didn’t come back at all.
Firmly ensconced in her chair, Jasmine Farah had wiled the next five hours texting and checking messages on her iPhone, playing games, and occasionally answering a call. In passing, she mentioned to Di Angelo the exact language her Placement Officer had used to tell Farah she wasn’t getting out of the department unless her candidacy was formally rejected in writing by Crawley.
“She said this position was on a ‘‘terminal track’.’”
“That sounds kind of… ominous,” said Di Angelo, but she didn’t laugh.
J.R. Rain is an ex-private investigator who now writes full-time in the Pacific Northwest. He lives in a small house on a small island with his small dog, Sadie.
Please visit him at www.jrrain.com.
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Rod Kierkegaard, Jr. is a writer and cartoonist best known in the US for his comic strip, “Rock Opera”, which ran as a regular feature in Heavy Metal Magazine during the 1980s.
He is the author of two French graphic novel collections, “Stars Massacre”, (released in the US as “Shooting Stars”) and “Rock Monstres”, both published by Editions Albin Michel, Paris. His first novel, “Obama Jones & The Logic Bomb”, is published by Dogma Press.
“The Department of Magic” and “Family Cursemas (Megamilionnaire Murders, Vol. 1)” are Rod’s first published works through Curiosity Quills Press during the 2011 Holiday season, followed by “The God Particle” in early 2012.
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The Dead Detective, by J.R. Rain & Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(http://j.mp/DeadDt)
Medical-school-dropout police detective Richelle Dadd is… well, dead.
But that won’t stop her from trying to hold on to her house in a divorce battle with a bitter husband. Or keep her from digging into her own murder, to discover who put the bullet into her heart. And it certainly won’t stand in the way of finding out the reason she’s been reanimated as a zombie assassin, no longer in control of her life.
Richelle will face off against Gypsy shamans, double-crossing ghosts, a partner she can’t trust, and her own undead nature in a journey into the depths of the occult world and out the other side without losing her sense of humor - or humanity - along the way.
It’s a good thing her deductive skills - and her aim - are still up to par.
The Department of Magic, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(http://j.mp/dofmagic)
Magic is nothing like it seems in children’s books. It’s dark and bloody and sexual—and requires its own semi-mythical branch of the US Federal Government to safeguard citizens against ever present supernatural threats.
Join Jasmine Farah and Rocco di Angelo—a pair of wet-behind-the-ears recruits of The Department of Magic—on a nightmare gallop through a world of ghosts, spooks, vampires, and demons, and the minions of South American and Voodoo god shell-bent on destroying all humanity in the year 2012.
The Curse Merchant, by J.P. Sloan
(http://bit.ly/1pRNMH7)
Baltimore socialite Dorian Lake makes his living crafting hexes and charms, manipulating karma for those the system has failed. His business has been poached lately by corrupt soul monger Neil Osterhaus, who wouldn’t be such a problem were it not for Carmen, Dorian’s captivating ex-lover. She has sold her soul to Osterhaus, and needs Dorian’s help to find a new soul to take her place. Hoping to win back her affections, Dorian must navigate Baltimore’s occult underworld and decide how low he is willing to stoop in order to save Carmen from eternal damnation.
Family Cursemas, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(http://j.mp/1ugsyGa)
When the weal
thy Goodman family assembles for its gloomy annual holiday reunion in their divorced mother’s crumbling mansion, Holly Singletary is pressed into service to help cater the Christmas Eve dinner. When “the storm of the century” hits, the attendees have more than a blackout to worry about. Someone—or something—is killing off the Goodman family one by one.
Only Holly can solve the mystery of the murderer’s identity before her first-grade sweetheart becomes the final victim…
Appetizer:
Book Cover
Title Page
Main Course:
Ghosts of Christmas Present, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr. & J.R. Rain
Christmas in the Morgue, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
Zombie App, by J.R. Rain
Dessert:
A Taste of The Dead Detective, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr. & J.R. Rain
A Taste of The Department of Magic, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
About J.R. Rain
About Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
Copyright & Publisher
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