Fortunately, Madame Zenovia did return to her story. Yes, the red-skulled stranger's lack of any kind of aura was truly unprecedented. It was as if he was not actually in the same world as the rest of them—like some kind of projection, except then there should have been a silver cord, or some similar trail leading elsewhere.
The stranger faced down the possessed dock-men and danced through their ranks, fading away one second to surge back and strike like a viper the next. The demons tried to use their numbers to their advantage, but the stranger was too nimble, and could fly up walls to escape them, only to dive down on their heads. He continued the dance until he'd smote every demon to the ground, though Madame Zenovia couldn't watch too closely, as she'd drawn her net of light around the vortex like a noose, strangling the Demon Queen as it thrashed its giant clawed arms. The mental strain of the exertion dizzied her. The whole world rocked and swayed like a ship in a tempest, as little red spots swam behind her eyes. The rift let out one final, desperate pulse of resistance, and she felt it collapse back to a tiny, pencil-thin hole, as it had been before.
Exhausted, she snapped back to her body, to see the glassy-eyed skull-man hovering over her, and though he'd saved her, she couldn't help but recoil as the impossible figure reached out to her, and she was terrified, for his lack of any type of spiritual presence was an even bigger affront to the universe than the demons had been, his simultaneous existence and non-existence confounding her senses. She didn't want him near her, but her throat was so sore, her scream came out as only the barest whisper. The stranger's presence expanded to fill her whole world, and she'd awoken in a horse-drawn cab outside her own door, as the cabbie helped her back to her couch, where she fell into a deep slumber and didn't wake until early evening the next day.
"And did you remember anything else about the Red Specter? Any specific details that stood out to you, besides the lack of an aura? Did he say anything to you?"
"What? What specter?”
Joy fought down her frustration. “The man with the red skull and glass eyes. You said—”
“That’s not a specter. A specter would've had an aura—this stranger was something else."
"Oh, I understand that—I think. I was just calling him that because that's what everyone does. In the papers and the comics. The Red Specter."
"What? Comics? This isn't some joke. Don't be mixing matters of spiritual import with comic-book nonsense. Are you making fun of me?"
"Oh, of course not! I’m investigating the truth behind the legend—the person… spirit… whatever—the entity they based the strips off of.”
"Name's all wrong," muttered Madame Zenovia. "A specter would have an aura. Don't put any stock in funny strips. Waste of time. An apparition like that is nothing to joke about."
"Well, they're not really joke strips--"
"Then why are they called comics? It's disrespectful, making jokes like that..." and Madame Zenovia went off on another tear, about the fools who scoffed at matters Beyond Their Ken, and how it would all catch up to them eventually, but the significance about what the medium had just said took a second to really register with her.
"Wait a second, Madame Zenovia--I just want to clear something up. Are you saying you don't read the Red Specter comic strip?"
"Of course I don't. I thought I told you--"
"But you read the Gazette, right? And the Red Specter comics run in the Gazette."
"I told you, I don't read comics."
Well, that was unexpected. Or maybe not. Joy had already talked to Madame Zenovia enough to realize how faulty her memory could be. She’d probably seen an image of the Red Specter in the Gazette while skimming past it and then forgotten about it. Anyway, her story was obviously delusional, but there were bits that seemed like they might intersect with reality. Maybe Joy could actually verify some of those. She asked Madame Zenovia if she could remember anything special about the cab or cab driver? Any names? Identifying marks? Apparently, the cabby had a strong, masculine blue and silver aura. Well, that helped a lot. The few physical details she got contradicted each other.
"Why are you going on about the cab driver, anyway? You're missing the most important part of the story. Are you sure you're a reporter?"
"I'm sorry," said Joy. "It's just that I'm still pretty new at dealing with these, uh... topics of advanced spirituality. That's why I need your help. What point am I missing?"
So then Joy had to spend the next half hour listening to Madame Zenovia expound at length on the topic of the mysterious stranger. (Apparently Madame Zenovia still didn't care for the term, "Red Specter.") She was convinced that the apparition she'd seen used to be human, some shaman of great power, who'd overreached, or been pushed past his limits--perhaps by a similar invasion of the forces of Mara--until his silver cord had snapped. This was catastrophic, certain to kill the shaman's physical body, and likely to shred his spirit to pieces, in the worst type of eternal oblivion. But somehow, the spirit-half of this shaman had survived, bereft of his body, and unable to find peace. He wandered the breadth of the Great Wheel in a state of limbo, neither alive nor dead, seeking justice or vengeance--who could say. Such were the dangers of astral travel, the risks that mediums like herself undertook for the good of all.
Joy nodded and jotted this all down in her notes, and tried to take it as seriously as she possibly could, until she was able to nudge the conversation back to the dock workers who'd assaulted her. Any memorable details or identifying marks about them? Would she be able to recognize any of them if she saw them again?
"What difference does that make?" snapped Madame Zenovia. "It wasn't them that shook me, it was the fiends possessing them that are dangerous. I could describe them if you like, but it'd do you no good. There could be one staring eye-to-eye with right now and you wouldn't see it, for all the sensitivity you have. You haven't the gift. I can tell these things."
"Oh, that’s too bad. Then it’s fortunate I have you to help me. But I wonder, would I be able to feel a demon’s presence if it possessed me? Like, those men from the docks—do you think they'd remember anything from when they were possessed? If I could find one and interview him, maybe I could learn some more about what happened that night. Maybe I could even learn some of the demon's plans. Did you get a good look at any of the dock men from that night?"
Madame Zenovia peered at her a long time. "You're smarter than I thought you were. Might be hope for you yet. Stay here.”
Madame Zenovia pulled herself to her feet and disappeared to a back room separated by a beaded curtain. The air was suffused with some kind of pungent incense. Joy had been able to ignore it before, but after being in here so long, it was becoming oppressive. She felt a dull pressure in her sinuses that was threatening to turn into a headache. Her stomach squirmed around in a weird way. She wasn’t sure if it was nausea or just hunger. One of the small tables along the wall held a tarnished tea set, along with a few small tea cakes arranged on the platter. Joy couldn't help wondering how long those cakes had been there, whether they were still edible, whether they were for guests or not, and whether it would be acceptable etiquette to help herself without being explicitly invited.
"You want some?" said Madame Zenovia, stumping back into the room. "Go ahead. They'll get stale otherwise."
Joy crunched into one of the cakes. Yeah, it was a bit late to stop them from going stale. She didn’t stop eating, though. That would be rude. Plus, she found that if she sucked on it the dry, cake-like material in her mouth enough, it’d start to moisten and dissolve, enough that she could get it down. She hoped her poor stomach wouldn’t punish her for this later.
"It was dark that night," said Madame Zenovia, "So I didn't get a good look at those dock-men. Was using my second sight to get around. But during the struggle, I grabbed something off of one of them. And when I woke the next day, what did I find clutched in my hand but this--" And with a big, dramatic flourish, Madame Zenovia slapped an oblong piece of metal into Joy's hand.
Joy stared at the object which could be best described as one half of a patterned metal eggshell. Smooth on the concave side, patterned on the convex side, Joy wasn't sure exactly what it was. It could've been an amulet, but she didn't see any spot to attach a cord or chain. It was too big and the shape was too odd for it to be a coin, but it was too small to be a belt buckle. And the design on the convex side was like nothing she'd ever seen before.
It was a picture of a very strange figure. Its head was some bizarre cross between a parrot's and an octopus', except it had three eyes on each side of its beaked, oblong head, and they were each on their own jointed stalk, like the eyes of a crab. Tentacles fanned out from behind the head like a ruff, twining across the borders of the piece, and Joy noted that while most of them were regular octopus tentacles, some of them terminated in five-fingered, almost human-looking hands. Below the head was a humanoid torso with lobster claws instead of arms, and below its knees the legs transformed into two separate fish-tails.
It was naked, and very male. There were all sorts of religions across the world who had gods with animal aspects to them, but Joy couldn't remember seeing one that looked like this one. Usually they weren't so creepy.
Well, that was a bit rude of her. There were all sorts of faiths practiced by various peoples throughout the former Albion Empire, some of which could have some rather odd traditions, but just because something was strange, didn't make it bad, necessarily. Still, she shuddered at the idea of people worshipping the creature on this medallion-thing. It was just too strange. The eyes, especially. Cold and blank, with too many sets all pointing in the wrong direction. There were faiths that worshipped gods with animal heads, but the eyes were always human. This thing was grotesque. It had to be some sort of adversarial figure, like a demon. But why carry around an embossed image of something like that?
Well, whatever it was, it was the only piece of physical evidence from Madame Zenovia's grand spiritual adventure. Joy asked her if she could keep it, and Madame Zenovia offered to sell it to her for a hundred dollars. Oh, for the love of….
Joy flipped over a fresh sheet of paper in her notebook, pressed the object between the pages, and rubbed her pencil over the top sheet. The end result was a passable copy of the image, though the curved surface of the amulet made for a bit of distortion on the rubbing. Now it looked even creepier. Joy tried to hand the amulet back to Madame Zenovia, who recoiled at the sight of it.
“Get that thing away from me, it’s tainted—cursed. Can’t you feel it?”
Joy stared at her. “But I got it from you. You were just trying to sell it to—”
“Like I’d keep something with that in my house? You need to get rid of it, right away. Ill fortune will follow you everywhere if you don’t. Take a boat into the middle of the ocean and hurl that thing into the sea. Then burn all your clothes and scour your skin with salt. Then come back to Madame Zenovia. I can cleanse your aura from your curse-sickness. I can see it now. Putrid olive green.”
Joy gave up. “Yes, I’ll definitely do that,” she said, and tossed the weird demon-medallion into her purse before taking her leave. “Thank you so much, Madame Zenovia. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me. And for… um, saving the whole city from that Demon Queen.”
“Not just the city, most of the Kallis Coast,” declared the medium. “You sure you don’t want more tea-cakes? They’ll go stale if nobody eats them.”
Joy stared long and hard at the two remaining bricks of dry sandstone that Madame Zenovia referred to as “tea cakes.” Her stomach was of the opinion that they technically counted as food, and there was room for more. Joy thanked her host, wrapped up both cakes in a handkerchief, tossed them in her purse, and made her escape to the outside world.
Chapter 20
Taking Stock
Joy found a bench nearby and took long, deep breaths of the clean air outside, trying to clear the incense from her lungs. Even though she’d spent the past hour sitting, she still felt exhausted. She’d wrapped those tea-cakes up for later, but her stomach asked her why she was bothering to wait, and she had no good answer. She crunched down on one of them while flipping through the names and addresses of the remaining “witnesses,” and wondered if the rest of them would also be nuts.
Joy still had no idea what to make of Madame Zenovia. At points it seemed like she really believed what she was saying, but Joy had caught her using blatant con-artist tricks, too. Was it a case of mental compartmentalization? Con people to pay the bills, because that worked better than her “real” stuff? Speaking of mental compartments, how much space did Zenovia even have? During the whole ordeal, there’d been stretches where she’d seemed lucid and cognizant of what was going on, and other points where she seemed unaware of what had happened the moment before.
And yet, she seemed to function well enough—she was apparently able to run her psychic business, despite having one of the worst methods of greeting customers Joy had ever experienced. And certain things seemed to stick in the medium’s mind—she’d never gotten confused about who Joy was, or why she was visiting. And somehow she’d managed to write a coherent letter to Garai about spotting the Red Specter, even if she’d forgotten about it later. Actually, Joy really wanted to see that letter now, to see if it actually contained the words “Red Specter,” since Madame Zenovia didn’t use it during their interview.
Thinking about the state of Madame Zenovia’s mind made Joy feel guilty for some reason. Maybe she was being too harsh to an old woman dealing with senility, apparently alone and abandoned. That could happen sometimes, and it pissed Joy off. How could anyone just toss their parents aside and shirk their responsibilities like that. Granted, she could easily imagine how dealing with someone like Madam Zenovia on a daily basis would be draining. There’d been days where having Gramma Euh-Meh around the house had felt confining, on top of Mom and Dad and all her siblings, but that was family. You had to do right by family.
Granted, the Fan family had been lucky—on Dad’s side, anyway. Every one of them had survived the Great War. There were a lot of families that couldn’t say that, and Joy knew her parents were grateful for it. Dad made sure to give thanks at every family gathering, ever since that first Liberation Day, that all of them were still there. Maybe Madame Zenovia hadn’t been so lucky. Maybe she didn’t talk about her family because they’d passed to the “other side” themselves. Maybe Joy could’ve looked past her own irritation to show more concern for a lonely old woman suffering from dementia.
Joy had a sudden impulse to get back up and knock on Madame Zenovia’s door—take a closer look and see if she was okay. But another thought delayed her. Something about her assumptions nagged at her… old woman with dementia. How old was Madame Zenovia, anyway? Joy tried to remember details of the medium’s face. She actually wasn’t remembering much in the way of wrinkles. Why did she assume she was old? Was it the way she dressed, with the elaborate headscarf and all those layers of flowing fabrics she wore? Had it been the way she walked? The more Joy thought about it, the more uncertain she felt. Madame Zenovia could be anywhere from early forties, to—heck, who even knew? Joy knew how unreliable appearances could be when determining someone’s age—Joy was twenty-six, but sometimes she had people mistaking her for a teenager.
But what did it matter, anyway? Even if Madam Zenovia did need some type of material help, Joy was in no position to offer it. She could barely take care of herself. That was just the cold reality of the situation. That was why she’d come out in the first place. She needed material for her article. So, what did she have?
Joy flipped through her notes from the session, as her jaw worked to grind down the stubborn tea cake, and felt her spirits sink. “A shaman of great power” who’d “let his silver cord snap.” This was just like her story about Kiona the dragon-girl princess. (With a tail!) It was nothing like the comic. It wasn’t what people expected or wanted to hear. She could already picture Garai giving her the lecture. That whole i
nterview had turned out to be a complete waste of time.
Joy gave herself a minute to feel disappointed before getting back to business. Persistence was a reporter’s best friend. You had to keep plugging away at every lead until you finally got the one that broke the big story. Joy checked the remaining three addresses against her city map. Two were within walking distance. The third was way off in the northwest corner of the city—she probably wouldn’t be able to get to it today. Joy headed off to the first address, which turned out to be an ugly, dilapidated rowhouse with boarded-up windows.
Chapter 21
The Soler Family
Joy knocked on the door and yanked on the pull-chain for the apartment number, to no avail. She double-checked the address against her notes, then pulled out Garai’s original paper, to make sure she hadn’t made some kind of transcription error. This was the right place. Joy tugged on the pull-chain again, then tugged on the ones for the other three apartments, just to see if she could find anyone to talk to. After ten minutes of this, she had to admit defeat. Either the building was abandoned, or everyone was out. She moved on to the next address, another rowhouse—but this one was in much better repair.
A tired-looking woman with a baby on her hip answered the door. Joy introduced herself and asked for the name on her list, a Thiago Soler. He did live there, but he wasn’t in.
“Said he needed to get out, be by himself—away from the kids,” she said. She wasn’t sure when he’d be back. Probably really late, maybe past midnight.
“You don’t know when he’ll be back?” Joy asked.
The woman pulled away from her, her expression guarded. “This time of year is really tough on him. This Liberation Day business. It reminds him of his brother. They were in the same unit, you know. Thiago saw him go. That would be rough on anyone, wouldn’t it? Well, wouldn’t it?”
The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1) Page 12