The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  And it was interesting that both Thiago and Madame Zenovia had reported both a Red Specter sighting and some kind of large fight (with gunshots, even?) three nights ago at the docks, by the warehouse district. Actually… Joy checked her notes from “Trench,” which said, “night before last,” in the same area. But when had Garai interviewed him? If it had been yesterday, that would line right up. It could easily be a coincidence, and that still left a huge area to cover, but still—was there any reason not to do a quick canvas? Just head down to the docks and ask around—see if anybody saw anything? Because it really did seem like something strange had happened. All she needed was one good, detailed account of it. Maybe it would even provide a useful context for Madame Zenovia’s ravings, and that weird amulet-thing she’d found. The Red Specter comics did seem to occasionally veer into some spooky-mystic territory, like during Diamond Jang’s Dreamtime trip. Maybe she could wring something useful from that interview after all.

  And it wasn’t like she had anything better to do today. Might as well make use of all the daylight hours of high summer. Yes, she had to think positive. She was going to get a break, and she’d use it to turn in the most entertainingly garbage-tastic piece of nonsense Garai had ever seen, and then she’d do it again on the next story, until she’d earned enough to quit the Gazette, and leave this city for a better one, whose serious newspapers weren’t infested with misogynist creeps and their enablers, so she could finally start her life for real.

  She headed off back down towards the docks, her resolution gaining a new level of urgency as she passed by the Golden Banquet again, the smell of hot, sweet, and savory food hitting her like a wave. Joy had to grit her teeth and think of the future, a time where she had a secure paycheck and would never have to settle for Victory Meat again.

  Chapter 23

  The Magic Lantern

  Joy got on 5th Street and made it all the way to Chontos Blvd before she decided to take another break. She could’ve kept going, but it made sense to pace herself. It felt so good to sit down and stretch her legs out. She was wearing the wrong shoes for hiking all over the city. She hadn’t been expecting to be doing any legwork today. She’d been hoping to turn in her anti-Hardwicke rant and take the rest of the day off. Ideally, she’d have been using pedi-cabs to cover this distance, but that wasn’t in the budget right now. Even the fares for the cable-trams were too much. The only cost to walking was time and energy. But her supply of those things wasn’t unlimited either, and the fact that she was getting hungry again wasn’t helpful. Joy remembered that she still had Madame Zenovia’s last tea cake, but as hungry as she was, she wasn’t that hungry yet.

  Thinking of Madame Zenovia reminded Joy that she had to be pretty close to the starting point of the medium’s “spirit walk.” Joy wondered if she’d have any chance of retracing Madame Zenovia’s steps if she headed to the docks from here. As soon as the thought crossed Joy’s mind, she spotted a potential landmark, about a half-block down from where she’d been sitting. She got up to take a better look at it. There, in full-color glory, was the Red Specter himself. He stood ten feet tall on a theater billboard for the “Legend of the Red Specter” Magic Lantern show.

  Magic lantern shows were the latest rage—traditional shadow puppetry mixed with new materials and analytic-engine techniques. It used a powerful electric lantern beamed through a diorama of translucent acetate cutouts to project a moving image onto a huge screen at the front of the stage: a window into another world.

  But Joy recognized something about the Magic Lantern that most people didn’t; it was actually an outgrowth of military technology used to create a pilot simulator for steam golems. She’d gotten a taste of it in one of her supplemental courses—the final boss in a simulated mission, designed to “kill” the trainee to teach them to respect just how complex the golems were, and how difficult piloting them was.

  Joy had spent two months on that course, mostly studying a manual and taking turns on a “dummy table”: an elaborate mockup of a steam golem control console, before getting one chance to do one simple mission on the simulator, running it in gimp mode. “Gimp” was short for GMP: General Mobility Protocol, a setting that allowed one person to run most major functions of the steam golem, albeit in a limited and sub-optimal way. Normally a steam golem ran with a team of three: Pilot, Gunner, and Combat Mechanic. GMP was for driving a steam golem around base, from one hangar to another, or for emergencies where the Combat Mechanic had become a casualty. Joy came out of the experience with a sense of awe of the skill of a real golem crew. She’d had enough trouble mastering the gimp controls—she couldn’t imagine dealing with the full version—which was more complex by several orders of magnitude.

  Joy stared up at the huge poster of the Red Specter and wished she could afford a ticket. She’d heard that the Magic Lantern productions kept getting more and more advanced. Freed from the restrictions of building generic scenery that had to constantly adapt to input from a pilot, the designers could focus their energies on making specific elements look as cool as possible. Apparently, there were portions of the show where the hand puppets would be replaced by an acetate reel with hundreds of individual paintings of the character, that scrolled across the screen at such high speed that it appeared to be moving, like a flip book or a zoetrope, only better. She’d really like to see that, even if it was for a cheesy Red Specter story.

  It had just started this week, and would be running for the next three months, at least. The show didn’t start until eight PM, and the tickets didn’t go on sale until four, which was… in ten minutes, according to the clock above the box office. Already there was a huge line stretching outside the front of the theater. Part of that had to be holiday traffic, but still, people seemed really excited to see this show. Joy wondered if maybe she could find room in her budget for a ticket after she got paid for her story. She decided that the answer was no. Money coming in from freelancing was too unreliable. She had to save in the flush times to prepare for the lean times. And she had to save up enough to pay for her relocation. She couldn’t forget that.

  And she couldn’t forget why she’d come here in the first place. On a whim, she went up to the box office to ask if anyone there had been working the evening shift three nights ago and had seen someone matching Madame Zenovia’s description walk past at any point. It was a bit of a long shot, but a woman decked out in a bright headdress and tons of gaudy costume jewelry wandering around talking to herself might leave an impression. The answer was yes, one of them had seen her, but it took a while to reach that point.

  First Joy had to listen to the attendant’s spiel about how tickets weren’t on sale yet, and anyone under the age of sixteen would need a parent or legal guardian’s permission to see the show. It had annoyed Joy enough to slap her military ID up against the glass, even though it didn’t matter, since she wasn’t buying a ticket. And the attendant (who was certainly younger than Joy—she’d bet ten cans of Victory Meat on that point) didn’t have much useful to add, other than he’d seen a strange woman matching Zenovia’s description acting weird and wandering off on Chontos heading south.

  Joy stomped away from the box office in a terrible mood, wondering if the meager diet she’d been on lately was to blame for being mistaken for a teenager. That had been the third time this month.

  Joy knew there were some women who would love to look younger than they were, but she hated it. Growing up, she remembered flipping through her mom’s fashion magazines, during her meager downtime between studying and watching over her siblings, looking in awe at the gorgeous, sophisticated, curvy women displayed therein. She wanted to be like them someday. But, at twenty-six, she had to face the truth that she’d done all the developing she was going to, and she’d fallen way short of her intended goal. Mom said that her breasts would get bigger when she got married and had kids, but Joy didn’t find that comforting at all. Why did she have to wait to get boobs until the point in her life when they’d be the least fun
to have? The way things were now, she had a nagging fear that she was unintentionally attracting pedophiles. Ew.

  Speaking of which, Joy realized that her angry haze had distracted her from noticing some guy trying to get her attention. He was being persistent about it, too. Well, that was the last thing she needed right now. She was about to ignore him and head off to the docks when a hand clapped down on her shoulder. Joy whirled around to tell this creep off, and found herself staring face-to-face with Professor Gelfland, her favorite teacher from Dodona university.

  Chapter 24

  Professor Gelfland

  Professor Gelfland was a huge cuddly bear of a man squeezed into one of his appropriately stuffy tweed jackets, despite the summer heat. He had a slightly squashed bulbous nose, an infectious smile, and eyes that radiated intelligence.

  “Oh! It’s you, Professor,” she said, letting out a sigh of relief. “Hello. It’s good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too. I’m sorry if I startled you, but you seemed lost in thought, and I didn’t was to miss the chance to catch up with one of my best students.”

  “Oh—thank you, Professor,” she said, though the compliment felt odd, like it applied to someone else. She felt a weird disconnect from Joy the academic. That Joy had been competent and successful; nothing like the person she was now.

  “But I’d give any credit there to my teacher,” she said. “And speaking of which, how’s that been going? Any more disrespectful kids giving you trouble?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” he said. “But how about you? I remember you were going to start up with the Journal, right? How’s that treating you? Flynn hasn’t been giving you a hard time, has he?”

  Joy felt the whole world drop out from beneath her feet. He didn’t know. He hadn’t heard. Whatever social club had been used by all the Dodona editors-in-chief to blackball her didn’t include her old professor, or at least they hadn’t mentioned it around him.

  And now she had to explain it? The whole embarrassing mess? She didn’t have time for that now, or the energy. She was right in the middle of something, and if she had to stop and explain the entire story, about getting assaulted and then getting fired for being assaulted… Well, it could lead to a messy sobbing breakdown right in the middle of the street, with a huge line of people as witnesses. Already she could feel the wave of emotion bubbling up, threatening to spill out of control. She had to put a lid on it. She couldn’t deal with this now.

  “Oh… No! He hasn’t… well…” Joy struggled to organize her thoughts. “I’m… I decided the Journal wasn’t the best fit for me. I’m freelancing now.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Professor Gelfland, although she thought he looked a bit confused. “Well, that’s got its upsides. You definitely have more freedom that way. Have you sold many stories? Anything I might’ve heard of?”

  “No, um… nothing you’d have heard of,” said Joy. Because if there was one thing Professor Gelfland had always emphasized in his classes, it was the civic and moral duty that journalists had: to serve as watchdogs for the Republic, to keep the public informed and hold the powerful accountable. She’d loved that about his classes. But there was no way she could tell him that she was freelancing for the Gazette, not without going into her whole sordid backstory.

  “But enough about me,” she said, “What about you? How have you been? Any major changes since I left?”

  “Fortunately, no,” he said, looking relieved. “For a while there was this push for all textbooks to require certification from one of Hardwicke’s agencies—not for accuracy, but to screen for “dangerous ideas.”

  “Ugh, that’s awful,” said Joy. “But you said it didn’t go through?”

  “Fortunately, there are still some folks in the Plenum with enough guts to stand up to Hardwicke’s overreach, and a few newspapers with the guts to report on it,” said Professor Gelfland. “We dodged a bullet for now.”

  …but who knew if they would the next time. He’d left that bit unsaid, but Joy could fill in the blanks. She felt another twinge of guilt. She hadn’t heard anything about this. She hadn’t been paying attention. She was so wrapped up in her own problems that she’d lost track of the rest of the world. That wasn’t like her. Something had gone wrong with her. She didn’t feel like herself any more. She hadn’t felt like herself for months.

  “Joy, are you feeling alright?” Professor Gelfland asked. “You look a little out of it.”

  “Oh, It’s… It’s nothing,” she said. “I think I’m getting a little hungry. I haven’t had much to eat since breakfast.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to treat you while we catch up, but then I’d lose my place in line, and I wouldn’t expect you to wait for food until we get our tickets, because that could be a while.”

  “You’re in line for the show, Professor?” Said Joy.

  “Of course,” he said. “Going to see it with my son, Hugo.”

  Joy looked over to where he was pointing to see a tow-headed kid far back in the line waving back at them. She smiled and waved politely.

  “Well, that makes sense,” said Joy. “Is he looking forward to the show?”

  “Not as much as I am,” said Professor Gelfland.

  Something about that startled Joy more than anything else that had happened that day. “Professor Gelfland! You’re a Red Specter fan?”

  “Is that surprising? It’s a very popular comic,” he said. “And, you know Joy, you’ve graduated already. It’s okay for you to call me Dan.”

  Joy ignored his suggestion, too blasphemous to even consider, and focused on the first bit. “Well, Professor, I know that it’s popular, but I didn’t expect something that cheesy to be popular with you.”

  “Professors aren’t allowed to enjoy cheese?” He said, eyes twinkling. “I never agreed to that. It doesn’t say that anywhere in the faculty handbook. I checked. Specter fandom isn’t limited to just young people like you.”

  “Me? I’m not a Red Specter fan.”

  “Eh? Then what were you checking at the box office?”

  “Oh, I was researching a story.” The words popped out of her mouth before she had a chance to think.

  “A story? Like, for the entertainment section? Interviewing the cast and crew?”

  “Ah… no. This is…” Joy had a burst of liar’s inspiration. “This is for a fictional story. A short story for a magazine.”

  Actually, that wasn’t stretching the truth too far. A good number of the Gazette’s front-page stories were so over-the-top ridiculous that she had a hard time believing that anyone took them seriously, even the Gazette’s readership. She suspected that a lot of people bought the paper purely for laughs. She hoped it was most of them.

  “Oh? I didn’t know you wrote fiction, Joy,” sad Professor Gelfland.

  “Well, this is a bit new, so I thought I’d try my hand,” she said. “But the magazine said they specifically wanted a story about the Red Specter, so I’m trying to do some research on that—like what the character is about, what the audience wants from a Red Specter story.”

  “Hmm…” said Professor Gelfland. “You know, that’s not a good approach for fiction, or any kind of writing, really. It’s best to write what you want, so your voice comes through. Otherwise—”

  “Well, great, but my voice is telling me I need to sell a story if I want to pay my rent this month,” Joy snapped. “Following my bliss or whatever sounds great, but I’m gonna have a hard time doing that if I’m out on the damned street lugging my typewriter around in a rucksack, now aren’t I?”

  Professor Gelfland withdrew as if stung, and Joy had to collect herself. “Oh, I’m sorry, Professor. I’ve been in a rotten mood lately, and—”

  “No, no—it’s my fault,” he said. “You know, you get tenure and you build a nice comfy nest in academia, and it’s easy to forget how it is for young people out in the real world. Of course your rent takes priority.”

  “Thank you,” said Joy. “Sorry.”

&
nbsp; “No problem,” he said. “You should see how cranky I get when I’m hungry. Say, there’s a bunch of decent sandwich shops around here—why don’t you grab a late lunch and meet us back here. We can get tickets for the show, and maybe it’ll give you ideas for your story. My treat for the lunch and the tickets.”

  “Oh! Thank you… but I’ll have to pass,” she said. Both those things would’ve been fantastic under other circumstances, but hanging out with her old college professor right now meant she’d have to be lying to him the whole time. It would ruin everything. “I still need to check out some Red Specter sightings down at the docks while it’s still light.”

  “Sightings? People have seen him?”

  Joy winced. “Well, some people think they’ve seen him. What they’ve actually seen is anybody’s guess. But it does seem like there was… some sort of incident by the docks three nights ago. Probably it wasn’t really the Red Specter, but… I don’t know… I just—”

  “Well, you never know,” he said. “Maybe you can get a story idea from whatever happened. That’s how the Red Specter folklore got its start, before it became a comic.”

  “Oh, really? The real-world sightings of the Red Specter actually did start before the comic, and not the other way ‘round?” Garai had said as much, but Joy had every reason to doubt him as a reliable source.

  “Oh, definitely. That’s been confirmed many times over,” he said, with a level of confidence that killed any doubts Joy might’ve had. Professor Gelfland wouldn’t repeat information if it hadn’t been credibly sourced. Actually, this could be a real opportunity.

  “You sound like you’ve done some research on this, Professor,” she said.

  “Well, folklore is a hobby of mine. And the Red Specter is a very special type of folklore.”