Life Slowly Faded
Novella 1 in the Marty Phillips series,
a Tale of the Erde Cycle
(A Worlds’ Mythos novella)
By Kieran Double
Foreword
I am writing this account of my first adventure to help the novice Huntsmen and Rotkäppchen of future generations. We are fewer than we once were, and I have found that the books of my ancestors and the Grimms are wholly inadequate at introducing novice Huntsmen to the Versteckt world. I hope to remedy this by providing a practical guide to entering the Versteckt world. I was older than most, by roughly nineteen years, when I discovered my powers.
I have, probably unnecessarily, added quotes from ‘Children’s and Household Tales’ by Brothers’ Grimm. These quotes are, although sanitized for a human audience, a good warning, and may help remind readers of the history behind all of what I describe, and what they will encounter as Huntsmen or Rotkäppchen. Even so, I believe that they add a certain literary feel to the book, as does the way I have written the book itself. I hope, as much as this an educational guide that should be heeded cautiously, that you enjoy my story nonetheless. God knows we Huntsmen and Rotkäppchen need more enjoyment in life (especially my sister, Ashley).
But know this, before you turn the next page, this book is to be guarded with your life. Losing your copy is a grave crime, and not reporting it will result in a death order. Do not show this to anyone you do not trust fully, even Grimms. When you die, make sure that this book is given to another Huntsman, preferably a child if you have any, or a Grimm. This may not, under any circumstances, fall into the hands of dangerous Verstecktvolk or Nobles, unless they have been judged to not be a threat to either the Versteckt population or the general human population, and even then, only to those that you trust most. The book may not be transcribed by any but a Huntsman or a Rotkäppchen, and cannot be posted on the internet. As such, this book, like all books written for a Versteckt world audience, may not be shown to ungifted humans.
This is a law and was passed by the House of Speakers in November 2014. If anyone breaks this law, it is the responsibility of a Huntsmen to hunt them down and kill them, along with anyone who helped them in the breaking of the law. Novice Huntsmen and Rotkäppchen know this; all that you are about to read really did happen, and it might just happen to you. Beware! And watch your back!!!
Marty Phillips, PI
P.S.
The wording of the warning and the law bit is the House of Speakers, not mine. I would never be so melodramatic.
1
Don’t Stray from the Path
Red-Cap thought to herself ‘As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so’
(Little Red Riding Hood/Little Red Cap)
November 1st, All Souls Day, 2014:
“Why do we have to leave Mommy, Mr. Phillips?” asked Susie Merkel, looking up at him. She was small, petite, a little girl of eleven years, with cloudy blue eyes and brown hair done in a ponytail.
“I don’t know. It was her decision to make” I answered, trying to tug the little girl further along the path. Around us rose a great forest of fir trees. Subconsciously, my hand kept reaching down to the Colt Python in my waistband. Just in case, I told myself. Just in case.
“Take me back to Mommy. Now,” said Susie, rather angrily. She bizarrely didn’t sound like a child, as if she really understood what was happening. “What if she gets hurt? You don’t know what he’s like. He’ll hurt her. He’ll kill her.”
“I know he hurt you and your mother, Susie. He’s a bad man, I know that. Now come on. Just a bit further. We’re nearly there,” I muttered. As much as I hated to admit it, I knew the girl was right. Her father was a dangerous man. It was with a heavy heart that I had left her mother back at the cabin, arguing with her estranged husband. There was nothing I could do about it and now, at least, little Susie would be safe.
Then we heard it; Sylvie Merkel’s scream. It was a scream of despair and death. Coming from the right, northwards, it drifted with the wind into our tired ears. Before I could stop her, Susie dived into the undergrowth, towards the scream. I shouted after her, “Susie, don’t leave the path”, but she had already disappeared from sight.
Having no other option, I followed her, drawing the Python. I didn’t like where this was going. She might have been a child, but cross-country Susie Merkel could sure run. I lost her after a minute or so, but kept moving northwards. How I knew where to go, I will never know, but I found the clearing eventually. Susie Merkel stood guard over her mother’s body, having produced a semi-automatic pistol from somewhere. It was probably her mother’s.
The body was completely mangled. A large chunk of the woman’s throat was missing. Some of her fingers seemed to have been chewed. Her innards lay about her chest and neck, dirtying her grey tank-top. A large pool of blood surrounded the body, attracting flies. Shorts ending at her thigh’s left the woman’s muscular legs open to the air. Merkel’s impressive collection of tattoos, all over her arms and legs were drenched in blood. They depicted many different esoteric images. Down her right leg there was a backdrop of trees with dark green leaves. Two wolves ran down from her thighs, chasing a girl with a red hoody. Further down, on her calf, the picture continued, only this time there was blood, or something bloody, between the jaws of the wolves. No sign of the girl.
On the opposite leg, there were many different tattoos, all depicting wolves killing men, or vice versa. Most had scarlet red ink mixed in amongst the grey; blood. Near her left hip, there was big full moon, with a wolf howling at it from atop a cliff. What looked like the phases of the moon had been inked out upon her upper right arm. Next to each of the moons was a word in a language I didn’t understand. Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier. Not Latin, not French – I’d done that in High School – not Spanish, probably not Portuguese, but it was definitely European. It sounded… angry. What European language sounded angry? German. Why German? What was it? Numbers? If so what did they mean?
A similar tattoo had been drawn on her left arm – complete with Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier – but it was slightly different. Unlike all the others, this one had color. The missing parts, like the other tattoos, were replaced by black ink, but the moon itself, rather than simply being the color of her skin, was actually white. Next to each moon were to figures that looked somewhere between human and wolves. One was a lot smaller than the other. They changed as the moon did. At the new moon, they were practically wolves, but they had become humans by the full moon. Backward it seemed. A black-haired woman and a brown-haired little girl. Mother and daughter
“Stop staring at her, Mr. Phillips,” said Susie, interrupting my thoughts “If you want to see her tattoos, just look at the crime scene photos. Like in CSI.” For a girl that had just lost her mother, Susie Merkel was doing remarkably well. Perhaps it was just the shock. Perhaps she was just stronger than most eleven-year-olds, than most of the human race.
“Sorry, Susie. I’ll call the police.” I slipped my phone out of my pocket. I was about to dial 911 when something strange happened. Susie stood upon a rocky outcrop and howled like a dying wolf. In that moment, she seemed to change. Her nose became elongated, she grew hair on her face and looked half a wolf.
“Susie?”
“Yes, Mr. Phillips?”
“Are you alright?” I asked, feeling stupid. “I know that is a stupid question right now, but you don’t look okay.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Phillips.” Before my eyes, she became the little girl I had known and all traces of wolf-ness disappeared. “Well, my Mummy’s dead. And that isn’t good. But i
t could be a lot worse. I could be dead too,” she answered simply. It was a very profound thing for an eleven-year-old to say. Then again, she was one profound eleven-year-old.
“Right,” I muttered, unconvinced. I dialed the number.
“Yes?” was the answer on the other end of the phone.
“This Marty Phillips. I’m a Private Investigator. There’s been a murder…”
2
An Unhappy Marriage
‘You are mine and I am yours, no one in the world can alter that’
(The Twelve Huntsmen)
“So you just found her body lying there in the middle of the forest?” said Detective Andrew Walker. He walked around the interview room impatiently. His partner, Muller, hung back in a corner, not wanting to get involved. Muller was a quiet man, reserved, but smart. I had seen him spend whole investigations silent before suddenly announcing exactly who was responsible and how.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t see anything strange about this, Phillips?”
“Of course I did, detective. I had left her at the cabin only five minutes before. Then she turned up dead a mile away from where she said she would be,” I answered, frustrated. Walker had it out for me. Back when I had been on the force, we had something of a rivalry. Even though Muller was my partner at the time, he seemed to have avoided most of Walker’s anger. Perhaps he was less of a jerk than I was. Course he was. Normally, though, Walker was alright, or at least not completely unreasonable. I wondered what had happened to him.
“And you didn’t have anything to do with this?”
“No, I didn’t, Walker.”
He got up and paced around the room again. His face had crumpled up, permanently frowning. I didn’t smell drink off him and there weren’t any of the usual signs, but that meant very little in the scheme of things. Something was up. Better ask Muller after the interview. “When Merkel approached you, why didn’t you call the police? A child had been kidnapped. It’s your duty as a citizen to report any crime you have knowledge of. You clearly did not do this. Why?”
“Mrs. Merkel didn’t want any trouble. She just wanted her daughter back. Calling the police would have been… complicated. Besides, she’d called the police before and they’d never done anything” I answered “That doesn’t inspire trust. Telling the police after that would have been a breach of our confidentiality agreement.”
“Confidentiality agreement?” said Walker, feigning bemusement, continuing his long strides. “Doesn’t informing the police of a crime come before that?”
“It does, in most cases, but this was different. It was personal. She had a restraining order against him. Legally, she was the girl’s only guardian” I said. “Would you really want to get a whole police department in on something like that? All of Seattle would have known. Having your personal life plastered all over the place wouldn’t be good. It was her decision to go to me, and not the police. I can’t question that decision. It’s not my place.”
“Not your place?” Walker chuckled to himself. “What is your place? You don’t fit in as a PI, and you never were a normal detective.” He stood up again and slapped a file down in front of me. “Read this tonight. Maybe it will enlighten you. Your Mrs. Merkel had arrests for assault, breaking and entering, theft, handling stolen goods, grand theft auto, armed robbery, and soliciting.”
“So? Once a criminal, not always a criminal. Her last arrest was over a year ago,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve already read that.”
“Is that how low you’ve gone in two years?”
He sat down again, then, after a pause, he continued speaking, “I wonder why she went you instead of the police. She seems to have trusted a private investigator more than the Police Department. Do you know why?”
“I dunno. I must have made a reputation for myself,” I answered, wondering the same thing. I had once been a police officer, perhaps Merkel had thought that sense of honor had stayed with you, but I was still a free agent. It made everything easier sometimes. I had been working for money. The police would get paid anyway. I needed the money, she must have known that. Money was more reliable. It could have been as simple as that. In the end, though, her motivations remain a mystery.
“A reputation for yourself. What for? Lending yourself out to criminals and prostitutes?” said Walker sarcastically. “Why that sounds glorious?”
“That’s enough, Andy. We don’t have any more to ask Mr. Phillips, do we?” Muller emerged from the corner. His voice was deep and measured, not angry, but maybe slightly annoyed. He was about six foot, with mousy brown hair and intelligent green eyes. Far from being the diminutive nerdy man you would have expected for such a prodigious reader, he was heavy set and quite muscular, even if he went to the gym as much as the next man.
“You’re free to go, Phillips, I suppose,” said Walker, gesturing grumpily towards the door, not even bothering to stand up.
As I walked up to the door, Muller added, “Keep out of trouble, if you can, Marty”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. Admittedly, doing my best to keep myself out of trouble would not keep me out of trouble, but what could I do about that? Muller knew that better than anyone. I don’t know why I bothered.
I walked out into the Homicide Unit offices. Passing through there wasn’t exactly pleasant. Only two years ago I had worked there round the clock, with Muller as my partner. Trying not to think about that too much, I went into Captain Schlaukopf’s office. He was the head of Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit. A good fifteen years older than me, he had been something of a mentor when I became a detective. Once again, I thought I was going mad. Artie looked more like a fox than a human. He had grown red hair all over his face and his nose had lengthened. It only lasted a second, though, and then he went back to normal. He was slightly overweight, but not too much, collapsing into his chair. His hair was bright red, his eyes green. The faint aroma of stale cigars hung about him. He said, “You alright, Marty?”
“Yeah… Yeah, I’m alright. Don’t worry, Artie,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I basically did. One minute I was talking to Merkel, five minutes later she was dead,” I answered. Schlaukopf just shrugged. Nothing of interest there. Marty Phillips losing his mind again, nothing strange.
Muller shouldered his way through the door, juggling three plastic coffee cups. “Coffee, Marlowe?”
“Oh, shut up. Give me the damn coffee.” I wasn’t in the mood for my nickname at the moment. It had been given to me my sister in childhood, a play on the infamous Raymond Chandler character. I took a sip of the coffee Muller handed me. “Can I have the post-mortem pictures for Sylvie Merkel?”
“Christ! How fast do you think they work down in the morgue?” exclaimed Captain Schlaukopf. “They haven’t finished yet.”
“I don’t need the preliminary results. I know how she died,” I said patiently. “Just the pictures of Merkel’s tattoos. There might be something in them.”
“Something in them? You sure that’s all, PI?” muttered Captain Schlaukopf humorously. “No ulterior motive?”
“You’re a married man, Artie. You remember that,” I said, the smallest of smiles dancing on my lips. “Seriously, though, I think there might be some message in them, about where she was in life. You know, that kind of stuff.”
“That kind of stuff,” agreed Schlaukopf. He handed me a file. I flicked through it, looking at the strange tattoos. “What do you think? Strange marks. A dog?”
I nodded. “An Alsatian. Michael Merkel owns one. It was there in the cabin. Any sign of either of them?”
“No. From what you say, it seems pretty obvious that he killed Sylvie Merkel, or got the dog to do it,” said Schlaukopf, sipping loudly at his coffee. “Even if he didn’t, he’ll be wanted for kidnapping Susie Merkel.”
“Won’t exactly be easy to prove, though, will it, Captain?” mused Muller “If we find the dog, it shouldn’
t be much of a problem – the bite marks would match – but Merkel surely knows that. He’ll get rid of the dog. Smash up the bones if he’s smart.”
“Even so, Muller. All the evidence points towards Michael Merkel. He was the only person within miles of the murder. There haven’t been any reports of bear attacks around there. He was clearly abusive towards Sylvie Merkel and her daughter,” countered Captain Schlaukopf. He turned to me. “Do you think Susie Merkel might know anything important? She was out of your sight for a minute or so before you got to Merkel’s body. Could she have seen anything?”
“I doubt it, Schlaukopf. The blood was congealing by the time I got there. She’d been dead a few minutes, since we heard her scream I’d say,” I answered. “I mean she’d be a good character witness for her father, describe his abusive relationship with her and her mother. That’s probably the most important part of the whole case. It’d be enough to sway most juries.”
“When did you actually meet Sylvie Merkel?” asked Captain Schlaukopf. Walker had just asked me the same question. It was hardly surprising that the Captain was asking me himself. He always believed that you needed to hear the words out of a person’s mouth, not words on a page.
“Four days ago. She came up to my office covered in blood. A chunk of flesh on her right arm was missing. She said the Alsatian had done it, after Michael Merkel set it on her. Started demanding that I find her daughter. She said a friend had recommended me.” I could still remember it vividly. Merkel had stumbled into my apartment, which doubled as the offices to my PI business. At first, I had thought she was delirious, but it soon became clear that mentally she was whole.
“Good. There should be medical records of the injury.”
“There isn’t, Captain. She never went to the hospital. She cauterized the wound with a lighter and sewed it up with Annie’s sewing kit. Ended up spending the night on my couch.”
Marty Phillips (Book 1): Life Slowly Faded Page 1