FFOLKES: I’ll begin with a few of your late uncle’s more noteworthy reviews, if I may…
TOM DARBERSMERE: Oh yes, please.
FFOLKES: “The bloody meat of Tim Darbersmere’s stories is always the exact opposite of the soothing, reasonable tone in which he communicates it.” “Never has such beautiful and clever prose been suborned to the service of such decadent and puerile ideas.” “Solipsistic to the point of sociopathy. Darbersmere is the sole protagonist of every story he’s ever written…the hero, the villain, and (most certainly) the love interest.” As you begin your own writing career, does the potential after-effect of these remarks disturb you?
DARBERSMERE: Not at all. I aspire, one day, to a similar critical impact.
FFOLKES: And “Ellis Iseland”, what about her? Why has she become central to your fiction, too – carried over from your late Uncle’s work, for continuity’s sake? Or does she represent some more personal archetype, perhaps?
DARBERSMERE: Ellis who? Oh, you mean the chainsmoking war profiteer femme fatale from that last story Uncle Tim’s supposed to have written, the one no one’s ever reliably found a copy of?
FFOLKES: “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, yes.
DARBERSMERE: Where we find out the secret key to eternal life and renewed youth is making a meal of filleted ghetto child? Well, that’s a bit like quizzing me on a viral Internet meme, one of those things that seep into the creative community’s groundwater with anyone noticing how, and wondering why you don’t get more of a distinct response.
FFOLKES: But she turns up here too, doesn’t she, in Tim’s own “Echidna Comes Rising” – he calls her Lisha Illen, granted, but each version is described using much the same language. Or here, from your novella “Copshawholme Fair”: Elfis Isham. Essa Highman in A Dull Wind Blows from the North, Ester Smallwaterhame in Safe in Their Alabaster Hives…
DARBERSMERE: Does she? I suppose she must. How extraordinary! You know, I never read my own stuff once I’m finished with it, no more than I re-read his. I really must start.
FFOLKES: Everyone’s got a type, I suppose.
DARBERSMERE: Oh, certainly. Every woman I write is my wife, to one degree or another.
««—»»
The package is waiting for them when they get back to Nim’s. As Veruca trudges past, still sunk in the same kicked-puppy misery haze that made their silent walk back so excruciating, Nim unlocks her mailbox and frowns at the result: A flat rectangle wrapped in subtly-striped brown paper with a registered-mail barcode in one corner, poking up out of the rest of Friday’s bills. The return is a name she doesn’t recognize, in Australia; scrawled across the front in letters two inches tall, meanwhile, is—
ATTN VERUCA LUZ c/o NIMUE EWALT
“Veruca!” Nim’s a little startled by, but not really sorry for, her own shout’s volume; Veruca skitters back down, eyes wide, as she holds up the parcel. “What the hell? You gave my mailing address out to some guy, without even asking me? You—”
But Veruca throws herself headlong to rip it from Nim’s hand, tearing at the paper, all the while emitting such a fast high-pitched squeak it takes Nim a second to decipher it: “Ooh, owemjee owemjee owemjee owemjee owemJEEEE!”
Owemjee, equalling O. M. G. As in Oh My God, in ‘Net-compacted typespeak for terminally lazy hunt-and-peckers. As in—
Let’s get this straight…you can’t be bothered to fill in four extra letters, like you were actually saying something out loud? Like a GENUINE FUCKING ADULT?
“What is it?” Nim makes herself ask, at last. And Veruca turns it towards her with a Prestige-y flick of the wrist, showmanlike, conspiratorial: Ricepaper cardstock cover, deep Chinese red, embossed carp design. Pretty classy, actually, for some cheap little one-story printing…
“Read the title,” she says. So Nim does.
(Oh.)
For a moment, she’s back on that blackwater beach, under that starless sky. It sort of hurts to breathe. The letters swim in front of her, drunken and dripping, pixilated in some almost tidal way – twenty characters if you count the apostrophe, letters slightly raised, DomCasual BT script at 22-point font. The Late’s name underneath, silver-stamped; his real signature or a very good imitation, probably traced from a treasured memento, by somebody like Veruca.
Because: There it is, the thing itself, its lacquered cover slick like skin under her increasingly sweaty fingers. And she can’t take her eyes off it.
While Veruca watches, her own green gaze reflective, serene. Almost sad.
“You see why I had to come, now?” she asks, gently. To which Nim can only nod, once. And then—
««—»»
Flash-cut to later, as Nim logs on to CreepTracker.org while Veruca cat-naps, getting herself good and charged for the full-frontal assault on Darbersmere Central. CreepTracker’s Nim’s favorite chat-hangout of choice, not to mention run by another “friend” she’s yet to meet in the non-virtual flesh (and man, is she starting to think that may never seem like a “good” idea again, no matter how calm and reasonable Ross Puget may seem when he’s just text on a screen, plus a blurred icon that’s all crested prematurely-grey hair and wide, crooked smile…)
Word on the ‘Net, and it’s not like he denies this, is Ross used to co-run a three-way haz-mat cleaning service – Glouwer-Cirrocco-Puget, currently defunct due to one of the founding members being kind of dead, the other kind of nuts – that was either a total scam or less about asbestos removal than scouring sites of “psychic fragments”.
Nim’s fingers fly over the keyboard, 60-words-a-minute speedy, more sure than she’s felt since she first touched “The Emperor’s…” fabled frontispiece. Asking—
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
Her server sings its “you have mail!” song, and she keys the link Ross just sent her: More like link salad, actually – different sites, different names, different angles. But the key-words stay the same: BODY FOUND…C.O.D. NOT APPARENT…NO CHARGES…WITNESS TESTIMONY LATER DISCOUNTED…INTOXICATED…UNDER INFLUENCE OF DRUGS…EXTREME COLD…BRIGHT WHITE LIGHT…
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
Seven people over three years in two separate clubs – one in New York, one in San Francisco. OWNER ALICIA DARBERSMERE HAD NO COMMENT…
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
A pause: Know what, exactly? Then—
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
And then there’s another chime – another email. Man, Ross codes almost faster than Nim can read…
(but not quite)
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
“Saying” it ultra-cool, a throw-away snark-snap, old-school Buffy-style. But feeling the hairs on the back of her neck go up nonetheless, oblivious to cliché, as her stomach clenches and flips: The disgusting gastronomic concept from which Tim’s notorious “memoir” takes its title playing itself out behind her eye-sockets, utterly unwanted, bad enough when done to a damn fish. Let alone a child…
Except, he didn’t. No one did. It’s a
frigging STORY, Nimue.
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree: <2 stay safe>
A long pause, this time. Long enough for Nim to remember the last time they “spoke”, when she spilled on Ross about Veruca’s RL nutsiness. Only to get a similarly wry line in return:
And thinking: Yeah, granted. Which may well be why she and Ross keep it strictly between the lines – why they’ve never thought to hook up for real, even though they live in the same city. Like they’re afraid to meet each other in the flesh, for fear of being disappointed that their “soulmate” might come attached to tics they can’t stand: Veruca, all over again. Thinking…
Shit, am I THAT easy? That HARD?
But all things must come to an end, even this. And so the pause breaks at last, with Ross’s final post—
KirlianPhotog:
««—»»
Hours later, meanwhile…
…they’re already through the door, inside the Speed of Pain, where the bass is loud enough to blow your hair back, bottom-heavy enough to sound like an Abyssal snake coiling and uncoiling in some parallel dimension. Up on stage, two women gyrate in a black-lit go-go cage, each using a hand-held buzzsaw to strike sparks off the crotch of the other’s metal bikini. Posters are plastered everywhere, blurring together in the changing light; there’s a livid yellow flyer on the floor at Nim’s feet, one of many, piled in clumps so high they brush the ankles. It reads:
TONIGHT, GRAND OPENING, AFTER MIDNIGHT. NO COVER. DEEJAY CEMETERY OX ‘TIL DAWN. FEATURED BANDS – FUDGETONGUE, DUST-GOWNED, PLUS RANCIDULCET (THE SOFT SOUND OF ROT).
Nim looks around, throat already raw with stray pot smoke and heat, vaguely recalling what it used to be like, back when this was still something else. But now it looks somehow darker and bigger, offputtingly so – a huge overhanging ceiling strung with lightbulb stars, a dance-floor inset intermittently with stained glass and lit from beneath, to weirdly patterned effect. Everything swims, hypnagogic, dream-sick.
And it’s at this point, naturally enough – when she’s already off-centre, and the noise conspires to render her all-but-unintelligible – that Nim sees Veruca’s face assume an awful look of slack hunger as somebody she can only assume is Tom Darbersmere appears in the middle distance, near one end of the room-long bar: That man-shaped thing with the laughing white null for a face, arm wound around the shoulders of a woman (Alicia?) whose long brown hair hangs heavy, interrupted only by a rising dragon’s tongue of smoke.
Veruca surges against the crowd, chapbook already in hand, but Nim grabs her by the arm before she can quite start to move.
“You know there’s no way any of that actually happened, right?” she bellows over the roar.
“What part?”
“Like, any of it? Holy crap, Veruca, get a fucking grip. I mean, this is some sick sort of shit right here – “
Veruca purses her lips, a disappointed moue, like: Oh, Nim. And says, only:
“I have to go.”
“Veruca, look at them!” Nim has to scream now, feeling her face distort with the effort. “Does he look seventy? Does she look, what, a fucking hundred?”
“Not any more.”
“They couldn’t get away with it. Not today. They couldn’t. Veruca!”
But she’s gone. Vanished into the crowd, a salmon slipping effortlessly beneath the rapids, heading upstream.
And it’s stupid, but Nim keeps on glitching on that…story. “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, which she finally read in full on her way up here, under streetcar-light. That scene in the kitchen, that last phone conversation between “Tim” and the Head Chef at the Precious Dragon Shrine…
Sure, the author makes it sound “plausible” enough, in the moment – that’s his damn job. Even if you accept “The Emperor’s…” as Tim Darbersmere’s work to begin with, though, all the Wiki’ing in the world won’t let you skip over the fact that he did this exact same sort of shit before, a couple of times: The case-study for a disease that didn’t exist, that 1960s piece where he convinced everybody who was anybody he’d lost his arms to gangrene, after a car accident outside Cannes… And yes, glamour and exoticism turns tarnished if it’s revealed that the gruesomeness is factual, not just squeamish, gleeful metaphor – but it doesn’t matter, does it? After all—
– things like that aren’t true. Thankfully. Because if you thought, if you even suspected, even dreamed they were, then it’d be time to—
(bury yourself in the sand, face-down)
And besides which: How could it go unnoticed, even if? How could such a price be paid over and over again in a world of SINs, DNA and GoogleEarth, of YouTube and datamining, a world drowning in celebrity poon-shots and political blowjobs, where nothing stays secret for long?
Yet: That’s exactly why, Nim suddenly realizes, silent and unmoving amid the rave, completely unconscious of the odd looks she’s getting from the crowd. Veruca thinks she’s stumbled across the greatest story never told, so she wants in. Not to take part, never that – but just to know, to be certain, to be on the Inside, for once. If only the once.
So either Veruca’s just batshit and about to get thrown out for spouting craziness all over the host, or…
But Nim shies away from the or, on principle; She doesn’t believe it, doesn’t need to. Forcing herself into movement, shouldering her way through the crowd, sliding between bodies where she can’t force them apart, ignoring the passing gropes and the leered invitations; nothing matters now except heading Veruca off, before she can render both their chances at a genuine life even more remote.
Then – thud, stumble, recognition: Anticlimax. Veruca stands (more accurately, sways) at the edge of a small circle ringing the good-looking man and his smoke-wreathed wife. Her face is pallid, her eyes wide and bright, and she clutches the chapbook to her heaving chest like a shield.
A second later, Tom Darbersmere can’t help but see her; his eyes widen, ever so slightly. Almost as though he—
(recognizes her)
He leans towards her, lips moving. Something that might be: My dear. And Veruca, Veruca…
Recoils, falls back. Goes whiter than white. Then backs away ‘til she hits somebody, blunders further, turns tail—
—and flees.
««—»»
Nim follows after, into the maelstrom. Past couples dry-humping up against the door-frames, through room after room of excoriatingly loud music of every possible type, a thousand-song playlist set on infinite shuffle. In one of them, people toss wreaths of lit sparklers back and forth, like they’re putting on some carny magic show. In another, a man hangs from the ceiling by Sundance hooks, a softball stuck with nails held tight in either hand; his friends stand underneath, videotaping the ordeal, as blood drips onto their camera’s lens. Each successive room is hotter, louder, stranger—
Nim wipes sweat away and checks her watch, only to find she’s lost more than an hour. Thinks: ‘Cause time works differently, in here.
Then catches a flash of blonde up ahead, ducking through yet another doorway, and heaves forward again, trying to bridge the gap between them. Ending up somehow caught inside what seems like ten or so feet of bead curtains strung one behind the other, instead – she swims through them, their warm plastic leaving a sticky trail behind everywhere it touches, and spills through to the other side: A cool, dim room so insulated she actually can’t hear the music playing in the rest of the club anymore (though she can still feel the sheer erratic pulse of it coming up, floor acting as a remarkably efficient conductor, even through the three-inch soles of her shoes). The sudden contrast makes her heart slam up against her ribs, beating fast. She pauses, long enough to take it all in—
&nbs
p; Dim and spare and hung with red, everywhere Nim looks. And it really must be later on, because the only people in there are Tom, Alicia (lighting a fresh cigarette with a flourish, then flipping her antique silver lighter shut) and a squat woman Nim doesn’t recognize at all: Thick glasses behind which her eyes swim like tiny fishes; a courderoy jumpsuit with purple irises printed all over it; beige hair, beige skin, beige voice.
She carries something small and squishy-looking in a baby-harness slung tight over her massive bosom – not a miscarriage that’s been dug up and somehow laminated, as Nim horribly assumed at first sight, but a plush creature of some weird derivation, with a gaze as hooded and squinty as her own. It jiggles back and forth with her breath as she stares down at the table, a tealight candle slopping dangerously between her palms.
Tom, to Alicia: “Not this again.”
And: “I need to know,” Alicia replies, her voice nothing like Nim night have expected – flat, Midwestern, abnormally “normal”. “Especially now. Think you’d feel the same, tai pan.”
“Would you?”
“Yeah. You saying you don’t?”
A spark passes between them, chased with a sigh. “It is your club,” Tom points out, finally.
Alicia grins. “Well, okay, then.” To the woman: “Is it here, right now?”
The woman gives a long sigh, lips twitching feebly, as though she doesn’t want to answer. At the same time, beneath the frame of Nim’s gaze, something stirs; she strains to focus on it for a second, before realizing—
(oh GOD)
—it’s that thing, that mockery, the woman’s snug-coccooned un-child, kicking out slightly in all directions, like it’s testing uterine waters. While the bulgy eyes blink and the mouth pulse in and out, stop-motion slow, like it’s clearing its throat…and from the woman’s own mouth, a slurred voice issues, hissing:
“…alwaysss herrre.”
(Like it’s puppeting her. Not the other way ‘round.)
Oh MAN, I need to get out of here.
Nim backs up, praying Tom and Alicia won’t notice; thankfully, they don’t seem to. Not Alicia, anyhow – who leans forward, brows knit, and keeps on quizzing.
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