Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Soul Survivor
Monday, March 9th, 2009
Marcus Marquardt paused before opening the email from Patti. They hadn’t parted on the best of terms. Would it be a diatribe? A summons of some sort? Or a restraining order? God forbid she’d send a suicide note.
But, he had to admit, Patti had never gone to extremes. She wasn’t prone to depression, and excepting that unfortunate incident with his vintage Coca-Cola bottle collection, she hadn’t even been particularly vengeful.
Marcus clicked on the message.
Dear M, Attached is my soul. You’re the only one I can trust to hold onto it for me. Where I’m going it would only be a liability. Please keep it safe and when I return make me take it back.
There it was, the little paper clip symbol with the words “patricia olsen.soul” next to it.
What the hell? Maybe Patti was pranking him somehow. More likely, somebody or something malicious had gotten to her computer’s address book. This was some trick to make him open the attachment and infect his own computer.
Still, what if? Patti’s message hadn’t even asked him to open the ‘soul’. She’d just asked him to keep it safe. He could do that much. But why him? Why not that new boyfriend of hers? Marcus had heard he was sick; hadn’t Deb said he’d gone into the hospital?
Marcus deliberately ignored the message and worked on a presentation due Monday. The clients had asked him to deliver something innovative while using their thirty-two page manual of specs. Typical. Two days later he got the call that Patti had died.
“Some weird suicide pact,” said Deb. “Her boyfriend just died of cancer and she asphyxiated herself in the same room. That’s love!”
Four months later Marcus cleaned out his email in-box. He paused, tapping his fingers too lightly on the keys to register. The cursor hovered over Patti’s message. With a tap on the delete key he could put everything behind him. Never think about Patti again. It was absurd that the message could be from her, or if it was that she’d have been able to send something he’d have any desire to see. Her ‘soul’. It was probably a picture of her boyfriend or a screed about how he was so much better than Marcus.
His finger drifted over to the key. A long moment passed.
Then he moved the message into his ‘family’ folder.
Brisneyland by Night – Part Two
Friday, March 6th, 2009
‘Why didn’t we come here first?’
Our last stop: a house in Ascot that I didn’t remember seeing before.
He shrugged. ‘Always the last place you look. It’s glamoured.’
He was right – I had to concentrate to see it properly. It got easier, but still the building seemed, well, slippery.
The house was set far back from the road, in the middle of an overgrown garden. Trees led up the driveway, grown so tall and close they formed a canopy overhead. Flying foxes squeaked, dark patches against the lightening sky.
I got out of the cab. ‘You’re not going anywhere, right?’
‘You paid me yet?’
‘Nope.’
‘I ain’t going nowhere.’
I wanted to go to bed. I’d spent the whole night picking through deserted houses. In West End, I’d nearly been spitted on the umbrella of an especially grumpy old lady whose wings unfurled in shock when she found me in her squat. That was fun.
West End’s filled with Weyrd. Everyone thinks it’s just students, drunks, artists, writers, a few yuppies waiting for an upgrade, junkies and the Saturday markets for cheap fruit and vegies. There’s also a metric butt-load of Weyrd, who do their best to blend in. In suburbs with a pretty strange human population, they generally succeed. The smart ones use glamours to hide what they are.
But this was Ascot; so upmarket that house prices could give you a nosebleed
I pushed hard on the doorbell. If anyone answered I’d ask if they were interested in a pyramid-selling scheme. People invariably backed away then, like you had an eye in your forehead.
No one came.
Through the front windows I couldn’t see too much: dark tidy rooms, some expensive pieces of furniture, a chandelier catching strays streaks of dawn light.
Out the back, steps lead down to a sunken garden. From the vantage of the veranda I could see it was set out as a maze, about five feet high; you might lose track of your path if you were short or a young kid.
Empty house. Why the glamour? I might have given up but that was the kicker. Something was amiss. Where do you hide a whole bunch of kids? Twenty-five kids in four weeks; all from unhappy homes so it looks like they’ve run away.
How do you make them disappear without a trace? A glamour.