Sometimes, it goes like this: a pearl necklace ripped from a throat. Droplets like tears, a lustrous rain scattering across a slick, black floor. A muted smack of flesh on flesh. A slammed door. Followed by more, in quick succession. A car engine and a feral, anguished scream. But the carpark out back doesn't talk about it. Not the wet asphalt and its reflections that mirror the entire event, not the dumpster or the startled homeless man who saw the whole thing from beneath his hood, unseen. There is only the frigid late night air that breathes a note. D minor; smashed glass, pit in the stomach, a baleful and distant train whistle.
The thing has happened. It's over. The redhead in one heel shoved in back is half way across town by now, with a clear run. Cherry red rear lights disappearing in someone's rear view mirror, while in his there's a forearm covered in skulls sitting on the lip of the car door, suit sleeve rolled to the elbow, a cigarette ember glowering like a faint beacon of danger. But the night is blind to it. Butch awaits the next green, ready to smoke the intersection.
She knows Blue Eyes will come. He always does.
All Vivienne sees from her crumpled mess of ivory silk and bruises is the sky which leans down and into the slice of open window, before rearing back with every jerk as the vehicle takes vicious corners, that speeding Viper Cuda that no one's gonna call in. She can smell the new leather and taste the highway. Fresh bills, concrete and thunder. The blood calls, dizzy in her head.
Alone in the dark behind the club, the homeless man picks up a single, perfect Paspaley from the ground and studies it in his filthy hand.
the calls of the blood
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
the calls of the blood
Last edited by Vivienne Kincaid on Wed Sep 25, 2024 4:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
Late April, 2024.
Motel 6, 1350 W Main St, Barstow, California
Her dreams ended the same. With the blast of a shrill trumpet, and the floor giving way beneath her, sending her tumbling into darkness below the stage. She could hear the staccato applause and whooping above grow distant as she careened further down in slow motion, while spectral, gloved hands reached out from the stygian, dank and frightening plane that surrounded her, groping, probing, clutching, caressing, prodding at her eyes, her cheeks, her ribs, yanking her hair, and sometimes, driving forcefully their fingers into her mouth, or burrowing into the most delicate of places beneath the lace of her gown.
Blue Eyes sat on the bed opposite, at yet another rundown, Marlboro Man motel at the edge of the world, arrived at via the backroads and underbelly of an American nightmare. He watched her with a cryptic face, but she knew from the muffled phone calls through bathroom doors as she pressed her ear to the thin wood, that he was worried. That options were exhausted. For as laconic his way and opaque his meanings at times, he couldn't hide the emotion in his eyes. There was only so far he could move them across the continent before luck ran out, there were forces at play, and they would torment fate itself. He bent over to pick up the half-full Millers Lite sitting between steel toed boots, and held it out towards her. She shook her head and made a face, shifting her eyes to the window. The blinds were thick, obstructing telltale signs of where the sun was or was not sitting, and the miserable wattage of this particular desert hellhole diffused what light managed to slither inside, so that the entire space was cast with a yellowed, stained aspect. It could be 10:00am or it could be 4:00pm, but whatever it was it felt sad, it felt lonesome. These rooms always did.
"It's too early." Her features contorted in disgust as she eased back under the covers and rolled to look over at him, aggrieved .
He made a noise deep in his throat, a laugh that was hoarse, and sat back to stare at the window with her, though he was seeing far, far beyond it, across an ocean. "Neve, it's nearly 5:30pm. We gotta go."
His voice was textured with the grain of his Southern heritage, and tickled with a lazy twang from his pastured youth in Texas. "I got the car packed up, and we have a flight out of LAX at midnight. Food we’ll get on the way. I need you showered, dressed, and you're gonna have to leave some of those jazz records behind. And some of your coats. Where w--." The beaten leather of his jacket creaked his unease as he got to his feet, sighing out the rest of it, "where you're going, you can't be taking all that."
Vivienne, still disassociated from her dream, and the news that she had slept away a full day, sat up onto her side and drove a questioning stare at her bulletproof savior with his bottom-shelf lager, with his hair, too long, even for him, thick sheets of grey that fell down to his shoulder blades. He took a joyless swig from the bottle, willing to be patient as she adjusted herself to the world, to the real world. Her eyes still puffy, her stare a little like she was not altogether yet here. But he would wait the minutes she needed. He knew all about the dreams, the horror. He knew about the fear and the dance she had to do on the daily mentally to not slip into her paranoias; storm water grates, spiral staircases, viaducts, swimming pools and ladders. He'd seen the fear manifest. Seen her shutdown, trembling, catatonic, and become a ragdoll.
"Wait, what do you mean leave some of my shit behind?" It wasn't anger moored in her tone as she sat up straighter again, tucking her legs back and up and over the edge of the bed so that she was facing him perfectly. It was panic. She tipped her head forward, silent askance, lines of concern starting to pull at the sides of her mouth, in the little 'v' between the dark, thin arches of her brows. "Julian, what is going on??"
Present day, St. Canice's Treatment Facility, Ireland
“Leri--” The old name he almost said, corrosive in his throat. He corrected himself and placed his hands on her shoulders, thinner than even a month ago. “Eat something. Take the fuckin’ meds. Don’t fuck around with someone in here. I brought you here so you wouldn’t have to be lookin’ over your goddamned shoulder. Texas won’t go us anymore, not Idaho, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Louisiana, the whole state, isn’t even a remote possibility for a long fuckin’ time. Just … just let them take care of you here. Fuckin’ let up.” He eased a pale auburn corkscrew behind her ear. Leaned in and brushed her cheek with his mouth. "They know, the people here know, sweetheart. Mickey fixed this up, just for you. All you have to do is just … just let go, Neve."
"What does that even mean?" She bristled.
He didn't respond, but instead took her small, red-nailed hands, and squeezed them. "I'll call you. And I'll be by in a week. And I mean it--." His hound-dog stare already seeking out the young, dark haired man he'd noticed watching them, watching her, from down the hall on the last visit, which had explained the heat he had clocked in her within minutes of arriving. "Don't fuck him. Might as well pour kerosene on the pair of you." He jabbed a finger at the hall where, coincidentally, Milo appeared, his blue eyes large enough to fall in, swim and splash around in, and, what Blue Eyes feared, drown. But the fluorescence of a glassed off room through a secured door Blue Eyes couldn't access ate up the last glimpse of the man in question as he retreated. "I'll kick your ass and I'll kick his, too. You're safe here. Don't jeopardise that."
With an uncompromising stare, Blue Eyes left. Problem was, she knew too well what had started, and that she didn't need kerosene to burn on for days.
The sonorous wail of the saxophone crooned behind her and she stepped up to the microphone, in the full, blinding light of her pseudo-moon. White sheets of artificial illumination washed out the serrated silhouettes at the edges of the stage, waiting in rows, with the solemnity of pallbearers and the menace of starved dogs.
A trumpet blared a deranged dirge, the trapdoor opened. She felt nothing, but heard the skull-piercing sound of her own cry.
Motel 6, 1350 W Main St, Barstow, California
Her dreams ended the same. With the blast of a shrill trumpet, and the floor giving way beneath her, sending her tumbling into darkness below the stage. She could hear the staccato applause and whooping above grow distant as she careened further down in slow motion, while spectral, gloved hands reached out from the stygian, dank and frightening plane that surrounded her, groping, probing, clutching, caressing, prodding at her eyes, her cheeks, her ribs, yanking her hair, and sometimes, driving forcefully their fingers into her mouth, or burrowing into the most delicate of places beneath the lace of her gown.
Blue Eyes sat on the bed opposite, at yet another rundown, Marlboro Man motel at the edge of the world, arrived at via the backroads and underbelly of an American nightmare. He watched her with a cryptic face, but she knew from the muffled phone calls through bathroom doors as she pressed her ear to the thin wood, that he was worried. That options were exhausted. For as laconic his way and opaque his meanings at times, he couldn't hide the emotion in his eyes. There was only so far he could move them across the continent before luck ran out, there were forces at play, and they would torment fate itself. He bent over to pick up the half-full Millers Lite sitting between steel toed boots, and held it out towards her. She shook her head and made a face, shifting her eyes to the window. The blinds were thick, obstructing telltale signs of where the sun was or was not sitting, and the miserable wattage of this particular desert hellhole diffused what light managed to slither inside, so that the entire space was cast with a yellowed, stained aspect. It could be 10:00am or it could be 4:00pm, but whatever it was it felt sad, it felt lonesome. These rooms always did.
"It's too early." Her features contorted in disgust as she eased back under the covers and rolled to look over at him, aggrieved .
He made a noise deep in his throat, a laugh that was hoarse, and sat back to stare at the window with her, though he was seeing far, far beyond it, across an ocean. "Neve, it's nearly 5:30pm. We gotta go."
His voice was textured with the grain of his Southern heritage, and tickled with a lazy twang from his pastured youth in Texas. "I got the car packed up, and we have a flight out of LAX at midnight. Food we’ll get on the way. I need you showered, dressed, and you're gonna have to leave some of those jazz records behind. And some of your coats. Where w--." The beaten leather of his jacket creaked his unease as he got to his feet, sighing out the rest of it, "where you're going, you can't be taking all that."
Vivienne, still disassociated from her dream, and the news that she had slept away a full day, sat up onto her side and drove a questioning stare at her bulletproof savior with his bottom-shelf lager, with his hair, too long, even for him, thick sheets of grey that fell down to his shoulder blades. He took a joyless swig from the bottle, willing to be patient as she adjusted herself to the world, to the real world. Her eyes still puffy, her stare a little like she was not altogether yet here. But he would wait the minutes she needed. He knew all about the dreams, the horror. He knew about the fear and the dance she had to do on the daily mentally to not slip into her paranoias; storm water grates, spiral staircases, viaducts, swimming pools and ladders. He'd seen the fear manifest. Seen her shutdown, trembling, catatonic, and become a ragdoll.
"Wait, what do you mean leave some of my shit behind?" It wasn't anger moored in her tone as she sat up straighter again, tucking her legs back and up and over the edge of the bed so that she was facing him perfectly. It was panic. She tipped her head forward, silent askance, lines of concern starting to pull at the sides of her mouth, in the little 'v' between the dark, thin arches of her brows. "Julian, what is going on??"
Present day, St. Canice's Treatment Facility, Ireland
“Leri--” The old name he almost said, corrosive in his throat. He corrected himself and placed his hands on her shoulders, thinner than even a month ago. “Eat something. Take the fuckin’ meds. Don’t fuck around with someone in here. I brought you here so you wouldn’t have to be lookin’ over your goddamned shoulder. Texas won’t go us anymore, not Idaho, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Louisiana, the whole state, isn’t even a remote possibility for a long fuckin’ time. Just … just let them take care of you here. Fuckin’ let up.” He eased a pale auburn corkscrew behind her ear. Leaned in and brushed her cheek with his mouth. "They know, the people here know, sweetheart. Mickey fixed this up, just for you. All you have to do is just … just let go, Neve."
"What does that even mean?" She bristled.
He didn't respond, but instead took her small, red-nailed hands, and squeezed them. "I'll call you. And I'll be by in a week. And I mean it--." His hound-dog stare already seeking out the young, dark haired man he'd noticed watching them, watching her, from down the hall on the last visit, which had explained the heat he had clocked in her within minutes of arriving. "Don't fuck him. Might as well pour kerosene on the pair of you." He jabbed a finger at the hall where, coincidentally, Milo appeared, his blue eyes large enough to fall in, swim and splash around in, and, what Blue Eyes feared, drown. But the fluorescence of a glassed off room through a secured door Blue Eyes couldn't access ate up the last glimpse of the man in question as he retreated. "I'll kick your ass and I'll kick his, too. You're safe here. Don't jeopardise that."
With an uncompromising stare, Blue Eyes left. Problem was, she knew too well what had started, and that she didn't need kerosene to burn on for days.
The sonorous wail of the saxophone crooned behind her and she stepped up to the microphone, in the full, blinding light of her pseudo-moon. White sheets of artificial illumination washed out the serrated silhouettes at the edges of the stage, waiting in rows, with the solemnity of pallbearers and the menace of starved dogs.
A trumpet blared a deranged dirge, the trapdoor opened. She felt nothing, but heard the skull-piercing sound of her own cry.
Last edited by Vivienne Kincaid on Thu Aug 01, 2024 8:11 am, edited 2 times in total.
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
Richard's Bar, 491 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60654, United States
Tin-ceiling bar with budget beers, hard-boiled eggs & a jukebox filled with rat-pack classics.
Butch slipped across the avenues as easy as his fingers had Google reviews, intent on spending his last night on the road at one of the last great bastions of old America, The Dive Bar. Paragon of malarkey, cheap booze, minimal flashiness, and the best jukes in the nation, and if he was lucky, a skirt who didn't mind the getting handsy as long her glass stayed full or he flashed a few of those Amazon gift cards the younger broads asked for these days; he knew Mickey would look him in the eye and said “that’s what you get for bonin’ a millennial!”
He landed on one only two blocks from where he was staying, south of Kalamazoo, looked like it had just about the right quantity of classlessness, and one squint over his reflective shades and through the glass-brick windows reassured him. He needed distraction, he was a version of himself he never liked to be, the version with too much on his mind. It was all pearls and roses and a redhead plot twist, because the trail had gone dead. The night was fat with questions, much like his phone with incessant calls from Slim, which is why it was face down on the counter as soon as he parked on a corner stool.
Butch blended in as much as any aging hitman does, which isn't very fucking well; he threw a violent aura - turned schoolyards of kids to silence when he passed by the gates, made dogs snarl and foam-mouth on street corners, and had convenience store clerks wincing upon entry (OK, so, there was that time at the 7-11 in Seattle...) but really, he was mostly harmless. Just "Follow along, yeah?" Don't be troublesome, do as I say."
But he knew was too old for this shit. But what else was he gonna do? Sit in some geezer's garage playing Black Jack and drinking Old Style every forsaken day? Hunched over in a gauze of green neon advertising Irish whiskey, he looked out over the crowd, assessing, noting every door, every chair, where the men’s was, and approximately how much thigh that ribald stare could peek. He had to crack a smirk at the GoodFellas print on the wall right behind him. Fuck. If they only knew.
Fly Me To The Moon.
Sinatra's voice soared over his head, dousing the worries that nibbled his nerves, instantaneously rendering in him a fine mood. He popped the top two buttons of his dress shirt and signaled the bartender for another shot.
In that moment, right as Frank got to his crescendo, as the scotch slid down his throat, the door flung open and in walked the last person he expected to see not only in that weary establishment, but outside the licking flames of the hell he was surely for.
Julian 'Blue Eyes' Keystone, perennial leather jacket flying sandblasted club insignia on the back and a constant look of exasperation etched into his long face and deep set brown eyes, headed towards him. In that fucking annoying way he walked, springy, on the balls of his feet because he was the rangy sort, too long, too tall, too much of a lot of fucking things.
"She's gone, that's the end of it."
"What the fuck do you mean you prick?"
Blue Eye assembled all 6’1 of himself onto the thimble of a stool beside Butch and looked over to the waitress, giving her two fingers. Two shot glasses followed, filled with the only thing Butch and he had ever agreed on - Jameson.
"It's over, Butch. Mickey cut a few to make it even. Old favors. You're not gonna find her, so close things with Slim, set me up a meeting with me if you aren't gonna do it. But, just fucking let Neve go.”
Butch jerked his head over and looked at Blue Eyes in contempt. Butch was rawboned, like he hadn’t been stitched with enough skin for his features, all of it pulled tight and gaunt, with deep marionette lines, he was severe and intense, yet the suits and cars and cologne and a crinkle to his gaze made the broads blush. "I beg yer fucking pardon, man. It's over? Who the fuck you think you are, what do you think this is? She isn't just a toy you forget on the bus. Slim's never gonna accept it. Nor is the Galleria.”
"He's gonna have to."
"The fuck you mean?" She's property for him, and a liability for you. . She isn’t here and that is a problem for you my friend.”
Blue Eyes lifted his shoulders and dropped them, trying to ride off the tension that rode him and had all day. Like Butch, he was crowded up in the strobing, bright green glare of the Jameson sign.
“Don’t talk to me about liable; she was black and blue when she came to me. That’s never going to fly, besides it being heinous, this is legacy. You knew I would have to continue stepping in. And you know what they were doing to Vivienne was gonna kill her.”
Butch released a sigh and coughed. Where were his smokes. "She's a cheap whore."
Blue Eyes leveled his eyes on Butch, sitting there, with his too-big sideburns, slick back, and an assortment of roving tattoos creeping out from every spot his shirt didn't reach; back of the neck, tops of his hands, chest, side of his neck. Demons, a heart, skulls, Iron Crosses, spiderwebs, pin ups. "Then she's not really market value, is she?"
“I'll find the bitch.”
Blue Eyes shook his head, and looked back up to the blazing neon green sign reflecting Jameson across the front window, under which his own face was superimposed. He very faintly worked a smile onto his face.
“What the fuck, you shmuck.”
“I’ve been patient, Butch. I’ve given you openings”, Blue Eyes held his hands out, long, slender fingers, steel wool at the knuckles, and made cups of his palms. “Many, many openings, like tonight. You swing any dick on this and the clubhouse will be on notice, I’ll have men posted corner to corner, from here to Metairie."
--
Two hours later, two blocks south, Butch shakes his cock dry, zips fly, and feeds his eyes full with the detritus of the dingier side of town as he steps away from the puddle of his urine. Where the buildings leaned a little too far to the side like hunched shoulders, shops closed early leaving dark pools to shadow on the sidewalk with their emptiness, the rest vacant, foreclosed, busted windows, unread mail, and fading signage. He went to turn the corner to find his Viper, when he heard it. A wall of sound he hadn’t ever heard before. It was emanating from a slit of a bar, a door too tall, too narrow, an opening off one of the forlorn, small streets running behind the commercial stretch. The music didn’t seem to have any melody he could get a handle on, nor any direction, like one of those asshole beatnik improvisational pieces, yet, it was hypnotic. A madman’s dream written into symphony, a lunatic calliope of punk jazz..rioting trumpets, a fucking oboe, wheezing Wurlitzer, an electric guitar wailing like a Greek widow, and someone playing a piano that sounded like it was being thrown downstairs, the rasp of a washboard. Arrhythmic drumming. Words flew through his head, trying to process the tin pan alley cacaphony. Freakshow shit.
Without answers as to where the absent songbird was, and with a lurching sick feeling that was beginning to leech into his bones again at having to tell Slim all he did know, the music was as a balm. While each step he took felt like lead, all doom and liquor, he found himself compelled to the red shuttered doorway with its strange multitude of triangular silk bally flags upon which shone ciphers in dramatic swells of text, and, once inside,the beckoning glower and blood-shadows of red lanterns throughout. At once, the circus of sound seemed to leap onto him, to adhere, to cling, to seep, thick and heavy, as though it were a substance, the air rife with an incense smokiness and extraordinary atmosphere of something lurid, dark, maniacal, exciting, but ultimately, unsettling.
Scattered around the venue was only a small crowd, their faces blood-shadowed with the crimson lantern light and the dramatic effect of the low, black ceiling and too close walls, velvet damask, the sight of it making his fingers itch to touch it as though it were a voluptuous offering, even as it seemed to writhe and undulate. Butch paused and looked around, his mind a berserk carousel. He momentarily felt dizzy.
Silence.
Scat.
It struck him like a cymbal. He tensed, except for his spooked eyes, seeking out features in the faceless red-lit mannequin-like audience that dotted this baroque cavern but no one looked back, from what he could make out in the luminous, radiating glare.
As he looked back to the stage he realised the scene had changed. The band gone, their instruments abandoned, black dense curtains peeled back like a sneer. The gaping darkened stage. He heard the whistle of dying stars and distant screams.
Skidoo.
And then, there were the puppets.
Tin-ceiling bar with budget beers, hard-boiled eggs & a jukebox filled with rat-pack classics.
Butch slipped across the avenues as easy as his fingers had Google reviews, intent on spending his last night on the road at one of the last great bastions of old America, The Dive Bar. Paragon of malarkey, cheap booze, minimal flashiness, and the best jukes in the nation, and if he was lucky, a skirt who didn't mind the getting handsy as long her glass stayed full or he flashed a few of those Amazon gift cards the younger broads asked for these days; he knew Mickey would look him in the eye and said “that’s what you get for bonin’ a millennial!”
He landed on one only two blocks from where he was staying, south of Kalamazoo, looked like it had just about the right quantity of classlessness, and one squint over his reflective shades and through the glass-brick windows reassured him. He needed distraction, he was a version of himself he never liked to be, the version with too much on his mind. It was all pearls and roses and a redhead plot twist, because the trail had gone dead. The night was fat with questions, much like his phone with incessant calls from Slim, which is why it was face down on the counter as soon as he parked on a corner stool.
Butch blended in as much as any aging hitman does, which isn't very fucking well; he threw a violent aura - turned schoolyards of kids to silence when he passed by the gates, made dogs snarl and foam-mouth on street corners, and had convenience store clerks wincing upon entry (OK, so, there was that time at the 7-11 in Seattle...) but really, he was mostly harmless. Just "Follow along, yeah?" Don't be troublesome, do as I say."
But he knew was too old for this shit. But what else was he gonna do? Sit in some geezer's garage playing Black Jack and drinking Old Style every forsaken day? Hunched over in a gauze of green neon advertising Irish whiskey, he looked out over the crowd, assessing, noting every door, every chair, where the men’s was, and approximately how much thigh that ribald stare could peek. He had to crack a smirk at the GoodFellas print on the wall right behind him. Fuck. If they only knew.
Fly Me To The Moon.
Sinatra's voice soared over his head, dousing the worries that nibbled his nerves, instantaneously rendering in him a fine mood. He popped the top two buttons of his dress shirt and signaled the bartender for another shot.
In that moment, right as Frank got to his crescendo, as the scotch slid down his throat, the door flung open and in walked the last person he expected to see not only in that weary establishment, but outside the licking flames of the hell he was surely for.
Julian 'Blue Eyes' Keystone, perennial leather jacket flying sandblasted club insignia on the back and a constant look of exasperation etched into his long face and deep set brown eyes, headed towards him. In that fucking annoying way he walked, springy, on the balls of his feet because he was the rangy sort, too long, too tall, too much of a lot of fucking things.
"She's gone, that's the end of it."
"What the fuck do you mean you prick?"
Blue Eye assembled all 6’1 of himself onto the thimble of a stool beside Butch and looked over to the waitress, giving her two fingers. Two shot glasses followed, filled with the only thing Butch and he had ever agreed on - Jameson.
"It's over, Butch. Mickey cut a few to make it even. Old favors. You're not gonna find her, so close things with Slim, set me up a meeting with me if you aren't gonna do it. But, just fucking let Neve go.”
Butch jerked his head over and looked at Blue Eyes in contempt. Butch was rawboned, like he hadn’t been stitched with enough skin for his features, all of it pulled tight and gaunt, with deep marionette lines, he was severe and intense, yet the suits and cars and cologne and a crinkle to his gaze made the broads blush. "I beg yer fucking pardon, man. It's over? Who the fuck you think you are, what do you think this is? She isn't just a toy you forget on the bus. Slim's never gonna accept it. Nor is the Galleria.”
"He's gonna have to."
"The fuck you mean?" She's property for him, and a liability for you. . She isn’t here and that is a problem for you my friend.”
Blue Eyes lifted his shoulders and dropped them, trying to ride off the tension that rode him and had all day. Like Butch, he was crowded up in the strobing, bright green glare of the Jameson sign.
“Don’t talk to me about liable; she was black and blue when she came to me. That’s never going to fly, besides it being heinous, this is legacy. You knew I would have to continue stepping in. And you know what they were doing to Vivienne was gonna kill her.”
Butch released a sigh and coughed. Where were his smokes. "She's a cheap whore."
Blue Eyes leveled his eyes on Butch, sitting there, with his too-big sideburns, slick back, and an assortment of roving tattoos creeping out from every spot his shirt didn't reach; back of the neck, tops of his hands, chest, side of his neck. Demons, a heart, skulls, Iron Crosses, spiderwebs, pin ups. "Then she's not really market value, is she?"
“I'll find the bitch.”
Blue Eyes shook his head, and looked back up to the blazing neon green sign reflecting Jameson across the front window, under which his own face was superimposed. He very faintly worked a smile onto his face.
“What the fuck, you shmuck.”
“I’ve been patient, Butch. I’ve given you openings”, Blue Eyes held his hands out, long, slender fingers, steel wool at the knuckles, and made cups of his palms. “Many, many openings, like tonight. You swing any dick on this and the clubhouse will be on notice, I’ll have men posted corner to corner, from here to Metairie."
--
Two hours later, two blocks south, Butch shakes his cock dry, zips fly, and feeds his eyes full with the detritus of the dingier side of town as he steps away from the puddle of his urine. Where the buildings leaned a little too far to the side like hunched shoulders, shops closed early leaving dark pools to shadow on the sidewalk with their emptiness, the rest vacant, foreclosed, busted windows, unread mail, and fading signage. He went to turn the corner to find his Viper, when he heard it. A wall of sound he hadn’t ever heard before. It was emanating from a slit of a bar, a door too tall, too narrow, an opening off one of the forlorn, small streets running behind the commercial stretch. The music didn’t seem to have any melody he could get a handle on, nor any direction, like one of those asshole beatnik improvisational pieces, yet, it was hypnotic. A madman’s dream written into symphony, a lunatic calliope of punk jazz..rioting trumpets, a fucking oboe, wheezing Wurlitzer, an electric guitar wailing like a Greek widow, and someone playing a piano that sounded like it was being thrown downstairs, the rasp of a washboard. Arrhythmic drumming. Words flew through his head, trying to process the tin pan alley cacaphony. Freakshow shit.
Without answers as to where the absent songbird was, and with a lurching sick feeling that was beginning to leech into his bones again at having to tell Slim all he did know, the music was as a balm. While each step he took felt like lead, all doom and liquor, he found himself compelled to the red shuttered doorway with its strange multitude of triangular silk bally flags upon which shone ciphers in dramatic swells of text, and, once inside,the beckoning glower and blood-shadows of red lanterns throughout. At once, the circus of sound seemed to leap onto him, to adhere, to cling, to seep, thick and heavy, as though it were a substance, the air rife with an incense smokiness and extraordinary atmosphere of something lurid, dark, maniacal, exciting, but ultimately, unsettling.
Scattered around the venue was only a small crowd, their faces blood-shadowed with the crimson lantern light and the dramatic effect of the low, black ceiling and too close walls, velvet damask, the sight of it making his fingers itch to touch it as though it were a voluptuous offering, even as it seemed to writhe and undulate. Butch paused and looked around, his mind a berserk carousel. He momentarily felt dizzy.
Silence.
Scat.
It struck him like a cymbal. He tensed, except for his spooked eyes, seeking out features in the faceless red-lit mannequin-like audience that dotted this baroque cavern but no one looked back, from what he could make out in the luminous, radiating glare.
As he looked back to the stage he realised the scene had changed. The band gone, their instruments abandoned, black dense curtains peeled back like a sneer. The gaping darkened stage. He heard the whistle of dying stars and distant screams.
Skidoo.
And then, there were the puppets.
Last edited by Vivienne Kincaid on Thu Aug 01, 2024 8:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
St. Canice's Treatment Facility, Ireland
He found her in the garden.
She was diaphanous with sunshine, eating up all available light. One hand was in the air, two fingers out like she was signaling her fellow Venusians, and a cigarette her other, wrist up, the smoke carefully balanced. She was swaying, earbuds in, and smiling.
Blue Eyes with hands in pockets stood and watched her for a little while, how she was free, unimpeded by the Galleria, Butch, Slim, or any of those assholes. Not having to linger behind curtains or doorways like some spook. But something gave warning inside, a zephyr alerting her instincts, and Neve spun around, tearing the buds from her ears, eyes wide and mirrored with a glossy fright. At once, Blue Eyes lifted his hands, leaned away, apologies falling, he hadn't meant to wander off into his own reverie, but the worry was painted in thick coats.
"Aye, aye, Nevey", he approached, slowly, as she relaxed and rose to her feet.
"Julian? I wasn't expecting you today. It's only Thursday?"
"It is" he conceded, or confirmed, and drew his palm down over his mouth. "Can we sit?"
He saw her eyes go for the sliding doors behind him, fixed like a dart, then flick back to him. "Dr. Rasmussen called, huh?" She smirked, took a long drag from what remained of her cigarette and sat back down, tangling her earbuds into the wide pocket of an oversized, gossamer blouse, cream coloured and occasioned by trills of lace circling the buttons, and barely-there buttery ribbons that bowed, faded velvet. Multi-rows of very delicate babies breath crystal beads were looped around her dainty neck, they twinkled in the sun, against the snow of her skin. "You come here to lecture me?"
The man sat forward, elbows on his knees and reached down into the grass to pluck a small, yellow flower. He stared at it, its pretty, dew-wet petals, the way it ached color and life. That was Neve. And she was going to be crushed, smashed, plucked to bits and left to wither on a sidewalk.
"Ya know, your Dad would have sent you to a goddamn Nunnery. I thought about it. But I figured, here, you get assessed, you get some help, you can learn about... whatever the hell it is that happened, and get yourself well, without having to worry about men. I figured here, of all fuckin' places, after a fuckin' nunnery or the Vatican itself, you might be safe. But lo and behold..." He put his head in his hands, long fingers clasping the back of his head, holding back his hair. "I can't protect you if you're going to do dumb shit, Vivienne." He snapped up and looked at her over there, smiling, her teeth even showing.
"Nothing happened!" Nothing warranting this, anyway.
"May as well have! And here, was it here - " he gestured to the bench, to the table, to the stone fountain flanked by cherubs mottled in bird shit. "And don't even tell me this is some new symptom, or that you're fuckin' lonely..." then he stopped himself, saw the way her smile collapsed into itself, and a glint of resentment in her eyes.
"Is making out a crime in Ireland?" Languorously. "Come on, J."
"This shit with your little boy toy cannot preclude what you were sent here for" his voice barreling at her, "and that's to stay the fuck alive, firstly", he waved a finger at her, pushing past the thorns, "...and secondly, deal with your triggers so you can lead a normal life. Adjust. I know it's hard, darlin', I get it, what I know of it, but this is a slap in my goddamn face." His reprimand a bark. "I'll have you taken out of here in a fuckin' minute. You hear me? I can't help you if you're not helping yourself. And I'm not gonna help you sort a temporary apartment in town for when this stint is finished if this is what your idea of smart is. No fuckin' way."
"Julian!"
He swung to his feet like an anvil and moved off into the garden, lurching. "I'm not financing a cathouse."
And the minute he said it, he knew he went too far. He hated himself. He was saturated in the feeling as he wheeled around. Neve was sitting straight, her legs crossed, just staring at him in astonishment. Fine, Harlow brows knitted to shock. Cigarette smoke making filigrees in the air.
"I'm... I'm sorry.…. Ah, shit, Vivienne."
"Cathouse?" The way she said it, a door sealing shut.
"Neve -- "
"I think you should go." Uncrossing her legs, and smoothing out the knee-length burgundy skirt that rippled and swelled about her bared, pink knees, Neve rolled to her feet and walked towards him. Her voice thin, cool, but wrought with a drowsy inflection, just as heavy hanging the moss, decorating Charleston boughs.
“You never asked me if I wanted to be in here. Then you get mad, because I'm reactin' to my situation. I haven't had anybody to talk to besides you for eight fucking months." Her voice cleaved with the expression of her big red heart, her eyes wet. "And I don't know how long it's been since I've been held. You dumped me here, you asshole. It's easier for you, not to have to drive me all over America. I get it, I get it..." shoulder bones rising, "but that's on you. I never asked you, not once, you set that expectation."
He watched as her lips quivered with emotion, a tear strike the curve of her cheek.
Surrender, his arms up, palms towards her, he turned for the sliding doors, glimpsing Neve's primary physician, Rasmussen, shadowing the admissions area. She snapped her eyes away, pretending to be consulting with Declan, one of the orderlies.
Her teary "fuck off" carried after Blue Eyes and through the door. Anyone and everyone in the lobby turning to look at the woman swearing in the yard, looking like some Victorian dervish by way of the 90s, with her patent Mary Janes, pleated skirt, and the whimsical taste of a vintage shirt. Riot of red piled atop her head. Not committed to any era or style, it was an eclecticism all her own, but in the context of a mental hospital, made her look like she was treading otherworldly, a bent for fantasy. Cuckoo crazy.
The doors took their sweet time to close, too long, Neve getting a final "asshole!" in before they did.
"I'll come by in a few days. Let her cool off." He winced. "I may have been a bit much. "
Dr. Rasmussen tilted her blank, chestnut face his way and touched his arm. "No, she needs to know this behaviour isn't condoned. We will be forced to take some authoritative steps if anything else occurs. But, maybe, go easy on her."
"And him? Blue Eyes said loudly. "You keepin' his dick out of frame? Huh? She's a vulnerable woman, Doc."
Rasmussen smiled politely. "Mr. Keystone. We're monitoring the situation."
She remained in the garden. Earbuds in, barricading herself in the music. Let it dismantle her mood. Take it away, piece by piece.
Somewhere on the grass, the yellow flower lay asunder.
He found her in the garden.
She was diaphanous with sunshine, eating up all available light. One hand was in the air, two fingers out like she was signaling her fellow Venusians, and a cigarette her other, wrist up, the smoke carefully balanced. She was swaying, earbuds in, and smiling.
Blue Eyes with hands in pockets stood and watched her for a little while, how she was free, unimpeded by the Galleria, Butch, Slim, or any of those assholes. Not having to linger behind curtains or doorways like some spook. But something gave warning inside, a zephyr alerting her instincts, and Neve spun around, tearing the buds from her ears, eyes wide and mirrored with a glossy fright. At once, Blue Eyes lifted his hands, leaned away, apologies falling, he hadn't meant to wander off into his own reverie, but the worry was painted in thick coats.
"Aye, aye, Nevey", he approached, slowly, as she relaxed and rose to her feet.
"Julian? I wasn't expecting you today. It's only Thursday?"
"It is" he conceded, or confirmed, and drew his palm down over his mouth. "Can we sit?"
He saw her eyes go for the sliding doors behind him, fixed like a dart, then flick back to him. "Dr. Rasmussen called, huh?" She smirked, took a long drag from what remained of her cigarette and sat back down, tangling her earbuds into the wide pocket of an oversized, gossamer blouse, cream coloured and occasioned by trills of lace circling the buttons, and barely-there buttery ribbons that bowed, faded velvet. Multi-rows of very delicate babies breath crystal beads were looped around her dainty neck, they twinkled in the sun, against the snow of her skin. "You come here to lecture me?"
The man sat forward, elbows on his knees and reached down into the grass to pluck a small, yellow flower. He stared at it, its pretty, dew-wet petals, the way it ached color and life. That was Neve. And she was going to be crushed, smashed, plucked to bits and left to wither on a sidewalk.
"Ya know, your Dad would have sent you to a goddamn Nunnery. I thought about it. But I figured, here, you get assessed, you get some help, you can learn about... whatever the hell it is that happened, and get yourself well, without having to worry about men. I figured here, of all fuckin' places, after a fuckin' nunnery or the Vatican itself, you might be safe. But lo and behold..." He put his head in his hands, long fingers clasping the back of his head, holding back his hair. "I can't protect you if you're going to do dumb shit, Vivienne." He snapped up and looked at her over there, smiling, her teeth even showing.
"Nothing happened!" Nothing warranting this, anyway.
"May as well have! And here, was it here - " he gestured to the bench, to the table, to the stone fountain flanked by cherubs mottled in bird shit. "And don't even tell me this is some new symptom, or that you're fuckin' lonely..." then he stopped himself, saw the way her smile collapsed into itself, and a glint of resentment in her eyes.
"Is making out a crime in Ireland?" Languorously. "Come on, J."
"This shit with your little boy toy cannot preclude what you were sent here for" his voice barreling at her, "and that's to stay the fuck alive, firstly", he waved a finger at her, pushing past the thorns, "...and secondly, deal with your triggers so you can lead a normal life. Adjust. I know it's hard, darlin', I get it, what I know of it, but this is a slap in my goddamn face." His reprimand a bark. "I'll have you taken out of here in a fuckin' minute. You hear me? I can't help you if you're not helping yourself. And I'm not gonna help you sort a temporary apartment in town for when this stint is finished if this is what your idea of smart is. No fuckin' way."
"Julian!"
He swung to his feet like an anvil and moved off into the garden, lurching. "I'm not financing a cathouse."
And the minute he said it, he knew he went too far. He hated himself. He was saturated in the feeling as he wheeled around. Neve was sitting straight, her legs crossed, just staring at him in astonishment. Fine, Harlow brows knitted to shock. Cigarette smoke making filigrees in the air.
"I'm... I'm sorry.…. Ah, shit, Vivienne."
"Cathouse?" The way she said it, a door sealing shut.
"Neve -- "
"I think you should go." Uncrossing her legs, and smoothing out the knee-length burgundy skirt that rippled and swelled about her bared, pink knees, Neve rolled to her feet and walked towards him. Her voice thin, cool, but wrought with a drowsy inflection, just as heavy hanging the moss, decorating Charleston boughs.
“You never asked me if I wanted to be in here. Then you get mad, because I'm reactin' to my situation. I haven't had anybody to talk to besides you for eight fucking months." Her voice cleaved with the expression of her big red heart, her eyes wet. "And I don't know how long it's been since I've been held. You dumped me here, you asshole. It's easier for you, not to have to drive me all over America. I get it, I get it..." shoulder bones rising, "but that's on you. I never asked you, not once, you set that expectation."
He watched as her lips quivered with emotion, a tear strike the curve of her cheek.
Surrender, his arms up, palms towards her, he turned for the sliding doors, glimpsing Neve's primary physician, Rasmussen, shadowing the admissions area. She snapped her eyes away, pretending to be consulting with Declan, one of the orderlies.
Her teary "fuck off" carried after Blue Eyes and through the door. Anyone and everyone in the lobby turning to look at the woman swearing in the yard, looking like some Victorian dervish by way of the 90s, with her patent Mary Janes, pleated skirt, and the whimsical taste of a vintage shirt. Riot of red piled atop her head. Not committed to any era or style, it was an eclecticism all her own, but in the context of a mental hospital, made her look like she was treading otherworldly, a bent for fantasy. Cuckoo crazy.
The doors took their sweet time to close, too long, Neve getting a final "asshole!" in before they did.
"I'll come by in a few days. Let her cool off." He winced. "I may have been a bit much. "
Dr. Rasmussen tilted her blank, chestnut face his way and touched his arm. "No, she needs to know this behaviour isn't condoned. We will be forced to take some authoritative steps if anything else occurs. But, maybe, go easy on her."
"And him? Blue Eyes said loudly. "You keepin' his dick out of frame? Huh? She's a vulnerable woman, Doc."
Rasmussen smiled politely. "Mr. Keystone. We're monitoring the situation."
She remained in the garden. Earbuds in, barricading herself in the music. Let it dismantle her mood. Take it away, piece by piece.
Somewhere on the grass, the yellow flower lay asunder.
Last edited by Vivienne Kincaid on Sat Jun 15, 2024 8:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
A few months ago...
Somewhere in Underbelly, Louisiana
Friday Nights. They were for fighting and fucking, broken teeth and broken hearts. They were the nights to press your chin to the asphalt and crawl. People were invested in themselves, distracted. They wouldn't see, wouldn't hear.
Blue Eyes stood in command, lording over the table of men who only obliged because he kept the heat off their back or they owed him something they would never pay back because the interest was their heads. All of them with hands still cold from the bars they'd clung to for years and now only too happy to have a little fresh air, pussy when they wanted, and something solid to put aside. Nothing came easy, and a blood debt was always better than the gaping maw of the pit, or the wardens with their batons on a drizzling afternoon watching your puke spiral down the drain while another set was behind you and coming.
He set the price and named the dance and made the men tango for little as he could. Hands out and shaking, vile conductor, telling them what where and how, but why was something kept in the back pocket like a lucky bullet or a phone number you never fucking called because deep down inside your too chicken shit. He rages about the woman that none of them quite comprehend his moods over, the one that isn't allowed one foot inside the clubhouse because "you'll be crawling all over her like flies to shit, no fucking way" so she's glimpses forever. A sculptural silhouette under street lamps in the passenger seat, sleek, a hand out the window sometimes, moon nectar skin and red nails glinting, Belladonna chasing the blood; blood, sugar, sex, magick - wasn't that what the Chilli's said? That's her. Smoke climbing the air, climbing to heaven where they can just tell she might be from. The little smile in the rearview, red mouth, Heron saw but once, and told all the men "she smiled at me, bra!" with elbow jerks and smarmy grins, and he can't pin it, but it's faraway, she's far away, that look on her face, like she's waiting to be picked up by an interstellar lover. "Looks like she's outta one of them old movies!" And the men laugh, make crude gestures, curse one another, but all go quiet, a rolling hush across their faces, whenever Blue Eyes is outside with her at the car, leaned over her side and leaned in, talking low. They can smell her. Lilac and lust.
And now she's gone.
"Cuda.. C.U.D.A. Viper Cuda you assholes", clicking through images on the projector he's presenting to the boys, including Butch. "Emaciated cocksucker in Brooks Brothers shirts stuck in his glory days of being the King of Wilshire Boulevard. You'll smell him before you'll see him. Too much of that goddamn Sauvage."
He lays out the plan and posts his men up and down the old bayou track known as Summers Grove, and is worried for the first time that he doesn't know how this will end. That he can't keep holding off a war he never sees but one he feels, the feeling growing stronger by the day. He isn't sure how far he can take the songbird before she's going to have one of her episodes, or whether there's even any closure to be made at all. Calls go across America in late hours, old friends, some dead, some counting it down, some gone underground, some being walked to the wagon with the cuffs right then and there, but one answers: Steve Foley. Boston mob, who always shone salmon-pink with hair as ruddy, wearing nothing but black, head to toe. Said he could could get her into a matchbox in Bray, but that he couldn't get her in for a couple months yet. "Kickin' out the absolute wankers first who've ruined me place, fix 'er up mate, then it's yours" and Blue Eyes agrees but he doesn't like the name of the town. Bray. Braying. Wolf tooth and rending flesh. Was this a bad feeling in his bones, or was he just getting old, and feeling twitchier than his youth? He didn't like it, he didn't like the drone it put into his brain, he didn't know Ireland at all, but Foley was a fixer, the fixer, and in twenty seven years had never fouled a ball. So he agreed. But first, to catch a lost bird. "OK, Steve, I'll call you."
The feeling doesn't go away. Even as he looks into the facility Foley has passed along over email, he says it's a way to cover tracks, have her be observed, safe haven "tighter than a witch's cleft, aye!", get treated for her "fits" and who can deny an enthusiastic Irishman? St. Canice's. So maybe they'll give her a bible and bless this dark taint off of her soul, her life, whatever it is that has spun havoc and rampant these last twelve years. Maybe pills, and the white coats, will help the rest. OK, ok, ok. He has a plan.
Outside the derelict rental, a doomsday of black cars and black bikes, engines thrilling and throttling, Butch awakens, an alligator flipping on the banks as the searchlights pan. In the grim estuary of shadows in that decaying French mansion, comprised only of rotting boards, must-murk & a reek of foreboding, with a porch slouching and sagging the whole way 'round like an undone tie, Blue Eyes and his horde find the pair. The mattress is without sheets and stained, and what he can make out in the din is all ripped up by scraps of brown light coming through the broken shutters, like someone wringing a dirty rag, muddy-gloom pouring in, glistening wetly in the degradation.
Neve is dopey as she comes to, but pretty as a portrait, even with the feral flowers that bloom purple and blue on her forehead and cheeks, sprouting along a thigh, and seeping creeping a crimson trail down the ivory of her dress. She feels like a mannequin in his arms, not real, prone yet stiff, and the desperation of the situation puts a big heavy over his own state, emotion pent up comes striking like tungsten to the steel, and getting her over his shoulder is no smooth maneuver, in fact, he struggles, gulping back a cry, and needs a hand from his second in command to get her out the door, as half clear the house, the rest ensuring Butch is going to need a long siesta in ICU. That's as far as they can go. They have her now and Blue Eyes is thinking of the dark grey mantle of Canice's settling around her like a blanket. Or would it be a manacle? Just another thing keeping her stuck. Trapped.
Just something else to run from, in the end. His mind puzzled with it. And the feeling remained, made him want to shit.
"She'll be fine, man. Ease up", Heron, passing him a beer, as they sit outside, waiting for the redhead to get treated and an all clear in a cellar on Burgundy, by the Doc that agrees to these jobs for a fat envelope. Heron watches Blue Eyes studiously, he's young, blonde, but it's shaved to toughen him up, along with a flurry of fresh tattoos. He won't look like a fag then. Fags don't join biker gangs. And anyway, he had been with women. He knew the redhead was a picture. Right?
"Just.... ya know when you get a feeling like you're about to do the wrong thing, and you can't fucking shake it?" Blue Eyes stared out into the parking lot. Watched a plane soar. Was this the thing to do? Get her out of this dirty land entirely? Not just the state, but across the world?
"She'll be inside a first rate facility man, what the hell? She'll be fed, have meds. She'll read some books, them magazines. Get some sea air, didn't you say it was near the water? Fuck. Maybe she'll even make some friends. Who's she know except that asshole we left behind tonight, the clubs, and you? She'll be fine, Bee Eee. You're being paranoid."
"Yeah, you're probably right." They clinked the necks of their beer.
"And man, I know, I was in one once. Eh, twice. They locked the FUCK down, yo! No chance of her getting out. Aight?"
Blue Eyes smiled falsely, and nodded. "Alright". Droll, he shook his head and lolled his eyes over to the doors waiting for sight of the woman in question who always seemed to be running through his fingers. "I sure hope so."
Somewhere in Underbelly, Louisiana
Friday Nights. They were for fighting and fucking, broken teeth and broken hearts. They were the nights to press your chin to the asphalt and crawl. People were invested in themselves, distracted. They wouldn't see, wouldn't hear.
Blue Eyes stood in command, lording over the table of men who only obliged because he kept the heat off their back or they owed him something they would never pay back because the interest was their heads. All of them with hands still cold from the bars they'd clung to for years and now only too happy to have a little fresh air, pussy when they wanted, and something solid to put aside. Nothing came easy, and a blood debt was always better than the gaping maw of the pit, or the wardens with their batons on a drizzling afternoon watching your puke spiral down the drain while another set was behind you and coming.
He set the price and named the dance and made the men tango for little as he could. Hands out and shaking, vile conductor, telling them what where and how, but why was something kept in the back pocket like a lucky bullet or a phone number you never fucking called because deep down inside your too chicken shit. He rages about the woman that none of them quite comprehend his moods over, the one that isn't allowed one foot inside the clubhouse because "you'll be crawling all over her like flies to shit, no fucking way" so she's glimpses forever. A sculptural silhouette under street lamps in the passenger seat, sleek, a hand out the window sometimes, moon nectar skin and red nails glinting, Belladonna chasing the blood; blood, sugar, sex, magick - wasn't that what the Chilli's said? That's her. Smoke climbing the air, climbing to heaven where they can just tell she might be from. The little smile in the rearview, red mouth, Heron saw but once, and told all the men "she smiled at me, bra!" with elbow jerks and smarmy grins, and he can't pin it, but it's faraway, she's far away, that look on her face, like she's waiting to be picked up by an interstellar lover. "Looks like she's outta one of them old movies!" And the men laugh, make crude gestures, curse one another, but all go quiet, a rolling hush across their faces, whenever Blue Eyes is outside with her at the car, leaned over her side and leaned in, talking low. They can smell her. Lilac and lust.
And now she's gone.
"Cuda.. C.U.D.A. Viper Cuda you assholes", clicking through images on the projector he's presenting to the boys, including Butch. "Emaciated cocksucker in Brooks Brothers shirts stuck in his glory days of being the King of Wilshire Boulevard. You'll smell him before you'll see him. Too much of that goddamn Sauvage."
He lays out the plan and posts his men up and down the old bayou track known as Summers Grove, and is worried for the first time that he doesn't know how this will end. That he can't keep holding off a war he never sees but one he feels, the feeling growing stronger by the day. He isn't sure how far he can take the songbird before she's going to have one of her episodes, or whether there's even any closure to be made at all. Calls go across America in late hours, old friends, some dead, some counting it down, some gone underground, some being walked to the wagon with the cuffs right then and there, but one answers: Steve Foley. Boston mob, who always shone salmon-pink with hair as ruddy, wearing nothing but black, head to toe. Said he could could get her into a matchbox in Bray, but that he couldn't get her in for a couple months yet. "Kickin' out the absolute wankers first who've ruined me place, fix 'er up mate, then it's yours" and Blue Eyes agrees but he doesn't like the name of the town. Bray. Braying. Wolf tooth and rending flesh. Was this a bad feeling in his bones, or was he just getting old, and feeling twitchier than his youth? He didn't like it, he didn't like the drone it put into his brain, he didn't know Ireland at all, but Foley was a fixer, the fixer, and in twenty seven years had never fouled a ball. So he agreed. But first, to catch a lost bird. "OK, Steve, I'll call you."
The feeling doesn't go away. Even as he looks into the facility Foley has passed along over email, he says it's a way to cover tracks, have her be observed, safe haven "tighter than a witch's cleft, aye!", get treated for her "fits" and who can deny an enthusiastic Irishman? St. Canice's. So maybe they'll give her a bible and bless this dark taint off of her soul, her life, whatever it is that has spun havoc and rampant these last twelve years. Maybe pills, and the white coats, will help the rest. OK, ok, ok. He has a plan.
Outside the derelict rental, a doomsday of black cars and black bikes, engines thrilling and throttling, Butch awakens, an alligator flipping on the banks as the searchlights pan. In the grim estuary of shadows in that decaying French mansion, comprised only of rotting boards, must-murk & a reek of foreboding, with a porch slouching and sagging the whole way 'round like an undone tie, Blue Eyes and his horde find the pair. The mattress is without sheets and stained, and what he can make out in the din is all ripped up by scraps of brown light coming through the broken shutters, like someone wringing a dirty rag, muddy-gloom pouring in, glistening wetly in the degradation.
Neve is dopey as she comes to, but pretty as a portrait, even with the feral flowers that bloom purple and blue on her forehead and cheeks, sprouting along a thigh, and seeping creeping a crimson trail down the ivory of her dress. She feels like a mannequin in his arms, not real, prone yet stiff, and the desperation of the situation puts a big heavy over his own state, emotion pent up comes striking like tungsten to the steel, and getting her over his shoulder is no smooth maneuver, in fact, he struggles, gulping back a cry, and needs a hand from his second in command to get her out the door, as half clear the house, the rest ensuring Butch is going to need a long siesta in ICU. That's as far as they can go. They have her now and Blue Eyes is thinking of the dark grey mantle of Canice's settling around her like a blanket. Or would it be a manacle? Just another thing keeping her stuck. Trapped.
Just something else to run from, in the end. His mind puzzled with it. And the feeling remained, made him want to shit.
"She'll be fine, man. Ease up", Heron, passing him a beer, as they sit outside, waiting for the redhead to get treated and an all clear in a cellar on Burgundy, by the Doc that agrees to these jobs for a fat envelope. Heron watches Blue Eyes studiously, he's young, blonde, but it's shaved to toughen him up, along with a flurry of fresh tattoos. He won't look like a fag then. Fags don't join biker gangs. And anyway, he had been with women. He knew the redhead was a picture. Right?
"Just.... ya know when you get a feeling like you're about to do the wrong thing, and you can't fucking shake it?" Blue Eyes stared out into the parking lot. Watched a plane soar. Was this the thing to do? Get her out of this dirty land entirely? Not just the state, but across the world?
"She'll be inside a first rate facility man, what the hell? She'll be fed, have meds. She'll read some books, them magazines. Get some sea air, didn't you say it was near the water? Fuck. Maybe she'll even make some friends. Who's she know except that asshole we left behind tonight, the clubs, and you? She'll be fine, Bee Eee. You're being paranoid."
"Yeah, you're probably right." They clinked the necks of their beer.
"And man, I know, I was in one once. Eh, twice. They locked the FUCK down, yo! No chance of her getting out. Aight?"
Blue Eyes smiled falsely, and nodded. "Alright". Droll, he shook his head and lolled his eyes over to the doors waiting for sight of the woman in question who always seemed to be running through his fingers. "I sure hope so."
Last edited by Vivienne Kincaid on Fri Sep 13, 2024 10:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
8 years prior
District Jazz
New Orleans, Louisiana
"Who the hell is that?"
"Vivienne. Been up here a while."
"Which club she from?"
"Blue Nile, nine months. Wanted a change."
Butch sat slumped back in the squeaky, slimy barrens of a leather booth, watching the neon lights paint the room a thousand colours, like broken dreams. And in the middle of it, her, girl he hadn't seen at District Jazz, and one he knew he hadn't as there was no missing that. It was the way she held herself, the way she moved like she's got the blues in the blood, it's in the sway of the body, her command over herself and gravity, in the stride, in the way she poured herself gracefully across chair backs to offer a delectable treat, like she's a delectable treat, and she was. But there was more. More than an antique beauty that sung with fragility, something almost twitchy and voltaic in the way she smiled, could excite a man, maybe give him a heart attack. Or bring him back from one.
"Hey, Bill, get her over here for me, tell her I wanna say hello.
He smiled and sunk lower, even the ice in his glass was chastising him, he's watching the way that dress sank down low, right to the tail of her spine where it rounded out in a satisfying scoop, revealed her entire back ala Vikki Dougan. Dark teal, the color of paradise waters, and she's just walking around like that, like she's not entrancing the room, not tying men into knots cell by frenzied cell. He found his head moving with her motions as she crossed the floor, in and out of people's way, and it was something in her face, a melancholy, sulky, brooding, that he realised was the source of his fixation. She looked faraway, like she's gliding through life but there's a prism around her, and she's all locked up in it. His drunk mind fucking whirled with obscene poetry for her. She was not someone he saw in places like this. And when she passed, her smell. Rain and sweetness. Like violets. He clutched at his chest. "Fuck me."
She turns, this one, the redhead, this improbable vixen, called Vivienne, and he thinks about a line in a book, a book she looks like she's just about set foot out of, swish by sultry swish. The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
"Hey."
Still, only her silence, and the dress. The dress. The dress. It poured down her body, it was about to carry him out to sea. Her chin was held defiant, her eyes cold and brittle.
"Hey, hey, I didn't mean "fuck me" like, right now, I meant "fuck me", the way you says it in Florence, starin' at that motherfuckin' David. It was a compliment, come here, come sit down." He patted the seat, empty, beside him, like he's not a leopard in a suit licking his teeth.
And, to his surprise, she did, her dress cursing him like his ice with its chiding susurrations, as it swam against her skin in swells and tides, her manner controlled, precise, delicate. Her mouth pursed like she's got an aching secret on her tongue.
"You the new singer?"
She coiffed at her hair, looking over to the crowd. He smiled, watching the way she managed him, the way the room shone on her face, a goddamn joyride for light.
"I am. I serve drinks when it's quiet."
"What else you do?"
She looked at him then, straight down her face. Cubes melted quicker in his glass.
"Butch, isn't it? I know you know Bill, and Sal. I'm on at seven." She made a motion, tapping the top of her left wrist. Then quickly, she answers his real question. "Cindy does. Not me."
He looked at her puzzled, then sat up, properly, and reached out to grab her knee. "Hey, I didn't mean that, I meant, lots of these girls have other.. uh, ya know,... hustles."
"I life model." She shrugs. "It's not that interesting". Her face bored, her and her lagoon of a dress were departing.
"Look, come over here after your little show. I want to talk to you. Serious like." He reached for her hand.
He watched as she looked across the room towards Bill, hovering over a railing across the floor. He nodded at her once, and she slowly put those eyes back on him. "Fine." And then she did leave, walking, like she's made of syrup and jasmine and night time, all hip, satin trailing behind her a river he wanted to follow. She conjured all the feelings for every girl he'd loved in his heyday. All those sweet girls saying no in class. In backseats. In movie theatres. No. She was the kind of girl so nice inside it made you want to cry. Saying no even when they said yes. Her fine pealed with “don’t bother”.
Later that night, in her makeup room, he cornered her.
District Jazz
New Orleans, Louisiana
"Who the hell is that?"
"Vivienne. Been up here a while."
"Which club she from?"
"Blue Nile, nine months. Wanted a change."
Butch sat slumped back in the squeaky, slimy barrens of a leather booth, watching the neon lights paint the room a thousand colours, like broken dreams. And in the middle of it, her, girl he hadn't seen at District Jazz, and one he knew he hadn't as there was no missing that. It was the way she held herself, the way she moved like she's got the blues in the blood, it's in the sway of the body, her command over herself and gravity, in the stride, in the way she poured herself gracefully across chair backs to offer a delectable treat, like she's a delectable treat, and she was. But there was more. More than an antique beauty that sung with fragility, something almost twitchy and voltaic in the way she smiled, could excite a man, maybe give him a heart attack. Or bring him back from one.
"Hey, Bill, get her over here for me, tell her I wanna say hello.
He smiled and sunk lower, even the ice in his glass was chastising him, he's watching the way that dress sank down low, right to the tail of her spine where it rounded out in a satisfying scoop, revealed her entire back ala Vikki Dougan. Dark teal, the color of paradise waters, and she's just walking around like that, like she's not entrancing the room, not tying men into knots cell by frenzied cell. He found his head moving with her motions as she crossed the floor, in and out of people's way, and it was something in her face, a melancholy, sulky, brooding, that he realised was the source of his fixation. She looked faraway, like she's gliding through life but there's a prism around her, and she's all locked up in it. His drunk mind fucking whirled with obscene poetry for her. She was not someone he saw in places like this. And when she passed, her smell. Rain and sweetness. Like violets. He clutched at his chest. "Fuck me."
She turns, this one, the redhead, this improbable vixen, called Vivienne, and he thinks about a line in a book, a book she looks like she's just about set foot out of, swish by sultry swish. The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
"Hey."
Still, only her silence, and the dress. The dress. The dress. It poured down her body, it was about to carry him out to sea. Her chin was held defiant, her eyes cold and brittle.
"Hey, hey, I didn't mean "fuck me" like, right now, I meant "fuck me", the way you says it in Florence, starin' at that motherfuckin' David. It was a compliment, come here, come sit down." He patted the seat, empty, beside him, like he's not a leopard in a suit licking his teeth.
And, to his surprise, she did, her dress cursing him like his ice with its chiding susurrations, as it swam against her skin in swells and tides, her manner controlled, precise, delicate. Her mouth pursed like she's got an aching secret on her tongue.
"You the new singer?"
She coiffed at her hair, looking over to the crowd. He smiled, watching the way she managed him, the way the room shone on her face, a goddamn joyride for light.
"I am. I serve drinks when it's quiet."
"What else you do?"
She looked at him then, straight down her face. Cubes melted quicker in his glass.
"Butch, isn't it? I know you know Bill, and Sal. I'm on at seven." She made a motion, tapping the top of her left wrist. Then quickly, she answers his real question. "Cindy does. Not me."
He looked at her puzzled, then sat up, properly, and reached out to grab her knee. "Hey, I didn't mean that, I meant, lots of these girls have other.. uh, ya know,... hustles."
"I life model." She shrugs. "It's not that interesting". Her face bored, her and her lagoon of a dress were departing.
"Look, come over here after your little show. I want to talk to you. Serious like." He reached for her hand.
He watched as she looked across the room towards Bill, hovering over a railing across the floor. He nodded at her once, and she slowly put those eyes back on him. "Fine." And then she did leave, walking, like she's made of syrup and jasmine and night time, all hip, satin trailing behind her a river he wanted to follow. She conjured all the feelings for every girl he'd loved in his heyday. All those sweet girls saying no in class. In backseats. In movie theatres. No. She was the kind of girl so nice inside it made you want to cry. Saying no even when they said yes. Her fine pealed with “don’t bother”.
Later that night, in her makeup room, he cornered her.
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
Late June, 2024
Skerries, Ireland
It starts with a slap. The sound dominoes through her mind, tumbles down the staircase of her spine, and draws her body backwards and down onto the mattress.
"Fucking whore." Butch looms. His voice curdles in his throat with rage, mouth wet with saliva, he spits the words, bending down to throw her onto her stomach, his hands a claw at her dress, bunching her up in his fist like trash.
Then the vision, the memory, fades out, and she flutters her eyes open to fix her stare on the Guinness before her. Still mostly full. Only ordered because it tasted to her of wild things. Bark or leaves. Wet stone. Dark honey. That, and she relished in licking the foam from her fingers. Exactly what she was doing when he saw her and made his approach. A dark blur at the corner of her vision, descending. Then she can only hear her heart. Thumping outside her body, right beside her ears. The pulsation of muscle and blood and anticipation. Then he's there, right in her space. He's nothing like the last one. This one is willowy and thin, tall-tall, spindly, with hair that shot out in all directions, white like paper, or shock.
He makes her think of rain. Heavy and cold.
“Yer meant to drink it, that” he teases, melodically, helping himself to the stool opposite hers, clicking his fingers as he makes a pistol at the huge glass in her small hand, right away he’s pressing his legs into her, denim ripped at the knees, she can feel his bony caps freezing, nudging past hers, stockinged and warm, before she opens them slowly. Likes the way it feels as her skirt pulls, rushes up her thighs. These are the spells women make saying nothing at all.
She has nothing for his enter stage remark except a kittenish smile and a shrug. That and her vortex of sex drawing him in, black widow woman.
Neve just stares, in that over-familiar way, like maybe they've met before (they have not), maybe she's an old hurricane come spinning back around, tattling black nails against the table, newly painted ‘Stark Raven Mad’. His leather jacket open, chimes with trinkets and zippers, the loose white t shirt beneath as thin as a lie through the teeth, Neve spies the bony, narrow rungs of his ribs through it. Already, she can imagine her fingers walking up them. Skipping along marble, until she finds a tattoo to trace.
“Ah, a quiet one, aye? That’s OK. I can do the talkin’ for the both of us. And answer for ya. Yes, Nibby, ya can buy me a drink. Yes, Nibby, ya can take me home after.”
Neve continues to abide in her silence and smile, thinking these Irish men are a different but no less welcome breed. She doesn’t shrug him off, she doesn’t counter his solicitation, as his leg starts pushing hers outwards, so his hand can slip beneath to python under the table, find the seam of her panties. He doesn't hear a no to anything, and lines drawn, ready to breach, he's off fetching more Guinness, and more quickfire remarks in the back of his throat, ready to shoot her way when he returns. She pulls her eyes off him to soak up the room, the closeness of others in this tiny warren of a pub, the sounds of glasses and plates and distantly, in one of the corner rooms, fiddle. The air coming in from the small, port-hole of a window is all salt, the sea so near, it makes her hungry, it makes her feel antsy. Then he’s back, and he’s looking pretty pleased with himself.
“So then, what’s yer name love?” Two pints to the table. Spilling over. Foam down the glass, smudging at the bottom.
“Vivienne. What’s Nibby short for?”
He makes a show of a reaction, swaying side to side, jacket rattling, and howls at the ceiling. “Oh, Vivienne!" stretching her name wide as it will go inside his mouth. "Of course. Good name t’at is. Nibby, long story. Ladies don't need ta know it. But my real name if’n yer askin’, is James. McCoy. Please ta meet ya, lass.”
He sticks out his hand, his nails are black too, and she laughs, takes it, and sinks her fingers between his. He feels nice. Their hands clasp, cling together, for a moment they are flying outside their bodies on the precipice. She likes the energy coming off him. He signals that he feels the same. He jostles closer still. He smells like cherry incense and pleather. And someone who hasn't been fucked in weeks.
“Do you always wear lipstick, Nibby?”
“Not always. Why, ya thinkin’ about smearin’ it across me face?” The lipstick becomes a grin. Plums, dark, rotting in the sun.
“Yes, I am.” Taking up her pint, she takes a sip, licks the foam from the corners of her red mouth, and looks him directly in the eye. The bloodbeat outside her head thumps on and on, less like drumming, and round and high like carillon bells.
A pin sinks through a butterfly.
“But first, tell me:
What do you think about pain, and do you like to hurt?”
Skerries, Ireland
It starts with a slap. The sound dominoes through her mind, tumbles down the staircase of her spine, and draws her body backwards and down onto the mattress.
"Fucking whore." Butch looms. His voice curdles in his throat with rage, mouth wet with saliva, he spits the words, bending down to throw her onto her stomach, his hands a claw at her dress, bunching her up in his fist like trash.
Then the vision, the memory, fades out, and she flutters her eyes open to fix her stare on the Guinness before her. Still mostly full. Only ordered because it tasted to her of wild things. Bark or leaves. Wet stone. Dark honey. That, and she relished in licking the foam from her fingers. Exactly what she was doing when he saw her and made his approach. A dark blur at the corner of her vision, descending. Then she can only hear her heart. Thumping outside her body, right beside her ears. The pulsation of muscle and blood and anticipation. Then he's there, right in her space. He's nothing like the last one. This one is willowy and thin, tall-tall, spindly, with hair that shot out in all directions, white like paper, or shock.
He makes her think of rain. Heavy and cold.
“Yer meant to drink it, that” he teases, melodically, helping himself to the stool opposite hers, clicking his fingers as he makes a pistol at the huge glass in her small hand, right away he’s pressing his legs into her, denim ripped at the knees, she can feel his bony caps freezing, nudging past hers, stockinged and warm, before she opens them slowly. Likes the way it feels as her skirt pulls, rushes up her thighs. These are the spells women make saying nothing at all.
She has nothing for his enter stage remark except a kittenish smile and a shrug. That and her vortex of sex drawing him in, black widow woman.
Neve just stares, in that over-familiar way, like maybe they've met before (they have not), maybe she's an old hurricane come spinning back around, tattling black nails against the table, newly painted ‘Stark Raven Mad’. His leather jacket open, chimes with trinkets and zippers, the loose white t shirt beneath as thin as a lie through the teeth, Neve spies the bony, narrow rungs of his ribs through it. Already, she can imagine her fingers walking up them. Skipping along marble, until she finds a tattoo to trace.
“Ah, a quiet one, aye? That’s OK. I can do the talkin’ for the both of us. And answer for ya. Yes, Nibby, ya can buy me a drink. Yes, Nibby, ya can take me home after.”
Neve continues to abide in her silence and smile, thinking these Irish men are a different but no less welcome breed. She doesn’t shrug him off, she doesn’t counter his solicitation, as his leg starts pushing hers outwards, so his hand can slip beneath to python under the table, find the seam of her panties. He doesn't hear a no to anything, and lines drawn, ready to breach, he's off fetching more Guinness, and more quickfire remarks in the back of his throat, ready to shoot her way when he returns. She pulls her eyes off him to soak up the room, the closeness of others in this tiny warren of a pub, the sounds of glasses and plates and distantly, in one of the corner rooms, fiddle. The air coming in from the small, port-hole of a window is all salt, the sea so near, it makes her hungry, it makes her feel antsy. Then he’s back, and he’s looking pretty pleased with himself.
“So then, what’s yer name love?” Two pints to the table. Spilling over. Foam down the glass, smudging at the bottom.
“Vivienne. What’s Nibby short for?”
He makes a show of a reaction, swaying side to side, jacket rattling, and howls at the ceiling. “Oh, Vivienne!" stretching her name wide as it will go inside his mouth. "Of course. Good name t’at is. Nibby, long story. Ladies don't need ta know it. But my real name if’n yer askin’, is James. McCoy. Please ta meet ya, lass.”
He sticks out his hand, his nails are black too, and she laughs, takes it, and sinks her fingers between his. He feels nice. Their hands clasp, cling together, for a moment they are flying outside their bodies on the precipice. She likes the energy coming off him. He signals that he feels the same. He jostles closer still. He smells like cherry incense and pleather. And someone who hasn't been fucked in weeks.
“Do you always wear lipstick, Nibby?”
“Not always. Why, ya thinkin’ about smearin’ it across me face?” The lipstick becomes a grin. Plums, dark, rotting in the sun.
“Yes, I am.” Taking up her pint, she takes a sip, licks the foam from the corners of her red mouth, and looks him directly in the eye. The bloodbeat outside her head thumps on and on, less like drumming, and round and high like carillon bells.
A pin sinks through a butterfly.
“But first, tell me:
What do you think about pain, and do you like to hurt?”
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
In the all time of all days, ever, and always, of all that is and was and will be, in the circling, in the spiral, there are rooms, somewhere, and in these rooms she is open and gleaming and sharp like scissors on tossed sheets. Sometimes, she is the oppressor, the cruel mistress, stiletto to a chest, thin nylons and thick latex, long, long gloves and her hand smothering mouths as she calls the men the names they beg. But in others, in the all time of all days, and always, of all that is and was and will be, in the circling, in the spiral there are others yet, where she is the hook by which hangs someone's deranged desires. She is the woman on the wheel spinning as the daggers fly.
Vivienne has lived on both sides of the mirror.
In this time, of now, she is free, reflected only in the glass of a voyeuristic window. Not the eyes of Butch or strange, mad boys in asylums. And she is not in any bed but upon a street corner, enwrapped in the grief-grey gloom of misty late night, holding a phone and a cigarette and admiring unforgettable patterns rooftops of West End make against the city backdrop; the sight collects a smile from her maraschino mouth.
Streets she hadn't set foot within for fourteen years. They shine. Or that's the tear in her eye.
They looked the same, felt the same, West End persisted, perennial, the same and not, shifting, kaleidoscopic. Somehow it endured.
Just like her.
But she knows in the way she always has, that there's things she cannot see but can feel and that they are squirming like maggots in her conscience. Unyielding. They never leave her for long, but where she is now, who she is now, she cannot decide or determine the origin - if it is trauma or instinct, horror or anxiety. There are faces in the shadows, black curtains and the stage of the carnivalesque, the behind world, the in between, past the tain of the glass and to that strange plane. There she knows he waits. Sepulchral. Dressed in inkspill lines of dark and with eyes of a gargoyle.
Pep Miz rings out a cry that intones a hair raising dread.
Bong. Bong. Bong.
Midnight. It's the moan of a cello, and the squeeze of a lover.
Shadows smear like lipstick in the rain. They pulse, unfurl their shiny wet fronds, beckoning. Black lake.
Bong. Bong. Bong.
Vivienne takes off running down a West End alley, dark coat dispersing in the air behind her as heels clip the cobblestones, her breaths rasped like paper through fast fingers. He's near. He's closer.
And the maggot feelings squirm.
Vivienne has lived on both sides of the mirror.
In this time, of now, she is free, reflected only in the glass of a voyeuristic window. Not the eyes of Butch or strange, mad boys in asylums. And she is not in any bed but upon a street corner, enwrapped in the grief-grey gloom of misty late night, holding a phone and a cigarette and admiring unforgettable patterns rooftops of West End make against the city backdrop; the sight collects a smile from her maraschino mouth.
Streets she hadn't set foot within for fourteen years. They shine. Or that's the tear in her eye.
They looked the same, felt the same, West End persisted, perennial, the same and not, shifting, kaleidoscopic. Somehow it endured.
Just like her.
But she knows in the way she always has, that there's things she cannot see but can feel and that they are squirming like maggots in her conscience. Unyielding. They never leave her for long, but where she is now, who she is now, she cannot decide or determine the origin - if it is trauma or instinct, horror or anxiety. There are faces in the shadows, black curtains and the stage of the carnivalesque, the behind world, the in between, past the tain of the glass and to that strange plane. There she knows he waits. Sepulchral. Dressed in inkspill lines of dark and with eyes of a gargoyle.
Pep Miz rings out a cry that intones a hair raising dread.
Bong. Bong. Bong.
Midnight. It's the moan of a cello, and the squeeze of a lover.
Shadows smear like lipstick in the rain. They pulse, unfurl their shiny wet fronds, beckoning. Black lake.
Bong. Bong. Bong.
Vivienne takes off running down a West End alley, dark coat dispersing in the air behind her as heels clip the cobblestones, her breaths rasped like paper through fast fingers. He's near. He's closer.
And the maggot feelings squirm.
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
Our Lady of Perpetual Misery
West End, Rhy'Din
The songbird moves beneath the arches and down the worn carpet where it begins and the scrappy tiles finish. To the left and straight into the closest pew, she melts into the seat and lifts her face to sweep the empty space.
A cold draught blows.
She stares blankly into the air, where she can see, just outside the corners of her eyes, the creep of things. The shadows which dilate with the plangent howl of the saxophone. Short, sharp stabs of trumpet. Eyes closed shut in her torment and she covers her face and rocks back and forth. Above her, circling around and around and around its serpent path the belltower with its spiral stairs. The weight of it is enough to bury the redhead. The way the half-seen memories pull and grab and claw and poke.
"Ma'am, excuse me".
Neve turns, startled, her red nailed white hands fallen into her lap, like upturned doves. Her eyes wide, empty, confused.
"Ma'am", the priest repeats, his voice a smooth stone in the slipstream of what is surely the beginning of an episode. "I am sorry to frighten you, but your boyfriend, he was asking if you were still in here? Are you OK?"
He bent down and sat back on his ankles, a freckled hand placed on the edge of her pew to support himself and the creak of bones.
Frightened. Fright. White, flickers like neon, intercepts her pained expression, haunts her features, the blood draining out of it. Her red lips parting as she sits up straight. She bursts into a short, weary laugh, trickled through with wild amusement. She is as discordant as the music that pursues her. Discordant as her sitting in a church, seeking shelter, or peace.
"I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. What's funny?" He frowns, trying to understand what has arrested the woman, who he is beginning to think is indeed mad; she wouldn't be the first nor the last person at the last grasp of their sanity seeking a conversation with Jesus, or trying to repent for a life of sin, or selfishness.
Her voice, sleepy with her South, floats the air between them its own melody. "I don't have a boyfriend, currently, Father.*" She pauses, tips her head to the side and back, lifts a Harlow brow high. "...That I know of."
The Priest doesn't quite know what to make of the oddball encounter that is unwinding around him, the disconcerting notes it plays.
Still, he asks. "You.... know of?"
Neve shrugs softly, shoulders giving beneath her thin coat. Her mind casts back - the Loner, her Punk, The Blue Butcher. Had one of them seen her? She couldn't imagine they would not follow her inside, all starkly different, but none the kind to not speak up, to say her name aloud in the night, to reach out. Surely not. Not after this span of time.
"Father, I haven't had a boyfriend in a long, long time, and I came here to this town alone. If someone is telling you they're my boyfriend and they're waiting outside then they're lying, and I'm going to need you to lie in God's house and tell them I'm not here anymore. That I left. And then I want you to come back in here and describe in great detail what he looks like."
As she speaks, her voice grows dense and dark with emotion, and shaking.
The Priest stands and leans away and brings a hand to his face, taps at his chin, considering her, and her reality, and whether the one she was in was the same as his, and then looks towards the doorway, past the four arches one passes beneath to enter the nave. He can see the reflection of the man's tall shadow along the step.
"Are you telling me you are in danger, Ma'am?"
She turns in her seat, doves turned to fists at her knees. "I'm telling you I don't have a boyfriend." Green eyes move towards the entrance. "Please, Father."
The man nods once and moves for the door and as he does she sits back and sinks down, shaking. Every pin drop is a boulder crash around her. She listens, strains to listen, to the exchange, making out only muffled men's voices. What she can hear of the stranger isn't any of her three, and it baffles and concerns her all the more.
Hearing footsteps, she turns sharply, watching the Priest return to her. He comes to a stop, folding his hands before him, and looks at her with a kindly smile. "He has said he will be on his way. Mistaken identity."
"What did he look like?"
He looks aside, thinking. "Quite quite tall, black hair, a ring, one of those signet rings? Nice suit, maroon. Shoes had shine. Seemed rather dapper. He was really rather friendly, and made no issue once I said no one was in here."
Perplexed, the song bird turns away and sinks back down into the pew. But Neve knows this is all wrong. The whine of the saxophone is too loud. It's too loud. It's too high, it's crying, it's crying. Her ears are full with it.
The darkness screams with shark teeth.
She can feel his eyes through the wall.
"He's still out there."
The priest inches aside, and peers. He smiles, expecting nothing, but the smile fades at once. He sees the same tall shadow has returned, it seems to vibrate unnaturally along the old marble, like a stop-motion shadow puppet, projecting onto the floor.
"Oh, my dear. You need to go."
Awash in gooseflesh, the priest at once ushers the redhead for the sanctity exit utilised only by the priests and alter attendants, with its secret passages under ground winding and then up and out the other side. Down the stairs and up the stairs, she holds her breath the whole time, body pressed against the wall.
"I'll call you a ride. Have you somewhere you can go?"
"Thank you. Red Dragon Inn.
Please."
West End, Rhy'Din
The songbird moves beneath the arches and down the worn carpet where it begins and the scrappy tiles finish. To the left and straight into the closest pew, she melts into the seat and lifts her face to sweep the empty space.
A cold draught blows.
She stares blankly into the air, where she can see, just outside the corners of her eyes, the creep of things. The shadows which dilate with the plangent howl of the saxophone. Short, sharp stabs of trumpet. Eyes closed shut in her torment and she covers her face and rocks back and forth. Above her, circling around and around and around its serpent path the belltower with its spiral stairs. The weight of it is enough to bury the redhead. The way the half-seen memories pull and grab and claw and poke.
"Ma'am, excuse me".
Neve turns, startled, her red nailed white hands fallen into her lap, like upturned doves. Her eyes wide, empty, confused.
"Ma'am", the priest repeats, his voice a smooth stone in the slipstream of what is surely the beginning of an episode. "I am sorry to frighten you, but your boyfriend, he was asking if you were still in here? Are you OK?"
He bent down and sat back on his ankles, a freckled hand placed on the edge of her pew to support himself and the creak of bones.
Frightened. Fright. White, flickers like neon, intercepts her pained expression, haunts her features, the blood draining out of it. Her red lips parting as she sits up straight. She bursts into a short, weary laugh, trickled through with wild amusement. She is as discordant as the music that pursues her. Discordant as her sitting in a church, seeking shelter, or peace.
"I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. What's funny?" He frowns, trying to understand what has arrested the woman, who he is beginning to think is indeed mad; she wouldn't be the first nor the last person at the last grasp of their sanity seeking a conversation with Jesus, or trying to repent for a life of sin, or selfishness.
Her voice, sleepy with her South, floats the air between them its own melody. "I don't have a boyfriend, currently, Father.*" She pauses, tips her head to the side and back, lifts a Harlow brow high. "...That I know of."
The Priest doesn't quite know what to make of the oddball encounter that is unwinding around him, the disconcerting notes it plays.
Still, he asks. "You.... know of?"
Neve shrugs softly, shoulders giving beneath her thin coat. Her mind casts back - the Loner, her Punk, The Blue Butcher. Had one of them seen her? She couldn't imagine they would not follow her inside, all starkly different, but none the kind to not speak up, to say her name aloud in the night, to reach out. Surely not. Not after this span of time.
"Father, I haven't had a boyfriend in a long, long time, and I came here to this town alone. If someone is telling you they're my boyfriend and they're waiting outside then they're lying, and I'm going to need you to lie in God's house and tell them I'm not here anymore. That I left. And then I want you to come back in here and describe in great detail what he looks like."
As she speaks, her voice grows dense and dark with emotion, and shaking.
The Priest stands and leans away and brings a hand to his face, taps at his chin, considering her, and her reality, and whether the one she was in was the same as his, and then looks towards the doorway, past the four arches one passes beneath to enter the nave. He can see the reflection of the man's tall shadow along the step.
"Are you telling me you are in danger, Ma'am?"
She turns in her seat, doves turned to fists at her knees. "I'm telling you I don't have a boyfriend." Green eyes move towards the entrance. "Please, Father."
The man nods once and moves for the door and as he does she sits back and sinks down, shaking. Every pin drop is a boulder crash around her. She listens, strains to listen, to the exchange, making out only muffled men's voices. What she can hear of the stranger isn't any of her three, and it baffles and concerns her all the more.
Hearing footsteps, she turns sharply, watching the Priest return to her. He comes to a stop, folding his hands before him, and looks at her with a kindly smile. "He has said he will be on his way. Mistaken identity."
"What did he look like?"
He looks aside, thinking. "Quite quite tall, black hair, a ring, one of those signet rings? Nice suit, maroon. Shoes had shine. Seemed rather dapper. He was really rather friendly, and made no issue once I said no one was in here."
Perplexed, the song bird turns away and sinks back down into the pew. But Neve knows this is all wrong. The whine of the saxophone is too loud. It's too loud. It's too high, it's crying, it's crying. Her ears are full with it.
The darkness screams with shark teeth.
She can feel his eyes through the wall.
"He's still out there."
The priest inches aside, and peers. He smiles, expecting nothing, but the smile fades at once. He sees the same tall shadow has returned, it seems to vibrate unnaturally along the old marble, like a stop-motion shadow puppet, projecting onto the floor.
"Oh, my dear. You need to go."
Awash in gooseflesh, the priest at once ushers the redhead for the sanctity exit utilised only by the priests and alter attendants, with its secret passages under ground winding and then up and out the other side. Down the stairs and up the stairs, she holds her breath the whole time, body pressed against the wall.
"I'll call you a ride. Have you somewhere you can go?"
"Thank you. Red Dragon Inn.
Please."
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
I like you when
you take off your
face
Put away all your
teeth
And take us
way
underneath.
"Fucking shut your trap, I'm on the phone, Kick. Yeah, Leri, so tell me, what it's like there? Same same, or you get lost right away? Fuck. Viv. Neve. Sorry."
The songbird bristles at the name, and pauses. When she speaks, it's through a sigh. "Same same, but I've barely left the room" she scans the street from her window, a drape held aside. "Same same."
"Magick, kid. Plays its tricks. Wear your real eyes. Take off the mask. Galleria ain't nowhere there."
Neve walks back across the dark room, barefoot, curtains falling back closed behind her, phone gripped in her hand. "He's here. I can feel him. He followed me."
"How do you know that? Are you sure?"
"The shadows." Like that it explains the whole picture, conveys a whole world. She can't talk about it. Too tired, sleepwalking.
Sleepwalker.
Dark dreamer.
"Neve, are you taking the meds? They're meant to help with the nerves. The episodes. Are you?"
"No.... they make me feel bad. Like I'm outside my body."
"Goddamnit, Vivienne. You need watching. You need me the fuck there. What's the hotel? " He thinks to himself maybe being outside her body might not be a bad thing, but he doesn't say it. He doesn't fucking breathe the words.
"I need to get used to being around magick again, try and get into some kind of routine....waking, waking up, the same time, and when I go to bed, like at Canice's. Routine, I think it helped", she sneaks towards the door and crooks it open, stares down the corridor. Memories flood and ooze and she thinks she sees a twitch in the lack of light further on near the landing, it's enough to get her behind the door again and locking it. Barricaded. She listens to the sounds through the phone, the racket and the riot, the club, the men, the crack of a cue hitting the balls on the pool table. Glass. Hollering. What sounded like a firecracker. "N.W.O" by Ministry screaming from the den's speakers.
"How about Arizona....", Blue Eyes puffs at his cigar, watching with that haggard stare from his jukebox lean, eyes tracking to the door and back to where through the smoky air and ubiquitous tension the men play-brawled and others ransacked a chest of Playboy magazines. Others slid cards across tables and cash. Pills. Somewhere outside, a Harley guns its engine and an exhaust putters away. "...Could hide you away with a fella I know, in south Phoenix."
"Too dry" she moans, collapsing back on the bed, picking up her copy of 'East of Eden', and rolling onto her belly, flicking through the pages, red nails a blur. "Arizona is too dry. Doesn't feel like me. I wouldn't know what to do with myself."
"Prefer your humidity, don't you."
That makes her smile. "I do."
"Yeah well, the South is off the cards. And it's not about what suits right now, is it? You're not in fucking Rhy'Din for the scenery. Think about it. Maybe the heat will be good for you. Sometimes I think there's too much water in you, too many of them tears. Maybe we need to get you under some sun. Maybe you need dryin' out."
Neve shakes her head and closes the book, glances at the door again. Arizona?
"I have an idea for him. I'll let you know, about things, here, and I'll... think about the desert. For now... Bye bye, Blue Eyes, bye bye..." she croons it, as if there are cymbals and snares about her, in counterpoint to her vibrato farewell.
__________________________________________________________________________
A listing appears on RHYDINLIST later that evening, posted by Jazz.Lover
Model seeking portrait photographer for one hour shoot local to Rhy'Din.
Needed ASAP.
$500.00 paid upfront.
Enquiries and EOI to be forwarded to jazzlover444@gmail.com
you take off your
face
Put away all your
teeth
And take us
way
underneath.
"Fucking shut your trap, I'm on the phone, Kick. Yeah, Leri, so tell me, what it's like there? Same same, or you get lost right away? Fuck. Viv. Neve. Sorry."
The songbird bristles at the name, and pauses. When she speaks, it's through a sigh. "Same same, but I've barely left the room" she scans the street from her window, a drape held aside. "Same same."
"Magick, kid. Plays its tricks. Wear your real eyes. Take off the mask. Galleria ain't nowhere there."
Neve walks back across the dark room, barefoot, curtains falling back closed behind her, phone gripped in her hand. "He's here. I can feel him. He followed me."
"How do you know that? Are you sure?"
"The shadows." Like that it explains the whole picture, conveys a whole world. She can't talk about it. Too tired, sleepwalking.
Sleepwalker.
Dark dreamer.
"Neve, are you taking the meds? They're meant to help with the nerves. The episodes. Are you?"
"No.... they make me feel bad. Like I'm outside my body."
"Goddamnit, Vivienne. You need watching. You need me the fuck there. What's the hotel? " He thinks to himself maybe being outside her body might not be a bad thing, but he doesn't say it. He doesn't fucking breathe the words.
"I need to get used to being around magick again, try and get into some kind of routine....waking, waking up, the same time, and when I go to bed, like at Canice's. Routine, I think it helped", she sneaks towards the door and crooks it open, stares down the corridor. Memories flood and ooze and she thinks she sees a twitch in the lack of light further on near the landing, it's enough to get her behind the door again and locking it. Barricaded. She listens to the sounds through the phone, the racket and the riot, the club, the men, the crack of a cue hitting the balls on the pool table. Glass. Hollering. What sounded like a firecracker. "N.W.O" by Ministry screaming from the den's speakers.
"How about Arizona....", Blue Eyes puffs at his cigar, watching with that haggard stare from his jukebox lean, eyes tracking to the door and back to where through the smoky air and ubiquitous tension the men play-brawled and others ransacked a chest of Playboy magazines. Others slid cards across tables and cash. Pills. Somewhere outside, a Harley guns its engine and an exhaust putters away. "...Could hide you away with a fella I know, in south Phoenix."
"Too dry" she moans, collapsing back on the bed, picking up her copy of 'East of Eden', and rolling onto her belly, flicking through the pages, red nails a blur. "Arizona is too dry. Doesn't feel like me. I wouldn't know what to do with myself."
"Prefer your humidity, don't you."
That makes her smile. "I do."
"Yeah well, the South is off the cards. And it's not about what suits right now, is it? You're not in fucking Rhy'Din for the scenery. Think about it. Maybe the heat will be good for you. Sometimes I think there's too much water in you, too many of them tears. Maybe we need to get you under some sun. Maybe you need dryin' out."
Neve shakes her head and closes the book, glances at the door again. Arizona?
"I have an idea for him. I'll let you know, about things, here, and I'll... think about the desert. For now... Bye bye, Blue Eyes, bye bye..." she croons it, as if there are cymbals and snares about her, in counterpoint to her vibrato farewell.
__________________________________________________________________________
A listing appears on RHYDINLIST later that evening, posted by Jazz.Lover
Model seeking portrait photographer for one hour shoot local to Rhy'Din.
Needed ASAP.
$500.00 paid upfront.
Enquiries and EOI to be forwarded to jazzlover444@gmail.com
Last edited by Vivienne Kincaid on Fri Sep 13, 2024 10:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
-
Vivienne Kincaid
- Junior Adventurer
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Fri May 03, 2024 7:23 am
- Location: On the move.
Re: the calls of the blood
Vans hit the pavement outside the Red Dragon Inn where, issued by a gust, a few rose petals pirouette across the shoes, unseen, as the cab pulls away behind a blonde. She's got her head tipped back almost automatically, dragging music buds from her ears, taking in this Inn she never hits up, the way it presides over the street like a beast on its haunches, she doesn't know that she's ever stepped inside, except perhaps with a bunch of other photogs, for a last call, some inane hour of the morning. But it's all a blur. Fact was, place always gave her the heebee jeebee's. She chalked it up to the constant buzz of its wards glowering in its walls and under the floors, maybe the series of mugshots always seated at the bar, but it just sung of dive, and not the type she liked. It felt wrong, she read between its lines, saw things that gave her pause, and her gift was sight, after all, it was what kept her fed, and at times even alive, so she heeded it.
But $500.00 up front was too much not to jump at. So there she was. Outside the infamous Red Dragon.
Hustle hustle hustle.
The girl looks down to her phone, re-reads the email this mysterious Jazz.Lover had sent back, and then up to the doors again, along the porch. It was mid-afternoon and there wasn't a single person out there. "Fucking hellhole", she mutters with a bit of a smirk and a roll of the eyes as she adjusts the gear bag hanging off her shoulder, casts a quick look back at the street, and heads up the stairs two at a time, and through the doors.
Empty, except someone parked on the far right stool, huddled over in all black. The barkeep. She looks to her phone and fires off a text.
Here. And here's the pin drop. If you don't hear from me by 6 I've been eaten by a shadow monster. Or something. Talk soon.
Then, through her aviator spectacles, looks across again to that stool, where the diminutive person sits. Red curls, burnished by the shitty light above. Lux wasn't one to fuck around and dally so crosses the room, readying her big smile and a perky "Hey, you're Jazz Lover, yeah?"
The woman turns, appearing startled at first, and then it passes. Her smile opens, pretty as a magnolia bud. She's like something out of the old movies, and very fair, so fair she is luminous, even in the grungy Dragon dim, and the photographer can't help but smile more, knowing this one will photograph like a dream. She's mapping it all out in her head, the poses, angles, even the presets she might mess around with later. Throws out a hand; nails silver, hand soft, but grip firm. "Lux, I answered your Rhy'Din List ad", then she lifts her shoulder, indicating the hefty bag that sat at her side. "Where we doing this? Cos uh, lighting is absolute shithouse down here, mate."
Neve takes the girls hand and shakes, first pushing away the napkin she's been scribbling something on with a ballpoint pen, ink kisses along her forefinger and thumb like words escaped and smudged like ants. The songbird is disarmed immediately by the girl's confidence and humor. Looks her over. A little taller than herself, she was a glimmer of aquamarine eyes, shaggy fall of wheat coloured hair, an assortment of tattoos at her arms and collarbones, words, a skull peeking, more curves than a drag race, all rendered by a dark grey tee with a faded band logo across the chest, black jeans, and ear buds drooping from one hand, still blasting music. Neve's voice dips a register, silk caught in a wind tunnel. "Neve. And, come upstairs."
The redhead slides off the stool and moves for the staircase but once she reaches the bottom most step, makes a hard right to the bannister and kind of just stalls, clinging onto it. There's something strange about this woman, Lux notes, even though the makeup is perfection and she's gone to the effort to dress well - little black dress, black lace cardigan and black velvet slippers, demure, elegant, and romantic, she seems lucid and vital and with it, however there's something ratty in her aura, like moth-bitten light, cobwebbed, dusty. Lux usually perceives these things from a mile off, they spiderwalk her senses, thinks maybe she should have sat with that ad a little longer, but rent was high and morale was low.
Lux hangs back, lifting her brows, eyes going left and right. She looks over to the barkeep who she just shrugs.
"Lady, ummmm... you OK?"
"I'll be a moment."
"...Fuck me..." Lux murmurs. She hated this place. She hated this place.
"How about you take my arm?" The blonde laughs a bit, because what you gon' do, and she's not an asshole, and balance uneven with the bag at one side, lurches up and beside her model, offering her elbow, and slowly, patiently, helps her up the stairs, noting the way Neve's knees actually buckle all Scooby Doo. Her face full of terror and then not, yet there's a sense she's out of range. They reach the top and she rings as fine. "Phobia?", Lux offers, inquisitive. She always seemed to find the weirdos.
"Could say that, sugar. Had a fall... once. I think? I can never be sure."
Terrific, thinks Lux, we have an A Grade Certified Looney Toons here... roll up, roll up... "Right...." an awkward smile as the woman leads her down the corridor, dark as night, and immediately she's on alert, can feel fear drop into her stomach, there's a definite energy here, about this woman, about all of this. But she tries to lighten things, it's what she does. "Soooooooo any purpose to this shoot? Portfolio? Gift for the boyfriend?" Give me something to work with lady, I'm about to shit myself.
Beat. Heartbeats. Fast heartbeats.
"You hear that?"
Neve spins. Stares at the girl as they arrive just outside Room 104.
"You hear it, too?"
Lux nods, once. "The saxophone has been drinking." Dryly, toying with a Waits lyric to explain what she's hearing. "Seriously, what the fuck is that though?" The girl takes a backwards step, even though she almost wanted to laugh at the perversity of it, looking deeper into the hall, then back to the woman. It felt like one of them haunted mazes, where something terrible was about to pop out at any moment. Neve looked well horrified at this point and Lux was about to beat it back to the landing. She liked the unusual, she appreciated eccentric, but this....
"I mean, how could ya not? Shit's loud."
Then there's a snatch to the girls arm as the redhead pulls her into the room, slamming the door.
But $500.00 up front was too much not to jump at. So there she was. Outside the infamous Red Dragon.
Hustle hustle hustle.
The girl looks down to her phone, re-reads the email this mysterious Jazz.Lover had sent back, and then up to the doors again, along the porch. It was mid-afternoon and there wasn't a single person out there. "Fucking hellhole", she mutters with a bit of a smirk and a roll of the eyes as she adjusts the gear bag hanging off her shoulder, casts a quick look back at the street, and heads up the stairs two at a time, and through the doors.
Empty, except someone parked on the far right stool, huddled over in all black. The barkeep. She looks to her phone and fires off a text.
Here. And here's the pin drop. If you don't hear from me by 6 I've been eaten by a shadow monster. Or something. Talk soon.
Then, through her aviator spectacles, looks across again to that stool, where the diminutive person sits. Red curls, burnished by the shitty light above. Lux wasn't one to fuck around and dally so crosses the room, readying her big smile and a perky "Hey, you're Jazz Lover, yeah?"
The woman turns, appearing startled at first, and then it passes. Her smile opens, pretty as a magnolia bud. She's like something out of the old movies, and very fair, so fair she is luminous, even in the grungy Dragon dim, and the photographer can't help but smile more, knowing this one will photograph like a dream. She's mapping it all out in her head, the poses, angles, even the presets she might mess around with later. Throws out a hand; nails silver, hand soft, but grip firm. "Lux, I answered your Rhy'Din List ad", then she lifts her shoulder, indicating the hefty bag that sat at her side. "Where we doing this? Cos uh, lighting is absolute shithouse down here, mate."
Neve takes the girls hand and shakes, first pushing away the napkin she's been scribbling something on with a ballpoint pen, ink kisses along her forefinger and thumb like words escaped and smudged like ants. The songbird is disarmed immediately by the girl's confidence and humor. Looks her over. A little taller than herself, she was a glimmer of aquamarine eyes, shaggy fall of wheat coloured hair, an assortment of tattoos at her arms and collarbones, words, a skull peeking, more curves than a drag race, all rendered by a dark grey tee with a faded band logo across the chest, black jeans, and ear buds drooping from one hand, still blasting music. Neve's voice dips a register, silk caught in a wind tunnel. "Neve. And, come upstairs."
The redhead slides off the stool and moves for the staircase but once she reaches the bottom most step, makes a hard right to the bannister and kind of just stalls, clinging onto it. There's something strange about this woman, Lux notes, even though the makeup is perfection and she's gone to the effort to dress well - little black dress, black lace cardigan and black velvet slippers, demure, elegant, and romantic, she seems lucid and vital and with it, however there's something ratty in her aura, like moth-bitten light, cobwebbed, dusty. Lux usually perceives these things from a mile off, they spiderwalk her senses, thinks maybe she should have sat with that ad a little longer, but rent was high and morale was low.
Lux hangs back, lifting her brows, eyes going left and right. She looks over to the barkeep who she just shrugs.
"Lady, ummmm... you OK?"
"I'll be a moment."
"...Fuck me..." Lux murmurs. She hated this place. She hated this place.
"How about you take my arm?" The blonde laughs a bit, because what you gon' do, and she's not an asshole, and balance uneven with the bag at one side, lurches up and beside her model, offering her elbow, and slowly, patiently, helps her up the stairs, noting the way Neve's knees actually buckle all Scooby Doo. Her face full of terror and then not, yet there's a sense she's out of range. They reach the top and she rings as fine. "Phobia?", Lux offers, inquisitive. She always seemed to find the weirdos.
"Could say that, sugar. Had a fall... once. I think? I can never be sure."
Terrific, thinks Lux, we have an A Grade Certified Looney Toons here... roll up, roll up... "Right...." an awkward smile as the woman leads her down the corridor, dark as night, and immediately she's on alert, can feel fear drop into her stomach, there's a definite energy here, about this woman, about all of this. But she tries to lighten things, it's what she does. "Soooooooo any purpose to this shoot? Portfolio? Gift for the boyfriend?" Give me something to work with lady, I'm about to shit myself.
Beat. Heartbeats. Fast heartbeats.
"You hear that?"
Neve spins. Stares at the girl as they arrive just outside Room 104.
"You hear it, too?"
Lux nods, once. "The saxophone has been drinking." Dryly, toying with a Waits lyric to explain what she's hearing. "Seriously, what the fuck is that though?" The girl takes a backwards step, even though she almost wanted to laugh at the perversity of it, looking deeper into the hall, then back to the woman. It felt like one of them haunted mazes, where something terrible was about to pop out at any moment. Neve looked well horrified at this point and Lux was about to beat it back to the landing. She liked the unusual, she appreciated eccentric, but this....
"I mean, how could ya not? Shit's loud."
Then there's a snatch to the girls arm as the redhead pulls her into the room, slamming the door.
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