Moira laughed at that, pleased, and with the laugh was a trace of the childish giggle. She came toward him. The paper with its words of release was smoldering in his grasp, and she took it from him. “This is what you always wanted, and Máthair knew that. I heard you make her a promise,” Moira told him. “Now keep it.”
He said nothing for a time, and she saw steam rise from the corners of his eyes. She went to the mantle and took Caitlyn’s pocket watch from where is sat, bringing it over to him and pressing the round form into his hand. “Remember us,” she said. “Remember us as we were.”
“I will,” he said finally.
The sound from the television set was tinny and the picture half lost in static. “Do you have any statement to make?” a reporter asked, shoving a microphone toward Gary, a darkness in a blizzard of transmitted snow and teeming rain from the storm flailing the island. She could see the curve of Church Bay behind him, gray in the downpour and besieged by a small invading squadron of press with cameras.
“I’m going home,” he said simply. “That’s all. I don’t have anything else to say, and I’d like you all to just leave me alone.” The press of reporters shouted a torrent of questions, but he ignored them, pushing through them. She heard some faint cries: “Damn, look out! He’ll burn you if you touch him!” The cameras pursued him, but Gary pushed his way up the ramp and onto the ferry. The reporter who’d asked the question turned to face the camera. “This is the scene, live on Rathlin Island-”
Moira touched the remote and the television went dark. She stared at the glass tube for several minutes before getting up. She pulled on a sweater and her slicker and went outside to check on the sheep and open the gate to the pasture.
She had moved in with Wide Abby Scanlon, who’d agreed to be her guardian, but Moira told Mayor Carrick that she wanted to keep the old house and move into it herself when she was older. The man had wriggled his rat nose and she knew what he was thinking. “Chances are that you won’t be needing the house, dearie. Chances are you’ll be dead . . .” But he’d agreed, and every day she walked back to the old place. Every day she did the chores and pretended for a time that she was an adult and this was her house now, and that she was living here for the rest of her life.
That she would die here, as Máthair had, as her Gramma had.
She swept out the barn and laid down new straw, then walked out across the field to the cliffs and just stood there as the sheep grazed, watching the waves thunder into the rocks in cascades of white foam. After a few hours, she went back to the cottage to fix supper—she should get back to Abby’s house, but she didn’t want to. Not yet.
She crumbled newspaper and placed it on the grate, then put a few turves of peat on top. She reached up to the mantlepiece for the book of matches and crouched back down.
The pack was empty. She tossed the empty cardboard into the fireplace. The stillness of the house struck her then, the silence lurking inside even as the storm softly lashed the structure. She wanted to cry, hunkered there in front of the cold, dead fireplace, listening to the rain patter and splash against the windows and roof while the house itself was consumed with somber quiet.
She heard the door open, heard footsteps cross quickly toward her. A dark hand reached past her shoulder and touched the paper. A flame curled away, yellow fire spreading as the paper began to crackle and smoke curl away toward the flue. She could hear the ticking of a watch. “I knew I could find you here when you weren’t at Abby’s,” he said.
He was smiling at her, uncertainly. She tried to frown sternly at him. “You broke your promise,” Moira began, but Gary shook his head.
“I promised Caitlyn that if I could, I’d go home,” he said. “I got as far the train for Belfast before I realized that I was going the wrong way.”
“Gary . .” She stopped. Took a breath and let it out again. She wasn’t going to hug him, wasn’t going to smile at him, because if she did either of those things, she’d be lost. “It’s going to happen soon. I can feel it. You should have gone. I want you to go.”
“Is that what you really want? To be alone? To be with Wide Abby when it happens and not me? If it is, tell me now and I’ll go.”
“He cupped his large, dark hands around her cheeks, warm and soft and loving. He kissed her forehead, and she sank into his embrace, pulling herself tightly to him, a child again, sobbing into his chest. He simply held her, rocking back and forth as they sat on the floor in front of the fire. “I don’t want to die, Gary,” she said. “I’m so scared . . . so scared . . .”
“I know, I know,” he crooned, whispering. “I’m scared, too. But whatever happens, I’ll be with you. I promise you that. I’ll be with you.”
WITH A FLOURISH AND A FLAIR
By Kevin Andrew Murphy
Pleasant evening, artist. A present. And a responsibility.” Sam looked up from his sketchbook just in time to see miniature squid attempting to escape from pirouline cookies, the pastry flutes impaled in a goblet filled with guacamole mixed with pomegranate seeds, winking like demonic eyes behind the round facets. While on one level he knew it was meant to be an exotic appetizer, fusion cuisine of the East-meets-West-goes-South-then-hits-the-other-side-of-the-galaxy school, the end result looked like nothing half so much as a sundae for the Elder Gods.
Hastet benasari Julali Ackroyd, earth’s first and currently only Takisian chef, set the eldritch offering on the table in Martha Stewart’s “It’s a good thing” presentation position.
Sam knew enough to smile, trying to avoid the wide-eyed “Help me!” stares and frantic tentacles of the squidlets which were, he noted out of the corner of one eye, frozen into position with strands of carmelized sugar.
“And the responsibility?”
“Inclusion in tomorrow’s brunch menu?” She preened, smoothing down her apron. “Since you’re already redoing it, I thought this might be Starfields’ new feature item.”
It looked more like a feature from the Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. A diorama of the Swarm Invasion perhaps, or one of the more disturbing examples of the Monstrous Joker Babies. But Sam knew it would not be politic to say so. Not if he wanted to keep his job. “Um . . . could we do it as table placards?”
“As you like,” said Hastet. “I just showed my husband, and he said it would be perfect for Halloween.” She beamed at the mass of tentacles, then frowned. “But that’s not till Wednesday, isn’t it?”
Sam gestured to the patrons in costume about the restaurant. “People celebrate early.”
“Oh good.” She pursed her lips then. “I haven’t given it a name yet. I was thinking ‘Takisian Surprise,’ but given the last one, I don’t think that would sell.” Absently, she tucked a stray brown curl under her chef’s pepperbox. “Jay also said something about ‘Lovecraft’ when he saw it. But that would be for Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t it?”
Sam pictured Cthulhu got up as Cupid and was immediately sorry he had. “No, not exactly.”
Hastet rolled her eyes. “You earthlings have too many holidays.” She gave a grandiloquent wave of dismissal to the tentacle parfait, which Sam guessed to be the Takisian equivalent of ‘Whatever.’ “I trust your judgment. Just let it speak to you.” With that, she slipped back through the arch to the kitchen, leaving Sam alone with the otherworldly hors d’oeuvre.
He leaned closer and gave it a wary glance, half expecting it to go scuttling across the table.
It was looking back. A nameless thing from the far depths of space. Bloodstone eyes watched below, flat lavender ovals stared above. Lidless. Unblinking. Alien. Sam wondered how it could possibly speak to him, afraid that it would.
Then it did: “Nice hat you have there.”
A lifetime of living in Jokertown had taught Sam that the most unlikely things could speak. Plants. Animals. Even the urinal in Squisher’s Basement. Things that had once been people, and horribly, on some level, still were, the wild card twisting their bodies into forms no longer even remotely human. But only rarely did they become entities as bizarre as Hastet’s new appetizer. “What?”
“I said ‘Nice hat,’” the dish of tentacles and avocado ichor repeated, its voice incongruously dulcet and feminine, albeit slightly annoyed. “Had it long?” Sam then realized that none of the squid were moving their lips, and unless the eldritch sundae were telepathic—always an option when dealing with victims of an alien virus—it was more likely that the speaker was someone behind it.
He sat up straight and looked past the sugar-frosted cephalopods.
The voice belonged to a woman. A nat woman to all appearances, mid-thirties but damn fine for all that, as petite or even more so than Hastet, with one of those figures you usually need corsetry to get, displaying it to best advantage in a tux shirt, black tie, swallowtail coat, black satin short-shorts, and cobweb-patterned black fishnets over stiletto heels. This ensemble was topped off with a top hat, worn over masses of Titian curls somewhere between Dr. Tachyon and the naturally vain girl from Peanuts. Accented with devil red lipstick and nails, the whole look said either stage magician or hooker, or something with the same effect thrown together for a semi-elegant semi-trashy evening of clubbing the Saturday before Halloween.
Sam heartily approved of the outfit, and the woman in it, and not just because his was almost the same, except he had the cobweb lace as cravat and cuffs, jeans instead of short-shorts, Does in place of stilettos, and slightly more gothic taste in nailpolish. And black velvet gloves, at least on his left hand. He tapped it to the brim of his own top hat. “No, just picked it up.” Sam felt a grin steal across his face as he took in the sights, since up close she looked even better than when he’d first noticed her an hour ago. “Nice threads yourself. Columbia, or Sally from Cabaret?”
She paused for a moment. “No, Topper.”
“She was one of the SCARE aces, right?” Now that she mentioned the name, Sam could see the likeness. “’Cause if you’re supposed to be the guy from the old ghost movies, I never would have gotten it. But speaking of spirits, can I buy you a drink?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you old enough to drink?”
Sam grinned. “ID’s are not a problem.” He chuckled then. “Of course, if you’re Topper, you’d just pull whatever you want out of your hat, right? Get me a Long Island?”
She gave a strained smile. “I’d be happy to, assuming I had the right hat. . . .”
Sam shook his head. “Nice try, but wrong answer. You got the costume perfect, but the real Topper can use any hat—top hats, bowlers, sombreros. And she never does requests.” Sam grinned further. “Besides, she retired that outfit when she quit the Justice Department.”
“Aces High is having a costume party. So sue me.” She put her hands on her hips. “So, how do you know so much about the ‘real’ Topper? Ace groupie?”
“Nah,” Sam shook his head, “someone donated a bunch of back issues of Aces! to the J-town orphanage. Topper was on the cover in the eighties. Had a pinup and everything.” Sam shrugged. “Haven’t made the cover yet myself, but we aces like to keep tabs on each other.”
She arched the same eyebrow. “New ace, huh?” Her eyes flicked over him. “So who are you then, the Artful Dodger?”
“That’s sort of the look I was going for,” Sam said, still smiling, “but actually, you can call me Swash.”
“Swash?”
“Well, it’s either that or ‘His Nibs,’ but even a goth can only be so pretentious.” He held up his ungloved right hand, which had been hidden behind his sketchbook. “Pardon me if I don’t shake, but I’m a little inky right now.”
He watched her eyes start, a pretty cerulean blue, as she took note of his hand, which was stained with that shade and several others beneath his hooked black-enameled Fu Manchu manicure. It wasn’t a joker, but it still had shock value, like an unexpected tongue-stud.
Sam laid his sketchbook flat, displaying the Art Nouveau letters and dancing pumpkins of the menu he’d been re-illuminating. He flexed his fingers, letting a drop of ink come to the tip of each split sharpened crow-quill pointed nail, glanced to Hastet’s nameless appetizer, then flipped to a fresh page and clawed down it. A twitch here, a slash there, a drop of the chartreuse of revulsion and the pale lavender of disquiet, and he’d pretty accurately captured his impression of the tentacular delight. He tossed in a few word balloons with the squidlets saying, “Eat me!” instead of “Help me!” then added a banner borne aloft by Cupidthulhu putti with a caption in dramatically dripping Salamanca script: “Dare you partake of LOVECRAFT’S MADNESS?”
With one more jig of his thumb, he signed it Swash. “See?” He used his gloved left hand to turn the book around. “Not just my ace name, but my artist’s signature too.” He blotted the nails of his right on one of Hastet’s no-longer-immaculately-white napkins. “Like I said, ID’s are not a problem.”
The woman applauded lightly. “Nice trick.”
“Thanks.” Sam grinned.
“Can I have my hat back now?”
He picked up his spare glove and slipped it on, sliding his fingertips into the special pencap sheathes. “Uh, you’re wearing it.” He shook his cuff so the lace fell properly, black cobwebs on black, stealing a glance up from beneath the brim of his own top hat.
“No, I think you’re wearing it.” She gestured to the bar. “About a half hour ago, when the waiter dropped his tray? Someone bumped into me and knocked my hat off.”
Sam remembered the loud and spectacular crash, which had not only made him jump and squirt ink all over a page, ruining one of his sketches, but had also had caused him to dig in his nails, injecting pigment into several pages previous, destroying hours of work. Which in fact was why he was still here, recopying pages and hitting up Hastet for snacks to refill his ink reservoirs. “And . . . ?”
“And my grandfather was a stage magician. I know all about misdirection.” She looked pointedly at a spot a few inches above his eyes. “Likewise the bump-and-switch.” She reached up and tapped her hat. “And while this is the same size and vintage as the one I came in with—even the same haberdasher’s mark—it’s not the same hat.”
Sam grimaced. He should have known it was something more than just mutual admiration of gothic finery. “If you wanted to look at my hat . . .” He doffed it, stray bits of blond mane falling into his face, “. . . all you had to do was ask.” He extended it to her. “Was yours a rental prop?”
“No,” she said coldly, grasping the brim, “but it had a lot of sentimental value.” She then thrust her arm inside his hat, up to the elbow. Her hand came out the other end, where the crown was partially detached, becoming even more detached as she did so, and Sam watched as her expression changed, from a look of smug satisfaction, to puzzlement, then to worry as her painted nails fumbled at the air, to red-faced embarrassment as she caught sight of them over the brim of the hat. “Wha—?”
Something in her expression made him flash back to the teenage girl on the cover of Aces! and he realized that, with the exception of Golden Boy, most aces didn’t stay unchanged since the early eighties. “Wait a second,” Sam said, “you really are Topper, aren’t you?” She looked at him and that look cinched it. “That article, it was wrong, right? SCARE disinformation. Your ace crutch isn’t just any hat, or a top hat, it’s one top hat in particular, the one you got from your grandfather. You hid it inside that sombrero and—”
“Not so loud!” she hissed, withdrawing her arm from his hat and abruptly sitting next to him. “I don’t want everyone to— What’s the matter?”
Sam gritted his teeth to keep from screaming. “You’re sitting on my tail!”
She looked. “Uh, it’s a nice tail coat but . . .”
Sam twitched his real tail, hidden down the sheath in the left-hand train of his own swallowtail coat where it had been stretched out in the booth, and Topper’s eyes started. She abruptly raised back up so he could yank it under himself, having a moment of trouble as it got tangled with the tails of her coat and the velvet of the upholstery, but at last he got it situated. “My Jokertown membership card, a little joker to go with my deuce.” He blinked back the pain, even though his tail was still smarting. “Okay, now you know my secret too.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” She grimaced and covered her eyes with one hand, shaking her head softly. “Good god, if Jay ever finds out that I’ve lost my hat, I’ll never hear the end of it. . . .”
“Hastet’s Jay?”
She dropped her hand and nodded. “I work for his agency.”
Sam glanced down at her fishnets through the hole in his hat. “What sort of agency . . . ?”
She follow his gaze, then muttered, “There was a reason I retired this costume. . . .” Then she glared at him. “Detective agency. Gads, I work for Popinjay, not Fortunato.” She looked then at Sam’s top hat, with its crown falling out, and gave a sheepish grin that made her look years younger. “Sorry about that. . . .” She glanced around the restaurant. “Do you see any other top hats?”
Sam looked himself. Starfields was packed, and given the night, he saw every sort of hat imaginable, from the odd dozen ostrich-plumed cavalier hats worn by the Dr. Tachyon lookalike waiters to representational foam rubber creations liberated from the Theatre District, looking to be cast-offs from last month’s Wild Card Follies everything from the Great Ape climbing the Empire State Building to Dr. Tod’s flaming blimp. But no top hats.
“Right now?” He smoothed his hair back with one velvet glove and replaced his battered hat with the other, pushing the crown inside. “Excepting mine and the one you’re wearing, no.”
She bit her lower lip. “Earlier?”
Sam thought back. “Several. Let me look. . . .” He picked up his sketchbook, blowing once across it so that the snot-trails from the Salamanca script would be dry, then flipped back past the buffer of blank pages he’d left to protect from bleed-through until he got to the ruined section. He pried open the last two sheets, still damp from the accident, revealing a giant multicolored Rorschach blot of sprayed ink, one hue bleeding into the next, predominantly the shocking pink of surprise. But underneath that, still visible on the lefthand page, were a series of sketches, including an image of the Starfields bar just minutes before the crash. Counting top hats, there were seven individuals of note, the first six wearing tail coats, the last without.
First was Topper, holding a martini, perched at the edge of the bar in her fishnets. Next, a short ways down, was a crippled boy with polio crutches. Then came a young man with a blond mane and velvet gloves, the very image of Sam himself, turned and talking to a darkly handsome man with black hair and a permanent five-o’-clock shadow, fiddling with a small hand-held black box. Then there was a set of improbably wide shoulders, facing the bar and taking up at least three seats, the top hat worn atop a perfectly average, even narrow, head. Next a pale horse-faced giant with a long white goatee and a spiked and spiraled Mohawk, his top hat artfully and absurdly impaled on the twisted spikes. Then, finally, there was a fetish girl, a long, lithe, willowy woman, thin as a supermodel and almost as tall, dressed head to toe in latex. Her catsuit and platform-soled dominatrix boots were all of a piece, broken only by buckles and straps, and her face was hidden by a pantomime mask, a single tear on one cheek. This was backed by long honey blond tresses and topped with a vintage silk top hat.
“Here.” Sam handed the book to Topper.
She scrutinized the page like a rogues gallery. “Do you know any of these people?”
“Everyone except the women on the ends.” Sam paused. “Though I’m getting to know the one of them.”
Topper looked at him, and their proximity, and smirked. “Don’t push it. I’m old enough to be your babysitter.”
Sam shrugged. “I grew up in an orphanage. I never had a babysitter.” He paused. “Though I did have fantasies.”
Topper didn’t touch this, focusing instead on the mystery woman. “So, the Vinyl Vixen here—any idea who she is? Is that an ace uniform? A joker disguise? A Halloween costume? A really kinky fashion statement?”
Sam shrugged. “All of the above? Go to bondage night at the Dead Nicholas and that’s a pretty common look.” Then he added, “I do their club flyers.”
“Is it just me, or does it look like she has an Adam’s apple under the latex?” Topper looked closer at the illustration. “Or is that an inkblot?”