M.K. Hobson's Blog

In a conversation with a co-worker the other day, it was suggested that I am a Philip Glass groupie. (It was also suggested that this was “cute”, a statement which rankles, honestly.) But the facts are these: I am currently at the Portland International Airport, drinking a mediocre Rogue Stout while I wait to board a flight to Los Angeles, where I will spend the night at a somewhat-sketch Airbnb, all in support of seeing the LA Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten.

My introduction to Glass’ music came when I was in high school. As I remember it, my family used to rent “Koyannisquatsi” on VHS tape from our local movie rental place on a semi-regular basis. It’s kind of odd now to remember my whole family gathered around the TV in rapt attention. The music of Philip Glass does tend to draw and sharpen focus, but I can’t imagine anything that would similarly enrapture my family today. Our attention spans have become withered and sapped. But I digress.

I first saw a live performance of Glass’ music in Eugene, in 1988, at the Hult Auditorium. I was in college and it was a production of “1000 Airplanes on the Roof.” I don’t quite recall how I got the tickets. I think they were being handed out free to students in the theater department (I was still a drama major at that point.) But if I *am* a Philip Glass groupie (and I think it is fair to say that I am, though I still refuse to admit that is “cute”) that performance was when it started. Because Philip Glass music experienced live is really far more wonderful and astonishing than any recording.

In 2001, I went to see Philip Glass live in Portland at a performance of “Dracula“. Philip Glass himself signed my CD box set of his Symphony #5  (which was, at the time, my favorite Glass symphony.) I ended up later giving the signed CDs to a guy with whom I had a desperate and intense fling. The guy is long gone, and now I kind of regret my impulsiveness. But really, both the gifting and the regret seem a fitting part of this story.

In 2005 I traveled to see the premiere of Symphony #7 at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. It was the day after the second inauguration of George W. Bush. It was bitterly cold, and I was as unimpressed with the symphony as I was by the President who had just been inaugurated. It sounded very rehashed and familiar (moreso than usual for Glass music, which always features a lot of “creative recycling”, to put it generously) and later I discovered that one passage which had sounded *really* familiar, but I couldn’t place, had been lifted exactly from one of his earlier movie works.

In 2012, I traveled to Berkeley to see “Einstein on the Beach.” This performance was life-changing for me, probably the most affecting piece of theater/music I have ever seen. The fact that no one was there to experience it with me is another regret … But like the regret over the CDs I gave away, it is a fitting part of this story.

Since 2012, I have dragged my sister to see “In the Penal Colony” in Boston (which neither of us much cared for, and parts of which were so ridiculous I rocked the seats of the people around us with silent laughter) as well as a brief performance of one Glass piece at Carnegie Hall this past October.

And now, Akhnaten.

The weird thing is, I know Glass is “lowbrow”. Bourgeois and pretentious. If you like Glass you’re presenting yourself as “smart” or at least “sophisticated.” I hate that part of being a Glass “groupie”. Because I do truly enjoy his music. The formality of it, the cleanliness, the control, the subtle evolutions of rhythm. I like to think I like Glass for the “right” reasons, that I’m not just cute and precious and full of myself.

But I probably am. And damn, I still wish I had those CDs back.

The Last Unenlightened Man

Hear a reading of this story.

As long as space remains,

As long as sentient beings remain,

Until then, may I too remain,

To  dispel the miseries of the world.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” the man in the shabby charcoal suit responded bitterly when Joe offered a banal observation about the half-and-half being almost out. “Think you’re pretty cute, don’t you? Blue scrubs. Doctor, medicine, nurse. Adorable. You think I don’t get it? I may be mired in error, but I’m not fucking stupid. You’re trying to enlighten me. All of you. You precious snowflakes. You buddhas, crystal-clear and free of all karmic obscurations, you masters of the secret knowledge of eternal bliss. You’re trying to drag me into Nirvana kicking and screaming and I am telling you right now … I want it to stop.”

They were in a coffee shop, standing side-by-side at the milk and sugar station, which was what had precipitated Joe’s mention of the half-and-half. The man completed his bizarre monologue by seizing a fistful of raw sugar packets, tearing them open all at once, and dumping their contents into his white cup. He did not look again at Joe.

Joe, who did indeed work as a trauma nurse at a nearby emergency room, had dealt with enough individuals undergoing mental health crises to find the man’s outburst surprising, but not particularly threatening or alarming. Garden variety paranoia. Hallucinations, maybe. There were no knives involved, and the only potential weapons within reach were wooden coffee stirrers. Joe’s immediate urge to take his coffee and walk away quickly was unsurprising. What was surprising, though, was that the urge was immediately overwhelmed by another urge, the urge to say:

“Wait, why wouldn’t you want to be enlightened?”

It was a question that just popped out of his mouth, a question wholly uninformed by any understanding of any of the various religions or philosophies in which enlightenment played a part. The pigeonhole in Joe’s brain that contained the concept “enlightenment” contained just two other items: that dusty old if you see the Buddha in the road, kill him thing (what was that, a koan? A riddle? An actual instruction? Whatever it was, Joe rarely examined it because he found it so uncomfortably inscrutable) and New Yorker cartoons. Specifically, the variety of New Yorker cartoons where ancient bearded yogis in saffron robes sat on top of snowy mountains and tormented exhausted supplicants with witty, urbane, New Yorker-ish quips. Thus, for Joe, enlightenment was either an enervating enigma or an unbearably twee cartoon, exactly like heaven or hell, like good or evil.

Joe’s question, however, merely annoyed the man further. Giving Joe a look like he was the crazy one, the man in the charcoal suit snarled and threw down his wooden stirrer. It missed the round garbage hole and made a faint wet-sounding slap on the streaked granite. He snapped a lid on his coffee and walked away quickly.

Joe finished stirring the last of the half-and-half into his coffee. The sound of “Lady of Spain” being played on an accordion drifted in from the street outside. The man, who had slammed his cup down on a small round table, sat glaring out the window at passersby, presumably as upset with them as he was at Joe.

Joe had already conditioned his mind to think no more of the encounter. He did need to get back to work. His hand was on the bar to push the door open. The notes of “Lady of Spain” grew louder. But then, he stopped. It was just too ridiculous. He had come in to get a cup of coffee to calm himself down. Just a half-hour before he’d watched a college kid die on a crash cart after being slammed off his bike by a driver who looked left before making a right turn. Joe had watched the kid just die, expire, stop living. All things that were and would be for that young person came to an end, in that time and place, a half-hour ago, on a morning where someone was playing “Lady of Spain” and coffee was being sold and some crazy man was accusing people of trying to enlighten him. And yet that morning, surely the young man had brushed his teeth, and thought about homework, and packed his book bag, and worried about grades.

Joe saw people die all the time. Usually it did not bother him. And actually, today, it wasn’t the kid’s death that bothered him, not really. What bothered him was that he couldn’t say why it didn’t bother him. If the violent, stupid, meaningless cutting short of a promising young life wasn’t what was bothering him, what could it possibly be? That he’d forgotten to bring his coffee card for a punch? Could that be it? He patted his pocket. It was still empty.

The fact was that Joe, at that particular moment, felt as far away from enlightenment–whatever the crazy man in the shabby suit meant by the word–as anyone could possibly feel. So instead of leaving, he walked over to the man’s table, and stood for a long time in silence. The man did not look up.

“What makes you think I’m trying to enlighten you?” Joe asked. “I mean, what makes you think I could enlighten anybody?”

“Leave me alone.” There was a desperate whine in the man’s voice. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said, “but you started this. You accused me of something that you apparently feel is pretty horrible and I demand that you explain yourself. Because as far as I know, enlightenment isn’t horrible. It’s supposed to be pure bliss, right? Not that I would know if it’s blissful or not, because I’m not enlightened.”

“Yes you are,” the man said wearily, in the tone of someone who knows a practical joke is being played on him and all the jokers have pushed the joke to a tedious extreme. He looked around the coffee shop. “Everyone is. Everyone except me. I’m the last one. The last man left in maya, the last man subject to the dukka of rebirth. All sentient beings have achieved supreme realizations, and are generating bodhicitta on my behalf, praying that I finally achieve buddahood.”

“All right, so what’s wrong with that, exactly?” Joe said. “What can you possibly have against all creatures existing in a state of bliss?”

“Because when there’s no one left to become enlightened, what happens?” The man leaned forward. “After that, I see only two options. After the last unenlightened man is enlightened, after all sentient beings have come to clearly perceive the essence of reality as it exists beyond the tarnished veil of karma and consequence, the world of illusion ceases to exist. Just stands to reason.”

“Which means bliss,” Joe pressed, as if somehow gaining that point was very important.

“All right, sure. Bliss for all eternity,” the man allowed with expansive sarcasm, before adding, “which is to say death. Stagnation. Extinction. Oblivion.” He paused to take a slow serious sip of his coffee. “Or then there’s option two. Maybe not death. Maybe rebirth. Maybe, somehow, everything restarts. The universe reboots. We all go back to level one. All the beings in the world who were enlightened, their enlightenment burns away in some kind of big bang metaphysical conflagration. The wheel turns again. And then, each and every sentient being has to battle their way through the muck of samsara all over again. Suffer through all those millions of rebirths, through all those lives where you’re born only to get tortured and raped and humiliated and your head bashed in by marauding soldiers. Do you know how much agonizing pain and suffering a sentient being has to survive in order to finally achieve nirvana?” He paused to draw a deep quavering breath. “Oh well, of course you know. Sure you know.”

“I don’t know,” Joe said softly, but the man didn’t seem to hear him.

“It’s physics! You don’t think that there’s any ending to any of this, do you? You can’t imagine that after you achieve enlightenment, that’s it? It can’t be. It can’t possibly be. No matter what, we’ll all end up on the wheel again. So better the wheel I know.”

He leaned forward, and suddenly, his eyes were pleading.

“And isn’t it better this way? That there is one man left unenlightened, so that all the buddhas of creation have something to do? Isn’t it better that I continue to suffer through craving and aversion and unfavorable rebirth than trillions of sentient beings be returned to the wheel of samsara? Why can’t you see it? Why won’t you?”

Joe could not answer. The pleading look on the man’s face hardened back into bitterness. He sank back into his chair, twisting his coffee cup a precise half-turn.

“That’s why I continue to create as much bad karma as I possibly can. You, of all people, should know how much bad karma is generated by insulting the buddhas and bodhisattvas who are working with such loving diligence on one’s behalf. You stinking pile of horse-manure, you verminous mass of pig-vomit, you reborn son of a diseased whore.” The man smiled to himself, as if pleased. “Remember those, they’ll come in handy later. Anyway, that’s 10,000 lifetimes right there. I will never clear my obscurations. Never in a million lifetimes, a hundred million lifetimes! Hell-realm beings have tried to rend my stubbornness out of me. Beautiful angelic devas have tried to love it out of me. But I won’t budge. I won’t budge!”

The last words were delivered at full volume, and punctuated with a violent gesture of resistance. Around them, the coffee shop fell quiet. Everyone was looking at them. Their eyes, Joe noted, did seem to be full of tender compassion. He’d never noticed that before.

“Can someone be enlightened without knowing it?” Joe asked. The man snorted.

“Oh please, enough,” he said. “You’re trying my patience.”

“No, honestly,” Joe said. “I don’t think I am. What makes you so sure that everyone is enlightened?”

The man sighed wearily, leaned back in his chair. “It’s a matter of odds. If we all have an infinite existence-stream ahead of us, that means we must all have an infinite existence-stream behind us. QED. And in that amount of time, anyone who wanted to be enlightened would become enlightened. Not could … not should … would. There is mathematically zero chance that someone who wants to be enlightened has not already become so. The only person who could fail to become enlightened is someone who has actively attempted to avoid that condition. Since I don’t want to be–and indeed, I have very well-thought-out and considered reasons for not wanting to be–I am sure I am not.”

“All right, but how can you be sure you’re the only one who’s come to that conclusion?” Joe pointed out. “Maybe there are other people who don’t want to be enlightened.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be enlightened?” The man slammed down his cup and glared at Joe. “Eternal calm and peace and bliss! Buddhahood is a sweet gig. But it can’t be for everyone. If it is for everyone, then it can’t be for anyone.”

“And you’re the only one who can possibly have figured this out?”

“I am much smarter than most people,” the man sniffed. “Besides, you didn’t figure it out, did you? And you’re the only one I’m ever having this conversation with.”

Indeed, it did seem as if they were going in circles, and Joe did have the feeling they’d gone in circles like this before. But he was unwilling to let it go.

“But what if people somehow refuse enlightenment just because they don’t understand it? I mean, because they don’t even understand that it’s an option, that it’s something they could possibly have?” Joe looked out the window to the busker on the sidewalk who was playing the accordion. He wasn’t a very good accordion player, but he was always outside the coffee shop, and always playing “Lady of Spain” over again and again. It seemed the only song he knew. It amused the tourists. “Take that fellow, for instance–”

“Enlightened.” The man in the charcoal suit said, without even looking up. He seemed to be growing bored, and this made Joe feel desperate.

“Hold on!” Joe said. “Give me a chance, why don’t you? My point is, he stands out there every day in the rain and the cold playing that accordion. Always the same song. He doesn’t make much money. He suffers. Why would he keep doing that if he was actually enlightened? Why would anyone keep doing anything? Why would kids on bikes keep getting hit by cars? Why would people keep dying?”

“Dying and enlightenment have nothing to do with each other,” the man said frostily.

Joe closed his mouth. He considered the accordion player, trying to figure out some other argument he could present using the accordion player as an example. Joe felt a special affinity for the accordion player. He himself had studied the accordion in his youth, and in fact, “Lady of Spain” was one of the only songs he knew how to play. He had even had made up a special flourish to go at the end of it that made it extra jaunty. The accordion player was one of the reasons Joe liked to come to this coffee shop. That, and the punch card. Joe patted his pocket. Still empty.

Then, something occurred to Joe in a flash. He leaned forward.

“But wait! If you’re refusing enlightenment–which is something I think you really want, despite what you say–in order to help others, then you’re certainly more enlightened than anyone! In fact, you’re probably the only truly enlightened one–“

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the man muttered. “You’ve tried that before. The double-fake-out, ‘if you think you’re not enlightened you must be the really enlightened one’ bullshit. Don’t embarrass yourself. You buddhas are supposed to be smarter than that.”

Joe clenched his teeth. “Listen, you’re really starting to piss me off. Could I feel this pissed off at you if I were enlightened? How about that?”

The man shrugged again. It was clear that he really was getting bored now. “You tell me,” he said. “You’re the wish-giving tree and the cow of plenty for the world.”

“All I’m asking you to consider,” Joe said, drawing a deep breath and attempting to access whatever inner peace this man seemed to think he possessed, “is that maybe you’re not the last unenlightened man. Maybe there are two of us. In fact, I’m pretty sure that there are. And you know what?” Joe set his chin resolutely. “I’m going to stay behind with you. Because it’s not fair that you should be the only one.”

The words had a profound effect on the man. The bitterness and boredom drained from his face, replaced with sudden, unfeigned gratitude. His eyes glistened with slight moisture; he reached up and dabbed away a tear.

“That’s … that’s so kind,” he said softly. “So … altruistic.” He sniffed, and then his voice hardened once more. “Almost buddha-like, one might even say.”

“Goddamn it, enough!” Joe roared, and this time it was him the coffee shop eyes turned to. But Joe didn’t care. “Stop trying to make me enlightened! I am not an enlightened being! I am not a buddha, free of obscurations and the curse of rebirth! I am not! I am not, and I won’t be!”

“You’re not, eh?”

“I’m not!”

“Prove it.”

This pulled Joe up short. But instead of answering, he shot back:

“Prove to me you’re not.”

The man peered at Joe. He nodded.

“All right,” he said softly. “I will. There was once a buddha in a coffee shop. He spoke with a man who said he was unenlightened.”

Joe waited expectantly. The man took a long drink from his cup, draining it. Then he set it down. He released a long, satisfied sigh, then punctuated his next words with a tap of his cup:

“The end.”

Joe surged to his feet, feeling his pocket, which was still empty. He was furious. “What’s the proof in that?” But only after the man had shrugged, and risen, and walked to the door did the question that Joe should have asked occur to him. But by that time, the man in charcoal suit had walked out the door.  

Joe watched him step into the road.

The accordion player finished the last notes of “Lady of Spain” with a flourish. Then Joe realized that it was his flourish, the jaunty one he’d made up, and he realized that it was his fingers playing the keys, and the accordion player was him. Oh well, why not? They were all him anyway, everyone inside the coffee shop with the compassionate eyes, and everyone outside and in the road and driving the car that made the right turn and riding the bike.

The man in the charcoal suit applauded the flourish.

“You’ve really improved,” he said.

Joe felt his pocket. He found it wasn’t empty. He pulled out a knife.

“You stinking pile of horse-manure, you verminous mass of pig-vomit, you reborn son of a diseased whore,” Joe said. Then he stabbed the man in the charcoal suit.

“That would be ten million lifetimes,” the man groaned as he slumped to his knees, the fabric his suit jacket becoming sodden black. “Except I’m not a buddha. Could a buddha convince someone to remain unenlightened?”

“Who but a buddha could be so convincing?” Joe demanded wildly.

“Who but a buddha could be so convinced?” the man rejoined weakly, and then fell silent, laying in the road, bleeding.

It was as inscrutable as a koan, as prim and self-congratulatory as a New Yorker doodle. The universe was beginning to come apart, bleeding from infinite sheared arteries all at once. Joe felt certain that he should try to stop the bleeding, except he also now felt equally certain that he shouldn’t.

And so he placed his bloody fingers over the keys again, and began playing “Lady of Spain” one more time, and waited for it all to happen again, hoping that this time–this next time–he would somehow remember to ask the one question he always forgot to ask.

Which man was which?

Continuing the practice of posting these first-draft chapters of “The Unsteady Earth” as I run them through my writer’s group. The usual caveats apply. The version I ultimately publish will likely differ substantially from these early drafts. There will also be spoilers. And shitty writing. Enjoy!

The Unsteady Earth
Chapter Two
“Uncle Royce”

New York City

Thursday, January 5, 1911

9 days until the full moon

A few hours later, after a cold and fitful rest, Will made his way down Seventh Avenue toward 34th, where he hoped he might be able to catch a train to Detroit. The thick flurries of snow made everything hazy and indistinct; he could see only what was directly before him as he trudged through the heavy powder. In the silence of the darkened city everything was soft, but also sudden—unexpected objects appeared when he was almost on top of them. A lone pedestrian bundled and waddling. A fire hydrant entombed beneath a smooth blister-like drift. A dark rat scurrying from one cover to another, trailing fingertip footprints.

At 34th, the columns of the new Penn Station’s Roman facade jutted up from sloppily-heaped snowpiles. A narrow shoveled tunnel provided a dark passageway up the stone front steps. As Will passed through the slushy outer vestibule, a sleepy newsboy rattled a paper at him.

“New York World, mister?” he called, though the once-over he gave Will indicated that he questioned his ability to afford the penny. But at that hour, in that storm, there weren’t many other people to sell to. “Maybe you wanna check your stocks.”

As he bit back a rude retort, Will caught sight of a picture on the cover of the paper. It was a picture of him, a new picture, a close-up drawing of his face. Fishing out a penny, Will snatched the paper and hurried away, head low. Stepping into a cove between two marble pillars, Will scrutinized the image—a skilled likeness that showed him sleeping, his head resting peacefully on his chest. The caption beneath it read: Murderer in Repose? Sketches from the Seventh Street Mission on a Snowy Night. Oscar Lewis.

The picture wasn’t as big as the one in the Times had been, but it showed how he looked right now more accurately than the photograph had. Suddenly, all the comments Lewis had made about murder and newspapers made sense. But if Lewis had guessed who he was, why hadn’t he turned him in? Why be satisfied with drawing his picture when a bigger story—and a bigger payday—could be had simply by stepping outside to hail a beat cop?

Perhaps the answer was to be found in the puzzling little question mark that ended the caption’s first sentence. Will remembered what the sketch-artist had said:

If Dreadnought Stanton weren’t dead, that would mean that the man they say killed him was innocent. Seems like he’d want to tell his side of the story.

Will folded the paper, picture-side in, and tucked it inside his coat. Whatever the reason, he was glad Lewis hadn’t turned him in. He had to get to Detroit.

But, just as he had feared, the snowstorm had brought all the trains to a complete standstill. Small groups of desperate travelers, bundled like fat sausages against the cold, were camped in various states of repose near the ticket windows. Some were stretched out on wooden benches, asleep, hats over their faces. Some smoked cigarettes with intense concentration. Stranded, marooned, they were all waiting for some change in circumstance. Not all of them, however, shared the same weary resignation. One of them, a young salesman, was particularly agitated. His large sample case, emblazoned with the name of a trade firm (“Jacobs & Sons, New York City”) sat battered and worn by his feet. He had laid his ash-colored homburg on top of it, and had thrust his red face as close to the bars of the ticket-agent’s window as he could without actually biting them. His voice shrilled in the early-morning silence.

“Do you understand me, pal? I have to get to Philadelphia! It’s a five-hundred dollar sale on the line. They can’t all be stopped!”

“Yessir, all of them,” the clerk drawled. He was an old man, with tobacco-stained gray whiskers, and he seemed perversely determined to deliver bad news in an extremely pleasant way. His slow mildness clearly stirred up the hot-headed young salesman, and he clearly enjoyed this. “Nothing goin’ for days”—he stretched out the word “days” like it was sugar-taffy—”not until this storm passes.”

“Don’t you people do any work? Plow the tracks?”

“Why, I’m sure we do work,” the ticket agent retorted thoughtfully, rubbing his chin as if the question required deep contemplation. “Yes, I guess we do—”

“Listen, bub. I need to get to Philadelphia. Have to get to Philadelphia. Do you know how much commission I’m going to lose if I’m not up there by morning?”

The ticket agent considered this. An innocent look of inspiration crept over his face.

“Well, say! I know what you can do! There’s a Haälbeck Office right next door.” He indicated the direction with a pointed finger. His voice was sweetly cruel. “They’re doing a bang-up trade with this snow. Maybe they can squeeze you in between the older gents.”

The young salesman’s eyes narrowed. “Think you’re being cute?” he snarled.

“Can’t you afford the fifty bucks?” the ticket agent credibly imitated shock. “It is for a five-hundred dollar sale, you said?”

“And risk a case of magical allergy that might kill me? No, thank you!” the young salesman picked up his homburg and jammed it down on his head. Before seizing his sample case, however, he shook an impotent fist toward the ticket agent’s bars. “Think you’re so cute! Well, hell with you! It’s so a young man can’t do an honest day’s work anymore! You old men—all of you—who can still use magic … when us wide-awake young fellows, the ones really working, plowing tracks and making sales why, we get sick if we even touch the stuff! Restraint of trade, that’s what it is! Unfair advantage! A five hundred dollar sale!”

The torrent of vitriol was as disjointed as it was furious. And it hadn’t the slightest impact on the ticket agent. When the young salesman paused for breath, he merely interjected pleasantly:

“Anything else I can help you with, son?”

“You? Help me? Fat lot of help you’ve given me, or ever will, you damned old fogey! The only help young men like me will get is if when Portman-Yates makes it to the President’s desk and all you old sons-of-bitches are forced to take the Panchrest. Live under the same limits we do. That’s the only help we young men are ever going to get!”

“If you’re going to swear, I’ll call the cops,” the ticket agent yawned.

“I’m done swearing,” the salesman growled. “I’m done talking all together. By God, I promise you, my Congressman is going to hear about this!”

Will watched the young man’s turbulent retreat. He did, Will noticed, storm off in the general direction the ticket clerk had indicated—toward the Haälbeck Office, where, for the extremely high price of fifty dollars, a man could pay to step through an old-fashioned magical device called a Haälbeck Door which would allow him to travel swiftly and magically across great distances. A whole interurban system of the doors had been put in place several decades earlier—before the Black Flu had fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship with magic, leaving anyone under the age of thirty congenitally unable to use magic without severe allergic reaction.

Anyone over thirty, however, born before the depredations of the Black Flu, were unhampered by such physical restrictions. Their ability to use magic was unimpaired. And so, older businessmen could take Haälbeck Doors in snowstorms and close five-hundred dollar deals, where their younger competitors could not do so without risking a bout of magical allergy, the severity of which would be dictated by the amount of magic involved.  A small amount of magic might leave a young man feeling queasy. A very large amount of magic might be fatal. It depended on the person and the magic and the situation.

So, perhaps, despite his angry words of refusal, the young salesman did think a five hundred dollar sale was worth risking a bout of magical allergy. Or perhaps, like other disgruntled young businessmen, he intended to hurl his sample case through the window of the Haälbeck Office in an act of economic protest.

Will walked away from the ticketing area, hands jammed in his pockets, pondering what he should do next. Getting to Detroit by train was clearly out of the question. And ironically enough, unlike the young salesman, he would have no physical difficulty using a Haälbeck Door, despite the fact that he had only turned eighteen a couple of months earlier. Just a few days after he’d been born, magic had been used to save his life from a bout of Black Flu—and as a result, his body had developed a kind of immunity to the damaging effects others his age suffered. He could channel magic as harmlessly as any older person—a fact which Cowdray would surely take full advantage of once he reclaimed control of their shared body. A fact which made it of critical importance for Will find a way to keep Cowdray from reclaiming control of their shared body.

But while Will had no physical difficulty, there was another just as pressing and seemingly insurmountable: financial. He didn’t have fifty dollars. After the small amount he’d given the clerk at the Times Square drug store, he had something less than ten dollars in grimy bills and coins.

If it’s money you lack, you need only take it, Cowdray said. Look, see that man there. Will’s eyes followed the drift of Cowdray’s thoughts, and came to rest on a prosperous-looking older man in a well-tailored herringbone suit, a heavy gold watch-chain looping from his vest. Standing at the station bar, he was draining of a pint of pilsner—his third, judging from the empty glasses. He will need to piss soon. Follow him. Use blood to quiet him. Take the money from his purse.

“I’m not a thief,” Will muttered.

Cowdray’s abrupt contempt saturated him, made him shiver.

You stole money from that child at the theater. Without any suggestion from me. Then Cowdray fell silent, allowing Will to watch as the well-dressed man pushed himself away from the bar, steadied himself with conscious effort, then began toward the concourse urinals.

Almost unconsciously, Will followed him, keeping his distance. It wasn’t that he intended to do anything. He just didn’t want to lose sight of the man.

You don’t even have to steal if you don’t want to, Cowdray murmured softly. Men have tastes. If you would rather be paid—

Without taking his eyes off the man, Will lifted his arm and sank his teeth hard into the softest part of his wrist. Cowdray hissed, and was silent.

The man swayed unsteadily as he walked out to where a broad set of filigreed ironwork stairs led down to the concourse level. Above them, the broad panes of glass set in the high arched ceilings glowed with the opaque, distant glow of approaching dawn. Here, near the platforms, it was cold. The tracks were empty. Will followed the man down to the baggage level to the lavatories.

The man threw open the door to the lavatories with a bang, and stumbled in. Will’s heart thudded. He couldn’t just rob someone. But he had to get to Detroit. Harley Briar might know how to help him, and time was running short, and soon the moon would be full again, and  …

Will opened the door to the lavatories silently, entering without a sound.

Standing at one of the urinals, the man leaned with one hand braced against the white-tiled wall. He didn’t look up as Will entered. Will glanced around the room—it was empty. He fingered the razor in his hand. When had he taken it out?

Draw blood, Cowdray whispered urgently. I will give you the words—

But at that moment the man straightened, and began buttoning his trousers. He looked at Will and smiled crookedly. Not smiling back, Will swerved into one of the stalls, banging it shut, fumbling the razor closed and tucking it away. He sat down on the toilet, holding himself as still and silent as he could until he heard the man leave. Then he buried his face in his hands.

“This is not who I am,” he whispered, voice cupped softly within his palms.

It is not who you were, Cowdray said. But it is who you are now. Who we are.

Helplessly, Will let his hands drop to his lap. The motion made the paper in his vest pocket crinkle, and he felt reflexively for it, an object of comfort.

Will unfolded it the paper, smoothed it mindlessly. By this time, the ritual was so pat and unconscious, in fact, that Will was in the process of refolding the paper before he realized that there was writing on it.

New writing.

Cold prickled along all his nerves as he lifted the paper closer, squinted at it in the half-light of the toilet stall.

I know you are still in New York.

Meet me at 13 Madison Avenue—the Sphinx Building—as soon as you receive this.

Ben.

Will began to tremble, both from the cold and from his overwrought state. Cowdray, however, was calmly arch.

What a message to send. After all you’ve been through.

Will’s excitement at the new message from his brother was suspended for a brief moment as he pondered Cowdray’s response. It revealed many important things, he realized. If, as Will suspected, the spirit was unable to read through their shared eyes, Cowdray would certainly take care not to reveal this weakness—no matter how dearly he desired to know the message’s contents. And that those contents did indeed seem to be opaque to him—the phrasing of his statement suggested that even the jist of the letter was beyond him. So even though Will had read the words, and he had comprehended them, they had not somehow leaked into the part of Will’s mind that Cowdray shared. Will filed these details away, deciding quickly to run one more experiment.

“Ben says that … he is well,” Will lied carefully, running a finger over the words as if reading them back. “He says that we will see each other soon.”

Oh, certainly, Cowdray said. There was scorn, but no hint of suspicion in his thoughts—not of Will, anyway. Now he wants to find you. But think, mooncalf—why has he not wanted to find you before? And is it a good idea to let him find you now?

But behind Cowdray’s warning, Will could perceive his intense longing. It was a strange feeling tinged with black and blue and gold. Cowdray wanted the box back too, more deeply than Will could imagine even Ben wanting it. The thought that it might be nearby—within the same city, within a few short blocks, perhaps—excited Cowdray immensely. But Will had control of the body. He had to think.

Ben was unable to channel magic. Like many others, he had taken the Panchrest—the medication which blocked the pathways through which magic flowed within the human body. So on the face of it, it would seem he posed little threat, at least insofar as a magical artifact like the snuffbox was concerned. However, at the Consecration he’d revealed that even those who’d taken the Panchrest were capable of directing magic, using the body of another. It was a process called vamping. He had done it using Will’s body at the Consecration, and perhaps it was his intention to try to do it again.

Will could, of course, simply refuse to allow it. Or could he? How much of what he’d agreed to at the New Faith Seat of Praise was as the result of his own volition? How much of it would he choose to do again, knowing what he knew now? How much of it was his older brother—whom he had trusted—manipulating him for his own ends?

There was the sound of the lavatory door opening and closing. The sound of another man steadying himself at the urinals. Will glanced up from the stationery—which he’d been staring at the whole time—then looked back quickly, fear jolting through him at the thought that the message might have disappeared, an illusion, a hallucination. But no, the words were still there.

I know you are still in New York.

Will quickly folded the letter and tucked it away.

He had trusted Ben before. He wouldn’t trust him again.

But he was going to get answers.

Will exited Penn Station onto Seventh Avenue and made his way along 31st Street. The going was slow and laborious. While some shopkeepers, hoping to open for the day, were making efforts to shovel the sidewalks, most had given it up for lost; the snow just kept coming down, and the horse-drawn plows piled snow onto the sidewalks as fast as they could be shoveled clear.

He looked for street signs. The snow was piled so high now that it was hard to see them; some were thickly encrusted in ice. He didn’t know the city very well, but he’d quickly picked up on the logic of the grid. All the named avenues—the ones like Park and Madison—were on the east side of the island. If he kept heading east along 31st he should eventually hit Madison—then he’d just have to figure out if that put him above or below the building number he was looking for.

He had to walk about four avenue blocks to reach Madison, and they were exhausting in the snow. But Madison Avenue, being more heavily-traveled, had been plowed more recently, and Will found that he could walk down the middle of the street without much difficulty.

It was as he walked down Madison Avenue that he saw the strange light.

He had been used to pitch-darkness as the heavy snow had blotted out the electric streetlights and brought down powerlines. But as he passed 26th, all around him the air seemed to take on peculiar lambence. Before him, somewhere up ahead, something was glowing brightly, as if lit by hundreds of bulbs. And as he drew closer, he saw that the glow was coming from a sleek, sparse, elegant black marble building.

13 Madison Avenue. The Sphinx Building.

The glow didn’t precisely emanate from it, but seemed to flash in shards from it, like a description Will had once read of the Northern Lights. As he got closer, the snowfall seemed to slacken. Around the building, somehow, the sidewalks were clear and bone-dry.

There is something strange here, Cowdray observed.

“Oh gee, what makes you think that?” Will retorted loudly. But the sarcasm was merely intended to mask his own nervousness. Clearly, it was no ordinary building, but rather a building suffused with magic—and even though Will was no expert, he knew that it had to be big magic.

Why have we come here? Now there was suspicion in Cowdray’s thoughts. Suspicion and apprehension. I mislike this.

You and me both, Will thought, but this time he did not speak the words.

The Sphinx Building had no windows, and only one canopied entrance, its heavy, ornate door flanked by a pair of veiled caryatids. Will tested the handle; the door opened easily. Warm air streamed out, surrounding him, drawing him inside almost physically.

The building’s lobby was expansively circular. The floor was of black marble veined with gold, and the walls were stencilled with odd designs—stylized red blobs. There was no doorman, no elevators, no stairs; the room was as self-contained as a fishbowl. There was no exit save the doors through which he’d entered. Against the far wall, opposite those doors, was a small sleek ebony table with a guestbook on it, the kind into which one might sign attendance. Will crossed the lobby to look down at it. It was blank, save for one large flourishing signature:

Damon Royce, Executive Director

Will spun, intending to make a break for the door. But as he did, he saw that three men now stood before it. Four, if you counted the one man Will wanted least to see in the entire world.

Uncle Royce.

Or rather, not-Uncle Royce; the man had taken great pleasure in informing Will, when last they met, that everything he thought he knew about his family was a lie. That really, not-Uncle Royce was actually Damon Royce, head of the Agency, and that he had been sent by the Stanton Institute to serve as a kind of jailer over Will’s family. To ensure both that Ma’am fulfilled her duties as the avatar of the increasingly-insane spirit of the Earth, and that Father never tried to reclaim the power of the name that he’d sold to the Institute.

Will stopped short, gathered himself up. Clenched his teeth. He realized, in a moment of irrelevant clarity, that the red blobs on the wallpaper were stylized orchids.

Not-Uncle Royce looked annoyed and out-of-sorts, much as he usually did. He wore a dark cashmere overcoat and black calfskin gloves, as if he’d just come in from outside and was ready to leave again at any moment. Will recognized the men standing behind him as a Trine—the functional unit in which Agency warlocks worked, each leveraging the power of the others. Will had encountered a Trine before, in Detroit. They had killed an old woman, his landlady, Mrs. Kosanovich, before his eyes. And the man who had led that Trine in Detroit—the one who had introduced himself as Bernays—was here now as well, in Royce’s retinue.

But this time, Bernays—and the other two men beside him—looked terrible. Ragged and tired, their black suits were rumpled, their faces were hollow with purple shadows of exhaustion. Even the red orchids they wore in their lapels seemed withered and wilted.

The foundation of their power is gone, Cowdray murmured urgently. Dreadnought Stanton is dead. You can defeat them. We can defeat them. Easily.

But Will revealed nothing of this as he stood examining Royce and his men.

“So, you are now the Executive Director,” Will said. “A title you inherited from … Mrs. Zeno, that was her name, right? The old woman who … Ma’am—” Will choked on the last words, bravado failing him. Royce sniffed.

“Yes. I am now the Executive Director of the Institute as well as the Agency,” he said. “The latter role I have always had. The former I assumed after Mrs. Zeno died at your mother’s hand.” Royce paused. “Your mother is still alive, by the way. She survived the fire.”

Will blinked a half dozen times. The last time he did, he felt hot tears soaking his lashes. He did not brush them away. Neither did he speak. He felt certain that it must be a lie, that Royce must have some reason for wanting to trick him … but he did not want to hear it was a lie.

“Aren’t you going to ask about your father?” Royce said, after a long silence.

“I don’t need to,” Will said. “He was Dreadnought Stanton once. If he was still alive, he’d be standing where you are. With Agency warlocks standing behind him, ready to kill me, I suppose.”

Royce pursed his lips. “That statement contains several incorrect assumptions,” he said. “Let me take them in order. First, while your father was once Dreadnought Stanton, it would be immeasurably dangerous to let him reclaim his name. Therefore, the fact that I have assumed the role of Executive Director has nothing to do with whether he is alive or dead. Second, if he were in my position, I don’t think he would want to kill you.”

“If you don’t want to kill me, then why do your men have knives?” Will’s eyes had caught sight of one Bernay’s hand sliding beneath his coat, where steel gleamed between belt and vest.

Royce smiled, icy and contemptuous. 

“You really have very little talent for critical listening, Will. I said if your father was in my position, I didn’t think he would want to kill you. Because if he were in my position, there would be no need to kill you.” Royce took three steps backward, and the warlocks of the Trine came to stand before him. And now, the knives were no longer hidden, but rather drawn and at the ready. “My position, however, is exactly the opposite. I don’t just want you dead, I need you dead. With you alive, I can’t keep what remains of your father’s power together for very much longer.”

Will watched the gleam of the knives. Contempt saturated him, and it wasn’t just Cowdray’s. Because he knew, in that moment, that this was all merely shallow posturing. As if Will—as if anyone—couldn’t smell just exactly how weak the men standing before him actually were. But something perverse made him widen his eyes and play along.

“Then you won’t give me the choice?” Will mimicked desperation. “Agency Warlocks always give people a choice, right?” He looked hard at Bernays, remembering how before, the man had attempted to make him choose between the needle and the knife—death, or forced magical sterilization with Panchrest.

“It is no longer possible to offer you that choice,” Royce said. “Sanitas Pharmaceutics has taken the Panchrest off the market. What stockpiles the Agency had had were destroyed in the fire, and the company is refusing to release any additional supplies. There are large political forces at work, Will. They will overwhelm us soon, unless …” He trailed off thoughtfully, a canny look stealing over his face. “Unless … perhaps … there is another choice I can offer you.”

Will repressed the urge to laugh. He remembered, quite randomly, a bit of Latin doggerel Father would recite whenever he encountered a blatantly self-serving or disingenuous ploy. Adventavit asinus, he would say, in his weary, cynical way. Translated, it had something to do with a donkey, but Father’s meaning had nothing to do with the translation. Rather, it meant, “Watch out. Here comes the con.” And without a doubt, this was a con. Threaten death, offer rescue. It was like theater. Bad theater.

“What other choice?” Will said softly, to keep from revealing his scorn.

“Help us,” Royce said. “Your mother is here, in this building. She is failing fast. You saw the strange lights around this building when you came here, I’m sure. They are the manifestation of the earth’s rage. Ososolyeh is using your mother’s body to lash out, madly, without any kind of reason. It is causing the snowstorm here, hurricanes and earthquakes elsewhere.  But the power of the magic is destroying her, and I don’t know how long she can survive.” He paused. “You can save her, Will.”

He’s lying.

“And you want me to believe you care about saving her?”

“Of course I do,” Royce snapped.

“But that’s not what you said. What you said was that you needed to hold my father’s power together.” He shrugged dismissively. “But I suppose it’s a better story to tell me it’s about Ma’am, isn’t it?”

“You jump to conclusions so quickly. You fail to consider that both statements might be true. That I want to keep intact the power that the Institute has spent decades amassing, and I also want to help your mother.” Royce regarded Will steadily. “Look outside. There’s never been a storm like this one—not since 1888, the last time we failed to precisely meet Ososolyeh’s insane demands. The last time we were unable to honor the specifics of Settlement. I believe you’ve indicated you’re familiar with the Settlement?”

Will did not reply, but knew he did not have to. He knew of the Settlement, an agreement that had been reached with Ososolyeh, the alien spirit of the earth, to keep it from destroying all humanity, which it had come to perceive as a vital threat. Humankind had agreed to pay its blackmail in blood—the blood of powerful Old Users. And the Agency was the strongarm that collected and delivered those payments.

“The Institute spent the past three decades bolstering the power of Dreadnought Stanton’s reputation so that the Agency could use that power to fulfill the terms of the Settlement. Now that Dreadnought Stanton is dead, my Trines do not have the power they need to pursue their duties. And your mother, the avatar of the earth, the creature who has always communicated its will, will die within days if something is not done. The system has collapsed, and seems beyond repair.”

He paused, his critical gaze delivering the natural conclusion: And it’s all your fault.

However, after this painful moment of silence, Royce continued. “As a result of this collapse, the earth seems to have gone truly mad. It doesn’t take a geologist to understand what kind of havoc a conscious—and insane—earth can wreak. And the longer the Settlement is not honored, the worse the damage will be.”

“And what do you think I can do about it?”

“I can bring Dreadnought Stanton back to life,” Royce said, with a calmness at odds with the enormity of the statement. “There’s nothing stopping me from doing so … except you. You have a blood-claim on his power—a right your father transferred to you when you were an infant, when he saved you from the Black Flu. If I were to resurrect Dreadnought Stanton, there would be nothing stopping you … or rather more precisely, the creature inside you… from invoking that blood claim, stealing the power and using it for your own ends. Unless you agreed to help. Unless you … joined us.”

Will remembered how Bernays had used magical words to crush Mrs. Kosanovich to death. It had been a terrible death, a cruel and monstrous death. And nothing he had seen or heard of the Agency led him to believe that, for them, it was anything other than routine.

“I don’t think I want to join you,” Will said.

“If you don’t care about saving your mother, maybe you care about saving your wife—” These words came from Bernays, but were cut short as a cloud of black fury passed over Royce’s face and he spun, striking Bernays across the face with a half-closed fist. It was a viciously swift movement; Bernays sunk to one knee, his hand pressed to a split lip. He lowered his head, glowering, but said no more.

Credomantic theater … Two-bit play acting …

But Will hardly heard the warning in Cowdray’s thoughts. Sudden panic rose in his chest, almost choking him.

“Jenny?” Will took a step forward. “What does he mean? Is she in danger?”

Right into his trap. Cowdray was annoyed. Slow, mooncalf, slow …

“No, I want to know,” Will countered, forgetting that no one else could hear Cowdray’s voice. But he did take a deep breath, and worked to calm himself. Cowdray was right; whatever Royce might say about Jenny was just as likely to be a lie as anything else.

Royce drew a deep breath. It was clear he was carefully framing his words, whether truth or lies.

“Your mother has been our primary concern, because she is the one with the connection to Ososolyeh,” he said, finally. “However, there are other factors that trouble us gravely. Your brother Ben, in particular.” He paused. “You know that Ben stole Aebedel Cowdray’s snuffbox at the Consecration. Took it and vanished.”

“Yes,” Will said.

“And you are aware, I believe, how much raw magical power the snuffbox contains?” Royce said.

“Yes.”

“I believe Ben intends to use that power to take over what remains of the Agency and the Institute. In short,” Royce said, with a puzzling half-smile. “To overthrow me.”

Will’s brow contracted in puzzlement.

“Overthrow you? Why?”

“That is a very long story,” Royce said, drily. “Your brother Ben has been a kind of … special project of mine since he was removed from your family’s home. For many years he was my employee. He worked for the Agency.”

This information was shocking … but as Will reflected on it, not surprising. Turning it over, he found that it was a key that unlocked many doors that had been strangely closed. So many things suddenly fell into place.

“Back in California … before Thanksgiving dinner,” Will mused. “You were the one who gave me the letter from Ben, the one written on the Sophos’ stationery.” He looked up. “And after the Consecration … that’s why it was Agency warlocks who stormed the church, even though Ben said he was working for the Institute.”

“He wasn’t exactly lying,” Royce said. “The two organizations have always been intimately interconnected. In your brother’s case, he worked for the Agency for several years, before retiring from regular duty. His skills were much better suited to assignments of particular sensitivity and difficulty. Posing as Professor Coeus—an expert in Aebedel Cowdray—he was to gain Phleger’s trust. Once that was accomplished, his mission was twofold: to obtain the snuffbox, and to kill Phleger.”

“But the Agency kills warlocks,” Will said. “Phleger wasn’t a warlock.”

“He was powerful enough to draw Ososolyeh’s attention,” Royce said. “We do not question the orders we are given.”

Will shook his head.

“Then Ben failed at both missions. He clearly did not reclaim the snuffbox for the Institute, as you don’t seem to know where he is. And he didn’t kill Phleger.”

“He certainly seems to have failed one of his missions,” Royce agreed. “But Phleger is dead. He hanged himself after you unleashed Cowdray on his mind.”

“But Ben had nothing to do with that.”

Royce shrugged. He did not smile.

“Would you have done it if Ben not put you in the way to do it?” He asked.

“No, but—”

“The fact that your brother was physically unable to wield magic—and yet occupied a position where he was constantly called upon to do battle with magical forces—required him to develop exceptional resourcefulness.” There was honest admiration in Royce’s voice as he spoke—and the depth of feeling in his words surprised Will. “I directed him to kill Phleger. And Phleger is dead.”

“You’re … proud of him,” Will said. “But you think he wants to overthrow you? To gain control of an Institute and an Agency that’s crumbling around you? Why?”

“He wants power,” Royce shrugged again, as if the answer were wholly self-evident. “This is the best time to take it. And if the possibility exists that I can hold together Dreadnought Stanton’s power, surely he can as well. He is arguably in a better position to do so, as a matter of fact. And perhaps that is how he justifies his betrayal. He has always been the most pragmatic of your stubborn, dreamy, deluded clan.”

“It can’t just be about power—”

“It is always just about power,” Royce interrupted. “Always. Your brother fulfilled one part of the mission—killing Phleger—because it served him to do so. Keeping the snuffbox for himself also serves him. I do not blame him, Will. He has been terribly cheated. Of all of you, he should have been the greatest. He deserved to be. And, despite what I’m sure are your self-pitying fantasies to the contrary, his is the greatest tragedy. If he can defeat me, he should. But I must fight him with every scrap of power I can muster. Every tactic, every stratagem. I owe him that respect.”

Will was silent for a long time, considering these words. He rubbed the sore place on his wrist, the place he had bitten to silence Cowdray.

“Then if it’s just about power, as you say … he will try to unlock the snuffbox.”

“Without a doubt,” Royce said. “He must.”

“And the only way he can do that is by using my blood.”

“Or the blood of your unborn child,” Royce said. He glanced back at Bernays, who was now standing with his hands clasped behind his back. There was still a smear of red across his upper lip. “Which brings us back to Jenny. She is currently a guest in the home of S.O. Hart, the President of Sanitas Pharmaceutics. She is under his protection, brought there by his son, Atherton. I believe you have met him.”

Will nodded, remembering the handsome older man who had itched to blow his brains out in Detroit. “And if you know where she is … then Ben must know too.”

“I’m sure he does,” Royce said. “Thus, if you want to save Jenny—and if we want to reclaim the snuffbox before he uses the power in it for himself—it is very important that we find him before he is able to find a way to get to her. She is well-protected by S.O. Hart … but as I have said, your brother is very resourceful.”

“And how do you think I can help?”

“Just as your child shares Cowdray’s cursed blood, you share Ben’s. There is magic that you can work, as his brother, to locate him. Perhaps even to compel him to reveal himself. Blood can be used to call to blood. We can teach you this. We can find Ben together.”

Will said nothing. Royce licked his lips before speaking again.

“You know, Cowdray could have told you all of this, too. He knows of this magic, surely. And I know he speaks to you … you made that apparent just a moment ago. But perhaps he does not want you to find Ben.”

He is a liar, Cowdray snarled. But Will could sense the false bravado, and he could feel that Royce was telling the truth.

“And why would Cowdray not tell you of something so useful?” Royce continued. “One might suggest that he’s waiting until the moon is full again, and he has control of your body, and your body’s ability to channel magic. Because if Ben is to be found, he wants to be the one to find him. Because he wants the snuffbox too, doesn’t he? More than anything?”

“Yes,” Will said softly, once again. But then, narrowing his eyes, he frowned at Royce.

“I can’t trust you,” he said, finally.  

“No,” Royce said simply. “You can’t trust anyone.”

Will smirked grimly.

“Now, that’s two honest things you’ve said,” he said. “Watch out, it might get to be a habit.”

“Here’s a third,” Royce said. “You can trust yourself least of all. So what is a man to do when he can’t even trust himself? What is to his best strategic advantage?” He paused. “I know that magic is new to you, Will. You are being forced to learn it. If you learn only one thing about credomancy, learn this: belief creates reality. By trusting, you can create trust. You can make those whom you trust trustworthy. Do you understand?”

Will considered all of this for a long time, looking between Royce and Bernays as he did. Finally, he exhaled.

“No.” He said. “I don’t understand. It all sounds like hogwash. Trusting you isn’t going to make you any better than you are. And why should I believe you can help me? You aren’t blood-sorcerors. Your power is all sunk in the grave with a dead man. And he’s not coming back, no matter what kind of necromancy you think you can pull.” He paused, thoughtfully. “There is someone who can help me, though. I think. And I do trust him. He is who I am going to find.”

“Who?” Royce said, too quickly. Will shook his head.

“That’s for me to know,” Will said, thinking of Detroit—thinking of Harley Briar. “If what you say is true, he can teach me how to find Ben. And he’ll do it without me having to hand over the snuffbox to you and the Agency.” He drew in a deep breath, blew it out with determination. He felt strangely better–light and strong. “Now, I will let you do one thing that will help me. And if you help me now, maybe I’ll feel grateful, and maybe sometime I’ll feel like repaying you.” The words came out with a hard negotiating edge that surprised even him. Will stepped close to Royce, stretching out his hand. “Give me fifty dollars.”

Royce’s brow lifted with surprise. “Fifty dollars?”

“I know you’ve got it. You always carry cash.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “I need fifty dollars.”

After staring at Will with perplexity for some time, Royce finally reached into his pocket. He pulled out three gold coins—double eagles, worth $20 each. He laid them in Will’s hand.

“I don’t have change,” Royce said drily.

Will closed his hand quickly, sliding the heavy coins into his pocket. “I’ll have to owe you,” he said. Then, pulling his coat around himself more tightly, he started for the door.

“So you won’t help?” Royce said. “She’s your mother, Will.”

Will said nothing, but kept walking.

“And you called me a murderer,” Bernays muttered, as Will passed him.

Will stopped. Uncontrollable fury twisted his stomach. It wasn’t even Cowdray, this was all his own. Spinning, he threw a hand against Bernays’ face—his palm smashing against Bernays’ nose, feeling it crack and give. He dragged his fingertips through the sudden rush of sticky red. Then, sliding his hand up, he grabbed Bernays by the hair, threw him backward, sunk a knee into his belly, and pressed bloody fingertips onto the side of his face. In the back of Will’s mind, Cowdray howled with abrupt glee. He made words available to Will, tossed them like a weapon: words in a guttural language of power. Will spoke them without hesitation. Cowdray made them available, but Will chose them. He was glad to make the choice. He felt flame rush from his fingertips. Bernays screamed.

Will stopped before the man was dead. The irony of killing a man for the insult of calling one a murderer did still penetrate his enraged consciousness. When he did finally push himself back up to his feet, though, Bernays was unconscious, with streaks of burn and char on the flesh of his face that would leave indelible scars.

Will glanced wildly around at the other men of the Trine. They all had their hands at their belts, skin touching steel, but it was reflex merely. Will saw the futility in their eyes. If Will wanted them dead, they would die.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful …

Will turned his eyes onto Royce, and he could feel the anger and heat of his own glare. The man who he had known as his uncle tried to maintain an air of cool, clinical curiosity, but Will saw the pulse fluttering at his smooth-shaven throat. Saw him swallow hard.

“Will,” Royce said. “Please reconsider. I will not betray you, I swear it.”

Will recognized the gravity of the statement as being the oath of a credomancer, one not given lightly and never broken.

“No,” Will said.

Royce nodded.

“All right,” he said. He tapped Will’s pocket, where, somehow, he knew the piece of stationery still rested. Then he extended the hand, clad in a smooth black calfskin glove. “If you change your mind, you know how to find us.”

Will took Royce’s hand. The leather of his calfskin glove was cold, still faintly damp from the snow outside. Royce clutched it tightly, held it, drew Will in even closer. His dark eyes gleamed.

“I am not surprised to find that sangrimancy seems to come so easily to you. You’re more like your father than anyone ever could have imagined.” He punctuated the words by giving Will’s hand one final, tight squeeze.

“Goodbye, Will,” he said.

When Will arrived back at Penn Station, he was cold and shaking.

At first he thought it was just the weariness of the past several days catching up to him. But soon he realized, it was more than that. He felt sick and numb. Once inside the station, even standing directly in front of one of the tall kerosene heaters, he continued to shiver. He flexed his right hand. He could hardly feel it; it was stiff, like it was no longer a part of him. It had to be the cold. It could only be the cold. He was tired. He was hungry. He’d used magic to hurt Bernays, hurt him terribly. Almost kill him. That’s what it was, that’s what it had to be. Tucking his numb hand beneath his armpit, Will made his way to the Haälbeck Office.

The office was small, and it seemed smaller because there were so many businessmen—old men—crowded inside, waiting in line on the hard wooden benches. The firm was indeed doing a brisk business. Will took a seat on the end of one of the long benches. He hunched over, arms folded tightly, trying to get warm. He couldn’t stop shaking. He looked at his right hand, tried to move his fingers. They did not move.

Something is wrong with the body, Cowdray was saying. At least Will thought that’s what he was saying. Whatever was wrong with him was making Cowdray’s voice recede, fainter and fainter, spinning down a long dark passage. Yes, Will thought. Something is wrong with the body. But he had no idea what. He had to get to Detroit.

Food might help, he thought. An enterprising boy had carried in supplies to resell to the waiting businessmen; from him, Will purchased a paper cup of coffee and a hard roll. He consumed these slowly and carefully, but they did not seem to help. When he was finished, as he went to dust the crumbs from his fingers, he saw, to his shock, that his right hand—the hand that was numb and dead—was now also discolored. His skin, from fingertips to wrist, had taken on a sickly green tinge.

He realized, quite suddenly, that it was his right hand that Royce had shaked.

Poison, Cowdray said, with sudden realization. His voice was now pinprick tiny, so far away. Of course. It must be. He needed you dead. He said it …

Tucking his discolored hand back beneath his arm, Will staggered to his feet. Desperately, he pushed his way to the counter.

We were too strong to attack magically and he knew it. So he took the route of the poisoner …

“I need to get to Detroit, please,” Will pleaded. He had pushed his way to the front of the line. He knew he was speaking too loudly, that he sounded wobbly and desperate. But if he could just get to Detroit. He had to get to Detroit …

“Hey, buddy!” One of the older men called from the back. “What the hell? There’s a line here! Get back in your place!”

“Please, I need …” Will had to steady himself. “I need to …”

He felt the world growing dark. He wasn’t going to make it.

I can get us there, Cowdray said. Let me take us there.

“Christ, kid!” Another man was yelling at him now. “You’re too young to use a Haälbeck anyway! Get out of here!”

“I can’t,” Will whispered.

The body will not be fully mine, Cowdray urged. But I will keep it from falling.

Will couldn’t fight any more. He let himself sink backward. He felt Cowdray step forward. Even though his body was still growing weaker by the moment, Will felt Cowdray pull it up straight. He lifted his chin, felt his lip curl in a sneer. He looked at the man at the front of the line, the man he’d cut in front of. The man wasn’t yelling like the others, but was eyeing Will with sardonic contempt, as if just waiting to give him a piece of his mind. Will laid a hand on the man’s wrist—his good hand—and squeezed.

“You don’t mind if I go ahead, do you?” Will felt himself say softly, his eyes holding the man’s. He wasn’t sure what passed between them, what power traveled from his hand to the man’s skin—no blood was exchanged—but the man jerked his arm back as if burned.

“Yeah, sure, go ahead,” the man said hastily, stepping out of the way. “Be my guest.”

There were howls of outrage from the rear of the line, but they rushed past Will’s ears like the sound of wind as he took the three gold double-eagles from his pocket and handed them to the Haälbeck clerk. Will felt Cowdray holding him up by sheer stubbornness as, together, they watched the clerk prepare the portal for Will’s destination.

Detroit, Michigan. Union Station.

Perhaps it was the magic of the door. Or perhaps it was the poison. Or perhaps it was Cowdray betraying him once again. Whatever it was, as soon as Will stepped across the threshold, delirium enveloped him and everything went black.

So I am going to keep up the practice of posting these first-draft chapters of “The Unsteady Earth” as I run them through my writer’s group. I think it’s good for me to do so. I’m an insane perfectionist who has a terror of sharing anything before it’s “ready” … but taken to pathological extremes, that often results in me never sharing anything, ever. So this is kind of a growth exercise for me. Nothing like working out one’s psychological hangups in public, I always say.

The usual caveats apply. The version I ultimately publish will likely differ substantially from these early drafts. There will also be spoilers. And shitty writing. Enjoy!

The Unsteady Earth
Chapter One
“The Man Who Killed Dreadnought Stanton”

New York City

Wednesday, January 4, 1911

10 days until the full moon

Will Edwards dreamed of fire. 

In his dream, he stood on a hill overlooking the Stanton Institute, watching it burn. In the leaping purple and blue brilliance of the flames, the limbs of the winter-bare oaks that overstretched the mansion seemed to twist spasmodically. There were muffled explosions as window glass shattered in the intense heat, spewing glowing tongues of flame and billows of bile-thick smoke.

Snow had begun to fall, fat flakes flashing in the werelight. Will brushed one from his cheek, the grit of ash and blood on his fingertips smearing the icy wetness. Fire trucks would soon arrive from boroughs all over the city. New metropolitan engines, old city engines—a hundred and twenty of them, and forty-six trucks and hose wagons and water tanks. Every man and machine that could be mustered, mechanical or horse-drawn. But all the firefighters in New York City would not be able to put out the otherworldly inferno. No human force could quench the blaze. Father would tell him as much.

But that would be later in the dream.

Somehow, Will still knew the difference between dreaming and memory—though it was frequently surprising to him that he did. If this were memory—playing in an endless kinetoscope loop through his waking mind, a clicking whirling cylinder of confused images inexorably carving an agonizing mental groove—he would watch the fire until the snow was falling so hard he could see only the shadows of the flames and the smell of the smoke clinging to the driving needles of ice. Will would not turn away until his feet had lost all sensation, and his blood and char-streaked fingertips were blue, and Aebedel Cowdray’s concern over the wellbeing of their shared body gave the    curse-spirit sufficient power to force Will’s legs to move in stumbling, dazed steps toward someplace—any place—more conducive to their body’s continued mortal existence than the top of a hill in a gathering snowstorm, watching his entire life burn. And Will would let Cowdray carry him away.

(He did not have to, of course. The moon was dark, and the power of the long-dead warlock who possessed him was at its weakest ebb. But having power—and having the power to use that power—were two very different things.)

Will would let Cowdray carry him away, because he could not fight him, because Cowdray was stronger than he was.

Only the force of Cowdray’s strength had kept Will alive in that horrible, disoriented time after he’d attacked his own mother, battering her with force of a magical smelting furnace. If it had not been for Cowdray, he would not have escaped his own attack. The fire had raged out of control so quickly. Will only vaguely remembered hurling himself through a shattered void where a stained glass window once had been—in a moment of desperate panic, Cowdray had compelled him to move. Will would have stayed, trying to reach Ma’am, pinned beneath a beam crackling with indigo flame. He would have saved her. Or so he liked to believe. He wasn’t sure.

That was the advantage of memory. At least there was some uncertainty, some blurring of the razor-sharp, agonizing edge. An opportunity to fool himself, to believe, however irrationally, that he might have behaved better than he did, if only … If only things had been slightly different.

But when he dreamed, there was no such comforting vagueness. His dreams were agonizingly sharp and accusatory, their edge forged of guilt and honed on the whetstone of remorse. When he dreamed, his parents stood with him, watching the fire in which they had burned to death. Ma’am stood with her back to the Institute, her plump form silhouetted by the shifting light, her gray-brown hair haloed. Hands on her hips, mouth twisted in a scolding frown. She said nothing, just looked at Will accusingly.  Or perhaps not at Will. Perhaps she looked inside him, at Cowdray, the corrupted soul of the inherited Kendall curse. Cowdray had once possessed her own mother’s body, infected it like a deadly illness. He’d used it to murder Ma’am’s father, an act which had driven Ma’am’s mother to  insanity and death. Maybe that’s why there was hatred in her eyes. Will hoped that was why.

Father, though, stood close beside him, staring fixedly at the flames. Light danced on his long narrow face. Will preferred it that his father did not look at him. He knew he would not see hatred in his father’s eyes, but disappointment and betrayal were just as bad. Worse, perhaps–because unlike the hatred, there was no question of who had inspired the emotions.

“The fire burns with such singular intensity because it is fuelled by magic,” Father said, in the remote didactic tone he so frequently used—as if he were merely recounting the progress of an ancient battle, long decided. With a small gesture of his head he indicated the fire engines that were running hoses from pumping carts, the diffidence of the gesture indicating futility. “They could fight that fire for days, but they will not be able to control it. It must run the course it is fated to run.”

“Don’t you dare call this fate.” Even speaking the word made Will angry, but he wanted to wake up and making himself angry was the best way.

Death is everyone’s fate,” Father said, his tone maddeningly reasonable. “Eventually.”

“Eventually,” Will spat the word back at him. “But not this way. This was wrong. This was—”

The word murder was in his mouth. Even dreaming, Will choked on it.

Father inclined his head thoughtfully. “You were attacked, Will. You responded reflexively.” He paused. “What else could you have done? That was fate too. You are helpless.”

“I am not helpless,” Will said, but it was merely a retort. He was helpless. He knew it.

“There was nothing you could have done.” Father still did not look at him, and his calm distant tone did not waver. Will could hardly stand the sound of the pity in it. “It wasn’t your fault. You feel pain, and it feels like guilt. But it is just pain. It will pass. Once you accept that, and make peace with Cowdray, it will pass more quickly.”

“Make peace?” Will hissed. “With Cowdray?”

“He is the one with the power, Will.” And now, Father did look at him, his dark green eyes piercing. But behind those eyes, Will saw the truth. The truth of who was speaking. He set his teeth.

“You have the power, Cowdray,” he growled. “But I have the body.”

Father smiled. And if Will had been at all uncertain about who was really speaking, his uncertainty vanished—for Father rarely smiled, and never, ever like that, in a way that mocked the very idea of a smile, of friendliness, of kindness, of ease.

“You have the body now, mooncalf,” Cowdray said, in Father’s voice. “But the moon will be full again soon. Sooner than you think.”

A furtive elbow jabbed into Will’s ribs, startling him awake.

“Kid! Hey kid!” A low, urgent whisper. “Wake up! They catch you sleeping, they throw you back out in the snow.”

Will eyes flew open; looked around wildly. It took him a few moments, as it always did, to sift the cold hard shards of reality from the soft poisoned miasma of sleep. He assessed his surroundings. He was in some kind of church. It was brightly lit with harsh white electric light. It was warm, and he didn’t remember falling asleep here. His lips tasted of chocolate. For a moment, he wondered if he was back in Justice, Illinois, at the New Faith Seat of Praise. But the preacher pacing back and forth in front of the enormous red cross at the front of the room, spewing and frothing and praising His name was not the handsome Brother Phleger; he was a man with crater-scarred cheeks and bad teeth. Will squinted and blinked and blinked again. Sitting up straighter, he noted the tug of unfamiliar, ill-fitting clothes. He was in New York City, he remembered.

Will glanced sidelong at the man who’d elbowed him. The man had introduced himself earlier—what had he said his name was? Lewis?—and now he had a sketchbook open on his lap and was drawing something, his slim graphite pencil making featherscratch noises on the white paper. Will could not see what he was drawing.

As sleep receded further, random fragments of certainty presented themselves.

It was the fourth day of January and it was a Wednesday. Ten days until the next full moon.

He was wearing a strange but warm assemblage consisting of two shirts, a heavy sweater, a muffler, a vest, and two pairs of pants. He had gotten the clothes from the charity bin of the mission. After the sermon there would be food.

He was in New York City.

His parents were dead.

And he was alone.

Oh no. Not alone, mooncalf, Cowdray soothed, wickedly. You’ll never be alone again.

Three days earlier, Will had seen a movie at the Belasco Theater on West 44th Street. It was the premier of a film called “The Warlock’s Curse.”

After the movie was over, the crowds had dispersed into the bitter cold and darkness—rushing for cabs and carriages and cars. The freakishly heavy snowfall had not abated; if anything, it was snowing harder. At least another half-foot had been dumped on the city since Will had snuck inside the movie theater, softly shadowing the heels of notables dodging the lightning-bright flashes of press-bulbs.

The heavy snow made the street lights and marquees of Times Square indistinct, a hazy flurry of light and glowing pastel color. The square had a strangely bright, deserted feel—all the electric lights were blazing like tiny white suns, but there was no one to appreciate them. It was just past midnight, and on any ordinary night the square would be thronged with post-theater thrill-seekers flocking to bars and restaurants and cafes—but tonight, all the other theaters were dark, and the only people on the streets were those with nowhere else to go.

Head down, arms held tightly across his chest against the biting cold, Will trudged along the sidewalk, along towering banks of shoveled snow, past heavily-bundled porters still engaged in the futile effort of clearing the walkways even as the snow continued to pile higher and higher. A handful of brightly-lit bars had their doors open; stuss joints and dance halls, dark and growling like a tiger’s empty belly. He had no wish to be swallowed by them. Barkers, made half-hearted by the cold and lack of street-traffic, diffidently invited him to step inside. In any other circumstance they wouldn’t have spared the breath; in his ragged clothes, Will did not look like he had a nickle for even the cheapest shot of whiskey. Shows what you know, Will grimaced bitterly as he passed them. Because he did have money—more than ten dollars in bills and coins that he’d stolen from a candy girl at the theater. She’d taken pity on him and he’d snatched the money from her till when her back was turned. He searched his soul for the presence of guilt, of remorse. But his whole being was saturated with guilt and remorse; the shame of having robbed some poor candy girl of a handful of cash barely registered.

As he passed a narrow alleyway, a streetwalker called to him, her desperate voice soft and rasping.  Will peered into the gloom of the grimy passage; in the streetlamp’s dim, wavering light he saw that she was huddled for shelter against a brick wall plastered with handbills. Her skin was pink with cold; her nose, her slim forearms, her half-revealed breasts.

Once, Will would have blushed. But now, he stared at her—not out of desire or even pity, but rather something more like hatred. It wasn’t that he hated her … rather, he hated how she appeared in the light of Cowdray’s eyes. A woman like this, bleating and coughing and bruised, was the meat a predator craved. Will had never before seen human beings in such shades of horrifying ugliness. Now they were all merely prisoners of stink and flesh, slaves to aging and decay and death. Even Jenny—even Jenny.

But while Will still had the body, he was very careful not to think about Jenny. He walked on quickly. He could hear the prostitute’s coughs echoing behind him. He did not know where he was going, but he was going away from her.

Cowdray, amused, shifted idly in the back of his mind. Maybe when I next have the body, I will take one of them and see how long I can make her scream before she dies.

Will shuddered, with cold and horror and disgust, and lifted his wrist to his mouth, pressing the tenderest part against his teeth. The spot was already broken and raw from the times he’d bitten himself there before; he’d discovered that causing his body pain would make Cowdray fall silent for a time. But it was a trick he had to use carefully. Each time, Cowdray recovered more quickly. And each time, he came back with another grudge to repay at the time of the next full moon, less than a fortnight away, when their shared body would come once more into the cruel spirit’s possession. Sighing heavily, Will did not bite.

“You’ll do what you like,” Will said, flatly. He lowered his wrist. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you.” He was aware how defeated his voice sounded. He felt Cowdray’s disgust.

Pathetic, Cowdray said. Have you given up fighting me already, mooncalf? Do you have any self-respect at all? Any courage?

Will shook his head. The questions were so ludicrous he could not even formulate an answer. He was alone in a strange city. His parents were dead. And the one person who had helped him—his older brother Ben, whom he’d relied upon for answers—was gone. Vanished. The last time he’d seen Ben was in Justice, Illinois, at the disastrous consecration of the New Faith Seat of Praise—the Scharfian megachurch built by the famous Teslaphone preacher Brother Dolphus Phleger.

A blast of icy wind sliced along the dark sidewalk, driving needles of ice into Will’s face. Stepping to one side, Will pressed himself into a corner of a recessed storefront and huddled, tucking his stiff numb hands beneath his armpits and rounding his back to the bitter wind. As the blast subsided, he rested for a moment in the brightness of the light from the shop’s display windows. His barely-warmed fingers felt for a piece of paper that was tucked inside his breast pocket—a magically sorcelled piece of stationery. It was fold-worn, grubby, smudged with blood and soot. Will had made the unfolding and refolding of the paper a kind of ritual; he did it several times a day now. The action didn’t comfort him, precisely—especially since the answer he was looking for was never there, and the paper remained resolutely blank, front and back. Ben had written him hundreds, perhaps thousands of words on this one piece of paper; each night at midnight the previous day’s message would vanish, leaving the paper blank so a new message could be written.  But now, even the last message it had held—I know where you are—penned the night before the disastrous Consecration, when Ben had revealed himself an undercover agent of the Stanton Institute going by the name of “Professor Coeus”, had long since faded into invisibility.

Will stared at the place where the words had been for a moment before refolding the paper and tucking it back. It was a reflexive movement, not even a purposeful one; he unfolded it merely so he could refold it, so he could then tuck it away.

Why? Why didn’t Ben write him? Why abandon him now?

You know why. Cowdray’s voice was curt, dismissive. If you are to get anywhere, mooncalf, you must begin asking yourself more difficult questions. For example, why, when I ask you about courage, do you think about your brother? Why are you forever seeking someone’s skirts to hide beneath?

Because, Will thought, whatever else Ben might seem to lack—brotherly loyalty, integrity, ethics—he possessed something far more valuable. Answers. But even if the sheet of stationery were to magically fill with words, Will knew it would take more than one sheet of paper for Ben to provide those answers—and far more than that to make Will believe he was telling the truth. Because every action Ben had taken, from the moment he’d revealed himself as “Professor Coeus,” seemed to indicate that despite his protestations of working for the Institute; despite his fine words about trying to help Will, to save Jenny, to save the world—he really only ever been interested in one thing. Stealing Aebedel Cowdray’s snuff-box.

Over three hundred years old, it was a magical artifact of immense power. It was was nothing less monstrous than a suffering engine—an artificial hell that imprisoned hundreds of souls in torment, storing century upon century of pain and misery, a well of power that could then be tapped for monstrous uses.

Because Will’s body and blood was cursed by the spirit of the warlock who had created the artifact, Brother Phleger had sought to use Will to unlock the snuff box’s vast power. But Phleger had lost control of the magical rite, and Cowdray had invaded his mind.

With Will incapacitated, and Phleger reduced to a filth-babbling madman by Cowdray’s attack, Ben had not hesitated. He’d seized the snuff-box and run. And Will had not heard from him since.

Your brother betrayed you, Cowdray said, harshly. He got the snuff box. That’s what he wanted. That’s all he wanted. He was using you, mooncalf. Why do you think I call you that, eh? Because you are no better than a bawling little bullock, crying for its mother. You pathetic fool! Pining after anyone who comes along with a little bit of the spine that you lack. You are a man, act like one! Fight!

Will sank his teeth into the back of his hand deeply, tasting blood. He felt the pain wash through him; he felt Cowdray gasp and stagger.

Oh, I see. Of course you think you should fight me. Because you think I am your only problem. Cowdray was bitter and scornful. Until you realize that I am really the least of your problems, mooncalf, you will continue to bawl for a mother who has gone to the slaughterhouse, until you are led there yourself.

But the pain had its intended effect—Cowdray fell silent after this last sally, retreating into the back of Will’s mind like a sullen cur—and the pain also made Will feel brighter and sharper. Looking up, he saw that the shop he’d taken shelter outside of was an all-night Times Square drug store, the kind that catered to drunkards and tourists. Looking into the snowfrosted front window, a pasteboard advertising placard caught Will’s eye. It depicted a curled snake, surrounded by 13 stars. He blinked as he recognized the logo of Sanitas Pharmaceutics. The company that manufactured Panchrest, the miracle medication that had stopped the ravages of the Black Flu. … by blocking the human body’s ability to channel magic in any form.

Certainty of his next move filled his entire body. It felt perfectly right. Of course that was what he had to do. He felt for the money in his pocket. Of course.

Inside, the drug store smelled cleanly of sulphur and iodine and alcohol. A bell over the door tinkled merrily as he entered; the warmth inside the shop made Will slightly dizzy. He had to stand for a moment near the entrance, steadying himself. There was a rack of periodicals near the front window; he stared down at them blearily, as if selecting something to read.  From somewhere in the back of the store there was the sound of a Teslaphone playing—not music, but a midnight news broadcast. The presenter’s resonant voice floated around him on clouds of letters:

The storm that currently holds the entire Eastern Seaboard in in an icy death-grip has led to business shutdowns, disruptions of travel, and shortages of staple food goods. In Detroit, Michigan, food and coal shortages have led to riots.

Papers shuffling.

Returning to the death of nationally-known warlock Dreadnought Stanton …

Still staring at the periodical rack, Will noticed that all of the brightly-colored Dreadnought Stanton serials had sold out, certainly snatched up by memorabilia seekers. The empty metal rack wavered before his eyes; he had to reach out to clutch it for a moment to keep from falling over. The void of stories the empty rack represented reminded him of his father. Gone. But his father hadn’t been Dreadnought Stanton—even if he had been born with that name, he hadn’t been anything like the flamboyant hero. His father was a fallible, imperfect creature of flesh and blood, and always had been. Will had never had any illusions about his father; but how strange that he should be so affected now, when the illusion had been destroyed.

He wiped his eyes with his dirty, damp sleeve. There was the sound of a click as the Teslaphone was switched off, leaving a yawning void of silence. The counterman, who Will now realized had been covertly watching him from the back of the shop, cleared his throat. In the sudden silence, it seemed as loud as a rockslide.

“Happy New Year, friend,” he chirped, in a voice that rang too-loudly through the quiet store. “What can I help you with this evening?”

Will staggered slowly to the counter. His wet feet, now warming, were heavy and the feeling was returning to them, making them all pins and needles. The snow on his clothes was melting, releasing ghastly odors of charred wool and blood. But it was warmth, and he intended to savor it as long as he could.

“I would like to buy a dose of Panchrest,” he said, fumbling money out of his pocket with a trembling, stiff-fingered hand—wadded bills, cold damp silver. With slow deliberation, he smoothed out one of the bills for the counterman to see.

The counterman looked at him incredulously for a moment, then grinned uneasily. He had shining brilliantined hair parted down the middle, and a peculiar twitchy pallor–not the sickness of magic allergy, rather something more mundane, like a nocturnal creature that never ventured into the sunlight.

“Sure, Panchrest,” he joshed back, glancing down at the money then back up to Will, his eyes bright and intense. He seemed to speak too quickly, as if rushing to get the words out. “Tell me another, mister.”

“You sell it, don’t you?” Will pointed in the direction of the pasteboard advertising placard in the front window. Sparkling, covered with gold swirls, it bore the distinctive logo of Sanitas Pharmaceutics: a curled snake, surrounded by 13 stars. The extravagance of the advertising, Will knew, was the result of—or perhaps the justification for—the very expensive price tag: $10 for a single dose, more than most working men made in a week. But the bills on the counter were enough.

“There’s not much demand for it. People generally don’t just walk in off the street at two in the morning to buy Panchrest. Doctors come in sometimes, but usually they go through suppliers.” Each word was like a ball-bearing dropped in a metal bowl; sharp and staccato.

“Why do you advertise it if you don’t sell it?” Will drew out each word, as if trying to slow the man down to his speed. He wasn’t sure if he was understanding him. Words were hard to parse at the moment.

“Well, it’s a nice looking placard, isn’t it?” the man jerked a shrug. “Looks good in the window. And if you don’t have an actual case of Black Flu,  there are plenty of other alternatives that are cheaper and almost as good.” Making a “wait here” gesture, the man hurried to the back and returned with two plain brown boxes. He set them down, side by side, on the counter before Will. “Now, I gather your problem is some kind of magical affliction, yes? Can’t be strong enough to kill you … but it likely makes you feel pretty rotten. Right? Am I right?”

“It’s a magical affliction,” Will said, leaning heavily on the counter. He was very tired and very hungry. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, and he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since days before that. The warmth of the drug store made all his limbs feel leaden, and the counterman’s speedy babble was both confusing and lulling.

“So, admittedly, these compounds won’t cure you forever, like Panchrest will. But they’ll subdue the flow of magic in your body temporarily. Ease the symptoms.”

“This is an elixir for female troubles,” Will growled, reading one of the boxes.

“Don’t let the label fool you. Yes, it’s for feminine complaints primarily, you know, for the agony of the monthlies or whatnot, I certainly don’t know. But it’s got enough morphine in it to knock you out even if you aren’t wearing a petticoat. It’s the cheapest, so a lot of folks like you—” He stopped short, looking at the grimy, wrinkled money Will had spread out on the counter. “But then again, price ain’t necessarily an object, so honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it. One false move with this stuff and you’ll end up in Bellevue.” He pushed the unsatisfactory lady’s elixir to one side. Opening the second box, he withdrew a squat brown bottle and showed it to Will. “This is a newer medication, and much better. Heroin hydrochloride in compressed tablets.” He pushed the box toward Will. “Specific for coughs, but grind a couple of those up into a powder and drink it with a shot of whiskey and I guarantee you’ll find relief.”

Will stared at the little brown bottle. He blinked, shook his head—he was still uncertain as to whether or not he was failing to understand the man, or the man was failing to understand him. “But I don’t want either of those. I want Panchrest.”

“Buddy, no offense, but even if you do have the cash, I don’t know if I can look myself in the mirror tomorrow morning if I let you give it to me! You’re half froze to death! If you’ve got all that dosh to throw around, why not go buy yourself a warm coat?”

“Are you going to tell me how to spend my money?”  Will snarled. “I know what I want—what I need. I need Panchrest.”

“Why do you need Panchrest?”

“I just need it,” Will said, sullenly, not wanting to explain that Panchrest was a medication that would stop his body’s ability to work magic. Block all the channels through which magic could flow. He wasn’t certain that taking Panchrest would mean that he’d be free of Cowdray—but if he could keep Cowdray from using his body to channel magic, to wreak horrible magical destruction, that would be enough.  “Now are you going to sell it to me or not?”

The counterman shrugged. “No sir, I’m not. I can’t. The distributor came through before the New Year and took back all the stock. Same all across the United States. Panchrest been taken off the market. A very odd thing. I hear they’re reformulating it.”

Cowdray chuckled. Will felt despondent, and angry. So angry. Furious. He closed his eyes, weariness and hunger making the world spin around him. He contemplated the  bleak rhythmic nature of what his life was to become … cycles of two weeks, as the moon waxed and waned, a tug of war for control between himself or Cowdray. There was only one way out.

“Fine,” he spat, more for Cowdray than the counterman. “Then give me a bottle of goddamn arsenic. All right? The biggest, most deluxe goddamn bottle of arsenic you have. Enough to kill a hundred rats. You sell that, don’t you?”

The counterman, hithertofore loquacious, stared at Will, slack-jawed. And to Will’s immense satisfaction, even Cowdray braced and bristled nervously—but his unspoken response was perfectly assured, perfectly calm:

You will not kill yourself.

“One of us is going to have to leave this body.” Will muttered to Cowdray, under his breath.

It would be a permanent solution only for you, mooncalf, Cowdray said. And you haven’t shown the slightest bit of courage to this point. Why should I expect that to change now? You are a coward, and you lack the nerve.

“Do you think so?” Will hissed. The counterman had not moved. Will glared at him challengingly.

“Are you going to sell it to me?” he snapped.

The counterman looked at him for a long time, calmly. It was the weary, knowing look of someone who’d dealt with a lot of Times Square crazies. Finally, he drew in a deep breath, retreated from the counter, and, after rustling around in the back for a moment, returned with a small bottle. He slammed it down on the counter with a pointedly loud “snap” then slid it across the counter to Will with a frown of challenge.

“There you go,” he said. “Arsenic.”

Will seized the bottle. The bottle did indeed bear a skull and crossbones logo, and looked sufficiently poison-like; but upon closer examination, Will could see that it wasn’t actually poison; it was rotgut whiskey—a marked-down gag item, left-over from Hallowe’en. The skull grinned mockingly at him. Will looked at the counterman, and was about to say something when the counterman interrupted him.

“That’ll take care of whatever’s bothering you,” the counterman said, flatly. “It’s all I got to sell you, friend. Take it or leave it.”

Will was about to give the counterman a piece of his mind when he realized something odd.

Cowdray was … afraid.

Will lifted the bottle, examined it.

“Pure arsenic, is it?” Will said. The counterman lifted an eyebrow. It was clear that Will was acting more crazy than his usual run-of-the-mill crazies.

“You can read, can’t you?” he said. And indeed, it was written right on the bottle that it wasn’t really arsenic—

But Cowdray was still afraid.

“Sure, I can read,” Will said, softly. “I can read just fine.”

But what if …

What if Cowdray couldn’t?

Somehow, even though Will could understand the meaning of those words, Cowdray couldn’t. Will let his eyes drift over the letters, feeling the old familiar struggle to make them resolve into meaning. He’d struggled with a condition called word-blindness all his life, and had to work very hard to read at all. What if … what if that made it hard for Cowdray, as well? What if Cowdray actually believed what Will held in his hand was poison? That Will actually meant to kill himself?

“Listen,” the counterman said, voice breaking through Will’s frenzied contemplation. “You want it, that’s what I got.”

You won’t do it. Cowdray was afraid. Cowdray was afraid. It was delicious to Will, horribly delicious.

“Oh yes,” Will said aloud, experimentally. “This is exactly what I want.”

You can’t do it, Cowdray said urgently. You must not.

Wrenching the cap off the bottle, Will lifted it to his lips …

You know where I go if you die? Cowdray barked urgently, as the smoothness of the glass touched Will’s lower lip. To the next unborn Kendall. Do you know that?

Will’s hand began to tremble as he realized what Cowdray meant.

The next Kendall in his mother’s womb.

Jenny’s child. His child.

Will looked at the bottle in his shaking hand. Even knowing that it wouldn’t kill Cowdray, he wanted very much to drain the bottle—just for the momentary pleasure of terrifying the beast inside him—making him believe, even for a second, that his host was braver and more resolute than he gave him credit for being.

But Will, even desperate and exhausted and hungry and half-frozen, was smarter than that. Jenny had once told him he was a genius. Genius or not, he knew that was better to let Cowdray remain fooled. Let him believe that it had really been arsenic.

“All right,” Will muttered, in tones of weariness and defeat he didn’t even have to feign. He lowered the bottle. “You win.”

Cowdray’s palpable relief flooded through him. Even if the warlock’s vengeful spirit did have an escape route in the form of Jenny’s unborn child, surely it would not be savory to him to have to wait another eighteen years to take advantage of it.

But Will felt better than he had in many days. He knew something that Cowdray didn’t. He could hide something from the monster that shared his body. It heartened him, gave him strength.

“I’m not going to take this,” he said, pushing the bottle back to the counterman. “Keep it. Maybe you can use it to kill some rats.”

He  was shuffling toward the door, the counterman called after him. He scooped up three nickel chocolate bars from a Hershey’s box on the counter, tossed them to Will. “Kid, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but those’ll put some color in your cheeks.”

“Thanks,” Will said. The chocolate smelled delicious. More sustaining than meat, was written on the wrapper.

“And not for nothin’, but I expect you know about the Scharfian mission? They’re right down the block, on the corner of Thirty-Second and Seventh. Big red neon cross out front, you can’t miss ‘em. They’re open all night and they have a charity box of clothes. They gave out a bunch over Christmas, but they must got something left. At least a coat, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Will said, without turning. Then he did turn, and he touched the brim of his cap to the man. He tucked the chocolate into his pocket. “Thanks for your help,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”

“I hope so, friend,” the counterman muttered, watching Will as he disappeared into the dark snowy night. “I do truly hope so.”

Will did find the Scharfian mission, and, throwing away his tattered old clothes, was able to put together a strange but warm assemblage consisting of two shirts, a heavy sweater, a muffler, a vest, and two pairs of pants. He had kept little more than his motoring cap, his Tesla Industries identification pin (which he kept carefully tucked behind his collar), the goddamn straight razor—and of course, the piece of stationery from Ben.

There was a midnight service, with a crater-cheeked preacher talking about desperation. Some of the regular alkies heckled the preacher mercilessly, interrupting his sermon with comments about Brother Phleger, whose breakdown had so recently been broadcast via Teslaphone. Sitting on one of the battered, penknife-marked wooden pews in the back, Will stole furtive bites of one of chocolate bars the counterman had given him, nibbling down the corners. The bitter, sour-milky sweetness gave him fresh strength. That, and the possibility that he’d learned something that might give him an advantage—however slight—over Cowdray. It was the first time he’d gotten the better of the cursed spirit.

It had to be his mind’s own struggle to read words that made it difficult for Cowdray to read through his eyes. That could be a huge advantage. It also meant that all of those letters Ben had written him, with all their strange family history … Cowdray would not know any of it. Sucking melted chocolate off his thumb, Will remembered something Jenny had said the last time he had seen her. That during the five days she’d been held prisoner by Cowdray, she said he’d asked her questions about him, about his family.

Will pushed slightly further. At the Consecration, Cowdray had forced the memories of those five days back upon him. Will had kept those memories carefully locked away, afraid to explore them .. But now, he reached through them very, very delicately, as if through a thick tangle of blackberry brambles. And in doing so, he remembered—the questions Cowdray had asked Jenny were ones he wouldn’t have had to ask if he’d read Ben’s letters.

Allowing himself to remember even that much made Will shudder. But the pain had been worth it. The idea that Cowdray couldn’t read through Will’s eyes … It was something. Will wasn’t sure how he could use it, yet … but it was something.

Thinking of Ben’s letter made his hand stray unconsciously to his inside pocket. He withdrew the paper, unfolded it, smoothed it. In the harsh white electric light of the chapel, he regarded the stationery’s engraved letterhead—the logo of the Stanton Institute, a rampant eagle with the motto “Ex Fide Fortis” beneath it.

How many times are you going to look for a message from your brother? Cowdray sneered. He an opportunist. Even if he were to contact you it would be only to serve his own ends. Surely you must see that. And why would he contact you? He doesn’t need you to unlock the snuff box. He knows that he can use the blood of your child do so. Wouldn’t that be easier for him, don’t you think?  

Will held his thoughts close, away from Cowdray, as he refolded the paper and tucked it away. He did not know where Jenny was, though he suspected she was with Atherton Hart, the financial advisor who had helped her invest the hundred thousand dollars she’d embezzled–well, she called it borrowed–from her father. Will remembered the way the handsome older man had looked at her, kind and protective. He had seemed to be a good man. But if Ben had the snuff box, and wanted to use Jenny to unlock it, Will didn’t give even the handsome, successful Atherton Hart very good odds.

A man slid into the pew next to him. Cold washed off him in waves. He looked more sober than all the other men, many of whom had now laid off catcalling the preacher and were nodding off in their pews. He leaned back in the pew, letting his elbows drape over the bench’s back.

“Rotten night out,” He extended a hand. “Oscar Lewis.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Will said, not offering his own name in return. But Lewis didn’t seem to care.

“This preacher, he’s no good. But they’re all off their game since news went around that Phleger hanged himself. You read about that in the papers?”

“I don’t read the papers,” Will said. Lewis looked him up and down for a long time.

“You really should read more,” Lewis observed. He was silent for a while, listening to the sermon, before he added:

“What else could he do, really?” Lewis said, conversationally. There were dark circles under his eyes; Will recognized that the man was likely making small talk simply to keep himself awake. He smelled like booze. “Apparently they found him hanging from the highest rafter in that new church of his out in Chicago.”

“Justice,” Will said, distantly.

Lewis regarded him oddly.

“I suppose you could call it that,” Lewis said. “Though death for bad preaching seems like pretty harsh justice to me. Of course, maybe that wasn’t what he was being called to task for. Maybe it was for trying to gull and manipulate the minds of his followers. It’s all credomancy, you know—propaganda.”

Will felt a chill at the word. Ben had described the magical practice of credomancy to him. The magic of faith, belief, perception.

“Now, it’s possible that Phleger isn’t dead at all. Me, I don’t believe a credomancer is dead unless I see it with my own eyes. Like Dreadnought Stanton. I’ll wager you a dollar right now that he’s not dead.”

Will’s eyes jerked up so violently that the man, who was just making conversation, fell silent, startled.

“Are you saying he isn’t dead?” Will asked.

“I’m saying I bet he isn’t,” the man said. “You have to know how to read these things. You got to look at how the coincidences add up. There’s a great big fire, and he dies … right before the premier of that new moving picture of theirs? That’s coincidence number one. And number two … apparently people have seen him all over. There have been sightings. There’s stories about it in the yellow sheets.” The man made a scoffing noise. “Not that I put even a penny’s worth of credence in those fishwrappers, but I can tell you, we aren’t getting the whole truth, I can promise you that.”

Will’s head spun. He frowned. Was it really possible that Father wasn’t dead? Or was it some sort of ploy? He knew the Institute maintained Dreadnought Stanton’s power on the simple premise that he was alive … had the actual man died, and now they were tried to salvage the story … or was it the other way around?

Credomancy. Cowdray’s voice in Will’s head was a sneer. The magic of priests and courtiers. Blood is far more reliable.

“Now, if Dreadnought Stanton weren’t dead,” Lewis added, with a strangely knowing glance, “that would mean that the man they say killed him was innocent. Seems like he’d want to tell his side of the story.”

“I guess,” Will said, distractedly.

The man unbuttoned his coat and eased it open. His entire body was encased in newspapers—he had stuffed his coat with them. He peered down at his own chest for a moment before making a recognizing grunt. He withdrew a half-folded section of The New York Times.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Will. “Like I said, you really should read more …”

There was a sudden loud bang, loud as a gunshot. Will’s heart almost exploded and he jumped. But it was just the mission’s hired flatfoot, prowling the back of the chapel, enforcing attention. He had brought down a wooden policeman’s truncheon on the back of the pew.

“You two!” the guard whispered harshly (a ridiculous effort, Will noticed, because the sound of the heavy black wood coming down on the pew had made even the preacher at the front fall silent) “Knock off the jib-jab! Shut the hell up or get the hell out!”

Both Will and Lewis sat at attention, eyes fixed on the preacher, and said no more.

Will discovered that Lewis’ tactic of conversation to help keep him awake was a good one; and after they stopped talking he did fall asleep a couple of times. The second time he woke up, he was alone—Lewis had gone—and everyone was being shuffled out of the mission, back onto the street. Some of the old alkies were complaining, whining tiredly about the snow, begging to be allowed to stay, but the employees had apparently heard enough sob-stories for one day. Most of the men didn’t even bother trying; they just wrapped their clothes around themselves more tightly to keep in the warmth that they’d managed to soak in.

Will was warm and dry in his new, ill-fitting clothes as he was shoved back out into the thickly-falling snow. He opened the newspaper Lewis had given him to shelter his head when he noticed a giant photo on the front page.

The picture on the front page, he realized, was of him. The Man Who Killed Dreadnought Stanton, the caption read.

Will folded the paper and tucked it under his arm, slipping and sliding through the heavy snow until he saw vacant, sheltered doorway near a dim, snow-obscured streetlight. He crouched in the doorway, blowing on his fingers, spreading the paper open and squinting at it in the dim light.

He read the article. There was a manhunt on for him. He should have expected it, but he hadn’t put the pieces together. He suddenly felt cold—colder—and edgy. He scanned the paper again to get hints about how much they knew about him. Did they list his name? No they didn’t. That was a good thing.

He read the article for more information, but there was little to be had. They didn’t mention his name, only that he was a desperate character and mostly likely armed. Most of the space was taken up by the huge picture of him, caught in the stark light of a flashbulb. He remembered the pressbulbs going off at the theater. Will scratched at his growth of beard, glad he hadn’t shaved in a week, despite the straight razor he carried. He’d used it for so many other things—worse things—it had seemed disrespectful to use it for its intended purpose. He was also glad for the jumbled motley he wore. It was awful, but nothing like the rags and burned charred tatters he wore in the photo.

It is also very easy to change your appearance, Cowdray noted with a silent yawn. The magic for it is simplicity itself.

“You can keep your damn magic,” Will barked. He was learning not to respond to Cowdray’s voice out loud, but sometimes he still forgot.

Still, he found that after the brief amount of sleep he’d been able to get, and the dry clothes, and the third chocolate bar he’d eaten before he left the mission, he was feeling much better. He could actually think.

He realized that if he wanted to stay alive—and he knew now that he had to—he couldn’t get caught by the police, or by anyone else who might be looking for him. He had less than a fortnight until Cowdray reclaimed the body they shared … and with the power Cowdray knew Will’s body could channel, it seemed a terrible certainty that the next time Cowdray took Will’s body, he would not give it back. Will couldn’t afford to lose a moment of that time sitting in a jail cell, trying to explain his predicament to cops who didn’t know a damn thing about curses or magic—and who wouldn’t believe a young man like him could suffer from such a powerful curse anyway.

And that was if the police found him. If the Agency found him ….

So clearly, getting out of New York City—where his picture was on the front page of every newspaper, even the ones the bums tucked under their coats—was a very good idea.

But where could he go? He could think of only one person who might be able to help him … Harley Briar, the labor organizer he’d met in Detroit. A man who Will thought of as a friend … except for the fact that the last time Will had seen him, he had recovering from a violent beating Will gave him, bruises and broken nose. Will wasn’t sure exactly if Briar would welcome him back to Detroit with open arms … but he was the only one Will could think of who could help. He was a sangrimancer, after all. He knew blood magic. Briar was the only person Will could think of who might stand any chance of helping him deal with Cowdray.

But he had no idea how to get to Detroit. While he had most of the money left he’d stolen from the candy-girl, it wasn’t enough for a train ticket to Detroit … even if the trains were running, and with the snowstorm having brought the rest of the city to a standstill, he doubted that they were.

You can have whatever you want, Cowdray said. If you need money, you can have money. Anything you need, I can show you how to take it. Take it with both hands, with courage.

“Go to hell,” Will spat, aloud, not caring who heard. Cowdray chuckled.

Too late, mooncalf. We’re both already there.

It was now getting on three in the morning. The darkest time of night, and the coldest. He couldn’t do anything at the moment. The doorway wasn’t warm, but it was sheltered and dry. The small amount of sleep he’d gotten in the mission was making him crave more. He curled up in a small ball, wrapping his arms around his chest and tucking his knees up tight.

Everyone who has been waiting for this book (the sequel to “The Warlock’s Curse“) has been waiting a heck of a long time, and I truly apologize.

And while I’m afraid I can’t report that “The Unsteady Earth” is ready (or even will be in the very near future,) I do have a little piece of progress to report, and a little tiny douceur for those who have been waiting so patiently. Below, I’ve posted the first draft of the prologue, which I just ran through my incredibly awesome and insightful writer’s group this past weekend. They gave me a lot of great feedback (pointing out blocking issues, repetitiveness, overwriting, POV problems, and the fact that there are far too many em-dashes) which I have not yet been able to incorporate. So what I’ve posted below is a true first draft, warts and all.

I will be running the next chunk through them within the next few weeks, and I will try to post those chapters as they become available as well.

Thanks everyone for your patience. I’m really sorry to be so slow.

The Unsteady Earth
Prologue

Tuesday, January 3, 1911

Dreadnought Stanton was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.

For a full quarter-hour, S.O. Hart, President of Sanitas Pharmaceutics, had been peering with intense concentration at the morning edition of The New York Times  spread out on the desk before him. Above the fold, on the all-important right hand side, just below the price (“5 cents”) and The Weather (“Snow to-day; clearing on the coast to-morrow; high east winds”) was printed a single word:

Murdered!

Stark, black, enormous, and completely sufficient–the notoriety of the famous warlock was such that no noun or adjective was required. The copy below the exclamation was similarly spare, detailing with customary precision the factual specifics of Dreadnought Stanton’s demise: the nation’s most prominent credomancer had perished three days before the New Year, in a sorcerous conflagration of suspicious origin that had leveled the Stanton Institute—the geographic and emotional center of his substantial power—as well as a vast swath of New York City’s Upper West Side.

“Murdered,” S.O. Hart drew the word out sweetly, contemplatively, gently stroking the word with his forefinger as if to calm it. This bit of theater was for the benefit of the subordinate whom he had kept standing before his desk for the past quarter-hour—a small, elegant black man named Clayton Thibodaux. The gesture was so extravagantly tender that it left no room for doubt: S.O. Hart was displeased. Severely displeased.

He was not displeased because Dreadnought Stanton was dead. In fact, he himself–acting in his capacity as leader of a Consortium of business and religious interests—had ordered the warlock’s death. And in all fairness, the man who had been charged with organizing the execution—the very man who he’d kept standing before his desk for the past quarter hour—had, without question, delivered a great deal more than had been asked of him. So much more, in fact, that Clayton Thibodaux might have been forgiven if he’d expected his efforts to be celebrated with an honorary dinner at a large downtown hotel, complete with applauding colleagues, vases full of hothouse flowers, and fillets of turbot served in cream. Instead, Clayton Thibodaux had received a curt, imperious telegram commanding him to make his way from the Santias Pharmaceutics headquarters in downtown Detroit, through the severest snowstorm in recent memory, out to S.O. Hart’s mansion in Grosse Pointe, so that he might be called, most definitely, onto his boss’ expensive Persian carpet.

The carpet was spread before an enormous mahogany desk in the subterranean vastness of the Hart mansion’s games room. The storm had precluded the great capitalist’s customary sojourn to his offices downtown, so he was, instead, conducting business before a ten-foot-high fireplace of carved Venetian marble–about the only place where he could stay warm, for even with the mansion’s modern steam heating system running at full blast, the cold of the boreal blast outside knifed through the walls like an assassin’s stiletto.

While S.O. Hart had a more formal and magnificent library and office upstairs, such grandeur was hardly appropriate to receive a disgraced subordinate–and certainly not a disgraced Negro subordinate. While S.O. Hart considered himself quite progressive in the matter of race-relations (the lofty position Thibodaux held within Sanitas Pharmaceutics certainly attested to that!) it was, after all, somehow more fitting to receive the man informally, casually, au coeur de la famille.

Never mind, by the way, that every individual who could conceivably be termed famille were grouped at the game room’s opposite end, over a hundred feet distant, as far from the lord of the manor as was physically practicable. S.O.’s wife Gracie (quietly embroidering something decorative and useless) and his son Atherton (puffing his way through an overly-enthusiastic game of table-tennis with a lovely young houseguest) were both exquisitely tuned to the moods of the domestic Zeus, and knew exactly when to absent themselves to avoid bolts from on high.

Lifting his eyes finally from The New York Times, S.O. let his mournful gaze rest on Thibodaux’s dark, impassive face for a long while. Then, pounding the desk with his fist so hard there was a sound of cracking wood, he thundered, “Murdered!”

The word rang against the dark walnut paneling with a dreadful volume and intensity. Gracie’s fingers trembled. Atherton, lowering his paddle, allowed the ping-pong ball to dribble to a disconsolate halt. Only Atherton’s lovely young houseguest—her name was Jenny Hansen—lifted her eyes to stare across the clutter that filled the cold vast void, past the objects collected on travels to Florence and Milan: gloomy paintings and dark, heavy, worn tapestries and altarpieces glowing with gold and plaster—at the senior Mr. Hart. Then, shifting aside a white arm-sling that dangled unused around her neck, she seized the ball.

“Come on,” she muttered irritably, serving it back to Atherton. “It’s just your father yelling again.”

“Well?” S.O. demanded of Thibodaux, more quietly this time, but in a voice no less intense. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

This demand for an accounting, coming as it did from one of the richest men in Michigan (if not the United States); the man who owned the patent for Panchrest, the wonder-drug that had beaten back the Black Flu pandemic; the man who helmed a company that employed over five thousand professional men and boasted revenues of over a hundred-and-fifteen millions annually—would have made anyone else tremble and stammer. But the supreme self-possession of Clayton Thibodaux was such that he did not respond immediately. Rather, he continued to stand motionless and silent, hands clasped neatly behind his back, eyes directed mildly forward, until S.O. deigned finally to gesture to a chair with an ill-tempered grunt. And only after Thibodaux had arranged himself on the 12th-century Belgian tapestry with the finicky neatness of a cat did he state, quite simply:

“Murder was always the intent, sir, if you will recall the plans that you approved.”

“The plans I approved!” S.O. roared incredulously, stabbing The New York Times with his forefinger. “What does any of this have to do with the plans I approved? There was nothing in the plans I approved about burning down half of the Upper West Side! There was nothing in the plans I approved about Brother Phleger—a man I intended to put into the White House—erupting into babbling insanity in front of his whole congregation, not to mention a Teslaphone audience of hundreds of thousands! And there was nothing, Mister Thibodaux, in the plans I approved, about him.”

The “him” to which S.O. referred was an individual captured in the photograph that accompanied the stark, single-word headline on the front cover of the Times. The photograph was captioned “The Man Who Murdered Dreadnought Stanton,” though the desperate individual depicted really looked little more than a boy. His image had been captured outside the Belasco Theater in New York, at the premiere of a moving-picture; how the gray lady had come to the conclusion that this young man was Dreadnought Stanton’s murderer was not explained. “Did you hire him?” S.O demanded. “Is he one of ours? Who exactly is he, anyway?”

“I did not hire him.” Thibodaux replied. “He is not one of ours. And I have no idea who he is.”

The calm precision and brazen simplicity with which Thibodaux delivered these shockingly unsatisfactory answers took S.O. aback. He sometimes appreciated bluntness from his subordinates, but not when he was yelling; when he was yelling, groveling was the only appropriate response. He opened his mouth, then closed it abruptly. Drawing in a deep breath through his nose he rubbed his hands together briskly, his breath congealing white as he blew on his fingers to warm them.

“My god it is cold in here!” he muttered. Then he roared, his voice echoing against the high coffered ceilings, “Thomas! Can’t you see the fire’s almost out? Get your lazy ass in here! Do I have to think of everything for you people?”

It took a few moments for the elderly black houseman—white haired, white coated, white gloved—to appear at the door in response to S.O.’s summons. He labored under the weight of two enormous oak logs, one balanced on each shoulder. As he made his way across the length of the room. S.O. watched him, lips twisted with scorn, his index finger tapping the desk impatiently.

“Come on, come on!” he said finally, leaping to his feet. “I could freeze to death waiting for you!”

Thibodaux, knowing better than to bristle at such crude bait, did not spare the servitor a glance.

“Mr. Hart, you are technically correct,” he said. “All did not go according to plan. The death of Dreadnought Stanton was supposed to appear in the eyes of the public as a magical misadventure, the result of a holy judgment visited upon him at the consecration of Brother Phleger’s New Faith Seat of Praise. That did not happen. Unexpected factors rendered Brother Phleger unable to perform that function.”

“Unexpected factors,” S.O. snorted, as he as he watched old Thomas shift the large logs onto the bed of glowing embers. When the fire was to his liking, he snapped his fingers at the elderly servitor. The action apparently did not need to be accompanied by words; climbing to his feet, Thomas went to the liquor cabinet and began arranging items on a silver tray—two crystal tumblers and a bottle of old Scotch.

The instant Thomas set the tray on the desk before him, S.O. seized the bottle and sloshed one of the tumblers full. He had no idea if the sun was past the yardarm—a series of small arched windows were the subterranean hall’s only source of natural light, and they all had several feet of snow banked up against them—but he didn’t care. “And so you improvised.” He sneered the word, then took a large swallow of liquor, as if to wash away the bad taste. “I despise improvisation.”

Thibodaux shook his head.

“No, sir,” he said. “While we had every reason to expect that Dreadnought Stanton would appear at the New Faith Seat of Praise, lured there in the hopes of capturing a powerful and malign magical artifact that Brother Phleger had in his possession, Dreadnought Stanton never appeared. Therefore, even if all had gone according to the plans you approved, Brother Phleger would not have had the opportunity to kill him.”

“Then how is it, precisely, that Dreadnought Stanton is dead?” S.O. punctuated the question by slamming down the crystal tumbler on the mantlepiece with a solid clonk. He stretched his hands toward the newly-replenished flames. “How is it that the most powerful warlock in the United States evaded our attempts to murder him—efforts which required tens of thousands of dollars in budget and man-hours—only to fall victim to a magical conflagration at his own Institute, set by some mysterious boy-arsonist? How exactly did that come to pass?”

The ferociousness of the interrogation was tempered by a faintly plaintive quality—the whine of an honest yokel who’d been cheated by a big-city card sharp. Clearly, what bothered S.O. Hart was not that the Consortium’s plan had failed—but rather that the Consortium’s very expensive and detailed plan had failed, whereas an apparently random and (presumably) inexpensive combination of actions–apparently carried out by a lone insane boy—had succeeded.

“I really don’t know.” Thibodaux spoke with dainty, respectful blandness, like a thug hiding a lead-weighted sap in a crocheted tea-cozy. “Does it matter? You wanted Dreadnought Stanton dead. And now he is.”

“As the result of someone else’s murderous designs!” S.O. barked. “Who? And why?”

“Surely any number of individuals, entities, or organizations must have had murderous designs on the Sophos of the Stanton Institute,” Thibodaux suggested dryly. “It was the central narrative of his entire existence. Miscreants and malefactors were always trying to kill him, and he always escaped. This time, for whatever reason, he did not.” Thibodaux paused, drawing a deep breath. “Sir, forgive my bluntness, but how Dreadnought Stanton’s death was accomplished is really of no importance whatsoever.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” S.O. snarled, reclaiming his tumbler and draining it. “You have no idea how this impacts the bigger picture. You were hired to do one thing—execute the plans I approved. To the letter. Dreadnought Stanton being dead is not is all there is to it. There are wheels within wheels, Mr. Thibodaux. Secrets. Deep, dark secrets.”

S.O. thought he made the words sound sufficiently impressive. He was usually good at making things sound impressive. Thus, when Thibodaux’s response was to scoff—to actually blow an amused, derisive snort through his mouth and nose—S.O. pulled himself up, enraged.

“Why … you!” He was so angry he could barely choke out the words. “You uppity smarty-pants … how dare you! Who exactly do you think you are?”

“Mister Samuel Orville Hart,” Thibodaux interrupted in a slow, clear—and strangely loud—voice. “Please calm yourself.”

Even as the words left Thibodaux’s mouth, a strange feeling of calm did seize S.O. Hart—a feeling sudden and powerful enough that it made him plop down in the carved chair. It was as if the Scotch had caught up to him all at once.

“Now,” Thibodaux said, staring steadily at him. “Are you calm, sir?”

“Yes,” S.O. said.

“Very calm?”

“Exceedingly,” S.O. confirmed. He noticed, as he sat still and quiescent, that the fire behind him seemed to have grown uncomfortably hot.

“Good,” Thibodaux said. “Then let’s start from the beginning. First of all, let’s agree that we are both intelligent men, working toward similar goals. There is no need for posturing or insult. Is there?”

“Apparently not,” S.O. muttered. Whatever dizziness had made him sit down so suddenly had now eased slightly, and he felt able to reach once again for the bottle of Scotch. He felt sullen, like a chastened schoolboy. And he wasn’t exactly sure why he felt that way. Or why Thomas was still standing at silent attention by the fire. Usually the old man would have retreated by now.

“Next, let’s examine precisely why you wanted Dreadnought Stanton dead. It is commonly known that Sanitas Pharmaceutics is one of the primary political backers of the Portman-Yates Bill.  A mandate to immunize every citizen of the United States with Panchrest—a medication for which you, Mr. Hart, personally hold sole patent rights.”

S.O. lifted his glass, likely in a salute to the spirit of capitalism. But if this was an attempt at humor, Thibodaux did not smile.

“You–and the Consortium of business interests you represent, and the elected officials they own–have pushed the Bill through the Senate. But you haven’t quite been able to get it through the House, have you? In particular, the House Committee on Magical Affairs, chaired by Congressman Lachey Whiterose–a politician whose opposition to the bill is passionate, personal–and paid for by the Stanton Institute.”

“Can’t find an honest politician these days,” S.O. sighed, looking into his glass. “And yes, I see where you’re going with all this, Thibodaux. All our problems with the House go straight back to the Stanton Institute. I thought that with Dreadnought Stanton dead, we could put pressure on Congressman Whiterose to change his position, get the bill through the House, and get that fat fool Taft to finally sign it before he’s out of office next year.”

“Not to mention putting a halt to all the Institute-planted newspaper cartoons depicting you as a fat pig with the word ‘profiteer’ written on its side.” Thibodaux seemed compelled to add.

“All right, so you’ve sussed the scheme. What are you expecting, a raise? Anyone with half a brain could have put that much together!”

“Since you don’t seem to be quite ready to dispense with insults, sir, I will agree that the plan, as I have just recounted it, does seem to be have been cooked up by someone with half a brain.” Thibodaux spoke with jovial malice. “Because even if everything had gone exactly the way you’d hoped, it would never have worked.”

S.O. frowned at him.

“Exactly how do you arrive at that conclusion?”

“Do you really think Congressman Whiterose is being obstructionist simply because of pressure from the Stanton Institute?” Thibodaux made the objectionable scoffing noise again. “No, Mr. Hart. Congressman Whiterose truly believes–as many do–that an immunization mandate would be disastrous for the country, and for the world. And he has very intelligent and important reasons for believing that, doesn’t he?”

Now, S.O. Hart really did feel a chill creep up his spine. For Thibodaux was alluding to information that he believed no one, other than himself and a handful of advisers and scientists, knew. He peered at Thibodaux cannily, warily.

“Well, now you’re just indulging in theory and speculation,” he said. “Crackpot conspiracist nonsense ….”

Thibodaux eyed him indulgently.

“You’re fishing to find out exactly how much I know,” he said. “I can tell you, sir, that I know–as does Congressman Whiterose—what the true effect of the immunization mandate will ultimately be,” Clay said. “The impact it will have on nations who do not mandate the proactive immunization for their own citizens.” He paused. “Knowing that, do you really believe that Congressman Whiterose will abandon his opposition simply because Dreadnought Stanton is dead, and the Institute is no longer able to bankroll the champagne and flowers he stocks his townhouse with? Is it not more likely, in fact, that Congressman Whiterose, seeing that the organization he has relied upon to help him fight this battle—his most powerful political ally—is now utterly debilitated?” He paused again. “Really, killing Dreadnought Stanton was the most penny-wise pound-foolish thing you could have done.”

S.O. thought all this through, staring into his glass. The fire behind him was really uncomfortably hot now. He leapt to his feet to get away from the heat, crossed to the front of the desk to where Thibodaux still sat, motionless. He leaned against the desk, crossed his arms thoughtfully.

“Well!” He said finally. “You might have mentioned this to me before we killed Dreadnought Stanton!”

“We didn’t kill Dreadnought Stanton,” Thibodaux frowned. “And we wouldn’t have in any case. It was a foolish, unnecessary action and I wouldn’t have allowed it to happen. But now he is dead, and we must proceed as best we can.”

At that moment, a cry resounded through the cold room: “Out!”

Despite the fact that the voice was female, it was so harsh and strident it made S.O. wince. It had come from the far end of the room, from the ping-pong table where Atherton and his lovely young houseguest were still playing. Atherton had served the ball too hard. It had overshot the table and was rolling across the rug toward where S.O. and Thibodaux were standing.

“All right,” S.O. said. When the ball reached him, S.O. Hart lifted his polished wingtip and stopped it. He rolled the ball gently beneath his foot, ignoring Jenny’s calls for him to kick it back.  “I’m listening. What do you propose? And what do you want?”

Instead of responding, Thibodaux looked back to where Thomas stood. The old servitor cleared his throat.

“Shall I send the nurse in, Mr. Thibodaux?” Thomas asked.

“Why are you asking him?” S.O. barked helplessly. Then he looked back at Thibodaux. “Nurse?”

“Yes, please, Thomas,” Thibodaux said, ignoring S.O. Hart entirely. “Thank you.”

As Thomas withdrew, Jenny Hansen stalked across the room toward them. Finally she came to stand before S.O. Hart, hands planted on her hips, eyes fierce and demanding. One gleaming mahogany curl had escaped its pins and curled down in front of her face, and she was breathing hard, fairly snorting with annoyance.

But S.O. was resolved not to give her the satisfaction of his notice. He’d put up with more than enough disrespect for one day. And this girl was quite the limit for disrespect. She’d come to his attention through Hetty Green–a female financier in New York City who had corresponded with the girl and said she was promising. If she was, S.O. certainly didn’t see it. He thought her sullen, proud, and arrogant–and not to mention a thief! She’d embezzled a hundred thousand dollars from her timber baron father back in San Francisco, and had come to Detroit to have Atherton invest it on behalf of the Consortium. Along the way she’d gotten married to some brute of a man—God only knew where he was–and there had been some kind of assault … and then, as if all that weren’t enough, for some reason or another (S.O. had never really gotten a clear answer on why) the girl had even been in attendance at the disastrous Consecration. In the melee that followed, she’d been stabbed—hence, the white sling that hung around her neck. The sling which she very rarely actually wore, despite the doctor’s strict orders.

If there was one thing S.O. knew, it was trouble. And this girl was trouble.

Worst of all, Atherton—his only son, heir to a fortune S.O. fully intended to make exponentially larger before he was finished–was clearly in love with the little vexation. And not just in love, but head-over-heels stupid in love.

So, for all these reasons (and because he very much enjoyed the feeling of putting her in her place) S.O. Hart pointedly ignored her, crossing his arms casually.

“I believe I asked you what you proposed, Thibodaux,” S.O. said.

Thibodaux gave Jenny an uncomfortable glance before continuing.

“What I propose, sir, is simply this. If you want the mandate on President Taft’s desk before he leaves office, you will have to disarm Congressman Whiterose. And disarming Congressman Whiterose will take more than simply debilitating the Stanton Institute. Other weapons must be brought to bear.”

“Weapons?” S.O. said.

“Mr. Hart!” Jenny barked, her voice harsh as a rifle-shot. Only then did S.O. turn his gaze on her.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said, innocently. “Did you want something?”

“The ball, dad,” Atherton called across the room.

“I can’t imagine where it’s gotten,” S.O. said.

“It is under your foot,” said Jenny, her voice low.

“It can’t be!”

“It is.” The girl forced the words through clenched teeth.

“Dad!” Atherton shouted. There was a note of exasperated pleading in his voice that made S.O. feel exceptionally cruel. He lifted his wingtip slowly, eyes wide.

“Why,” he said, “So it is!”

But he made no move to bend down to retrieve it for her, or even to lift his foot. Instead, with a malicious grin, he rolled it under his foot a few more times.

Jenny was having none of it. With a cry, she kicked his foot aside, then bent over and reached for the ball. The mahogany curl gleamed in the firelight.

As her fingers touched the ball, she gasped in pain, hand going to her chest, to the wound beneath her left collarbone. Even though it had been a glancing attack, deflected by a piece of jewelry she wore, the knife had still sunk deep into the muscle of her shoulder. Her face paled with pain as she froze, hunched, her fingers tightly curled around the little white ball.

She stayed that way for a moment, breathing heavily, waiting for the pain to pass. Then she straightened and stood. She was turning to go back to the ping-pong table when something caught her eye. It didn’t seem possible that her color-drained face could go paler, but it did. She stood looking down at the copy of The New York Times that was spread out on the desk. Her fingers brushed the large photo on the cover. She muttered something under her breath.

“Did you say something, Jenny?” S.O. snapped.

Jenny did not answer. Then, with a soft groan, she sank into the desk chair.

“I need to sit for a moment,” she said.

“Oh, by all means,” S.O. said sourly. “It’s not like I’m trying to conduct business here.”

“Jenny, are you alright?” This, from Atherton. Not only had he hotfooted it over like a whistled-for dog, he’d even brought Jenny’s shawl with him, and was tucking it tenderly around the girl’s shoulders. Next he’d probably fetch her some cocoa. What a spectacle.

Jenny didn’t even do Atherton the honor of answering him. She just stared down at the cover of The New York Times, with a puzzled, angry look on her face.

At that moment, Thomas returned, escorting the nurse that Thibodaux had mentioned. She was a grim-looking woman of indeterminate middle-age dressed in a pristine white starched uniform. But S.O. quickly realized that it wasn’t the nurse that Thibodaux meant to present to him. It was, instead, the child being escorted by the nurse–a little girl about seven years old, with white-blond ringlets, fish-belly pale skin, and pink eyes fringed with frost-thin tendrils.

Little Sanctity Snow, “God’s Special Snowflake.” She had been a prominent member of Brother Phleger’s doomed entourage—some kind of musical prodigy on the electric organ—another bit of shrapnel thrown off by the famous preacher’s implosion. But more importantly (and really, very importantly, S.O. realized, with sudden appreciation for Thibodaux’s insight) she was the public face of the pro-immunization movement. Her sweet innocent face had, over the past year, graced thousands of posters across the United States—the visual embodiment of everything Americans sought to protect.

On those posters, she looked so sweet and dainty and loveable, all ringlets and bows and tiny white teeth like little polished seashells. But standing here now, in the shadow of her imposing nurse, she seemed much less promising. She was sullen and frowning, her white gloves dirty and her snowboots heavily caked with mud.

“Snowflake!” Jenny said, masking surprise beneath a kind sisterly tone. “Don’t tell me they’ve brought you here, too?”

When the girl heard Jenny’s voice, her face lightened slightly.  She looked like she might want to hug Jenny, but that she was against hugging on principle, so she didn’t move, and just stood, clenching her fists. And there was something about the way that Jenny held herself that suggested that a hug, even from a small child, would not be reciprocated.

Jenny leaned back in the desk chair, and cast a challenging look at Thibodaux.

“Well? Why have you brought her here?”

“For God’s sake why are you asking him?” S.O. bellowed. “And how is it any of your business anyway? Maybe we just wanted to make sure you had a little play-friend for around the house.”

“Brother Phleger is dead,” Sanctity Snow interrupted sharply, spitting out the words with relish. “He hanged himself, Jenny.”

Jenny’s brow contracted, but she did not comment on this.

“Not a nice topic of conversation for little girls,” S.O. said, letting the descriptor encompass them both.

“He hanged himself from the highest rafter of the new church,” Sanctity Snow continued, as if S.O. had not spoken. She made her voice conspiratorial. “No one knows how he got up there. It was God, probably.”

“Probably,” Jenny replied, equally softly.

“Is there an organ here, Jenny?” the girl then blurted, in an anguished tone. The nurse put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and even S.O. saw how hard the woman pinched. The girl, however, didn’t flinch. Either she was used to getting pinched, or was so interested in getting an answer about the organ that it didn’t matter.

“There isn’t an organ, but there is a piano upstairs.” Jenny voice was matter-of-fact. She stood carefully, steadying herself against the edge of the desk before reaching for the little girl’s hand. “Come on, I’ll take you.”

S.O. Hart opened his mouth to protest, but Jenny gave him a glare of withering contempt.

“You did say that I could have her to play with, didn’t you?” she said. Then, with pleasant ascerbity: “Or is she another thing of mine that isn’t really mine?”

S.O. felt his face turning red. He was on the verge of spluttering. She was, of course, referring to the money that she had embezzled from her father—money which had been invested on behalf of the Consortium. Money which she now wanted back.

Now, to be fair, S.O. was willing to admit that promises had been made. Jenny had been under the impression that the substantial earnings her investments had made would go toward developing a cure for her sister, currently languishing in a California asylum for crippled survivors of the Black Flu. But what Jenny didn’t understand was that it wasn’t S.O. Hart who had made those promises. Brother Phleger had made them. And Brother Phleger was dead. And that meant that all bets were off.

Clearly, however, Jenny didn’t agree. But for the moment she seemed satisfied with having gotten in a parting shot. Holding Sanctity Snow’s hand firmly in hers, they strode together from the games room. The stalwart nurse gave Thibodaux a brief, perplexed glance, then hurried after them.

S.O. Hart, having refrained from spluttering, now found himself short of breath. He threw himself into the desk chair and shook his head with astonishment.

“Do you see!” He lifted his hand to Atherton in amazement. “Thibodaux, surely you see! The girl is a lunatic!”

Thibodaux did not respond to S.O.’s statement, seemingly finding something in the air above his boss’ left shoulder worthy of intense scrutiny. Atherton, however, was spoiling for a fight.

“How could you treat Jenny like that!” Atherton shouted. “A guest! In your own house!”

“I can’t see as I’m treating her any particular way,” S.O. replied calmly. “She’s just awfully sensitive. Traumatized. Hysterical. Not in full control of herself. Perhaps in need of some kind of psychological analysis. Don’t agree, Thibodaux?”

Atherton flared silently at the indignity of having such a question put to one of his father’s subordinates.

“I would not venture to form an opinion on such a personal matter, sir,” Thibodaux said, through pursed lips.

“Well, I have an opinion,” S.O. continued. “And my opinion is that she’s very sensitive. As a matter of fact, I don’t treat her like a houseguest because I don’t think she should be a houseguest. I think she should be in a goddamn insane asylum!”

“Baloney!” Atherton snapped. “Jenny’s the smartest, sanest girl I know!”

“Well, then clearly you belong in the nuthouse right along with her,” S.O. sneered. “For God’s sake, boy, she’s just about leading you around this place like a spaniel on a little gold chain! I won’t stand my own son being made a fool of under my own roof!”

With a strangled cry and a dismissive gesture, Atherton turned on his heel. S.O. watched him go. When the room was finally silent again, he shook his head.

“So,” he said to Thibodaux,  who was still critically scrutinizing the middle distance. “You’ve brought me little Miss Snow. And I’m assuming it’s not just because you think I’ll enjoy having another mouth to feed.”

“Miss Snow can help us reclaim the faithful who have been cast adrift by Brother Phleger’s downfall and death,”  Thibodaux said.

“I imagine they always did like her more than him, anyway,” S.O. said. “So, it’s your thought that she will help us retain those supporters, who will in turn pressure their representatives in Congress to do the right thing once we do whatever it is we’re going to do to Congressman Whiterose. Correct?”

Thibodaux opened his mouth to say something, but then seemed to think better of it. He merely shrugged. “Close enough,” he said.

“Good. Fine.” S.O. said, mopping his face with his hand. He was exhausted. Three Scotches in, the fire was too damn hot, and even though he generally liked yelling there had been far too much of it.

He was about to dismiss Thibodaux when he was surprised to see someone walking back across the room toward them. It was hard to see in the gloom, but he thought it might be Thomas, or perhaps his wife Gracie (the rock-ribbed old harridan hadn’t gotten her dig in on the conversation yet) but while it was a female form, it wasn’t Gracie.

“Oh for God’s sake,” S.O. barked, as Jenny came to stand before the desk. “Back for another ball? Another fainting spell? Another look at the newspaper? I told you, I’m trying to conduct business here, Miss Hansen!”

“I know,” she said. “So am I.” She paused. “I want my money back.”

“And I’ve told you, the money can’t be gotten,” S.O. said. “Clearly, you have no idea how expensive building a megachurch is. And now, with Brother Phleger dead, it’s a sunk cost. There are cash flow problems.”

“Cash flow problems?” Jenny snorted. “Creditors calling in their notes on the new building, I bet. With Phleger dead, I’d call mine in too.” She looked at Thibodaux, then extended her hand. “Jenny Hansen, by the way. We haven’t been introduced, Mr—”

“Thibodaux, Miss,” he said, not taking her hand, but rather executing a European-style bow over it.

“Thibodaux arranges the company’s charitable giving,” S.O. said.

“That’s not all you arrange,” Jenny said.

S.O. bristled, sitting bolt upright in the chair. “Just what has Atherton been telling you?” He knew the boy was stupid in love, but was he really that stupid?

“Atherton hasn’t told me anything,” Jenny’s lips curled in a humorless grin. “But you just did, Mr. Hart.” She looked back at Thibodaux. “You see, Mr. Thibodaux, I have made a point of closely observing Mr. Hart. The volume at which he conducts his affairs makes it hard not to. While his company likes to posture that it is progressive in matters of racial advancement, I doubt very much he is any particular friend of your race. In fact, I doubt very much he would have you in his company, much less out to his home in a snowstorm, if you did not offer some exceptionally valuable service to him—a service, certainly, beyond that of Secretary of Philanthropic Affairs. So what exactly is your sideline then, Mr. Thibodaux? Murder? Magic?”

“I studied law at college, Miss Hansen.” Thibodaux spoke with extravagant helpfulness, as if trying to help a child guess at a puzzle.

“Mr. Hart has plenty of lawyers,” Jenny said. “The last thing he needs is another one. And you seem too refined to be a killer, Mr. Thibodaux. So that only leaves magic.” (She said “magic” as if the word itself were bitter.) “You’re old enough to have been born before the Great Change. So you must be a warlock.”

“I am flattered by the sentiment, Miss,” Thibodaux said. It was unclear exactly which sentiment he was referring to.

“You brought Snowflake here. I assume you’re going to use her to gather back up all the churchgoers who are without a leader now that Phleger is dead. I also  heard you talking about Whiterose, so clearly your primary ends are political … but you can use her to kill two birds with one stone. If she can hold the faithful together, and keep their charitable donations flowing in, the creditors will settle down, and that’ll take care of your cash flow problems.”

“Well, yeah,” S.O. bluffed bravely (though he certainly hadn’t thought of that.) “I mean, obviously. That is if, unlike some other females around here, the willful little brat will cooperate.”

“I can see to it that she does,” Jenny said. “There’s a lot of help I can give you. If you’re willing to see that I get my money back.”

S.O. clenched his teeth. This girl was the limit!

“I hate to remind you, Jenny, but strictly speaking that money isn’t even yours,” he said. “You stole it from your father.”

“I borrowed it from my father without asking,” she said, emphasizing the difference. She leaned forward. “And certainly, if that’s the way you want to play it, Mr. Hart, if you’ll allow me to telegraph my father we could discuss it with him together. I would be just as happy if you gave it back to him as to me.”

S.O. cursed under his breath. He should have known that gambit wouldn’t work. He didn’t fear D.L. Hansen; by all accounts the timber baron was pretty unsophisticated (and certainly, he’d have to be, to let his 17-year-old daughter embezzle a hundred thousand dollars in gold certificates!) But unsophisticated or not, he was still rich, and could still hire plenty of  lawyers. And the last thing S.O. needed at the moment was any more yelling.

“I think you need to rest,” S.O. averred. “You’re sounding hysterical again. I’ll have Thomas phone the doctor back.”

“I don’t need the doctor back,” Jenny growled. “I need my money back. I want you to give me my money back. If it’s gone, I want you to replace it. You can afford it. You’re a rich man.”

“Yes, Jenny. I am a rich man. But I certainly did not become so by reimbursing generous charitable contributions when silly girls have second thoughts about having made them!” S.O. was so fed up he did not even attempt to keep his voice down. “And just you give me one good reason why on earth should I even consider giving you a single plugged nickel, you vexatious little—“

“Because I heard you talking about a weapon,” Jenny interrupted. “A weapon needs a target. You need someone for Snowflake to go after. Forget Whiterose. There’s someone better. Someone much better.”

“Better? What are you talking about?” S.O. looked at Thibodaux, and saw that Thibodaux was looking at Jenny curiously. She did not speak, but met his look with a cool level stare.

“A man who has just been elected,” Thibodaux said finally. “A young firebrand from California. He’ll be on his way to Washington soon to be sworn in.”

Jenny smiled queerly, as if both pleased and sad. “So. You do know about Congressman Argus Edwards. Clearly, Mr. Thibodaux, you are one of those two-steps-ahead kind of people.”

“Who the hell is Congressman Argus Edwards?” S.O. waved an exasperated hand. He was getting tired of all these knowing glances passing between people.

“He has a reputation for making excellent speeches,” Thibodaux said.

Jenny snorted.

“That’s not all he has a reputation for.” Jenny frowned in S.O.’s direction. “I know him from San Francisco. There’s plenty you can use to go after him.”

“And why exactly do I want to go after him?”

“Because you need to push your Panchrest legislation through the House,” Jenny said, sounding almost bored. “The new Congressman is a rising star on the anti-immunization side. I know he spent plenty of time in Washington while he was campaigning, and he got close to Whiterose. Very close. Close enough to destroy him. Make him do whatever you want.” She narrowed her eyes at Thibodaux, and her voice became strangely mean. “And you wouldn’t even have to stick pins into any little dolls, Mr. Thibodaux.”

“Why should I believe you?” S.O. said.

Jenny shrugged imperceptibly. The cool, level stare was back. It was clear she was waiting for an offer. S.O was beginning to see what Hetty Green had seen in the girl.

“What kind of information do you have, Miss?” This question came from Thibodaux, soft and subtly intended. She did not answer, but simply shifted that level gaze onto him, sizing him up.

“I wonder why you really care,” she said finally. “I mean, I’ve decided you’re in the magical line. I think that’s pretty obvious. So even if you want Mr. Hart to think you’re interested in helping him get the Panchrest legislation passed, I kind of doubt you are. Because not only will his legislation hurt warlocks like you, it will hurt people like you. Magic is a great leveller, isn’t it?” She paused, then continued, despite the fact that a certain tenseness around Thibodaux’s eyes indicated clearly that he wished she would not. “Honestly, I think you probably care more about what happened at the Consecration. There was a man there. Professor Coeus. He ran away with something. I don’t know what it was, some little box …” She fell silent for a moment, her gaze drifting to the floor as the events seemed to kindle in her memory. When she spoke again, her voice was distant. “There was some kind of magic happening during that consecration, and it wasn’t just Godly faith. It wasn’t any kind of miracle … unless it was a miracle worked by the devil.” Lifting her eyes, her voice became strong again. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’re really looking for.”

For the first time ever, S.O. saw a look of complete astonishment pass over the face of his Secretary of Philanthropic Affairs. The astonishment was so complete that S.O. felt obliged to clear his throat politely. Thibodaux dropped his eyes to the floor, took a few steps back.

“An impressive exercise, Miss,” he muttered, but did not speak again.

Having dispensed with Thibodaux, Jenny turned her gaze to S.O. Hart.

“He asked me what information I had,” Jenny said. “I’ve got a lot. But really, there’s only one piece that you need. It’s enough to make the new Congressman Argus Edwards do whatever it is you want him to do. Turn on whoever you want him to turn on. Betray whoever you want him to betray.”

“And what exactly is that?”

“Congressman Argus Edwards is my brother-in-law,” Jenny said. “My husband’s brother.”

S.O.’s brows lifted with surprise. “Really? Well, that’s … shocking. Utterly surprising, really. Fascinatingly coincidental. But … and I say this with all respect that you are due, Miss Hansen … so what? The fact that you’re married to his brother gives us power over Congressman Argus Edwards because …?” S.O. Hart let the question hang.

Jenny’s fingertips drifted to gently touch the photo on the cover of  The New York Times.

“Because,” she said, “my husband is The Man Who Killed Dreadnought Stanton.”

Jesus Christ, this movie. THIS MOVIE. Spoilers follow, in case you give a damn.

So I didn’t expect much from Crimson Peak, given that I cannot think of one single film that has been described as “gothic” since 1986 (when Ken Russell’s “Gothic” redefined the term for the worse) that has been anything other than tedious, self-indulgent, and infuriatingly shitty. But I thought maybe, maybe with first-rate auteur Guillermo Del Toro at the helm, Crimson Peak might at least kind of hold together, to the minimal extent required for me to enjoy the pretty pictures without having my intelligence too egregiously insulted.

No such goddamn luck, I regret to report.

I mean yes. This movie is pretty. So damn pretty. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty! But so was “Moulin Rouge” and “Phantom of the Opera” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “Interview with the Vampire” and “Sweeney Todd” and “Sleepy Hollow.” They were all heartbreakingly pretty. So why did they all have to suck so badly, each and every one of them? Whatever the reason, I can only conclude that era of the well-made “gothic” movie passed with Olivier and Welles and Hitchcock. I would love to see a modern interpretation that could hold a candle to “Rebecca” or “Gaslight” or  “Wuthering Heights” or “The Magnificent Ambersons”  … or even to “Dragonwyck” or “Sunset Boulevard” or “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” … but I’m not going to hold my breath.

So anyway, on to my rant. Because when a movie gets my hopes up, even a little, then disappoints me, I tend to get somewhat vindictive. The TL:DR version is that Crimson Peak is a movie that obsesses over little details while getting the whole thing so wrong that it’s like a beautifully-decorated wedding cake that’s been baked with salt instead of sugar. Much like Allerton Hall, it is gorgeous ornamentation sinking into a faulty foundation.

Pretty blue dress is pretty.

But let’s start with what I liked, shall we? I already mentioned the pretty. I also appreciated that, in one oddly specific way, the “pretty” actually supported the narrative. Early in the film (which is easily dated to the late 1890s based on Edith’s ginormous leg-o-mutton sleeves), Edith notes that Sir Thomas wears fashion that is a decade out of date. Thus, when we first see his sister Lucille wearing a natural form gown that is totally not period (that silhouette would have been au courant between like 1878-1882, between the first and second bustle era) we actually realize that it’s a costuming discrepancy that’s accounted for in the plot–not a costuming mistake. So that was nifty. It was also kind of nifty that we pretty much only ever saw Lucille in one dress, that fancy dark blue number.  That suggested that she didn’t have a whole lot of other gowns to choose from, which is also true to the character as an impoverished, yet proud, aristocrat.

That said, however …

GODDAMN IT VICTORIAN MOVIES, STOP IT WITH THE SUNGLASSES.

OK. Sure. There were some instances of  people wearing smoked lenses in the Victorian/Edwardian era. But they were mostly invalids and blind people and people with syphillis. NOT vampires and bad asses. Just please stop it.

Please stop it?

Seriously. Stop it.

AIIIIGH.

There was another thing I did kind of like, though I’m not sure if the movie actually meant to do this or not (I’m willing to be generous and assume that it did). Apparently, the convention of this world is that when someone comes back as a ghost, their spectral appearance is tied to the current, actual, physical appearance of their mortal remains. So this explains why Sir Thomas looks all handsome and wistful (because he has just died), while Edith’s mom appears all black and creepy (due to her death from the “black cholera” whatever the hell that is) and the dead wives all look all red and gruesome because their bodies have been, I guess, submerged in the the clay vats (which, why? Clay vats? Clearly I am not an expert on clay processing but by no stretch of the imagination can I think why it would require subterranean vats.) But anyway, this is kind of a neat convention. I did wonder why we didn’t see the ghost of Edith’s dad. And of course I wondered many other things, like why the ghost of Enola was cradling the ghost of a dead baby that wasn’t even hers. And for that matter, why do we even have a baby in this story? The baby serves absolutely no purpose in the narrative. I mean, I suppose it could have been used, in some way, to “clue us in” to the possibility that Sir Thomas and Lucille are gettin’ it on, incest-wise … but, no, wait, that would be completely unnecessary BECAUSE NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON, FOR EVEN ONE SECOND, DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING.

There was some interview I read (I can’t be arsed to find it) where Del Toro took the very noble and generous position that he wanted the women in the movie to be the ones who were the rescuers and not the rescuees. Which is great, except that literally every action Edith takes is because some ghost is pointing her there, or warning her, or scaring her so badly that she’s forced to try to escape down a creepy elevator. She never even asks any intelligent questions, like, “Hey Sir Thomas, where the hell do you GO every night when I can’t find you in bed?” or “Why haven’t we actually had sex yet, despite that we have been on an extended honeymoon trip?” or “Seriously? A hole in the fucking roof? And you expect me to LIVE here?”

By the way, what exactly does Edith do all day? Play with the dog? The only time she ever discovers anything seems to be at night, when she’s scared and has ghosts chasing her around. Why isn’t she doing any of her poking around in broad daylight, while Sir Thomas is working on his clay digger thing and Lucille is … oh, what the hell ever, playing the piano in an impassioned way.

By the way, speaking of Sir Thomas … damn. What a mook. If the only way Del Toro can make the female characters “strong” is to make the male characters completely weak and uninteresting … well, blech. It’s sloppy and condescending. And analogous, in an odd way, to how the movie tips its hat to socio-historical realism by casting black actors for all of the American servants (the bathroom attendant and housemaids). Does that depiction comport with the actual reality of the era? Sure. Is it also kind of weird that this is one of the few places the director decides to be extra-realistic in a fantasy movie about a rotting gothic mansion set atop a mountain of bloody red clay? Uh, yeah, kinda.

Oh man, there’s so much more. But I’m losing the will to continue. But let’s hit the highlights. The recordings and the evidence Edith finds about the dead wives. Boy, Sir Thomas and Lucille sure do keep nice neat envelopes full of evidence, don’t they? What a couple of tidy and obliging types they are. And why, precisely, are the gramophone cylinders themselves not locked up? They’re just sitting on a closet shelf? I guess because someone figures that if the gramophone is locked up, it doesn’t matter? But how exactly did this go down? There are, apparently, recordings all the way back to the first wife. OK, so, the phonograph is a toy that the first wife plays with. Fine. Second wife finds it, also decides to play with it? Except somehow the recordings from the first wife are not with the phonograph, but a blank wax cylinder for recording is? Oh … kay. Well, in any event Sir Thomas surely won’t make that mistake with third wife … but wait! I guess he puts away the recordings from wives number 1 and 2, but leaves the phonograph sitting around (again, with the ultra-convenient blank wax cylinders for recording) and Enola finds it and records everything! And then after she’s dead, Sir Thomas collects ALL the recordings, puts them on a shelf in the closet, and locks up the phonograph because … um … oh Jesus, my head hurts. This makes no damn sense at all.

I’m not even going to go into the ultra-convenient injuries at the end (Edith falls from a balcony, is almost dead from poisoning, and yet runs around spry as a frisking colt). My daughter was willing to attribute this superhuman performance to adrenaline. I have my doubts. Also, what did the letter from Milan say? Who was it from? Why were there rusty hoopskirt frames just sitting around in the hallway? Where did all the leaves come from that blew through the hole in the roof if the house was atop a tree-less peak? YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE!

Finally: poor dog.

Anyway, in closing, let me just say this movie depicts precisely why I never believe anyone who tells me they like my novels. Because seriously, the odds are they are just looking for a 4th wife to abduct to their creepy gothic mansion and slowly murder. Thank you and good night.

I didn’t hike last weekend because of belated Father’s Day activities, so this weekend I definitely needed a good long tromp through fields and fen. This hike didn’t have much of either (well, I guess it did kind of have fields, namely along the powerline cuts, but those sections of the trail seriously sucked.) Mostly it had lots of rocks and hotness. But the good news was I managed to convince Sugar to come hiking with me again! Though this morning she is very wrung out and tired.

Anyway, here’s a brief video trip report.

Chronology:

7:30 a.m.: On the trail early to beat the heat
9:30 a.m.: Pup Creek Falls
10:45 a.m.: Turned around at 8 miles (just shy of Indian Henry Trailhead)
1:30 p.m.: Back in the car and headed home

Injuries: Sugar got stung by a bee.

Weather: Hot as hell.

Miles: ~16 miles

Elevation Gain: ~2200 feet (basically that was from all the ups and downs in the trail, not any kind of overall elevation gain.)

Bugs swallowed: None!

Gear: Beat up old Saucony running shoes (a mistake), Columbia Sportswear shorts (another mistake, as my legs are all scratched to hell now), Nike dri-fit t-shirt, Mountainsmith Tour lumbar daypack with strapettes, platypus collapsible water bottles w/drinking straw apparatus thingy, and my favorite Nike baseball cap.

Identified Gear Gaps: None!

So, I was craving a solitary anodyne to last weekend’s overly-populated hike, and according to OregonHikers.org, this particular trail wasn’t likely to be crowded, so why not. I was also looking for a hike with a nice climb (as I’ve mentioned, I like climbing, for some damn reason) and with good mileage opportunities, as I am trying to build up my endurance. And also a hike that would allow me to gather some empirical data on whether hiking poles really allow one to travel further & faster, as so many claim.

Speaking of poles, behold my new ones, purchased to replace the Mountainsmith Pinnacles that lasted exactly 9/10ths of my last hike. These don’t have cool shock absorbers, but they got uniformly good reviews, and the wrist straps are  comfy and the grips less pinchy, and they were on sale, so.

Things I learned about poles on this hike:

When the trail looks like this, you will love your poles. They will give you the wings of Mercury. You will literally fly through the woods with the speed and grace of a panther with wings on its heels.

When the trail looks like this, you will be cursing the fact that such a thing as poles even exist, and you will spend most of your time bitching, moaning, stumbling, and wondering what you did to make God and nature hate you so damn much.

Other things I learned about poles on this hike:

When you really get going with them, they serve a purpose not unlike that slave on those galley ships that sit there and beat the drum. You slam those suckers down (which some “pole” experts call “a good plant” or something like that) and it forces you to keep a rhythm. This is probably one reason they encourage you to go faster. Sometimes it’s great (like when the trail is amenable to it) and sometimes … well, forget it. You just tuck those suckers away and resign yourself to having no rhythm and being OK with that.

Also, I found that when I was hiking uphill with poles, I actually got more tired. I think this is because while my legs are used to climbing, my arms are not at all used to helping my legs. So while my legs are all still like, “OK, let’s do this thing” my arms were like, “screw you, we need a rest.” So I will need to keep working to get my arms in better condition. My shoulders & upper back are certainly sore today, I can tell you that.

Some final thoughts about poles:

I still feel like an asshole using them. I don’t know why. It just seems so … “old fussy REI hiker” as opposed to “actual badass NW hiker.” But that’s just me being judgy. Overall, I do think I will keep working with them. But it’s nice to know (as I discovered) that I can collapse them down and fasten them to the bottom of my waist pack when I need to.

Other things:

Sugar, again, expressed not the slightest bit of interest in going with me. This is getting really sad-making. I don’t know if its her allergies (they’re really bad right now) or that she just takes longer to recover (the day before Nora and I took her out to the tennis courts and she went nuts trying to catch the tennis balls we were hitting between us), but in general all she wants to do is short walks and then sleep a lot. I need to get her in for a checkup or something. Hiking alone is OK, I guess. But it’s kind of lonely.

Overall this was a nice hike in the woods. It didn’t have as many scenic vistas as the last few hikes I’ve been on, which is probably why it’s not as busy/crowded. Also, I wish I could have gotten out to Grouse Point (as I originally intended) but I got too late a start and honestly, just doing Dry Ridge tired me out. Still working on that endurance thing.

Chronology:

1:15 p.m.: Got on the trail. This represents a very late start for me, but Nora and I had dentist appointments that morning.
3 p.m.: Rest and snack. I got really tired on this hike for some reason, my endurance was not what it usually is. But I was determined to at least get to the Grouse Point trail junction, dammit!
4:07 p.m.: Grouse Point trail junction. Thank God.
5:00 p.m.: Rest and another snack.
6:41 p.m.: Back in car, heading home

Injuries: None! My feet appreciated having the sock liners back.

Weather: Nice, not super hot. I was in the shade most of the way. One thing to remember for future reference … on a warm summer day, you definitely will not need a second layer climbing up the mountain. However, you may need one coming down. Just think about that next time you decide not to pack your wind shirt, Mary!

Miles: 13.21 miles

Elevation Gain: 3350 feet

Bugs swallowed: None! (Surprisingly.) There were a lot of bugs up there. Once again, deet defended me.

Gear: HiTec Altitude V hiking boots (w/homemade paracord laces & orange Superfoot insoles, Darn Tough merino wool socks w/REI silk liners) Nike dri-fit windpants & t-shirt, Mountainsmith Tour lumbar daypack with strapettes, platypus collapsible water bottles w/drinking straw apparatus thingy, Black Diamond Ergo Cork Trekking poles, and my favorite Nike baseball cap (which, honestly, I packed more than wore). Also, Probar Base Bars, which have more sugar, protein and calories than the bars I have been bringing. I wanted something with more sugar to see if they would help avert the jelly legs I get toward the end of a long hike. And they helped, I guess, but ugh they were sweeeeeeet.

Identified Gear Gaps: None! Though I might want to see if I can rig up some kind of strap contraption that makes it easier to lash my poles to the bottom of my pack. There are loops at the bottom of the pack that I can pass them through, but that’s kind of a fiddly arrangement. Just a refinement, really.

This was a strange, somewhat awesome but ultimately unsatisfying hike. Hamilton Mountain, which is in the Beacon Rock State Park on the Washington side of the Columbia River, is not a hike I would otherwise choose. It’s kind of like Eagle Creek on the Oregon side … it’s just too damn popular and there are too many idiots in flip-flops. Furthermore, any hike you take on the Washington side of the Columbia requires you to purchase a Washington “Discover Pass” which, like the NW Forest Pass, is also $30 a year (and $10 a day!) and seriously, I just can’t afford to buy both. So this year I decided to buy the NW Forest Pass and really focus on the trails around Mt. Hood & the Clackamas River wilderness areas.

But! The cool thing is that Washington *does* have a few “free days” every year where you can visit their parks without a “Discover Pass.” And 6/13/15 happened to be one of those “free days” so I decided to suck it up and hike Hamilton Mountain, just so I could say I’d done it. I figured I’d get a really early start so I could avoid the inevitable crowds, and all would be well.

And get an early start I did … I was out of the house by about 5:30 a.m. The first weirdness of the trip was the fact that Sugar *really* did not want to go. She saw me getting all my hiking stuff out and instead of getting excited, she started looking very reticent. I took her outside for a potty break, tried to see if throwing a ball around for her would get her excited … but she ignored the ball, did her dirty bidness, then ran back into the house. All of which made me think,”hmm, this is a dog who does not want to go hiking today.” Which was weird. I’ve already broken my daughter (who now refuses to go hiking with me because of my fondness for long distances and steep climbs) …. have I now broken my *dog* too? A depressing thought.

Anyway, I got my traditional Dutch Bros soy latte for the drive, and arrived at the trailhead by 7 a.m. Which meant I encountered very few people on the way up the mountain, which was awesome. But then on my way back down the mountain, that’s when it started to get busy.

The first annoyance was a bunch of very loud blah-blah-ers on the mountaintop. Now look, I understand, people are going to talk. But man, it’s hard to appreciate the splendor of the scenery when a bunch of chicks are loudly yammering about how fat they are and how they shouldn’t be allowed to wear leggings because they’re so fat. Jesus take the wheel. Fat shaming at 3100 feet. Ugh.

So I hot-footed it down the mountain. At the saddle (below the summit of the mountain) I decided to branch off onto the Upper Hardy Creek trail in search of extra miles (it was only about 3-4 miles back to the car, and I wasn’t feeling tired yet.) This part of the hike, which followed old logging roads, was nice and gentle, but also super confusing, as trails & old roads branched off at random intervals and I kept getting confused as to which ones to take. So I kind of got lost up there, and had to backtrack to get to the Bridge Trail/Hardy Ridge Trail–which I hadn’t even intended to take in the first place. But whatever.

By the way, this was my first hike with poles. I got a pair of super-cheap bargain basement REI clearance poles (Mountainsmith Pinnacle) just to see if I’d like them. My response was mixed. First of all, the poles themselves had some issues. The rubber handles were very pinchy on my hands (especially my thumb-crotches) and ultimately, the strap broke on one of them (quality!) But I did like the “shock absorber” feature.

Overall, hiking with poles is something I’ll have to get used to. Number one, it makes you look like a douche. No two ways around that. Also, it’s one more damn thing to juggle, and you start to feel like an asshole, juggling water straws, and poles, and all that crap. But maybe that’s something to just get used to. There were times I *really* got into the stride and understood why people like poles. They give you more power on the long open spots, and when climbing they *are* quite a bit of extra help. So I’m going to keep working with them, notwithstanding the douche factor. I will have to see how they work out when I also have a *dog* with me (that is, if Sugar ever deigns to hike with me again). Because juggling poles *and* a dog … I’m not quite sure how I would do that.

And speaking of juggling things and being annoyed … when I got out of the mysterious maze that was Upper Hardy Creek and onto the Hardy Ridge Trail, that’s when things really started to piss me off. Because there was some damn *trail run* going on. And seriously, it was like Grand Central Station up in there. Runners kept shoving by me on the narrowest of trails, necessitating me finding some place to step off and stop, breaking my stride, my concentration, my meditation, etc. They also kept *talking* to me. “Hi! How ya doin’? Thank you! Howdy!” etc. If I wanted to have eighteen million douches talking to me all day, I wouldn’t be in the fucking mountains, assholes. Whatever. I know I’m a misanthrope. But this was another reason I was actually really glad that Sugar decided not to come with me on the hike. If she’d been there, it would have been triply annoying and hard to deal with. Also, up near the top of the mountain there were some *really* sheer cliff faces and I would have been scared for her.

So, overall … a good hike, nice mileage, nice climb, I’m glad I did it (and can now *say* I’ve done it.) The waterfalls (Pool of the Winds) are gorgeous, and the trails are well-maintained. But yeah, all the annoyances of a “busy” trail (which is why I try to avoid Gorge trails now, for the most part.)

Chronology:


Arrived 7 am
Summit 9:10. Snack.
Upper Hardy Creek 10 a.m.: Second snack & water bottle change
Somewhere on the Hardy Ridge Trail, noon: Third snack (this was a very hungry hike!)
Back in the car at 1:13 p.m.

Injuries: None, though my feet were real tired at the end and I got the “jelly toast” legs. Also my hips were quite stiff and sore. I think I need to start stretching more.

Weather: Sunny, a bit on the hot side.

Miles: ~15.4

Elevation Gain: ~3170

Bugs swallowed: None, but there were lots of bugs. Thank goodness I was liberally doused with deet.

Gear: HiTec Altitude V hiking boots (with new paracord laces that I made myself!) with orange Superfoot insoles, Darn Tough merino wool socks (no liners … a mistake), Nike dry capris (cooler, but I missed the leg protection in underbrushy areas), red cotton tank top, red Nike wind shirt (packed it away early, didn’t really need it), Mountainsmith Tour lumbar daypack with strapettes (this was my first outing with the strapettes.  I liked them. They add good support to the lumbar pack and provide a place to clip the Platypus water hose) platypus collapsible water bottles w/drinking straw apparatus thingy, Mountainsmith Pinnacle Trekking poles, and my favorite Nike baseball cap.

Identified Gear Gaps: New hiking poles. (I returned the Mountainsmith ones to REI for a refund, and have ordered a pair of Black Diamond Ergo Cork poles from Backcountry. They were on sale!). Other than that … I think I’m finally mostly set for gear. And if I find something else I need, my awesome sister sent me a ginormous gift-card to Next Adventure!

This was a really fun, picturesque hike on the wooded slopes of Mt. Hood. Wonderful hike, clear, perfect day. After an early start, I had to stop in Zigzag to pick up a 1-day NW Wilderness Pass (I hadn’t bought an annual one yet.) The road to get up to the Burnt Lake/Zigzag Mountain Trailhead is exactly the same one that you take to go up to Ramona Falls, except to go to Ramona Falls you bear left, and to get to this trail you head right. Got to use the 4WD again, boy that’s useful! And rugged!

It was a much warmer day than the last hike, and Sugar was definitely feeling it. She kept herself hydrated on trail water (which, I know, isn’t a great idea) but to carry enough water for both of us I’m going to have to get her to start packing her own. Two liters is not really not sufficient to share, especially when you’re going uphill on a warm day. All gear performed fine, though I need to figure out how to load my pack so I have better access to needed things. On the steep downhills and rocky slopes, I definitely wished for poles—those are going to be one of my next gear purchases.

New gear obtained for this trip included new platypus water bottles (to replace the crackly plastic water bottles from the store that didn’t really fit my daypack) as well as a kind of attachable camelback-y straw-y thing. I also got fresh first aid supplies for the first aid kit, and some other basic preparedness supplies. As far as food, I kept myself going with a couple of power bars during the hike, but after the hike I made buckwheat pancakes and then took Nora out for sushi.

Chronology:

Arrived trailhead: 9:14 a.m.
Burnt Lake: 10:40 a.m.
Zigzag trailhead: 11 am
Zigzag summit:  11:30 (lunch, rest, water)
In car for home: 2:19 pm (after a loop around the lake and a long break to let Sugar have a swim in the cool water)

Injuries: Dog bite (Accidental. Sugar tried to take a stick out of my hand. Naughty dog!)

Weather: Sunny, clear, perfect

Miles: ~14

Elevation Gain: ~3100

Bugs swallowed: 2

Gear: HiTec Altitude V hiking boots with orange Superfoot insoles, REI silk liner socks under Darn Tough merino wool socks, Nike dry windpants, black cotton t-shirt, Mountainsmith Tour lumbar daypack, platypus collapsible water bottles w/drinking straw apparatus thingy, and my favorite Nike baseball cap.

Identified Gear Gaps: A properly fitting dog harness, hiking poles, fresh (or at least non-expired) sunscreen & bug repellent, strapettes for the lumbar pack, annual NW Wilderness Pass