12/30/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

Internet has been wonky this evening.

There is a line from the Old Americans about a magical monster, and never mind that they had none: It burbled as it came! That was the coming of Charlie. The unholy amalgamation of spirit and ghost clanged and crunched like metal smashing into metal. In this form it smelled industrial, too, like one of Greater Hershey’s machines. Rubber and metal and polish and rust, all ground in and baked until hard.

This heartened me. All of that meant that the occult lure was definitely working. To arcanely define an entity is halfway to controlling it – or, in this case, destroying it.

In theory, it would all come down to timing. According to the song, Charlie would be in this station, at this time of day, and ready to receive a crab cake from his wife. Reenacting these conditions would align us arcanely, ritually making us part of the song. From there it would follow well enough: Mistress Hawes would place the crab containing the Old American nickel on the focus, symbolically paying for Charlie’s exit fare. That tacit fulfilling of the curse would weaken the occult link between the spirit and the ghost, and Gallagher and I would exploit that weakness to hammer the two entities apart. From there we would have to improvise. This was First Age spontaneous magic, after all. If people could have planned better against its manifestation, the world might not have ended seven hundred years ago.

12/29/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

I am pardonably proud of this bit.

He bore up well under the strain — and, indeed, the costly spellcasting had found us a candidate. “This is Mistress Jaquelyn Hawes, Mistress Dexter,” he told me, absently wiping his face with a handkerchief before waving it at the angry-faced young woman he had in tow. “She has graciously agreed to serve her country in this ritual.”

Mistress Hawes glared in my general direction. “I had conditions. You’re not bringing that cheating bastard back to life, are you?”

“No,” I told her promptly. “That would require a body intact enough to be reinvigorated, quite a lot of magic, a decent amount of good fortune, and most importantly: any willingness on my part to resurrect the man. Sending his soul on to its presumed reward is my goal, this afternoon. I presume you and your husband are… estranged?”

“He’s not supposed to be my husband,” she ground out. “The son of a bitch skipped out on me three months ago. I’ve been trying to serve papers on him ever since. The cop said you’d maybe want them?”

I took the proffered envelope and riffed through the contents. “I might, at that. Do you mind?”

“Will it get rid of the son of a bitch, once and for all?”

“Hopefully.”

“Then no, I don’t mind. I’d say shove them down his throat, except he doesn’t have one, because he’s dead.” The smile on Hawes’ face was truly chilling to behold. “Is it gonna hurt, whatever it is you’re gonna do?”

“As little as possible,” I managed to say.

She scowled. “Well, I guess you can’t have everything.”

12/28/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

Academia!

Gallagher peered over the proffered sheet. “Ah. Yes. Mid-twentieth century ballad, at least by the Old American definition of ‘ballad.’ Note how the text features a spoken-word introduction, followed by verses meant to be sung. That suggests a transitional work between the old and new lyric traditions that arose in the last two centuries of the First Republic…”

“Freeman,” I interrupted, and he grinned at me.

“Sorry, Sun. Academic itches must be scratched. Anyway, yes, it looks like it’s a folk song — no idea of the tune, mind you — of some poor unfortunate, trapped forever on the… oh, of course. It’s a song about the Antiquity! That must be why our Mr. Shane had collected it. A very old song, too. It must have been made at least a century before the dawn of the First Age of Magic.” He handed me the paper. “I don’t suppose you can glean more, with psychometry or suchlike?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I absently responded, really reading the text now. All scholars in the Second Republic may learn Old American from books, but actually encountering the language as it was spoken can sometimes be a challenge. “Would this Charlie in the song really have been forced to ride on their trains for an eternity?” I asked Gallagher. “Surely somebody else would have given him a nickel to get off.”

12/27/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

Getting to the big reveal!

“Direct or not, there was some link between the two.” Gallagher frowned. “I cannot imagine that either the ghost or the spirit are enjoying their inadvertent bond.”

“My sympathies would be stronger,” I retorted, “if I thought either entity fully deserved them. Our Mister David C. Shane was a thoroughly unpleasant man in life, and the spirit that has him stuck in its gullet seems little better. It took pleasure in killing the man, even if it cannot consume the soul. I would almost be willing to let the two have the joy of each other, except that their shared indigestion is troubling the rest of the city.”

“And there is the upcoming conference,” Curwin noted.

“And there is the upcoming conference. I have received word from Superintendent Marsh: his superiors would like assurances that we will not have our deliberations with our new allies interrupted by foul necromantic events. They are disquieted enough by our ethical ones.” I sighed. “That need for reassurance comes from the very top, gentlemen. Sprague House will be very concerned if things go poorly.”

“But not enough to give us actual support,” Gallagher muttered, probably out of politeness for Curwin’s and my practical inability to do the same. “The Marshes were always purse-pinchers.”

12/22/2024 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE BAD PLACE.

Ah, my old friend/enemy in media res.

This wasn’t the first time Timmy had to run away on a wet winter’s night. It wasn’t even his — fourth, fifth time? He wasn’t really sure. Timmy got chased a lot, in this kind of weather. That’s why he wore boots that wouldn’t slip in the snow. You never knew.

He didn’t like being chased, but at least he knew how to do it now. You kept your eyes open, and your ears even wider. And you didn’t run faster than you had to, either. You did that, you lost your breath fast, and then you were caught.

Timmy figured he was gonna get caught at some point anyway. But that was why you kept your eyes open. You only cut and run when you want to find a good place to turn, and fight. Or at least a better place.

You didn’t waste your breath whining, either. That’s why he didn’t even mutter, “Where’s the garbage cans?” as he ran. He just thought it real hard.

Just like he thought about how Frostvile Pines absolutely sucked.

12/12/2024 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE BAD PLACE.

Damned if watching the movie didn’t help.

Maggie Henderson wasn’t the mayor of Frostvale Pines. That was an old guy named Bob. She wasn’t the fire or police chief, either. No, Mrs. Henderson owned the local coffee shop, which made her the person running the town. Timmy could get his head around that. He’d seen lots of people run things from behind the scenes.

What got Timmy was the way Mrs. Henderson talked. Nobody was that nice all the time and meant it. And her smile! It reached her eyes! That was way crazy, too.

“We first noticed something was wrong a week ago, Tim.” (He was apparently too old for ‘Timmy,’ and too young for ‘Timothy.’ It’d been weird for a second when she’d asked what his name was, too.) “Little things, like a garbage can knocked down, or a light left on. We weren’t sure what was going on until food started going missing. Then we knew.” Mrs. Henderson’s smile went worried. Really worried. “Somebody from Out Of Town had shown up.”

Timmy could hear the capitals in the words. “You mean, somebody like me. Not somebody from, um…”

“The Big City?” Timmy noted those capitals, too. “Oh, no, definitely not like one of those folks. They’re always welcome to visit our little town! In fact, they come here all the time, especially around the turn of the year. But they’re not the sort who’d just hide and steal food. That’s a… well, that’s a problem.”

12/11/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

A double helping of wordcount, today.

Abbie was a better codesmacker than Tobias was, so he let her navigate the barely stable mess that was their current electronic mail system. He also pulled in Ward, for reasons he tried not to think about. The good doctor had a certain viewpoint that was proving increasingly helpful for… anomalous cases. It made sense to have him along for the ride from the start.

It wasn’t that easy. Grabinski hadn’t logged into the system in the last twenty-four hours. But he had been checking his mail before that. He had even sent a message. The message file had been thoroughly corrupted, to the point of making the recipient unintelligible, but at least it was a sign of some activity.

“Why didn’t we think of this before?” grumbled Abbie. “Are we just assuming that a crazy person’s too crazy to even use email?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ward snickered. “We weren’t even wrong. Nobody on base these days sends an email when a face-to-face meeting will do. I’ve been encouraging it, actually. Too many neverwokes happening to people who stayed in their rooms and never saw anybody. I’m hoping bunking up two to a room will help with that in the future.”

12/10/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

Accomodations!

“Only none of them have seen hide or hair of the man.” Tobias scowled at the tablet. “He’s not drawing rations anywhere, either. That concerns me more.”

“Because it means he has a food source we don’t know about?”

“Exactly. I don’t care if he’s living on thrown-out shipping nuggets; we need to know where every calorie is.” He scowled. “Hell, we need more shipping nuggets. They’d be perfect for the Lifeboat.”

“Hmm. What does Asenath think?” Lillian smiled at Tobias’s startled look. “She may just be a manifestation of your current mental state, but you do have the advantage of being a very smart man. I assume that would extend to your hallucinations. We have to use everything we can.”

Tobias decided — not for the first time — that Lillian was very smart herself. Well, Asenath, what do you think? Oh, and sorry about Lillian…

There is nothing to forgive, Commander. She does not dislike or even disapprove of either me, or our working together. She simply believes that I do not exist. This hardly makes her unique. Dr. Peters is also better at making you practice self-care than I am, sometimes. It is in my best interest to maintain a good working relationship with her, even by proxy.

12/09/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

The Bad Week!

He didn’t need to ask her what she meant by the term. “As well as we could. We managed to get all but one of the surviving domes under lockdown, but the mutineers in Bloch Dome had somehow managed to disable the HVAC control, so we had to go in and stun them by hand. That was Hell.”

By now the memory didn’t suddenly flash into his brain. It ambled in, almost comfortably: They were still in the life-support tubes when the mutineers stumbled upon them. Tobias’s team had been offered no quarter by their foes, and it was all that Tobias could do to keep his troops from responding in kind. He’d had to stun one of his own team to keep her from strangling a stringy-haired maniac after they’d finally dragged him off the soldier he’d been disemboweling with a rusty saw.

“Stunners? You were lucky, Commander. We had no stunners, no pacification gas after the first week — the fool that Bruno replaced saw to that! — and not enough hibernation drugs. But when our rebels had been taken? Oh, we had knives. Such a helpful crowd control measure, knives. Cheap, simple, no power, no moving parts. Just an edge and a throat.”

Reithner’s eyes may have been open, but they were looking at nothing in the room. “They cycled us all through crowd control at first, you know. And we all did it. Even Bruno took a turn, slicing the throats of those too violent and insane to trust. But you could tell right away who among us hated it, and who did not. The ones who did not somehow found themselves on the rotation more often. They even volunteered! And we did not forbid them.”