Thursday, September 12, 2002

Lexa's Diary: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 (continued)



It was raining tadpoles.

For 15 freaking minutes. They piled up in the yard, on the roofs of the houses we could see. What else weird can happen?

That sorta did away with our appetites, so Fiona, Seth and I went down into the basement to investigate. Seth discovered that the bulb was actually broken. While he replaced it, Fi and I explored the basement.

I have a pretty good eye for detail, and on a shard of glass remaining in the broken window, I found a clump of dog hair. It smelled awful, like a sick dog. I'm not sure if I'll ever get that smell off my hands, or out of my olfactory memory.

The scratches on the back of the door went as high as 4 1/2-5 feet, although they were deepest around 2-3 feet. One of the two planks making up the top step was broken in half.

We kept exploring and found that the boxes and stuff piled along wall (mostly Michael's old childhood stuff, at least according to the labels) had been shoved back to make a path. We needed a flashlight back in that dark corner, and discovered a door with a fairly new padlock on it. None of the keys on Michael's keyring worked.

Seth surprised us by picking the lock. There's no telling what hidden talents he has.

I cautiously opened the door. In the glow of the flashlight we found a long crate with something written on the cement floor around it. Fiona found a light switch.

Not a crate. A wooden coffin. Written in chalk all the way around it was Michael's full name, date and time of birth, social security number, driver's license number... The whole experience gave me the wiggins in a major way.

Much to my chagrin, Seth and Fiona opened the coffin.

Inside, the bottom of the coffin was worm-eaten, but there was no body, thank God. But what there was sent an icy spike down my spine.

A shroud. On top of which were Michael's driver's license, student ID, social security card. The clothes he was wearing last time we saw him. And his favorite sword, the one missing from under his bed. Beside the door was an empty paper sack.

Fiona called the police, who were still lingering in the area. We gave them Michael's things.

I felt only a little guilty going on to class, I was so glad to be away from there. Seth and Fiona set about cleaning the tadpoles out of the gutter and boarding up the broken window. Before class I heard people talking about the fall of tadpoles--it had appeared on the news.

Concentrating on the lecture was nearly impossible. At the break I opened my mouth to answer a friend's question about Michael when it really hit me. Hard.

Michael was gone. Just like everyone else in my life I cared about.

I remembered sobbing, sliding down against the wall. I couldn't catch my breath, I was crying so hard. Someone took me home--I'm not even sure who.

Wonderful Fiona. She's always so strong and brave. She calmed me down, made me tea. I panicked again when Seth wasn't there, but Fi said he'd gone out to ask around on the street about Michael. [We later found out the rabbi and the man with him had been asking people on the street about Michael.]

I finally gathered my wits about me enough to go to work at the bookstore as scheduled. We weren't too busy, so I flipped through some of the volumes in the (very small) paranormal section. A book by Charles Fort actually mentioned falls of tadpoles and other weird things as well, like frogs, fish, meat (!), etc., but nowhere did I find anything about coffins with chalk numbers around them.

The direct way is the best way, I think. I asked Mrs. Rosemont if she knew anything about weird occurrences, or where I could find someone who did. She tried to dissuade me from asking, but to my surprise, she thought she knew of someone, a reclusive artist, but she'd have to check with her before giving out her address. Mrs. Rosemont promised to tell me tomorrow.

[Seth revealed later that while he was at work, a stoner came by asking about Michael, the same guy who'd come by the day before, but this time he wanted to know if we'd seen Michael when he left that morning.]

I was in a good mood walking home, thinking about Mrs. Rosemont's friend and what she might tell me. Maybe I wasn't quite as attentive as I should've been, but it wasn't even dark yet. As I passed by an alley a couple of blocks from the bookstore, a hand clamped over my mouth. I tried my tae kwan do, but it's not the same as it was in the gym. He dragged me into the alley, fingers pressing my lips into my teeth so hard I could barely breathe. I've always heard the expression "cold steel"--the knife blade at my throat sent an icy wave shuddering through me, and would've started my teeth chattering had they not been clenched beneath his hand.

His breath on my right ear was like the hot summer air before a lightning storm. He rumbled in a gravelly voice, calling me filthy obscenities and threatening to use his knife on me in places my boyfriend hadn't seen. At that point, his grip on my mouth was all that kept my knees from buckling. Every horror or detective movie I've ever seen about women dismembered by serial killers flashed through my mind. Through the roaring in my head I heard him demand to know where Michael was. He took his hand away and I protested that I hadn't seen him since last Thursday.

Then he asked the weirdest question--if I saw Michael when he left the house that morning.

I reiterated that I hadn't seen him since Thursday, which didn't make him happy. He ordered me to find Michael and that if we didn't, he would kill all of us in the house.

As I was realizing that he wasn't going to Jack-the-Ripper me right then and there, he shoved me in the small of the back with his foot and was gone. The feel of his hand and the knife burned my face and neck as I picked myself up from the ground and ran.

I have no memory of the run. I slammed into the house, pausing only to lock the front door, locked myself in my room, shoved the dresser in front of the door, and sat hunched up on the bed, arms wrapped around my knees, trembling all over. Sometime later I heard Fiona calling my name, but I was afraid it wasn't really her. She at last persuaded me to let her in, that she was alone. Calming me down is becoming her full-time job, I think. When I was a little calmer, she called the police again and I had to tell them the whole story. They said I could go by the station in the morning and sign the statement. Meanwhile an unmarked car would patrol the street.

In the midst of all this, Seth came home, so we told him what happened.

And then it hit me. I'd heard the voice before. The man who grabbed me was Mr. Lake, the associate of the rabbi. And the reason he thought Michael had left was because the police took Michael's things away.

I told the police the identity of the attacker, took not quite as many Tylenol PM as I wanted (Fiona said I wouldn't wake up with the dosage I'd chosen first), and slept.

[I later found out that Fiona had a terrifying dream that night in which she saw her mother--who then suddenly burst into flame--something that had actually happened to her in real life.]

Wednesday, August 28, 2002



Fiona instituted a policy that we were not to go anywhere alone, so she drove me to work. Mrs. Rosemont, kindly woman that she is, when I told her about the attack, said I could take off as much time as I needed.

She also gave me the name of her friend, renowned artist Amelia Horner, and directions to her house. Fiona drove me out to a shabby but genteel section of town.

The yard was overgrown, but there was a working mechanical fountain in front that was amazing. When we got out of the car, a woman in her 60s appeared at the front door, pointing some kind of paperback-sized box at us that she rested on one arm, as if it were very heavy. I quickly explained who we were and that Mrs. Rosemont had sent us, and she became very friendly and put the weapon away.

She welcomed us into the strangest place I'd ever seen, yet I felt right at home. There were clocks everywhere. She offered us tea, brought in in an elaborate mechanical pot on tracks.

And then Amelia Horner talked about the Occult Underground.

We told her about Michael, about the little parties he had with us four times a year, about those of us in the house and how we all said a little statement about how we were all living together with a common purpose at each of those parties.

Tilts. Bonding ritual. Wards--an alarm system of sorts. Getting the machine to do things it isn't supposed to do. My head was spinning. She was talking about magic as if it was real.

Fiona didn't believe it, and demanded proof, so Amelia whistled and summoned a creature I took to be a bird. It flew around the room and landed on her finger--and it was fashioned of brass.

Amelia said we were in danger, that Michael was involved in the Underground, but that he probably wasn't an adept--whatever that meant. I was fascinated.

And she knows my uncle! I mentioned him and how he worked on things for a living, machines and clocks and such, and she asked his name. I told her.

"Nicholas Valentine?"

"Yes..."

"So you're Nick Valentine's niece."

"How do you know my uncle?"

"Oh, I know him professionally."

Professionally? I had no idea what she meant.

She invited me back, saying she had a lot to tell me, and gave us a pamphlet explaining tilts. And as we were leaving, she warned us again to be careful and stay together, that the bonding would afford us some protection, but that we must be a group, for our own protection.

Her parting gift to me was the thing she'd pointed at us when we arrived, a box the size of a paperback book with a handle, but *many* times heavier than it should be. "It's a weapon, dear," Amelia told me. "Just don't point it at anything you want to keep."

I'm afraid to write these words, but could it possibly get any stranger?

Friday, September 06, 2002

Lexa's Diary: Tuesday, August 27, 2002



We all went to bed. What happened next is so weird. It was some ungodly hour, nearly morning but still dark, when some sound downstairs woke me up. I grabbed and robe and ran downstairs from my attic room to the next floor, where I saw Seth, who clutched a baseball bat. There was a heavy banging sound somewhere below us. All of a sudden Fiona yelled through the door of her room that Michael just called on her cell phone and said not to open the door. Seth and I ran downstairs.

Beneath the stairs is the door down to the basement. Something was on the other side of that door, clawing to get out. We heard a horrible thudding down the stairs, wood snapping, then shortly thereafter clawing again. Fiona came downstairs at that point, saying she'd called the police. We dragged furniture in front of the door and waited tensely.

The cops were prompt, a man and a woman, Ray and Sarah, I think were their names. Ray shoved back the furniture and opened the basement door. On the back of it were deep claw marks, and the top step was broken, but when he turned the light on, the bulb exploded.

Just then, Sarah, who was outside the house, yelled to her partner. He ran out while we looked out the window. We couldn't see much, but did catch a glimpse of a black shape slinking into the bushes in the dim streetlight.

When Sarah came in the house, she was white as a sheet, her eyes wide and hands shaking. She told us it was some kind of dog, with a cancerous bulge on the side of its head. The basement window was broken in, but the hole seemed much too small for a dog that size.

The cops left after alerting Animal Control, saying they'd patrol the area.

By that time it was getting light outside, and Fiona was about to fix omelettes for us (she makes the best!), when we heard what sounded like hail on the roof.

Nope, not hail.

It was raining tadpoles.
As promised, here's "Lexa's Diary", a summary of what happened in our Unknown Armies game the first day.

By way of intro, Lexa (or Alexandra Valentine) is a 21-year-old college senior who attends the University of Alexandria and works at an antiquarian bookseller in the (fictional) Southern town of Alexandria. She's rather outspoken, attractive but tomboyish--think Angel-era Cordelia without the vanity. She's lived in a house owned by Michael Burroughs for two years. Her housemates are Fiona Cantwell, who has lived there for seven years, and newcomer Seth MacAdams, who found refuge there six months ago after a life on the street.

Lexa's Diary: Monday, August 26, 2002



Michael's been gone since Thursday, and we were getting worried. Sure, his work as an antiques procurer takes him off places pretty frequently, but he always tells one of us, or his mother for sure, and it's just not like him to leave his cell phone. [Oh, man, we had no idea!] Fiona called Black and White Antiques, but Mr. White hadn't seen him and Mr. Black was unreachable.

And then two guys showed up at our door. They wore expensive suits. One was an older guy who introduced himself as Rabbi Simon Ben-Ezra and a very tall younger man, Mr. Lake, in town on business. I could wear Mr. Lake had a gun in a shoulder holster under his jacket. The rabbi had a large signet ring with the Star of David on it. Both had a faint oily smell about them, the older man more than the younger.

Rabbi Ben-Ezra claimed that Michael had acquired an item in a small box that should've gone to them. We claimed ignorance, pretty much because we were. The rabbi gave me his card—expensive-looking, with an 800 number on it. They left in a chauffeured limousine.

We searched Michael's room to see if we could find the item. I felt bad about doing it, but we didn't find it. Fiona said his favorite sword was missing from his fencing stuff under the bed.

Fiona and I checked all the usual hangouts. We even questioned Bill, the smelly homeless guy by the grocery store that Michael always brings food to, but no one had seen our missing friend.

Seth went on to work at Blockbuster, as usual. [Note: he told us later that some guy with a drug addict vibe came in asking for something Michael had, saying he'd make it worth Seth's while.]

Thursday, September 05, 2002

A story on NPR the other day about the new cathedral in Los Angeles mentioned that it is constructed with no right angles. Is that mystically significant? It would certainly keep out Hounds of Tindalos...
Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman inspired me to enter the world of blogs.

S. sent me this news article yesterday: Man Found with Mouth Sewn Shut in City Square
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020903/od_nm/mouth_dc

Tomorrow night is the next installment of the Unknown Armies game that S is running. I greatly fear for my character's sanity. I'll post a summary of what's happened so far in the next few days.

Riveting stuff, this.