Explanation after the story, but this short is about a noir-setting 50's mage with some modicum of control over time/ fate.
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Maybe I knew it was coming. It’s possible you know, to feel something, to know something and yet to act so contrary.
Maybe I was tired. That would explain the second glances unchecked, the pauses never noted. Those eyes…
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, okay pal? I don’t want to be a bore, never boring that’d be the worst…
If you’ve never heard this one listen up, it’s a real riot if it gets told right.
Alright, so three guys walk into an abandoned shipyard--
--dead of night mind you, dead of night.
So these three guys, they’re packing obviously, because what kind of moron comes to these things without a heater?
So, as I was saying, they come to the yard all ready and waiting and they find a guy there, a guy and a crate.
--How big was the crate? Hell if I remember brother, it aint important for the telling buddy, stop throwing off my rhythm.
Right: the guy, the crate, and the boys with the guns all meet up that night, and it’s a legitimate deal mind you, so they get to talkin’ and it’s all fine, all fine and dandy. The three of em’ even lower the guns a bit, they all start to have a laugh and the deal goes through without a hitch.
Yeah, you’re right pal, of course you are.
Okay let me try again from the middle somewhere, sound good? Be patient, be patient I’ll give you what I promised, I always do.
So these three guys don’t put down the guns, they don’t start to chuckle, it’s not a very good time for anyone actually. They want what’s in the box, half price, and seein’ how he’s dumb enough not to bring a gun he should just say fine and take the loss.
You see, he needs the money for something, and it’s really important; it’s important enough that he needs all of it and he needs it now.
He steps back from the crate, and as they turn away to carry it to the car, he reaches into his coat for his revolver.
Surprise! He’s not so stupid after all.
So, he’s about to level the gun, he’s going to kill three idiots too busy carrying a crate to worry about a loser like him.
And he does it, he shoots all three of them, he shoots them exactly where he needs to and they all go down.
Except they don’t, because when he pulls the trigger, the gun clicks instead.
It’s the girl. They know it, you know it, and he knows it. She took the smart option, why gamble if you can guarantee success?
Somewhere there are six bullets lying where they shouldn’t be.
So she’d be getting that money after all, what’s he need it for now, right? Anyway, it doesn’t matter a whole lot anyway because right then his chest explodes, and I mean blood everywhere, he’s off the dock into the water in seconds.
So he’s sinking down there, down to the bottom, and he’s thinking about it all.
I mean all of it buddy, this is probably the penultimate moment of clarity in his entire life.
Imagine that, laughing under water? Not as whimsical as it sounds my friend I can tell you, it hurts a whole lot.
Somehow he kept at it though, and as his lungs filled with water he looked down past the silt on the ocean bed. As he hit the bottom, the mud and pebbles that layered his final resting place pulled away from him as he was engulfed further and further.
Everything was black, his lungs were screaming, but he was completely calm. His eyes were open, and despite the total blackness, he began to dig himself further down, following a slight feeling, a little tug against his ribcage that told him down was the way to go.
So he follows the tug right? I mean why not at this point, just go with the flow when you’ve got nothing to lose. Soon enough it’s more than that, not violent but inherent. It’s instinctual and denying it just has to be the worst decision you’ve ever made.
Now by this point you have to be asking yourself: “how long can a man who’s bleeding to death dig into some silt as he drowns?”
You weren’t going to ask that?
It takes him exactly 25 hours, 36 minutes, and 4 seconds to break through the bottom of the water bed.
That is, it takes him no time at all.
It happens in seconds and it happens in days. It takes all the time in the world and he’s out before he left. Of course where is often more important than when, as so many of us have realized over the course of our time wandering about the streets only to be robbed or shot or to find a hundred dollar bill or to just miss being hit by a cab.
So now that I’ve defined the when, the where:
Imagine bursting out from a floor of pebbles and silt to find yourself in a desert. Yeah, I know it sounds strange, but it gets weirder, trust me.
So the water from the hole begins to seep out into the sand, turning it to mud as it slips back into the hole and the water spreads. So the guy pulls himself out and tries to liberate himself from this desert, but he doesn’t seem to be able to. You see each step he takes away from the hole, it seems like there’s just that many more to the edge of the sand dunes. This isn’t a laughing matter either, the mud hole’s getting bigger you see, the water’s really pouring out now. So he runs, and he runs.
He runs until his chest wound stops bleeding and he runs until the light’s waned and returned too many times to count.
He chances a glance back and the hole is all encompassing now, he looks forward and the desert goes on forever. Well, I mean if there could be forever this would be it, you know?
So he’s about to run again, but he notices he’s lacking something he had before. There’s no tug anymore, not right then or there.
The water comes closer, and the muddy silt threatens to melt away the sand right under him and consume him once again, but he waits. He’s quickly surrounded by the muck, and it takes days to encompass him, in seconds.
He’s under in a heartbeat, he cannot breath, he cannot see.
There it is, pulling against my ribs, there it is again.
I can feel something grab my hand from above and the next thing I know I’m next to another man who’s pulled me out.
He hasn’t saved me, I know he hasn’t, but the sand recedes into the background and the forests repopulate the world as somehow I know they should and I am grateful. The hole is nothing more than a tiny little puddle now, off in the distance and as I turn back to him I smile at my companion with relief.
“Took you long enough to make up your mind,” he says to me beaming.
Suddenly it shoots through my spine: I don’t trust him, I don’t trust anyone.
“I didn’t know I was on the clock,” I say with a smirk.
“We’re going for a little walk, if you don’t mind too much,” he says ignoring my comment. He’s already a few meters away when I get to my feet. I can feel myself pulled behind him, as if he has me on a rope tied to my insides.
It’s not unpleasant, the contrary.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
I knew the answer before he told me.
I trust that everything will turn out right, I trust him completely.
Exactly 3 minutes after he fell into the water, the man climbed back up to the surface and dragged himself back onto the dock.
There was blood everywhere, but the wounds were none of them lethal. As the car begins to pull away, he reaches out and tries to say something, but collapses on the ground instead and blacks out.
Four blocks away, a car with four men and a box is accidentally run off the road by a bus. The bus driver would later claim that the headlights of the car blinked out halfway down the road and he was unable to see the vehicle. The four bodies of the men from the car have not been identified.
A fantastic structure of vines, twisted tree trunks, shale, and every possible material looms ahead of us. It always seems so far away, but I know we’ll get there in good time.
He says we might meet up again after this, if I can find him again.
I think I’ll try, but I have some business to clear up first.
Anyway pal, that’s my story.
Yeah, I agree, it’s pretty fantastic.
Oh yeah, just fill the bag up, sorry about taking so much of your time.
“The boss is going to be here any minute, he’s going to have your head man, you’d better get out of here while you can.”
That’s sweet of you pal, it is, but he’s exactly the man I want to see.
In exactly 2 minutes and 34 seconds a man will walk through that door, he’ll demand to know what’s going on. He’ll tell me who he is and that I just can’t take his money. He’ll tell me I’m a dead man I probably will be. He’ll have a gun, and he’ll be confident. He’ll have his two mooks and I’ll have a bag of his money and He’ll probably kill me right there. Lord knows the case’d never hit the courts.
So In exactly 2 minutes and 30 seconds I unload my tommy gun into a door, wounding three men. Two of them are in the hospital for a month, and one of them has a punctured lung and a ruined left leg. He settles down and someone else takes his place. Chronic pain to the day I hear.
Four seconds later I’m on my way out the back door.
It'll do.
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So, I play a tabletop role-playing game called World of Darkness. For those of you who don't really have experience in this area, It's like Dungeons and Dragons but without far fewer numbers and far more onus put on group-storytelling. Also it's focused on horror/ mystery etc. As part of a game of Mage Noir (so, like, Mages in a noir setting) Alderman was an ex-lower-end mobster that now ran a dive-ish bar. This following short was something I wrote to get into the mindset of the character. It's basically the story of his Awakening as a Mage, an event by which normal people (sleepers) realize that they can magic it up via a existential journey to a "Watchtower" associated with their powers. Alderman was a fate/time focused mage. I wrote it about two years ago.
Might flesh it out in the future.
annaxmalina
snowghoul
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titsay
theartofmadeline
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