who: @shivparekh
where: The backroom of Parekh & Co, above the premises of Cogg & Bells Clockmakers and Cocordia Plunketts Musical Instruments.
when: 20th of September, 1984
“You’ve got to be– Fuck.” was muttered from gritted teeth as the carefully laid barricade of salt, perfectly measured to be exactly a step inside the smokey fire hazard of a work room, was swiftly dragged underneath one unscuffed sole. Breaking the protective measure against the very man Evan had been doing so well to ignore. The drones of untimely demise quick on his heels, whinging run on sentences about the appearance of seven black birds lurking in the dawn’s first rays, as he leaned back against the now closed thick iron door.
“Skurge? You ever heard of it?” He reached behind him and latched the lock for good measure, knowing it would do absolutely nothing to stop the determined gothic ghoul lurking and listening on the other side. “He’s done and made a mess of your whole floor.” (He hadn’t.) Words were spouted into an empty room, for Shiv had never had the joie de vivre Evan required when he graced others with his immaculate presence and took to hiding behind mountains of bits and bobs and–
Inventions. Not. Junk.
The thought made him roll his eyes as he toed the spilled about grains back into the best impression of a neat line he could manage, before giving up and grasping for his wand to fix a mess that (might have been of his own making but) certainly wasn’t his fault. “I nearly lost my life on one of his accidents. Could you imagine the headlines? They’d take you in. You never took out an insurance plan, did you? Has this been the goal all along? Milk me dry for my delightful company and dispose of me with your untrained live-in lover when you’ve gotten your golds worth? It won’t work!” Sing-songing his words, Evan peeked around one more molehill of crap and was met with emptiness and disappointment.
“Hide and seek isn’t to my tastes, Burke.” The next turn was met with the same result and his patience, never resolute or lasting, had nearly vanished. “And games aren’t your strong suit.” His fingers reached out towards a rather captivating charm, a thing of gold that called out to be touched with a ring on the end of its dangling chain to match. If he squinted, it almost seemed the impression of his name was carved onto the surface of– were those palms trees? He drew his hand back, head snapping around as he expected Shiv to be lurking behind but Evan, and his self-preservation instinct that old kicked in at the last possible moment, were met with more dust, what he was sure was rot, and empty mocking silence.
He sniffed. Once. Twice.
A third time to be sure. “Are you cooking?”
As was often the case when it came to the interruptions of Evan Rosier, Shiv heard him long before he saw him.
What existed behind the thick iron door that separated the showroom floor of Parekh & Co from the universe behind it was a story, in the way that most of Shiv’s greatest creations began in essence, with a story. It began, in no uncertain terms, be wary those who enter here — and from there the story took shape in a workshop, crafted from stone and iron and thick slabs of aged wood, scarred and battered by projects that had come before. From the workshop, lit in ash and smoke and embers, the story grew outwards. A maze of narrow corridors and open doors, rooms bathed in natural light, others shrouded in dust and the dark, stacked with forgotten objects and ghosts. For every room and every improbable square foot of floorspace that reverberated once, on the hour, every hour, with a cacophany of muffled chiming from the shop below, there was another choked and smothered secret and every secret led back to him.
The monster who waited in the midsts of this labyrinth, ignoring the complaints of the man who’d stumbled into it as he searched through the woven illusions written into the grains of the floorboards and the flaking paint on the walls, didn’t much look like a monster, leaning back upon his stool to crack his spine in a long and lazy stretch of one arm and then the other over his head, a satisfying popping of bones realigning. He cracked his knuckles loudly, one hand and then the other as he set down his tools and swept the magnifying goggles back up his forehead, yawned and then rose to his feet, extinguishing his wand with a dismissive, ‘Nox’ he tucked it away behind his ear and shuffled to the door of his gem-cutting room, a flood of natural light subsuming the artificial one he’d just extinguished as he tugged open a disillusioned door to lean into the frame and eye his frequent intruder.
A fragrant waft of smoked turmeric, lavender and sage crept out the doorway, from the agarbatti perched in a copper pot upon the windowsill. Shiv’s lips twitched as he waited, counting out the beats in the air of a lingering mocking silence before he pushed off the doorframe, crossing through any last vestiges of illusion back into reality and asked, “Why? Are you hungry?”
He slipped past Evan in the narrow corridor, cracking his neck with a satisfying pop as he trailed off down the hall and shuffled towards the kitchen, the murmuring inside the walls acknowledged with a brush of his palm against the surface, until the fragrance of star anise and cinnamon warmed the air. Shiv’s culinary pursuits were as unpredictable as his projects, varying from dangerous to merely spicy. Unlikely. “You didn’t disturb the saltlines again did you? Nigel knows what he did.”
With an errant tap of his wand and a hollow clang he set the pot of chai upon the stove back to warming, Shiv’s nose wrinkling faintly upon finding the last of his cinnamon sticks between his fingers before tossing it into the mix. The monster at the center of this story had a particular taste for cinnamon. He paused, scrubbed at his hair for a few moments and then enquired of his guest, “Why are you nosing around my workshop today?”
