#thread: leland.

[charyka-a]

@gcnenineteen. | closed starter.

There’s not much to see or do, in the devil’s car, other than lower the windows and let the night suck you dry. He’s used to it, hot air when it’s cold, cold air when it’s warm, the endless nothing around him. Coast to coast on the upside-down, the highway 50 of nightmares, the Unseelie Court of this day and age, a roaring engine and the mad king behind them. Oh, it’s been a while since he’s called himself Erlking, been a while since he’s supped with Oberon and Puck, tongue-twisted tricksters of their own, but the roar beneath their Hunt has never changed. Now it’s pistons, then it was the beating of hooves, once it was the ekstasis of Maenads. Ek, out of, stasis, the state of being. Outside the state of being: is this not what Leland Gaunt is, right now, in this Other America, in his horse-drawn black cart of hot metal? Is this not what the is along these Highways in Hiding, this traced map beneath the stars, these ways that only sometimes follow paved roads?

Oh yes he is. Oh yes he always has been. His boots know the roads better than anyone, he’s traversed them longer than anyone. Mr. Skin in New Orleans, the Black Man in Arkham and Salem, the Walkin’ Dude in Las Vegas, and outside of the damned damnable United States, the God of Bloody Tongues in Kenya, the Faceless God in Egypt. And so many more. Too many more.

But in a country that lives on petrol and the blood of the poor, he much loves to wear the face of Leland Gaunt in his pristinely-kept Tucker Talisman. Who knows who or what he might hit, after all: a little blood on the front grill’s always had its character.

[charyka-a]

@talkingsainthood | cont. from here.

Ah, here now: the headstrong one. The drowning but breathing one. The one who thinks she can challenge the world in its entirety from the pits of Hell where it crawled from in the first place to hurt her, to hurt her.

Too bad he crawled out of those same exact pits, too.

“Au contraire, miss. I am being perfectly literal.”

The smile is enough to show the spark of delight that dances in his eyes: surely she must know he is joking. Surely she must see he is simply paling along, as they say, part of the town. The newcomer, certainly, but still damnably trustworthy.

“My name is Leland Gaunt, or simply Mister Gaunt, or simply Leland.”

He offers her a ringed hand, the same one that’s been serving customers all day in that small shop he opened just at the beginning of the week: a quaint little thing that always seems to give you just the thing you wanted to find. One day it’s a carefully decorated plate. The next it’s a small set of thimbles. Tomorrow, who knows?

“I so happen to be the proprietor of Twin Peaks’ most recent little shop... Found Chances. I suppose you’ve heard of it.”