58 HOURS, 30 MINUTES, AND 12 SECONDS
"You see that light, Aerin?"
After at least half an hour of the rushing of sewage rapids and
the echo of both elves' footsteps, Aerin and Dhubagèl had
reached an obscure maintenance tunnel. The only light source
buzzed away from a bulb at the end.
They passed through a heavy iron gate which took up the entire
height and width of the stagnant, abandoned old tunnel and
stopped at a grubby fuse box that was draped with spider webs.
Dhubagèl opened it up, pushed his finger through a hole in the
wires and pressed a button at the back of the box. "Lovely
weather we’re having today." Something beeped, and a section of
the wall clicked open. He shut the box. "...said no one in a
sewer ever."
On the other side of the door, the ancient brickwork became
newer and more slapdash the further they ventured down the
tunnel. Both of them bent down at the low ceiling, which was
spotted with tiny stalactites, as they huddled towards a dead
end. Dhubagèl knocked on the wall.
The wall swung open. "AAAAAAAYYYYY!" shouted the naked man, his
richly tan skin reflecting the warm glow of the room behind him.
After the initial shock, Aerin noticed a tattoo on his right arm
of an orange minotaur.
Dhubagèl turned off his torch. "Really, Mo?"
The man pulled Dhuabgèl into a hug which was visibly crushing
the slender elf. "It’s been too long, Dhubagèl! Who's your
friend?"
Dhubagèl receded back upon being released. "This is Aerin. Aerin
Liette."
The man grinned at Aerin and shook his hand. "Aerin Liette!
Dhubagèl has told me so much about you!"
"Really?"
"No,” said the man, his smile dropping into blank seriousness,
still looking Aerin in the eyes and still, continually, shaking
his hand. “I'm Maurice Lockswell, brother to Winston and Robert
Lockswell, son of Albert Lockswell,
great-great-something-or-other of Sir James Lockswell."
Aerin, who had - heroically - resisted glancing at the man's
penis for this long, looked up at him in quiet horror. "Well,
it's...very nice to finally meet you."
"Come in, come in." Lockswell gestured with lean, muscular arms.
The room was low, but wide, with two ornamented arches that
sprung from the corners of the roof and intersected in the
middle. In the far corner of the room, a television buzzed with
broken half-images and static opposite an old sofa below wires
spotted with little orange light bulbs that hung from the gothic
arches like criss-crossing vines. In the centre was a long stone
table - like an altar - that stretched half the length of the
room, the light casting shadows of the faded names engraved
centuries ago in the stones Aerin stood on; likely the names of
the builders, he thought, but that reminded him of graves that
had been eroded into anonymity by the rain, as did the walls of
richly carved coffins that had been slotted into- "Is this a
fucking crypt?" asked Aerin.
Lockswell laughed. "Go on, ask me why the last hope for humanity
has settled into a crypt."
"You live here? Right next to the corpses?"
Dhubagèl threw a towel over to Lockswell, which landed on a
little wooden stool flanked by chunky radio equipment. He picked
it up and pulled it around his waist. "This is the basement of a
very old church they built in...around about-"
"The deathly, noxious summer of 1191." Dhubagèl whispered,
making his way over to a shelf packed with drinks.
"-in 1191, when they were trying to bring human religion to
these swamps. The ground was awful, but they thought this would
be a good place to build because it was right in the middle of
all the villages that would later form the city above us. They
tried to wean in the locals with talk of love and tolerance, but
soon they warned against witchery, and communion with the
swamp's dark spirit. This was not enough, and so they captured a
young woman they claimed to have found at an altar of sticks and
mud and declared 'tomorrow, this witch will burn'. That night,
the rivalry between the villages was put aside. The mothers and
daughters of each one gathered around the church and chanted in
old Elvin tongues for the woman's innocence. When the monks
awoke the next morning, the woman was gone, and their
newly-finished church was sinking into the muck.”
A deeply, darkly thunderous voice spoke from another room off to
the side. "The beautiful conceit of that tale being that the
elves could put the blame either on the ancient and terrible
powers of the sons and daughters of the Stag, or the mere
carelessness of imperialist cowboy builders." The speaker
stepped carefully into view, a snow-white orc with great tusks
rising up from behind his bottom lip, nuzzling into the neck of
a fuzzy little mole that was sleeping in his arms. Mo Lockswell
stepped in between Aerin and the orc. "Aerin, this is Täikur,
he's our doctor and...uhm..."
"Spiritual middle-manager for the soul of humankind."
"That."
A shout from the top of a narrow stone staircase: "IS SOMEONE
DOWN THERE?"
"The Collisterrans sent a new boy, he's just in with Dhubagèl!"
Bellowed Lockswell.
"COMING!" Bare footsteps clapped against the steps that wound
down a narrow passage, what must have once been the tower of the
church. Lockswell battered a drum roll on a wooden table.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Red Hand, boys and girls, give a
big hand for the leader of this cell, champion of the legendary
allies of the Lockswell clan, the saviour of Eusogee, the
stalker in the nightmares of Collisterran princes, the whirlwind
of blood and fire heralded by the first whisper of dissent…” he
finished his drumroll, and gestured towards the doorway, arms
and hands outstretched. A few awkward seconds passed as the
woman came down to their floor, yawning and running a hand
through the black mass of tangled curls she called hair. She saw
Aerin and forced a polite smile as she sauntered over to him.
“This is Aerin Liette,” said Lockswell.
“Hi Aerin,” said the woman, shaking his hand. “John Boss. Always
nice to meet an elf fighting the good fight.”
Aerin’s face did nothing, for a few moments. Receiving no
command from the brain, his hand continued to shake hers, and
his organs and nervous system more or less functioned as normal
for these six, seven, eight, nine seconds of total independence
from thought. He tried to process what he was looking at: she
was slightly shorter than he was, barefoot with pale legs that
disappeared just above the knees under a puffy white dress,
raggedy with elegant lace sleeves that looked like they'd been
scavenged from a wedding dress. Her small mouth was
half-finished with red lipstick, below a thin, twirly moustache
drawn in eyeliner pencil. Despite that, her face was most
strikingly dominated by the large circle of black glass where
her right eye should have been. In this light, Aerin could just
about see the nest of rotating circles and lenses housed inside.
The only other distinctive detail Aerin could recount: a
pin-prick mole on the apple of her cheek.
"What." Said Aerin.
"Um...maybe Mo oversold it a bit. It’s beneficial to have a
reputation, but… I just sort of run things around here: making
plans, rescue missions, shopping trips. That sort of thing."
The signal from Aerin's brain that told Aerin's hand to let go
finally arrived. "Which one?”
“Sorry?”
“Which John Boss are you?”
"What?"
“John Boss the 34th was 200 years ago,” he thought out loud. “So
assume ‘a generation’ lasts 25 years, ish. That’s...eight
generations. Which is...four plus eight would be...42. But wait,
how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Right, so that would make you the 41st?”
“The 41st what?”
“John Boss the 41st, daughter of John Boss the 40th,
great-great-something-or-other of John Boss the 34th,” nodded
Aerin, satisfied. “Right. That’s fine. Hello.”
“I...didn’t know we had numbers now.”
“He’s a big fan, John!” said Dhubagèl, grinning. “He expected
you’d be taller. Hairier. Bear-ier.”
“Oh, right.” John nodded. “The name.”
“The moustache threw me off a bit, to be honest,” said Aerin,
gesturing to his upper lip.
John paused, narrowed her eye, and stormed over to a mirror.
Lockswell exploded with laughter.
“Oh, fuck off!” She tried to rub it off with a finger, spreading
a black smudge over her lip. She sighed, turned around and and
sat down at the long stone table in the centre of the room,
pulling over a large paper folder. “So Aerin, your old cell sent
me over your file two weeks ago. If anyone else in this room had
endeavored to read it…” she glanced at Lockswell.
Lockswell interrupted. "-you don't know that I haven’t read his
file."
"You don’t read anything, in Language classes you always just
skipped to the annotations."
"I had a healthy appetite for academic success!"
"Maurice,” she folded her arms and leaned forward. “The only
thing you had an appetite for between the ages of 14 and 19 was
this p-"
"-LEASE CHILDREN FOR THE LOVE OF ANY GOD WHO MIGHT HEAR MY CRY,
WE HAVE VISITORS!" shouted Täikur. He sighed, noticing the mole
in his arms wriggling awake. "Shh, shush now, go back to sleep
Aleister. I am so sorry Aerin."
Aerin hadn't moved in minutes, his hands glued to his sides.
"That's...fine."
Täikur turned around and left the room. "I'm putting Aleister to
bed, he's far too young to be hearing this kind of puerility."
Lockswell leaned back in his chair to look at Täikur as he
vanished into his room. “You have no right to complain anymore,
holy man!” He raised his left hand and flicked a wedding ring.
“We’re legit now! You enabled this!”
Aerin didn't think about his cover before the words were out.
"You're married?!"
“ATATATAT! No!” John pointed at him from across the table.
"Stop. Don't say it. We know. We know it's amusing and
inevitable that a Lockswell and a Boss would eventually get
married. Life imitates art. You are not original. Maybe when
this is over we'll retire to Ludorena and the peasants will fall
to their knees at the sight of us. But in the meantime..." She
picked up the file and tossed it over to Aerin's end of the
table. The cover read 'Aerin Liette, #9230'.
Aerin Liette sat down at the table, inspecting his name and
number, trying to get into the character of Aerin Liette.
“You’ve read my file,” he said, pulling a confident smirk. “So I
probably don’t need to list my qualifications.” He opened the
thick file to a blank page. But you get blank inside pages at
the start of books, he thought, so he didn’t let this phase him
as he casually flipped over to the second blank page. Would
‘Aerin’ break a sweat as he skimmed through to find the first
page unaffected by this obvious printing error? No, so he
didn’t, as he skimmed through to the end of the file of fifty
blank pages.
He closed the file, and placed it quietly back on the table.
“Okay.”
"This came from the ‘Drummers Corner’ cell,” said John Boss.
“The same place we got that insane transmission this morning. So
tell us, Aerin, who are you and why were you sent here?"
"Ah. Yes. The phone call. Well, you see...my..." His eyes
widened as his physical awkwardness snapped into the mode of a
storyteller. "My mate Ricky, he had...a plan. An plan to fix..."
John Boss leaned forward, interested. "...everything. Ricky
called it...Operation Mr. Worldwide. Operation Mr. Worldwide
was…” he paused, “...an idea. A plan, designed over many years
in total secrecy to turn the rebellion's fortunes around.
Getting me here was just step…” he contemplated. “Two.”
"What was step one?” Lockswell asked.
“Step one was faking my death. Aerin Liette died in Collisterra.
This?" He picked up the blank file. "This was just a decoy, a
patsy, a prop. They burned the real file along with my body."
"Why wouldn't they keep it?” Dhubagèl interjected. “Surely
they'd want to-"
Aerin pressed his finger against Dhubagèl's lips and gave him a
steely, authoritative look. "Sweetie, this is Collisterra we're
talking about. Maybe you have room to hoard your little records,
diaries, and photo albums here in the big city. But in
Collisterra, you die one day, and the planet just keeps on
spinning the next."
Täikur ran into the room, bounding over the sofa. "TV!" In a
second he'd thrown himself around the little plastic box,
fiddling with the aerial at the back. Inside the box, two old
elvin men in suits argued in front of an audience.
"CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT LEFT THAT
EUDDNJWEHIDAHDWNAJDJAWOFICWHEHDDI." The crowd applauded as the
fallen aerial swung to a good position for a moment. The other
elf pointed angrily at the semi-circular table: "HANG ON, LET'S
JUST- LET'S JUST CAST OUR MIND BACK THROUGH FFFREPWPPPSSS RECORD
IN OFFICE, HE'HE'HEDSBXNULKSPALQQPSOSJDNDNSSWCLOPSOJAJAVVVV-"
Täikur held the aerial high and hit a button. The image switched
to a woman with a large microphone staring out from behind the
lit glass. Behind her, there was an anxious crowd with islands
of police vans dotted around, and even further back the black
smoke rising from the Dryadoran Amphitheatre. "-have been told
that the situation is still developing. Claims have been made
that the explosion was a technical fault with the unit itself."
She looked down at a cue card. "DefCorp, the creators of Siran
X-01, have already responded and called these rumours
'nonsense'. The Prime Minister is expected to hold a rally
outside the amphitheatre this Sunday."
Cut to an old man sitting in a small chair flanked by huge
screens and office workers running behind a frosted glass
window. "Is there anything more we know about what was going on
inside the theatre just before the explosion, if the machine had
exhibited any kind of faults before it combusted?"
Cut back to the woman on the soot-blackened street. "While the
live television broadcast had numerous technical difficulties in
the final minutes before the disaster, eyewitness accounts agree
that the machine was working perfectly, saluting the Dryadoran
national anthem and giving a bouquet of flowers to two choirboys
before displaying a variety of functions in a 'quick and fluid
succession'. Due to the murder of the gladiator Bo Krodah
earlier today, the match was rescheduled to include an arena
human known as ‘John Boss’-”
“What!?” John Boss shot out of her chair.
The signal cut out as Täikur dropped the aerial. "WHO THE HELL
ARE YOU!?"
Everyone turned around from the TV, as a woman in rotten jeans
and a hoodie was carried into the room and placed on the stone
table by a colossal man with an eyepatch and a moustache.
"Hello,” said John Boss the 34th, bluntly. "This must be the
safe house. Is there a doctor?"
Aerin knocked his chair back as he stood up. "WHAT!? You're
supposed to be dead!"
"Unconscious." Boss declared, lifting up Chel’s hand and holding
a thumb against the inside of her wrist. "This woman is
unconscious and needs a doctor. Who, and where?"
Täikur snapped back into life and rushed over to Chel's
unconscious body. "That would be me. Bring her through to my
laboratory, what happened?"
"Shot in the shoulder. She was walking and talking for about 30
minutes before she collapsed."
The human and the orc lifted Chel off the table and carried her
through to Täikur's room. A few moments after they'd
disappeared, Lockswell was the first to speak up. "So we're just
not going to question the strange man that just walked in with-"
he paused as he glanced at the entrance tunnel, "-without
closing the bloody door! How the fuck did he get through those
without…” he trailed off as he stormed out into the tunnel.
Dhubagèl had one arm around his chest, the other supporting his
chin. "Well, he IS human. It's not like he has much option to
betray us. He'd be killed on sight if he was seen by, well,
anyone."
Boss the 41st stalked around the table to Aerin. "Maybe Aerin
would like to enlighten us all?"
Aerin was silent for a few more seconds. "Isn't it obvious?"
"What?"
He scoffed dramatically. "Didn't you even listen to Brittany's
phone message?”
John Boss, without breaking eye contact, pulled out a knife the
size of Aerin’s hand from god-knows-where and impaled his name
on the file, about a centimeter from the tip of his pinky
finger.
"Jingles,” Aerin murmured. “That man is...Jacques Jingles.
Codename: Solvent. And the woman is...Stephi."
“‘Stephi’ being codename for…?”
“In espionage, as in fiction, I like to keep things
need-to-know. The Drummers Corner cell feels the same way.”
"So they're the ones who are going to solve all our problems,
are they? And how exactly might they do tha-"
"Excuse me, where's the armoury?"
John Boss turned around to face John Boss. "Why should I tell
you!?"
"Täikur needs something to cut with and, amazingly, doesn't have
anything safe to cut with. Did you just glance at that little
side door behind the staircase?"
"No."
"Thanks." John Boss ran across the room and through the little
side door behind the staircase.
John Boss got up off the table, her eye burning a hole into John
Boss' back. "Why would you look there? You expecting a gallery
of swords there you medieval fucker? Well there’s just guns and
bombs and the one-”
She was interrupted by a huge gasp from the armoury. "Fancy
meeting you here!"
John Boss ran into the room and screamed “THAT’S A FAMILY
HEIRLOOM YOU DUMB SHITE!” as John Boss strode out of the room,
grinning as he inspected the red scimitar of the Doom Pirate
Nazir Al-Zahabi. He picked up the backpack from the floor and
momentarily looked up. "Hi, Aerin."
"Hello," said Aerin, as Boss returned to Täikur's room with John
screaming at him as she followed, leaving Aerin, Dhubagèl and
Maurice alone with eachother.
Words from the laboratory reverberated around the millennia-old
crypt walls. "YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST WALK IN HERE AND- HOW DID
YOU EVEN FIND THIS PLACE? THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE
HEADQUARTERS FOR THE ONLY HOPE LEFT FOR OUR ENTIRE SPECIES!
BILLIONS OF LIVES DEPEND ON THIS BUNKER'S SECRECY! YOU COULDN'T
HAVE JUST MADE A LUCKY FUCKING GUESS!"
"I didn't have to."
"THEN PLEASE, ENLIGHTEN US ALL! ‘HOW DID HE DO IT?’!?"
John Boss the 34th's head popped out from around the doorframe,
an eye trained on Aerin. "Footprints in puddles of gunge, a
still-active torch dropped in the water, and the faint yet
distinctive hint of rum nipping above the general atmosphere of
piss. Eau de toilette, indeed." John vanished behind the door
again.
Dhubagèl threw his head back and cackled, "I love it!" Lockswell
silently glared at the both of them from across the room, then
turned and headed to Taïkur’s lab at the sound of the escalating
argume-
"WHO DO YOU EVEN THINK YOU ARE!?"
"My name is Joh-"
"JACQUES FUCKING JINGLES. WE KNOW. WHAT A NICE NAME FOR A
GRAVE."
Aerin, Lockswell, and Dhubagèl drifted into the lab. Glassware
and cups and bowls of powder were scattered all over the
workbenches. Täikur took the sword off John Boss. "With all due
respect Professor Jingles, a kitchen knife would have sufficed."
John Boss opened the backpack and gave him the first aid kit.
"Men of medicine like us should be nowhere without the necessary
supplies."
Boss the 41st interjected. "So who's the elf girl? And why is a
qualified surgeon dressed like a homeless person?"
Professor Jacques Jingles, Ph.D straightened Chel out on the
floor and put her feet up on a stool. Täikur pulled on the
sodden bandage and carefully sliced it open with the scimitar.
He prepared a bottle of alcohol and a towel from the first aid
kit, and picked up a pair of dull forceps.
John Boss the 41st noticed the backpack as everyone else watched
Chel anxiously. "What else have you got in that magic bag?"
John Boss the 34th launched from Chel to the bag, zipped it
closed and threw it onto Täikur's bed on the other side of the
room. "Official business. Nothing you'd be interested in, kid."
"Kid!?" She stood there for a moment, hands clenched into fists.
"I'm old enough to have died long before you were born,” warned
John Boss. “Surely this woman's life is more important than your
childlike curiosity?"
Chel weakly drew in a breath. "...what?"
John knelt down beside her as her eyes widened in shock. "Just
stay still Chel, okay? These people are our friends, you're
going to be fine."
Täikur turned her head to face him as he inspected her eyes with
a torch. "You've suffered internal bleeding, you went into shock
in a delayed reaction from all that adrenaline, which doesn't
help with the bleeding, and there are bacteria coursing through
your veins that just hours ago were once in other people's
bowels."
Just as Chel was about to muster a reply, a bulletproof vest
with a police badge was thrown to the floor. Her eyes rolled
back to see John Boss the 41st, pointing a revolver at her head
from above. "Explain."
The other Red Hand members stood still. Aerin was glued to the
side of the room. Only the older John Boss moved even a breath.
"Put the gun down, and let me explain."
She pointed the gun at him. "Why? When a stranger walks into my
bunker, completely unknown to all but four living souls,
carrying a police officer in his arms and a sob story about a
bullet, why shouldn't I keep a gun on you?"
"Would you believe me if I told you I was John Boss the 34th
sent 200 years-"
She clicked the hammer back.
"-okay, then what if I let my good friend and colleague Mr.
Liette explain?"
"Oh," she pointed the gun at Aerin. "And YOU, the one who
just...led these idiots right into my-"
John Boss slammed her down onto the floor. Lockswell and Täikur
rushed over to the fight, but pulled back when gunshots started
bouncing off the walls. John (34) tried to disarm John (41) but
Boss (41) was, amazingly, able to counter his attacks. Lockswell
dived into the commotion a second too late.
Gunshot.
Two years, seven weeks, three days, five hours, fourteen
minutes, and twenty-six seconds ago, John Boss the 34th had
slain a dragon. Thirteen years, thirty six weeks, four days, two
hours, fifteen minutes, and seven seconds ago he had waltzed in
the court of Duke Tiberius with the- One year, seven seconds,
twelve years, six hours, he he stolen the heart of a- Two
hundred years, eight hours, fifteen minutes and four seconds he
saved the town of Ludorena from- the jewel-encrusted- heart of
a- crying- YOU NOT YOU PLEASE GODS STOP IT STOP IT HERE I JUST
WANT THIS- gallantly venturing out onto the rolling sand dunes
with the vigour of his newfound youth- inspected with morbid
fascination the hourglass emptying and filling up again when he
reversed it- John Boss lit the fuse, and jumped behind the bed.
They ducked, and in the most serious of tones the girl said "If
this kills me, I am going to fucking haunt you forever". The
fuze sizzled.
"I look forward to the compa- no come on we have to go now- NOW!
!WON NONONONO You you you're there and you're I'm a gone bakc
here rememmememememememememembbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
twelve hours twelve minutes twelve seconds five for three to
dark red wine oceans oceans oceans oceans oceans oceans oceans
oceans oceans o L L L L L L
About thirty minutes ago, a gun had gone off by accident. What
was once a man called John Boss the 34th was now a small mess of
indeterminate red chunks, with a puddle of blood spreading from
the remaining half of a skull. Aerin ran through the sewers,
completely directionless, his head was numb and heavy and he
felt like if he stopped he would scream black bile from his
burning stomach. There was nothing down there anymore. Nothing
in that bunker but meat. Trapped in a foreign, hostile country
with only one person left who knew him, Aerin Liette's life was
a black hole from which no hope could escape. Out through a
sewer grate and up into the cobbled street, a gray-purple sky
lit by the first gold of dawn, a slow and icy breeze biting at
his cheeks and the bottoms of his ears. He wandered for hours,
clinging to only the vaguest sense of location; half-remembered
shop signs and particular buildings. It occurred to him that if
John Boss the 41st had just killed John Boss the 34th, and John
Boss the 34th hadn't yet become the Red Death and founded the
rebellion, not to mention been alive to become John Boss the
41st's ancestor; how could Boss the 41st have been alive to kill
him, and how could there have ever been a Red Hand bunker to
kill him in? Aerin didn't know. He was too exhausted to care
anymore.
Aerin reached the riverside and walked until he found a bridge
he recognised. Retracing his drive through familiar territory,
he wearily climbed the steps of 10 Cadilay Avenue. Krieda shot
up off the sofa and had to cling to the doorframe to stop. "So!
How was it?" She grinned. She was grinning. At a time like this.
The world was ending, Aerin thought to himself, and Krieda
Caishead was smiling because he had come home. She put whatever
book she was reading on the hallway table and wrapped herself
around him. She wasn't looking into his sullen eyes when he
mumbled "fine. How are you?" It was an advantage, sometimes,
that anyone who knew him knew not to ask what was wrong with
him. At times like this Aerin would throw himself into work, and
a usefully insurmountable project was about to emerge from the
tectonics: the next day, Krieda’s father was diagnosed with a
cancer of the bowels.
It was her younger brother that walked her down the aisle of an
ancient and beautiful church outside the city. Aerin still
basically hated weddings, where demonic relatives dressed up in
their best smiles to infest what was allegedly the best day of
Krieda's life. Luckily for the both of them, it wasn't. That day
came five years later, and her name was Katrìona Liette. She had
her mother's smile, the smile at the end of the universe, whose
light could escape a black hole such as that morning seven
years, two hundred and five days fifteen hours, and fourteen
minutes ago; and she had her father's eyes that looked at the
world and this time, this time, saw one thing that didn't feel
wretched, fragile, and immediately mortal. Then another. And
another, and another: his name was Artair Liette before she
changed it to Arabella eighteen years later. But that was still
to come, and Aerin had tens of thousands of days to spend in
streets and supermarkets and parks and fields and cliffside
footpaths and trendy cafés, tacky kids’ restaurants and what
were once human lands; the bay that devoured Lieopes and the
fields where Magnus once stood; the boring, daily solitude of
his bathroom and his house, his garden and his study, his study
where he wrote nothing for two years since The Incident, but
instead devoured the literature of the centuries he’d skipped:
his detractors and the precious few who had laboured under his
past self’s shadow. And then he sat bored one afternoon, a rare
afternoon stolen away from his raucous children, and there it
went. A pen raced across a page and didn't stop for four hours.
His handwriting looked like asylum scrawl, atrophied from
disuse, which meant he had to learn to use a typewriter.
Ever-encouraging and quietly assertive, Krieda politely
suggested a daily pagecount. It was a small-press magazine that
first published him, and he cringed the moment it reached print,
but the experience was novel.
His fortieth birthday started with a noisy six-year-old and a
noisier four-year-old invading his bed, was spent in a silent
amazement that he was actually having a fortieth birthday, and
ended with the four of them half-asleep on a sofa watching, of
all things, the shite film adaption of Darian Danger, whose
ending cleared the obstacle of Darian's death so he could ride
off into the galactic sunset with Lucy Lightning, having
miraculously - inexplicably - escaped the jaws of a supermassive
black hole. Four years later, Aerin and Krieda brought home a
puppy, and through all the lovely chaos of a family life Krieda
was still able to steal away to her studio and draw and paint
and sculpt work that had inflated over the decades with love and
awe without its cerebral edge dulling in the slightest.
Aerin Liette would not escape death forever. But today, just
today, for this one glorious moment he sat at his desk and
looked down from the second-storey window of 10 Cadilay Avenue,
a house they never moved from, whose walls gathered a billion,
billion little moments too quiet for memory: laughter whose tiny
vibrations would reverberate in the atmosphere forever, which
would accumulate over miles and months to one day guide winds
and stop hurricanes; whispered bedtime stories of knights and
demons and worlds saved through song. He looked out the window
and watched Krieda and the children chasing an unruly puppy
through the garden in which - in the past, in a foreign, hostile
country - he thought this would never happen. He was silly
enough to think this would not happen to him, if only he clung
to the good.
He felt a golden sense of finality glowing within him. The task
of his soul complete, Aerin cracked his knuckles and decided it
was time to put this sodding typewriter to use.
And we lived happily ever after.
THE END
AERIN LIETTE WILL RETURN
IN
CHRISTMAS ON CADILAY AVENUE