You can now grab entry 2 right here. Enjoy.

Right, well, I’ve finally gotten around to starting a new project. I’ve not abandoned An Old Friend just yet, but it’s slipped away from me a little. I’m not sure where it’s going yet, or at all, and it didn’t seem right to continue it just yet.

That said, this new project suddenly did feel right to me.  It’s an audio series, read by me, and I suppose somewhat inspired by The Raw Shark Texts, although that was something I only spotted once it was finished.  I’m hoping to do one of these a week, assuming people aren’t put off by my reading, but it all depends on whether anyone is interested.

I know I say this a lot, but it’s important.  I need to know if you like a specific piece or not, I crave feedback.  Actually, I crave constructive feedback, to be precise.  I like almost everything I write, sort of comes with the territory, but I would like to know what the audience thinks, even if I just end up ignoring you like the creepy little silhouettes you are in my mind.

Anyway, here’s part one of my new project – Aide Memoir – written and read by me but certainly not based on me in any way, shape or form.  Maybe me in the future.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy.

Aide Memoir – Entry the first.

The expanded and revised version of Childhood Thievery is now available for purchase via lulu.com!

Here’s a link, please go and buy it. I’ll be your best friend.

Is it bad form to end a chapter halfway through a flashback?

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I used to run a book store, back in my youth. I had gotten it into my head that the writing was my calling, and that the best way to learn how to do that would be to absorb the accumulated knowledge of every author the world has ever known. My father seemed to agree, and he purchased for me the shop in question as a birthday gift, although for which birthday I cannot remember.

The shop was not very successful, garnering no more than three paying customers per week, but as a bastion of knowledge it was unparalleled. Bastions rarely supply the necessary funds to pay debts, however, and within a year the shop was to close. It seemed people were no longer interested in the printed word, at least from my establishment.

As I packed up the shop (exceptionally slowly, I might add) I happened across a small chest underneath a pile of books in one of the shop’s many corners. Upon further examination I found it to contain a small, yellowed sphere of a curious weight. It was a queer little thing, but I opted to hold onto it for a while, popping it into my pocket as I stepped out into the pungent air of the city.

It was a short walk back to my home, but with every step I could feel the orb getting heavier. It wasn’t becoming physically heavier of course, but it began to weigh on my mind more and more. An odd effect for a mere keepsake to have, but I began to covet it in the same way one covets their own bill-fold. As every person passed me on the street, I would plunge a hand into my pocket and wrap it around the orb to ensure it was still safe and sound. I had only just discovered the odd trinket, and now I was terrified that someone would take it from me.

I found myself hurrying home, and before long I was greeted by the large wooden door I had come to know and love. Bursting into my house, I dashed for the drawing room, threw myself into a chair and pulled the sphere from my pocket.

Ordinarily, I am not one to mindlessly cling onto keepsakes and trinkets, even when I was young. My home was a decidedly Spartan place, little in the way of furniture and no ornaments. Anything that would require dusting had no place in my life at the time, an ideal that starts to slip as you get older and you find yourself in need of a china tea service “for special occasions”. In fact, at that moment, the only thing present in the house that hadn’t come with it (other than myself) was the little sphere.

Despite being a perfect sphere, I soon discovered that the object was ill-suited to being rolled. As I observed it, I attempted to roll it from one hand to the other as a child does with a marble, but the thing would invariably stop halfway through its little journey. At first I though that perhaps it was weighted on one side, like the trick dice used by the alleyway swindlers, but I could feel no such thing when I held it. In spite of this, or possibly because of it, the thing kept me entertained for hours. No matter how large or small the distance between my hands, the sphere would always stop its journey in the exact centre of the space available.

After hours of playing with the thing I fell asleep at the table. I couldn’t bear to leave the sphere alone, and yet fatigue had set in; the only logical choice was to sleep at the table. In retrospect, such logic seems a little unusual, but at the time it seemed perfectly natural. So, with my forehead plastered to the table with a thin film of sweat, I allowed myself to drift off to sleep.

Then came the dreams. My youth was permeated by bad dreams of such lucidity that on many occasions I had cause to question my sanity, but I was also a particularly nervous youth. The dreams that I had that night, however, illustrated to me just how distant all other dreams had been. These were not just lucid, they were real.

I began stood in a forest of dead trees. Dead wood flaked from grey branches as a light breeze blew past my face, and I walked deeper into the trees. The sky was black and obscured the tops of each trunk, but the area near the ground was curiously well lit given the surroundings. I dodged a number of probing roots and creeping vines, obstacles that would have been hidden in any less light, before finally emerging into a clearing.

The clearing gave the impression that some vast pastry cutter had stamped a hole into the forest. Any sign of wildlife came to a halt with a noticeable crispness, with a distinct boundary that seemingly nothing from nature could cross. If pressed, I would describe the clearing as circular, although I am convinced that there may have been a corner in it somewhere, but I couldn’t tell you for certain.

A lake sat in the centre of the clearing, or at least what my mind judged to be a lake. It didn’t share many of the features of the more usual lake, being neither filled with water nor looking particularly lake-like. It looked more like a vast crater filled with an almost fluid mist, yet I just cannot bring myself to think of it as anything other than a lake. Perhaps it was the way the mist rippled as the creature emerged that cemented this image for me.

What emerged from the lake is described as a creature only because I have never seen a mountain move so fast. The knobbly façade rose before me, gleaming in the eerie light, and towered above me by a clear twenty feet. It’s growth was silent, yet every movement implied that it should have produced a cacophony of noise, as though a building were collapsing in reverse, perhaps. Glistening folds parted to reveal a multitude of what I assumed to be eyes, and a vast maw littered with needle-like teeth.

As you can imagine, it was an unsettling image, freakish enough to cause me to snap awake instantly. I hurriedly peeled my face from the table and grasped at the sphere, pushing it into my chest like it were a child. As my heartbeat slowed, I ran a sweaty hand through my already damp hair and turned to drink.

The regenerative qualities of a good whiskey should ever be underestimated. Many a bad day has been cured by a drop of the amber nectar, and I had cause to believe that today would be no different. A reflection in the glass, however, told me different.

As I poured my drink, I spied a figure standing behind me, in the doorway that lead into the hall. I didn’t risk turning around, fear had rooted me to the spot anyway, and I did nothing as he hissed at me.

‘Greetings, Mister Enoch.’

Yeah, went and turned it into a webnovella again.  Retitled part 1, so this is now officially part 2.  Not too long this time, but I have plans for this novella, and the next part will invariably be much longer.  We’re going into flashbacks I think, which should be fun.  Let’s see if I can maintain some semblance of regularity this time…

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In all the time I’ve devoted to studying the various phantasmagoria that inhabits this country, I’ve never seen the same creature twice. Once that specific case is closed, the entity in question was gone, for one reason or another, never to return. I had allowed a crust of arrogance to build up as a result, one that was well and truly fractured by the spectre haunting Hyde.

It was ironic, I suppose, that the first entity to be encountered twice would be the very first phantasm I ever encountered.

The porcelain eyes shifted soundlessly in the not-quite-reflection. Hyde had moved out of sight of the mirror now, yet still the image remained, just as I had expected. Now it was me that should have been reflected, standing as I was mere inches away from the glass, but still it was Hyde leering back at me.

The real Hyde was breathlessly muttering to himself now. After it was explained to him that the creature in the mirror was using his image for some sort of nefarious purposes, the man had suffered some form of mental imbalance and shut down. This suited me fine, however, as it allowed for a bit of science to go undisturbed.

With the imposter-Hyde staring blindly at me, I began an examination of the mirror to the best of my atrophied ability. A few years prior, and I would have been able to recall every factor that required observation, but time and drink had dulled the senses and I could only summon the knowledge to look for the most general of witchcrafts. What this amounted to was a cursory observation of exactly how close to manifestation the doppelgänger currently was.

Manifestation is the endgame when it comes to phantasms. Like pest control, a great deal of Phantasmagology is concerned with preventing the spread of whatever spectral nuisance is in question. Allowing them to manifest tends to mean that you have failed, and will often lead to a bit of combat, which is best avoided when dealing with malevolent spirits. The porcelain eyed beast was closer than I would have liked, and that set me on edge. At the corners of the mirror, small bubbles were starting to form. Within the hour they would have progressed to hideous distortions in the surface of the glass, and not long after that the beast would break through.

I turned to Hyde and tried to rouse him from his fevered babbling, but had little success. For a moment he looked up at me, but all I saw in his face was confusion and fear. An old colleague of mine, a psychiatrist once remarked that, to an unprepared mind, the fantastical world that I studied could be nothing more than a catalyst to psychosis. Hyde was the latest in a vast library of corroborating evidence.

The beast was becoming more animated as time progressed, and I could see the small bubbles in the mirror beginning to grow and blacken. I racked my mind for anything from the past that could help me, something that could spark an old memory and rejuvenate some of my hard-earned skills. One memory answered the call.

How many of you would be prepared to pay for a hard-copy of the novellas?

I’ve been considering self-publishing for a while, although a viable means has just been pointed out to me by another author’s own investigations.  I’d be wary of publishing a novel I’m submitting to agents though, so I was thinking the novellas would be a better place to start.  They’d be redrafted and polished beforehand, obviously; revised and expanded throughout as they say, and I could probably pop in one of the odd stand-alone stories too.

Not a definite go yet, but just something I was thinking about.  Please provide comment, if you don’t mind.  Need to know whether it would be worthwhile.

When this popped into my head it was a dark horror tale, but I don’t think that’s how I write really.  That said, long-time readers may find something familiar in this story.

Now, can I get through a short story without turning it into yet another novella?  let’s find out.

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I am not accustomed to seeing a man run into a public house screaming bloody murder.

In my experience, this usually comes at the end of a particularly good evening, after a few pints of real ale and a carafe of Barnsley’s finest. The man that burst into my local, however, seemed to have gotten his evening a bit arse-about-face, doing the drinking at home and invading the pub like a dervish.

As the wide-eyed yobbo crashed through the door, the collected clientèle managed to lock eyes with each other. In one of the more modern establishments this would be difficult, jam packed with young people sipping cheap liquor like it was iced tea, but The Duke had no such problems. Being of the old school, The Duke only had twelve clients, and we met each other’s gaze with the well-practised look of manly fear.

When the socially different enter a situation that, by its very nature, is social, the more gifted people present will always slip into this look. It is a look that says ‘you may be my best friend, my wife, my son or even a servant of the lord himself, but right now I would rip out my own heart if it meant that the newcomer would sit next to you and not me.’

Unfortunately, my hands are not of sufficient resilience to punch a hole through my rib cage, so the man sat next to me.

He ordered an American beer, which I found somewhat depressing, and paid for it with coins. As he slammed each piece of tarnished nickel onto the bar, I got a good look at him. He was younger than me, although in fairness that’s quite easy nowadays, and positively dripping with sweat. His eyes were so bloodshot that for a moment I thought some sort of plant was growing inside his head, sending needle-thin tendrils snaking around his eyes. That would have explained his laboured breathing too, I supposed, but wasn’t the most likely of explanations.

I watched as he downed his drink in one, a feat of which the difficulty comes from the vile taste of the colonial tipple. It was then, as he used his forearm to wipe the foam from his lips, that our eyes met. I swore to myself, I had made a young man’s mistake; in situations with the socially different, a British man may successfully ignore the offender so long as eye contact is avoided. It’s a rule, so long as it cannot be proved you have seen them then it is perfectly polite to ignore them until they go away. It is a mistake the young often make, drinking up the visual eccentricity as though they’ve been in a drought, but a man of my age should know better.

I heard the other patrons chuckle quietly as the moist man swivelled on his bar stool to face me. I swallowed hard and tried to turn away, but it was useless. A damp hand gripped my shoulder and a blotchy face swung into view once more.

‘Blink!’ it demanded.

‘Pardon?’

‘Bloody well blink!’

Naturally, I blinked. The man signed and sat back.

‘Thank God,’ he blasphemed. ‘I was worried you was in league with him!’

‘Pardon?’ I said once again, somewhat stunned by the man’s tenuous grasp of grammar.

He frowned conspiratorially, an expression I hadn’t been sure was possible before, and his eyes flicked at the other patrons. ‘He was looking at me, staring, for hours. I saw him, just watching me, not taking notes or anything. He just sort of sat there, stock still, never once blinking, just watching me from the mirror.

You will have experienced, I’m sure, that moment when you realise just how futile a conversation is with a particular party. You feel your manners evaporate, something behind your eyes falls away with an audible clunk, and you feel your mind detach itself from the issue, realising that it is surplus to the requirements laid down by person B. This happened to me the moment he mentioned the mirror.

‘That would be your reflection, my friend,’ I said.

‘No! No, no, no!’ he bellowed. ‘Because I know, see, I know he’s always looking at me, even when I’m not looking at him. Besides, he don’t even look like me, not really.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, I mean, I know what I look –’

‘No, I mean how do you know he’s looking at you even when you aren’t looking at him?’

He faltered for a moment and chewed on a thumbnail. ‘Because… because he was always looking at me when I looked back.’

I sighed. ‘Yes, that’s how mirrors work.’

‘Aaah, but no! Because he doesn’t look like me! Look, I’ll show you!’ he spluttered, then he grabbed my arm.

It should be noted that, when I myself was young, I was a world class boxer. I never actually competed of course, too busy with work (the nature of which we will come to in good time), but I was scouted by the colonials to fight their world champion, a man by the name of Kingdom Bale. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Anyway, as time took its toll on me, I lost most of my prowess, and at no moment before or since had I rued it quite as much as when the sweaty child of bedlam dragged me into the wash room.

As the door slammed behind me, I was surprised to find myself feeling proud that the land lord had maintained such clean facilities. Then the fear started to bubble in my belly, and I began to tense up. It would be foolish to believe I could beat the man in a fight, but I would damn well try if I had to.

He dragged me across the room to the basins. Above each hung an individual mirror, set flush into the marble-effect wall. He thrust me towards the mirror. ‘Look!’

I looked. My own reflection stared back me, wrinkled but refined, and over my shoulder leered another. At first I thought it was the man, and that he had been talking bunkum, but something appeared wrong. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but there was definitely a certain detachment between the face in the mirror and that of the man standing behind me, a certain spectral disconnect that registered only in the back of my mind.

‘Can you see it now?’ he asked.

Only he didn’t ask, not immediately. Oh, the man certainly did, that much was true, but the reflection did not. It lagged behind, almost imperceptibly so, but definite. There was but a fraction of a second between the speech and the reflection, but there it was, and my blood started to run cold.

By profession I was a Phantasmagologist in my youth, studying the various spooks and spectres that people would occasionally report. True Phantasmagoria is strangely abundant in London and its surrounding settlements, and I used to be the man who documented such things. As such, it takes a lot to chill my blood.

I leant in closer as the reflection finally caught up with its silent master, and I observed. It was his reflection, at least in form, but something was askew. The face was all in place, same chin and nose and mouth, same cheeks. It took me embarrassingly long to spot it, but there it was, there was the alien element.

I glanced back at the real man to make sure.

I was right!

‘Oddly enough, mister…’ I ventured.

‘Hyde.’

I blinked. ‘Hyde? Seriously?’

‘Yes. Why, is it important?’

The man was clearly not a big reader. I ignored his question. ‘Oddly enough, mister Hyde. You may have stumbled upon the only man in London who can help you.’

‘Really? You believe me? Oh thank God! Can you see it, can you see what I mean? It’s not me, the reflection, it doesn’t look like me!’

I ran a withered hand over my beard and turned to face the reflection once more. ‘Oh, indeed, mister Hyde. You certainly do not have cracked porcelain eyes.’

Here we are, the final part to this little webnovella.  I may bookend this with a little epilude (like an epilogue but in keeping with my interludes), but I’m not sure whether it needs it yet.  I don’t think I’m done with Leander Crane though, and once I’ve made some more progress on novel 2 (which I keep putting on hold to do these more immediately gratifying novellas) I may just come back to him.  Or maybe someone new, I’m not sure yet.

Anyway, part 10.

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A number of things run through your mind when you find out that your trusted friend is actually a commissioned member of the Watch, the first of which being the urge to run. Fortunately, my various accumulated injuries made that impossible, which is a good thing because running from the Watch can land you in serious trouble.

It’s all about the probabilities. Sometimes running is necessary, and I have done it on more than one occasion, but that makes you look guilty. It’s a fine piece of police psychology that only the guilty run, therefore you should always walk away from the scene of a crime if given the opportunity. You first action when presented with the Watch will cement their view of you for the immediate future, and looking like a criminal means that they will pursue you like one. Lying in a pool of your own blood, however, gives a rather different impression.

Bridge surveyed the area in slow motion as his merry band of watchmen fanned out around him. The Lendians were stunned (even those who hadn’t taken a brick in the head) and did nothing until Th, eyes ablaze with anger, lifted his sword away from me and pointed at the mage.

‘Kill them all! Protect the children!’ he shouted with genuine fury, spittle flying everywhere.

It had the desired effect, and before long a proper brawl had kicked off, and Th and Bridge were right in the middle, stalking each other. In a fair fight I would have had to put my money on Th, especially in his current condition. When he had been toying with me (I realised now that this was what he had been doing) the man had looked rather serene, if a little too arrogant for his own good. He had treated me like an inconvenience rather than a threat which, I had to admit, was probably true. He seemed to have a different view of the Watch.

Th and Bridge circled each other a number of times, one of them occasionally spinning around to help out his underlings briefly, or to ensure they didn’t breach the circle. This always happened in fights, a duel among the organised chaos.

‘Back off, sorcerer,’ Th said. ‘You cannot win this fight. I know of your kind and their strengths. They excel at long range combat against numerous foes, where accuracy isn’t too big of an issue. If your spell swings wide you take out only enemies, not friends. You start slinging spells in here and there’s every possibility you’ll hit the very thing you came to save.’ Th gestured to the cage.

Bridge tweaked the brim of his fedora. ‘You know a lot about magicians, foreigner. Killed many?’

‘Seventy eight.’

‘Whereas I have killed,’ Bridge stopped for a moment to count his fingers. ‘Three thousand four hundred and twelve swordsmen, only half of them at a distance.’

This was probably true. In his youth, Bridge had signed up for every war going, even ones that didn’t even involve us. His theorised that the best way to be a warlock (as was the fashion for young magicians at the time) was to actually be in a war. It seemed to do him a world of good, too, as his skills increased rapidly with every tour he accomplished.

If Bridge’s kill count had startled Th, he didn’t show it. ‘Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many people you have killed, sorcerer, only that you can kill whoever stands before you, and I can’t die. I won’t allow it.’

‘You seem to have misunderstood how the modern Watch works…’

Bridge was interrupted by the blade of Th’s sword. It cut through the air like a blur but struck nothing. The space where Bridge had been standing less than a second before was now empty but for the ageing sword, the magician having moved out of the way like a whisper. Th swung again and again, a constant blur of steel and fury, but every strike was without luck. Bridge didn’t even need to move fast to dodge the blow, he just folded through a variety of poses at an almost leisurely pace.

The dance continued for almost a full minute, Th swinging and Bridge dodging, until the magician finally committed to the fight. The dance had moved them around in a half circle, and Bridge had noticed he was now with his back to the cage. I saw his eyes flick to take note of this, and I knew that what Th had said had been true. Magicians can do accuracy when they need to, but it requires more concentrating than a combat situation usually allows.

Combat magic, pure and proper combat magic, is frightening. I’d never actually seen it used before, and I had assumed it would be similar to the emotional maelstrom that Bridge had levelled at the man who had stolen his wife all those years ago. But combat magic is much more pure than that, which is what is so frightening about it.

The pure fury that can come from any emotion distilled into magic can create something you expect magic to be: flashy, colourful, explosive. Combat magic is refined, taking only the best cuts of every emotion, every feeling and condensing it into a single powerful force. In this case, Bridge summoned a small sphere that shimmered with a crimson light and drove it into Th’s face.

I had expected an explosion or something, at least some nice crackle effect like lightning, and this was probably why I wasn’t magically gifted. Refined magic doesn’t do effects as they waste energy, it takes all that potential waste and forces it back into the spell, keeping it pure and powerful. So powerful, in this case, that when the sphere vanished Th’s head was gone. No gore, no spurt of blood, just a space where the head had been. The sword dropped from the dead fingers and clattered on the wooden floor, closely followed by the body itself.

The fighting between the underlings was still going strong, but Bridge ignored it for the moment. He picked me up with one hand and hoisted me to my feet. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here,’ he lied.

‘You’re a watchman?’ I replied weakly.

‘Yes. Have been for a few years now,’ Bridge said. ‘Before I even knew you, I think. I’m not entirely certain, my memory has been giving me a bit of trouble recently.’

‘That can happen as you get older,’ I said.

‘Indeed. For instance, I can’t remember if I invited you along on this trip to help open this cage,’ he murmured, eyes glittering. ‘If I had, that would certainly explain your presence here. A valued locksmith would make perfect sense in this sort of situation, don’t you think? Of course, if he had arrived a little early then he might have taken it upon himself to be a hero, got into a fight he couldn’t win.’

I leant in and lowered my voice. ‘What are you doing, Bridge.’

He responded in kind. ‘Keeping you out of jail. Sometimes the law can be best served by allowing the right kind of criminal a little leeway. How else do you think you’ve avoided prison recently, with everything I know? I have plans for this city, and plans for you which currently intertwine. You would do well to follow my lead.’

A whole host of things crumbled and collapsed inside my head at that moment, things that I could only briefly acknowledge at that moment. Was it true? Had Bridge been the one to keep me out of prison? If so, did that mean I wasn’t as good a thief as I thought I was? Was I just a fraud, someone’s pet project allowed the illusion of success to keep me cosy? It would all weigh me down later, but right now I was too busy to dwell.

I detached myself from Bridge and hobbled over to the cage. Behind me I heard Bridge cast another spell, and the fighting ceased immediately. I didn’t look round.

The children in the cage were younger than I had thought, if any were over seven then they had skin a dowager would kill for. They stared at me with big eyes full of tears, the same eyes that professional beggars spend years learning to perfect after having forgotten that they used to come naturally. They watched as I started to fiddle with the lock.

It wasn’t hard to pick. Locks are simple devices really, and it’s all in the wrist anyway. A few flicks of the wrist and the door clicked loudly. I pulled the door open noisily and was instantly hit by a flood of youth. Every child in the cage, at least twenty of them I realised, slammed into me and my damaged ribs, forcing me to the ground. I’d never been attacked by children before and I wondered what to do.

Then I realised that it wasn’t an attack, they were hugging me. They thought I was a hero, which was an odd state of affairs to be honest. They had heard everything I had said to Th, and everything he had said to me, but at the end of the day he had been the one who locked them in a cage. Things are very black and white to children, very simple.

My ribs, however, were still black and blue, and the weight of twenty children was more than a little uncomfortable. I tried to scream, but the excited children were hugging me too tightly and painfully to let any air in or out, and before long my only option was to pass out.

I awoke with a face full of beard. Bridge had been staring at my unconscious form, it seemed, and I had chosen that moment to wake up. I sneezed his beard out the way and sat up sharply, nearly bashing my head on the magician’s chin. I scanned the area quickly for any signs of the children, but they were gone. My ribs pulsed happily at that.

‘I suppose you have some question for me,’ Bridge said from behind me.

‘No,’ I replied without turning. ‘Everything makes perfect sense. You’ve been playing me for years. Keeping me as a pet, your own little conversation starter at parties. “There’s this guy I own who thinks he’s a thief!”, then everybody laughs and you have a nice canapé or two.’

Bridge sighed. ‘You don’t understand -’

‘I understand enough.’

‘No, you don’t. The city doesn’t work, it’s stagnated and has started to sink back into the filth it’s worked so hard to escape. It has become so used to the normal rules of society that it has forgotten what to do when they start to give diminishing returns. The politicians can’t think anymore, so I’m going to do it for them. You are part of that, part of my plan to rejuvenate the city.’

‘So you trick me into letting some children out of a cage? You hardly needed me for that,’ I snarled.

‘It all makes sense in the grand scheme,’ Bridge replied calmly. ‘Eventually you’ll see what I mean.’

I did my best to storm out of the building and through the giant hole in the wall he had blasted. It’s hard to storm with two broken ribs and a cut leg. Still, after a ludicrously long storm, I made it to the breach and stepped out into the night.

From the darkness I heard Bridge shout. ‘I’m still your friend, Leander. Remember that!’

I ignored the captain of the Watch and set about hoisting myself onto my cart, still faithful parked in the alleyway between the museum and the other building. I reached down into the hole in the centre and fished out the diamond. It was still there, untouched and undamaged. The Watch were clearly more interested in the safety of the children than the witterings of a museum security guard, and hadn’t even bothered to begin the search yet.

I stared at the diamond for perhaps too long. There was a code, I had to return this in a few days. But then, that was a code that thieves followed, wasn’t it? Was I even a real thief anymore? It’s not the taking that makes someone a thief, but the not being caught. If my numerous successful escapes were all the result of one undercover watchmen pulling strings, then could I legitimately claim to be a thief? Probably not.

And with that in mind I took the diamond home, with no intention of ever returning it.

Crikey, I’m pumping these out now, eh?  Oh, and the reason the thing isn’t properly justified this time is a wordpress issue.  Wasn’t letting me copy things across for some reason, but I’m sure you can make do

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Any number of things can go wrong on a job, but by far the worst that I have ever experienced is a broken rib. As well as being unbelievably painful, that particular injury makes it almost impossible to move or breathe, leaving you suffocating in a cocoon of agony.

I remember the first time I snapped a rib. I was a young thief then, still running with a gang out of Pleasant Court, a group of young kids led by a very old man. Looking back on it, that may have been a somewhat shady situation, but at the time the old guy was perfectly genial to us. At least most of the time.

Old Jack (that was how we knew him) was a man of his generation, and he wasn’t about to modernise himself for anyone. If you failed Old Jack then you could be damn sure he’d have something to say about it. He did most of his talking with his fists too, as I found out when I managed to blow a carefully planned streak of burglaries by getting a bit too chatty with a target’s daughter. I was thirteen.

Because of that little event, I was familiar enough with the unique feeling of a broken rib to be able to diagnose myself with two, courtesy of my rather stupid leap from the top of the museum. I was lucky on two counts really, no three. I was lucky not to have been caught by the guards, lucky not to have died from the fall and, after a very brief look about the roof I was currently on, extremely lucky the building hadn’t collapsed.

My brief survey of the building from ground level had told me that the thing was damn near to falling down on its own, but once I saw the roof I reassessed and decided that it was a miracle the thing hadn’t already fallen. There was little roof left, all told, except for the patch I had landed on, and some of that had caved in quite worryingly. Despite my agonising pain I lurched off the roof and down a nearby ladder, just to get to some point of safety.

I made it halfway down the ladder, which was no mean feat actually, before the red hot pain in my chest caused me to let go and fall the rest of the way. Bloody ribs. You forget how closely connected they are to your arms until the pain kicks in. If I had been descending some stairs I could probably have dealt with the pain, but ladders require the use of your arms, which somehow means your ribs need to move. I’m not too good with biology. Of course, the pain I experienced as I landed at the foot of the ladder made me wish I had held onto the rungs.

I’m not ashamed to say I screamed.

It was a manly scream at least, pained and deep rather than a girlish shriek of fear. It was just as likely to get me noticed, however, and in my current state I couldn’t be dealing with that. I tried to ignore the fact that the conclusion of my job would require heavy lifting, and pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t hear anyone running to check on the noise, so I assumed no-one had heard me.

The interior of the building was just as decayed as the exterior, perhaps more so. The walls had rotted away so completely that only the brickwork was left, itself missing a number of key components, and the wooden floor had seemingly collapsed in the centre, leaving a vast chasm that disappeared off into the darkness. Any lamps that had once been in the building were gone now, and while I couldn’t smell gas, I wasn’t about to risk blowing up and entire building just in case.

I carefully made my way through the dark and debris and found the staircase down. I doubted that anyone would risk camping out on these floors, so my target would most likely be on the ground floor, the only place with sturdy ground, which would mean a long and uneventful descent, which was something I could currently accept.

I could feel my ribs moving, the broken ones. Your body, for all the squishy bits, is so well put together that it tends to stay solid for the most part, so the sensation of something almost swaying about inside is distinctly off putting. It threw my balance out of whack a few times, and I stumbled down a few steps painfully fast, but eventually I worked it out. It’s amazing how easily you can train yourself to overcome a bone spear jabbing you repeatedly in the squishy bits when you have to.

The descent was remarkably easy, pain excepted. There was no-one, not even a trace of them, as I passed each floor. In fact, it was so quiet that I was starting to wonder if I had even landed on the right building. If I had gone through all this pain for nothing I was going to be extremely pissed off.

Thankfully, as I stumbled onto the ground floor, everything was justified.

A group of people, clearly foreign, were clustered around a small fire. Apparently the building wasn’t full of gas. They seemed to have built the fire out of the remnants of the floors above, which explained where all the floorboards from the chasm had gone and why the ground floor was considerably cleaner. Behind the men, the firelight dancing off the metal bars, sat a cage containing what I assumed to be my target.

The cage was full of children.

I couldn’t tell if what I felt was a pang of disgust or just a rib poking something, but all of a sudden I was conflicted. There had to be a line where not even a career criminal would cross. I had never bothered to define that line properly, theorising that I would know it when I saw it, and perhaps I just had. Children were supposed to be all innocent and naïve, given freedom from this horrible and dark world, weren’t they?

I hadn’t been. I’d been abandoned in the cold streets at about four, left to fend for myself until Old Jack took me in and moulded me into who I am today. Maybe the whole innocence of children thing was just something I’d picked up from a particularly soppy play. You have to take some women to soppy plays to get them in the right mood, and although I didn’t listen it was certainly possible my subconscious had picked up something from them.

When it came down to it, I had been contracted to steal these children out from under the foreigner’s noses, end of. I could try and moralise it all, claim that taking them to Wolf would be as good as setting them free, everyone knows how foreigners are with kids, but that would be pointless. Truth told, I had no reason to believe that Wolf would treat the kids any better than the Lendians before me would. The Lendians may have locked the kids in a cage, but God only knew what Wolf would do. The potential is always worse than the real.

As I observed the cage and the men, working out a way of stealing an entire cage full of children without anyone noticing, I felt something jab me in the back. At first I thought it was one of the loose ribs again, taking a grand tour around my innards and stopping for a rest by my spine. It took me far too long to realise that the pressure was actually coming from an external source.

The intelligent mind understands things about a blade that the more average mind does not, and will often take command of the body. Your conscious choices are pushed away, as are any other pressures upon your actions, leaving you with pure instinct. The instinctual reaction to something pointy being pressed into your back is to stand perfectly still, which is rarely the incorrect response.

My new captor seemed to agree. ‘That’ll do, mister Crane. Step forward into the light of the fire, if you please,’ a man’s voice rumbled from behind my left ear.

Naturally, I did as I was told. Each step was murder, my ribs were still sloshing about but now they were joined by whatever metallic instrument the foreigner was poking me with. It was sharp, which led me to believe it was a blade, probably a knife, judging by how close the voice was to my ear. I managed to make it into the flickering light of the fire, however, and all the men around it turned to stare.

I don’t like being stared at. Perhaps that comes from spending so long going unseen.

The blade retreated from my back, and a man built like a wall slipped past me, joined his countrymen around the fire, and turned back to face me. It was Th, which explained how he knew my name at least. I get very edgy when people know my name without having been introduced.

Th eyed me carefully for a while. In his hand he held a gold plated dagger, so well maintained that I theorised that Th thought it was made of genuine gold. He swished it around idly for a moment before dropping it into a sheath inside his jacket.

‘When you said you were going to rob the museum,’ Th said, ‘I didn’t expect you to make your escape through our building.’

‘Nor did I, to tell the truth,’ I lied.

Th frowned. ‘Yes, Mister Crane, tell the truth. I know why you are here, who you are working for, even what you intend to steal, and you can’t have them!’ He was getting remarkably aggressive for someone merely protecting their stock. ‘I won’t let you take them. We know what that Wolf man intends to do with these children, and we will not let him.’

‘Well I may not know the specifics,’ I spat, ‘But I’m damn well sure he won’t keep them locked in a cage!’

Th got right in my face. ‘No, he won’t keep them in a cage, not a real one at any rate. He has far darker things in mind for them. We’re trying to save them, don’t you see? We’re going to get them out of this cesspool and take them somewhere safe!’

‘Back to Lend?’

‘If we have to!’

This was madness. Th actually believe he was helping the children, the fire in his eyes said as much. He was kidnapping them, exporting them to a foreign nation, all while incarcerated in a metal box, and he still thought he was helping them. Wolf may have been a little shady, but at least he was sane. Besides, he was paying me, and the customer is always right.

With considerable effort, I unbuckled my new weapon. The collapsible sword unrolled into a shimmering serpent of death, and I snapped it erect with a press of a button. I stood there, shiny new blade held as high as my ribs would allow, intending to fight off ten able bodied Lendians on my own. Th looked me up and down, confused.

‘You’re actually going to fight for that man?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m fighting for the contract, for my reputation.’

‘But taking these children to Wolf will do nothing but tarnish that reputation!’

‘I fail to agree.’

Th sighed and snapped his fingers. One of the other men threw him a very old sword, which he caught deftly with one hand. The blade was stained brown with old blood and dented in numerous places. It was well used, ugly and deadly like a real sword should be.

‘If you insist on being like that, Mister Crane,’ Th said. ‘The others will not intervene. A gentlemen’s duel, if you will. But make no mistake, even if you win you shall not have the children.’

He readied his blade, and I did my best to ready mine. It was hopeless. I could barely move my arms, let alone swing a sword. Th would have been hard to best in a fair fight or, as is my usual tactic, an unfair fight to my advantage. With these injuries I was worse than a sitting duck, I was already dead. I would have to think fast.

Th lunged while I was thinking, and my damaged body was too slow to avoid completely. I dodged most of the blow but the blade still managed to open a deep gash on my thigh which, coupled with the bastarding ribs again, caused me to fall to the floor. It was going to be the shortest duel in history.

Then, as Th closed in for the kill, my saviour appeared.

The wall nearest the cage exploded in a hailstorm of masonry, and what amounted to a battalion of men marched through. They were dressed as Watchmen, with the exception of their leader who was dressed in a purple pinstripe suit with a red shirt and a navy blue fedora.

‘Captain Bridge Tepping, Rand City Watch! You’re all under arrest!’

Another Interlude.  This one hasn’t been caused by any real-life intervention, like the last one, but I felt I needed to expand the story a little.  Just like the last one, it is completely unnecessary in regards to the full story of Childhood Thievery, it’s just a bit of background colour.

———————————————————-

Benjamin Nineacres liked is job, even if his co-workers didn’t. To be fair, it was probably him that they didn’t like, not the job, but he wasn’t one to take it personally. So what if he had been promoted faster than anyone else? He had worked damn hard for the last two months to make it to night shift supervisor, and it wasn’t as if his colleagues were really any threat to that position.

Oh they were pleasant enough, sure, but a little meat-headed. Benjamin supposed that you needed some meat-headedness in a security guard, but you also needed strong leadership and discipline. You had to be prepared for every eventuality, every possible mishap, to be ready to deal with any possible threat. In short, a security guard needed to think like a soldier.

Benjamin had never managed to make it into the army, but he knew enough about it to know which parts to borrow and adapt into the civilian lifestyle. The security industry was only one step down from the Watch after all, who themselves were one step down from the army, so it stood to reason that something must trickle down.

His first act as supervisor had been to hire yet more guards. The museum already had a pretty large detail of security guards, but Benjamin had spotted some glaring omissions in the floor plan and, through a long and boring presentation to the management, had secured the funds to clog those holes with yet more guards. Now the museum employed a force large enough to dissuade most gangs from coming within three streets of the museum, an impression further cemented by Benjamin ensuring that he had hired the most bloodthirsty, yet obedient, crazies he could find.

For the first few weeks, however, Benjamin’s initiative had come under fire. The management, in typical number-crunching fashion, didn’t understand that having no attempted thefts was a better situation than catching a thief. They didn’t see deterrence as a cost effective solution, if they were paying for that many men then they wanted some scoundrel’s head kicked in. Benjamin was under pressure and he wasn’t used to it.

But today was his lucky day.

He was on patrol, guarding the museum’s pride and joy, a Diamond. As far as he was concerned, it deserved the capital letter, the thing was bigger than his head and incredibly beautiful. During the day, in the hour between arriving for work and work actually starting, Benjamin had played around with refracting various light sources through the thing. At first he was upset to see that nothing was happening, but then a helpful tour guide explained to him that the Diamond was so unique that it managed to slow light down significantly. As a result, Benjamin had spent the first few hours of his shift watching patterns dance around the darkened room, all with no obvious origin. It was the closest to magic he had ever been.

The Diamond was coming to the end of its little show, or at least the end of the light he had subjected it to hours before, when someone gambolled up the stairs from the ground floor and crashed into him.

It was a man of average height and build, with an average face and he was dressed in a strange black outfit. The man had more belts that waists, one of which seemed to be tied across his chest, and he gave the general impression of a man who had gotten lost when trying to make him way to the nearest play house. He looked like one of the arty actors that Benjamin hated, the ones who can never seem to turn off their stage voice.

As he refocused his gaze, however, he realised who the man really was. That wasn’t a belt across his chest, it was a bandoleer. Three sorts of people wore bandoleers, and none of them were welcome in a museum at night. Benjamin reached for his weapon, a cheap short-sword.

The thief was quicker. Before Benjamin’s hand was even a quarter of the way to his sword, the thief had driven his fist right into Benjamin’s throat. He keeled over almost immediately, choking heavily. His mouth tasted of iron, but before he had time to dwell on that he was introduced to the floor via a blow to the back of the skull.

He languished in the darkness for a moment or too, running it over in his mind. Hesitation had been the problem. Benjamin had hesitated, and now a thief was making off with the precious Diamond that he had been entrusted to protect. Worse still, the man had shown no respect for the security professionals, apparently sneaking past them with little care at all. That just wouldn’t do.

Benjamin grabbed his mind and dragged it back into consciousness, a technique he had learned at school, and forced his eyes to open. One eye wasn’t working, but that was to be expected, probably a mild concussion. His left eye, his favourite eye, was having none of it, however, and snapped into crystal clarity after only two blinks.

He was on the floor, as expected, and his mouth still tasted like iron. It was probably blood from his throat, but there wasn’t time for that now. An abominable noise told him that his alarm belt had worked, and almost immediately he was hoisted to his feet by a pair of gorillas under his command. They looked at him for orders, and he barked them like a pro.

‘You, come with me! You, get the others and follow us!’

Both gorillas nodded, the first falling in line with Benjamin as he bolted for the stairs.

There was only one way out of the building now, Benjamin knew, especially as the thief couldn’t risk going back out the main entrance now the alarm had been sounded. Sure, he shouldn’t have been able to get in that way in the first place, but it would be suicide to go back out that way now, regardless of his skills. No, he’d head to the roof and climb down the wall.

Benjamin stormed up the steps three at a time, his colleague slowly dropping behind. He could hear the others a little way further behind him now, but he didn’t care, the thief was his. Every twist on the staircase allowed him the briefest of glimpses of his target, a brief flash of heel or swatch of fabric just dashing out of sight. Benjamin had slipped into hunting mode, like he assumed so many of his colleagues must do in similar situations. He was wrong, of course, but it was that which made him a good security professional.

Ultimately he reached the roof door, just in time to see it slam shut. It wouldn’t hold for long, the thing was practically held on with chewing gum by now, and he began ramming it with his shoulder. He was right, it gave quickly and swung open, only to be returned at such a speed that the impact with Benjamin’s face resulted in a loud crack and an explosion of blood. A broken nose as well as a concussion.

Benjamin staggered back into a wall of meat. He turned, and was greeted by the toothless grins of his army. He regained his composure, despite his useless eye and flattened nose and throbbing head, and led the charge.

He emerged from the doorway screaming in anger, and his colleagues followed suit, just in time to see the thief launch himself over the edge. Benjamin dashed to the edge and peered out, trying desperately to catch any sight of the man or the Diamond. But there was nothing, the dark had swallowed him up.

Benjamin turned to the nearest gorilla.

‘He jumped, must have fallen all the way to ground level. Go downstairs and find his body, we need that Diamond!’

The gorilla grunted, signalled a few others, and disappeared back into the building. Benjamin waited until he was out of sight and sank to the floor. He’d never driven a man to suicide before.