Talyesin's Tales

Saving a mugger from the clutches of his insane nemesis, the Arachnid, leads Squirrelman to an chance encounter with Darklight, the petite blonde sorceress from Weirdsville, and Officer Jimenez, one of Action City's Finest. Jimenez informs them that what had seemed at straightforward homicide a week previous had, in fact, been a dark ritual that had driven his partner insane...





I've never liked investigating homicide scenes.

Catch a criminal in the act? Sure. Charge headlong into a villain's lair? No problem.

But investigating the place where someone lived until some idiot decided to end that life for whatever reason? It just creeps me out. All their stuff still there. Dirty dishes in the sink. Food in the fridge. Last week's newspaper going yellow under the coffee table.

It's just... tragic. Truly tragic. This is what a life ended looks like, not a corpse and a splash of blood, not the best dress and the calm expression and the coffin. A life ended is an empty place that once was a home.

Annabeth O'Day's apartment is no different. A scarf she'll never finish knitting. A pantry full of soups she'll never eat. Laundry she'll never wash.

There's blood. Everywhere. A week old, dried dark brown, but everywhere. She was dragged, or crawled, from the front door, bleeding, to the dining room. Tied to the dining room table.

'Eviscerated' is somehow more antiseptic than 'gutted' but they mean the same thing.

Darklight makes a "tsk" sound as we enter the apartment, shutting the door behind us.

"What?" I ask. It's dark in the little cramped apartment, the only light coming from the streetlights outside.

"Anderson was here," she says, disapproving, frowning.

"Who?"

"Detective Anderson," she says, looking around. I get the impression she's seeing things I can't. "Action City PD Psi Division. Investigates the paranormal crimes. He's a... the technical term is 'psychic dampener' but what he really is, is a psychic sponge of sorts. He absorbs the psychic residue of a paranormal crime scene."

"This guy absorbed the whatever it was that made Jimenez' partner catatonic?"

"He's better trained to handle the negative energies," Darklight explains. "Well, we can't investigate in the dark now can we?"

She waves her hands and says something and suddenly daylight starts streaming in the window.

"You can make it be day?"

"Don't be silly," she laughs. "It's still night out. Have a look."

I look outside. It's night out there, rain starting to fall.

Inside, daylight.

"Okay," I say with a shrug. "You know, one of these days you'll answer one of my questions."

"That's entirely possible, Matt."

There's a little awkward pause. I've never given her my name.

"Sorry," she says finally. "Sometimes it's hard to keep track of when things happen."

"So, what? You know everything?"

"It's not like that. I have glimpses of non-linear time. For example, I know I can trust you with my life, because I know I will. I know you tell me your name, Matt, but not really when. I know I'm present at your wedding. It's a little like remembering something without really remembering when it happened. Like a college party you went to once, but you can't remember which year of college it happened?"

"Right," I say. "Anything I should know? Do we find out who did this?"

"I don't know," she says with a little shake of her head. "It's never perfectly clear, and it's almost always knowledge without context. I know there's a party at some point, and there are a lot of people. You'll make a speech, but I don't know what you're going to say."

"That sounds more frustrating than useful."

"Sometimes it is."

"Okay, anyway. So this Anderson guy sucked up all the negative energy in the room?"

"Not quite," she says, bending down to squint at the bloodstained dining table. She's at it a couple of minutes, tilting her head this way and that. I look around the apartment.

Lots of newspaper clippings in frames on the walls - smugglers, spies, anarchists, all foiled by Annie O'Day, Girl Pilot. All the dates are before World War II. A medal in a velvet display case. A couple of piloting awards. A few photos here and there. She was a looker, back in the day. Dressed in a bomber jacket and jodhpurs, knee-high boots and one of those leather helmets. Shaking President Roosevelt's hand. In front of a biplane, then a closed-cockpit single prop plane. Aviation magazines everywhere. No family snapshots anywhere.

"Powers above and below," Darklight says finally. I look back at her.

She's standing next to the table.

"A zone of silence, so she could scream all she wanted," she says, pointing at one end of the table. "Tied to the table with... umbilical cords." She looks at me, her eyes filled with pain. "This was the darkest of magic, Matt."

"Necromancy?"

"Not exactly," she says, then mimes holding someone down and jamming a knife in them. Slicing them open. Pulling out their insides.

"Haruspicy," she says.

"Whoodywhatty?"

"The act of divination through examining the entrails of a sacrificial animal."

"Entrails, as in, intestines?"

"Exactly," she says, pulling out imaginary intestines and examining them. Puts them aside. Picks up an imaginary knife and smiles, then plunges it in again.

Yeah. Seriously creepy.

"Anna?" I say, trying to get her back to the here and now.

"Hepatoscopy," she explains, using boths hands to lift something imaginary up out of the imaginary body. "Divination by examining the liver. Hieromancy... divination through the examination of a sacrifice. Then... then came the necromancy. Communing with the spirit of the deceased."

She shakes herself, stepping back away from the table, puts a trembling hand to her forehead.

"You alright?" I ask.

She takes a deep breath and steadies herself.

"Someone was very seriously trying to find something," she says finally. "Miss O'Day was alive during the entire process, Matt. She wasn't allowed to die or drift into unconsciousness. The mage who did this wanted her awake and suffering, right until the end. Then wouldn't let her spirit depart until they had the answers they sought."

"They?"

"I'm... not sure. Anderson's investigation has all but wiped out the ritual itself," she says, crossing her arms. "The next tenants will probably only feel vaguely uneasy in the dining room."

"Swell," I say. "So, someone, we don't know who or how many, was looking for something, we don't know what, and sacrificed an old lady to find it. So now what?"

"We talk to the only witness," she says.

"There was a witness?"

"Of sorts. Officer Jimenez' partner received a full, undampened experience of the negative energy. In a sense, she witnessed what happened here."

"Jimenez' partner is not only catatonic, but she's locked in the Kane Sanitarium. It's way after visiting hours, Anna."

She gives me a little smile.

"You know that's rarely an issue at the Kane Sanitarium," she says.

It's true. ACPD is always bringing in psychos they can't or don't dare house in their own lockup, or that Bendis Correctional can't deal with. It's part of the security problems I keep telling them about. If they're going to be admitting nutjobs at three in the morning, they need to have more than just a skeleton staff at night. Funding, they tell me. Not enough funding. The accountant in me really wants to look at their books and see where all those taxpayer dollars are really going.

"So let's go," I tell her. She waves her hands and it's not daytime inside any more. I'm not really religious, but I say a little prayer for the spirit of Annie O'Day. I hope she's found the peace she was denied in her manner of death.

Darklight and I head out the way we came, unnoticeable by the crowd. The Kane Sanitarium is the other side of Weirdsville from here, and I suggest taking the el train around it. I don't like going into Weirdsville, period, and especially not at night. She agrees, and a few minutes later we're holding on to the side of the el train as it heads around Weirdsville. I take her in my arms - it's easier that way - and jump off between stops. We start heading up Kane Avenue, old manors lining the dark streets. A lot of them are empty - property values around here are shit.

The Kane squats at the end of the avenue, almost like it's brooding, trapped there by the high stone walls with their ironwork grills stabbing at the sky. Rain is pouring now, although somehow Anna seems to keep from getting wet. Lightning is arching and hitting the Kane a lot more than any other building in the area. Probably all the copper that went into the construction. R. Thaddeus Kane was a copper baron, and certifiably insane. Local legend says he had six daughters and they each bore him a son, and he was trying to decide which of them was pure enough to bear him his seventh son, who would be a great mage, when the girls killed their incestuous father and fed him to their baby boys. That's one of the more pleasant stories about this fucking place.

Darklight looks paler than usual as we stand at the heavy iron gates, looking up at this gothic monstrosity. Seriously, it's hideous. But the Action City Historical Society named it a Historical Landmark back in the seventies, so every time it gets blown up or demolished, they have to rebuild it exactly the way it was. Of course, no one can really remember what it looked like, and it doesn't show up very well in photographs, so it gets more and more nightmarish as new architects show up to try and repair it.

Burn it to the ground, salt the earth, exorcise the land. That's what I'd do with it.

"Shall we go in, Matt?" Anna asks me, jolting me from my thoughts.

"Right," I say, opening the iron gate. It's never locked. They swear they lock it but it's never locked from the outside, like the Kane was waiting for us, inviting us in.

Yeah. The gate swings shut on its own. We know each other, the Kane and I. I hate it... but it loves me. Wants me to stay. Stay and play.

"Matthew," Anna says, steel in her voice. I shake my head to clear it.

"Fuck," I mutter. It always gets to me. Fucking place.

"There is great evil here, Matt," she says, low and quiet. "Evil in the name of God. Evil in the name of Good. Evil in the name of Science. Evil... in the name of Evil." She looks up at me, right in the eyes. "But the evil is directionless, without form or purpose."

Anna waves her hands over my chest and my head, and things start to clear up a little. It's just an old building. It's not out to get me.

We walk up the drive, old oak trees lining either side. They aren't claws reaching out to grab me, drag me down. Up the front steps. Just tall double doors, stone pillars on either side. Not a gaping maw ready to swallow me whole. Nope. Not a bit.

I ring the door buzzer and show my Action City Costumed Crimefighter ID card to the camera set in a corner of the front gallery. Darklight does likewise. We're buzzed in.

The lobby of the Kane was once the foyer of the mansion. Staircases to either side lead up to the second floor, maybe fifteen feet above us. The lobby runs all the way up, four storeys, to a skylight in the roof, where we can see lightning tracing white lines across the night sky. A huge clock at the back of the foyer tick-tocks the seconds away. It's nearly midnight, I notice.

There's a desk in the middle of the foyer. Lobby. Usually it's where the admitting nurse sits. She's not sitting, she's talking to three security guards.

And Ragdoll.

"Hey," I say, crossing the lobby to her. She looks just about as surprised to see me as I am to see her.

"What brings you here?" she asks, with a nod hello to Darklight.

I tell her about Arachnid, running into Anna, investigating the O'Day murder.

"Weird," she says.

"You?" I ask.

"The Dollmen."

The Dollmen are three nutjobs from Ragdoll's fan club who transplanted their minds into life-size marionettes so they could prove their love for her or some stupid thing. Only, they couldn't get out of the puppets once they were in.

"Shit," I say.

"No big deal," she shrugs. The security guys and the admitting nurse call her over and she gives them instructions on how to keep the Dollmen in their cells. Ragdoll's not as polite as I would have been, and I think they're a bunch of fucking incompetent idiots.

That's when Ace and Physique enter the lobby from a side door.

"What brings you guys here?" I ask. Darklight is frowning. She looks as suspicious as I feel.

"Candyman," Ace says, looking at me and Ragdoll and Darklight.

"Masker," Physique adds.

"Weird coincidence," someone says high above us. It's Blue Jay. She glides down.

Anna gets pale. Paler.

"Not coincidence," she almost whispers.

Other masks show up. Red Bolt, suddenly appearing in a blur of red and yellow, looking confused. Dragon, all seven feet of green scales and clawed hands and feet, huge bat wings growing out of his shoulders, horns out of his temples. Superia, golden blonde and stunningly gorgeous, maskless, gold plate bustier and bracers, navy skirt, boots, cape. Phenom, all in oranges and reds, yellow goggles and a huge yellow exclamation mark on his chest, wavy brown hair tumbling out the top of his half-cowl. Rapunzel, her hair so pale a blonde it's nearly platinum reaching down to her ankles, dressed quasi-medieval, puffed sleeves on her jacket, thigh high boots, little diamond mask, all in shades of purple.

"Howdy folks," Ace says to everyone.

"What is this, this flavour?" Darklight mutters. As I turn to look at her, her eyes roll up in her head and she faints. Red Bolt catches her before I even have a chance to move.

"Anna!" I say, reaching for her as Red Bolt lays her carefully on the ground. I look at him and say, "Get the nurse."

"No, I'm alright," Darklight says shakily. Red Bolt is already at the door when he stops.

I help Anna back to her feet.

"You sure?" Blue Jay asks. "You don't look alright."

"I'll be fine," Darklight says. "But something terrible has drawn us here tonight."

"Yeah, a bunch of escaped loonies," Phenom says.

"Waitaminute," I say. "All of you caught an escaped inmate? Which ones?"

"Fearmonger," Superia says.

"Purity," Dragon rumbles.

"Speed Freak," Red Bolt says.

"Stitches," says Phenom.

"Rumplestiltskin," Rapunzel adds.

I point to Ace and Physique. "Candyman. Masker. I had a run in with Arachnid tonight. Ragdoll, you brought in the Dollmen. Does it strike anyone as odd that a dozen psychos escaped from the Kane tonight, and there weren't any alerts? I didn't hear anything, did any of you?"

No one has.

"What's weirder is that they were all caught tonight," Superia says.

"Huh?" Dragon asks.

"They all escaped tonight and the public wasn't alerted," Superia explains. "But they were all caught tonight as well. Fearmonger doesn't usually start his sprees until the public has built up a heady steam of panic."

"She's right," I say. "Arachnid usually lays low for a day or so after she escapes, busts Webmaster out of Bendis, sort of thing."

"Lurk doesn't walk down the street in plain view of everyone," Blue Jay adds.

"Darklight, you said this wasn't a coincidence?" I ask her.

"No. I mean, it is. But it's not a natural coincidence."

"Care to explain, hon?" Physique asks.

"Yeah, pretend none of us is a magician," Phenom adds.

"Someone has... manipulated events, to draw us all here," Darklight explains.

"Coincidental magic?" Superia asks.

"Not quite, but close," Darklight answers.

"Someone cast a spell to let loose all our craziest enemies and then made sure we'd catch them tonight?" Dragon says. "What's the point in that?"

"The doors just opened," I say, suddenly understanding. The others are looking at me. "Arachnid said to me that the doors 'just opened' and she walked out."

Red Bolt disappears in a blur of red and yellow.

"So someone wanted us all here tonight?" Ragdoll asks. "Why tonight?"

"Why us?" Phenom asks.

"That's not the worst of it," Darklight says. "Magic has... a.. flavour to it. This isn't merely the manipulation of probabilities. This is chronomancy."

"Chronowha?" Phenom asks before I can.

"Someone is manipulating time," Superia explains. "From the future?"

"Exactly," Darklight says.

"Okay, whoa," Ace says. "Someone from the future cast a spell to free our psycho playmates and make sure all of us here would be here tonight. Who? Why?"

Red Bolt races in, panting, and says, "Thdrsrlkt."

"Slow down, Red," I tell him.

"He says the doors are locked," Phenom translates.

"The cell doors, right?" I say, a sinking feeling in my stomach.

"And the doors leading out," he answers.

The clock starts to chime midnight.

Lightning crashes right overhead, and the lights go out.

There's a sound I hope I'll never hear again, as hundreds of deadbolts turn in their locks, hundred of padlocks suddenly unlock, hundreds of cell doors swing wide open.

Then the laughter starts.