Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Twelve (1/5)
Spook Secrets
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
“Bugger off, Paul.”
Paul flickered silvery-pale, long fronds of smoky hair drifting dejectedly around his shoulders.
Tattie threw the captube she‘d been smoking from the window and turned to face him. “Don’t give me those sad eyes. I’ve had a crappy day like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I don’t want to make your day worse, Tattie.”
If he’d been flesh and blood, the static whine in his voice would have prompted her to slap him. Unfortunately, Tattie knew that any attempt to plant violence on her surly lodger would only end in a useless swipe at frigid air followed by days of sulking. Paul couldn’t abide physical contact.
“I have a fairly good grasp of what you’re planning,” he said. “I won’t try to dissuade you from this fool’s errand, I know that’s pointless. I just need to tell you something before things progress.”
“Before things progress?”
“Yes, before you embark on such a risky endeavor.”
Tattie was sorely tempted to spark up a second tube. “Why do you talk like that?”
“Like what?” Paul seemed genuinely surprised. His hair riffled across his back, glinting a brief, faded cherry red before blanching back to pearly translucence.
“Like some moneyed professor with a stick up his arse.”
For a moment, Tattie was sure Paul would pull one of his patented tantrums but he only scowled at her, his eyes hardening to icy points.
“I won’t dignify that with a reply,” he said. “This is too important.”
Tattie finally relented, sitting cross-legged in the armchair and motioning for Paul to continue. A fresh cup of coffee was steaming on the table—Paul’s idea of caffeinated bribery. Tattie reached for it, curled listless fingers around its comforting warmth. It really had been a shitty day. She was glad Ginx had taken herself back to whatever dank hole she called home. Being forced to look at the flayed remnants of her face, the daemon constantly rising in her eyes like the first flickerings of violent cap-rage, had been exhausting.
“I have something for you,” Paul began.
He floated across the room, stopped beside the front door, and dropped to the vague outline of a knee. Tattie watched him from behind her coffee cup, wishing he would hurry up so she could join Brax in getting some shut-eye. Memories of wet meat dropping into a basket, then Ginx erupting like a tentacled flesh geyser, refused to shut down. The images continued to rise in her mind—stuttering visions of blood and shattered bone—and all Tattie could do was grit her teeth against them.
At least Paul had provided her with a distraction. He fumbled with something on the wall, something small wedged up against the doorframe. Her heavy eyelids started to close, the coffee cup drooping in her hands. Then Paul finally tripped the switch he’d been looking for and a segment of the wall slid away, blasting the heavy weariness from Tattie’s system with the force of a high pulse stun pike.
“What the fuck is that?”
Tattie slammed the coffee cup back down on the table and disentangled herself from the armchair, eager to examine the dark alcove that had appeared in her wall.
“Has this always been here?”
“Yes. You just never knew about it.”
Paul drifted to the side, allowing Tattie to inspect the alcove. It was a perfect square in the thick concrete, lined with dull steel. There were several objects inside. Small, secret things wrapped in muslin and leather.
“Are these yours, Paul?”
Paul didn’t have personal belongings. He’d appeared on the day she moved in, as devoid of any possessions as the blank-faced apartment. She’d questioned him, of course. Actually, she’d screamed at him to get the fuck out, then spent two hours examining the kitchen wall when he ran at it and disappeared in a spray of angry green sparks. He had always refused to explain his presence. All he ever said was that he was a spectral event, whatever that meant, and was unable to leave the apartment. Then he made firm friends with Mr Meow. He started drifting about the place, leaving his cold coffee offerings in his fumy wake and reminding her when it was time to leave for work, and Tattie stopped asking questions. He became as much a part of the apartment as the cheap wardrobe or the broken viewscreen. Finding out he’d been keeping a secret stash of Mervaroid-knows-what in a hidden vault this entire time was jarring.
“Yes, they belong to me,” Paul said. “Or they used to.”
“So they belong to me now?” Tattie reached inside the steel box but before she could close on one of the strangely wrapped packages, Paul moved to block her.
“They’re not for you,” he said. His hair lifted from his shoulders and rose about his head, seguing from fleshy pink to a sickly yellow.
“Then who are they for? What are they?”
Paul turned and bent again, rummaging towards the back of the alcove and pulling out a small drawstring pouch. He flipped the switch against the doorframe before Tattie could react and the wall slid back into place with a sharp click.
“I don’t suppose you’ll ever tell me what this is all about,” she said, expelling a low, frustrated breath. As if there wasn’t enough going on, now she had to try and forget there was a hidden vault in her own bloody apartment that she wasn’t supposed to open.
“I won’t tell you everything,” Paul said. “And don’t go thinking you can just trip the switch when I’m not looking and start prying through my private stuff.”
“I thought it wasn’t yours.”
“Regardless of the semantics, you won’t be able to access this portal. The switch is coded to respond to my touch alone.”
He drifted closer as Tattie glared at him, the drawstring pouch held tight to his gauzy chest.
“This, though,” he said, holding the pouch open so Tattie could see inside, “is for you.”
There was a pendant nestled at the bottom of the pouch, a thick, ugly droplet of gold set with a dull green stone.
“It’s a storage device,” Paul explained. “A deceptively large storage device. Large enough to store an entire spectral entity.”
Tattie wished she had finished drinking the coffee. She was too tired to jam all the pieces of Paul’s nonsense together.
“You’re talking about yourself, right? Or do you have some spectral girlfriend stashed away somewhere and you want me to go grab her so she can move in? I really don’t know if I can deal with more than one of you, Paul. You’ve already freaked the shit out of every guest I’ve ever had, and Mr Meow still—”
Paul seemed to grow in stature as he blazed a deep neon blue, his hair moving like thrashing tails that writhed about his head. “It’s for me,” he said. “If you stop jabbering for just a few minutes, I can explain.”
Tattie held her hands up in a gesture of resignation and Paul calmed a little, the harsh blues flooding his body fading to an artic burr.
“This will come as no surprise to you, Tattiana, but I do not enjoy being trapped within these walls. This storage device has always been my backup plan. I’ve waited for the right tenant to come along.” He shuddered, the effect like sand rolling through foamy seawater. “I’ve been waiting for a lifetime. Some tenants seemed likely candidates, people I could entrust with my being, but all eventually fell short. I’m still not sure if I can trust you with a task of this magnitude, but you’re the best I’ve got. The best I’ve had. You have certain abilities and you’re rather intimidating.”
Tattie wasn’t sure if she should feel insulted or not, but she let him continue.
“If you were attacked or set upon, my chances of remaining safe within this storage device are high. Let’s face it, if anyone tried to rob you, they’d probably regret it until the end of their days.”
She considered this, nodded curt agreement.
“So you see, it has to be you. I can only hope that you’ll agree to such a thing. When you leave to broach the Noctarum and steal their data, I will download myself into the pendant. I’ll be helpless at that point, only able to be retrieved once you find a system powerful enough to hold me. That idea is bleak and terrifying, but it’s now or never. Once you’ve completed your task, you’ll leave and I might have to wait another lifetime before finding another capable of helping me.”
He slumped slightly as he finished, as though the effort of relaying such a vast amount of information had exhausted him. Tattie knew how he felt. She wanted to crawl into bed beside Brax so badly it was almost a physical ache.
“This is some crazy shit,” she said.
“I agree.”
Paul was a serious guy. Tattie couldn’t imagine he’d ever been the life of anyone’s party, but she’d never seen such fierce intensity in his eyes before. He was pleading for his life, such as it was. She rubbed fists into her eyes, trying to kickstart her tired brain.
“So, you’ll be in that pendant by the time I get back from the Noctarum?”
“Yes.”
“What if it all goes tits up? What if I don’t come back? You’ll be stuck inside that thing forever.”
“You’ll make it back. You’re the Arcanoforge.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes, fuck.”
They stared at each other, the silence heavy with hope and want and fear. Tattie wanted to tell him to bugger off. She wasn’t a spectral babysitter. She looked out for herself, she didn’t need this motherlode of a responsibility. How dare he ask? She narrowed her eyes and straightened her shoulders, hating Paul a little for making her do this.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll be coming back for Mr Meow, I might as well let you tag along too. I’m not wearing that ugly thing, though. You’re getting stuffed in the bottom of a bag and you’ll say sweet fuck all about it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Paul’s relief rippled through him like a fresh breeze. His hair gleamed, woven through with shimmering tendrils of gold, and the fraying outline of his face fine-tuned, morphing into softly rounded features made unfamiliar by a tight smile.
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Content Warnings
Description of gore/violence, swearing