Chapter Five: Dial M for Sofa

“Science was a masquerade, meant to sell you lemonay-ade, and it worked! They’re laughing in their graves!”

Ace watched Reeso clear off his table, which was a disintigrating card table of dubious origin and mismatched legs. The entire apartment looked like a tornado had run through it, except that Reeso’s habits were such that if a tornado scattered his stuff around it would actually leave things more organized.

“What’s that you’re singing?”

“Wha? Oh. It’s called Don’t Be Like The Sun. By Neil Cis… Ceise… Oh hell, I couldn’t pronounce it if the life of three supermodels depended on it. But he’s basically a one man band called Lemon Demon. Mitch told me about him and I’ve been hunting down his CDs from that point onward.”

“You are a music nut?”

“More of a music snob. Before Lemon Demon, I only listened to one band, the Five Horsemen. Heard of them?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Figures. Well, the styles of the groups are very similar, right down to the odd lyrics and subject matter, but the Five Horsemen will sometimes give hints that they are clued-in.”

“Clued-in to what?”

A glass almost slipped out of John’s hands, but his superhuman reflexes prevented it. “I probably should not have been surprised by this, but it’s still a little weird.”

“You’re doing that thing again, that talking about stuff that I should know but don’t.”

“Right right… damn, Mitch should have been here by now… shit. Alright. Seat thy buttocks upon a chair and we shall discuss the past happenstance over alcohol poisoning.”

“…why is my stomach trying to steer my legs away from the table?”

***

“…what… the hell… is in this.” Ace stared straight ahead, his eyes pointing at John but not actually looking at him, his entire endocrine system thrown out of whack and arguing with his nervous system about the fastest way to get the drink out of the body.

“You know, I never really figured that out. I know it came with the apartment and it causes Episcopal preists to break out in hives when they smell it.”

“So it was here when you came here?”

“Well… yeah. And one time I got all sorts of crazy thoughts in my thinking organ and threw it out the window… when I woke up, it was still in the back of the cabinet.”

“Maybe you just hallucinated it.”

“That’s what I thought, until I went out for food and heard some homeless guy was killed when a flying bottle of liquor hit him and cut him up like thirty angry ninja stars.”

“Maybe he hallucinated that too.”

Cody lept up and put his paws on the edge of the rickety card table. “Cody demands alcohol!”

John hunted around the kitchenette until he found a reasonably clean saucer and poured some of the mystery booze into it.

“Muchos Gracias, capitan!”

“Sure thing.” John sat down again, then rolled his eyes and stood up again when somebody knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” he called in a mock-falsetto voice.

“Vaccuum Cleaner salesman, sir or madame. I’d like you to sell me yours.”

John walked over and began unlatching the locks on the inside of the door. Ace noticed for the second time that there were a very large number of locks on that door. Even more than could be rationalized by the bad neighborhood.

The door swung open and Ace found himself looking at a man wearing a garish touristy Hawaiin shirt, a camera around his neck, a large floppy hat, and Groucho Marx glasses.

“What the hell?”

The man walked in and grinned. “I’m in disguise. Don’t tell anyone.”

John poked his head out in the hall and looked around. “What about Drew? Where is your protege, Disguisotron?”

“He was right behind me. Must have been put off by the smell.”

“That is very much the fault of somebody besides me. I haven’t killed- Aha! I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with ‘It was a dark and stormy night!’ Come in. Or out.”

“Hah hah, John.” A young man… a VERY young man, to Ace’s eyes… squeezed into the apartment. Height implied at least an age of the twenties, but the face looked much like that of a guy in his early teens. It was a bit disorienting.

“So this is the famous Mac? I’ve been waiting to meet you. Mitch has been telling me all sorts of stuff about your misadventures.”

John sat down at the table. “Yeah, about that. It would probably be really helpful if Mitch could repeat those stories to the guy who is the center of them. Let us become organized! Grab a seat! Then let go of it and sit down in it! Puzzle peices, assemble!”

Mitch and Drew took chairs opposite each other, and Cody took a spot next to Ace.

John reached over and grabbed a wooden spoon from the counter and rapped on the coffee table. “This meeting of the Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things will come to order! First on the agenda: Do fried chicken lay hard boiled eggs?”

Mitch picked up an empty glass on the table, and sniffed the vapours remaining. “You crazy dick. You started without us.”

***

“Okay. Coffee. Weeeeee. Sobering up, for great justice.” John shook his head from side so side violently, in an even more dog-like manner than Cody could.

“Alrighty then. Summary. Our friend Mac here has forgotten stuff. Which comes as no surprise. But he appears to have forgotten everything this time. He does not remember us, but I think he remembered the apartment building. Yes?”

“Not really. I found a note, apparently written to myself, that implied I had an apartment somewhere. Cody and I systematically searched the whole damned city until we wound up here.”

“Alright then. That clears things up. You remember nothing about us or this place. What about yourself? What do you remember about your own identity and history?”

Ace scratched his chin. “Fragments of incompatible memories. Some stuff when I was a kid, horsing around. Building this thing,” he trailed off as he pulled out the metal puzzle cube. Drew leaned forward for a closer look, but Mitch and John only looked at each other.

“Anything about how you built it?”

“Just that I was using something called a torsion pic at one point. Why?”

“Just a theory. Do you have any tools on hand?”

“Funny you should bring that up.” Ace began rummaging through his bag that held his old clothes and got the tools he had purchased from the store. “Shortly after I came to and high-tailed it out of the hospital, I went through the hardware section of a store and I felt compelled to by some hand tools.”

John nodded. “I suspected as much. Your tools are essential for your particular magick.”

Ace stared. “Excuse me, I thought I heard you use the word magick.”

“Probably because I did, though in this world it’s hard to tell.”

John leaned back and tapped his fingers on the table, waiting. Any moment now, Mac would get up and walk out, convinced everyone in the room was nuts. Or loudly and proudly claim magick to be imaginary. Any moment now. Any moment… hurry up dammit, the paint doesn’t watch itself dry.

Ace looked at each person at the table, then down at Cody, who shrugged as well as a dog could. He turned back to look at John.

“When you said hunter-seeker earlier… what exactly were you referring to?”

***

Nobody had a spare key to the apartment, but Drew was able to pick the lock in about five minutes. He pushed the door open and the five faces — four men, one dog — looked expectantly into the room.

“Uh, Drew, you wanna hit the lights? Or rather, the light switch. If you hit the lights they’ll break and we still won’t be able to see anything.”

The lights came on, but only Cody did anything like a gasp of surprise. Ace, for his part, just walked slowly into the entryway.

A crude machine that looked like a metal skeleton’s limb reached out for him; Ace held up the bag of stuff he had been carrying around, and the hand automatically hung it on a coathook.

“…my life. And my work. My life’s work.”

Like most apartments, this one had various fixtures and furnishings. Unusually for apartments in this building, a lot of them were in good shape. There were stacks of books and diagrams in the corners, and kitchen appliances in various stages of disassembly on the kitchen counter, chairs, and coffee table.

Information lined up and organized in his conscious mind, like the answer to a riddle that escaped deduction for weeks at a time. His heart rate slowed down, his pupils dilated, and his posture got less rigid — in fact, it wasn’t until he was able to relax in the presence of his machinery that he realized how stressed out he had been.

That was when he noticed the mounted fish on the wall looking at him. He walked over and was not surprised when it began to talk to him.

“Welcome back, Builder. There have been — zero — unauthorized intrusions since your departure three days ago. Have a productive day.”

Ace reached out and twisted the dorsal fin of the fish. The side facing him popped open, showing spinning gears and tiny belts, plus a number of… actually, what were those things…?

Ace looked back at his companions. Every single one of them looked a little bit cross-eyed.

They can’t see some of those parts, he thought to himself with a sudden clarity. Those are… those aren’t actually physical parts. They’re parts of an energy field that extended back into normal space from the 90 degree orientation of the actual parts… yes, because that was actually what time is, right? A difference between two energy fields, synchronized but with a sort of meta-doppler shift… yes, yes, of course!

Ace grinned triumphantly and grabbed a nearby screwdriver. He didn’t even see it, he just knew that it was there. He used it to turn a screw, but instead of tightening or loosening a fastening, it compressed more energy into a metallic mainspring close to the tail. He closed the fish-panel, spun the screwdriver around his fingers like a baton, then held it over his chest, like he was going to…

Put it in a jacket pocket.

A very special jacket.

“Like the blind man pissing into the wind, it’s all coming back to me now.”

***

“The first I knew about it was about five months ago. I was searching for John. I wanted him to train me in his magick of the flesh and blood and bitching tattoos.”

“I NEVER bitch about my tattoos,” John said in a condescending tone and british upper class accent, sticking his nose in the air in a haughty manner.

“Maybe you should. Anyway, I was involved in a manhunt for you, Mac. A guy, Something Vargus-”

“Cassidy Vargus.”

“In any event, he called himself Dr. Vague and he wanted to grind you into a meat paste. You killed his wife, either by accident or design. The thing is, his wife’s ghost started haunting you because she knew her husband was going to go nuts and turn into a demon.”

“Buh?”

John held up two fingers. “There are two kinds of restless spirits we know of, according to a friend of mine. The first is obsessed with doing things, and they are demons. The second is obsessed with getting things done, and they are revenants. Vague’s wife was the second type.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One tries to steal your body and the other doesn’t need to.”

“Oh.”

“ANYWAY, we found out, about the same time you found us, that you were a clockworker. A practitioner of a very, very old form of magick called Mechanomancy. To power your machinery, you put in tiny bits of your soul, usually parts of your memories. And you had done that so much, made so many machines, that you no longer remembered anything coherent about your origins. You left yourself some detailed notes, though.”

“That makes sense.”

“The notes were incomplete, though. Your lists of inventions neglected a few things, like a mechanical eye you used to have. Plus, the journals you kept only went back a few years.”

“At least I was smart enough to try.”

“When they foreclosed on your safehouse, you got an apartment here. Right about the time I started grasping the magickal approach myself. Of course, that’s a whole other, very odd, story.”

John covered his face with his hands. “Sweet Jebus, can’t we just drop that? It’s so freaking STUPID!”

“I know that, but it did happen.”

Ace looked between the two men. “This requires elaboration, sirs!”

“Okay, fine. Tell him Mitch.”

“John was trying to teach me the principles of flesh magick, but for reasons neither of us have ever been able to grasp, I learned an entirely different school. It’s called chaos magick. Entropomancy. I think it happened because of John comparing magickal energy to electricity and the human nervous system as a superconducting matrix. I couldn’t really get excited about the blood and the burning and the tattoos, but the adrenaline rush… that’s what keyed it for me.”

“Doubting Thomas put out feelers into the Underground, and nothing like this has ever been known to happen. Most apprentices pick up their mentor’s magick like a carbon copy. The variations are so slight they can’t be seen with the naked eye.”

Ace was about to ask what they meant by Underground, but his brain, supercharged by the confidence of recovering his most important skills, was able to reason it out for him. Humans in large numbers, and even a few all by themselves, go absolutely apeshit when something defies their expectations of the world. Much as children are liable to scream in terror when a parent dresses like Santa Claus and becomes unrecognizable, so to will people panic if gravity becomes inconsistent, television characters real, or chickens shoot lightning. Those who were able to cause such strange events had to keep it on the low-down, so to speak.

“And where does Drew come into all of this?”

“He’s trying to learn Entropomancy from me. Given the luck our little knitting circle here has, he’ll end up getting his mystic kicks with liquor or something.”

“So he wasn’t around during that event you were talking about?”

“No, he hunted me down after I managed to save him from a bungee jump gone very bad.”

Drew scratched Cody behind the ears, and a comical look flashed across the dog’s face. “Mitch introduced me to John early on, but every time I came to visit, you were out hunting for parts, so this is the first time we’ve met.”

“I see. So what do you guys do? Hell, what do I do? All this magick can’t pay all of the bills, right?”

John jumped up and struck a hilarious muscle-man pose. “I may be a mild-mannered magician by night, but by day I am Jani-Tor! Foe of Dust and Dirt!”

“He sweeps up at the hospital during the day shift. Sometimes he’ll send someone with AIDS or shit into spontaneous remission. Just to keep the doctors on their toes. I personally stock things at Convenio-Mart. Drew?”

“Guidance Counselor. At the high school.”

Ace looked at Cody. “And you?”

“Well, technically, I was between jobs at the time… I did a lot of web design work though. I don’t think that’s going to be an option unless they build ergonomic keyboards for paws.”

Drew’s fingers froze and his eyes widened.

“Excuse me. Did the dog just speak?”

“Technically, I’m a wolf. But yes, I said something.”

“Oh. Okay. Mitch, is this another one of the tests you mentioned?”

“If it is, I didn’t plan on it. Of course, life as a whole is really a test.”

“I see. Excuse me gentleman. I have to throw up out of shock now.”

John started pointing in various directions. “The roof is down at the end of the-”

Mitch elbowed him. “You have an unhealthy fascination with the roof, man. I think that Mac’s bathroom actually works. In fact, thanks to him, so does yours now. And you STILL go up there! What the hell is that about?!”