The Magniloquent Mr. Tombs & The Case of The Immortality Apocalypse

Point of Entry:

The Damascus Road Cemetery

April 23rd—

Bruiser McKnight stood in an open grave on the crown of Quixote Hill, absorbing the rain and all the details of the Victorian toe pincher anchored beneath his boots. Jagged streaks of lightning revealed the coffin’s flowered edges, illuminating painted boughs of green and dark red roses spiraling together along its outline that was narrow at the foot section and broad-shouldered at the head. It was a magnificent product of Old-World artistry with a black lid as slick as a mirror. Equal attention was given to the metamorphic anthracite the grave walls were constructed from, smoothed by hand with pumice and washing until all four sections had a reflective luster; each possessing intricate carvings of horse-mounted knights made visible with every burst of electricity that lit up the night sky.

Details were essential.

It was the formula for success, especially for an artist like Bruiser who was hoping to finally make the fractured edges of his personal life and his meager bank account advance together with some sense of complicity as an erstwhile gravedigger. The opportunity awaiting him topside was something few authors would dare to believe was possible, a one-night-only ticket that meant he could permanently retire from his filthy side profession.

But he had to win the immediate battle ahead first.

Bruiser was an enigma as classic as any literary device. The record of his strange and hardboiled life contained inexplicable gaps of essential information and a constant fatigue of anything resembling a linear chronology transparent enough to understand or relate to in average terms. He could remember the years he spent traveling about from the Blackwell bookstore in Oxford to the Paris-based Shakespeare & Co. as one of many Tumbleweed initiates, living on a shoestring budget waged by hot, grueling labor and a laughable record of old royalty payments for a long-forgotten piece of commercial fiction he had come to suspect was published using a pseudonym.

But that was more than a decade ago.

The only evidence he had of being a published author were phantom memories and the burnt remnants of a check he found clutched in his fist on that stormy night when he first woke up alone and disoriented in the Damascus Road Cemetery—a storm identical in its ferocity to the present maelstrom sweeping by overhead. There was nothing definitive to account for his arrival in this unrenowned corner of the world; just as there was no ready answer to explain the original catalyst for the lingering state of his impairment. All that remained of the only clue to his true-identity was the eight-dollar amount on the charred edges of the residual and the name of a trite little independent publishing house in rural Pennsylvania which, he had learned by way of his many rebuffed inquiries, thought way too highly of their place in a cutthroat industry governed by the super-literate.

There was a book in the world somewhere with his name on it. He knew it existed despite the many obstacles suggesting otherwise; and it was a novel. He was certain of it. Yet every web search he did with his name yielded nothing, as did relentless financial probing at local banks for any additional information concerning past royalty payments. It was a strategy based on the idea that Roxboro, North Carolina may have been his birthplace. It would certainly help in determining why this little innocuous heap of exile in the world was where he was meant to be stranded in and tortured by for so many years now. But when no one in town recognizes you or your name, hope quickly turns to something just short of a heavy lean toward hate. A cesspool of religious ignorance polarized against fractured segments of bumpkin mentalities, a feckless arts council, oafish police with holstered deism, and a local community college running amok with taxpayer dollars, was not a place for someone like Bruiser to subsist in for any protracted amount of time without risking his sanity. The “I seen” intransitive colloquialisms of the region alone were enough to drive any sane person mad.

Yet here he remained.

Why?

There was no real answer beyond the necessary evil of being shaped by fire; and just simply not knowing what to do or where to go next. That was his best response to an investigation lacking all the pertinent clues he needed, barring some unexpected parcels delivered anonymously to his loft on North Main Street for the last twelve years of his convoluted existence, as if he were some new millennium Pip being groomed for a modern adaptation of Great Expectations. And so, he chose to stay put and work, training and planning fervently for that one precious moment when he could make like the Count of Monte Cristo and quit this place as a man of patience and divine aptitude. It had been the only reasonable course of action for the longest time.

Until tonight, that is.

Bruiser waited with his head bowed, enjoying the rain and its drumbeat on the lid. Despite the name, he didn’t possess the stature of a giant. He stood exactly five-feet-ten inches tall. His Doc Marten boots gave him an extra two inches when needed. And his body was not soft and weak as one would usually expect from a veteran of pens and keys. He had the hardened profile Hemingway admired, his tanned physique bulging against the wet fabric of his jeans and the knee-length coat of black velvet he was wearing. Some of the best parts of his physical attributes were strategically on display, his shirtless torso protruding through the coat’s opening in a stacked pattern of muscularity baked to flexible iron by years of toiling beneath the sun, with ropy veins stretching the dark skin of his fists and the chiseled swoop of his clavicle. It was the body of a gravedigger made hard before he ever dug a single hole in this little patch of hell.

The moment Bruiser was waiting for came with a hard strike on the lightning rods fixed at the compass points of the grave’s opening, channeling the energy downward through the walls with small eruptions of blue flame that exploded through the grooves of the horse-mounted knights. The heat was immediate, fueled by the ignition temperature of the slow-burning anthracite warming his black hair and the sharply-angled features of his reflection that was hovering in the surface of the lid. His eyes burned with a ghostly shade of emerald light in the haze of the flames, absorbing the epitaph over and over that was carved in gold script beneath the coffin’s lion-faced medallion and its wild mane of golden sunbeams.

“Fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”

The quote was from the lengthy introduction to Thomas Wolfe’s classic novel Look Homeward, Angel. It was one of Bruiser’s favorites from what he could remember. Few lines in the annals of literature could sum up the mystery of his life as well as that little gem. It was also a steady reminder of a certain redheaded woman that often appeared in fleeting images when sleep was more of an addled limbo of dreams than the restful state of death it was meant to simulate. There was always a woman somewhere near the heart of the greatest stories, real or imagined. But the most notable reminder of the book’s excerpt for him was that it consisted of eight words—the number for resurrection.

The walls of the eight-foot-deep grave were part of an elaborate memorial meant to honor the town’s legend of an Unknown Soldier; and were the greatest works of art he had ever produced outside of his writing. But the coffin was one of the parcels he had received from his benefactor, arriving with the curious epitaph Pequod carved in silver on the foot section—the name of Captain Ahab’s ill-fated vessel destroyed at the end of Moby Dick. The fact that a coffin served as a life buoy for Ahab’s remaining crew of thirty made the gift seem a little heavy handed in its symbolism. It was by far the strangest of the gifts. He wasn’t sure why he added it to the memorial, but it just seemed appropriate since the town didn’t have any remains to honor their missing son whose name no one knew. And there was no way to tell what was inside the coffin since it was locked. The lion medallion was the tumbler for the lock, which coincided with the circuit of numbers engraved on the sunbeams. But he had no idea what the combination was. Whatever lay inside, it wasn’t a body. He had weighed it several times before adding it to the finished memorial.

Finishing the monument had brought him a great amount of satisfaction considering the many rejections he had endured in his chief profession. The design was inspired by an array of ideas from the many graveyards he had visited during his time trotting about. Years of traveling and learning had given him the necessary skills to create something that would make the Earth itself cry out with remembrance when all the forces of nature were aligned in one perfect moment.

And this was one of those perfect moments.

“The Knight of Mirrors,” he said with a nod to Cervantes. “Fiction doesn’t come more dangerous than this, does it? But you protected all those arrogant bastards and the meek just the same, punishing those who would narrate the destruction of Salinger and Vonnegut before their due. You outlived the commonplace coin of speech H.L. Mencken once craved with the appetite of a rabid dog. And now my time has come to do likewise. To electrify the ivory towers of sleep so that all the Finnegans of Joyce will be magnetized together in a hell of their own babble.”

He squatted on the edge of the coffin and leaned a little closer to the image of his face, touching the drenched reflection with the tips of his fingers. “All right, then. Let’s take the dramatic posturing to the next level, shall we? Show the editors waiting for you on the other side of this memorial just how well you can market an image; and without a single profile on social media.”

He grinned.

It felt good to be in control for once.

Bruiser stood with perfect timing as another spear of electricity ripped through the sky, its force driving the rain away almost instantly. The clouds began to recede, giving way to a large moon that appeared behind his head. He slicked back the wet locks of his hair with both hands before reaching into one of the side pockets of his coat, pulling out a radio-controlled device and a pair of vintage sunglasses with rose-colored lenses. A loud pop and scratch of vinyl erupted from somewhere beyond the grave with a push of the transmitter’s button, igniting bright flashes of light and the brazen tulip of an Old- World phonograph that started humming with the tune Long Black Road.

He slid the glasses on and turned toward the narrow wall behind him where there were eight rungs for a built-in ladder, his grin widening at the music’s steady rise in volume. The ladder was already warm to the touch as he began his climb, his face rising through pockets of shadow and halos of blue flame. He slapped his hand against the top rung, pulling himself over the edge. A thump of wind hit him sideways the moment he stood upright, snapping the train of his coat outward with a flash of its honeycomb interior that was loomed with yellow silk, framing him in that universal pose of the romantic loner. Every element felt perfectly bent to the will and timing of his imagination.

“Use it,” he whispered to himself. “Give them the Malamud fastball.”

The mysterious cast of characters standing in front of the large bonfire at the foot of Quixote Hill started judging him the moment he rose from the grave. And he would need every edge of distinction available to enhance his strategy for the contest ahead, no matter how dramatic or overwrought. Publishers worried unceasingly about an author’s skill to promote their work and forge a marketable image; usually at creator expense. New writers and mid-list veterans were always at a disadvantage when it came to affordable marketing that made a difference in sales and lasting awareness. The big money went to the usual factory nomenclatures like King and Rowling and the Diaz dominators of the pedagogue circuit; and to the ubiquitous publishing deals for annoying and undeserving celebrities mugging for the covers of Publisher’s Weekly and Book Page.

He had worked for two months straight to prepare for this night, using the preexisting scenery of Quixote Hill and the rest of the Damascus Road Cemetery to create a home field advantage. A marker of five intersected crosses of white meerschaum was positioned behind him at the head of the grave, with the central cross rising higher than the other four connected to it. Looming behind the grave marker was a gnarled, hollowed-out oak tree grasping at the moon with crooked fingers that popped and cracked with each shift of the night air. At the base of the hill was an old Sherman tank salvaged from the Battle of the Bulge. It was buried halfway beneath the mound’s foundation, its large barrel and forward chassis taking on the shape of a nose and a steel jaw beneath two craters in the hill’s eroding façade. Together it gave off the vibe of a bleeding skull amidst rivers of muck and patchwork green.

Bruiser took his moment of control to size up the group assembled near the bonfire of old railroad beams, which had been doused with gallons of gasoline to survive the passing storm and remotely lit when he cued the phonograph. The faces staring back at him were an array of youth and middle age made firm by a regimen of corporate demand for healthy bodies to support the powerful minds the syndicate depended on for optimum results. The truth about the existence of the Black House Syndicate was a combination of legend and the whispered admissions of the power they wielded throughout the industry. They owned an impressive network of publishing labels, mass producing everything from the schlock of the low brow bestsellers to the award-minded tomes that couldn’t suck at the ivory tits of Pulitzer and O. Henry fast enough. The syndicate was even rumored to wield great influence over the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva that administered the ISBN codes for books and created trade rules for all the commercial markets of the industrialized nations.

That was the nature of success, though. The giant would always be envied and mimicked. Even the savvy little boutiques were not immune. The Hot House of Farrar, Straus & Giroux was a glimpse of what was doable. They were famous for their capacity to muscle up on the shared conceits of the independents better than anyone else on each side of the Atlantic. Bruiser called it the Frankenstein mentality. Create a formula for something unique from all that is both remote and relatable to the fringe parts of the human condition and you can make a monster of your name to be feared and respected.

None of that mattered to him right now. All he cared about were the preparations he had made. The four pillars he erected hours ago, two in front of the flames and two near the base of the hill, were choice selections of stained cedar accented with thickly-scaled dragons spiraling upward, their gaping jaws at the top burning with blue flames that had been lit simultaneously with the bonfire in a glorious explosion of pyrotechnics. Versailles chairs of dark leather were assembled between the totems, with a wide aisle of white gravel separating them in the manner of a rectangular boxing ring. The domed backrests and curved walls of the chairs had helped protect the interior seats from the rain. Another chair with an abnormally high backrest was covered from view and anchored in the grass and mud between the two pillars erected at the foot of the hill. The phonograph on the table to the right of the lead chair was spinning the tune of his triumphant entry, building in tempo with the vinyl’s wet spin. A final piece of furniture, a tall wardrobe delivered anonymously to his loft seven months after his initial arrival, was standing on the left side of the lead chair, covered by a shroud of midnight blue silk with a circuit of stars.

It had taken a balance of timing and all his limited resources to set the stage for his entrance, not even knowing how it would go without a dress rehearsal. But it was done. The music was riveting. The fires were roaring to expectation. And the players were all gathered together for a spectacle only one of them knew had been centuries in the making. Shakespeare himself, or Lord Oxford as some still insisted on calling the playwright, would be proud of what was about to unfold on the ancient anniversary of his expiration, a date—despite the ten-day difference in the Julian Calendar at the time of his demise—he now shared in myth and memoriam with the Prince of Wits Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It was an event, if for just one glorious spring night, that was meant to revive an age when public speaking was an art form worthy of emulation.

Bruiser started his march down the hill, the scalloped train of his coat snapping sideways with the wind. He stepped down over the tank’s hatch and its large gun turret that had the name Rocinante written on its barrel in a faded color of white paint, his boots splash-landing at the foot of the hill. Every muddy step was timed to the hard-charging beats of music as he zoned in on a female figure, watching her step forward a pace from amongst the twelve hard-looking men arrayed in varying shades of darkness common to the corporate power suit.

No originality; just uniformed looks of aggression.

The long-legged woman was different. She was dressed in heels and a magenta-colored skirt of silk and percale that had pelvis splits on each side, and was belted around the waist with a black sash detailed in a pattern of golden hoof prints and a flourish of roses and picador swords. An ample display of cleavage pressed against the opening in her white blouse, leading the eye upward toward a face that was clearly Spanish in origin, framed by raven locks of hair and a floppy hat of black felt. The cover girl stare was almond and fiery, bringing out the depth of a fascinating scar on her right cheek. She reminded him of a buccaneer, an impossibly fit and colorfully-adorned pirate of the book world. Her entire look not only exuded a sleek persona of danger and intelligence, but something aesthetically familiar on a professional level.

Bruiser walked to the turntable where the phonograph was sitting and stopped, pulling the needle in mid-spin with a quick scratch of the vinyl. No one spoke. There was only the act of immediate preparation for the bonus-round he had been told would precede the beginning of the pitch session. He had the choice of refusing the bonus due to the level of skill required to win the stakes. But he was confident enough of his wherewithal to be competitive.

The woman shuffled forward a few steps from the rest of the group with a look of sheer amusement at Bruiser’s flair for showmanship, watching as he snatched a roll of duct-tape from the turntable and a copy of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. He made a fist with his right hand and slapped the book against his knuckles, wrapping the tape around both with the wildness of a boxer prepping for the bout of his life. A thickly-ringed cane of acacia wood with a brass pommel of a Monarch typewriter was the next item he snapped up from the table; another one of the select gifts he had received anonymously a few months after being mysteriously deposited in this Podunk town.

The framework for the Hemingway Pentameter, the contest that had the promise of netting him a seven-figure bonus in addition to the total purse that was on the table for the pitch session to come, was simple enough to follow seeing there were only two ways to beat your opponent. Executing the moves for a win would be the difficult part. The bout was to be a combination of the Vingy-style of French cane fighting and good old- fashioned pugilism. None of that Neil Gaiman punch-free narrative would keep him on his feet tonight.

The main stipulation for the Pentameter was that once the inaugural blow was landed to start the bout neither of the chosen combatants could move their feet for positioning no more than five times. Whoever succeeded in breaking the spine of their opponent’s book or forced the other into a sixth step was the winner. It was all part of the offer the syndicate had proposed to him two months ago, which had given him plenty of time to prepare for the bonus-round. He had also been given the choice of selecting the secondary form of combat. The book-fisted pugilism was not an option. So he chose the Vingy-style of French cane fighting, a skill he couldn’t fully remember how he had attained, but knew he was proficient enough in to use as an advantage due to the fact that the last great practitioners of the art were British soldiers in 19th century India. And it was a reasonable assertion to believe his yet to be revealed opponent was likely unfamiliar with such an obscure form of self defense.

“What a thrilling entrance, Mr. McKnight. Bravo,” said the woman, confirming Bruiser’s suspicions about her heritage the moment she spoke in that lilt familiar to Spanish transplants. “You can call me Madame Slush Pile. And despite the flair and your obvious need for being in control, I will be the mistress of ceremonies for the remainder of this evening’s pitch session. This is the bonus-round. It’s part of a long and storied tradition inspired by Hemingway when he struck author Max Eastman with his own book to defend the machismo Eastman had criticized in one of his essays. To some it may be considered just another form of new millennium barbarism. We simply do not care what assessment others in the industry arrive at when our ways are made known. We do what we want because we can.”

The swiftness of her candor helped her reassert some dominance of the proceedings, though not fully due to Bruiser’s defiant grin. “I like the confidence I have already witnessed from you, Mr. McKnight,” she continued. “It shows the potential for a depth of intelligence and strength to be mined and cultivated further. But if you lose this bonus-round it may prove your bravado to be nothing more than the product of a monstrous brain feeding on the hubris of its own fiction.”

Bruiser raised his cane with an undaunted salute.

Madame Slush Pile nodded in return. “All right, then. We can get started.”

She stepped to the side and motioned with her hand, cueing the group of twelve behind her to separate. Their movement revealed a dark figure hiding behind their clustered formation, prostrated on one knee. The man in the black fatigues rose to his feet as the crowd of suits continued to shuffle aside in a slow and dramatic fashion. He was built like a titan and at least six and a half-feet-tall from what Bruiser could estimate, with short pricks of black hair that gave off billows of steam in the glow of the bonfire. The ice blue stare of the man’s bearded face, which was trimmed so tightly and so thickly as to conjure the squared images of the Babylonian kings of old, was a national treasure featured on the cover for a New York Times bestseller about one of the most controversial operators to serve in the elite units of the United States Navy.

Baal Han Marko was also a womanizing sensation on Instagram and other social media platforms, always looking to increase his fame with action photos of him wielding heavy weaponry while surrounded by scantily-clad women. His business pursuits included a wide range of indulgences, most notably his private boot camp for high rollers in the corporate world who wanted to know what it felt like to be trained by an elite soldier.

Marko looked at Bruiser dismissively, raising an elaborate gauntlet of Kevlar bi-weave extending from his right forearm to his fist. A hardcover copy of his own book was secured firmly against his hand by straps with knuckle fasteners. His secondary weapon was a retractable baton sheathed in a side holster on his web belt.

“Kind-a-pretty for a gravedigger,” Marko said with a little Texas swagger. “Sure you really want go through with this? Money isn’t everything, boy. Trust me. I know.”

Bruiser smiled at the famous braggart without a twinge of fear. The syndicate was playing with a loaded deck. But he didn’t care. A few bruises and maybe some broken bones were worth the chance to increase the amount he was being offered should the syndicate accept his pitch. Besides, it wasn’t the first time he had taken a beating. And it certainly wasn’t the first time he was ready to give one, either. The bigger the threat the sweeter the victory always proved to be.

“There’s no shame in being afraid, gravedigger. Few ever continue with this challenge once I make my entrance.”

“I’m not afraid in the least,” Bruiser answered. “As a point of fact, this very moment is a dream come true for me.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. The opportunity to humble someone like yourself who never deserved a book deal means Christmas has come early. Hollywood hacks, athletes, and celebrity soldiers with delusions of literary grandeur are the bane of all true writers.”

Marko laughed through that thick beard of his as he lazily took off his shirt, revealing a protruding gut that looked as hard and defined as a tortoise shell. Every flex of his tattooed chest and arms moved with just enough vigor, accentuating the idea of a human peacock as a pliable mountain of well-etched brawn. “You got some sass, gravedigger,” he admitted. “It’s a good thing you chose a cemetery for this little contest of ours, because I’m going to bury you here.”

Bruiser lowered his chin with a defiant smirk and a twirl of his cane. “It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself tilting at windmills.”

Madame Slush Pile took control again and motioned for the suited twelve to take their seats. She gave a quick nod to the syndicate’s chosen hero before turning to Bruiser again. “There is only one abiding rule for Book Club,” she said to both combatants, taking another step back like a line judge ready to fire a starting pistol. “Break the spine!”

Bruiser ran toward his opponent with a side to side sprint, surprising his opponent with his off-the-line speed and his boldness. He could feel the power of the moment’s adrenaline so keenly in his legs he thought he might take flight. He slid across the white gravel with the soles of his boots just as he had practiced for the last two months, ducking like a surfer beneath a blistering haymaker thrown at his head, spinning in reverse without stopping to catch the mercenary from behind with a beautiful kidney shot from the cane that nearly ended the contest before it even started. Marko wobbled forward with a terrible gasp for air, trying to keep from buckling to his knees as he was forced to use up two of his steps for the pentameter allowance now that the first blow had been struck. He struggled to keep his balance on the gravel as he pivoted back around as fast as he could with his third step, sliding sideways with his fourth as he whipped out his baton and missed Bruiser’s jaw with the breadth of a whisker.

Bruiser came in low and fast again, feigning several lunges of the book and the cane without touching the mercenary, forcing a defensive reflex and a fifth step from Marko to maintain balance.

Bruiser pulled back from the contest suddenly, using one of his four remaining steps to put a little distance between them. “Right now you’re asking yourself how this is possible,” he noted, letting a slight grin creep into view beneath the rose-colored sunglasses. “It’s simple. Preparation separates winners from losers.”

Marko couldn’t respond. He was too busy huffing for air through clenched teeth and trying not to make another step on his wobbly legs.

“Now don’t misjudge this teachable moment by thinking I lack respect for those who serve their country. What I don’t have respect for is a man who feigns humility while bragging about the necessity of murdering children in a war zone. Honorable soldiers usually restrain themselves from bragging about such heinous acts. Their widows do the same. They keep those experiences in the community of men and women they served beside. And they certainly don’t commission books to be written about themselves just because they feel the need to justify the nature of their misdeeds. There’s nothing wrong with a biography. But exploitation and exaggeration cannot be tolerated.”

He paused in the middle of his little pedantic speech to let the shadows of the bonfire behind him accentuate the sudden hardness of his mouth, casually tugging at several pages peeking out suspiciously through the tightness of the book wrapped around his fist. “Valor doesn’t determine honor,” he continued. “Try and remember that when I take what little dignity you have left.”

With that, Bruiser sprung forward with a whip of his hand and a flurry of pages, snagging the free-flying paper with his cane before striking the distracted mercenary in the forehead with a hard press of the cane’s brass typewriter. He spun to the right with the momentum of the impact, circling behind his opponent in the same continuous motion with the last step of their pentameter allowance. Marko’s left knee buckled as the cane dug into the spine of his naked back, forcing him to lunge ahead with a sixth step to save his face from crashing into the gravel.

The Baal of Instagram and the darling hero of the Black House Syndicate gazed into the fire with pain and disbelief, unaware that print type from the last chapter of The Count of Monte Cristo was stamped on his forehead with the words…

“Wait and hope.”

But one thing the mercenary did know was that he had just been beaten in a matter of seconds by someone of no worldly importance. Madame Slush Pile and her group of twelve had the same look of surprise. None of them expected Bruiser to go through with the bonus-round once their champion was revealed. And winning was never expected. Not against a professional soldier.

Marko slid his outstretched leg back into place and resumed his formidable height with a wounded growl. His bearded face was heated to a shade of bright red as he slowly turned and started walking toward Bruiser with the most unforgiving expression of hate; and a damning of all the rules.

“Stop!” Madame Slush Pile shouted with a quick step between them, ordering Marko to stand down. “The contest is over. Mr. McKnight is the winner.”

The mercenary hesitated to obey, panting through gritted teeth like a bull ready to charge them both. But Madame Slush Pile was undaunted in her brave stance. The immediate fierceness of her resolve had been honed by stepping to the beat of near death in the arenas of Spain, rising through the ranks of picador horsemen and the cuadrillas of the callejon fences since she was sixteen to become one of the most accomplished toreros of Seville. She was a unique throwback to the glory days of Hemingway, when muscular beasts like Huron—the prized stock of ranchero Don Antonio Lopez Plata— ruled the bullring in an uncanny age of combat involving tigers and the occasional locomotive.

She turned and faced Marko head on, her almond glare rising past the floppy brim of her hat. “You are no longer the Baal of Book Club,” she said firmly. “Your services are terminated. Leave on your feet now or I will put you on your back in the public eye first thing tomorrow morning. The syndicate made you into a hero to be worshipped. And I assure you we will break that image if you fail to make the right choice now.”

Marko threw his baton at her feet and lumbered away. All that could be heard was the crunch of gravel beneath his heavy steps. His form was visible in the glow of the pyre for a few minutes until he finally slinked away into the shadows of the vast cemetery and its rolling landscape of hedges and tombstones.

“All right, then,” she said with a twist in Bruiser’s direction. “Shall we get this interview started?”

Syndicate Session Status:

The Interlude

April 23rd—

Bruiser unwound the tape from around his fist and tossed the book on the phonograph table. He walked over to the tall wardrobe while the others watched, still looking amazed by everything they had witnessed since his dramatic rise from the grave. Madame Slush Pile looked especially impressed, smiling with approval at his nonchalant handling of the situation.

“It’s rare that I say this, but your performance so far tonight has left me very intrigued, Mr. McKnight,” she remarked. “I never really believed you had much of a chance against Marko. As a point of fact, none of us even expected you to go through with the bonus-round once we revealed your opponent.”

Bruiser kept Madame Slush Pile and the seated twelve in the periphery of his side stance as any good magician would do just before a reveal, grinning through her compliments and the amp of adrenaline still pumping through his heart. He grabbed the midnight-blue shroud of stars and ripped it off the wardrobe, unveiling a masterwork of acacia wood and mechanology. The cabinet was seven-feet-tall with panels sunken between edges of rolled trim resembling the frame of a grandfather clock. The legs had the muscularity and the equestrian distinctiveness of a wild Mustang, its hooves lodged firmly in the grass and mud. Cherubic wings flanked the top four corners. A sun-shaped clock face with the blue and gold countenance of a woman was nestled between the two waves of carved wood meeting above the center of the cabinet’s double-cut doors. In the middle of the doorway was a wonderfully intricate carving of an open book protruding eight inches from the dual panels. Raised consonants of brass from the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets were interspersed together on the book’s open pages, each one coinciding with mechanized pressure plates hidden in the ornamental wood of the doors that were made of Damascus Steele beneath, a near mythical alloy of great tensile strength and flexibility.

Bruiser leaned sideways and grabbed a folded Japanese blind with black screens and stretched it out in front of the wardrobe, creating a barrier of privacy against the eyes trained on his every move. He needed some space to change out of his soaked attire for the pitch. He also didn’t want them to see how he opened the cabinet; or get a look at what was inside. The wardrobe was one of the few things of value he still owned. To him it was priceless. He believed it to be an elaborate puzzle cleverly possessed of mechanical and literary clues to finding the man that he knew without a doubt had all the answers he needed; someone a select few within the highest ranks of the Literati had come to know as the Magniloquent Mr. Tombs.

It was a name rarely heard on the publishing vine anymore. Those who knew anything about the legends and the scuttlebutt only spoke of him in whispers and strict confidence lest they be thought of as fools bewitched by too much emersion in the fantasies the industry was smothering readers with ad nauseam. But Bruiser’s query for a novel about Tombs had set off alarms of excitement amongst true believers at the syndicate’s flagship label.

Once he was fully blocked from view by the black screens and their colorful paintings of horse-mounted samurai, Bruiser turned to the wardrobe and leaned against it with his hands and released a heavy sigh of relief. He wasn’t physically tired in the least. The fire of the moment was still hot in his veins. But this would be his last solitary chance to compose himself for the next four hours without the prying gazes of Madame Slush Pile and her lettered crew. A writer as insignificant as most thought him to be shouldn’t possess the knowledge he was privy to about the syndicate, especially the shadowy expertise of their top agents rumored to be versed in the rhetorical skill of Word-Fu—a very old form of public oratory capable of manipulating the neural system of the human mind. Some called it a higher form of Svengali mesmerism.

“If you’re trying to prove yourself to be a man of mystery then you’re doing a very good job of it, Mr. McKnight,” Madame Slush Pile shouted over the blinds, turning about to inspect the elaborate setup for their pitch session. “And I must admit I never expected such a lavish display for our meeting. I think I can speak for the rest of my colleagues here and say that we have never experienced this kind of preparation before. It’s very impressive. Not at all what one would expect from a struggling writer.”

Bruiser glanced over his shoulder while leaning against the wardrobe. There was just a hint of a smirk in his expression. Though agreeing to the bonus-round had a definite appeal of being desperate for cash, which he was, he had to present himself as a man of some means even if it meant spending every ounce of his savings. It was worth the sacrifice if it gave him the advantage he needed to be everything they couldn’t have possibly anticipated.

“I’m surprised at your mistake, mistress,” he noted. “Anyone familiar with Greek knows full well that the word mystery doesn’t mean what most everyone has come to believe it means. A mystery is not a puzzle to be solved with clues or inferences due to a consequence of ignorance. It’s a secret that can never be known unless revealed by the holder, which pretty much destroys its association with every work of sleuthing fiction ever published. But I wouldn’t tell that to the many adherents of Doyle and Grimes. The deception is too far apace to convince them now. So, I would suggest that the word enigma is a term of thought better suited for what I am; or rather for what I have become.”

Madame Slush Pile took a step toward the blinds, nodding with another smile of approval. “Well said, Mr. McKnight. You continue to leap over every hurdle of your introduction. And since you have now fully schooled me on the finer points of what a mystery truly is, what prompts you to be so secretive now? You don’t strike me as a man who is too shy for prying eyes.”

Bruiser hung his head and laughed under his breath. Someone of Madame Slush Pile’s literary bearing wouldn’t have made a mistake as pedestrian as the one he just pointed out. He looked a little too quick on the draw to prove his worth, barring the whole rising from the grave scenario.

“We only have four hours, Mr. McKnight,” she added. “We need to get the biography phase out of the way so we can proceed with the session.”

Bruiser looked up at the wardrobe’s coded book and just shook his head at the thought of giving a biography, forcing himself not to laugh this time. “I understand,” he answered instead. “Give me a few minutes to change out of these wet clothes and we can get started.”

“Make it a quick change. We have a lot to discuss.”

Bruiser took his hand and slid it across the wooden book’s Hebrew consonants and their vowel markers first, feeling the lightness of the movable springs nestled behind each of the brass letters that were connected to identical pressure plates hidden inside the wardrobe doors. He let out a gentle sigh and started rifling across the alphabets with the speed of a master typist, spelling out a codified entry in all three languages to pop the cabinet’s lock system. Bars of Damascus Steele sheared backwards inside the wardrobe’s frame, allowing its heavy doors to open outward in a slow, spring-loaded yawn on hinges that creaked with just enough soulfulness to speak of both its considerable age and its continued durability. The pattern of stained-glass panels on the interior of the doors bore a colorful resemblance to moveable rank and files on dual chess boards, revealing original etchings from comic book artists and Renaissance masters alike. An array of items was on display against the padded interior of scarlet that was painstakingly crafted from the secretion fluids of bivalve mollusks collected on the shores of the Mediterranean. There was a change of clothes hanging on the right-side wall of the cabinet and a leather garment bag with a Gieves & Hawkes logo mounted on the back. In the foot section were small piles of books, a few comics sheathed in plastic, a thick stack of very old letters written on vellum and sealed with leather straps and signets of red wax, and a slew of other precious relics.

All the contents were sealed in the cabinet when it first arrived years ago. And it came with detailed instructions not to make any attempt at opening it until he was contacted again to do so. That allowance finally came via an old-fashioned telegram the same day a literary agency working for the syndicate responded to his query. It included the code to unlock its secrets. For years, it just sat beneath a skylight in one of the arid corners of his loft, its clock face reflecting all those lonely seasons in small town hell with that silent expression of its indigo heavens and its golden hands paused at one minute till midnight, hovering between the Virgo and Leo constellations of brass in the clock’s stalled circuit of the Zodiac.

Dreams of a redheaded girl only made the loneliness worse for some reason, though he had dabbled in several failed romances since his arrival more than a decade ago. It had always been strange to him how much the wardrobe’s clock face resembled the vision bouncing around in his head; the indigo eyes, the sleek nose, and the high cheekbones with stars that looked like freckles. Instinct told him it was all subjective. Years of having it sit there in the corner of his home was a very real influence in his possible concoction of a love affair from whole cloth. It wasn’t that he had a thing for redheads over blondes or brunettes. He just couldn’t shake the bob and weave of that strawberry ponytail with the golden highlights. And he was never sure if they were memories masquerading as dreams until the telegram with the code for unlocking the wardrobe arrived, thus granting him access to the pile of letters that confirmed them to be memories indeed—but those belonging to the man at the center of his patient hope for answers. The same man he found himself imitating from day to day as much as possible. When you don’t have a complete identity of your own you emulate what you wish to be the most.

Bruiser bent down and grabbed the stack of letters with the broken seals of red wax. Some of his own rejection letters from publishers were inserted into the stack as a strange way of bonding with the man he had been writing about for so many years. He hated the overwrought nature of his immediate thoughts, but there was no denying how heavy the stack felt in his hand—the gravitas of what most would consider a canon of mythologies mixed with hard refusals and the sadness of groping about too soon for a return to the status of published author. The letters had revealed so much more about the legendary figure he first met when he was a young writer working for The Jerusalem Post, yet left out all the pertinent details on how to find him again. Even though that information was wanting, it was still a relief to have his suspicions finally confirmed about the identity of his mysterious benefactor. It would have been of equal relief had money been part of the gift parade, an issue he was sure to address if he ever saw the Magniloquent Mr. Tombs again. But getting the answers for his memory loss and his continued exile was at the top of his list for the inquisition he had planned.

The information in the letters had proven to be an invaluable source for the manuscript’s rewrite Bruiser managed to complete over the last two months. His query for the novel the syndicate was eager to hear him pitch contained just enough information about Tombs to draw their interest. But the content of the letters helped affect a far richer portrait of the book’s leading man, allowing him to weave together all the facts in a parabolic tale of secrets unlike anything he thought possible. The letters also revealed everything he needed to know about the syndicate and the strategy for facing them. It gave him a real sense of hope.

“Save it for the pitch,” he whispered to himself, pushing back against the sentiment threatening his preparation. “This night will be won by discipline.”

Bruiser put the letters down beside the stack of comics and shuffled through their titles with a casual slide of his hand. They were all mint-valued first printings he had once owned, and then reacquired to his surprise when he opened the wardrobe for the first time. Among the titles were Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula #9, The Brave and the Bold #197, Superman #344, House of Mystery #1, Six-Gun Gorilla #1, Tokyo Ghost #1, The Incredible Hulk #181, Grant Morrison’s Batman #666, The Dark Knight Returns, and issue # 64 of the Justice League of America that featured a mechanized being with tornadic powers and a faceless past. There was a host of other rare editions, including a first run issue of Detective Comics #432—a book from the Bronze Age of the 70s that bore an ominous warning in its cover design about the very pitch session he was just moments away from hosting.

Bruiser let his hand slide across to a stack of some very old novels and other works of literature. Everything in the wardrobe was a first edition. Few were as priceless as the 1605 part one edition of The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha. Its gold stenciling and finely-preserved boards of cloth were as pristine as they come for a volume that old. He looked at the title page and its accompanying certificate, still instinctively searching for signs of washing, rebinding, or miniscule glue spots mixed with older samples. Some antique book dealers were known to forge first edition title pages with later editions to try and pass them off as being authentic first runs. But he knew he would never find a single trace of forgery, and that there would be no records of theft in the pink sheets of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers. According to one of the letters, the book was discovered in the San Juan house of Ponce de León the same year it was published. It even had the certificates of price and errata, and the stamp of the royal scrivener Juan Gallo de Andrada.

The thought of selling the cabinet and everything in it had occurred to him as being a sure way out of his current state of financial imprisonment. But the thought of doing something so repugnant after everything he had been through to get the answers he needed never lingered past that first initial inkling of crudeness.

Bruiser glanced at another item sitting in the corner beside Cervantes’ greatest work. His hand hovered above the brown paper the book-sized object was wrapped in so tightly. There was a singular warning written with the flourish of beautiful penmanship just beneath the strings of twine the paper was bound with in a tight formation of five intersecting crosses. He hadn’t even dared to touch it since the first day he was given the code for unlocking the wardrobe, fearing if he did so that whatever lay hidden inside would vanish with all its magic the warning seemed to convey in its brevity…

DO NOT OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT

APRIL 23RD

But those fears were distant now as he lowered his hand gently to feel the coarseness of the paper and its string of twine, his fingers probing the crevices of the warning that had obviously been written with the ink of a fountain pen. He snatched his hand back with a sudden look of surprise, feeling a jolt of energy surge through his fingertips with his last swerve of the D. A circus of images gave him a brief flash of the world of the Magniloquent Mr. Tombs before slipping away again with a puff of cigar smoke. The image of a large hunter’s moon and the tall silhouette of a man standing against its backdrop with radium eyes, a gleaming smile, a windswept coat tattered around the edges, and the glow of a cigar was the last thing he saw before it all vanished with the quick removal of his hand.

He slapped his palm flat against the paper and its warning again to try and retrieve the moment. Nothing happened, though. All he had left was that disturbing glow of a cigar clenched between a gleaming set of teeth that looked more bestial than human, like a tiger in the jungles of India smiling at a prey of hunters hovering unaware around a campfire. It was strange, but those flashes were identical to the descriptions Tombs had given in his letters about his greatest nemesis. They had been instrumental in fleshing out the villain of the book.

Bruiser ripped off his wet garments in a flurry of inspiration. He reached for the fresh change of clothes hanging inside the wardrobe, grabbing a pair of light blue crackerjack jeans first. A midnight blue T-shirt loomed in heather was the next item of clothing he snatched from the cabinet, its chest area showcasing a large white moon that punctuated a shadowy jungle scene like something straight out of the pulp magazines of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but was in fact partially inspired by the Tim Sale variant cover for the Marvel comic book The Ultimates #003—a 50th anniversary edition celebrating the first appearance of Black Panther. A caped and lithely-muscled silhouette of a red-eyed figure hovered in the center of the moon’s image, standing on a giant, moss-covered limb that snaked outward in subtle hues of green from the black and blue shades of color that painted the rest of the jungle scene. Beneath the imposing tree limb was the enigmatic phrase—The Immortality Apocalypse—written in blood red letters.

He stood there for a moment gazing at the image on the T-shirt, comparing it to what he had just seen flash through his mind when he touched the parcel. The shirt was custom made like everything else in the cabinet appeared to be; another prop for the stage his benefactor had helped set for him. But even amidst the inspiration and the sheer charge of what felt like a brush with the supernatural, he caught himself wondering peripherally if the answers he needed to sort out his convoluted life would truly be his for the taking by the end of the pitch.

“Enough. This night will be won by discipline,” he repeated to himself.

Bruiser got dressed with the deliberateness of a soldier, taking his time with each article of clothing. The denim was first, and then an identical pair of Doc Marten boots sans the mud, making sure to tuck the legs of the trousers inside each one. He slid the T-shirt on next. His hand paused on the Gieves &Hawkes garment bag hanging on the back wall, his eyes drifting toward a wooden plaque mounted above the hook. A quote from George Eliot’s short story “Silas Marner” was etched with such deep flourishes into the wood and with the blackest effulgence possible as to suggest a pen made of steel and fire was the instrument responsible for its notable placement.

“No one knew where wandering men had their homes or

Origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at

Least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?”

It was the first thing his eyes hit upon when he received the code for unlocking the cabinet. The impact had nearly floored him at the time. Somebody had the answers he needed. Everything had been set up to infer a greater purpose for his suffering. But it was more of an annoyance than a comfort.

Bruiser took a quick breath and ripped open the G&H garment bag, pulling out a knee-length coat of dark gray velvet that had a tall collar and wide lapels with a thick pallet of black shearling. The coat flared outward as he twirled the frock around him, revealing its lining in a flash of crimson silk as he slid his arms through the tight-fitting sleeves, its bespoke design hugging the whittled contours of his physique as perfectly as a centurion’s body armor. He reached inside the coat’s inner pocket and pulled out a pair of aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses that were tinted with a light blue shade of film. A meerschaum pipe with a lion’s head smoke bowl was the next item he fished out of his pocket.

The glasses and the pipe weren’t just the theatrical props of an eccentric author. They were necessary for the pitch to come. The telegram had been very precise about their importance. Like the heat of the fire that would keep his countenance flush with color, the lenses would hide the emotion of his eyes like any well-prepared gambler, and peripherally distract an opponent with images of their own reflections cast against the mirrored lenses. A peak at self was something no mortal could resist. It was comparable to the mesmerizing technique that was used for the original incarnation of Clark Kent in the Golden Age of comics when he wore a simple pair of glasses and a fedora to disguise himself, even though such a seemingly ineffective disguise had become a thing to be ridiculed due to the modern observer’s interpretation of the character that was ill-informed of Superman’s hypnotizing power to make people forget what he looks like. And though Bruiser was not a smoker, he had also learned how to tolerate tobacco on a limited basis over the last few months. Nicotine was a scientifically proven stimulant for concentration and cognitive thought during stressful predicaments. And a pipe always offered a more appealing aroma. It also had a certain vibe of intimidation worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

“We are waiting, Mr. McKnight,” Madame Slush Pile shouted from the other side of the blinds.

“Is that so?” Bruiser said under his breath as he slid the glasses on with a crooked grin, clasping the pipe’s curved tip between his teeth with a look of absolute triumph. “Now you know how it feels.”

Syndicate Session Status:

The Biography

April 23rd—

Bruiser closed the wardrobe and put the blinds away, ignoring the waiting stares as he walked toward the covered chair. He grabbed the tarp and ripped it sideways, revealing a throne of sorts with a buttoned-up backrest and seat made of padded red leather. Intertwining dragons of bronzed ironwork spiraled together around the edges of the backrest to give it a royal flair, matching the fierceness of the dual dragon heads protruding from each armrest and the clawed toes of the legs that were dug into the mud and the grass. He sat down in the chair with a deliberate slowness, letting his velvet and blue jean profile take center stage—finally.

Bruiser struck a wooden match with the tip of his thumb and lit the pipe, its flame merging with those of the bonfire reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses. “So,” he started, taking a few puffs on the pipe’s tip,” what would you like to know?”

Madame Slush Pile walked forward with a look that was all business, her heels digging into the gravel with determination. She gave the novelty of his attire a long and sturdy glance before addressing him again. “I can see theatricality is not the only weapon you have chosen to employ, Mr. McKnight. Witnessing such degrees of preparation is the first time my staff and I have ever been truly surprised by a potential client. It makes someone in my unique position believe there is a lot more to you than what your query revealed; and perhaps a far sight more than what meets the eye at this point.”

She whipped around in place and gestured at the seated twelve. “Change of plans, gentlemen. I will be conducting this interview alone. You are all dismissed. I will meet you at the airfield when I am done.”

The twelve handsomely dressed men stood up at once and formed two lines of six. They all gave her a simultaneous nod of salute and then turned and started marching away around the bonfire.

She faced Bruiser again. “I hope you don’t mind?” she asked, not genuinely caring if he did. “This is a very important moment for the both of us. And I need to connect with you on a personal level. After all, isn’t that what all good editors yearn for when they’re considering a query? Connection is the gold standard of believability. It’s the coin of the publishing realm.”

Bruiser took the sudden change to the pitch in stride. “Connection and the subjectivity of what is believable are too often used as an overinflated excuse for nondescript rejection letters,” he replied, not missing a beat to her new challenge. “Harlequin romances and fantastical literature that no reader can possibly relate to in the ordinary dregs of human existence dominates bookshelves everywhere. Shakespeare wrote more fantasy and spook-filled stories than most literary critics probably remember, and yet he is the standard bearer of the super-literate. Hell, most of his characters were hiding behind masks or pretending to be dead. Even stories that are supposedly grounded in realism are spiced up during the editorial process to make them more interesting. We see that at times in the war machine press. Conflict correspondents fudge the facts to make themselves and their predicaments seem more dangerous. Navy Seals and Army Rangers wax on incessantly about how their brutal tours of duty turned them into real men. Yet I can scarcely recall any of the D-Day veterans trying to postulate false happenings so they can cash in on a reader base that’s used to gorging themselves on lies. But that’s just part of the James Frey Syndrome, isn’t it? People lie and readers on both sides of the book world suck it down like candy. In Frey’s case, all that fat bastard had to do was create a literary sweatshop for desperate authors and an all-consuming pseudonym like Pittacus Lore, and bam, this liar is bedfellows with Hollywood and The New York Times bestsellers list again.”

“And why is it that people prefer lies, Mr. McKnight?”

“Because they want to believe, like I do, that there is something bigger at work than the usual editorial trope of common experience. Even the rich and the pseudo intellectuals are not immune to those facts. They just have a much harder time admitting it than the rest of us do. Until death comes knocking, of course. That puts everyone on an equal footing with an eventual moment of humility.”

He paused for a moment while he took a drag on the pipe, blowing a large cloud of smoke outward. “Well, that’s true for the majority.”

She took another step closer to where he was sitting. “What an intriguing thing to say, Mr. McKnight.”

“Please. Call me Bruiser.”

“No.”

“Very well, then. We will keep it formal.”

“No. We will keep it professional.”

Bruiser raised his pipe and nodded.

She started pacing back and forth with a slow crunch of the gravel. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. McKnight. There’s nothing about you on the web at all, which I find intriguing. And I’m not easily impressed as I have already made clear. I do remember your query mentioned a contract offer from Night Shade Books in San Francisco that was rescinded due to their looming insolvency.”

“Insolvency? Try corrupt bookkeeping and failure to pay author royalties. That’s why they were put on probation twice by the SFWA. They were eventually de-listed because of their behavior before their remaining contracts and their preexisting titles were purchased by another house. I didn’t even get a kill fee for my trouble.”

“None of that interests me, Mr. McKnight. Besides, I know everything that happens in this business. You’re the only thing that appears inscrutable to me right now. And since your letter contained scant information about your biography, I need you to personally enlighten me.”

Bruiser had to stop himself from laughing. “My personal information was brief because I can’t remember much past the last twelve years of my life. I’m not even sure how old I am. Based on my refection alone, I would guess my age to be somewhere in the range of the early thirties. But who knows? I could be just some old geezer with really good genes.”

She stopped and looked at him with a hint of suspicion. “Yes. Your letter briefly mentioned a battle with partial memory loss.”

“It’s a lot more convoluted than that.”

“Tell me about it, then. Tell me how you ended up here in this microcosmic junction of the world.”

Bruiser took a long drag on the pipe this time, glancing around at the ground beneath his feet while the smoke trailed backward through the purse of his lips. “I have no idea how I came to be here,” he told her. “I woke up on this very spot with nothing but the charred remains of an old royalty check clutched in my hand. And the few memories I possess prior to that stormy event are difficult to place in a linear chronology. The recollections come in scattershot moments. They’re vivid. But the full gist of the context is often missing even for those moments. I’m not even sure if Bruiser McKnight is my real name. It was the first jolt of awareness that came to mind when I awoke. It was as if someone whispered it in my ear to wake me; or to mislead me. Who knows?”

“The royalty check didn’t confirm it for you?”

“No. All that was left of the payment was its ridiculous amount and the name of an inbred little publishing house in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.”

“That reeks of bitterness, Mr. McKnight.”

“Try working for decades and being told to live on practically nothing as your reward. That’s the reality of royalty payments for most authors not privileged enough to have access to a corporate publicity machine. And the old-adage that good work will eventually find an audience doesn’t keep you from starving until then. And as far as my bitterness goes, you can’t know the depths of it until you have stood in a Barnes & Noble bookstore staring at the new releases section. Staring so hard at all those asinine celebrity chefs from the Food Network and those ridiculously overpaid morons from the world of professional sports that pack the shelves with their toothy headshots. I compare that feeling of rage to seeing some fat, undisciplined rich guy driving around in a Jag or a vintage muscle car. The aesthetic is all wrong. The man doesn’t match the machine in skill or appearance. It’s ridiculous. And it’s the same with all these celebrity publications. I was so angry once at the injustice of these fools being granted a book deal with such ease that I kicked an entire display across the store. Books went flying in every direction. It was glorious. It got me banned from all Barnes & Noble stores in the Chapel Hill area. But the beauty of this night, if all goes well, is that I will return to those stores on publication day.”

“Jealousy is not an attractive quality in a potential client, Mr. McKnight.”

“Neither is nepotism. But authors like me are forced to live with the reality that the playing field will never be level. So, don’t begrudge me my right to point out the ridiculous behavior of an industry that will give a nine-year-old girl a major book deal as a publicity stunt.”

“And what would you change about the industry? Enlighten me with your profound wisdom, please.”

“Who said anything about changing it?” he replied, grinning crookedly through the clench of his pipe. “And what would I change if I could? Would I change the stench of all the backdoor deals? Would I change the fact that most authors only receive a very small percentage of their book sales? Would I change the fact that some authors only get paid twice a year? Would I change the forgettable corporate schlock of celebrity propaganda and their incessant pandering to all those so-called teenage geniuses sucking at the tits of social media? Would I change the fact that anyone can call themselves an author today without experiencing the true cost of this profession due to the 21st century ease of web submissions and self publishing?”

Bruiser paused for effect. “No,” he continued. “I harbor no wish to change any of it. Like Edgar Allan Poe once wrote: ‘The enormous multiplication of books in all branches of knowledge is one of the scourges of this age, for it is one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of any real knowledge.’”

“And what knowledge is that, Mr. McKnight?”

“The greatest knowledge anyone can possess is the truth about immortality, of course. Wacko televangelists hock their ludicrous brand of it. Even scientists are now touting their own calculated version of what they think is possible. But writers are the chief culprits of all the lies associated with immortality. For most of them, everlasting life is the moment when a publisher stipples the top corner of their works with a stone-grain pattern to marbleize them in an Everyman Library. It’s the 19th century standard for immortality that Oscar Wilde once wrestled against his own hubris to vilify.”

Bruiser stopped and leaned forward some. “The lunatics of Nebuchadnezzar are feeding beneath Bradbury’s Tree of Knowledge,” he added. “And this lunar spell of madness and lycanthropy cannot be easily broken. The librarians have stockpiled enough fuel on this subject to set fire to Borges’ Library of Babel for a thousand years. It’s just a matter of time before the match is lit. And that’s going to be one hell of a show to see.”

Madame Slush Pile lowered her chin a bit, using the floppy brim of her hat to hide the sudden gleam of excitement in her eyes, as if there was a moment of familiarity in his words and the ever-deepening tone of his dialect of Standard English. “That’s a very interesting response, Mr. McKnight. But we will come back to that in a moment.”

She started pacing in front of him again, negotiating the shifting gravel better than Marko had managed to do, her every step accentuating the sleek musculature of her legs and their fluid movements through the silk and percale of her outfit. Years of dancing on the dangerous sands of the bullring had made her strong and agile. “You say you have little memory beyond the years you have been living here,” she continued. “So, tell me about the time you have spent in this place? Let’s start with that. But let’s skip what is already obvious. You’re a disgruntled writer with unappreciated ideals and talent. And you work in the graveyard of a ruined town. It’s clear that you run the show here. How else would you be able to create such an elaborate stage for this moment of ours? But I want to know about the man behind the image that has been presented to me so far.”

Bruiser lowered the pipe in a casual manner, his sunglasses reflecting the image of the pacing woman and the violent snaps of fire in the distance. “No, you don’t,” he replied. “You’re only here for one thing.”

She stopped and looked at him for a second before resuming the seduction of her subtle dance across the white pallet of gravel, tossing her black hair backwards with a flick of her hand. “On that we are in complete agreement,” she said rather coldly. “Let’s get to the pitch for your novel. Start with the hero of this would-be masterpiece you have created.”

“He’s not a hero.”

“Very well then, he’s an antihero.”

Bruiser nodded as he crossed his right leg over the other, clasping the pipe between his teeth again with a soft roll of the tobacco’s sweetened aroma. “He is known as Damian Tombs,” he began. “Many call him the Magniloquent Mr. Tombs. He has black hair and green eyes very much like my own. There’s a little transference there for the sake of fiction. It helps protect his identity in a way. I even started mimicking his penmanship while reading some of his old letters that were made available to me for the book. I picked it up easier than I thought I would. The goal was to immerse myself in his character like a method actor. One of my failings in doing that, though, was my financial inability to dress like the Beau Brummell I remember him to be. This designer outfit was a gift, and my first chance to emulate a portion of his style.”

He stopped for a moment to consider the gravity of his words as the description of his protagonist started to deepen into a more serious subject matter. “Damian is the one true champion the Literati can count on to keep their way of life secure in this dispensation of grace,” he continued. “He is older than the printing press itself. But he is not immortal. Not yet. And like any true knight of history in need of a goblin or a dragon, he is on a quest to find the mobile source for the Immortality Apocalypse.”

She ground to another sudden halt. “Wait a minute. Stop. This all sounds like you’re trying to describe a real person.”

“I am.”

“Do you think me to be a fool?”

Bruiser lowered his pipe with a grin that was starting to feel and look more like a smirk each time it pushed its way across his face. “Come now, mistress. We both know that the syndicate wouldn’t have traveled all this way to see someone like myself if I hadn’t mentioned Damian Tombs in my letter. I know you believe he is real. You refer to him as the Man of the Book, do you not? So, let’s dispense with the charade and continue with the pitch, shall we?”

“Still think you’re in control, Mr. McKnight?”

“You came to me. What do you think?”

“I think I have grown weary of playing along.”

Madame Slush Pile spun around in a flurry of white dust and ground her way toward the chair allotted for her. She grabbed a leather purse that was stashed in the corner of the covered seat and made her way back to where Bruiser was sitting. She reached into the bag and pulled out an 1837 London edition of a Penny Dreadful and held it aloft, its cover depicting three English gentlemen in a graveyard being surprised at the midnight hour by a jack-booted figure dressed in white trousers, a black helmet with horns, and a batwing cape that was spread wide over the tombstone the menacing figure had leaped upon.

Bruiser looked at the magazine serial she was holding with a shaded squint. The scene on the cover was a powerful image, showcasing the sheer terror of the three men as they trembled together around an open grave, their lanterns highlighting the features of the resurrected soul in a yellowed pall of flickering light, exposing some of the Gothic ruins hidden in the shadows behind the horned figure. Splashed across the header of the magazine was a colorful title…

Spring-Heeled Jack:

A Mystery Of Mysteries

“The early versions of Spring-Heeled Jack started appearing in 1837,” she noted. “Even one of the most respected newspapers in London added to the hysteria that was brewing amongst the commoners in those days. Spring-Heeled Jack was predominantly portrayed as a villainous prankster attacking men and women in their homes and on the street. Some stories even have him menacing soldiers standing guard at their posts. His legend endures to this day on the fringes of popular culture thanks to Stephen King and other authors like him. But they all portray this mysterious Jack figure as being evil. The only author to give the legend a different take was Charlton Lea; and now you, of course. Does any of this ring a bell?”

“Is it supposed to ring a bell other than what I already know of it?

“The bell I’m referring to is the one ringing for you to wake up.”

Bruiser waited for the explanation, trying not to show any emotion with his body language. He sat like a statue and just stared at the magazine.

“Wake up, Mr. McKnight! You are part of a legacy that has caused a great deal of suffering!”

He laughed. “A legacy of suffering? Lady, you have no idea what real suffering is.” Bruiser eschewed the discipline without another thought of the consequences, sliding forward some in his seat with the pipe clenched in his fist as the smoke rolled through the vice of his fingers. “Do you know what it’s like to lose everything? Are you without anyone to love you or miss you? Do you remember your parents? Can you remember what it was like to hear your mother say your name? Can you remember her face when she held you in the middle of a storm and assured you that it would pass? Do you have any idea what it’s like to go without food for a week at a time? Have you ever lived in a car while working two jobs? Have you waited years on end for a reply from editors and agents with a smattering of hope that the one thing you have left in this world will eventually give you the means to take back just a little of what you have lost? If you are unacquainted with any of this grief, then do not speak to me about a legacy of suffering!”

Madame Slush Pile pulled out a .22 caliber Luger and slung the bag aside, pointing the barrel at his head while she held the magazine in the other hand. “You really don’t remember who you are, do you?”

Bruiser kept his position on the edge of the seat, his fist tightening around the pipe even more as he stared fearlessly into the gun barrel pointed at his head, as if knowing he was still not meant to die in this unexpected moment of aggression.

“Answer me!” she demanded.

“No, I really don’t remember.”

The shot rang out in a loud flash of light, shattering the right lens of Bruiser’s sunglasses as the bullet grazed his temple, its force slamming him backward into the chair’s cushion of red leather, his head bouncing off the ironworks.

Bruiser slumped forward after the impact, grabbing the armrests to catch himself from falling to the ground. He removed the broken glasses hanging by one ear while clinging to the chair with his other hand, lifting his head slowly as the blood dripped through his eyelashes.

“Does that jar your memory?” she asked triumphantly.

Bruiser took a second to catch his breath. “No. But it does tell me what a poor shot you are even at this range,” he answered breathlessly.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you. Not yet, anyway.”

Bruiser shrugged off the itch of the bullet’s lingering heat, trying to use his wit to regain control of the situation. “This is such a classic mistake you’re making,” he told her. “You spend all this time getting to know someone just to kill them off before the story even gets underway? Haven’t you ever read Writer’s Digest? You never kill the main character in the opening scenes of a book. The pedagogues hate that. They gripe about it every chance they can. That and prologues and sentences ending with prepositions, though the latter is only a rule for Latin despite all the mythologizing perpetrated by armchair grammarians.”

“You talk when you should be silent with introspection. Being a good listener is part of mastering Word-Fu. Besides, who said you were the leading man anyway?”

“Well I guess since you seem to know me better than I do, you should be used to the fact that I’m always punching above my weight.”

“I’m not Marko, Mr. McKnight. I’m vengeance incarnate. Now stand up.”

He took a moment to steady his legs before rising from the chair.

“Marko was right about one thing,” she told him, taking aim at the larger target on his chest. “You picked a good place to die. Think of this as a Bernard Malamud novel. I will play the assassin hunting down her unsuspecting prey, a man deluded into thinking he was a rare specimen of natural talent before becoming a has-been that never was.”

Bruiser was struck silent by her analogy. But it was only temporary while he tried to deduce the reason for his sudden feeling of déjà vu. It was the same anomaly he felt when he first laid eyes on her. It was strange. He had a wild thought of who she could possibly be, but was too concerned about surviving to confirm it.

“Turn around, Mr. McKnight”

“You think I’m going to let you shoot me in the back?”

“I’m not going to shoot you in the back. I want my face to be the last thing you see when I end your life. But we’re going to finish this where the evening started. Now turn around and march back up that hill.”

He hesitated to obey.

“Now!” she shouted, cocking the gun’s hammer.

Bruiser complied with a nod that was strangely courteous and started walking, retracing his steps up the hill’s muddy terrain past the old Rocinante tank. Strategies jockeyed for position in his mind with his deliberately slow pace up the hill. But each one involved stall tactics that were waning in effectiveness. And she was keeping just enough distance to make rushing her troublesome to pull off even with his speed, though he felt if he just willed it to happen then he could beat the pull of the trigger, or maybe even the discharge of a bullet. He could take a body shot and possibly survive. But another headshot would surely be fatal. With all his preparation, this was the one moment he had been warned to beware of the most—the expected threat when you’re feeling the most in control that still surprises you when it happens.

He stopped at the foot of the grave and peered down into its flickering abyss where the blue fires were still burning outward through the anthracite walls and their horse-mounted knights. The coffin lid reflected his image with the same clarity as before, both ringed in a similar flame-work Bram Stoker once used to mark treasures hidden in the earth of his greatest fiction.

“Turn around,” she ordered.

Bruiser buttoned up his coat and whipped around with his signature flair, stretching out his arms on each side of him in a cross formation that eclipsed the five intersecting crosses of meerschaum posted at the other end of the memorial.

She glanced at the grave behind him, tossing the Penny Dreadful into the pit with a shake of her head. “Your final resting place looks as arrogant and delusional as your life has been—deep with self reflection and burning with the sort of pride no one really cares to see in a cursory passing.”

Bruiser shrugged defiantly. “I would tell you to go to hell. But since we’re already there, what’s the point?”

“You still think you’re in control, don’t you? You actually think you can escape this.”

Bruiser smiled through the blood, laughing as a distant strike of lightning from another approaching storm lit up the giant oak behind him. “Did you ever read A Tale of Two Cities?” he asked pointedly, his voice downshifting into a guttural chew of every word like a man who still believed he could pull a Houdini and escape the impossible, his knees bending just slightly for the impact.

She didn’t give him the satisfaction of heeding another tactic to stall her. She walked forward and fired two shots into his chest, the bullets digging hard into the thick lapels of his coat’s black shearling. Bruiser fell through the opening of the grave with a hammered expression, grasping at the walls and their spews of blue flame just seconds before hitting the coffin with a hard echo.

Madame Slush Pile made her way to the edge of the grave, the smoke still rolling from the barrel of her gun. A distant flash of lightning illuminated the satisfaction on her face as she offered a brief eulogy to the author muted beneath her. “The Man in the Moon always keeps his promises,” she said roughly, glancing at the Penny Dreadful sprawled out on the coffin beneath Bruiser’s boots. “And there’s nothing on this side of the grave sweeter than revenge.”