From THE RETURN OF LITTLE PRECIOUS

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CHAPTER FIVE: THE VANISHING CURIO SHOP


Down in the office the next morning, I found Dana standing in front of her desk frowning at an envelope that must have arrived in the early mail. She held it in her hand as though it were an ugly little animal that might bite her if it got a chance.


"How come you're standing there frowning at an envelope?" I asked.


"It's from my cousin Louis," Dana said. "Why is he writing to me?

The whole family avoids him-- myself included. He's been involved in any number of shady things. Last I heard, he was in the vanishing curio shop business."


"Vanishing curio shop?" I repeated. "What the hell is that?"


"Oh, I'm sure you've heard stories about them. Some poor, hapless schmo-- call him the mark-- is walking around in a part of town he's unfamiliar with. He spots a strange-looking little curio shop and feels irresistibly compelled to go inside. The proprietor is some strange old coot who gives the mark the creeps. The mark notices an exotic object of some sort, and expresses an interest. The proprietor spins some yarn about the object and what it can do-- grant wishes, bestow great personal power, whatever. The mark purchases the object-- usually for a ridiculously low price--takes the object home and uses it for whatever purpose he has in mind. Things are fine at first, but the whole deal quickly goes south. Remember that story, 'The Monkey's Paw?'


"So, the mark returns to the curio shop, hoping the proprietor can help him undo whatever he's done. But when he arrives, he finds an empty lot or an abandoned building that looks nothing like the shop he remembers. A quick canvass of the neighborhood reveals that the building or the lot has been vacant for as long as anyone can remember; there is not, and never has been, a curio shop there. The mark returns to the mess the power object has made of his life, and either dies or loses his mind and gets locked up in an asylum for the rest of his life."


"Jesus," I said, "that's messed up. Why the hell would anybody do a thing like that to people?"


"Practitioners of the Dark Arts claim it increases their personal power by a factor of five every time they fleece a mark. Of course, pulling jobs like that is pure hell on the karma, but that's what they want. Dark Arts practitioners have a thing called anti-karma. They rack up so many demerits they could never possibly atone for them, even if they were reincarnated a thousand times. Once you hit that level, the question becomes moot. They never reincarnate because they never die. Death itself won't touch anybody with that much stink on them. And there's really no point in them dying if they can't come back in another form. They've sabotaged their whole cycle of life and death, and so become untouchable. Basically, they're written off the ledger. They can go on for centuries that way. It's actually pretty elegant in its simplicity, but it's an absolutely repugnant practice, and only the lowest of the low go in for it."


"Like your cousin."


She sighed. "I'm afraid so. I guess you could say I was closer to him than anyone else, because I only disliked him intensely; the rest of the family hated him or worse. But what little I had to do with him was years ago, when I was a kid. Why the hell is he writing to me now?"


"People typically answer that kind of question by opening the letter and reading it," I advised her. "It's always worked for me."


"Shut up, Jack," she said absently as she tore the envelope open and extracted a single folded sheet of paper. She unfolded it and read it. Then she read it again. She was going for a hat trick when I snatched it away from her.


"He has nice penmanship for a fiend," I remarked as I glanced over the thing. "Seems very polite, too. Calls you Dearest Dana in the salutation-- you don't see that very often these days. He inquires about your health, expresses the hope that you are well... Ah, here's the punch line. He hates to bother you and would not dream of imposing on your good nature-- oh, that's a hot one!-- but wonders if you could look into a little matter for him. Sounds like a case of retail theft to me. Some mysterious someone swiped some mysterious something from him-- he says what it is, but I can't pronounce that word..."


"It's pronounced exactly the way it's spelled," Dana said. "Cauliodanbannasertopsis."


"Oh yeah," I said. "So, anyhow, a mysterious somebody swiped his supercalifragilisticexpialiwhateverthefuck, and he needs help getting it back. He thought of you immediately because you're one of the smartest people he knows and one of the most adept sorceresses in the world. Boy, he lays it on, doesn't he? And look how he closes it: 'Yours in Christ.' What the heck? I thought he was irredeemably evil!"


"He is. I can only assume that he's had some kind of a scare thrown into him and he's trying to hedge his bets. Sort of like a politician who gets caught committing adultery, or a serial killer with a death sentence. First thing they do is leap blindly at Jesus. Well, he won't help them-- not under those conditions."


"I assume, then," I said, "that this is going straight into the circular file?"


"I don't think so," Dana said. "I'd ignore it if it were anything but a Cauliodanbannasertopsis. I can't explain why, but I think this has something to do with the Little Precious business."


"Refresh my memory," I said. "What is a wopbopaloobalopalopbamboom again?"


"Something that has the potential to be a very, very dangerous thing, if it falls into the wrong hands."


"Okay, so you're just gonna sit there, then," I said, "and not explain it to me, is that the program?"


"No, of course it isn't. But it's difficult to explain a Cauliodanbannasertopsis..."


"Say," I interrupted, "is there, like, an abbreviated version of that word?"


"That is the abbreviated version."


"Ah."


"It has the power," she said, "to blur the lines between what is and what is not. That which exists and that which does not exist. In fact, it can breach those lines, and allow people and things to pass from one state to the other, and back again. There are places that don't exactly exist, as such. The concept is pure magic-- it cannot be expressed mathematically, it cannot even be theorized about in any school of purely scientific thought. And there are also places that have been magically sealed in one way or another. Sometimes the entrances to the non-existent places fall into that category. Dad used to do a lot of that, but I haven't...


"Well, a Cauliodanbannasertopsis is a sort of magical skeleton key-- it can be used to gain access to such places."


I didn't like the sound of that.


*


Two hours after we read the letter, Dana and I were standing on the sidewalk in front of a seedy vacant lot on one of the dreariest streets in Zenith.


This area of town wasn't far from the brownstone in terms of miles. No more than six blocks away, actually-- Dana and I had walked here-- but it was a world away in terms of ambiance.


"Tell me again why we're standing here like this," I said to Dana.


She consulted her watch. "Because this is where Louis' curio shop will be in five... four... three... two...one."


Suddenly, we were standing in a shadow, rather than the light of the afternoon sun that had been shining through the gap between the buildings. Looking up, I saw that another brick building had manifested itself, neatly filling the slot.


"I'll be damned," I said. "A curio shop. It even says so on the window-- look: CURIO SHOP. How quaint!"


"Let's get this done," Dana said coldly, moving forward and pushing the door open.


We stepped inside. The place was jam-packed with all manner of bizarre objects. There was a long counter at the far end of the room, behind which stood the smiling proprietor of this nightmarish five-and-dime.


Cousin Louis was a surprise. I was prepared to meet a greasy, wormy-looking little specimen, the sort of malicious troll you'd expect to find plying such a loathsome trade. In fact, to be a lot more candid than I'm comfortable being, he was gorgeous. He had an androgynous quality that reminded me of the young David Bowie.


Dana introduced us. Louis offered to shake hands. I declined. Maybe I was imagining things because of what Dana had told me, but I thought I sensed the presence of impossibly concentrated evil.

He moved as though to kiss Dana on the cheek, but she gave him a look that could have capsized a battleship. Louis fumbled and dithered and backed off. He turned his attention to me and asked, "Have you found the Lord Jesus?"


"I didn't know he was lost," I said. "Do you want to hire us for that, too?"


Dana snickered.


"It isn't a laughing matter," Louis said reproachfully. "He died on the cross for your sins, you know."


"Right. Well, I've been making sure he gets his money's worth."


"You should accept him as your lord and savior," Louis said gravely. "That is what he requires of you."


"Have you accepted him?"


"Well, I've, ah... I've tried. It's not easy for someone with a past like mine. Look, you could really help me out here if you'd accept him. If I can score a lot of souls for him, that's bound to work in my favor, don't you think?"


"You'd have to ask a lawyer," I said. "If you can find one that has a soul."


Dana had watched this exchange with considerable amusement Sometimes she appreciates me. I was just getting warmed up, but she caught my eye and gave me a look that said it was time to get down to business.


"Tell us what happened, Louis," she said evenly. "Tell us why we're here."


"Of course, Dana," Louis said. He cleared his throat and began his gripping tale:


"I had touched down in Cleveland. That's always a good place to find marks. Probably the local economy. I had just arrived there when I suddenly found myself under siege! Someone kicked in the front door and rushed me. I was knocked to the floor! The individual then ransacked the premises."


"What was this individual like?" Dana asked. "Did he say anything to you?"


"Yes, he did. A threat of some kind, the exact wording escapes me. But I remember his voice. He had an accent. Sounded Russian to me."


As he reached this point in his tale, Louis began to tremble. He was lying about the wording of the threat, I was sure. He was scared, and it was because of whatever the intruder had said to him. He wasn't going to give that up, but he was telling the truth about everything else. Probably.


"What got me," he was saying, "was that he was all arrayed in spotless white garments. It could have been one of the Lord's angels. That's what scared me so. It could also be one of the fallen ones. I do know that I need that thing back."


"White garments?" Dana asked.


"Well, more sort of beige, I guess, if I think about it. Very nice. I couldn't identify the fabric."


"What did these garments look like?"


"An overcoat and a hat. The brim of the hat was pulled..."


"... down low enough to hide the intruder's face," I finished.


"Yes," Louis said, nodding, "exactly. It also struck me that he might be wearing something over his face-- a mask of some sort-- but I never got a really close look. The lighting isn't the best, as you can see, and everything happened so fast... It was quite jarring. You know, this is the first time a vanishing curio shop has been robbed in almost a decade! It was old Charlie Fishman the last time. Remember him, Dana? Somebody stole a contraption that Charlie had conned H.G. Wells out of. Something big. One of those Martian war machines, maybe."


"That must have been some con," Dana said.


"Oh, Charlie was a smooth one in his day! But he never caught the guy that robbed him. To this day it's a mystery."


"Uh-huh. Was anything else missing from here, Louis?"


"Funny you should say that. I didn't notice until about an hour ago, but a ritual dagger seems to be missing. It has little or no monetary value, and no inherent magical qualities."


"Do you have a picture of it?"


"Indeed I do. I have a picture of the Cauliodanbannasertopsis, too. I have them ready for you."


He handed Dana two photographs. She looked them over, then passed them to me.


"Hmmm," I said, studying the photos. "This one here, I cannot make heads or tails of. But this one looks like the kind of knife that sometimes gets caught by the hilt in midair at a dead run-- don't you think so, Dana?"


"I believe it does," she said. She took the photos back and put them in her little handbag."I'll see what I can do, Louis. I'm very busy at present, but I'll look into it. "


On that note we said goodbye to Cousin Louis. As we stepped through the doorway onto the sidewalk, I felt a great sense of relief. The inside of that shop had been giving me the creeps.


Turning to look back over my shoulder, I saw that vanishing curio shop had... vanished.







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BLACK CENTIPEDE CONFIDENTIAL

The Black Centipede and his friend and partner, Amelia Earhart, will return in Black Centipede Confidential, facing off against Professor Moriarty, Lord of the Vampires, and his diabolical Order of the Sunless Circle. The stakes are higher than ever this time around, and our heroes will be sorely pressed. But they will not fight alone. Joining them will be the members of the Black Centipede's Invisible Round Table.

 BLACK CENTIPEDE CONFIDENTIAL: THE FIGHT CARD

(Some names appear on both lists. They aren't typos-- they're just fickle.)

THE BLACK CENTIPEDE and the INVISIBLE ROUND TABLE:

Amelia Earhart

Anonymoushka

Gregor Samsa
Patience and Prudence

J. Alfred Prufrock

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Percival Doiley

Resurrection Mary

Lester Dent

Walter B. Gibson

Bela Lugosi

John Dillinger

Mary Jane Gallows

Dr. Wilhelm Reich

Frank Nitti

and a

SUPER-SECRET SURPRISE GUEST HERO!

VERSUS

 PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY, LORD OF THE VAMPIRES, and the 
ORDER OF THE SUNLESS CIRCLE:

Bonnie Parker

Clyde Barrow

Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd

John Dillinger

Kate "Ma" Barker

Max Schreck

Dr. Herbert West, Re-Animator

Zelda Fitzgerald

Dr. Hawley Crippen

Mary Jane Gallows

Judith DeCortez

Stagger Lee

The Loch Ness Monster

The Bell Witch

and a

SUPER-SECRET SURPRISE GUEST ARCH-FIEND!

BLACK CENTIPEDE CONFIDENTIAL-- MAY be published within the lifetime of the author and the readers, we hope. So, to renew your acquaintance and/or whet your appetite, here is an excerpt from BLOOD OF THE CENTIPEDE:

CHAPTER TEN: FISHING TRIP


Frank Nitti had been as good as his word-- a relatively new experience for him, I imagined-- and Amelia and I went out on another fact-finding mission, armed with the list of speakeasies. I went unmasked, dressed in something other than one of my customary suits of solemn black. Amelia, very wisely, had donned a suit of men's clothes and had her hair stuffed up under a newsboy cap.

I had taken possession of my car that afternoon-- I had made arrangements for it to be shipped out on a freight train when it started looking like I might need it.  Amelia and I visited one dive after another, and we played it very low-key.  We sat and drank and listened to conversations around us. We identified the drunkest and most questionable-looking patrons and struck up acquaintances, paying for drinks, listening to stories, asking very discreet questions. We learned the same rumors over and over again, about an unknown new crime boss who was trying to set up shop, and about the mad Judith DeCortez, who was thought to be working for him.

Nothing we didn't already know.

"The important thing about an iron fist in a velvet glove," I observed at one point, "is that it has an iron fist in it. We're getting nowhere fast using the glove by itself."

"I'm just not comfortable with all that violence."

"Nobody is. That's how come it works."

She heaved a heavy sigh. "Maybe you're right."

"Of course I am. I don't see how you ever could have doubted it. I am, after all, an expert. Whoever this guy is-- whether he's this so-called White Centipede or not-- he is ruthless. Judith DeCortez is ruthless. That means whoever goes up against them has got to be ruthless, too. He has to be more ruthless than they are, or he will not win. And if he doesn't win, he is dead. Very straightforward."

Amelia stood up. "Well, in any event, I think I've had enough of this. Let's go."

"Where?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. I could really use some fresh air."

So we hit the street and walked around aimlessly for the better part of an hour. We were dressed rather roughly, and I had plastered an expression on my face that was an unmistakable warning to anyone who thought he might like to try any rough stuff on us. I wasn't worried about ordinary muggers and sex perverts. I almost wished somebody would get big ideas-- the exercise would have done me some good.

As we crossed a street at the corner, something caught Amelia's eye. She peered up the cross street and said, "Isn't that Roscoe Arbuckle?"

"Where?"

"Ducking into that alley, there." I looked in the direction she was pointing her finger, and saw a figure that certainly matched Fatty in terms of height and girth.

"Could be," I said. "Wonder what he's doing down here."

"So do I. Let's find out."

I shrugged and followed her toward the mouth of the alley. I didn't have anything better to do. And if Fatty was a habitué of this kind of neighborhood, he might be of some help.

We reached the alley and peeped around the corner. I saw someone slip around the corner at the other end of the alley, but whoever it was was too tall and slender to be Arbuckle. From where I was, I could not see any doorways into which Fatty might have ducked. Motioning for Amelia to remain where she was, I crept around the corner and made my way toward the opposite end of the alley. There were no convenient doorways, and I figured Fatty-- or whoever it was-- had simply cut through to the next street. I was on my way back to Amelia when something caught my eye.

Someone had chalked a few words onto the brick wall roughly at the halfway point of the alley. They were as high up as the shoulders of an average man, and they looked fresh:

The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing

If not for the fact that I have nerves of steel and ice water in my veins, I would no doubt have felt an icy talon clutching my heart just then. I recognized that sentence. And what was chalked onto the wall just below it, in smaller letters, gave me considerable pause:

It Begins Again

"What's that?" Amelia asked, peering over my shoulder, apparently having trotted up while I was in deep contemplation.

"This?" I replied. "It's nothing. Just some silly graffiti."

She gave it a look. "Huh. Crazy. Is that some kind of anti-Semitic screed?"

"I guess." I didn't tell her where, and under what circumstances, the odd message with the curious spelling had famously appeared many years earlier.  It had been found scrawled on a wall in London, England, some 44 years before, in close proximity to two very extraordinary murders. Many believed that the message had been written by the faceless jackal known as Jack the Ripper.

You know, the guy they never caught...
 
But it probably didn't mean anything here. I filed it away in my brain. I had bigger things to worry about.

"Gosh," Amelia said, "there are a lot of Jews in the movie business. I hope nobody's trying to start some of that Nazi crap over here."

"So do I," I said.

"No Fatty?" she asked.

"No Fatty," I affirmed.

We decided to call it a night.

Back in my room, I went through the motions of another fruitless attempt to analyze the material I had obtained from the rubber-suited woman. None of it made sense. I crawled into bed and glanced through the newspaper.

The first of FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps facilities had just opened in Michigan. In Scotland, someone claimed to have spotted a huge aquatic monster in Loch Ness. Adolf Hitler had eliminated all of the labor unions in Germany. Someone calling himself the Blue Candiru had foiled a bank robbery in Los Angeles. Another new masked avenger, evidently. Hooray.

I tossed the paper onto the floor, turned off the light, and went to sleep.

Now BUY it already!

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From Doctor Unknown Junior's Rogues Gallery

From "Who Was Little Precious?"
by Garrison "Grassy" Knowles
National Watchdog Magazine

Perhaps the most famous correctional facility in history, the federal prison on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay had a history that went back to before the American Civil War. In 1934, it was acquired by the U.S.  Department of Justice and turned into a federal penitentiary.

It was shut down in 1963, and eventually became a popular tourist attraction.

Ten years ago, the property was taken over once more by the federal government, and Alcatraz was refurbished and specially outfitted to house one single prisoner.

That prisoner was the most dangerous criminal mastermind, terrorist and mass killer the world has ever seen. None of us who experienced those four hellish days will ever forget Little Precious' orgy of terror-- the time-displacement wave in Beijing that left the city knee-deep in medieval plague victims. The DNA Scrambler Bomb that wrought genetic havoc in Egypt. The city of Rio De Janeiro teleported to the surface of the moon. The President of the United States forced to commit an act of inspired perversion on live television with a creature nature did not design with such antics in mind.

Nor will we forget the epic battle that finally brought her down.
 
A decade ago, after an epic trial,  she was sentenced to a total of seven thousand years in prison on multiple counts of murder, assault, theft, kidnapping, mayhem, terrorism and assorted other crimes, ranging from simple felonies to treason, sedition, and crimes against humanity.

She was taken to Alcatraz to begin serving her sentence two weeks after her ninth birthday. She has not aged a day since. Nobody knows why.

So ended the Little Precious Crisis.  With Jessie Von Cosel safely locked away, the world buried its dead and tried to forget. The unanswered questions-- and they are legion-- were brushed aside by our leaders, who told us it was time to "look to the future."

But the questions remained, a herd of elephants in the world's living room. Jessie Von Cosel was only half of the entity called Little Precious-- a single consciousness inhabiting two bodies. The other half was a mysterious robot, a small mechanical man whose origin and ultimate fate were never conclusively determined. Some "experts" maintain that the robot was destroyed during the final battle with Little Precious in the Nevada desert, but there is no proof of this.

Where did the robot come from and what happened to it? How did it enter the state of quantum entanglement with Jessie Von Cosel that gave birth to Little Precious?

Where did Little Precious get the super-weapons with which she nearly wiped out mankind?

How can we be sure Little Precious has really been neutralized forever?

If anyone knows the answers to these troubling questions, they haven't spoken them publicly. Though the government denies it, all information pertaining Little Precious is classified at a level so far above Top Secret that the President himself may not be privy to it. The public record has been scrubbed clean of all but the most innocuous and least controversial data.

All of this is troubling enough, but the final unanswered question is the most troubling of all:

Did Little Precious Act Alone?

This reporter believes that she did not.

The Harrison Commission told the public that she did. But the Commission's proceedings were held behind closed doors, and no transcript has ever been released. Who testified before the Commission and to what did they testify?

This reporter is currently pursuing leads that may establish a link between Little Precious and one of the most respected and revered figures of the modern age, a man who, without explanation, disappeared from public life several years ago. There is credible evidence that this man acted in concert with one of the most notorious criminals of all time, and that, together, they at least abetted Little Precious' deadly rampage, and may have facilitated it. And there is also the clear implication that this public figure worked in concert with the Harrison Commission to prevent the truth from becoming known to the public.

This reporter has chosen to go public with the existence of these
leads, before they have been confirmed sufficiently for publication, as a means of safeguarding his own life. Copies of all the information and evidence thus far compiled have been placed with several individuals around the world, to be released to the public in the event of this reporter's untimely death.

THE FABULOUS WORLD OF ZENITH!

BLACK CENTIPEDE CREATOR SIGNS ON FOR SERIES IN PRO SE PRODUCTIONS SIGNATURE LINE

Pro Se Productions announces that the creator of one of the most popular New Pulp franchises in the last 3 years is bringing a different view of his fictional world to a series as a part of the PRO SE SINGLE SHOT SIGNATURE line. Chuck Miller, the man behind The Black Centipede and his wild cast of supporting characters, will show even more of why his work is often referred to as ‘Psychedlic Pulp’ in his digital single series-THE FABULOUS WORLD OF ZENITH.

“In THE FABULOUS WORLD OF ZENITH,” says Miller, “we will examine the world of the Black Centipede, Vionna Valis, Mary Kelly and Doctor Unknown Junior from a variety of strange and oblique angles.

“Zenith, of course, is the city in which the Black Centipede and the other characters in his circle of friends and foes make their home. The series will feature both standalone short stories and multi-part epics. In the first of these, we will be taking a look into THE JOURNAL OF BLOODY MARY JANE. For the first time, in her own words, we will have a glimpse into the life of the Black Centipede's closest friend and most implacable opponent, the mysterious and deadly Mary Jane Gallows.

"What happened to her after she killed Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother in 1892, and before she returned to Fall River, Massachusetts in 1927? You will thrill to her surreal encounters with Ponce De Leon, Cotton Mather, Professor James Moriarty, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, Doctor Herbert West, Mary Pickford, H. P. Lovecraft, and many others-- including her father, the diabolical genius known as Jack the Ripper. Follow her as she struggles to understand just who and what she really is, and carves out her own unique place in the world.”

Future installments of the series will focus on Vionna Valis, Mary Jane Kelly, Dana Unknown, Jack Christian, Doctor Unknown Senior, Percival Doiley, Stan Bartowski, and other heroes, criminals, lunatics and more-or-less ordinary citizens who inhabit THE FABULOUS WORLD OF ZENITH!

Chuck Miller is the creator/writer of TALES OF THE BLACK CENTIPEDE, THE INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES OF VIONNA VALIS AND MARY JANE KELLY, THE BAY PHANTOM CHRONICLES, and THE MYSTIC FILES OF DOCTOR UNKNOWN JUNIOR. He has also written stories featuring such classic characters as Jill Trent: Science Sleuth, Armless O'Neil, The Griffon, and others.

Miller received the BEST NEW WRITER OF 2011 Award from Pulp Ark. His first novel, the critically acclaimed "Creeping Dawn: The Rise of the Black Centipede" was published in 2011 by Pro Se Press. The second installment in the Black Centipede series, "Blood of the Centipede" was published in 2012. "Vionna and the Vampires," the first installment of The Incredible Adventures of Vionna Valis and Mary Jane Kelly, debuted in March 2014 and "Black Centipede Confidential" is slated for release later this year.

For interviews with Chuck Miller or more information on his imprint or the Pro Se Single Shots Signature Line, contact Morgan Minor, Pro Se’s Director of Corporate Operations, at directorofcorporateoperations@prose-press.com.

For more information on Pro Se Productions, go to www.prose-press.com. Like Pro Se on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ProSeProductions.

THE ABOMINABLE MYRA LINSKY RISES AGAIN

Excerpt from "THE ABOMINABLE MYRA LINSKY RISES AGAIN," A DOCTOR UNKNOWN JUNIOR adventure by Chuck Miller, available NOW on Amazon:
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (August 31, 2012)

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 CHAPTER ONE: AND BESIDES, THE WENCH IS DEAD 

CITY OF ZENITH
THE HOME/OFFICE OF DOCTOR DANA UNKNOWN
aka "Doctor Unknown Junior"
 

“What the hell kind of name is Myra Linsky?” I asked, shaking my head.

“I think it’s Irish, Jack,” said Dana. "I know it sounds Eastern European, but it has a 'y,' instead of an 'i' at the end.'"

We were in the ground-floor office of an old brownstone house in downtown Zenith. The house is owned by Doctor Dana Marie Laveau Unknown, and serves her-- and me-- as both residence and workplace. My name is Jack Christian. That's the one I was born into, but I've had several others at various times.

I was sitting behind my desk, and Dana was standing in front of hers.

“That’s not what I mean.” I refolded the newspaper I’d been reading and tossed it in her direction. “I mean, what kind of name is Myra Linsky for an arch-enemy? An evil sorceress called Myra? It doesn’t strike much fear into the heart, does it?”

Dana caught the newspaper and shrugged. “I’m sorry your aesthetic sense is outraged, Jack, but it is what it is. And I wouldn’t necessarily call her evil. I never thought of her as diabolical. Misguided, maybe. She certainly chose to abuse her gifts. But I would stop short of calling her evil, and I would also hesitate to use the term arch-enemy. She's just somebody I never got along with.”

“Were you ever friends?”

“No. We always hated each other. I always kind of wished we could have been friends, but there was something about her that put people off. It wasn't just me. I don't think she had any real friends at all.”

“Uh-huh. That’s really kind of a shame. It would be a lot more poignant if you had been best friends to start with, then something awful happened. But that’s as may be. You said you fought her almost to the death on three different occasions. That’s an arch-enemy, whether you like it or not.”

Doctor Dana Unknown is my partner in an agency whose mission cannot be summed up in two or three words. Just looking at her-- an unassuming young brunette, just a shade over five and a half feet tall, dark, slender and bespectacled-- you'd never guess she was so incredibly formidable, but Dana is probably the most powerful sorceress in the world. She's a Level Twelve Magus, whatever the hell that is.

Or she was, anyhow, until she lost a huge chunk of her power helping me to fight a monstrously evil ghost that was trying to make a major incursion into our world. The ectoplasmic fiend was screwing around with me, my sister Vionna, and my friend the Black Centipede. It’s a very interesting story, but we don’t have time for it here. The bottom line is, we saved the day—more or less—but it cost Dana dearly.

I kind of felt responsible for bringing her into the whole mess—mainly because I was responsible for bringing her into the whole mess. So, once the dust had settled, and Dana had come to terms with her diminished capacity, I—out of the goodness of my heart—had offered my services to her, at a very reasonable rate, as right-hand man, able assistant, bodyguard, and jack of all trades. Not that I ever got a proper acknowledgement of any of that from her!

I should mention here that Dana's father is Raoul Deveraux Unknown, the famed sorcerer/superhero/certified public accountant. The old man had retired several years earlier, after a traumatic incident in which a spell of his had gotten out of control and destroyed the planet Earth and a large portion of the solar system. He and Dana had successfully rebooted the time stream, more or less erasing the episode from history, but the experience left him a shattered man.

He currently resides in a retirement village in Florida, where his hobbies include drinking, wallowing in guilt, drinking, watching soap operas, and drinking. Dana took over his role as the mystical defender of the earth, or whatever the hell you call it. Which had been a cakewalk for her, up until her path crossed mine.

And now, six months into our partnership, things were so not rosy. I was thinking seriously about ending our arrangement. I hated to do it, but the fact was, Dana Unknown was driving me crazy.

Her attitude toward me, so it seemed, was supercilious and arrogant on a good day, and close to contempt on a bad one. And for the past month or so, the bad days had outnumbered the good ones. I supposed I was staying on with her because of the guilt I felt. Why Dana let it continue, I couldn't fathom.

Though I considered our arrangement a full partnership, Dana, for some reason-- no doubt psychological-- felt the need to maintain the fiction that she was actually my employer and that she hired me out of pity because I had no direction in life, was virtually unemployable, and would certainly drink myself to death within six months if I didn’t have something to occupy me. Which is absurd, because I could have gone another ten years at least.

And Dana, in the time-honored manner of everyone who spends a lot of time with a person who drinks to a degree that a layman would find excessive, nagged me about it incessantly. The universal bane of the dedicated drinker, these Carrie Nation types.

Actually, I had, by this time, cut back considerably, but I still indulged when the mood struck me-- which it had been doing more and more of late. It seemed that Dana and I were constantly at one another's throats.



"Why do I even have to have an arch-enemy?" she asked. "Did you have one back when you were running around in a cape and tights?"

"They were leggings, and yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Do you remember Mackie Messer and the Threepenny Gang? They had this so-called 'mascot' named Pirate Jenny. She was about my age, and I scrapped with her on several occasions. The Gang treated her like a baby, but I knew there was something in her that she kept hidden. And, sure enough, when she turned 14, she murdered the whole Threepenny Gang and took off with their accumulated loot. Hasn't been seen since. I often wonder where she ended up."

“Yes, well, I may have exaggerated a little about our battles. The first time Myra and I fought ‘almost to the death,’ we were both seven years old. It was a playground spat that got out of hand.”

“Whatever, she’s the only person I know of who has enough of a history with you to qualify for arch-enemy status. And it doesn’t reflect well on you to have a mortal foe with such a pedestrian name. ‘The Diabolical Myra Linsky.’ It just doesn’t track.”

“I can’t help that. Actually, she called herself ‘Lady Diabolique’ for a while. This was one summer when we were teenagers. She was going through a goth phase. She had this truly horrible costume, with a sort of...”

“So,” I continued, overriding her fashion commentary, “you two grew up together and attended Hogwarts, or wherever you people go.”

"Something like that, yeah. Her father and my father were friends. They had hoped their daughters would carry on that tradition, but things didn't work out that way. Myra always had a rebellious streak, and she never took her education very seriously. She started hanging around with a bad crowd. Got into some seriously forbidden practices. I found out much later that she had secretly apprenticed herself to Sikorski, the Dark Necromancer.”

“Are there any light necromancers?”

“Shut up, Jack. She ended up going down a very dark path.”

"But you did fight almost to the death the other two times?"

"Yes, yes," she replied sharply. "As I say, she went down some very dark paths, and on two occasions, I felt the need to step in. I imagine she hated me even more after that."

“And now she’s dead.”

"Yeah. Maybe."

This conversation had begun when I mentioned to Dana that I had just read an obituary in the Zenith Orator early edition for one Myra Linsky, and wondered aloud if she was the same one I had heard mentioned once or twice or a hundred times when Dana had been in a nostalgic and/or maudlin mood. I warmed quickly to the subject because it took the focus off of me and her. We had not actually discussed our problems as such, and I was eager to avoid doing so until I could come up with a good escape plan.

"Are you going to the funeral?" I asked.

"I hardly think I'd be welcome. But I do want to see the body."

"The funeral's tomorrow," I told her.

"Then I want to see the body tonight."

*

Which meant doing something stupid. That's the only way to describe breaking into a funeral home at 3 in the morning, which is what we did. But She Who Must Be Obeyed had spoken...

The Melchoir Memorial Chapel and Crematorium was located on the outskirts of Zenith, in one of those neighborhoods I never have any legitimate business visiting. Dana had to defer to me on the details, since stealth is my business, or was at one time.

For a few years I had been known as Kid Mercury, boy sidekick of Captain Mercury, noted American superhero, currently deceased. That gig had its ups and downs, and had ended badly twelve years before the events that brought Dana Unknown into my life, or vice-versa. Captain Mercury died a nasty death, and I was pretty well ground up by the vicious gears of an uncaring world. After a very brief stint as a ward of the state-- and a few criminal misadventures-- I broke out of the juvenile detention home and fled into the wide world beyond the city of Zenith. The less said about that, the better.

That night at the funeral home, my old skills-- both as a superhero and a juvenile delinquent-- answered my call, still well-oiled and ready for anything. We parked a block away, crept around to the back of the establishment, and found the rear entrance. It was made of light metal painted a somber brown. Next to it was a large garage-type door.

I bypassed the burglar alarm with ease, something I had learned to do at the age of eleven, then went to work on the smaller door.

"Rumor has it," I told Dana as I deftly prodded the tumblers inside the lock with a thin, rigid wire, "that this place was once owned by the Stiff. Don't know how true that is. Nobody's seen him since 1963. Four witnesses swear they saw him on a certain grassy knoll in Dallas on November 22... Ah, here we go!"

I popped the door and we entered. My sense of pride and accomplishment was tempered by the fact that I hate funeral homes, even in the daytime, and at three in the morning, there is nowhere I'd rather not be. It was cold and dark, and had that sad smell of chemicals and flowers, vying with one another for control of the atmosphere. The flowers never win the battle, and the resulting amalgam of odors always makes my skin crawl.

We were in some sort of receiving bay. We picked our way through the dark, not daring to use flashlights until we were further into the building, away from any windows. We found another locked door which I made short work of. Once we were through and it was closed behind us, we turned on the flashlights.

This was evidently the crematorium.

"Goddamn," I said, "that's a big oven. Hey, you remember those Easy Bake toy ovens they used to sell? You could make a cupcake in them. They used an ordinary light bulb to generate the heat."

"I don't think that's what this is."

"I know that, I was just making conversation."

"I wonder if you could refrain from voicing every inane trifle that crosses your mind."

"I don't believe so, Dana."

We went past the oven and found locked door number three, upon which I worked my magic. Beyond it was a small, dark room with heavy drapes on all the walls. In there, we found four caskets, each one sitting on a metal table with wheels. I hung back while Dana lifted one of the lids. The occupant was a middle-aged man. She went to another, which contained the corpse of an elderly woman.

The third one was the charm.

"Well, it's her, alright," Dana said, gazing at the remains of a young woman. "Poor thing."

Myra Linsky's mortal clay had been dressed up in a high-necked black dress with some white lace at the neck and wrists. She had a magnificent head of red hair and a nicely-arranged face. She was actually quite attractive, but I pushed that thought out of my mind, her being a cadaver and all. Corpses are like your parents; you aren't at all comfortable imagining them in sexual situations, but once the idea gets into your head, it's difficult to dismiss.

"I wonder what she died of," I said. "The paper didn't say."

"I doubt it was anything mundane. Probably something the paper wouldn't dare print even if they knew what it was."

"Like magic cancer or something?"

Dana looked at me as though I were something she had just stepped in, then turned back to the corpse of her old acquaintance. Her back to me, I took the opportunity to covertly give her the finger.

I can't say I was surprised by what happened next, but it did catch me off guard. Myra Linsky sat up in the coffin, grabbed Dana by the throat and started throttling her.

Though I could sympathize with the corpse, I sprang to Dana's rescue. I grabbed Myra's cold wrist and applied pressure, but that didn't loosen her grip. So I started beating her on the head with my heavy flashlight. The glass shattered, the bulb popped, the flashlight got dented up, and that was the net result of that maneuver. Myra's grip remained firm.

I was wondering what I might do next when the cadaver abruptly let go, went limp, and fell back into a supine position in the casket. Dana put some distance between herself and the casket, rubbing her neck and coughing. I put myself between her and Myra, holding my mortally injured flashlight out in front of me as though it might offer some protection.

"Are you okay, and what the hell was that?" I asked, eyeing the apparently inert body.

"Yes and I'm not sure. It felt like some kind of post-mortem spell release. Whatever it was, it's over. There's nothing in there. Something jumped out. I couldn't get a fix on it because my senses are still badly scrambled. Something was in that body and it left. It took a moment to screw with me, but that wasn't its ultimate aim. It has gone from here."

"To where?" I asked quite reasonably.

"Somewhere," Dana replied, sounding petulant and juvenile.

"How come?"

"To do something," she snapped.

"Well." I clammed up then and started thinking for the umpteenth time about my possible exit strategies. Irritation was rapidly beating the hell out of guilt.

Dana gave me one of her looks. "If I could be more specific, I would, Jack."

"I don't doubt that. You'd run your mouth for hours. Was it Myra herself? Her spirit or whatever?"

"I don't think so. Not as such." She shook her head. "I just don't know. Whatever it was, it left an empty shell behind. She's dead, really dead, that much I can tell."

She put her hand on the corpse's forehead. "Myra," she said in a low, sad voice. "What the hell have you been up to?"

I shuddered. "Do you have to touch that thing?" Though I am of course fearless, I'm a  little superstitious about dead bodies. I don't like handling them, and would never do so voluntarily for no compelling reason. Dana paid me no mind.

"So, basically, this is not over," I piped up after a while. "Something bad is going to happen. Right?"

Dana continued ignoring me and I decided to keep my trap shut until she got tired of this grim tableau. I was thoroughly sick of it, but I do have a certain capacity for self-discipline. I stood idly by while she contemplated her old adversary's remains.

Finally, Dana sighed and said, "I wonder why we couldn't have been friends." She stepped back from the casket and closed the lid.

We were silent on the drive back to Dana's brownstone. She was thinking whatever she was thinking, and I was thinking that once this Myra Linsky business was settled, I would start looking for someplace else to go. 

http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Se-Presents-Chuck-Miller/dp/1479250651/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346849136&sr=8-1&keywords=pro+se+presents+blalock

 Doctor Unknown Jr.-- Original character; original name!