James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-12-24 14:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | james hutchins, npc |
Fathers and Sons
Who: James Hutchins, NPC Sam Hutchins, NPC Aaron Turner
What: What Happened at Sam's House (Witch Hunter Plot)
When: May 26, 2011 and December 21, 2020
Where: 4570 Churchfield Circle, Las Vegas
Ratings: Language, Gore
May 26, 2011
The house was mustard yellow with red trim. It had a patch of green grass on the side.
“It looks like something you’d put on a hot dog,” James said to his father when he bought the house in 2011 for $162,000. A steal, Sam called it. What James saw was 1,188 square feet of late-life crisis. How his yurt-loving, earth-worshipping, grass-smoking father had down-shifted into the 1970s version of the suburban dream was a mystery to him, but Sam was set on it.
“I need a place to settle,” the man said, his palms on an unseen horizontal plane. “The neighborhood’s quiet and it’s low maintenance. You’re going to like the backyard. There’s room for a fire pit. Come on.” With a beckoning gesture, Sam started up the fresh-paved driveway and opened a metal gate on the side of the house. The hinges squealed and the door closed with a tooth-rattling bang. They took a sidewalk past the garage and a couple of putrid garbage cans.
While Sam extolled the virtues of the covered patio and succulent garden, James sweated through his t-shirt and looked from the privacy wall separating the tiny yard from its next-door neighbors to the screen door with an ornate metal frame. He tried to imagine his father living here for the rest of his life. He’d pictured Sam ending up in a co-op community, or buying an RV and touring with a group of similarly white-haired witches, not digging a hole and burrowing into the soil long before he planned to retire. It was uncomfortable. In his mind, his father would never rest, never stop challenging him. Even in death, Sam would find a way to peer over his shoulder like the pagan version of a Force ghost.
“—Work is important,” Sam was saying, his stance a bit stiff-legged. “But when you get old, you realize that there are other things worth passing onto someone. You realize that—.” He looked over at the blank, unappreciative face of his only son and sighed, the noise carrying in the empty space between them. “Forget it. You might understand one day.” He used a plain handkerchief to mop sweat off his face.
“What?” Frowning, James got off the mental freight train he was riding and came back to the moment at hand. A large insect buzzed by his ear. He caught it, noticing the helpless squiggle of tiny legs and wings in his palm, and debated what to do with it, now that he had it.
Sam stared at him, exasperated. “Actually, you might not. Young women appreciate a man who pays attention.”
“Good note.” James opened his fingers and watched the slow-going climb of the insect, injured but able to fly away from him. “Does that courtesy extend to women after you sleep with them, or just before?” In the bright afternoon sunlight, he squinted at the single patriarch of the family.
Sam held open the screen door and fished for his house key. “Very funny, James.” The metal pins turned within the knob and the door opened with a nudge of his hip. The unfamiliar scent of someone else’s home wafted past them as Sam entered the open floor plan of his new bachelor pad.
“When are you putting in the hot tub, Sam?” James stepped into the dim house and flipped a light switch. It clicked up-down, up-down, to no effect. “I hear women appreciate those, too, but you might wanna be careful,” he deadpanned. “They can get pregnant from sperm in the water.”
“That is not how you were conceived,” Sam said, pointing across the distance between them. “Although there was water involved. You get warmer all the time.” The older man tossed his key ring on the countertop. “So! Are you ready for the tour?” He opened the door of the refrigerator and pulled a bottle of celebratory wine from otherwise barren shelves. There was a functional bottle opener in the drawer.
“That depends.” James reached up to touch a dining room light fixture, swinging it like a pendulum. “Promise you won’t die and leave this ugly house to me.” A dust bunny landed in his eyelashes.
Sam was both gallant and triumphant as he disappeared down the hall. “Try and stop me.”
December 21, 2020
Sam wasn’t answering his phone.
Celeste had the truck. James grabbed the keys to his bike, headed west of the strip to a subdivision called Spring Valley, and rolled into the cul-de-sac where his father lived. He parked on the driveway, right next to Sam’s old Chevy Malibu, and took off his helmet. Somewhere a dog was barking in the distance. It was the plaintive yelp of an animal that had been trying to get its human’s attention for a long time. When he touched the hood of Sam’s car, it was cold. No matter where Sam had gone that day, he’d been back for a while. The porch was dark, the door closed with two or three take-out menus rubber-banded to the knob. None of that was unusual; the older man preferred to use the back door to come and go. He said it kept the solicitors guessing. With his motorcycle helmet under his arm and his molars digging into the soft flesh of his cheek, James started towards the yard, stepping around the trail of outdated newspapers on the way.
Sam’s peeling, wrought-iron gate was open. Something slick clung to the latch, pungent and shining like mucous. James took off his gloves and reached out with his index and middle fingers to touch it, but thought better of making skin contact. Whatever it was, it smelled caustic. As if it would burn him.
“Hey...” James called out and side-stepped through the gate. He swallowed past the dry patch in his throat and tried again. “Sam, are you out here?” Silence came back to him after the odd resonance of his own voice in the enclosed courtyard, more concrete and rock than living things. The shadows along the house ran deep, the walkway narrow. James couldn’t stretch out his arms without rubbing the stucco or the privacy wall. That same viscous slug trail ran along the side of the house, going from clear to something darker and redder the farther James went.
In the back, the fire in the pit was still burning. Not long ago, the flames had flashed too high and hot, such that the lounger beside it was now warped and twisted, reminding him of how objects looked in photographs of forest fires and nuclear blast zones. The air was acrid with the scent of melted plastic. Under his right shoe, broken pieces of a wine glass crunched in the same spot where liquid stained the pavers a reddish-pink. James recognized the charge in the air. It was how the world felt when a spellcaster ripped a hole in the fabric of things. He had caused it himself too many times to count and knew that nails-on-a-blackboard frequency: Someone had summoned a monster.
“Sam!” Alarmed, James turned around. The screen door was off its hinges. The back door was open wide, some of its glass panels cracked or missing. James dropped his helmet and gloves and ran into the dark house. The hardwood floor jutted up in broken planks, shards rising out of it like disrupted bedrock after an earthquake. The ceiling fan dangled by a host of live wires, the blades still somehow turning.
The warlock named Aaron Turner slumped against the kitchen island. He was awake but too dazed to move. In the melee, the boy had been thrown into the corner of the granite countertop. Blood seeped from a gash on the side of his head, matting his short, brown hair like the pelt of a dead deer. The sleeves of his hoodie were pushed above the elbows. Blood wept from the self-inflicted wounds of sigils he had carved into his forearms. “He left me.” The statement was flat. Then he smiled like an idiot, one who knew he had lost, and only now understood that he was the pet and the demon, his master.
James looked over the tall back of the couch and saw his dad’s body. Far inside him, wherever a soul or spirit clung to a physical self to make a person whole, something came loose.
His father was not on the coffee table, but in it. When the old witch fell, the glass caved around him, dropping Sam inside the metal frame. He reminded James of a marionette with the strings cut, or a scarecrow without enough straw to stuff his thin arms and legs. His head drooped at an awkward angle. There were claw marks in his shirt and welts on his face and neck, as though whatever picked him up had tried to choke the life out of him with its tentacles.
“Dad!” James was at his side. He got on his knees, chunks of tempered glass tearing up his jeans as he hoisted the older man out of the frame and cleared a spot for him on the floor. James leaned down and put his cheek to Sam’s mouth, straining to feel the warmth of breath on his face and see the rise and fall of respiration. He jammed his fingers into the loose skin of Sam’s neck. He pressed hard, rearranged his fingers and tried again, unsure at first if the faint thump he felt was Sam’s or his own pulse slamming in his hands. “Dad, wait. I got you.”
James pulled out his phone, hands trembling as he struggled to unlock it and dial 9-1-1. He was sweating in his heavy jacket, fumbling over his words when he gave the address and hung up against the instructions of the dispatcher. He sat back. Thinking. Scouring everything he knew for a way to keep his father going, but how could he fix something when he didn’t know what was wrong? James looked at the kid in the kitchen and quickly stripped out of his jacket. He crossed the distance and grabbed Aaron by the ankles. James backed up and dragged him around the far end of the couch. Aaron’s head bounced on the turbulence of the buckled floorboards.
“You piece of shit.” James dropped the kid’s legs and knelt between him and Sam. “You wanted to do magic, you can bleed more than that.” He pinched Aaron’s chin and cranked it to one side, searching for the injury on his head. The wound was three inches long and down to the skull, but the blood had started to coagulate. James kneaded the edges until it started to run again and got his fingers wet.
Scrambling, he hiked up Sam’s winter clothes and began to paint a circular, knotted design on his torso. It was the one he’d used on Celeste when she broke her ribs, the symbol of an entity that could facilitate a link between the broken pieces of his father’s body and the healthy parts of his. But this was harder. He didn’t have all the ingredients. He didn’t know what the fuck he was trying to heal, but he’d give whatever was asked of him. James repeated the symbol on his palm and pressed it to his dad’s body. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and waited for the familiar, buzzing heat of a channel opening between them. He willed his energy to flow in Sam’s direction, coming out of every organ, limb, and cell of his body.
When nothing happened, James put an arm underneath his dad’s back and held him closer. When had his dad gotten so small? He was skin and bones. James could smell the pungent odor of stress and didn’t know if it was Sam or him. He buried his face in his father’s neck and mumbled, “It’s me. You can take it, Dad.” But somehow he could feel his father closing it off, refusing his magic, just like he’d done for twenty-three years. James ground his teeth together and screamed into Sam’s coat. “Just fucking take it, come on!”
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get the spell to take. He breathed hard against Sam's shirt. His eyes and throat were on fire.
The wail of a siren drifted through the open door. It grew louder as it turned onto Churchfield Circle. James picked his head up and let go. He laid his father on the floor and fixed the old man’s clothes. After he wiped his face and cleared his throat, he took out his phone. One at a time, he took pictures of the symbols on Aaron's arms and texted them to Izzy.
Then he hid the device when he heard stretcher wheels hit the pavement outside.