「WHO」 Baird 「WHAT」 The call of Winter, with a stop for business 「WHEN」 Dec 5th, 3AM 「WARNINGS」 Dead things. Always dead things
"But I'm tellin' ya, I don't feel dead, ya coot." A stone's throw from Le Cirque's glittering ingress, a strange scene progressed.
In the pre-dawn indigo, two men sat at opposite ends of a rickety park bench, couched in darkness by a stretch of unlit streetlights. The largest of the two, a humanoid mountain lit by the occasional orange flare of a cigar, sat properly—straight backed, with his loosely tied boots planted and squarely spaced, proportionate to the higher planes of his frame. Atop his left knee, a black leather stovepipe hat so weathered it more closely resembled suede sat perfectly balanced. Only the cigar and supporting hand moved. To his left, the second man looked as though he counted several members of the weasel family as kin. Cocooned in a ripped NorthFace puffer triaged with duct tape, he slouched and fidgeted. Dirtied fingernails scored the white whiskers on his face and neck. Back and forth, his focus transitioned from eyeballing his unwelcome company, to glancing along the route in hopes of spying a means of escape. A soiled sleeping bag draped the bench beneath him, the zippered edges pulled tight around a slack, colorless corpse with a face identical to that of the restless man. Thus far, he had not noticed this anomaly.
Like a firefly angered by the end of summer, kindled embers did combat with the roadside gloom. "Dead is not a feeling." The voice issued behind was low and stoical, untroubled by the agitation of the deceased.
"What the fuck's that s'posed to mean? Listen, you-" Down the route, another streetlight sputtered, then darkened. Above, oak limbs dressed in spanish moss grayed by the season shifted in a breeze—it sounded like whispering, like laughter dry as old bones cracking over a vacant radio station. Temperate warmth added weight to the evening air, but the weasel in NorthFace shuddered, then furrowed his brow. Not even he seemed to know why. "I've had enough a' ya, ya skeevey motherfucker. Get the hell outta..." For half a minute, he continued to string together colorful obscenities, like Christmas lights, or paper chains, or daisy ropes. Ephemeral things. Beautiful things. Mortal things.
The orange glow livened and died, livened and died. Eventually, the sailor's mouth ran out of steam, not once interrupted.
Discarded, the cigar struck concrete. After dislodged ash produced a miniature firework, a boot heel ground the remains. Reluctant to complicate the silence, the voice of the darker man returned gently—less pedantic, but not far removed from the manner one uses to address a child refusing their bedtime. "Fate comes at you cat-footed, unavoidable, bloodthirsty. Death was written at your birth." His speech unhurried and carefully annunciated, there was a peculiar lyricism, almost a metre to his treatment of the subject. Leaning forward with elbows resting on his knees, he hung the hat betwixt; his thumb grazed its worn curves, grave as a poet, mindful as a lover. "Your mother holds you up, hands you to your father, who tickles the stomach where cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma's dark signature is already written on the optic nerve, touches the back which will build a home for cirrhosis-" one of the few remaining streetlights glanced off dark eyes as they turned to appraise the dead, gauging how soon understanding might breech, "-feels the pulse, and the blood that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the axe cleave of a stroke…"
The weasel's eyes had begun to round, wider by the second. It was not a reaction to the freak and his cataloguing, but to the lightless shapes which had begun to creep from the darkest recesses along the street. Some quadrupedal figures crawled, smooth and parlous as spilt oil. On two legs, others wobbled a destabilized herky-jerk, struggling with the heft and balance of their limbs. White-faced, the dead man leapt to his feet, stammering nonsense as he went. In turning to fetch his sleeping bag, his hands flew once more to scour his whiskers when he saw the body left behind.
"I'm not—that's not—did Vernon put you up to this? It's not fuckin' funny! You put something in ma' damned Coors, didn-"
"-there's little time," said the other, finally interrupting. Drumming a four beat against the hat's rim, he unfolded from his seat to tower over his panicking company. He continued. "It might be your heart in the end, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, may explode in your chest ... like a light goes out." The tall man tipped his head at the cooling body, then gently smiled. Behind him, the bulb in an elegant wrought iron streetlamp fizzled and popped. One of the crawlers keened like a mouse clamped in half by a trap. It hungered. "Do you wish to pass on?" Patient and stable as a monolith, he waited, the hat hung motionless at his side.
For a breath, the deceased faltered. His brow knit. His mouth hung slack. He considered, and questioned. Then he jabbed a finger at his company's chest. "I toldja to fuck right o-"
That was a 'no.'
As a vampire's demeanor changes once invited across a threshold, gentility fled with the last of the street's light. Pale blue runes lit beneath the taller man's olivine skin, blackening rapidly from fingertip to forearm. The gracious smile widened to reveal filed teeth. Dark eyes were no longer simply dark, but pitch to consume the whites. A large hand gripped the skull of the dead man at the crown, though no movement visible to the eye had brought it there. The deceased's maw spread wide in soundless screaming, eyes rolled back in their sockets. A fragile mote of light floated forth from the man's chest, tendrils of color briefly clinging to its house of flesh before it disappeared, with neither farewell nor ceremony. Unmoved, the corpse on the bench suffered no effect. The homeless mote hovered, awaiting instruction. With a courtly backward step, the tall figure bent with undiluted pomp, and rolled the hat in the air as accessory to the most gracious of bows, indicating the denizens waiting in the gloom. Floating merrily forward, the light complied ... to be swarmed by hissing shapes fierce as dogs rending flesh from one another over a contested steak.
Without a backward glance, he set off in the direction of the Cirque's intake. It was, after all, why he returned.
There was a vacancy, an empty chair, a hollow in the order of things to be rectified—and he so abhorred disorder. Death was order. Winter was order. Or rather, it was meant to be. It required a King to be so. Black fingers snapped thrice beside his leg as he strolled. A pristinely, unnaturally white canine the size of a wolfhound loped from shadows behind the bench, her nails clicking against the concrete. As he reached to stroke a felted ear, the pitch stain and phosphorescent runes on his skin receded. He slowed, cast a glance over his shoulder, and softened at the edges of considerate hazel eyes.
"Enough." Though spoken mildly, he may as well have thrown a grenade. Lightless shapes scattered. "Behave," he instructed, indicating the Cirque with an open-handed wave too casual to lift above hip height. Into the deepest shadows they clambered. In the distance, one streetlamp plinked to life. Then the next. By the last, nothing remained on the street but a man in a sleeping bag, motionless beneath a lamp keeping vigil above a park bench.