An October in Libreville
Miles Cressbeckler has a busy day ahead of him. Today, he must train another set of delinquents to work his print shop on Earle Street, boys hailing from St. Regina School. Mild anxiety fills him as he reflects on the last group, considering if it isn't too soon to start taking on new charges. The police had certainly bought into the story that the miscreants had simply wandered off, and, though Cressbeckler was the last one to see them, it wasn't unheard of for such boys to simply skip town for weeks or months at a time.
"Ah crud, what a mess," he groans, stepping in a pile of chewing gum, ruining his new leather shoes.
"And how!" answers a passerby, gone before Miles can look up. Anger fills him. An indignity beneath the Cressbecklers, one that would have to be punished.
He rounds the corner, fuming, just in time to hear the chapel bells as St. Regina lets out for the day. A well-built ox of a man ushers out a pack of cheaply appointed boys through a side door; he is Mr. Bradley, the Physical Education Teacher, a man of little other than stern and unhappy expressions.
"Here is Mr. Cressbeckler, you boys. Don't talk back to him, now, and get going with him! You remember: better to work than to rot!" Bradley growls, his red face pinched. There is an air of disapproval about him.
"My thanks, Mr. Bradley," Cressbeckler offers distantly, his mind still on that damned gum. It was probably one of these very boys. Well, they'd get what was coming soon enough.
"Cheap labour for local business, a reduction in youth delinquency in the community. A work draft rather wasteful spending on jailing them," Adam Cressbeckler had told his fellow councilmen and the mayor. No-bid contracts for his own were, naturally, included in the offing, with Miles being the largest beneficiary.
He surveys the boys, all lined up as they are. He knows their names from the dossiers he reviewed earlier in the day. Names, faces, crimes against society. Travis Faunk and Tadwell Stickers, feared among the weaker and nerdlier segment of the local school population. Neville Statternby, son of a wealthy local landlord whose fortune was sufficient to ensure that an apprenticeship at the printer's would be the harshest punishment his boy would face for his increasingly horrific acts. Nicholas Naberius Lincolnship and Toby Crenshaw, caught worshipping the unspeakable in the basement of the Libreville Church in the Spring of 1919.
Miles Cressbeckler looks the young delinquents over and notes their physical imperfections, the sadness and frustration conveyed in their posture and bearing. He studies the muscular tensions in the face of each boy in turn, silently noting the obvious correspondence between their physical conditions and their invisible internal conditions, and he is unimpressed. With a sigh he proclaims each of the boys utterly predictable and thus accurately predicts the extent to which any of them might be found useful in the business of printing.
Lifting a tray full of cliches to the light, he decides that the Statternby and Crenshaw boys might be of some use to him.
The other three he will feed to his Queen.
Cynddelw Cystenian sat at his desk and tapped his pen against the open page of the notebook. He had been sitting in silence like this for hours. The notebook was open to what would be the last page for most people, but Cynddelw's left handedness and ruggish individualism led him to open his books from right to left.
The first set of worrisome thinking he'd been experiencing was the belief that he was a magician or wizard, and one of particular prowess. He believed he had, in a fit of rage, afflicted his next door neighbor with chronic and undiagnosable presentations of weeping sores on her hands and feet, as well as voices in her head. He had done this entirely in his imagination, vividly experiencing the process of filling little bags of ratskin with gunpowder, fecal matter, rusty nails, dried Coca Cola, and the like, then hiring local punks to bury them in a spiral around the woman's house.
He had also, one afternoon, afflicted the nation's most famous radio talk show host with Parkinson's Disease. He had done this by making a collage and showing it to his roommates.
The thing that was bothering Cystenian is that he'd done both of these things without really thinking he was doing anything other than using his imagination or playing around with photographs. He certainly had no belief in the occult.
Cynddelw rolled another joint and tapped the notebook with his pen some more. It was the year 1999.
Motley Howe is sitting in an Old West Saloon now, beginning to pen the last of his letters. The saloon is rowdy and full, but he's in his regular spot in the back behind a large round table and everyone knows not to sit with him. To Howe, it feels like he's alone in a quiet study. But there's a reason he always chooses the seat with a clear view of the front door. He looks up and glimpses a black squirrel darting past the entrance to the saloon. He fingers the revolver that's sitting next to his stationary and picks up his pen.
"Dear Mr. McFing," he begins.
I'm in one of those mean and low towns on the western fridge of European encroachment. You can actually order Indian toe cigar snuffers. These are savage drunk greedy bastards slobbering sniffing for gold. I'm here chasing the trail of one Varse Collins. This is a man travailing the west and wanted by the law most everywhere east of where he's been. Starting in Europe. He is a scoundrel making his money off of snake oil, cons and stealing children and selling them in little prairie towns and wild gold rush salons. But there's a lot more to Collins then meets the eye. And he is traveling with a small handful of very important items and artifacts. I've never met this Varse Collins but I have read about him when I was just out of school. He and his medicine wagon disappeared here in Oregon around this time. He has a book Motely needs. The book is from a alternative reality next door. 'Zairophan's book of Our world' its called. The book describes aspects of this co existing world next door. And this world is important to Motley because he's learned how to cross over to that and only that world. He has the two CD set of songs that comes with the book. But this Varse Collins is said to be the one who found the book when it crashed to the earth like a meteor burning shrubs in the prairie Varse was passing through.
Cliff Waggons stares into the tepid water swirling down the drain in his moldy bathroom. Another vision.
Ever since his parents died over a year ago, he has lived with his grandfather in this earthy little shack on the edge of town. The evil Laws of Intestacy had been used, nefariously, to rob him of his place in this world: his general comfort, gone. The well apportioned modern appurtenances of his lost family's home, reappropriated. The entirety of his considerable inheritance, possibly his sanity?
Gone.
And now, another issue to add to his troubles: The visions.
As the last of the water runs down the filthy drain, the vision evaporates into the aether. He shudders, eyes wide, and steels himself. No time now for reflection, he thinks.
This latest vision frightens him, but, in it's grim reality, it also causes him to grow, tapping strength from reserves he didn't know he possessed, prematurely aging him, perhaps, but also instantly making of him a man. He is brimming with insistence, an urge to action.
He had seen, deep in a basement on Earle Street, some boys of his acquaintance. Not the most lovable boys in town, to be sure, but his heart went out to them nonetheless. They had been placed in indentured servitude to that frightening man Miles Cressbeckler. Even worse, he was planning on sacrificing them in some squalid ceremony. Cliff knows what he has to do, and the reality of the task grips him in a withering terror. He has to save them!
Aubrey Hain walked along the edge of the Millsberry river. She is a student at Fnordham University. She is studying the Crumpatako Indians and the Infictites who where here even earlier. Beside her stomped Selma Jenders. Selma is a tall thick wedge of a woman. Nick named "The Troll" behind her back. Mean ugly and wicked, that's our Selma. She is in Aubrey's class. Aubrey is a little stylish wisp of a girl, with hair like black spun silk. White white skin that nets her the nick name "Contrasty girl". They are looking for relics along the waters edge. What they find is part of a child's foot. Aubrey screams and pukes while Selma looks at it in wonder and awe, prodding it with a stick.