Andrew Sato walked towards his home with a sense of purpose, through the crowds of people who were, unlike him, trudging to their trains, buses, or, if they were lucky, their own private havens from humanity on wheels. No one simply walked anymore. Andrew looked at those people nearest him and saw the liquid emptiness of souls dragged into the mundane futility of the routine which life had become. This was all existence had become for most people in the cities of the so-called “developed world.”
Andrew shook his head slightly at the thought people once had the delusional audacity to refer to their own societies as the “first world,” as if this was a claim to greatness. Andrew had come to know better, at least in his opinion, and had come to dismiss the claims to greatness of those who would lead the “developed world.” Andrew let out a chuckle which was a little too loud and drew looks from the suited wage slaves around him. Hands thrust into the pockets of his pink business suit against the cool of the air, Andrew descended into the subway, one face among the millions the cameras would scan, register, and dismiss that day and every day.
The train ride home was mercifully short. Andrew lived in the inner suburbs, in an apartment he could only afford with the money he got from his business, as he called it, despite the derogatory comments of those who had no clue. As Andrew opened the door and entered his sumptuously appointed small apartment on the tenth floor, the faint waft of incense reached him. He liked the smells while he was working. Scent was an important stimulant to his astral self, or whatever people wanted to call it. Andrew was nothing if not a pragmatist, which made him a rarity in the business he was involved with. He went with whatever worked, even if it meant breaking the advice of some of the greatest names in the faith. He was almost like preserved unicorn’s urine. Andrew smiled to himself at the thought and wondered if he could make anything from that idea. The people who made up Andrew’s clientele were a lot less discerning, as far as he was concerned, making him feel much better about what he was doing. That is, charging a shed tonne of money to locate and retrieve mystical objects.
Avoiding food before a job was part of the routine. Andrew went straight to his study, filled with all the paraphernalia of modern spirituality, from crystals to the almost obligatory idol of Ganesha. He sat in a large, plush, red seat resembling a moon chair with an over-stuffed cushion jammed into the frame. Andrew loved it, and it was big enough to let him spread out and get really comfortable.
Andrew closed his eyes and started regulating his breathing, as he had done hundreds of times before. Fixing his conscious thoughts and mind onto one point, a single word, he soon started to feel his consciousness gently disconnect from its internal anchors. Andrew felt the familiar sense of falling in, something he had stopped jerking away from long ago. He let the sensation build up, carrying him along in its gentle curent after the sudden snap of disconnection.
Thought faded and condensed into light and shadow. Out of the amorphous air, shapes began to take form, as the light shifted and moved through the spectrum and hues beyond human vision. Andrew allowed himself to be swept along with the movement and change. The shadows became blocks of darkness. Other, smaller shadows emerged between the squares and rectangular presences. The dim mist lifted and retreated from Andrew’s vision. He looked about, seeing the familiar landscape, the buildings, and the trees. He had arrived.
Andrew walked down the road stretching away before him, entering the small village. It was a small town straight out of a medieval painting, but it had power lines along the streets, electric lamps illuminating the still dark morning, and oddly shaped cars parked along the sides of the roads. The blacksmith was up early, a man simply called John. His electric ute, a massive hulk of a truck, was parked outside the shop, from where the sounds of hammering, metal on metal, could be heard over the hoarse puffing of John’s bellows. As Andrew passed by, he caught John’s eye and waved a morning greeting. John, a man careful with his words as well as his gestures, merely nodded his head in greeting.
The shops, apothecaries with the black leeches, copyists, butchers, and more, passed by as Andrew walked along the main street under the warm orange glow of the street lamps. Plumes of smoke rose from the thatched roofs of homes, as people arose and got ready for the day. Andrew made for the church on the other side of the town.
As the old wooden building came into view around a bend in the road, Andrew suddenly stopped. He looked about, an eyebrow raised in focused concentration. His head tilted and his mouth dropped open a little. The town was unusually quiet for this time of the morning, even with the town folk rising for the day. Then it hit him.
Where were the cats?
The priest, an old man with long, white hair, and a long white beard, resembled what Andrew remembered Moses looked like in the old Charleton Heston movie. They were sitting in the priest’s small office, crammed full of books, bare wooden walls hanging with pictures of various scenes from different holy books the priest had read; not all of them from his own religion. Andrew was never sure why Father Paul Wentworth always appeared as a church priest, but he had learned to just run with it. They had often met in previous journeys Andrew had made to the town, and Andrew valued the man’s advice and wisdom.
“The cats left only a few days ago. The town’s worried. Some people are saying it’s a curse, but they’re just the fruitcake fringe. Personally, I think it’s just cats being cats. They found a better deal elsewhere,” Paul was explaining, finishing with a shrug.
“It’s not something I’d have thought I’d ever see,” Andrew commented, rubbing the back of his neck to ease the tension he felt there. In all the years he had been coming to this town, Andrew had always seen the cats.
“Me neither, son. It’s downright odd, if you ask me. Anyhoo, what brings you to our humble town?”
“A client’s asked me to find someone by the name of Gabriel Neilsson. I can’t go into all the details, but they’re looking for something they think once belonged to the man.”
“Can’t think of anyone by that name. But you might want to take a peek at the parish records. If this man of yours was here, his name’ll be in there somewhere.”
“Thanks, I really appreciate you letting me.”
“Don’t thank me yet, son. You haven’t seen how they’re organised,” Paul gave Andrew a knowing look and a sly grin.
Father Wentworth was right, and Andrew groaned at the sight of piles upon piles of large, leather bound volumes making up the parish records. Andrew had no idea how far back the records went. As far as he knew, this place was timeless in a way he had no clue about, despite the number of times, over the years, he had visited. In broad terms, the large volumes were arranged, or so they seemed, in basic order of centuries. It was hardly any help at all, but it was a start. Andrew knew roughly when his client came to him with the request to find the odd object, so he would work back from that date. It took him a few moments, and a surreptitious moment to cheat with the calculator on his phone, to convert the Earth date to the time frame used here. Time worked in weird ways in the Dreamlands, as previous wanderers had dubbed them.
Andrew looked over the stacks of parish records, then closed his eyes, and stood stock still. His mind rapidly slowed to a halt, as Andrew let his consciousness expand and search for the presence. It did not take long. After all, Andrew was a practised adept of the art, and it had taken long years to training to reach his level of skill.
The blue is the sea, came the whispered, baritone voice.
Andrew looked at the volumes before him, on shelves and tables, noting the colours. His eyes scanned right, left, and then back to the right. He passed over a number of blue spined volumes, but his eyes shot back to one in particular. The spine was a lighter blue than the others, and wavy creases had marred its smoothness over the years. Andrew lifted the other volumes from on top of it and pulled it out to the reading desk nearby.
Sea is the cruellest of mistresses, the voice came again.
Looking inside the parish volume, Andrew noticed something odd. The sections were arranged in alphabetical order, and some were in scripts Andrew knew were not human languages. He found the ‘S’ section and turned to it. ‘Sea’ started with the letter, so it was as good a place as any to start. His guide seemed to accept the plan in silence, which was usually a good sign. The entire book was arranged in groups of occupations held in life. Andrew had never seen such a weird thing before in any church record. Looking in the same section, Andrew looked up sailors, since his guide had mentioned the sea. In minutes, Andrew had the right name.
Gabriel Neilsson: sailor. Cause of death: drowned at sea.
That was not good news. Andrew would not be able to locate any residual spirit without at least some proximity to a corpse. If Neilsson was drowned at sea, it meant his grave here in the churchyard would be empty.
“So, guide, it’ll have to be you. You’ll need to get in touch with this guy,” Andrew commented to the air.
And that was when Redevere panicked. What the hell was she going to do? If the mortal she had been guiding for the last decade and a half could not get hold of the stiff through the usual channels, it could complicate things.
Well?
The human was losing patience. Redevere thought of a plan. Not a great plan, but it was something. She lied.
“There is a blockage between the departed spirit and myself,” Redevere said, whispering in that pathetic, James Earl Jones voice humans went all gooey over.
You’re supposed to find ways through this stuff, aren’t you?
Redevere could have groaned. She swore in Aramaic instead.
“The blockage is a barrier of divine proportions, my host,” she whispered, and it was technically true.
What? You’re the guide. You’re the navigator of realms. What could possibly be blocked to you?
The human sounded more than a little upset by the revelation of Redevere’s limitations. She had to think fast.
“You shall need something of the deceased man’s belongings,” Redevere whispered in the most authoritative voice she could muster under the circumstances.
He drowned! At sea! All his stuff’s with him at the bottom of an ocean famous for only one thing. It does not have a friggin’ bottom!
Redevere was sure other guides did not have to put up with this sort of drama. She wracked her mind searching for a workable lie she could foist onto the human and keep the whole ‘guide’ angle going, but there was nothing. Redevere would have to admit to this whiny sack of meat there was something she could not do. She needed this mortal more than he needed her, she realised with a rare burst of self-honesty. With a massive eye roll and an almost audible moan, Revedere did the unthinkable.
Andrew screamed and jumped back from the reading desk and the open parish record. His eyes went as wide as plates while his hands and legs started shaking like thirty thousand volts were being fed through him. When the sulphuric stench-laden smoke cleared, Andrew was confronted by a woman dressed in a very tight, pink tracksuit, the zip pulled down to show ample cleavage, with jet black hair flowing over her shoulders while two horns poked through the tresses. Her skin was a dull red, but gleamed in the dim light of the room. Her yellow eyes, like those of a cat, flashed at him.
She blew him a kiss.
Andrew backed up at least six more steps and would have retreated more if it had not been for the wall.
“Calm down, mortal. It’s me,” the woman snapped like she was talking to a wayward dog.
“It’s who?” Andrew squeaked.
The woman rolled her eyes and shook her head at the same time.
“It’s me,” came the familiar baritone voice.
Andrew sank down the wall to sit on the floor and put his face in his hands. The huge number of questions competing to get out of his head collided with the thoughts and horror rushing in. This guide, this thing knew everything about him. It had been living inside his head, with his permission, for years.
“Um, yeah. Can still hear you over here,” the woman muttered.
Andrew did some of his breathing exercises, and they seemed to help. He felt his heart rate slow down slightly, while he worked up the courage to open his eyes again and face whatever it was before him. The red woman was leaning against the tall reading desk, her chin propped in one hand on an elbow next to the open book, waiting for him to calm down. Her yellow eyes blazed with impatience, like she was a woman with urgent things to do.
“What are you?” Andrew asked, barely a whisper.
“Now it matters what I am, does it?” the woman’s eyebrow shot up, as she fixed Andrew with a glare.
“Not like that, . . .,” Andrew started.
“Sure it is, mortal. As long as it all worked, you were happy, huh?” Redevere cut him off with a wave of her long hand. “What I am depends on who you ask. Fallen angel, demon, spirit of the damned, take your pick.”
“Why now?” Andrew asked.
“Why now what?”
“Why show yourself now?”
“You’re looking for it. I need it. I can’t get to the mark. We need to work together on this one. Like for reals,” Redevere explained, imitating a self-entitled teen girl.
Andrew must have had an idiot’s look of incomprehension on his face, because the demon humphed at him before continuing.
“Are you lot completely dumb? This Neilsson person’s not here and his body’s not here. He’s in the Place of Waiting. He’s on the good side of it,” Redevere said.
“Why do we need Neilsson, anyway?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You really are an imbecile, huh? Neilsson knows where the item is, doesn’t he? He’s dead. He’s not useless.”
“How do you know where he is? I only found out about him a few days ago,” Andrew asked, finally getting to his feet.
“Yeah, um. I might have known for a bit longer than you,” Redevere admitted, the look on her face daring Andrew to challenge her on it.
Andrew chose not to, but instead shifted angles suddenly.
“So, why should I help you?” he asked, arms folded across his chest.
“Your client is not the type to accept failure calmly. Let’s just leave it at that,” was all Redevere would say.
“I guess that tracks. So, what do I call you?”
“Redevere. And if you call me ‘Red,’ I’m going to gut you like a fish with the rustiest butter knife I can find, and feed your testicles to the ravens while you are still alive.”
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