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Writing Machine
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Is that an existential question?
Posts: 1,863
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Driving the Keys
This is from the Expectations of Finality. which itself is WAY too long to post in its original format. Each story is a chapter in the book, and each is about the chars from Expectations. Each are about the same length. This is a little over 2000 words. The third one is more fun in my opinion. Emerita starts that one out wooing a 16 year old boy at his mother's behest...
“You will simply do as I tell you---and reveal to me the keys.”
I held up a ring of keys by my thumb. They dangled before my inquisitor without a sound.
There was a detail here everyone missed, this questioner in particular, as he disregarded what was in front of him.
I wasn’t about to point those details out.
Ms. Justine Winterbauer tittered nervously. She was just an old spinster aunt, a schoolteacher from Rural Backwater, U.S.A., trying to make some extra money after her town went broke and she lost her job. She was supposed to be transporting keys according to the whims of her employer.
Intrigue had not been a part of the job specifics, though the upfront money of $300,000 directly into her bank account should have set off a warning bell or two.
My inquisitor was her employer.
Mr. Allard Roblards wasn’t an unattractive man. He had hair a less than notable shade of blond, pulled back into a neat tail, and wore small, square, wire rimmed glasses. He had a smooth, seductive voice that drew even the most wary, streaked with a hard, commanding undercurrent that controlled those he had drawn.
Mr. Allard’s trouble was Justine’s traveling companion, her niece Ieleah Brock.
Miss Brock was 30 years old, had lived in a city all her life, couldn’t drive a car, and didn’t have a job. Justine was her only family.
Ieleah looked as delicate as her name. She had long, white-blond hair, crystal blue eyes, and a sylph like body. She looked as if she were finely etched glass; flawless complexion, perfect features, fragile.
Justine had asked Mr. Roblards if Ieleah could keep her company during the trip. After a moment of serious examination, it was agreed with a measure of satisfaction on both parts.
“Make sure this woman is the only one who touches the keys.” He instructed.
Did I mention that both Justine and Ieleah were virgins?
Anyone see where this is going?
So, Mr. Roblards gave Justine her instructions, with a parting caution that she was to question nothing.
Justine was to follow the directions given to a pond, then to an area near Mount St. Helens’, and finally to the site of a 9/11 crash. In each place, a map indicated where her niece was supposed to put her hand in order to retrieve a key.
When the three keys were in their possession, they were to transport the keys to another location unheard of, and then go as if it all had never happened.
Money was given for food, fuel, accommodations and any emergencies encountered.
Mr. Roblards had chosen well; two people who would follow his orders explicitly because one had never lived beyond her small backwater, and the other was so flighty, she’d never think enough beyond any moment that seemed to favor her.
Ieleah saw half of $300,000 along with free travel as a moment of favor.
Well, she got the free travel part, stuffed nicely inside my identity and body as I took her place for this excursion.
My name is TSgt Terri Canon. I’m a member of the United States Air Force, though they are in no way connected with my present activities.
No, Death actually had more to do with it than a federal government who had no clue that people like me even exists.
Two years ago, several others and I died in a terrorist attack on a school. Because of how we died, and how we viewed that death and our lives, we gained a certain understanding about reality and our place in it.
To put it in the least complicated way, life is a script, we are the writers, belief and will is the pen, and the soul –creativity – is the ink.
There are a few more specifics to it, but you don’t get those or the senses required to decipher them unless you die.
One of us – an Interpol agent named Artemis Aislinn Feeney – requested I take Ieleah’s place in concerns to a smuggling scam.
While the accepted reality of the keys is that they were stolen from some museum, the legend attached to them indicates that having all three with a virgin’s blood spilled on them grants that virgin power, or the one holding the keys at the time power over the virgin whose blood is spilled on them.
The virgin, of course, must procure those keys.
While I can’t confirm or deny the power of a virgin’s blood, there’s enough evil in the world that doesn’t need another unbalanced person in possession of a powerful object.
It was easy to assume Ieleah’s body and life. She considered herself a ‘seed in the wind’. She did not believe she had a grasp on her life, so it was easy to control for my own ends.
She considered her life poetry.
I considered her an idiot, and hoped she’d come away with some common sense from being a rider in my life. She’d be there for the duration, believing she was me until I switched her back---though she wouldn’t remember it except as a dream.
So I rode with ‘Auntie’ and we followed the instructions.
I put my hand in the water of probably the only pollution-free pond in America and pulled out a key.
I plunged my hand in some ashy dirt at Mount St. Helens’ and pulled out a key.
The site of 9/11 wasn’t as hard as I expected it to be. It was near the crash site of the plane whose passengers fought back, tucked away in a dead tree.
It was all rather boring actually. We traversed the country without incident. ‘Auntie’ Justine talked about teaching, her town. She cooed about the largest ball of twine and hid in the hotel room when I conned her into a detour to New Orleans.
Yes, I know I manipulated the poor woman, but the trip was so incredibly uneventful.
Except for the keys.
Which was why I stopped at a locksmith’s right before we hit our final destination.
Our last stop turned out to be a big warehouse in the middle of nowhere, outside a dead town. There was nothing really to draw anyone’s attention until you got just beyond the inside entryway.
It looked like Grand Central Station converted into some sort of urban nightclub. It was rather stylish, unless you really concentrated on what you were looking at.
Or maybe it was simply because my eyes were different.
This place, its details, were gray and washed out. And while ‘Auntie’ was in awe at the beautiful people milling about her, I saw people as gray and washed out as their haunt, drifting aimlessly and without direction.
All of these people---were just ghosts.
All but him…
“…You will simply do as I tell you---and reveal to me the keys.”
And here we are, right this moment, right now, as I dangle keys Mr. Allard Roblards does not recognize, thinks they belong to Auntie Justine.
He does not notice that they are identical.
He does not notice that they do not jingle.
What he does notice, is problem enough…
***
It’s never simple.
If this had been a simple smuggling scam, there wouldn’t have been a need for any of my kind. Justine and her niece would have simply delivered the keys, been shot, their bodies dumped in a ditch to rot, nameless statistics both.
The keys weren’t so problematic as the one trying to wield them.
Despite being seen as a crackpot by most federal agencies, Allard Roblards was rich and powerful, and no matter how hard they tried to pin a charge on him, nothing stuck.
His motto was “Belief is the power will wields over the blind.”
He used other people’s faith and belief against them. If a person believed they had no power over their lives, he took that power, directed whatever gifts that person had to his advantage. Even a person’s belief in magic granted him such---and it would be no illusion.
The fortunate thing was that the power had a small sphere of influence, the effect minimal. He could not manipulate children, because their will and energies were too wild. He could not utilize mass belief because it was too powerful. He could not override a person’s belief in a more powerful entity (god) being in control of their life, and therefore had no power over them. Their faith in this however, had to be absolute.
He could not control anyone in our group, for we could see our own reality.
Roblards described himself as not a bad man, only one who understood humanity for what it truly was; a single, spiritual entity with the maturity of a toddler that had yet to develop its mind.
God had failed in being an adequate caregiver, Roblards stated, so it was time for a mind to develop, to take control, before the child self destructed.
Allard Roblards had declared himself that mind.
Whether or not the man had a point, my group already functioned like a group mind, but maintained individuality nicely. We had no intention of letting some demi-god wannabe messing it up.
Besides, the guy really was trouble.
All these ‘ghosts’---were the result of his becoming their ‘mind’…
“Miss Brock, I am a patient man, and I understand that you aren’t very bright---“ He reached out then, Justine squeaking like a mouse when her employer furthered her use to him as a blackmailing tool. “So go back to the car,” Roblards instructed carefully “And bring me THE keys.”
I shrugged and performed like a dutiful little monkey.
The life pattern Ieleah Brock had created was trying to assert ‘Damsel in Distress’ mode, which I found very annoying, but I thought it would hide the truth of me.
“He can see you, y’know this.”
“But he can’t see the keys.” I shot to Artemis as we lobbed thoughts back and forth “He doesn’t realize that their energies are transferable.” Which was why I made up the ordinary keys.
This guy could ‘see’, but he was still prey to his own preconceived ideas; what he anticipated rather than what actually was.
When I handed him the keys he expected to have, he’d have no extra power.
“Just---when are you guys going to show?”
“Five---we’ve monitors to take out.” He answered “Keep Roblards busy, and keep ‘Auntie’ in the dark so he can’t go using her…”
I grumbled, pulling the canvas bag out of the trunk.
Unless the woman was in her own hometown, she gave credence to every urban legend, every bogeyman ever created. She was jumpier than a pagan attending the Air Force Academy.
We get a lot of prosetilyzing there…
“Here.” I walked past Mr. Roblards, opened my hand and let the handle slip over his grasp.
The bag landed on his foot.
“Er---sorry.” My apology was obviously flimsy, and lost in his howl of pain.
Forgot to mention the keys were made of marble, silver, and gold, didn’t I?
Then, I reasserted the ‘Ieleah’ persona.
“Oh! I am so sorry!” I gasped in that flighty way men find so endearing. “Auntie, help me get him off his feet---take off his shoe there.”
We rushed him to one of those sunken chairs that are so hard to get out of, and Auntie Nightingale went into autopilot.
The momentary flutter of frantic activity got Mr. Roblards off balance enough that he accidentally shoved Justine into the beam just behind her.
Oh, the tragedy of that.
Yes, I’m being sarcastic.
I made sure Justine’s landing wasn’t quite so hard. After all, the fact that she was unconscious in an act that seemed purely accidental served me well enough.
Auntie was out of the game by no fault of her niece, enough that her memory would no doubt be hazy, and it might lead Mr. Roblards into the notion that I wasn’t very smart.
“How effective.” He praised, standing up and brushing himself off, though he had not a hair out of place “And you’ve put me at an uncomfortable disadvantage, my dear.”
Mr. Roblards didn’t seem to like the gun he pulled out of his pocket, like using it was beneath him somehow, but he really had little choice.
He’d sucked the ghosts’ dry, I’d removed ‘Auntie’ and he couldn’t pull anything from me.
Guns to someone like him were probably seen as the lowest, most brutish form of power.
“Yes, I can see that there’s someone quite different inside Miss Brock’s body, and so I can probably assume that you know me for what I am.” Mr. Roblards went on to say, moving slowly towards the bag “But---do you know why I want these keys, my dear?”
Because he believed virgin’s blood would unlock energies he thought he could manipulate? Because he believed they could control virgins and call unicorns? Make a virgin a willing sacrifice to darker forces to gain more power?
Far be it from me to give him ideas.
“No guesses?” He lamely taunted, picking up the bag. “Well my dear, I had these keys stolen to access creatures called the Lightflight. Creatures---like you…”
“NOW!”
I should have known. All Interpol wanted was a confession concerning the smuggling, to see the perp holding the goods.
Anything else Allard Roblards had to say was lunatic claptrap, useless until a shrink decreed him certifiable.
With their ‘mind’ distracted, the club goers scattered into holes in the wall like the skittish bugs both Roblards and the Interpol agents chasing them considered them to be.
More than one of Artemis’ people – seemingly skittish of the task – apprehended both Roblards and the keys.
“Don’t worry my dear.” The man smiled at me, despite having his hands roughly cuffed behind him “I may not be able to see your true face, but beauty such as yours transcends mere physical form. I will remember you.”
There was something to look forward to.
“You couldn’t hold off until he explained about this ‘Lightflight’? How he knew us, and considered us like them?” I demanded of Artemis, who was somewhere beyond my field of vision.
“There are still protocols within the Interpol system I have to follow, darlin’.”
“Are your people going to be able to hold him long enough for you to ask him?”
“No, but that isn’t, at present, the point. The point this time, was the keys…”
I found that really disturbing.
If there was one thing I was fast learning about Artemis was that he covered every base and then some. He had the connections and the knowledge, and he had the control long before he got the power and the pen.
That he considered the energies now in my possession more of a danger than the man trying to steal them meant they were a specific danger to us.
It meant there was a connection between this ‘Lightflight’ and us. But what…
“…I’m working on that.” Artemis intercepted the thought before it became a question. “Until then, the new ‘keys’ must be relocated to a place having no connection to us. And Miss Brock must be returned. Even as we speak,” He added, his consciousness shifting “Mr. Roblards is trying to trace your essence.”
“Do you want me to leave her with or without memory?”
“All but your little trip to New Orleans.” He instructed, finding some amusement in my private diversion “And anything Roblards mentioned when he addressed you, not Miss Brock.”
Right before ‘Auntie’ was logged out, then.
Yes, I could understand the logic.
Roblards won’t admit to anything beyond the aspect of smuggling, and any memory of more would get Miss Brock in trouble with more than the feds.
I hid the keys where Artemis could find them, walked Miss Brock’s body discreetly back into the limelight, and made the switch.
My body wasn’t this hot, sylph thing that she was; it was a solidly, compact thing, becoming fluid when I willed it so. I was more a sharply homey thing.
Roblards said I was beautiful, despite being unable to see my face.
He wasn’t speaking of the way a man finds a woman beautiful though; not sexual, not physical.
He spoke to me as obsession speaks to what drives it, rather than what it consumes.
And I get the distinct impression that while I did not create the monster, the beast has been granted a sort of justification in the confirmation of my existence.
So maybe Artemis got it wrong, and the keys he kept aren’t so much the danger, not what Roblards really wanted.
For Roblards, maybe the real keys---are the ones who are still able to walk away…
__________________
Old enough to know better, young enough to think I can still get away with it.
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