This choice: Pretend to being a golem • Go Back...Chapter #14Will Shabbleman by: Seuzz   This is altogether too weird, and when weird things happen in a weird house like Blackwell's, it seems best to keep one's head low.
"Whatever you say," you mutter. You feel no compulsion to obey anyone, but you can also tell that even a fake Shabbleman would be surly.
The other one, the original Shabbleman, licks his lips, and his pale tongue disgusts you. "You sure no one'll figure out it's a fake?"
"Oh, there are always ways," Blackwell says. "But the particular art associated with these masks is so abstruse that only a warlock of immense skill--and already on his guard against imposters--could defeat the illusion."
You stifle a snort. Unless the twin wants to discovered. You catch yourself. But probably I don't. Not yet.
"So I'm just supposed to go home," you say aloud. The others jump a little; it appears they'd forgotten that you'd be listening to them.
"The sooner the better," Blackwell says with a shrug. "If you will disencumber yourself of your wardrobe," he says to the real Will Shabbleman, "we can send your duplicate on his way. I'll have another set of clothes for you shortly." He then gives you a penetrating look. "Do not make trouble for the gentleman. Dress in his clothes, then come downstairs to the library." You shrug, and he leaves.
Shabbleman glares at you. You glare back. But he slowly draws off his shirt, baring a wide, strong chest and flat stomach, and powerful shoulders and biceps. Yours, of course, are a match. You put on his shirt while he takes off his pants and everything else. Within a few minutes you are completely dressed. "Maybe I should take the cell phone too," you tell him.
"Fuck you," he says.
"Blackwell will tell you to give it to me."
"Whose orders are you supposed to follow?" he snarls.
You remember how Blackwell made a duplicate of you. "His," you reply.
White spots show in the other's cheeks, and you know he feels both anger and great fear. He slaps the phone into your outstretched hand. You smile mirthlessly. As you turn to the door you have the presence of mind to swerve from his fist, which he hurls at the back of your head. It barely grazes you, and you grab and shove him into the corner of the doorway, spin him around, and drop him with a knee to the groin. It's quite satisfying to leave him gasping and spitting onto the floor, and you swagger happily down the staircase.
"Did I hear fighting?" Blackwell inquires as you step into the library.
"Not really. Asshole's not used to fighting someone as good as him." You cock your head. "So I wonder how come I won so easily?"
"Don't trouble yourself with paradoxes," the magician says. "You haven't the brain. Now, you are to return directly to Cuthbert. Go on with your life. But you are to telephone or email or text me with anything that strikes you as unusual."
"What counts as unusual?"
"You'll know it if you see it."
You doubt Blackwell realizes just how "unusual" Cuthbert usually is.
Shabbleman now appears, staggering a little as he comes down the stairs. You give him a wicked, lop-sided smile and a little salute as you saunter to the front door. You can already hear him and Blackwell starting to talk as you exit, but you know they won't say anything immediately interesting, and you won't be able to linger until they do.
Your car is out front. Well, Shabbleman's car, but it's yours now, as his life is yours. That car, a livid green '73 Chevy Corvette, is the best thing he's got. The only really good thing, even. You slide in, turn the motor over, punch the radio up loud, and with a satisfying roar and rumble take off down the road while thumping the roof in time to the hard, driving beat. It's a good environment for very liquid thinking.
* * * * *
The fat man with the bald head had shown up in Cuthbert only a few days ago, and quickly made himself unwelcome with his not-very-subtle snooping around. You--or Shabbleman, for they are his memories you are paddling around in--had quietly rejoiced when the summons had come from the big house. Your lips curled in anticipation as Grandmother appeared in the front doorway and, leaning against her twin canes, lurched to the chair on the front porch and lowered her ponderous bulk into it. "You've seen that lowlander around here, ain't ya, Will?"
"Want me to take care of him, Grandmother?" you murmured hungrily.
"Nate can do that if it comes to it," she replied. (Nate, one of your uncles, is the town constable.) "Though I fancy it won't. He'll be leaving tomorrow." You muttered an oath, but she ignored it.
Instead, she seemed to change the subject. "Your birthday's on Saturday. You'll be nineteen. A man, by our reckoning." You grinned. "The band will come off, and you'll be free to spend your seed."
"Hope Rosalie can handle it. I've got about six years worth to jam into her," you smirked. Every muscle in your body had throbbed simultaneously.
"You can spend it until she's with child. Then the band goes back on," Grandmother snapped.
You turned to spit behind you, off the porch and into the dirt. That way Grandmother would know it was a gesture of frustration, not disrespect.
"You know it's the rule," she said shrilly, and her sunken, watery eyes gleamed hard. "And there have been compensations, as you know. You are a fine looking boy," she added softly. "The handsomest, strongest, most cunning pup in the kennel. Without the band you'd be no better than the others."
The others. The cousins and second cousins and third cousins, some of whom were also brothers and aunts and grandparents to each other. The polluted dregs of the generations. Some mad, most bad, all twisted. You'd never win a TV contract for your looks, but you alone, like your father and grandfather and great-grandfather, going back for many years, could pass in the lowlands as normal.
So could Rosalie, your betrothed, though after six years of not even being able to relieve the engorged tensions of puberty you would madly fuck anything that had a plausible orifice.
"I'm giving you your present early," Grandmother added suddenly.
"Daddy's car?"
"And another present. You can take it down into the lowlands for a spell. This fellow from the city wants to take you back with him for a visit."
"What for?"
"Science, he says." She waved her hand scornfully. "But I can tell it's business he's after."
"Glad I'm not the only one who thought that," you said.
She smiled nastily. "It fairly stinks off him, don't it? I wanna know what he's after. Find out, come back, tell me." She gave you a shrewd glance. "I would be most appreciative. There are, you know, ways of delaying a moment of conception. You would be happier, wouldn't you, if Rosalie didn't conceive for a good few months?"
You'd almost fainted from desire.
* * * * *
When Grandmother said "business," of course, she meant what others called "magic." She'd given you no talismans, but you felt her spirit near you, hovering like a cruel, keen-eyed kite bird, on the drive down to Saratoga Falls, you following the Professor Blackwell in your new ride. It felt so good to finally have it in your possession, and early too, after years spent maintaining it but never getting to drive it. "Mercy," your granddad had nicknamed her. "Ruth," your dad had called her. You weren't sure yet what you'd name her, and Grandmother had encouraged you to wait until you'd made her fully your own before bestowing on her a name. "Names are powerful things," she'd said more than once. "Do you wonder why you are named Will?" She'd told you the answer to that riddle, of course, on your thirteenth birthday, when they had held you down and cauterized the band onto your cock. She'd explained a great deal more on each birthday after that, as you'd grown more and more powerful by straining with volcanic rebellion against the ever-heavier chains she'd placed on your mind and spirit.
And so you had salivated when Blackwell showed you into his house, and showed you his library, and whispered what he wanted of you. You had agreed instantly to become his adept. Let the old bat back in Cuthbert keep her moonshine and parlor tricks. Once you'd mastered what Blackwell could teach you, you could squash her into bug jelly.
* * * * *
You smile grimly to yourself as you entertain these memories, for with William Shabbleman's mind and personality so close to yours it is not hard to be as inveigled by them as he was. And yet you also can't stop shuddering at the thought of what dangers might even now be bubbling inside Blackwell's villa.
You stop at an intersection, still beating your hand in time to the music, when a familiar sound catches your ear. You glance over to see a truck pulled up next to you, and hear shouts of mirth from inside.
It's your truck. That is, it's William Prescott's truck. And you recognize your best friend, Caleb, leaning out the passenger-side window and calling back cheerfully to the car behind you. You look in the mirror: Of course. Keith.
Your own duplicate must have been living the life of William Prescott for the past week, you calculate, in the time since ... Since that thing happened in the work loft. You wonder what has been going on elsewhere.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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