The Midnight Express lived up to its name, dumping its passengers unceremoniously onto Skid Row in the middle of the night like it worked for the goddamned LAPD or something. Seymour and Penny stepped off the train and suddenly found themselves crawling out of a graffiti-covered cardboard refrigerator box stuffed back beside a dumpster in a dark alley. A siren wailed in the distance, and other car-related noises sounded much closer; engines idling and a car alarm honking. This was Earth, alright.
It suddenly struck Seymour that the ambient soundtrack of Heschia had been composed entirely of birds singing, horse-hooves clopping, winds whispering across the savannah, and the murmur of one-thousand simultaneous conversations going on in the showroom of Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot, punctuated by the occasional zap of nearby magic. By contrast, modern-day Earth’s background noise felt straight up traumatic – not to mention the sights and smells of this urban alleyway.
After brushing herself off, Penny assessed the situation similarly:
“It’s so terribly, terribly dirty here,” she whispered, “and terribly loud. And also quite unpleasant from an olfactory standpoint.”
“Yep, it’s home-sweet-home and whatnot.”
“This is your village?”
“I actually couldn’t say just yet – it’s too dark. Sure feels like some place in America, though. And shit, come to think of it, we’re super lucky the Midnight Express spit us out here in a city and not in the middle of the Sahara or something.”
“America – that is the name of your empire, correct?”
Seymour chuckled. “We usually don’t toss out the e-word quite that casually, but yeah. Welcome to the United States.”
“I fear,” she began, panning her gaze up and down the moonlit, trash-filled alleyway, “that we visit it perhaps during a period of some decline.”
Suddenly, an oddly-nostalgic chime rang out in the night. It took Seymour a beat to realize it was coming from his pocket. He had always sort of assumed that his phone must have been stolen or lost or whatever during the whole ordeal he’d gone through back on the night he’d been taken to Heschia – but evidently he’d been wrong.
The Stuczi Brothers had told him while under the influence of a truth aura that a legit vampire had abducted him and taken him through a magical portal hidden in his uncle Rick’s cozy little antique shop. That was supposedly how he’d first traveled to Heschia – as some sort of prisoner. So it was easy to arrive at the conclusion that his vampire kidnapper had been the one who got rid of Seymour’s phone and wallet before taking him through the portal, but now—realizing that his wallet was back in his pocket, as well—Seymour had a fresh guess at what might have gone down:
The gate back to Heschia, the Moonlight Express – it must not let you bring items from Earth or something. Sort of a bummer. Not that I’d have wanted to bring an uzi back there or anything, but it might have been nice to at least have the option.
“Where is this invasive bird who chirps so repetitively?"
“That’s no bird – it’s my phone.” He drew it from his pocket and checked the caller ID. “I’m kinda surprised they haven’t shut it off yet.”
“A phone? What is its purpose? Some sort of noisemaker?”
He held it up so she could see the screen. “It’s a, uh, long-range communication device, basically.”
“‘Scam likely’,” she read aloud, voice tinged with mysticism like a fortuneteller peering into a crystal ball. “Can it detect the motivations of potential scrying partners?”
“Something like that.” He silenced the ringer. “Anyway, first things first, you gotta put your familiars away. They’re gonna stand out like a sore thumb around here and I really don’t think we want all that attention.”
“I begrudgingly agree.” With a thought and a nod, she de-summoned both Glory and Rodney. They simply popped out of existence. “And what of yours?”
Jerome sat perched on Seymour’s shoulder, still shaped like a little man. He stood and flexed his hand-nubs like he was cracking knuckles that didn’t exist.
“I can do incognito by my own bad self.”
He suddenly melted all at once like a candle thrust inside a furnace. His body turned to pale, green liquid and coursed down Seymour’s back. His liquified form stopped at Seymour’s waist and began to spread out, wrapping all the way around his torso. Over the next fifteen or twenty seconds Jerome enveloped Seymour’s entire upper-half, aside from his head and neck and most of his arms. And then he began to dry out, transforming from a liquid into something more like a thin sheet of cactus leather. He had altered his form to become a sort of glossy, tacky t-shirt for Seymour, like a second skin. Almost like the peel of a severely underripe banana.
“I mean, this is still pretty weird.” Seymour posed, modeling his new look for Penny. “But at least it’ll be less attention-grabbing than having a cactus man riding on my shoulder.”
“Perfect, problem solved.” Penny paused as a police cruiser sped past the alley’s mouth, sirens blaring. “So what do we do now?”
“That’s a great question. I guess we’d better figure out where we are exactly.”
Caw! Caw! Caw! Shrieked the darkness.
“A raven!” Penny cheered. “An auspicious visitor, to be certain.”
“Eh, not so much on Earth. Here, ravens are just birds that hang out back behind fast food joints, getting fat off the dumpsters.”
The midnight-black bird landed suddenly on Seymour’s shoulder and cried right up close to his ear: CAW! CAW!
“Aw, shit!” He shooed it away. “What the hell, dude?”
The raven danced around at Seymour’s feet. It was damned near invisible with its black feathers and black beak against the black asphalt alleyway in the dead of night – but Seymour could make out the funky little backpack tied between its wings. The bird reached back and plucked a rolled sheet of parchment from its pack, and then with a flick of its beak it shot the letter up on a trajectory to collide with Seymour’s face. He snatched it from the air in a surprisingly-agile act of self-defense.
Somehow, this raven courier felt more unreal than anything Seymour had encountered during his time on Heschia; less plausible than orcs and topiary monsters and magic and dragons.
That’s because magic belongs there. It just fits. The raven cackled as it flapped up, up, and away, into the noisy night. But here on Earth, a bird delivering the mail straight up breaks my brain.
“Well?” Penny crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “Are you going to tell me what it says?”
“Jesus, Penny. Just give me a sec.”
He unraveled the parchment and began to read.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Not even three days later, Seymour frowned at his phone. It was Penny again. She’d been on Earth for less than seventy-two hours, and the girl had already developed a nasty addiction to texting. She’d started blowing him up within minutes after he closed the door and left the rental yurt they’d checked into the night before.
The last thing he’d said to her was, “wait for me to call before you start messaging, okay? I don’t want to be distracted by a million texts today.”
Her latest text appeared to have been sent before she’d meant to, reading: The gate will almost certainly be covered in unmistakably demonic blood runes, and—
She insisted on feeding him intel like this whenever they were apart, despite the fact they’d been going over everything she knew about demonic blood gates pretty much non-stop in the three days since that damn raven had brought them the letter informing Seymour of his uncle Rick’s death.
It turned out the Midnight Express had dropped them off in Denver, Colorado, which was uncannily convenient because Uncle Rick had owned an antique shop in the mountains just two hours up the pass, and it just so happened that as Rick Little’s closest surviving relative, Seymour was going to inherit the place. The raven had been sent by a firm called Youngman, Shuster, and Jobe, and in addition to regretfully informing him of his uncle’s passing and his subsequent inheritance, it invited him to contact them by phone. He’d done so the next day, and now he was all set to tour Uncle Rick’s shop, where he was tasked with sniffing out the exact location of the Moonlight Express, about which Penny had just sent a follow-up text to finish explaining:
—will require an offering of blood to activate, like any demonic blood gate. Human blood should suffice.
“Sorry about that.” Seymour nodded to the lawyer handling his uncle’s estate. He set his phone to silent, slipping it into the inside pocket of the gray-and-charcoal suit coat he’d been delighted to find in a Denver thrift shop for just seven bucks.
“No worries, Mr. Little. It’s obvious that you’re a very popular dude.”
He laughed. “‘Dude’, huh? Are you really a lawyer, Darnold? Like, seriously? No offense, it’s just…. compared to every other lawyer I've ever met, you’re a little…. Let’s just say different.”
“Thanks for noticing.”
His smile invited Seymour to follow as they continued touring the cramped antique shop he really couldn’t have cared less about inheriting. Maybe it was because he’d spent so much time at the Adventure Depot, but this sad, cramped retail space felt kinda scuzzy. He imagined Uncle Rick puttering around, maintaining all these crappy, kitschy knick-knacks – and it struck him as a sort of pathetic way to earn a living.
You spend a couple weeks working in a distant realm’s preeminent magical emporium and all of a sudden you’re some kind of snob who’s too good for the crap in your uncle’s shop?
Darnold the lawyer led Seymour into the next room. It was the same as the last two: the walls lined with rows of wooden shelves and the scuffed wood-floors crammed with glass-fronted display cases. Peeling, floral-print wallpaper and dusty old junk everywhere. Big hoarder energy; at certain points they had to twist and turn to squeeze through an extra-tight space. It reminded him of a shittier version of the Depot’s third floor, but everything had this sour fruity scent to it, like twenty flavors of potpourri fighting for dominance in an old lady’s bathroom.
The lawyer kept talking as they walked, adept as his kind always were at filling any potential silence with the sound of their own voice. “First time visiting the valley, I’m guessing? Well, you’ll see – we’re all a little different here. If you’d like, I’d be happy to show you around town when we’re done with the grand tour.”
“Appreciate the offer, I’ll think about it.”
The valley this laidback lawyer was referring to was Manitou Valley, a quirky little colony of artists and rich weirdos perched about ten-thousand feet above sea-level between a pair of snow-capped Colorado Rockies. And describing the people who lived there as different was putting it mildly.
For example, this weird-ass lawyer who called himself Darnold Youngman was wearing a tailored midnight-black suit with this impossibly sleek, blue-black hair to match, swept straight back and hanging down to his butt. No necktie; big sharp collar on his expensive-looking crimson dress shirt, unbuttoned and open to the middle of his startlingly pale, hairless chest. Looked like a goddamn cocaine warlock.
Meanwhile, over the past few days Seymour had been busy reacclimating himself to Earth by picking up some clothes for he and Penny at a thrift shop back in Denver, including the faded jeans and gray suit coat he’d picked out for this tour of his uncle’s shop.
His wallet had still been holding all the cash he’d left behind, as well as his debit and credit cards, and in addition to buying new outfits to replace his and Penny’s fantasy-world garb he’d also splurged on a burner phone for Penny so they could keep in touch while he ran whatever errands needed to be done. They’d figured out early on that she couldn’t really be out in public if they wanted to maintain a low profile, because she was literally an alien and she had a habit of walking around wide-eyed and loudly commenting on everything she saw the way an alien might.
So Seymour had gone on his own to check out Uncle Rick’s shop. There were no bank accounts. Rick Little didn’t leave a life insurance policy or any investments. No Mickey Mantles or gold coins or other highly-sought collectibles. Just junk, junk, and more junk – and somewhere in the mix: a supposedly stable portal back to Penny’s world.
Uncle Rick had never married or had any kids. And there were no pets to deal with, either, which Seymour was more than a little grateful for. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone, not even a dog or—heaven forbid—some foo-foo princess of a cat. But according to Darnold the lawyer, Uncle Rick had lived completely alone here for decades in a dinky studio apartment above the shop and didn’t even own a car.
Seymour’s surprise inheritance would amount to this quaint little mountain chalet-turned-antique-shop and all the merchandise inside.
If you can call this stuff merchandise. He shook his head as he continued following the lawyer. There you go again, snobbin it up. People dig this kind of stuff. It’s for tourists really, right? They come in looking for some kind of unique memento to remember their vacation—
“Before we go any further, there’s something you need to see,” Darnold suddenly said, interrupting Seymour’s thoughts. The tour had finally brought them to the very rear of the shop. This room appeared to be almost completely empty, unlike the others, and had no windows.
There was an under construction feel to the space, partially on account of the plastic drop cloth spread out on the floor. Paint supplies were piled in one corner: plastic-wrapped brushes and rollers, along with an unopened can of off-white paint. The only other feature Seymour noticed was a narrow broom closet on the opposite wall.
But something about the room was setting off his alarms.
It feels staged, he realized.
Those unopened paint brushes were covered in a skin of dust. How long had they been sitting there? And the drop cloth positioning made no sense – why was it in the middle of the room instead of closer to a wall where it might actually protect the wood floors from paint splatter? This stuff was all props. He stopped in his tracks just after entering the space but Darnold continued forward, angling toward the broom closet.
It suddenly struck Seymour as completely obvious that this Darnold joker wasn’t any kind of lawyer. The thought that this dude might be a fraud had been percolating in the back of his mind this entire time as a kind of absurd joke, but now it was forcing its way to the front as something much more serious; something much more sinister.
This empty room, with its staged painting scene and its mispositioned drop cloth. It was like something a serial killer would set up, wasn’t it? That drop cloth was in the middle of the floor so the murderer could quickly wrap up a body and dispose of it.
Across the room, Darnold was waiting beside the closet door, wearing a grin which Seymour couldn’t quite read. Operating on a hunch, he allowed Sanguine Sight to feed him information about his guide:
This Darnold Youngman character – he was a goddamn vampire. Could he be the same bloodsucker who had taken Seymour to Heschia? He had to be, didn’t he? How many vampires could be running around this cozy little mountain village?
He’d said something just now but Seymour had been too distracted by Sanguine Sight and his own morbid thoughts to catch what it was exactly. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he flinched but didn’t bother checking what Penny sent.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to mutter, “I missed what you just said.”
“You okay?” Darnold the vampire esquire snorted a laugh. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Is it in the room with us right now?”
“I’m good.”
“Sure, sure.” The vampire narrowed his eyes at Seymour. Then he grinned, exposing his fangs, and jerked his chin toward the broom closet on the far side of this kill room. “Anyway, I said that through this door is a demonic blood gate. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
