Chapter 29, Part 1: Gastown and other Oddities

As usual, warnings apply: This is the rough draft of a story with adult themes and situations. If you are offended by bad language and grammatical errors, gentle reader, read no further! For those of you who have decided to stay, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy this week's chapter!




Breaking every stereotype of Vancouver in winter, morning sunlight elbowed it’s way through the streaked bus window to fall with irritating cheeriness onto his face. His phone was buzzing in his pocket and the 90s country hit, Achy Breaky Heart was blasting through his earbuds. He ranked his enjoyment of that song in the same neighbourhood as testicular cancer, but it was guaranteed to reliably wake him—if for no other reason than to make it stop.

From looking out the window, he guessed he was somewhere in Vancouver. “Wher’r we?” he mumbled to Magnon, who was sitting on one thigh.

“On a fucking bus, remember?”

He began to remember his partially-hypothermic rationale of the night before. It has something to do with his notion that it was harder to hit a moving target. He’d given a bus driver a fifty to ignore the crow and let him stay on and sleep in a seat above the heater.

He stretched and yawned. “What’s wrong with you? Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.”

“I’m on a fucking bus,” the crow repeated.

“And?”

“And, we crows aren’t known for squeamishness, roadkill is part of a balanced breakfast where I’m from, but I’ve eaten the ass out of dead cat that smelled better than some of these people.”

“They’re not that bad,” Stirling demurred, looking around at the other passengers. “As long as your shots are up to date you’ll probably be just fine.”

Some of his fellow passengers were beginning to cast furtive glances at him. He adjusted his earbud and grinned at them in what he hoped was a reassuring manner.“So, where are we?”

“Almost back where we started. Your cunning plan to ride the bus for five hours has had us looping through Richmond all morning.”

“Exactly where they’d never expect to look,” Stirling agreed, sitting up in his seat. His neck was stiff, his head was throbbing, and he badly wanted a shower.

“You're no Sun Tzu.”

“I’m a results-based kind of guy. I got some sleep and I’m alive. That’s a check in the ‘wins’ column in my book.”

It was another ten minuted until the bus loop came into sight and he shuffled off the bus.

“I thank you for your hospitality,” he said throatily to the bus driver, “I’ll definitely be leaving a glowing review on Yelp.” He spun on his heel and skipped out the door. Magnon had to grip on tight to hold onto his perch.

“You can’t help it, can you?” asked Magnon.

“What?”

“Fucking with people.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad. They know I’m just a lovable scamp.”

Stirling began slogging in the direction of the stairs to the train platform above. Magnon leapt from his shoulder to fly a distance ahead of him.

A ghost, barely visible in the bright sunlight on the median, began to scream obscenities at him. Stirling slowed to listen to the ranting with a critical ear. She wasn’t bad. She was using creativity and imagination with her insults rather than the just the usual permutations of the word “fuck.” As he approached, she retreated into a concrete pillar.

“Eight points,” Stirling called to the cement column. “Full marks for creativity and the excellent use of consonance in the words, ‘penis pustules.’ You lost points on the delivery though. Next time enunciate, and work on your projection. Remember we project from the diaphragm.” He clasped his hands below his rib cage to demonstrate. This brought a fresh volley of abuse from the ghost.

“You’ll never insult people at Carnegie Hall with that kind of attitude,” he called back to her.

“I’d have given her 9,” said Magnon, swooping back in.

“Oh right, you can see the drifting idiots too. Why don’t you go and move her along to the spirit world, or whatever it is you crows do?”

“We usually don’t bother with them unless they make a nuisance of themselves. Ghosts are just fragments of soul that sometimes get broken off at death. Soul shrapnel. That’s why talking with them is so frustrating, there’s not enough there to have much of a conversation with. They usually just dissipate by themselves after a couple years.”

“You’ve been hanging around in my backyard eating my peanuts for five years, and not once you thought about letting me in on stuff like this?”

“I couldn’t talk to you until you knew you were a Necromancer. I was just hanging around on the off-chance you realized it on your own.”

“That’s dumb. I honestly feel more stupid from just hearing that reason.”

“That’s the way it is. Know thyself, and know the gods.”

Stirling stopped on the sidewalk, held out his arms to the sky and flung back his head. “I’m absolutely convinced that I’m Bill Gates,” he yelled to the clear sky. After a beat, he opened an eye and looked around.

“Didn’t work.”

“That’s because you’re a necromancer, not a billionaire computer geek.”

“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.”

“Why Bill Gates?”

“The guy is richer than God, and he’s married to that sex bomb, Melinda. All being a necromancer ever got me is no sex, no friends, and a rampant case of high-functioning sociopathy.”

Stirling started moving again. “So do those other crows you hang with have the same job as you?”

Magnon didn’t get back to him for a few seconds and when he did, there was a tinge of embarrassment to his thoughts. “No, I guess you’d call them intimate acquaintances.”

“Crow groupies! Good for you, man. At least someone at my address was getting some action.” He sent the crow a mental high-five. He was new to the mental communication thing, but he was pretty sure that the crow left him hanging.

“So you’ve been in this business for a while?”

“A very long time.” With the words came the impression of the ocean of time the crow had sailed upon. He felt old sadness as friends and colleagues grew old and passed on as Magnon continued to exist.

“Wow, so are all crows all so ball-saggingly old, or is it just you?”

“There are twelve others like me.”

“Thirteen crows,” Stirling mused, “now that sounds seriously metal. I believe I’ve just found my new band name.”

“You don’t play an instrument.”

“I didn’t have a name like Thirteen Crows before either. Now, because of you, I want to learn to play drums.”

Stirling tapped his transfer on the card reader and made his way through the gate and up an escalator to track level. Magnon landed on the railing behind him.

Stirling looked around at the people around him. “I seriously need to get my car, if I keep using the public transit I’m going to start wearing hemp and grow my hair out.” This got him a dirty look from a skinny guy with a beard and ponytail carrying an acoustic guitar in a nylon case.
“I wasn’t talking to you. Eyes front, Sea Shepherd.”

Stirling took his phone from his pocket. It was a quarter after ten. He boarded the next train north, garnering some curious looks, many of them from the female passengers. He wasn’t self-deluded enough to think that the new attention was anything but an interest in Magnon, who was again riding his shoulder, but he’d take what little female attention he could get. Granted, you typically didn’t go looking for hook-ups on public transit unless you were into dreadlocks and alternate forms of deodorant, but after a decade of near-celibacy, Stirling wasn’t picky. His list of requirements in a potential relationship had shrunk over the years to now requiring applicants to only be nominally female, and have at minimum a single working tooth in case he wanted to take her out for dinner. Everything else was negotiable.