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!
“I can’t believe you’re letting them see this,” the crow complained.
“Spooky? What do you mean spooky?” asked one of the waitresses, an Asian woman with a black apron tied around her waist and a neat ponytail.
Stirling walked to the door and gripped its tarnished brass knob, it had the mellow feel of real tarnished metal and felt solid in his hand. “Spooky like this,” he said, turning the knob. At the click of the latch, the door pulled open as though yanked from the other side. Air rushed into the room on the other side, taking with it a number of unsecured cloth napkins from a nearby rack. It was like whatever was behind the door was taking in a breath after being trapped underwater.
As the door swung in, it continued all the way around and slammed against the unseen wall on the other side with a tremendous crash. Behind him, Stirling heard the sound of several feet thundering back up the stairs to the restaurant.
“Eighty years?” Stirling asked.
“Eighty years.”
The open doorway revealed a patch of dark polished hardwood floor, lit only by the overhead light in the basement. Beyond crouched only blackness.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream,” he said.
When he didn’t get a reply he looked over at the crow. “That’s Shirley Jackson, you know.”
Stirling approached the entrance, his heart still beating fast. He was pulling out his smartphone to use the flashlight app when an old-style sconce on the wall lit with a warm yellow light that flooded the room beyond the doorway.
The light revealed an entrance with what appeared to be a coat check and a wide carpeted staircase that curved up and to the right. The head of what could only be described as a carnivorous moose was mounted on the wood panelled wall opposite and snarled down at him. Well, that wasn’t going to be any help in lowering his heart rate at all.
Under the mounted head was an engraved plaque with the words, “Alces Alces Infernalis.” Even more creepy than the snarling head, was the fact that someone had taken the time to taxidermy the front legs and had them mounted underneath its head. The result was that it made it look as though the creature was in the process of leaping through the wall. Here was a random act of fuckery nearly a century old that Stirling would have been proud of producing himself.
Magnon sprung off his shoulder and flapped up to the first landing and out of sight. Stirling followed, his boots sinking into a thick Persian area rug as he stepped across the threshold and into the room. He looked back to see the stunned look of the remaining staff staring at him from the basement.
“Be right back, I should check this out.” He swung the door closed on the restaurant staff and followed Magnon up the stairs and into a large open space.
On entering the room, Stirling felt like an archaeologist opening the door of King Tut’s tomb—if the tomb had all the decor and opulence of a turn of the nineteenth-century club decorated by Alistair Crowley.
It was a long room with tables and comfortable chairs set far apart for privacy. Lining the sides of the room was a series of alcoves with an assortment of tables, chairs, and couches. Each was separated by carved wooden screens of slowly shifting whorls and shapes that looked like a one night stand between a fractal and a Celtic knot.
Around the top perimeter of the walls, paintings depicted a ring of people, living and dead, men, women, and children, dancing together and holding hands.
Everywhere were esoteric items that were clearly magical. A trio of finches fluttered up from the floor to land on a light sconce. Where their breasts would be on a regular finch though, there were tiny golden cages, each imprisoning a wisp of bright scarlet flame. Next to him, an engraved brass basin of water silently reflected the earth, from what Stirling took to be the surface of the moon.
The room tickled Stirling’s memory, and it took him a second to realize that The Skeleton Club reminded him a lot of Strangefellows. In a sudden burst of insight, he realized that it was the reverse that was true. The Skeleton Club didn’t remind him of Strangefellows, Strangefellows reminded him of the Skeleton Club. In that instant, he’d have bet his good right testicle that it was Strangefellows that had borrowed from this place in an attempt to echo the atmosphere and not the other way around.
“So, I’ll be safe here?” Stirling asked Magnon, who had been eyeing the finches critically from the back of a high-backed chair.
“Safe? No, but here it will be impossible for anyone to locate you magically. It doesn’t mean they won’t figure it out eventually though. You’ll need to find a way to make them stop trying to hunt you.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“I couldn’t help but overhear part of your conversation,” a roughened male voice said distantly from one of the far shadowed niches, “and I think we might just be able to give one and other a helping hand.”
Magnon let out a caw and flapped to perch on an overhead chandelier.
A man, six feet tall and change, rose from his seat at the far edge of the room which had been facing away from them. He groaned and put a hand to the small of his back and rotated his neck with an audible crackle. When he finally turned to look at Stirling, there were traceries of orange ember flaring across fissures in his exposed and partly blackened skin. His beard was in a state of constant low burn, orange filaments of hair glowing briefly to be consumed, but never flaring up. As Stirling watched, the glowing orange crawled through the capillaries his eyes and across his forehead.
His clothing looked like it had come from the rough side of the early nineteen hundreds. He wore a brown bowler hat and vest with a pair of baggy pants held up with suspenders and scuffed leather boots. A cloud of grey smoke that drifted lazily away from him, disappearing as it left his immediate presence.
He began slowly walking toward Stirling, working the kinks out of his arms and legs as he came. There was a clinking sound on every right step and Stirling saw a blackened manacle with a heavy silver chain attached to his ankle. The chain disappeared into the shadowed corner where he’d been sitting.
“Finally, a genuine member in good standing of the Skeleton Club,” he said with a grin, doffing his bowler with a puff of smoke. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you at last.” His way of speaking reminded Stirling a bit of the pirates from those Johnny Depp movies; here was a man that liked to dwell on the Rs as he spoke them.
The chain around his ankle pulled him up before he was ten feet away, and he looked down to give it a sour look.
“If you could do me a favour and pass over one of them bottles, I’d be in your debt.”
Stirling noticed for the first time that the tables in this part of the room had been set up in a ring. On each of the tables was a bottle containing a different kind of alcohol, and all of them were about ten feet out of reach of the chained man. Now that he was aware of it, he could see the wear line in the floor that marked the length of the chain. Kudos to whoever had chained him here for that inventively petty act of assholery.
Stirling took the closest bottle and handed it over. It was an unopened bottle of rum with a label he didn’t recognize. In a little under five seconds the man had the lead foil seal off and the bottle uncorked. He took a long pull with his eyes closed and sighed out a long streamer of blue flame in contentment.
“Candlewax is my name.” He said at last, shifting the bottle and holding out his hand for Stirling to shake.
Stirling grinned back and went to shake his hand, and he would have, if not for Magnon dropping down suddenly from the ceiling and flapping and cawing in his face. He flapped his own hands above his head to ward off the crow and took a wing to the mouth.
“Gah! What?!” he asked, spitting out a feather.
“Don’t! He’s dangerous.”
“Well duh, look at him, he’s on fire and he’s all chained up. The only thing he’s missing from the outfit is a pitchfork and horns. If he had a handlebar moustache, he’d be fucking twirling it. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be polite.” Stirling tossed his jacket over the back of a nearby chair. “Sorry, don’t mean to be rude, trouble with the staff.”
“Not to worry. Good help and all that.”
“Stirling!” the crow protested. “He’s one of the Great Fires!”
This brought Stirling up short. “You say that like it should mean something to me.”
“Stirling, is it?! A fine how do you do then, young Master Stirling.” said Candlewax. He turned to Magnon, and very clearly, Stirling heard Candlewax’s voice inside his head.
“Ah, but you’re right of course, my fine, feathery, chum. I am dangerous, and indeed I am one of the Great Fires, well spotted there.” The embers under Candlewax’s skin began to glow more brightly like a blast furnace was beginning to spool up in his rectum. Waves of heat began to shed from his body. Even from where he stood a good two meters away, Stirling still needed to take a step back from the heat. “But all that amounts to less than a fart in a tempest whilst I’m stuck in this fucking place!!” he thundered, rattling his chain.
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