When last we met, our heroes arrived home after a night at
the box and began to experience all manner of even stranger strangeness…
Alia falls back to sleep after her strange nightmare and is
awoken by a knock at her door. It is
Mia, a fellow working girl, and she looks incredibly rough, as though she’s not
been to bed at all and is still intoxicated.
Alia lets her in. Mia offers her
a cricket (marijuana laced with meth) out of an Altoids tin, which Alia
declines as she starts making breakfast.
Mia lights up and confesses to Alia that she’s afraid she’s
pregnant. After giving her grief for not
using protection while working, Alia asks what she can do to help. Mia says she’s got no money, not enough for a
legitimate clinic at least, but she’ll give Alia what she’s got if she’ll do
something to end the pregnancy. Alia
refuses and takes her to a free clinic after helping Mia into clothing other
than her tight stained dress.
Drake is asleep in his apartment. He is shocked into wakefulness by the sound
of automatic gunfire from outside his apartment, spraying his apartment from
the street below. Brick explodes, glass
shatters, and holes are peppering his ceiling and floor. Something ricochets and gets him in his left
arm. After what feels like an eternity,
the gunfire stops and tires squeal away, followed by screams from people
outside – this is not the sort of neighbourhood where drive-by shootings
happen. Drake rolls out of bed and
huddles for a moment until he is sure it is over. When he hears sirens, he scrambles to get
dressed and joins the other building residents in evacuating the building. On the street, he sees officers entering the
building, one uniformed man poking his head out of Drake’s window to view the
street. An ambulance shows up, and Drake
eventually gets help for his graze wound while an officer questions him.
A plainclothes officer named Detective Matthews asks
permission to look in Drake’s apartment, as he seemed to be the target, and if
there is anyone who might have wanted to harm him? Drake gives permission – he’s got nothing to
hide and the laptop where he does all of his nefarious book-cooking is heavily
protected and encrypted. He makes up some
story, not entirely untrue, about calling out Diggles at a bar or club, and
that Diggles seemed very upset. The cop
buys the story, says Diggles has been linked to another “act of dramatic
violence” recently, and that he thinks he received a big break recently – a new
source, better business – something that has given him confidence to step up
his game and assert himself. Drake
senses something off in the detective’s story, but goes along with it, saying
that he’s got a safe place to stay with family near Buffalo.
He gives Det. Matthews his burner phone number and asks if he can get
his laptop. As the apartment is a crime
scene, the detective won’t let him do it himself, but radios up to have someone
bring it down. It takes a lot longer
than Drake feels is necessary, though at a brief glance, it appears to be
OK. Drake leaves, getting on a bus and
making several changes throughout the borough on his way to Gareth’s loft,
shaking the police that were sent after to tail him.
Meanwhile, outside Gareth’s apartment, Wally has just been
struck by a taxi. Thankfully, it was
going the speed limit in a residential area, so he’s not terribly injured. The cabbie gets out of his vehicle with a cry
of, “Oh no, not again!” Goom, still
standing just outside of the alley, says that he is a paramedic and that he
will attend to Wally. Wally, of course,
will have absolutely none of this, although Goom insists and does a cursory
examination of Wally, noting that he’s pretty much just bruised. The cabbie offers to take Wally to the
hospital, or call paramedics, but Wally again refuses help. He picks up his duffel bag from where it was
flung across the street, dismayed to hear his entire Pyrex collection making a cacophony
of brokenness. He brings it with him
anyway and begins to limp away. At this
point, Gareth and Alex have arrived streetside and Gareth tries to go after
Wally. Wally ignores Gareth’s requests
to just come back inside and continues walking.
Goom, Alex, and Gareth all return to Gareth’s loft where
Goom starts to explain his bandaged face (even revealing his empty eye socket
for them – Gareth grabs a beer) but says the full explanation should wait for
everyone to be together. Goom sits on Gareth’s couch and begins knitting. Alex asks what he’s making, and Goom says it
is an eye patch. Gareth is fascinated
that Goom knits, and suggests a collaboration for a future art installation.
Wally gets about four blocks away, when he again feels that
thrumming in the air, to his right. He
stops, partly because he’s got a stitch in his side, and looks downtown to
where the skyscrapers rise. He sees one
of the buildings (he thinks it’s the Chrysler) vibrating and emanating that violet
darkness, with tendrils whipping out from the top floors, reaching
skyward. “Motherfucker” he whispers as
the pain in his side eases and his violet vision fades. He looks around – no one else seemed to
notice – and begins heading to his apartment.
Morgan awakens with no incident, has a cup of tea, and
checks her messages, seeing all of the back and forth from earlier in the
morning and over night about the butterflies and other strange goings on. She gets dressed and begins to make her way
over to Gareth’s. She and Drake end up
arriving at the same time. Once inside,
Drake tells the tale of his morning misadventure, Goom reveals what happened
with his dream and waking nightmare, and Alex tells the full story behind the
butterflies at the high school. When he
mentions the part about not having a face, something odd happens – everyone in
the room sees his facial features disappear.
It is only for a brief second, the blink of an eye, but it definitely
happens. Goom keeps knitting his eye
patch in the green red and yellow colours symbolizing Vietnam,
stitching “Death” and “Forgotten” on it.
At the free clinic, Mia is refused service, as she is too
inebriated to give consent, and there is a good chance that she would lose a
lot of blood as a result of said inebriation.
Alia tries to convince them otherwise, but they are steadfast. She is given the third degree about how
serious this procedure is, how critical it is that her friend be sober for
this, and what complications may and will arise after the procedure if Mia has
sex, continues to use drugs and alcohol, and so forth. Alia hears and understands, but gives
flippant responses and eventually the health worker gives up – bring her in
once she’s sober, and they’ll see what they can do. Alia leaves with Mia, returning to their
apartment building in the projects, all the while explaining again and again
that Mia has to be sober, and no, she can’t have any drink or drugs until the
whole thing is over. She is finally able
to convince Mia to do it by offering to cover her wages while Mia is out of
commission after the procedure.
Back in the loft, Gareth has started into his and Wally’s
strange encounter from the night before – the “TOUCHED” note, the footprint on
the windowsill, the unsettling feeling that they’d missed something. Goom says he might be able to figure
something out, and Gareth gives his permission for Goom to investigate. While this is happening, Drake examines his
laptop and sees fine scratch marks around a USB portal – someone had tried in a
hurry to plug in a flash drive, and he knows it had to have been the cops. Nothing seems removed or damaged, though, and
he asks Gareth for a hot glue gun, to fill in the open ports on his computer to
prevent future tampering. He then begins
to look up what his doppelgänger has been doing, noting his odd purchases of
stock in concrete and steel. He wonders
what his Other is up to – building something?
Meanwhile, Goom has started sniffing around Gareth’s
apartment. Literally – nose to the
ground, at the windowsill, going all over the space, tracking almost like a
hound. He goes from the window, across
the apartment to the bathroom door (though not in), over to the couch, and back
to the window. He says that is the path
the intruder followed, noting that the person stopped in the bathroom door, and
paused for a while at the couch where Wally slept, presumably to leave the
note, before exiting the way they entered.
He says the person smelled of
sweat and stale beer, he smells metal, like a bunch of body piercings, and
blood. This description doesn’t seem
familiar to Gareth or anyone else.
Wally finally makes it back to his apartment, but doesn’t go
in. Parked about a block down is a sleek
black limo, definitely out of place for this area, and the back door and window
are thrumming violet black. It starts
rolling towards him, and he walks quickly away, turning down a side
street. It changes course and follows. Wally runs down an alley. The back door of the limo opens and someone
shouts, “Mr. Kim!” He keeps
running. He dashes into another alley
and disposes of his Pyrex shards, keeping anything that managed to make it
through the accident. He circles back
around to his apartment.
Back at Gareth’s, Morgan notices something in her pocket
that hadn’t been there before. It is a
golf ball sized sphere, dark and shiny, like a large black pearl, and it is
cool to the touch. She hands it to Goom
to sniff. It has no smell. Not just that, it is the absence of
smell. She recalls from her red door
dream that she had put a bottle in her pocket, although it hadn’t been there
when she came back to The Box. This is
the same pocket. Goom picks up a scrap
of something from Gareth’s work bench, and has Morgan put it in her pocket;
Goom’s theory is that it is a magic pocket.
He adds that it may be best for them to find a new meeting place, if
they’re all already being watched, and he offers up his lair as a meeting
place, provided no one is opposed to entering a sewer to get there.
Sneaking back to his building, Wally again sees the
limo. This time it is parked directly in
front of his building. Again he turns
tail, calling 911, reporting that “There are people threatening me outside my
apartment, they’ve been threatening me all day” and provides the address and
hangs up, avoiding the area for part of the afternoon. The limo is, of course,
still there when he returns. Giving up,
he approaches it with his arms out. A
man wearing a cross between a chauffeur’s outfit and a Nazi SS uniform steps
out of the driver door. His head is
shaved and his face is covered in piercings.
“Mr. Kim?” he asks, and Wally nods.
The man pulls out a small box topped with a blue bow and a black
butterfly, offering it to Wally, who tells him to put it on the ground. The man confers with his passenger and then
places the box on the street. He gets
back in the limo and drives away, past Wally.
Wally makes sure they’re good and gone before picking up the box. The butterfly atop it is fake, made mostly of
wire. He brings it up to his apartment
where he finds the hole in his wall has been patched and poorly painted. He shoves as much of his book collection as
he can fit into his duffel bag, and then opens the box.
On top is nice parchment with Japanese writing. (Wally is Korean, but knows some
Japanese). Beneath the parchment are
envelopes, each with the name of a person in the abductees group, along with
one addressed to “The Woman In White”.
Getting a rough translation, Wally reads the parchment as “Any nice
dreams lately?” He ponders it for a bit
before opening his envelope which, like the others, is sealed with a butterfly
stamp. It contains an invitation card
with an address, date and time, and instructions to be dressed in “business
casual” attire. He looks up the
address. It is the Chrysler building,
and the suite number on the card corresponds to the 75th floor of
77. According to the information he
finds online, floors 75 – 77 are owned by an unpublished occupant. The meeting time is at 1:30pm the following
Friday – Black Friday.
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