Will Christopher Baer - Penny Dreadful

Originally published by:

Lawson Library

A division of MacAdam/Cage Publishing

155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

San Francisco, CA 94104

www.macadamcage.com

Copyright 2004 by Will Christopher Baer

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baer, Will Christopher.

Penny dreadful / by Will Christopher Baer.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-931561-81-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Ex-mental patientsFiction. 2. Ex-police officersFiction.

3. Missing personsFiction. 4. Denver (Colo.)Fiction.

5. Punk cultureFiction. I. Title

Paperback edition: November, 2006

ISBN 13: 978-1-59692-107-8

Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith.

Publishers note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Born in Mississippi in 1966. Old Southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, Tennessee. Attended college in New Orleans, Louisiana (Tulane). Dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. California since 1996, Bay Area, L.A., now Santa Barbara. Worked as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, Washington), screenwriter, and journalist. Short stories published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother. Parents still living in North Carolina.

To play the Game of Tongues, you must first understand the caste system. Phineas Poe, antihero of Kiss Me, Judas, returns to Denver to find reality rewritten and the laws of reason fractured. When Poe is enlisted by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky, he is drawn into the Game of Tongues, a violent fantasy game played out by disaffected college drones, hacker kids, and Goth refugees in underground punk clubs, on rooftops, and in sewers. Everyone he meets has multiple personalities, and before long Poe begins to lose track of his own identity. If he can hang on to his sanity long enough to find Jimmy Sky, he might just beat the game.

for Elias

-Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?
-He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told.

-Ulysses , James Joyce

penny dreadful

a novel by will christopher baer

I am near the end now and this notebook is falling apart in my hands. Damp, becoming pulp. The pages are swollen together and the ink bleeds. The ink disappears and I am not what I appear to be. I wanted to make that clear from the first, from the beginning. But failed, somehow. I tell myself that nothing has vanished, nothing is lost. The lies are chronological, evolutionary.

The dead are watching, listening. I wonder what they know.

The thing is that my consciousness drifts and I have forgotten exactly what I look like. I pass my reflection in a blackened window and I may not recognize myself. My reflection is now perceived as a threat, an ugly twin. My reflection is a dark nonperson, a stranger on the street and this is not an identity crisis as I understand the phrase.

Dear Jude. The mutation of self is normal.

But this is not a suicide note and I dont want you to feel sorry for me. Theres no point in that. It has always been in my nature to stare at the sun, to step out into traffic. I am an unlikely suicide but I did want to get a good close look at death, to touch his matted hair and pass him by.

You should know that I am an alien, a stranger. I may ask you for a cigarette, for the time, for spare change. I may suddenly push you down an alley and steal your wallet, cut out your tongue. I may stop you from choking to death on a fishbone and I may have more than one name.

Did you know that your eyes tend to change colors. They slip from yellow to gray and blue and the change is irrelevant to mood, to disposition. The names are something like that. Phineas Poe. Ray Fine. Fred.

I wasnt thinking clearly when I came back to Denver. I followed myself back to Eves place because I believed I would be safe there. I was equipped only with the small brain of a bird, the heart and bone structure of a chicken. I was a stupid chicken.

I was not quite self-aware.

The strangers in me are easily distracted. They are daydreamers, romantics. And therefore unreliable. They are often drunk and they dont always look out for each other. They pretend not to notice things. It always comes back to this business of drifting and I dont mean the way clouds drift. The way shadows drift behind the sun. Its a geological thing, a tectonic shift. The drift is not so easily noticed, but the impact tends to be profound.

Open your eyes, boy. Your eyes. Open your eyes and no more turn aside and brood.

from a small blue notebook found on a Denver city bus,

apparently the diary of Phineas Poe. This was the final entry.

Thursday

Goo:

The Trembler was young and fair, with red hair and stupid blue eyes and the pale furry limbs of a spider monkey. And shameless. The girl had no shame. She clung to Chrome as if grafted to his hip. Goo rolled her eyes and followed them down a road white with mist. Chrome was her boyfriend, technically. She liked to sleep with him. But she rarely hunted with him. It wasnt her bag. Goo was not a Mariner, and she didnt share his bottomless black hunger for tongue. Nor did she like to watch him go down on others, which Chrome very well knew.

They had found the Trembler under the 17th Street Bridge, crouched near a sewer opening. Alone and mute. She had obviously become separated from her little tribe, her pocket of the game. And when Chrome and Goo had come upon her she had pathetically tried to tremble them, which only made Goo more tired and grumpy.

Chrome, though. He had been unpleasantly cheerful all evening and apparently found the Trembler amusing so he had scooped her up like an injured sparrow. He had muttered something to Goo about having a delicious threesome, a sickening idea. Goo wished he would just take the girls tongue quickly and cleanly and deposit her in an abandoned car, or behind a trash barrel.

But she could see that he was in no mood for the efficient kill.

The Trembler could be no more than sixteen, thought Goo. She was a newborn, barely an apprentice. Fashionably unclean, barbaric. The girl was dressed as some sort of prehistoric cave dweller, wearing a babydoll dress of raw suede and no shoes. Her legs were unshaven and she smelled.

Goo spat in disgust. She was an Exquisitor and was therefore expected to be a bit more elegant. She wore brown leather trousers, clean. She wore polished black motorcycle boots and a vest of fine silver chain mail. And Chrome, being a hunter, wore only black. Black jeans tirelessly reconstructed with black tape and rubber patches. Boots that laced up to the knee and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His head was shaved to black stubble.