Jazz Monster Collector in: Man Behind the Curtain (Season 1 Episode 16) Read online

or nostalgia, Gladstone only remind me, despite how hard I’d fought and how deeply I’d suffered, of how little I’d achieved.

  Uh-oh, there’s that introspect again. I wondered if the Not-Now-Stone, my magical healing rock that had very nearly killed me, could cure me of that as well. I sighed. I’d never find out because I’d sworn to myself that I’d never use the stone again…unless of course in the utmost dire want of need.

  A billboard attached to the side of a stone building brought me to a stop. It wouldn’t seem like anything unusual in Gladstone, perhaps a little niche. It was an advertisement for Anchor-Hawking Glass. Two green, cut glass drinking glasses had been superimposed over an anchor image. Our Glass is Superior in Every Way, the copy read. A tagline beneath read, The Anchor Man Stands behind this Motto. Anchor-Hawking had gone belly-up long before the invasion; the ad was more of the old Earth atmosphere. But it was also a warning, if you knew how to read it. I knew how to read it because I was the one who’d put it there.

  I must have stared longer than I’d realized because DJ spoke to me at last. “Jazz, are you okay?”

  I turned and dropped the shawl over my shoulders, then removed my dark glasses. “Yeah, I’m okay. How are you?”

  DJ’s eyes darted side to side like she expected something terrible was about descend upon us.

  I tried my best to show her a reassuring smile, but smiling wasn’t one of my strong suits. “We’re safe here, you can relax.”

  Her eyes narrowed and I felt her distrust more strongly. “But the enforcer corps?”

  “Are not coming,” I said, shook my head and tried to improve the quality of my smile. “No one’s looking for us in Gladstone, why would they? You give the corps more credit than they deserve. Besides, Detective Samules is working to keep them off our tails. We’re safe for now.”

  “Then why are you so scared?” DJ asked as she undid the clasp from her shawl exposing a subtle but obviously condescending smile.

  That hurt. DJ had never looked at me like that before. I’d hurt her, hurt her bad, and I was going to have to accept that this was the way things were now. Deep down I braced myself for the day she tells me she’s leaving to pursue a better life. I couldn’t blame her for that, but I couldn’t say that it wouldn’t sting.

  I glanced back up at the billboard. “It’s not the enforcer corps I’m afraid of.”

  The enforcer coups were the closest thing the Wizards Council, the governing body of Mirth, had to a police force… and an army…and an emergency responder team. But in reality hey weren’t much more useful than the Bedrock Fire Department. Bedrock was a fictional prehistoric town, home of the Flintstones, a cartoon family on the long forgotten television broadcasts. The whole of Bedrock, the houses, the furniture, the cars, were made of stone. A town made of stone can’t burn, so the fire department was really just an excuse for the men to get away from their wives and drink beer and eat brontosaurus burgers.

  Admittedly the Enforcer Corps did slightly more than that, although not much more. They were a volunteer organization, completely vid trained, and more of a club than a threat. The fact was that on a utopian world, even a utopia that was a magically constructed lie, there was little need for policing. The people here were idle, lazy, and fat, but they were also content, at least they believed they were. They had everything they wanted and could be anything they wanted to be, but almost all of them sought leisure and splendid idleness. Even the monsters here behaved themselves; most of them did most of the time anyway. The council was good at keeping the ‘undesirables’ of the deferred species, the politically correct term for monsters, out of their utopian human cities. The few allowed in that did step out of line were dealt with quickly and harshly. Any of those that were too much for the enforcer corps to handle, which were most of them, were passed on to me, Mirth’s only deferred species bond collector. I’d stopped a lot of bad guys over the course of my career, but I wasn’t well liked, feared by many, hated by even more. But I wasn’t on Mirth to make friends, I was there to do what I’d been doing since I was sixteen, kill monsters. I was a violent person on a world that worked hard to pretend that bad things didn’t happen and I was an un-ignorable beacon that bad things were happening all the time. I paid a price for being who I was.

  “Jazz,” DJ said in a soft tone.

  I pulled my gaze off the billboard and onto her, and, by the widening of her eyes and the rise of her eyebrows, she must have seen dread in it. I heaved out a sigh. “No more putting it off I suppose.”

  “Suppose not,” she said, sounding more curious than scared. She had changed, but was still a little too naive.

  “Come on then,” I said and, without bothering to look either way, led her across the street. There was hardly ever any traffic here.

  On the corner stood the three-story faux stone house; it had gargoyle faces staring out from the faux granite soffits, faux wrought iron railings on every window, and a small balcony off the alley side with faux carved spindled railings. It all gave the structure a very Parisian appearance. In fact, standing on its walkway, it would be easy to imagine Paris was exactly where I was if it wasn’t for the pair of miniature griffins tending a nest on the afore mentioned balcony. Besides, Paris, as well as France and every other old Earth country, no longer existed.

  I pulled open a tall, wooden door and held it as DJ entered, and then I followed. My stomach lurched as I crossed the threshold and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to look back and see that my stomach had dropped out through the bottoms of my feet. It hadn’t, but a sickening dread racked my guts with ache.

  DJ tried to pull the locked inner door open, rattling its faux leaded glass. Still gripping the handle, she looked back at me. Yellow light streamed though the textured glass and tinted one side of her face, shadow shaded the other side. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, apparently reading the trepidation my heart had sent to my face without my approval.

  “No,” I said, pulling the cord around my neck out from my blouse. “But I’m going anyway.” Hanging from the cord were two items. One was a brass broach in the shape of an anchor. The other was an old fashioned skeleton key. I slid the key in the lock and, with more effort than I expected, turned it drawing the rusted bolt from the door frame. I opened the door, and, with a tip of my head, gestured for DJ to enter.

  She paused on the threshold for a cautious look around, and then went in the rest of the way. I followed, stopping to relock the door with the key before tucking it away again.

  We were in a small entrance foyer. The ceiling was high above us, fifteen feet at least, and covered with faux tin ceiling tiles. One wall was covered in little brass (I’m dispensing with all the fauxing, you get the picture) doors. Each door had a number plate and a little glass insert so one could peek in and see if any mail had been delivered. None had in over a hundred years.

  A wide set of granite stairs rose up to the floor above, and a narrow hallway along the stairs led to the rooms beyond the foyer. I headed up the stairs.

  We came to a landing that turned us one hundred and eighty degrees, and then went up a shorter section of steps that landed us on the second floor.

  “Wow,” DJ said taking in the old Earth decor, things like flowered wallpaper and doors made to look like wood. The curiosity in her eyes and the wonder in her voice reassured me that my trusty sidekick, the DJ I knew and loved, was still with me.

  To our immediate left was another set of stairs, this one leading straight to the third floor as the ceiling here was much lower. A hall led away from the steps. There were four doors, two to either side, and one door straight at the end of the hall. Each door had a button that rang a mechanical bell, and a number plate above. The place projected a dark, dreary, and dismal aura. This floor carried a particular musk that, as only smells can, brought to me clear memories of a past I wished to forget.

  Something big, and angry sounding, snorted. The sound echoed through the empty hall. DJ stiffened and squeezed my
arm. Her eyes nervously searched the shadows and I felt her muscles tense with an alert preparedness.

  “It’s alright,” I said. “I’ll just—”

  The door at the end of the hall slammed open and a dark figure ducked his head and turned sideways so he could squeeze his huge body through the opening. He squared off and snorted again. He was every bit of seven feet tall with rippling muscles that flexed as he tightened his great fists. His massive pecks gathered into an angry scowl on his bare chest. He looked human, huge and muscular, except that his skin was as black as ink and he had the head of a huge bull with a gold ring through his nostrils and horns that were so wide they dragged the walls as he charged, snorting and spitting.

  DJ must have been practicing, or I was getting slow, because before I could move she shoved me away. “Jazz, get down!”

  I was caught completely unprepared and stumbled sideways. I tried to get my feet back under me, but only managed to get them across one another and I tumbled to the floor.

  I watched her strike a stance and draw her kinetic force compressor.

  “DJ, no!” I shouted. Too late; she pulled the trigger.

  The tiny (pathetic I’d say) gun hummed as it gathered in latent energy then, with a screeching of release, fired a compressed ball of force.