#ill kill for the senile train

[91divoc]

silly old man

[cruetrimeblog]

The Unfortunate Story of Edmund Kemper

Edmund Kemper III was born in Burbank, California on December 18, 1948. He was a middle child and the only son in his family. His parents' names were Clarnell and Edmund II. His father was a veteran and an electrician. Edmund's parents had a very tumultuous relationship. Edmund was a very large child, weighing 13 pounds at birth. He was ahead taller than other kids his age by the age of four. He also showed signs of antisocial behavior early on in his childhood. At 10 years old, it is known that Edmund buried a cat alive. Once he knew the cat was dead, he dug up the cat, decapitated it, and put its head on a spike. He admitted that lying to his parents about this incident gave him pleasure. He killed another cat at age 13 because he believed the cat liked his sister more than him. He kept pieces of this cat in his closet for a while until his mother found them.

These dark fantasies weren't the only one's Edmund would experience through the years. He often removed the heads and hands from his sister's dolls. When asked if Edmund would want to kiss his attractive teacher, he responded, "If I kiss her, I'd have to kill her first."

Edmund once snuck out of the house carrying his father's bayonet. He went to his teacher's house and proceeded to watch her through her windows. His favorite games to play as a child were "Gas Chamber" and "Electric Chair." He liked asking his sisters to pretend to kill him when they played. Edmund experienced two scary childhood traumas: being pushed in front of a train by his sister and being pushed into the deep end of the pool by his sister. He made is through both of these events virtually unharmed.

Edmund was very troubled by his parents' separation in 1957. While Edmund had a good relationship with his father, he didn't care for his mother very much. She was a neurotic, domineering alcoholic. She would frequently belittle, humiliate and abuse him. She often made him sleep in the locked basement because she was supposedly afraid of what he would do to his sisters. She often teased the 6'4 teen for being too tall. She refused to show him affection for fear that it would make him gay. Edmund described his mother as a "sick, angry woman" Many people believed Clarnell may have suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder.

At 14 years old, Edmund ran away from home to reunite with his father. He arrived to find his father had started a whole new family that didn't really include him. He stayed with his father for a short time before being sent to live with his grandparents. Edmund wasn't pleased with this living arrangement. He referred to his grandfather as "senile," and described his grandmother as "constantly emasculating" him and his grandfather.

On August 27, 1964 Edmund got into an argument with his grandmother Matilda Kemper at the dinner table. In the midst of the argument, Edmund got up, retrieved a gun that belonged to his grandfather, and returned to the dinner table where he proceeded to shoot his grandmother in the head. He then shot her twice in the back. It's also been reported that she suffered from several stab wounds with a kitchen knife postmortem.

When Edmund's grandfather returned home after a trip to the grocery store, Edmund fatally shot him in the driveway. Edmund then called his mother asking for advice. She told him he needed to call the police. Edmund did so willingly, and awaited to be arrested. Edmund was quoted as saying that he, "just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma." He admitted to killing his grandfather to spare him the sight of his dead wife.

Edmund's crimes were deemed incomprehensible for a 15 year old. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was sent to Atascadero State Hospital which was a maximum security facility for mentally ill convicts.

Doctors at Atascadero disagreed with Edmund's original diagnoses. He was rediagnosed with a "personality trait disturbance, passive aggressive type." Kemper's IQ was measured at 145.

Edmund was a model prisoner and was eventually trained to run psychiatric tests on other inmates. He was noted as taking pride in his work. Kemper also joined the Jaycees while institutionalized. However it was while he was running tests on sex offenders that he picked up tips for how to successfully kill people.

Edmund was released on parole on his 21st birthday on December 18, 1969. This was against the recommendations of the prison psychiatrists. His mother agreed to take him in. She had remarried and divorced again by this time. It appeared as if Edmund had been rehabilitated. So much so, that his criminal record was expunged on November 29, 1972.

Edmund's parole required him to attend community college. He wanted to be a police officer, but was turned away due to his height which was 6'9 by this time. He was nicknamed "Big Ed." Although Edmund was rejected from the police academy, he remained friends with many of the officers.

Kemper found a job working with the California Highway Department, but his relationship with his mother was still suffering. Neighbors heard them arguing frequently. Edmund described these encounters with his mother as follows: "My mother and I started right in on horrendous battles, just horrible battles, violent and vicious. I've never been in such a vicious verbal battle with anyone. It would go to fists with a man, but this was my mother, and I couldn't stand the thought of my mother and I doing these things. She insisted on it and just over stupid thing. I remember one roof-raiser was over whether I should have my teeth cleaned."

Kemper eventually saved up enough money to move in with a friend, but his mother had a hard time with him leaving. She called him frequently and would drop by unannounced. Whenever Edmund struggled with money, he would temporarily move back into his mother's house. Edmund eventually met a girl at Santa Cruz beach. The two got engaged in March 1973. The engagement was called off after Edmund's second arrest. Her name was never released to the public.

Edmund was once greatly injured during a motorcycle accident. He was awarded $15,000 in a civil suit because of it. He used the money to buy a new car which he started using to pick up female hitchhikers. He started carrying suspicious items around in his car such as: plastic bags, knives, blankets, and handcuffs. He started out by picking the women up and then letting them go. He claimed to have picked up over 150 women before hurting anyone. He often referred to his homicidal urges as "little zappies."

Edmund killed 8 people between May of 1972 and April of 1973. He would pick up female hitchhikers, take them to isolated places, murder them, and take their bodies home. He would then decapitate them, sexually assault the corpses, and dismember them. He claimed that the arguments with his mother are what drove him to look for victims. It's believed that these victims were just surrogates for Edmund's mother and the rage he had toward her.

When all was said and done, Edmund was indicted on 8 counts of first degree murder on May 7, 1973. Edmund had given a detailed confession to the police, so he was advised by his attorney to enter a guilty by reason of insanity plea. He attempted suicide twice while in custody. His trial began on October 23, 1973.

Three different psychiatrists ruled that Edmund was legally sane. This is with keeping his juvenile records in consideration. Edmund admitted to one of them that he was a cannibal, but later recanted that part of his confession.

After deliberating a jury declared Edmund sane and guilty on all charges. This took place on November 8, 1973. He requested for "death by torture." Instead he received 7 years to life for each count to be served concurrently. He was sentenced to serve his time in a California medical facility.

Edmund shared a prison cell block with several other notorious killers like Herbert Mullin and Charles Manson. He placed into the general population. He was once again considered to be a model prioner. He had many hobbies behind bars, like crafting, reading, and narrating audiobooks. He "retired" in 2015 after suffering from a stroke. He was then declared medically disabled.

Edmund gave many interviews that were eventually used in several different documentaries about his story. He was noted as being intelligent and insightful. When asked why he participated in interviews, Edmund replied, "There's somebody out there that is watching this and hasn't done that-- hasn't killed people, and wants to, and rages inside and struggles with that feeling, or is so sure they have it under control. They need to talk to somebody about it. Trust somebody enough to sit down and talk about something that isn't a crime. Doing it isn't just a crime, it's a horrible thing. It doesn't know then to quit and it can't be stopped easily one it starts."

Edmund was first eligible for parole in 1979, but was denied. He was also denied for the next three years. He waived his right to a hearing in 1985. When he was denied for parole in 1988 he said, "Society is not ready in any shape or form for me. I can't fault them for that." He was again denied for parole in 1991 and 1994. He waived his right to a hearing again in 1997 and 2002. He was denied again in 2007. He waived his right again in 2012, and was denied again in 2017. He won't be up for parole again until 2024.

[leegarcia97]

Brain Teasers games for everyone to tease brain

The human brain is said to be as complex as sixty NASA space shuttles, yet most people click here to learn more take the minimal effort to care for their brain.

Brain Teasers are problem-solving games that stimulate and train our brains. There are many different Brain teasers around; anything from board games, to Rubik’s cubes to that literally anything that challenges your brain to think outside of the box.

Most people only allow their brain to receive information by watching television and other mindless activities. When you force your brain to activate its problem solving mechanisms then you actually work out your brain. The brain is sort of like a muscle, and when you work it out regularly the functionality of your cognition increases. Basically this means that the more you use your brain the faster you can think, the faster it creates solutions to your everyday problems.

Brain Teasers are designed to help you give your brain its daily exercise and as a result will allow you to get more out of your mind and quicker cognition. It will also allow your creativity to flow because for most of these games it forces you to think of solutions you normally would not think of. Human are a species of patterns, and as we go through life we naturally begin to create patterns in order to simplify life.

What this does is that it actually lowers the brain activity and lessens the activity on your gray matter. Also because of this fact our attention spans lessens, because your brain sort of goes in autopilot when faced with any conditioned pattern you might have installed through your daily walk.  Most people are unaware of these facts and continue in a downward spiral of less and less brain activity.

Brain Teasers such as the Magic Brain Teaser Metal Puzzle toy is a perfect example of simplicity in training your brain. This specific game will augment your IQ considerably, as even though the device seems simple and straightforward, it will challenge you more than you can imagine. The beauty of these games is that they are inexpensive and can be played by absolutely all ages, making it a perfect gift for anyone. Also the benefits that can be obtained by any of these wonderful trinkets will appreciate in the long run by anyone who uses it.

By stimulating your brain you also begin to do some preventive exercises against illness of old age, such as becoming senile and Alzheimer’s. By maintaining your brain active your memory will absolutely increase all the way into your old age. These toys hardly ever cost more than ten Euros if that much, some of them can be found for one or two Euros which means that you can buy a bunch of these wonderfully challenging Brain Teaser toys. You will never regret doing something as proactive to your own cognition as owning one of these brainy toys, it helps for your mind and to kill time if you happen to have an abundance of that. Do not hesitate and get your own mental exercise routine started by purchasing one of these toys.

[khr-guilded-cage]

I mean a monitored place, like a house in a isolate land, monitored by people loyal to Luna or Harry in a way. Or the Varia, Xanxus deserves revenge on his pathetic foster father.

Maybe still do to 'help' her training, since he doesn't seen to have a problem with Luna becoming Tenth against her will. Fuck Dino, he will learn very soon that he is not Luna's family.

Iemitsu? Either public declare him an enemy of the Vongola and let his enemies hunt him down or just kill him in a painful way.

Nana is mental ill and an awful mother. The crazy bitch will accept any kind of excuse as long her perfect and beloved Iemitsu-kun says so.

Liked the last idea. Just obliviate everyone.

Also, about the Vongola? Fuck. Them.

But really, does that pathetic senile old fool thinks he will be able to get Luna or Harry in his side? That they won't hate him? Just be a 'little angry' and will forgive him with time and probally will attempt to force them to forgive him? He is that naive and delusional? Yes

And he will pay for it

There is no sequel for this history, so I remain upset.

Luna already thrived, your senile old fool.

She has a career, a loving family and friends

She has no delusional crazy whore for a mother or narcissist sociopath mafioso for a father. No fake friends or Guardians for you to use and manipulate.

You don't custody over her (thats the worse thing about Tsuna's story really, his legal guardians begin useless)

She is a grow ass woman with a life, thank you very much.

Not a moldable abused child.

Timoteo would go all 'my dear' and 'young lady' and Harry would have 'my dear boy' flashbacks.

Harry is an professional at manipulative entitled old man that wants full control and acess to his pawn's life and choices.

Dino is a dumb ass and will try to impose familiarity in Luna and her friends would hate him. I'd be furious at him and refuse his attempts at friendship. He helped ruin my life and he can burn in hell for it.

Luna does not need you, she will not help you.

[broken-balance-baby]

some new ideas for the crazy old tyrant au:

bhadra grew up learning how to fight. as much as amita did teach her, she didn’t really know what to do when amita tried to kill her. so after defending herself, she got away with only a bullet that missed her brain, lodged somewhere between her jaw and her cheekbone, and was found by ajay who later zoomed off to get noore to help him. they couldn’t get the bullet away from her jaw without permanently damaging it though, so bhadra has a permanent scar on her face (one for her jaw, another on her cheek) and a story to tell if she ever doesn’t get past a metal detector. 

she helped noore with everything, even though noore’s insistence for her to be a child was prevalent she just... didn’t know how to be one anyway. she helps noore cook, clean, take care of peoples’ wounds, and the way she learns to trust her is when noore truly starts looking at her like a daughter. 

bhadra trained herself. after dealing with the amita incident, she decided she had to be more useful out there, actually learning how to defend herself and fight people, and even though killing weighs heavy on her already traumatized conscience she knows that people don’t survive in a place like this without killing somebody. 

all that trauma, all that pain had caused bhadra to grow up angry. though she says she holds no ill will towards sabal and amita, there is something that pains her when she thinks of them and only starts getting angrier and angrier, especially when she works. she genuinely is angry that ajay became king, enabling pagan’s actions, but she also loves ajay too much to even be mad forever. 

i just want bhadass bhadra, man. 

ajay, cynical and exhausted, presumably out of his mind has an easier time joining pagan’s side. although, yeah, there was a bit of punishment in the middle of it, they had to have talk after talk, fight after fight before finally making up about the mess. he got to lakshmana, learned about his family’s story, and realized that there was no way he could go back to his old life if it meant leaving this. he couldn’t leave his only family left; and so ajay decided to stay. ajay decided to follow him, be like him (accidentally), taking after his sass and his attitude. he was going to be king, he had to act like it, after all. 

eventually, ajay decided to take over without communicating this to pagan. how? simple. pagan was senile. he was also vulnerable enough, and ajay decided that he couldn’t really watch a senile old man rule over kyrat while it’s destroying itself. and so, quietly, he took the reigns of being king, every new order under him still being seen as pagan’s choice, however. the kyrati people are wondering why things have been getting more peaceful lately. 

[safestsephiroth]

#7: Nonagenarian - Tange Shishido (FFXIVWrite2020)

More information on FFXIVWrite can be found here: https://sea-wolf-coast-to-coast.tumblr.com/tagged/ffxivwrite2020+prompt+list

-

Tange Shishido may have hit old age by the standards of most of her peers - those few who still lived - but as she sat in her makeshift dojo, empty for the second straight moon, she pondered what was to come for her.

So few ever came to her for the guidance she sought to deliver. Those who did were so often put off by the standards she imposed, by the demands she made of her students. She was not here to train a passing fancy. She was here to train the dedicated. Train the devoted. Train those who would help Doma.

Now, she had but two she counted as her students. And she had seen neither in quite some time. The first, an absurd ijin with the strangest speech impediment she had ever seen, she worried about. The fool may well have died, somewhere, on some distant shore. The other she worried less about - the mentor to an out-of-control child who refused discipline at all costs.

The mentor followed the child, and had not returned. But she was more than capable of taking care of herself, and Tange believed she would return one day.

Perhaps she was fated to waste away. The war had hit a lull. She would not travel to Eorzea to fight to defend that distant land. She would not leave Doma so vulnerable. Yet in her state, as she hobbled about with every step, one-eyed, practically one-armed and one-legged, she would be of no use in reconstruction. She would only slow the efforts down, she reasoned.

So what was she to do? Shout words of encouragement? Sit and watch the rest of her life as some doddering, senile nonagenarian? No. This was not the life she would lead, all this time later. She needed desperately to find the blade she had pursued for so long.

She needed to find her lost weapon. All her ill fortunes were surely punishment from the Kami for betraying her cherished katana. For using this cheap, nameless stand-in. An ill-fitting replacement she'd had given the most minimal amount of care by an ijin smith. She should not even have accepted that.

It was no surprise she had no students, though. She had attended exhibition after exhibition, tournament after tournament, and every time old age had seen her defeated. The most infuriating thing, to Tange, was that she knew that she would have won each of those duels had she only been younger. Had she only had full function in all her limbs. Had she only avoided the Colossus that had nearly killed her. Left her to crawl for malms with the festering wounds.

Well.

When she was younger, she had hated the elderly that she saw as too lazy and complacent. She had vowed, then, to never be such a woman. A poor excuse for a Samurai. She would not falter the way they had. And what was she doing now?

She shook her head. Rose from the dojo floor, using the nameless, worthless katana in its sheath as a makeshift cane. She knew what to do.

There was one, single lead she had yet to follow. It was dangerous. But she had contacts. She had allies who had pledged to aid her in her time of greatest need. She had friends yet. And she had to finally swallow her pride and accept their help in her most dangerous task yet.

The only place she had been unable to gather information was the Garlean Consulate, after all. If the location of her sword were recorded, then there was nowhere else those records would be that she could ever hope to reach.

[chibivesicle]

What does Kirawus bring to the table in GK?  How much does he know about the gold?

This is something that has been stewing in the back of my mind for sometime and with the cover for volume 18 revealed, I might as well write up a meta on Kirawus, the mysterious Ainu, who has been periodically playing an important role in the hunt for the convicts.  Since he keeps popping up, I have a feeling that he will become more important to the story as things progress. . .

Volume 18 has him running across Lake Akan with Kadokura, and we finally know the colors for his clothing.  He has the fuzzy deerskin shoes similar to Kiro and Asirpa, his clothing is mainly navy blue with white accents, he’s wearing a dark red head scarf and he has a fur cloak (similar to the one Kiro had).  He also has a pair of tenkupe (hand covers) that he seems to wear in the winter.  We can also see his larger hunting knife and tobacco box.

Kirawus was first introduced in the Anehata Shiton arc, in the swamps of the Kushiro area.  He’s in the flashback explanation from Inkarmat, on how he noticed that Tanigaki had Nihei’s rifle with him.  He states he hunted with Nihei more than 10 years ago for brown bears.  Just based on his appearance and knowledge, I’d guess Kirawus is in his 40s.  He’s got crow’s feet around his eyes but without sunscreen at the time it would be harder to estimate age.

This indicates that Kirawus is a very observant individual to immediately recognize that.  Inkarmat describes him as a local since he states Nihei would have killed all the bears in their area based on his skills.

He is then found by Sugimoto and Asirpa.  He’s in the middle of thanking the kamuy for the deer that he just killed.  Asirpa explains the actions to Sugimoto as he performs them from a distance away.  He has placed the inaw kike (wood spiral) offerings on the deer’s antlers and he’s also giving it an offering of tobacco.

We still can’t see his face clearly here but Asirpa explains that in this region they count the deer as kamuy, but here they do indicating different regions chose different kamuy based on how accessible they are.  e.g. yuk where Asirpa lives.

Once he is finished he turns around and nods to recognize their presence.  It is very interesting that the first thing he says to Asirpa isn’t hello.  Instead, he asks her if she uses her bow for hunting.  Kirawus has very long sideburns, and his eyes are very shaded.  We do not see his eyebrows, they are covered by the scarf.

I find it interesting that he talks to Asirpa about hunting rather than greeting her and Sugimoto first.  She goes on to explain to him that rifles are too heavy to use for her so bow and arrow it is.  He tells her that she’s strange hunting that way.  Sugimoto then asks him about the animal killer and he reveals that he knows it must be Tanigaki since the individual who knocked him out when he was alone had Nihei’s rifle.  Since he recognized the rifle he must be the culprit.

For the entire Tanigaki fugitive arc, he will act as the intermediary between the kotan and Sugimoto’s group.  When they catch Tanigaki and take him back to the kotan it is interesting to see that most of the men don’t wear a scarf.  He stands out as one of the few individuals that does here:

He serves as the translator for the Ainu elder and gives them the time limit to find Anehata in 3 days.  This is an indication that in the future, he will serve as a go between for Japanese people with the local Ainu.  Since he went hunting with Nihei, it is hard to tell if he did it for money or if he made it his place in the village to be an official translator.

He immediately shows himself again to be observant while watching Tanigaki and Ogata.  He comes out to offer some breakfast to Ogata.  The fact he pokes the other man with his foot indicates that he’s a rather assertive person, but polite enough to bring the watchman a bowl and Ogata.

Not getting a response, he pulls the cloak off of the traveling bags and then immediately turns to look at the bear cage where Tanigaki is gone.

He very quickly realizes that they’ve escaped so he grabs to other men to chase after them into the swamp.  He gets to see first hand the actions of Anehata and besides being shocked, knows that Tanigaki was not the culprit in the animal violation and murder.  Once they kill the bear, he shows them how they skin it for the send off.  Asirpa comments that she was trained to skin a bear differently.

Kirawus then invites everyone back to the kotan to send off the bear properly and feast.  He then apologizes to Tanigaki for doubting him and then proceeds to try to get him as drunk as possible.  He’s already flushed in the cheeks and also has additional lines under his eyes and he looks relaxed and friendly.  He may even have a bit of a crush on Tanigaki . . . i mean this is Noda after all and that’s how all the boys looked when the cooked the otter meat in a few chapters.

He later tells Tanigaki the story of Nihei’s rifle and the notches in the stock.  Based on Kirawus quoting Nihei, I would take it that he really respected him.

In a way Kirawus told Tanigaki about Nihei and how precious the rifle was to him.  Unfortunately, Tanigaki will continue to struggle to take care of the rifle as indicated by the actions during the Karafuto arc.  The flashback also shows a younger Kirawus wearing his winter clothes, the fur cloak and tenkupe, and his scarf still covering his eyebrows.

After the group have left he serves an important purpose.  He is the one who connects Anehata’s actions with that of the plague of locusts.  His crow’s feet are clearly visible in this panel as he appeals to the gods to not punish them.

The plague of locusts are important as they will drive him to go in search of work later on to help support his kotan.  It is when Hijikata, Nagakura and Ushiyama are in search of Youichirou battousai, the former Joi assassin who fought against the Shinsengumi.  He was also a prisoner at Abarashi and was also tattooed but is clearly suffering from dementia and is working at a fish porter to support himself.

Kirawus is first shown in the background carrying fish and he turns to watch Hijikata, Nagakura and Ushiyama.  It almost looks at though he recognizes them or knows of them.  He’s working hard carrying the fish as indicated by the breath marks but when he turns there’s a little action “ah ha” motion and he’s got a sweat drop as well.  Is the sweat drop from working hard or from determining their identity?

It is hard to tell if he’s interested in them or not.  I would say not at that point, as Ushiyama approaches him for advice on a place to stay he seems surprised.  He then tells them to come with him.  He then offers some smelt to them and explains the habits of the smelt.  The Kushiro generally catch salmon (a bit earlier = when they broke into Abashiri) so the smelt are usually ignored.

He explains that the smelt were willow leaves turned into fish by the kamuy to save the Ainu from starvation.  His kotan is currently being saved by the smelt as they don’t have enough food - which means that the locusts got into their food stores (~1-2 months back in the story line after the Anehata arc).  This food shortage has displaced Kirawus and he’s out to make money, likely to help with getting some more food and supplies for the winter for the kotan.  It is unclear if he has a family of his own or not.  Currently, I would say no - I think he may have a parent alive and maybe some siblings but he didn’t introduce anyone to his wife or kids during the feast.  Does this mean he had a family and they died?  Similar to Wilk’s family through disease or has he never settled down?  He looks old enough that him being single seems a bit unusual. Either way, Hijikata asks him to identify his mystery item.  He is able to quickly tell them that it is part of the beak of a puffin.

He seems happy or excited as he explains that it is a part of the beak.  He then proceeds to give an information dump for the trio of Japanese men.  This part of the beak sheds at the end of each mating season and Nagakura comments he knows a lot about puffins but he explains that since the Japanese don’t hunt puffins they wouldn’t know much about him and that their skins can be used to make clothing.

He goes on to explain that the tufted puffins are in Nemuro to the east.  The plot then reveals Youichirou and based on his behaviors and statements he’s gone senile and has some form of dementia since he can’t answer general questions about himself.  Hijikata reveals that he’s been living under a false name of Doi Shinzou.

It then is clear that Hijikata hired Kirawus to be an assistant and translator for him.  They are shown to visit an Ainu kotan near Nemuro looking for information on him.  The head of the kotan knows about Doi and that for some time he lived in the kotan.

He arrived in the kotan 30 years prior, married a woman and was find until a man 8 year ago took his wife hostage due to a grudge against him.  He killed the man but ended up in Abashiri.  When they escaped, he returned to the kotan to stay with his ill wife until she died and then he went to work at the fishery.  Therefore, Kirawus was able to obtain a lot of information with the help of Kirawus who can talk to older Ainu who have important information but may not be able to transfer the information to non-Ainu etc.

Kirawus isn’t involved in any of the action with Youichirou and instead only witnesses the death of him by HIjikata’s hands ah he delivers the puffin beak back to him, a gift from his wife to remember Nemuro.  Everyone else watches things stoically but Kirawus is shocked and sweating a bit.

Is he sweating b/c he just watched Hijikata kill a man?  Or is he sweating b/c the two puffins fly off together? 

The action then returns to Karafuto and Kirawus doesn’t reappear until action around Lake Akan with Kadokura who is now officially a part of team Hijikata.  Interestingly, the note a the top of the page refers to them as the Ossans club!? so they are the old man club.  I guess this implies that they are two single dudes too lame to hang out with anyone else.

Kirawus is wondering if Hijikata and Ushiyama were victim to the tattooed convict.  Kadokura explains that he doesn’t think the convict could take down the two of them but he’s a smart guy. 

This then leads into the jokes about how due to Kadokura knew his asshole wrinkles better than his face, that of Sekiya who would poison others based on the luck of their draw with things.  He got aconite from outside the prison walls and snuck it in with him. Recall, that this is the same plant that Asirpa uses to make her poisoned arrowheads.  To prevent him from doing it again he had to give Sekiya a full body search every time and it was his job as a guard.  Including his asshole.  Kirawus quickly informs him that he wouldn’t be able to do that without it having adverse effects on himself. 

Poor Kadokura realizes he was looking at his ass for no good reason.  Which based on his poor luck, is just another thing that he accepts due to his unlucky fate.  They begin looking for Hijikata and Ushiyama at Lake Akan asking local fisherman for help.  Kirawus asks the Ainu while Kadokura asks Japanese fisherman.  He then tries to order Kirawus to go talk to more Ainu but he refuses to do what a butthole peeker.

What is most interesting is that Kadokura ignores his comment and gripes about having to be a supervisor . . . Kirawus then talks to Sekiya and he accepts some free smelt from him excitedly not knowing they have been poisoned.  He quickly figures out he’s not a local since he was trying to catch the wrong fish for that time of day.  But he’s more excited to accept the free fish than wonder if he’s the convict.

The two of them then get a ransom note for Sekiya and go out to rescue Hijikata.  As they are running Kadokura proves he lacks the physical fitness and stamina to really try to save Hijikata.  Kirawus then calls him an old man as he can’t run, he states they need to find Nagakura but Kadokura insists on coming up a plan to save Hijikata.  This leads to them bickering about their plan and Kadokura insults Kirawus calling him “Mr. Poverty”.  Kirawus ups his reply by telling Kadokura that he’s just a “jobless and poor” as he is - asshole rummaging man!

Kirawus actually comes up with a decent plan to make the exchange fail on purpose so they can tail Sekiya; and it works until Kadokura’s luck makes Ushiyama pop up and he’s able to escape.  Thankfully Kirawus is able to save the day by noticing that Kadokura found a silkworm cocoon.  He as a local, knows where the silkworm farms are and their times of operation e.g. not working in the winter. They split up to try to figure out where he’s gone to.

Kadokura runs off and Kirawus doesn’t follow his orders.  He ends up in the silkworm poison gamble with Sekiya, Ushiyama dazed, wonders into town and when it is all said and done, Kirawus alone standing on the lake wondering if Kadokura is okay.  Could he not be bothered to follow?  Or did he not want to take the risk to face Sekiya.  He has his rifle with him and his knives so he’s not defenseless.

And that’s the last we’ve seen of Kirawus for the time being.

Kirawus is now linked to 3 of the tattooed convicts, one who he thought was Tanigaki, he assisted in finding Youichirou and now Sekiya.  He was hired by Hijikata for the last two to assist in the search for them and since he’s in the general area of Kushiro for all of these events, I would guess he’s sending some of the money back to the kotan as well as keeping some of it to support himself.

The Lake Akan arc shows that both he and Kadokura are working for Hijikata b/c they need the money.  Kadokura seems to be framing it as doing it out of loyalty to Hijikata but really is that his only reason? 

Kirawus is more interesting, he’s an older Ainu who seems to be walking the line between working with the Japanese for money and still working for the kotan.  He hunted with Nihei and clearly respected him based on his encounter with Tanigaki.  He was immediately curious about Hijikata and Co. in Kushiro and greatly helped them - was this only for money or for something else?  By Lake Akan, he’s clearly working for Hijikata and he makes it clear it is for the money.  I really wonder if he’s only in this for the money or for information on the gold.

Of the Ainu in the series Kirawus is on the older side.  Kiro was 41, and Wilk was likely a year or two older than him.  Inkarmat is around 29/30, Ipopte [Ariko] is likely in his mid 20s at most. Makanakkuru (Asirpa’s uncle) appears to be a younger brother to Asirpa’s mother but I’d put him in his 30s.  Based on his crow’s feet and the joke that he’s an ossan with Kadokura, i’d say Kirawus is mid-late 40s maybe, since joking he’s an old man would actually hurt his feelings. 

Being an older Ainu and someone who clearly has the respect of older leaders as a translator, I would not be surprised if Kirawus knows something about the gold.  If anything he’s the right age to have been one of the people involved in the decision to do something about it.  He has the advantage to speak Japanese so he would be an individual who would be a good person deal with the logistics of gathering and collecting the gold.

Ipopte [Ariko] was a bit too young or too far away to not be on the inside scoop about the tattoos link to gold since his mother had to tell him about it.  I frequently wonder what his connection with the Ainu community is - if someone would be more subversive I would see it to be someone like Kirawus.  He has the trust of Japanese to get them to hire him but he still can travel between kotans and ask serious questions and get honest and straight answers.

Kirawus is a clever guy - he only suffered from the fate of having to work with Kadokura.  He also refused to follow any of Kadokura’s orders - he came up with their plan and he did seem to respect Hijikata and Nagakura but is this b/c they are the ones paying him but Kadokura is a peer instead?  He clearly seems them as two equal hired men. 

I’ve been wondering about the fact that Kirawus has never been shown taking his headscarf/headband (I apologize, I do not know the correct term for this item of clothing).  This was only briefly alluded to during the silent kotan arc.  Suspicious of the men, Asirpa almost takes it off, but then doesn’t here.  I do understand the idea that it is supposed to protect the wearer from harm, hence when Ogata barely hits Tanigaki, Huci puts it on him so that he has the protection of the kamuy.

When she behaves rudely, she runs off to go to the bathroom and Sugimoto feels the need to apologize for her behaviors as he’s even taken his hat off.

I wish I knew more about proper hat, headband, scarf etiquette but I do wonder why Kirawus never takes his off.  When they first meet him, every other man is shown not wearing one here.

I wonder if Kirawus is actually from the Kushiro area originally? Or did he move there at some point in time more than 10 years ago (e.g. to be able to hunt with Nihei).  I can’t help but wonder if he’s some sort of facial scar under it.  Men with distinctive scars are a “thing” in the series.  Sugimoto, Tsurumi, Ogata, Tanigaki, Ipopte [Ariko] and most importantly, Wilk all have very distinct facial scars.  Is Kirawus hiding something?  I’m still stuck on the fact that the first thing he asks Asirpa is about her hunting with a bow.  Yes, she does b/c she can’t hold a rifle but Wilk trained her to use a weapon that is essentially silent and easy for her to use.  Does Kirawus suspect something about her choice of weapon?

There is a part of me who wonders if he’s a partisan ally or sympathizer to the cause . . . he’s doing things in the background.  The most recent appearance of Toni Anji means someone else was likely with him in Noribetsu - Kantaro?  Is Kirawus doing recon in the Ainu community for Hijikata?  Maybe he’s someone in favor of HIjikata’s Republic of Ezo. 

Kiro told Inkarmat that Wilk changed and he was supposed to tell his allies about the gold but then worked with Hijikata.  I can’t help but wonder if Kirawus is one of those allies.  If he is a single man, who does not have a family to support or the family died as a result of the Japanese actions (say disease) it might explain his ability to have few ties to others.  We can all know why Kadokura is a single “old” man, it is b/c of his terrible luck.  But Kirawus doesn’t have terrible luck that we are aware of.  Maybe him blushing over Tanigaki is an indication that he is not a straight character?  The series has several canon characters that are not straight.  He could be one of them. 

Anyhoo, I really like him as a secondary character but I’m a bit suspicious of him.  The fact his headscarf always keeps his eyebrows covered and his eyes shaded makes me think there is more to him than he appears to be.  When will Kirawus appear and what will his purpose be?  Is he serving himself or others?

[chiseler]

The Madness of Ken Russell

Critical thinking in Britain has always taken the view that Ken Russell was a wild, ill-disciplined talent who ultimately went artistically mad: this was also the view in the film industry. The only major disagreement was about when he went from being merely excessive to being balls-out crazy: different parties chose different tipping points.

(WAIT! WHO CARES ABOUT CRITICS?)

(Bear with me: in Russell’s case, the critical consensus serves as a valuable reverse barometer.)

Russell, a suburban boy, former merchant seaman and Catholic convert, made a few brilliant short films with his wife and fellow genius, costume designer Shirley Russell, before landing a job at the BBC’s flagship arts program, Monitor. His stint here taught him to fight, and placed him under the stern patronage of producer Huw Weldon, probably the only authority figure he ever respected. Many good fights were enjoyed. When Russell joined the program, there was an absolute ban on dramatization and re-enactment: the most he was allowed was to show a composer’s hands at the piano. By the time he finished up on the show, he’d managed to twist it out of shape to the point where he’d been allowed to make complete dramatic works in the guise of documentary. These TV plays are highly cinematic, kinetic and bold: like Kubrick, Russell had a love of both stark symmetry and dynamic movement. Control and its opposite.

Russell found actors he liked, including Oliver Reed, with whom he enjoyed a strange kinship: both were heavy drinkers, both affected a casual attitude to their work, though Russell was never ashamed to call himself an artist. Ollie became the John Wayne to Russell’s Ford (in a roiling, nightmare vision of classical cinema).

The point when Russell moved out of TV is the first moment his detractors choose to mark his decline into self-indulgent craziness. He made a modest, eccentric comedy, French Dressing (with mounds of inflatable girls piled up like Holocaust victims) and a wild, idiosyncratic spy movie, The Billion Dollar Brain, a Russophile anti-Bond movie full of flip humor and Eisenstein homages. Critics saw these films as work-for-hire, as perhaps they were, and largely discount them. They are quite brilliant.

Women in Love is counted by others as the last pre-madness film, and its relative sanity can be attributed to the control exerted by its writer-producer Larry Kramer. Russell’s excesses are held in check, it is argued, and the tension between its creators was productive. It’s a very good film, but I find it too sedate in places, though the vivid color and Shirley Russell’s bold designs, and some scenes of genuine wildness and invention stave off actual boredom.

The Music Lovers, his dream project, expanding the TV composer film to the big screen and color, is where a real case for craziness begins to be made: the choice to explore Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality now seems mature rather than lurid, but Ken is undeniably pushing the biopic into unfamiliar terrain: fantasies of decapitation by cannon-shot, a filthy madhouse, a demented honeymoon on a train rocking like the Starship Enterprise, complete with crotch shots. Maybe even worse, from the critics’ viewpoint, Russell, who had directed one TV commercial before walking away from that business in disgust, co-opted the visual language of the shampoo commercial to depict the images conjured by the composer’s music. Russell was in love with romanticism but saw through it too. Ironically, the filmmaker constantly castigated for unsubtlety injected an irony into the film that critics missed, taking the soppiness at face value and not seeing how the concealed satire blended perfectly with the overt caricature and phantasmagoric visions.

Still, the subject was respectable, but with The Devils, Russell managed a film maudit that took decades to be reappraised, and earned him criticism of a uniquely vociferous sort, admittedly in keeping with the hysteria of the film itself. An account – or channelling – of a 16th Century witchcraft trial in France, the movie didn’t so much push as cremate the envelope as far as sex, violence and blasphemy were concerned: Russell, who had converted to Catholicism in his youth, lost his faith while making this one, converting to an animist worship of the Lake District, a religion of his own devising. Well, he did have a substantial ego.

Russell was upsetting: apart from the torture, abuse and madness, the film threw in discordant tonal shifts, creative anachronisms and deployed all of his cinematic influences, which prominently featured Orson Welles, Fellini, Fritz Lang’s German silents, and the musicals of Busby Berkeley, which supplied the top-shots used to depict the rape of Christ on the cross, a scene cut by the censor and lovingly preserved by the director for a future restoration, still explicitly forbidden by the film’s backers, Warner Brothers.

Asides from his crisis of faith and crises in his marriage and his dealings with the studio, Russell was also knocking back the wine. “Better before lunch,” was his prop man’s characterization of the director. Production designer Derek Jarman recounted Russell asking him, “What can I do that’ll really offend the British public?” “Well you could kill a lot of people,” mused Jarman, “but if you really want to upset them you could kill some animals.” A plan was then devised to have King Louis with a musket blowing the heads off the peacocks on his lawn: the birds were to be fitted with explosives at the neck, like Snake Plissken, but Russell backed away from this extreme, even by his standards, approach, and instead had the target practice performed with a man dressed as a blackbird, and the King saying “Bye-bye, blackbird,” and Peter Maxwell-Davies’ remarkable score quoting the popular twenties song, and that infuriated the critics just as much as actual bird-blasting would have.

Less amusingly, Russell was also guilty of unsafe practices involving the naked girls and rowdy extras: the stories here get really dark. As does the film: a demented masterpiece that shows Russell for once engaging with the political: a film about corruption that uses physical disintegration alongside social and spiritual rot.

Just to confuse us even more, Russell made The Boy Friend the same year, an epic music and a miniature at the same time, allowing him to recreate Busby Berkeley’s pixilated fantasias in a seedy English theater. It’s light and charming, but Russell’s version of these qualities was not recognized by the critics, and it’s true that his wit is clodhopping, his whimsy grotesque, everything is overplayed, in your face: but you have to climb aboard the film, get into its spirit, and then it really is a very lovely reversal of the usual nightmare.

The seventies brought more composer films, Mahler and Lisztomania, and also the rock opera Tommy, which earned Russell slightly better reviews as his boisterousness was judged more in keeping with the material (critics, it seemed, could not stand the idea of a filmmaker responding to classical music for its passion and energy, its rock ‘n’ roll qualities, rather than for its assumed civilising effect). Russell got away with showing Ann-Margret humping her cushions while slathered in feculent chocolate sauce, shot Tina Turner with a 6mm lens to uglify her as she thrashed around a steel sarcophagus studded with hypos, and put Elton John on ten-foot platform shoes.

Lisztomania is another movie that’s seen as marking the decline into lunacy: its producer, David Puttnam, hugely impressed by Russell’s flare and his ability to shoot Mahler after half the budget fell through, felt that ultimately the relentless negative press knocked his enfant terrible off-balance. Instead of rolling over in submission, Russell perversely doubled down on the excess and became a parody of himself. And he had already been a parody to begin with (but a parody without an original, unless we take him as a combined burlesque of all his cinematic influences). I’ve always adored Lisztomania, which knows it’s going too far, knows its japes and conceits are ludicrous and indefensible, knows it can’t get away with Roger Daltrey as Liszt and Ringo Starr as the Pope. And just. Doesn’t. Care.

Valentino, which marked the end of the Russell marriage (there would be a bunch more), was dismissed by Russell as the fag-end of his first British period, “everything about it was bored and boring, including me,” but it’s actually rather good. Nureyev as Valentino (well, he was used to being called Rudolph), Russell as Rex Ingram wielding a megaphone the size of a cannon. The twenties, as lived by Rambova, Dorothy Arzner, Fatty Arbuckle, or as dreamt by Mad Ken.

Russell had made his career in Britain at a time when the industry was in collapse: he largely missed the explosion of energy that marked Swinging London, the British new wave, and the only kitchen sink he liked was the one he was always throwing in. Now, the domestic business seemed to have expired of ennui, senile dementia and blood poisoning, but Hollywood beckoned. Russell was bottom of a long list of directors who all turned down Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, a late-mid-life crisis film about sensory deprivation tanks and psychedelics which takes John C. Lilley and fuses him with Dr. Jekyll. Russell took it on despite being forbidden from changing a line of dialogue, but got his revenge by having his actors speak fast -- like Jimmy Cagney fast, not so much throwing away their lines as firing them like tennis balls. And by having them eat at the same time. And by expanding the hallucination sequences until they took over the movie, so that they were all anyone talked about. Druggie audiences would hang out into the lobby, Russell gleefully reported, posting a sentry in the auditorium who would yell “Hallucination!” whenever one was starting, and everyone would rush back in to get a hit of audiovisual delirium.

A bit like Women in Love, Altered States benefited from the creative clash between director and writer (who took his name off the script in protest at Russell’s backhanded fidelity), but the reaction among respectable types was mainly a theatrical eye-roll: the maniac was up to his old tricks. Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins, was next, with she as a Belle de Jour career girl by day, working girl by night, he as an insane sex-obsessed preacher, some forgettable soap opera type as leading man, the whole thing soaked in neon colors and spliced full of Bearsley and Hokusai, whom the American censor duly deleted in horror. “They cut out anything to do with art,” observed the filmmaker.

And that was it for America, save occasional pieces for HBO, progressively more televisual, the locked-off symmetrical winning out over the kinetic. Russell returned to the UK to make theatrical features, and again you heard the cry off “Whatever happened? He used to be good!” Gothic dealt with Byron and the Shelleys and the birth of Frankenstein, and was fruity, literate, dirty good fun. The Rainbow was a return to Women in Love territory, on a lower budget and with less energy and star wattage: Russell declared it his best film since that imagined zenith, and a few critics wanly agreed. The Lair of the White Worm was another journey beyond the pale, thrusting some of the same actors into a ludicrous vampire and snake goddess phallic farrago with Hugh Grant and a kilted Peter Capaldi attempting to snakecharm with bagpipes. A vampirized policeman gets his head impaled on a deco sundial. Marvelous. And the sequence was rounded out with Salome’s Last Dance, which stages Oscar Wilde’s biblical wet dream in a Victorian brothel, an inspired no-budget solution and a film which, unlike Altered States, really respects its words, lingering over them, rolling them salaciously over its tongue. Add in also Ken’s episode of Aria, in which he stages Nessun Dorma as an accident victim’s operating room hallucination, with porn mag model Linzi Drew, a new Russell favorite, in the lead.

Time was running out, the budgets shrinking like a Fu Manchu death chamber, the ceiling pressing down and clearly constraining what Russell could achieve, despite his continuing ambition. Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the BBC scored huge ratings, and he was never asked back. Commercial television’s top arts programme, The South Bank Show, run by Russell’s old screenwriter from Women in Love, Melvyn Bragg, kept him going with more-or-less annual commissions: he’d come full circle, or did when he moved back to home movies, shot in his garden or in his favorite Soho pub, which he hoped to “flog on the internet.” The symmetry of the career, its ourobousness, is more pleasing to contemplate than it must have been to live, though the last marriage lasted and was happy, and the ever-moving critical pendulum had reached the place where people were starting to say that The Devils and some of the other seventies work was really good, actually.

I can admire everything up until the final home movies, and maybe I’ll come round to them: Russell was right to admire all his earlier films. He spent decades more or less brushing off French Dressing, then saw it on TV and thought, “This is a masterpiece!” which it is. But only a minor one compared to what was those around it. Seaside-postcard humor, musical comedy performances, pop art imagery, Wagnerian and Stravinskian soundtracks, a defiant rejection of subtlety. “I don’t believe there’s any value in understatement […] This is the age of kicking people in the balls and telling them something and getting a reaction […] Picasso was not restrained, Mahler was not restrained!’” His detractors thought he should be, possibly in a straitjacket and with megadoses of Thorazine, but Russell was a volcanic eruption in cinematic form, a purple-faced tyrant of the Stroheim school, a demonic force driven to possess reels of celluloid and make them glow in the dark with a sugar rush radiation that has yet to decay. He was too big, too vulgar, too beautiful, too nasty and too beautiful for a national cinema mired in lethargic literary-theatrical respectability. “The visual arts have never had a foothold in England,” he sneered.

Ken!

Life is not a Ken Loach movie. It is a Ken Russell movie.

by David Cairns

[bert19900321-blog]

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[tanzrielle]

As usual, Russell sat in his cave quietly. He was planning on how to retrieve the Bronze flight artifact that the Twilight dragon asked of him. He couldn’t be seen. That would be hard, considering the Collective would be fighting Riku, who intended to use it. He wasn’t sure what the artifact did exactly, but he needed to take it from him without being seen.

The artifact would most likely be wanted by the Collective. He had to take it from them, too. He didn’t want to become enemies with everyone, and he got the feeling that his actions were going to decide that.

He still had his suspicions. But Xoronia offered him a chance at his  goals, and it was a risk he was willing to take. He couldn’t second guess himself now. He already made the deal. He still needed to tell Alphonse, too. He knew that wouldn’t go over well.

Alphonse had nearly perished at the maws of Twilight dragons many times during the Cataclysm. He knew the auburn haired man would not approve. At all. But maybe he’d understand if he explained it to him? He didn’t want to hurt Alphonse. He didn’t want to become his enemy. He doubted it would work, but he had to try.

Quiet footsteps entered the cavern as Russell’s gaze landed on none other than Alphonse himself. His heart sank, he wasn’t ready yet. “Hello, Alphonse.” He greeted.

“Hi. I was just coming by to make sure you weren’t frozen again.” Alphonse quipped.

“I already apologized for that, Alphonse.”

“I know, I just wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again.”

Russell sighed. “Well, it hasn’t. “

“Good...Now uh. About your experiment. I ran out of ingredients and also failed to catch a whelp that was bratty enough.” Alphonse said, sitting in the snow.

“Oh, you were serious about catching an ill mannered whelp.”

“Absolutely.”

“Well. As for you ingredients, you don’t have to worry anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve met someone who can help us....Significantly.” The dragon said, keeping his eyes trained on Alphonse.

“Oh. Well then....Who is it?” Alphonse asked.

“She is another dragon. Now....Don’t get riled up.....” Russell began.

Alphonse just stared. “ Why would I get riled up?”

“She’s...A Twilight dragon.” Russell answered, bracing himself for Alphonse’s reaction.

And boy was there a reaction. Alphonse practically bristled as he glared at Russell. “ Who is it really.” He hissed. The air began to warm as Russell didn’t respond. Alphonse was at a loss for words as he glared angrily at the dragon.

“She isn’t like the others.” Russell spoke calmly.

“AND HOW DO YOU KNOW!? DID SHE SAY THINGS YOU WANTED TO HEAR?” Alphonse shouted, leaning forward.

Russell narrowed his eyes. “Her mind is her own. She and I nearly came to blows after she came here, but I can’t disagree with her cause.”

“SHE WAS HERE?”

“Yes.”

“ARE YOU GOING SENILE? BE HONEST.”

“No, Alphonse.”

“TWILIGHT DRAGONS ARE MONSTERS. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS.”

“Because I want to see the same future she does. I want to see a future where dragons aren’t weak and pathetic like we are now. “ Russell explained.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this. Maybe you should have stayed asleep.” Alphonse snarled as he rose to his feet.

“I don’t want to be your enemy, Alphonse. Calm down.”

“SORRY IF I’M AGAINST WORKING WITH A FLIGHT THAT TRIED TO DESTROY THE WORLD. NOT TO MENTION I’M JUST A LITTLE IFFY CONSIDERING HOW I WAS CAUGHT AND DRAINED OF MY ENERGY MULTIPLE TIMES BY A FEW LIKE I WAS A FUCKIN JUICE BOX OR SOME SHIT.”

“I know what happened to you, Alphonse. Calm down.”

“NO. NOTHING GOOD COMES FROM TWILIGHT DRAGONS. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE MY ENEMY, STOP TALKING TO HER. SHE’S USING YOU.” Alphonse nearly shrieked. He was quivering in rage at this point. The snow and ice in the cavern was beginning to melt and drip from the ceiling. Alphonse was emitting a lot of heat, for someone so small. Compared to Russell, at least.

Russell knew this wasn’t going to end well. He kept silent, staring at his dragonsworn who locked his gaze with his. It was hard. He didn’t want to hurt Alphonse. But he wasn’t going to cooperate.

And....He didn’t want him to get in the way, now did he?

“Then....I’m sorry it has to be this way.” Russell said finally. He didn’t even give Alphonse a chance to speak before he began to drain magic from the smaller man without so much as a movement. The only visible indication it was happening was the beam of blue energy that came from Alphonse’s chest, streaming into Russell’s muzzle.

But it wasn’t just a simple draining spell. He was revoking his blessing, taking away the power he had bestowed upon him several years ago. Alphonse turned pale as his body locked up and pain prevented him from even seeing properly. He forced a hand to his chest, where it hurt most. “S.....STOP IT. WHAT.....ARE YOU DOING!?” He forced out.

“It’s for your own good, Alphonse.” Russell replied.

Alphonse wasn’t able to manage anymore words out. It felt like his soul was being ripped from his body. It may as well be. He had never felt more hurt and betrayed in his life. He trusted Russell. He believed in him. He killed his own father for him when they first met. Several people, actually. All of them prepared to kill Russell and his current partner. He burned all of them.

Was it all meaningless now? It seemed that way.

Alphonse collapsed into the snow, trembling and gasping for air as the dragon finished taking back his blessing. He still couldn’t see straight. His body ached with a level of pain he thought he’d never feel. He couldn’t move. Even breathing was difficult. The tears that formed in his eyes stung his skin.

“Wh....Why.....?” He managed weakly. It was barely audible.

“Alphonse. I’m sorry.” Russell said, warping a mana potion into existence next to his former apprentice. He’d need it to help recover. Rising to his feet, he stepped past Alphonse an left the cavern without another word.

Alphonse didn’t reach for the potion immediately. He was still in shock, and he hurt too much to even consider moving. He only had the strength to whimper.

“D........D...ad....”

Alphonse blacked out shortly after.

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Striding Place

Gertrude Atherton (1896)

Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse-shooting. To stand propped against a sod fence while his host's workmen routed up the birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth the killing. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his estates in the South. The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills.

It had been a bad day. A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it fairly sprang beneath the feet. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been small. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of a new-minded débutante who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above them.

But it was no one of these things that sat on Weigall's mind as, when the other men went up to bed, he let himself out of the castle and sauntered down to the river. His intimate friend, the companion of his boyhood, the chum of his college days, his fellow-traveller in many lands, the man for whom he possessed stronger affection than for all men, had mysteriously disappeared two days ago, and his track might have sprung to the upper air for all trace he had left behind him. He had been a guest on the adjoining estate during the past week, shooting with the fervor of the true sportsman, making love in the intervals to Adeline Cavan, and apparently in the best of spirits. As far as was known there was nothing to lower his mental mercury, for his rent-roll was a large one, Miss Cavan blushed whenever he looked at her, and, being one of the best shots in England, he was never happier than in August. The suicide theory was preposterous, all agreed, and there was as little reason to believe him murdered. Nevertheless, he had walked out of March Abbey two nights ago without hat or overcoat, and had not been seen since.

The country was being patrolled night and day. A hundred keepers and workmen were beating the woods and poking the bogs on the moors, but as yet not so much as a handkerchief had been found.

Weigall did not believe for a moment that Wyatt Gifford was dead, and although it was impossible not to be affected by the general uneasiness, he was disposed to be more angry than frightened. At Cambridge Gifford had been an incorrigible practical joker, and by no means had outgrown the habit; it would be like him to cut across the country in his evening clothes, board a cattle-train, and amuse himself touching up the picture of the sensation in West Riding.

However, Weigall's affection for his friend was too deep to companion with tranquillity in the present state of doubt, and, instead of going to bed early with the other men, he determined to walk until ready for sleep. He went down to the river and followed the path through the woods. There was no moon, but the stars sprinkled their cold light upon the pretty belt of water flowing placidly past wood and ruin, between green masses of overhanging rocks or sloping banks tangled with tree and shrub, leaping occasionally over stones with the harsh notes of an angry scold, to recover its equanimity the moment the way was clear again.

It was very dark in the depths where Weigall trod. He smiled as he recalled a remark of Gifford's: "An English wood is like a good many other things in life—very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be—what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days."

Weigall strolled along, smoking, and thinking of his friend, his pranks—many of which had done more credit to his imagination than this—and recalling conversations that had lasted the night through. Just before the end of the London season they had walked the streets one hot night after a party, discussing the various theories of the soul's destiny. That afternoon they had met at the coffin of a college friend whose mind had been a blank for the past three years. Some months previously they had called at the asylum to see him. His expression had been senile, his face imprinted with the record of debauchery. In death the face was placid, intelligent, without ignoble lineation—the face of the man they had known at college. Weigall and Gifford had had no time to comment there, and the afternoon and evening were full; but, coming forth from the house of festivity together, they had reverted almost at once to the topic.

"I cherish the theory," Gifford had said, "that the soul sometimes lingers in the body after death. During madness, of course, it is an impotent prisoner, albeit a conscious one. Fancy its agony, and its horror! What more natural than that, when the life-spark goes out, the tortured soul should take possession of the vacant skull and triumph once more for a few hours while old friends look their last? It has had time to repent while compelled to crouch and behold the result of its work, and it has shrived itself into a state of comparative purity. If I had my way, I should stay inside my bones until the coffin had gone into its niche, that I might obviate for my poor old comrade the tragic impersonality of death. And I should like to see justice done to it, as it were—to see it lowered among its ancestors with the ceremony and solemnity that are its due. I am afraid that if I dissevered myself too quickly, I should yield to curiosity and hasten to investigate the mysteries of space."

"You believe in the soul as an independent entity, then—-that it and the vital principle are not one and the same?"

"Absolutely. The body and soul are twins, life comrades—sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, but always loyal in the last instance. Some day, when I am tired of the world, I shall go to India and become a mahatma, solely for the pleasure of receiving proof during life of this independent relationship."

"Suppose you were not sealed up properly, and returned after one of your astral flights to find your earthly part unfit for habitation? It is an experiment I don't think I should care to try, unless even juggling with soul and flesh had palled."

"That would not be an uninteresting predicament. I should rather enjoy experimenting with broken machinery."

The high wild roar of water smote suddenly upon Weigall's ear and checked his memories. He left the wood and walked out on the huge slippery stones which nearly close the River Wharfe at this point, and watched the waters boil down into the narrow pass with their furious untiring energy. The black quiet of the woods rose high on either side. The stars seemed colder and whiter just above. On either hand the perspective of the river might have run into a rayless cavern. There was no lonelier spot in England, nor one which had the right to claim so many ghosts, if ghosts there were.

Weigall was not a coward, but he recalled uncomfortably the tales of those that had been done to death in the Strid. Wordsworth's Boy of Egremond had been disposed of by the practical Whitaker; but countless others, more venturesome than wise, had gone down into that narrow boiling course, never to appear in the still pool a few yards beyond. Below the great rocks which form the walls of the Strid was believed to be a natural vault, on to whose shelves the dead were drawn. The spot had an ugly fascination. Weigall stood, visioning skeletons, uncoffined and green, the home of the eyeless things which had devoured all that had covered and filled that rattling symbol of man's mortality; then fell to wondering if any one had attempted to leap the Strid of late. It was covered with slime; he had never seen it look so treacherous.

"This striding place is called the 'Strid,'     A name which it took of yore; A thousand years hath it borne the name,     And it shall a thousand more."

He shuddered and turned away, impelled, despite his manhood, to flee the spot. As he did so, something tossing in the foam below the fall—something as white, yet independent of it—caught his eye and arrested his step. Then he saw that it was describing a contrary motion to the rushing water—an upward backward motion. Weigall stood rigid, breathless; he fancied he heard the crackling of his hair. Was that a hand? It thrust itself still higher above the boiling foam, turned sidewise, and four frantic fingers were distinctly visible against the black rock beyond.

Weigall's superstitious terror left him. A man was there, struggling to free himself from the suction beneath the Strid, swept down, doubtless, but a moment before his arrival, perhaps as he stood with his back to the current.

He stepped as close to the edge as he dared. The hand doubled as if in imprecation, shaking savagely in the face of that force which leaves its creatures to immutable law; then spread wide again, clutching, expanding, crying for help as audibly as the human voice.

Weigall dashed to the nearest tree, dragged and twisted off a branch with his strong arms, and returned as swiftly to the Strid. The hand was in the same place, still gesticulating as wildly; the body was undoubtedly caught in the rocks below, perhaps already half-way along one of those hideous shelves. Weigall let himself down upon a lower rock, braced his shoulder against the mass beside him, then, leaning out over the water, thrust the branch into the hand. The fingers clutched it convulsively. Weigall tugged powerfully, his own feet dragged perilously near the edge. For a moment he produced no impression, then an arm shot above the waters.

The blood sprang to Weigall's head; he was choked with the impression that the Strid had him in her roaring hold, and he saw nothing. Then the mist cleared. The hand and arm were nearer, although the rest of the body was still concealed by the foam. Weigall peered out with distended eyes. The meagre light revealed in the cuffs links of a peculiar device. The fingers clutching the branch were as familiar.

Weigall forgot the slippery stones, the terrible death if he stepped too far. He pulled with passionate will and muscle. Memories flung themselves into the hot light of his brain, trooping rapidly upon each other's heels, as in the thought of the drowning. Most of the pleasures of his life, good and bad, were identified in some way with this friend. Scenes of college days, of travel, where they had deliberately sought adventure and stood between one another and death upon more occasions than one, of hours of delightful companionship among the treasures of art, and others in the pursuit of pleasure, flashed like the changing particles of a kaleidoscope. Weigall had loved several women; but he would have flouted in these moments the thought that he had ever loved any woman as he loved Wyatt Gifford. There were so many charming women in the world, and in the thirty-two years of his life he had never known another man to whom he had cared to give his intimate friendship.

He threw himself on his face. His wrists were cracking, the skin was torn from his hands. The fingers still gripped the stick. There was life in them yet.

Suddenly something gave way. The hand swung about, tearing the branch from Weigall's grasp. The body had been liberated and flung outward, though still submerged by the foam and spray.

Weigall scrambled to his feet and sprang along the rocks, knowing that the danger from suction was over and that Gifford must be carried straight to the quiet pool. Gifford was a fish in the water and could live under it longer than most men. If he survived this, it would not be the first time that his pluck and science had saved him from drowning.

Weigall reached the pool. A man in his evening clothes floated on it, his face turned towards a projecting rock over which his arm had fallen, upholding the body. The hand that had held the branch hung limply over the rock, its white reflection visible in the black water. Weigall plunged into the shallow pool, lifted Gifford in his arms and returned to the bank. He laid the body down and threw off his coat that he might be the freer to practise the methods of resuscitation. He was glad of the moment's respite. The valiant life in the man might have been exhausted in that last struggle. He had not dared to look at his face, to put his ear to the heart. The hesitation lasted but a moment. There was no time to lose.

He turned to his prostrate friend. As he did so, something strange and disagreeable smote his senses. For a half-moment he did not appreciate its nature. Then his teeth clacked together, his feet, his outstretched arms pointed towards the woods. But he sprang to the side of the man and bent down and peered into his face. There was no face.

[somuchforprayer]

🍳 Headcanons

Childhood:

Ian sees his birth mother get shot in front of him; as she fell forward the 1 Rand coin dropped from her pocket, he picked it up and pocketed it before the men could notice. Due to his birth mother being killed in front of him, he has feel a need, an urge to have a mother or mother-figure in his life.

Roman’s rabbit at the orphanage was a white rabbit, which he named Floyd. Alice was the only who knew he named his rabbit.

When Ian found out he was going to be formally adopted by Ellen Briggs, on his first flight to America he cried himself to sleep out of relief and joy. He finally had a mother and he was going somewhere safe.

Icecream. TBA*

Roman’s favourite sweet is white chocolate. He found loads of it in a cupboard one time as a child in an unattended store cupboard in the orphanage and ate so much, he felt sick.**

Adulthood:

Roman has a male black rabbit called Bobby. He picked the rabbit up from rescue as a kit, once he was old enough to be taken from his mother. Roman picked him up four days before Remi flew out to Afghanistan.

As an adult, Roman always keeps some white chocolate in a coolbox and takes it with him, whether travelling by car, motorbike or other mode of transport.**

Roman also likes strawberries, fudge and treacle toffee. Remi gives Roman treacle toffee if he is annoying her, to shut up him on purpose.

Post-ORION:

TBA*

Remi, Back from the Dead:

Usually if Remi becomes ill she wouldn’t let the illness stand in her way however once she is too ill to function and has to stay in bed. As stubborn and resilient she is, Remi attempts to resist when Roman and Shepherd tell her they are going to carry on planning minor details whilst she rests up. Remi is frustrated and annoyed but can’t walk the length of her bedroom without being overcome with nausea. Oscar is on “chicken soup” duty. If he’s not with the Viper Kings, Roman spends every spare moment checking on Remi, even though she insists she’s fine - much to Oscar’s annoyance. Roman brings her cups of tea, and asks her how she is and lets her know if he and Shepherd have made any progress/changes to the plan. One night, Remi had been particularly bad so Roman stayed with her for most of the night. Shepherd found him the next morning, fast asleep in the chair besides Remi’s bed.**

Forming the Plan:

In the mornings Roman makes himself, Remi and Shepherd cups of tea or coffee so they have something hot to perk them up as the three of them go over plans for their next move (the tattoos) with Remi infiltraiting the FBI as a Jane Doe. It is something he likes doing, often roping Oscar in to make the family breakfast. It’s actually one of the rare occasions that Shepherd, Remi and Roman could be called a “normal” family. Shepherd sits in a chair with a hot cup of tea on the side of her desk, still sleepy from having just woken up so she’s a little bit quiet. She and Roman share a smile talking over blueprints and plans, while Remi is jotting down points they may have missed taking a drink of her tea, as does Roman.**

Tattoo Designs:

TBA*

Training Remi:

TBA*

Kat and the Viper Kings:

TBA*

2x01, In Night So Ransomed Rogue:

TBA*

2x02, Heavy Fiery Knot:

TBA*

2x03, Hero Fears Imminent Rot:

TBA*

2x04, If Beth:

TBA*

2x05, Condone Untidiest Thefts:

TBA*

2x06, Her Spy’s Harmed:

TBA*

2x07, Resolves Eleven Myths:

TBA*

2x08, We Fight Deaths on Thick Lone Waters:

TBA*

2x09, We Fight Deaths on Thick Lone Waters:

TBA*

2x10, Nor I Nigel, AKA Leg in Iron:

TBA*

2x11, Droll Autumn, Unmutual Lord:

TBA*

2x12, Devil Never Even Lived:

TBA*

2x13, Name Not One Man:

TBA*

2x14, Borrow Or Rob:

TBA*

2x15, Draw O Caesar, Erase a Coward:

TBA*

2x16, Evil Did I Dwell Lewd I Did Live:

TBA*

2x17, Solos:

TBA*

2x18, Senile Lines:

TBA*

2x19, Regard a Mere Mad Rager:

TBA*

2x20, In Words, Drown I:

TBA*

2x21, Mom:

Even though Roman said he hated Jane because she ZIP’d him, still loves her with all his heart. He just feels betrayed that he was lied to by the one person he thought he could trust. Roman may forgive Jane one day; but it is going to take a lot to rebuild trust between the siblings.

Roman sides with Shepherd during the assault on the New York Office because he wanted to get out of the cell he had been kept in since Jane “brought him in”. He is still brooding over the fact Jane wiped his memories. His aim misses Jane and Kurt on purpose, to warn them to get out of the way or be killed by other Sandstorm members.

2x22, Lepers Repel:

TBA*

*To be written. This will be updated as I see fit. **Written in collaboration with @in-night-so-ransomed-rogue

[clans-of-the-sea]

About the Black Skies

Welcome to everything you’ll need to know in this crash-course pile of information.

The cats of the Black Skies believe they were gathered on the island by the Call of the Moon; something that supposedly calls to all of them who live there and bond them as Kinfolk.

Their religion is rather dark when it comes down to it, so be warned now that there isn’t all things pretty ahead!

This group believes in the spirit called Scattered Scales, who can bless a cat with the coveted Nine Lives a leader should get. However in the history of the Black Skies, as far as the cats know no leader has ever held more then seven. The extra lives are still a gift, and their belief remains that a feline cannot actually die of any natural causes or illnesses and must actually be murdered life by life and think one can live forever if they were careful. 

(Which could be why they don’t believe a cat doesn’t get nine lives, if they happened to lose one to illness or age, but lets digress)

Those born in the clowder don’t really bond with their kits until after its shown they will live past their Blood Royal. They don’t name them, they don’t spend much time with them other then feeding them and making sure they live long enough for their Name Day. If a new member gets a bit hysterical or too close, they are separated, and possibly exiled. 

It all starts at kithood, where young are not named until they are large enough to be ushered to the nearby small town. Young cats are sent and watched over to beg for food until a No-Fur names them. Watchmen are sent to keep track of the kits to make sure they are actually named, and not that they made one up just to return home early. Kits are not allowed to return home in sunlight, and sometimes have to wait days before being named.

If a kit returns home with a name an older member has, the older member is sent back out until they have a new name. Unless that older member is of course in the Sky Court; in which case obviously that kit has to wait until they get a new name. Though prettier leaders have had kits abandoned.

After they are named (or renamed, for those who are older and must revisit the town) the young cats of the same litter start training immediately. They are chosen by older cats called Clouds and are made Shadows. If a kit does not obtain a patron, they are deemed a disgrace and chased out to live with the No-Furs. If a kit has two possible patrons, the two Clouds fight each other and the loser is given a kit who is left unchosen to mentor as punishment for losing. The runt of a litter, the one who looks easiest to die, is called the Easy Blood.

After that it may as well be a betting pool. The Clouds train the kits a bit harshly after awhile, because before they’re allowed to be full Kinfolk the littermates are made to fight one another. Casualties happen far more often then not, there is even a term for the first kit to die, the First Blood, and their killer is usually given a minor status among the other young cats. It’s almost an unspoken rule that only one kit per litter is ever really expected to make it to Kinfolk. 

Since sires and dams are not exactly allowed to get attached to their kits, usually Clouds are the first parental figures to the kits and do their best to nurture and care for them while brainwashing them to their ways.

The cats do in fact gamble. Bets are made on the kits by Clouds and family members and other kinfolk alike. Catching ones prey for the other is a common bet, but the more confident exchange favors. Favors are a very big deal to the clowder, and not following through when called upon is a death sentence. While favors have ranged from killing someone for each other, training their kit even if they’re a runt, or even having their kits for them, to exiling yourself for a moon, you need to follow through.

Usually if a litter does have more survivors, if its two they are split up - one is sent to the mainland, deemed a Forgotten Blood, and put on a mission (getting there via fishing boat or ferry) until their littermate, who has the less injuries and is then called the High Blood, dies. Even when the High Blood dies and the Forgotten Blood returns they are still referred to as ‘Forgotten Blood’, as they are not allowed to forget they are only allowed to return because their sibling died.

The winner, the High Blood, is celebrated for their winning, and treated amazingly well for about a moon before being assimilated back into a normal life that in’t exactly perfect.

The Forgotten Blood cat is taken with a Watchmen until they dock, and are given a mission directed by the Waxing Moon. Some are supposed to recruit loners, or convert them to their religion. Other are sent on murder missions of formerly exiled cats. Even more some are sent to find New Blood, and kitnap or make new kits to send to the island.

New Blood is such an important part of the clowders life that if a Rearer (queen) has a weak litter of kits and needs to nurse New Bloods, she is expected to give up all but one of her litter in exchange to take care of the New Bloods. New Bloods are pitted against each other after their training as well, but if they have more then one survivor they are all welcomed to stay on the island.

When a cat swears personal loyalty to someone in the clowder (as Watchmen will do to the Waxing Moon, etc) they bow and expose their necks to ask if the other trusts them. The Moon Ranks under the Moon Leader are asked to do this to their leader when promoted, called upon; or when another is chosen for exile, death, or returning to the clowder.

It is also a custom to expose the back of your neck when giving a report to both express honesty and for trust.

When asking permission to do something, you roll onto your back and expose the belly as you would when you want a No-Fur to pet and name you. Exposing your soft spot that can be torn into easily makes the higher rank seem larger then you, and reminds you that they are the sky and you are the earth.

When you do like someone you can date, which is as much as asking to do tasks and patrols with that other kinfolk alone. There is a marriage type ceremony where the Moon Leader names you a couple to the whole clowder during the full moon before Scattered Scales and you can take time off (like a honeymoon) to leave the island. If you do not return by the New Moon, you will be tracked down ad punished.

There are bonds like friendships where you can ask to be Bonded to someone. Friendships, platonic relationships, love interest get bonded by the Night Consort, who does a ceremony during the New Moon.

If your affections go to someone who is already dating, you can challenge your opponent and possibly kill them. It does not mean you will win your love, but more often then not strength is admired and they sway to your side.

An elder lives long because they are strong, they are special and should be admired.  Unless they become a burden; senile, injured and unable to contribute to the greater good - thats when they are led from the camp and abandoned to the No-Furs.

It is said on the night of Solar Eclipse when the Night takes full power, an offering must be made to this mistress of darkness. Since this is a group trained to fight, on nights like these there is a Battle Royal between the strongest members. It is an honor to be chosen, an honor to win, and an honor for many to die. The more scars and closer to the edge of death the survivors carry the  more rewarding Scattered Scales becomes.  It is also said on Red Moons, blood must be sacrificed, and another Royal is held.

It is also believed the flesh of the dead should be eaten, so that Scattered Scales can consume the lost soul easier without going through the body.

Death is not seen as a bitter end; all life and death and the cycle of it is seen as a gift given by Scattered Scales. The afterlife told to all is amazing. No illness, no injury stays, you're peak in health, and you can choose someone still alive to protect and influence the life around them. After doing this, and assisting the living, you’re allowed to reincarnate into a more hopeful life.

Burials are a private matter for those who considered them close to the deceased and the Crescent Moon. They bury the cat away from the ruins; their mentor and what family they had themselves are there to say good bye. The rest of the kinfolk stay in camp and listen to a nice speech about the departed made by the Moon Leader.

For the young mass burials like those after Blood Royal, its a hushed traditions. Often the Crescent Moon buries them alone, and Clouds don’t always show up to say goodbye. On rare occasion their dam says farewell. The speech in camp is short, and routine to the point older members hardly listen. Then the celebration for the winner is held and over powers any feeling of loss.

[thxnder-sxrge]

“ ...for my family, me and my little brother live in my grandmother’s Herb Shop near the end of town right across the alley where there’s always trouble brewing with street punks and the common school delinquents. “ he explains

“ When I was little,my father,a man full of hate and spite killed my mother before my very eyes while my brother was only just 4 years old, hiding behind a closet when that happened. She tried to protect us both before my father could get to us so he left and soon he’d became a murderous Assassin by joining a Gang that goes by the Name of The Black Devils. So me and my brother ran off “ he said.

“ some of which my relatives from my mom’s side of the family wanted nothing to do with me and my brother after hearing what happened so they ridiculed and pointed their blame on us both for being sons of a murder, with no place to go my grandmother was the only one that took us in regardless for my father’s crimes he committed athough... she’s very strict and always has me and my little brother working hard to maintain the family business but..” he looks at his arm, clenching his Palm into a fist—squeezes it tightly.

“ as years gone by, the old lady herself have been getting senile, forgetful at times to the point things were looking grim and with the business being bad and all with those thugs and thieves running amok, we were gonna lose the only home we had left so I became a Shinobi to earn whatever I could “ He looked at her and places his hand on his chest as he needed to breathed for a second before speaking once more

”I’ve trained and trained so hard to protect them both from any harm to come but then one night it happened..” he said “ my father he saw what I become and with only hatred and rage in my heart for all the things he’s done we’ve fought. However I became careless and had my heel cut off doing so, with that I wasn’t able to balance myself and lost.” He said

“ afterwards my training was stopped for a while when my brother had told me about my grandmother and that she had fallen ill and now is constantly fighting for her life in bed. So I spent most of my time taking care of her and running the shop but with my bad foot I can’t fight as much like before so money was running low and we couldn’t afford both medical bills and the warrant so I got Desperate and decided to take the job as an assassin just to pay off whatever we’d owe “ finally after all that he was done he looks at her with his one good eye, glancing to the side and spoke “ so now you know”

Meeting the Strongest Shinobi

That’s when a boulder lands right next to where he was hiding. Even through all his tricks, she did figure out his patterns of movement, and found it easy to stop his plan from continuing.

“Why don’t you come say it to my face then?” She retorted, before smirking.

[broodyauthor62]

This the first chapter from my first book “Baker’s Dozen: a Fantasy Novel”. Available quite cheaply on Kindle worldwide.

Prologue: Goin’ Over Town

 In a reality not far from our own...

 Paul Baker Colson speaks:

 I was heading down Cedric Street, “goin’ over town”, as my late mother would have put it, and stopped on the bridge. It was a hot, extremely muggy afternoon and I was surprised to see a large number of people (mostly men and boys) fishing from the bridge and the shores of the river. This was strange: the Clarke River is not a clean stream; its dark waters are polluted by a paper-mill upstream. “Town” water was taken from Lake Ontario, not the river.

 I quit counting the catches at 30. Most of the fish seemed to be bass. I looked west, down-river, and something caught my eye. Amid the coloured T-shirts and shorts, a spot of black-on-white showed: a figure sitting on one of the benches by the river. It appeared to be an old man, black from broad-brimmed hat, severe suit, and pants, white from shirt and skin.

 I felt drawn to this figure... I couldn’t explain why at the time. I took the stairs to the shore at the south end of the bridge. I walked down the boardwalk to where the man was sitting, dodging excited fishermen as I went.

 The oldster sat quite still, a large, dark green book on his lap. He looked, I remember now, like the old-time preachers you would see in Westerns. Oddly, something made me uneasy. This was even before I had a good look at him. His shirt was bright white and the wrinkled skin on his hands was hardly a shade darker. Looking at him, I could sense, somehow, his great age and youthful intensity at the same time. These two conflicting emanations seemed to cause me to want to talk to him. His hat’s brim shielded his eyes from mine as I stood before him.

 To his left sat a teenager in a Jays’ baseball cap, white shirt, blue jeans, and black high-tops. I couldn’t see his eyes, either. He sat very still, his dark hair forming a duck-tail at the back of his cap. He sat so still I wasn’t even sure he was breathing.

 The elder of the two tilted his head back, gazed at me with pale blue eyes, and croaked: “Have you read from the Book?”

 I figured he meant the Bible; probably that was what he was holding on his lap.

 “I’ve cracked it open from time-to-time,” I answered, glibly.

His eyes hardened at that.

 “Not this Book! This is that which you can’t handle lightly!” he hissed loudly.

 His breath stank of decayed fish. The young man flinched at the outburst. Then he looked up at me.

 Bad drugs, I thought. His skin was paler than the old man’s... if that was possible. His eyes were brown, dilated, blank, and staring.

 “Darrel, here,” said the senior in a more-normal tone, “has read from the Book. He is one with us!”

 “Darrel” flinched again.

 “My name is Ezra Marsh, out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts.”

 “Paul Baker Colson.”

 Okay, I thought, Introductions made. Still, I felt I was getting out of my depth with this conversation so I had to ask: “Okay. So what is this book?”

 “The Hymns of Dagon!” he answered, triumphantly.

 “Dagon,” I repeated. “Who’s he?”

 The wasted face brightened.

 “He is the Render the Seas! The Bringer of the bounty! The Father of the multitude, the Deep Ones!”

 He became agitated, again; he almost fell flat on his face as he snarled the last sentence out.

 I grabbed his slender shoulders to steady him. His suit was damp with sweat. I looked around but the anglers hadn’t seemed to notice his outburst. He had staggered up off the bench; I steadied him back down. Darrel had jerked several times during the man’s rant.

 “I apologize for my zeal... but if you knew... if you knew ... ,” he spoke, thickly; he sounded like he was losing his voice. For a moment, I thought the old guy would have a stroke right there, what with the heat. After a moment, though, he seemed to calm down and his breathing normalized. Marsh looked up at me, a sly look on his emaciated face.

 He asked, “Would you like to hear one?”

 I looked at my watch: almost 4:00 pm.

 I replied, “Well. Okay. You’ve made me kinda curious.”

 I sat down on the bench beside him, to his right. The smell of fish increased incredibly: it was as if he should be covered in scales, flopping by the feet of one of the nearby fishermen. He opened the book on his lap. There were no musical notes that I could see, just script that I took to be Arabic or close to it. I could read Arabic script but the words seemed meaningless to me.

 He began to “sing.” His voice hissed, moaned and gobbled.

It made no sense to me (although I did hear the name “Dagon” in his sighing and sputtering tune). He went on like that for a few minutes, never raising his voice. From the other side of him, I could hear Darrel humming atonally.

 When Marsh was done, he turned to me square and asked, “What do you think?”

 “I think... I hafta go!” I replied. I stood up and added, “Good luck spreading the word! Bye, Darrel!”

 His “song” and Darrel’s moaning undertone had really bothered me. The sun had seemed to dim and the cooling air had given me goose flesh. I hurried away, back up to Cedric Street. I heard Ezra Marsh call after me. I made out the word “again” over the noise of the crowd...

 “Dagon,” I mumbled that night as Andy, my 16-year-old brother and I cleaned up the supper dishes. They didn’t amount to much as we had ordered out for pizza, a habit we were indulging in probably more often than was good for us.

Andy looked at me.

 “‘Dagon’? Have you been into the Old Testament or lookin’ through my library?” he asked. He looked puzzled but amused.

 We’d been getting along well recently, so I replied mildly, “Neither. Just some weird old guy I saw today.”

 I set the last washed plate in the right sink for him to dry.

 “He used that word or name,” I finished.

 “Really!” he responded. “Hmm... the only ‘Dagon’ I know of was a god of the sea worshiped by the Philistines in the O.T... They used to sacrifice people to him for more fish. And... . oh, yeah! He was also a nasty critter from some of those books of mine you refer to as ‘simple horseshit’.”

 “Which horseshit?” I demanded of him.

 I hated it when he knew more about something than I did! He held up his palms in mock-defence.

 “Okay, okay!  In my collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories, Dagon was a god of the sea, too. He was a deity for some humans on land and for his ‘children’, the Deep Ones, under the water. Was this guy an H.P. nut or sumthin?”

 “No... I don’t know!” I growled.

 I was angry with myself for feeling strange about the whole business and mad at my brother for making light of it. Should I tell him that Marsh had used those strange names as if they meant something real to him? I wouldn’t be able to face his knowing smile: Go on, Bro. Have another rum and cola!

 I drew in a breath and said, “Okay. Maybe he was just a senile, old ‘H.P. nut’. That’s probably how you’ll end up, too, if you don’t watch it!”

 I smiled at him; being nice was something we were working on, too.

 We finished the dishes and, as usual, he went to his room in the back of the house to go on-line and I sat down in the living-room to watch the Jays on the 54-inch. The Jays were having a better season than those past, the games were usually good... but Ezra Marsh was still on my mind.

 As the game progressed, my mind wandered. A rum and Pepsi would go good right now, I thought. I shook my head fiercely; I was trying to dry out! Going on the straight-and-narrow! I felt myself getting angry. The Jays scored a run. I inwardly studied my feelings. All my frustrations came from one source: Andrew. My parents had tried to leave it all to him... with the proviso that he looked after me! It turned out that wasn’t legal. But Andy’s lawyer was trying to set some kind of precedent, so...

 So what if I’d alienated my parents by joining the Armed Forces at the fresh-faced age of 16? So what if the bottle had been holding me instead of the other way? So what if they couldn’t practice birth control in their 40s? I guess I wasn’t enough of a son for them! So what if... it was an endless litany that I indulged in often... and it wasn’t a good habit. There had been times since I had left the Forces that I had considered seeking medical help, because I felt the feelings I had were unhealthy. I wasn’t a strong believer that mental illnesses really existed, so I never acted on that idea.

 Mom and Dad had been livid when I signed up but I felt at the time my country needed me... that, and I hated school. Plus, about ten years earlier, the Canadian government had decided to beef up the military. The Nazis hadn’t made any aggressive moves in almost fifty years but the consensus was, “Why take a chance?”

 The Americans were such isolationists and ball-less wonders... at least, as far as I was concerned. They couldn’t be counted on for protection. The government had passed what had been widely known as “Pierre’s Choice”: at the age of sixteen, you stayed in school, got a job (there were few of them) or joined the Armed Forces (you weren’t thrown into the fray immediately; there was a two-year training period) so I headed off to learn how to be a soldier. The infantry was my trade of choice as it had the easiest entry requirements. I had become very good at killing and other “nastiness” over the years. The League of Nations continued to limp along, trying to maintain the peace. They quite often called on Canadians to do the dirty work (I think many of the European delegates considered Canucks quasi-barbarians): clandestine operations that usually occurred in European nations not totally under Nazi control. I took all the right courses that could fit into my schedule and moved up the ranks quite quickly. I was a bit of a wunderkind and my superiors were very happy with me. Ironically, during my career, it was pointed out that an education would be a definite asset. I applied myself, put in many long days, and came out with college equivalence. Of course, there was also a slight drinking problem. My brother had sidestepped the Choice... later governments had liked it a lot... by starting university early, on-line. He was now working on his second year of his Bachelor of Science, majoring in physics. He was a genius.

 The game ended at ten pm. It had been a slug-fest, 10-6, with the Blue Jays winning in the ninth. The news came on: apparently, the princess-in-exile was in trouble with Revenue Canada... again. This bored me. I took a Pepsi out to the front porch (no rum, damn it!), looking to cool off on the chaise lounge. The soggy night heat then wrapped around me like steam in a sauna. The moon was high in the sky, nearly full.  The air’s moisture had placed a faint ring around it. I watched it rise while I drank three cans of cola. Midnight came on and I decided to go to bed.

 Might as well, I thought. Have a whole day of hanging around to do tomorrow.

 I had it in my mind, then, that the scream I heard from the north was wordless. In my dreams, now, it is a pleading negation: “Not me!” or just “NO!” I stood straight from the comfortable chair and dropped my half-full pop can. The shriek sounded like it came from the park by the river. A few dogs in the neighbourhood responded to the sound by yelping but all fell quickly silent.

 I was a block down the street, running in my moccasins before I thought: What are you doing? But I kept on. The park was fronted by the boardwalk where just eight hours earlier I had met that strange man. And Darrel. I cut through the park between the wide-spaced trees, moving on the wet grass as quietly as my military training could supply.

 When I got to the wooden planks, I noticed this first: one of the benches had been smashed in half. There was a coppery smell in the air. The moonlight spotlighted a dark object lying on the dewy, trampled grass. It was a black high-top running shoe.

 I picked it up and was surprised by the weight. I realized the ugly truth... I’d seen it in Czechoslovakia: the foot was still in it. The anklebones stuck out, splintered. I threw it from me with an angry cry of disgust. It hit the water with a loud splash.

After that sound, there came a loud churning of the water’s surface. It became apparent that someone or something was swimming toward shore. I crouched down, going into what I call my “war-mode”. I was ready to fight, weaponless as I was. I only wished that the lights along the walkway had been lit that night.

 Two bright ovals of light caught me in that position.

 A voice yelled out, “Hold it right there!”

 “Okay, okay!” I shouted back.

 I slowly dropped to my knees to put the yeller at ease. The noises from the river ceased.

 Oh, good, I thought.

 The policeman and the policewoman, Drury and McAvoy, were from the O.P.P. Clarkesville didn't have its own policing anymore. They inquired what was going on, had I broke the bench (though they quickly concluded that I couldn’t have done it by myself), and why did I have blood on my moccasins. That question startled me.

 Blood! I said to myself. That smell; I should have recognized that smell!

 In short order, they had me handcuffed. McAvoy held my left arm tightly. I did the smart thing: I did not resist. Drury went over by the busted bench and found where the blood was on the grass. He stood up; put his mike to his lips and contacted headquarters (I supposed), getting info from my wallet, and using the cryptic language police use while so doing. Another patrol car pulled into the park, blinding me with its headlights.

 The next few hours rushed and dragged, alternatively. We rocketed to the HQ. We flew by the front desk, stopping long enough to remove my belt and keys and get my fingerprints. They indicated I was probably going to be charged with mischief (nothing was said about the blood at the scene). We went zooming to the holding cell, which was mercifully empty. They left me there and time slowed to a crawl. It seemed like hours before one officer came back with a portable phone so I could call Andy.

 “I’ll call Sade,” he said and added, “I’m very disappointed with you, Bro.”

 A very large man in a grey suit looked in on me. He held up a detective badge for me to see.

 “I’m Detective Jimmy Cochrane. Let’s talk.”

 He wanted to know what I’d been doing in the park so late at night. I told him about hearing the scream, finding the foot. He sniffed.

 “Divers will find it. We got your ID from your prints. Got them from the Ministry of Defence. You’re some kind of hero, eh? Had a bitch of a time getting anything about you... except awards.”

 “I’m no hero.”

 “Well, you do have a lot of decorations and medals on file... it even says you were a Regimental Sergeant Major.”

 I looked down at my bare feet. “Any fool can win medals! Look. I haven’t done anything. Won’t you guys let me out?”

 “Yes, they will!” called Yvan Sade as he walked up to the cell. “Are you charging Mr. Colson with anything? Substantial?”

 Cochrane replied, “We were originally thinking of mischief but it looks like we need more evidence.”

 Andy’s lawyer smiled his shark’s smile.

 “Then I think we’re done here! Come on, James, that’s a good fellow!”

 They let me go. The short, burly Mr. Sade led me to his car.

 “Cheaper than a taxi!” he enthused.

 During the short drive home (Sade drove like a maniac), I told the lawyer my story.

 “Shouldn’t have chucked that foot away! Evidence, my boy! Evidence!”

 We pulled into my driveway. I asked Sade if he wanted to have a coffee but he declined. “Busy day tomorrow! Or, I guess it’s today!”

 Yvan Sade always spoke using exclamation marks. He wheeled out and was gone in a spray of gravel. I walked into the house in my bare feet, my leather moccasins, bloodstained as they were, being held for testing.

 Andy was waiting for me in the kitchen. It was 3:00 am. He asked me if I wanted to eat, that he was making something for himself.

 “Just wanna go to bed... feel like a bag of shit.”

 “You look it, too.”

 “Screw you.”

 “Just kidding!” he said. “You okay?”

 “Will be... ”

 That said, I went to my bedroom, climbed on my bed and fell asleep without even undressing. Fortunately, I hadn’t any blood on my clothes.

 My dreams were fierce. The worst one had Andy being torn apart, his bones cracking like dry kindling, by something huge and dark, eyes like egg-shaped, glowing prisms. I heard Marsh’s voice screaming in triumph, “Dagon! Dagonnn!”  I could hear waves crashing in the background and smell the ocean. It turned its blazing eyes on me...

 “No!” I shouted as I jerked myself upwards into full wakefulness.

 I was sweating and felt ill. A cool breeze blew fitfully through the west window but all it did was chill me.

 Change in the weather comin’, I reasoned.

 The front doorbell rang. I looked at the clock: just past nine. I got up, knowing Andy was probably asleep, and only the Last Trump could wake him. I straightened my clothes as much as possible and went to answer the door, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs left by my short sleep. Jimmy Cochrane stood outside, his detective’s badge in hand. I’m 183 cm. but the man had a good head on me and probably 25 kilos, too. He extended a large hand to shake.

 “May I come in?” he asked, as I accepted his hand.

 I let him inside and showed him to the kitchen. He pulled out one of the crafted wooden chairs and sat down slowly. You could tell this fellow had broken chairs before then; I worried about my brother’s investment. I offered him a cold drink (“No, thanks”), then a coffee (“Yes, please.”). I went about setting up the coffee maker and we talked back and forth about the heat, the cooling in the air that a.m. and the Jays. Finally, we sat across from each other, coffees in hand.

 Cochrane sat back slightly.

 “Tell me again about last night. Don’t leave anything out.”

 I told him, in detail, all that had happened late Friday night and early Saturday. I spoke with some heat about having nothing to do with the broken bench or the blood. I made a point about mentioning the shoe and the noises from the river again.

 “What does the noise from the river suggest to you?” he asked.

 “I, I don’t know. It was as if I was in shock. Most of the night seems like a blur.”

 “Does the name 'Darrel Spencer' mean anything to you?”

 Darrel! “No. Why?”

 “He was a young offender who had given a DNA sample a few months ago. It was his blood at the crime scene. They dragged the river there, too.”

 “What did they find?”

 “I’m not at liberty to say.” He gave me a cryptic look. “It’s beginning to look like a homicide, though. You’ll be relieved to know you’re not the prime suspect. The lab boys found your footprints in the blood but no other physical evidence. So you shouldn’t worry.”

 He gave me a smile which showed missing teeth, a boxer’s smile. It clashed with his fine, grey suit. He ran his left hand through thinning, red hair.  

 “Sorry to have troubled you. Actually, this news might have made you feel some better.”

 He gulped the last of his coffee and stood up.

 “I’ll let myself out. And, yeah, I know this sound’s hokey but: don’t leave town for the next few days.”

 He grinned at me and patted me on the shoulder as he left. I heard the door open and shut.

 That was weird, I thought.

 I felt strange after Cochrane left. Lassitude flooded over me, leaving me sitting there at the table as my coffee cooled down to undrinkable. The effects of arriving at the scene of Darrel Spencer’s slaughter had unnerved me more than I had realized. Had I been away from action... from war and death so long that this occurrence shocked me into immobility?

 And why, I wondered, haven’t I mentioned Ezra Marsh?

 Sacrifice, Andy had said. For more fish.

 Not tonight! I thought. I won’t let it happen again!

 As I stood up from the table, I appraised my life briefly. I said to myself, I’ve done... questionable things, even evil things. It’s time to balance things out.

 Later, in the early afternoon light, with thunder rumbling in the distance, I went to my bedroom and began my preparations. I wasn’t sure for what I was getting ready but I was sure it involved death... and death was something I knew.

 I knew Andy still slept so I quietly entered the closet in my room. I was quiet because the bathtub in the bathroom next door would act as a sound conduit right into Andy’s room. I didn’t want to take the small chance of waking him, yet. I removed the collection of shoes and boots from the closet floor. Once the floor was cleared, I removed the piece of carpeting, exposing the trapdoor to the crawlspace.

 I opened it. The smell of fresh damp earth surrounded me. Reaching down, I found the waterproof box. I felt around for the handle on one end and picked the container up. Carefully, still trying to be as quiet as possible, I pulled it up through the square hole. I set the heavy box on the floor just outside the closet and worked the combination lock.  

 The khaki combat uniform was still folded neatly. I removed the clothing to get at the smaller box under it. The box opened revealing a GLOCK 37 pistol and several clips of ten .45 calibre hollow-point bullets. I inspected this then closed the tin and set it aside. Farther down in the main box, I found two sticks of camouflage paint.

 There we go, I thought, feeling complete.

 I slid the smaller box, the paint, and my uniform under the bed. The bigger box went back under the floor. I then laid down and waited...

 The storm that struck later that afternoon was intense. Clarkesville hadn’t had one like it all summer. The lightning flashed almost continuously followed by cannonades of thunder. The wind blew up a gale. The power went off twice but neither time lasted more than a few moments. It was bad enough to make me think a tornado was in the works.

 I could hear Andy awake in his room yelling at the more brilliant displays: “Jesus! Holy fuck!”

 The storm rolled its way eastward, leaving cooler air in its wake... plus a few relieved citizens. It was 5:00 pm. so I went to the kitchen. I wasn’t hungry but Andy was always a bottomless pit when it came to food. I began to prepare some spaghetti, using slices of fried sausage in the sauce (Andy’s preference).

 I was quiet during supper. Andy was, too, sensing my mood. The noodles and sauce could have been paper and water as far as I was concerned but my brother enjoyed it. Due to his efforts, there wasn’t any left to be refrigerated. He helped me clean off the table and grabbed a bagel from the fridge. I told him I would wash and dry the supper dishes later. He looked surprised.

 “What’s with the sudden generosity?” he asked.

 “Maybe I went and got religion.”

 He chuckled, stuffed the bagel in his mouth, and went to his room, a can of Pepsi in hand. Excluding forays for more cola and trips to the bathroom, I knew I had probably seen the last of him until morning. I went back to my room. I knew I had some hours to wait.

 What was I going to be facing? A band of cultists of some kind, likely. Marsh couldn’t have butchered Darrel all by himself. Could he? My mind raced.

 I somehow knew that Ezra Marsh and his followers (how many?) would have another victim there by the river tonight. Sixth sense? I didn’t think so. It was just one hunter reading the heart of another.

 I knelt beside the bed and pulled out the box and the uniform. The “COLSON” name-tag stared up at me from above the left breast pocket. I looked at the Regimental Sergeant Major insignia’s lion and unicorn. I sighed and opened the box and took out the GLOCK. Dominic, my supplier, had told me I’d like this weapon. I’d only test-fired it five times while back at the old farm. I pulled the slide back and gazed at the cleanliness of the breech. I sighed again. I set the automatic pistol aside and took out ten clips of ammunition.

 A small voice inside me cried, Tell the police!

 I ignored it. I'd decided to treat it as a “The Black” op but this time I was certain of the ethics of my target(s). I laid the uniform beside me on the queen-sized bed. I put nine of the clips in the pant-leg pockets, four on one side, the rest on the other. I loaded the last clip into the GLOCK and clicked the pistol’s safety, putting it under my pillow. I put the tin box back under the bed. I then reached over to my alarm clock and set it for 11:00 pm.; four hours to wait. I wondered if I’d sleep.

 I stared at the clock until 10:30. I climbed off the bed and stripped to my shorts and put the khaki on. I tucked the shirt in, reached under my pillow, and got the pistol. I stopped for a second; I’d forgotten the holster. I shook my head in disbelief and corrected that by getting the metal container out again.

 As I pulled the holster out of the very bottom, I thought, I had better get a grip or I’m going to die tonight.

 The holster held the pistol under my left armpit. I placed the GLOCK gently, barrel first, into the leather. I then took the camouflage paint out. I didn’t need a mirror. I had done it so many times before. It took a minute, using both shades of green. To finish, I put a camouflage baseball cap (from my collection of caps on the wall) on my head. I then went into “war-mode” and moved like a ghost out of my bedroom. I could hear Andy clicking away on his keyboard but he didn’t hear me. I opened and closed the door to the breezeway silently and in a moment, I was outside.

 There was a stiff breeze blowing from the southwest, pushing fitful clouds ahead of it. I circled the south side of our house and headed north.

 I crouched, crawled, and slid behind the neighbours’ houses on Sandra Street until I reached Babcock Road and the south side of the park. I crossed Babcock like a shadow. The light from the almost-full moon waxed and waned with the passing of the clouds. Gravel pressed against my bare feet, followed by the kiss of cool, wet grass.

 Passage through the conservation area was tricky: some branches had been blown down. As I approached the boardwalk, I saw the path’s lights were lit this night. The bench had been hastily slapped together and was festooned with crime-scene tape. I was rather surprised that any repairs had been done. Two figures were seated there. One of them was Marsh; I could tell from his black hat. I couldn’t tell who the other was. I waited.

 Ezra Marsh stood up. He was wearing a black robe instead of his suit. He held out his hand to the other, who was female. She took his hand and stood up. She was slim with long, dark hair. She was clothed in jeans and a denim jacket. She moved slowly, stiffly... as if she was in a trance. The old man walked her to the side of the boardwalk away from the water.

 “Stay here, Nicole,” he said quite clearly.

 He walked to the water’s edge. I could tell he was singing one the Hymns of Dagon without the book this time.

 Probably has them all memorized! I thought inanely.

 Marsh reached the river’s brink and turned and faced the girl. He dropped his robe, exposing his scrawny, hairless body. He turned back to the water and raised his arms to it.

 Seeing him naked and then vulnerable, I stepped out of the shadows, brandishing the GLOCK and yelled, “Forget it, Marsh, you ass-hole! It’s over! Let the girl go!”

His response was a maniacal cackle. He swivelled his head to look at me.

 “You cannot stop what has been started here! Dread Cthulhu will curse you if you try!”

 He looked back at the water, arms still outstretched.

 “Caleb! In the name of Dagonnnn! Rise up!” he roared, body quaking, the volume of his voice giving a lie to his weak-appearing form.

 Just in front of him, the water erupted and something leapt ashore. The first thought I had was, The Creature from the Black Lagoon!

 Then Nicole started screaming and collapsed into a quivering ball of fear. This was real! The sea animal, half-human thing; it let out a blubbering squeal and moved toward the terrified girl. I acted, filled with rage.

 “No, you don’t scumbag!” I screamed and aimed.

 Marsh saw this and bellowed, in return, “No!”

 I put the laser-sight right on the monster’s chest and fired. It moved sideways incredibly fast but the slug still connected. The right shoulder disintegrated into a cloud of flesh, scales, and bone fragments. The beast howled, the remains of its right arm hanging loose. Marsh yelled out in anguish.

 I ran up to the young woman. I was 5 metres or so from “Caleb”. I grabbed her left flailing wrist and pulled her to her feet. She resisted but I lifted her up with fear-fuelled strength. She looked at me with shock-dimmed eyes. She looked past me and saw the thing and almost withdrew into her ball again. I slapped her hard. Her eyes cleared and she looked at me sanely for just a moment.

 I hollered in her face, “Run! For fuck's sake, run!”

 She turned and scampered south, toward Babcock Road. She cried out as she ran. Answering cries came from the west.

 I felt a heavy impact on the ground behind me. I whirled around. Mortally wounded, the beast stood before me, taller and wider than a normal man could be. It had jumped the five metres! I brought my pistol up and it hit me with its good hand... with claws. Pain splashed through me and I was raised spinning in the air. My right side was aflame and I was sure I was leaving my intestines quivering in the air.

 In that second I thought wildly, Don't drop the GLOCK! Don't drop the GLOCK!

 I hit the ground, bone-breaking hard. I didn’t drop the GLOCK.

 I rolled to my back and looked between my feet. Caleb was now twice as far away. I tried to raise my right arm. Pain! I reached across my chest and took my weapon from my injured right hand. I aimed the pistol with my left, putting the little red dot on Caleb’s chest. Marsh saw this as he stood by the monster and flung himself across the creature in its defence.

 I thought, Get one of you!

 The round hit the old man in the head, taking the back of it off. His body dropped like a stone. Caleb looked down wildly, his eyes like wide green prisms, the gore on his chest now with the addition of Marsh's brain-matter.

 “Poppa! Poppa!” he howled.

 He picked the elderly man’s corpse up with his left hand and turned back to the river. I aimed shakily with my left hand and unloaded a shot at the back of his head. Then everything went black...

 Through waking and losing consciousness, I saw much:

 A tall, wide-shouldered, middle-aged man with a full grey beard bending over me and saying, “Well done.”

 A harried-looking policeman, dripping-wet from rain, yelling, “EMS! Right now!”

 Lightning flashed before my eyes, turning the raindrops silver...

 I laid swaddled in a bed in the ICU of the County Hospital. Worried-looking nurses looked in on me from time-to-time. Andy was by my bed much, holding my left hand, careful of the IV. Doctor Alder was there several times. He looked concerned, too. Over it all was the smell of seaweed. I decided I was dying.

 There came a time, though, when I was alone. I started to close my eyes and enter oblivion once more when movement caught them. The middle-aged man with the full beard entered the room (no other patients were there) without hindrance from the nurses. He walked to the head of my bed. I rolled my eyes to look at him.

 “Well done,” he repeated, reaching into his grey robe. He pulled out a vial filled with clear liquid. He uncorked it and reached over, holding it to my lips.

 “Drink,” he said.

 Dumbfounded, I followed his command. It was bitter but somehow soothing. I noticed the seaweed smell ebbing. The pain in my right side eased markedly.

 “In two days you’ll go home.”

 He walked out of the ICU with the same silence as when he came. I drifted off to sleep.

 Two days later, I was sitting in front of the 54-inch with a Pepsi in my hand. The wounds and infections had cleared up... just like that... after the antibiotics had failed at first.

 Doctor Alder called it jokingly, “A medical miracle.”

 You could see the puzzlement in his eyes.

 I sat there on the LayZeeBoy, with the ounce of rum in my cola taking the edge off the itch in my right side (Andy had agreed one ounce wouldn’t hurt). The sutures were still in but would be dissolved in a few weeks (or less). The Jays were winning on the tube and life was good...

 In the next few weeks of healing, I found out a few things. The girl whose life I’d saved was Nicole Troyer, a friend of Andy’s. I had met her before but under much more relaxed circumstances. She’d actually come screaming to our door. Andy had taken her in and called the O.P.P. and the ambulance. They thought someone had tried to rape her (I was briefly accused of that!). Nicole couldn’t remember anything after the first bad storm. Some teenagers had been smoking marijuana over by the bandstand: they saw everything, they said, but their stories, interesting (and close to the truth) though they were, were dismissed. Any blood and brain tissue had been washed away by the second storm that had occurred right after my meeting with Marsh and Caleb. The river was dragged but no bodies were found.

 Finally, I think the official story ran that I had stopped in the park and rescued Miss Troyer from two attackers. One of them had been in some type of costume, perhaps a wet suit and mask. I had fired at both but they were able to get away. They had, however, had time to stab me repeatedly before leaving. The police then arrived to find me bleeding to death in the rain. End of story.

 My pistol was confiscated, being illegal in Canada. There were a few other charges against me, mostly firearms-related, but Sade was able to have them dropped.

 Most of the information came from Cochrane who showed up one day to see how I was doing.

 Since he had AB- blood, Andy had donated some of his to make up for what I’d lost. This brought us closer together and made us friends for months.

 To make a long story short: I healed well. I still walked, using a cane to help with the pain on my right side: ribs had been broken as well as the gashes and bruises. I walked around town, looking for the middle-aged man with the full grey beard... but I never saw him. After a few months, I gave up, about the same time as I stopped using the cane. In a town the size of Clarkesville, you would see anybody that time.

 I was “goin’ over town” quite a bit during that search. I’ve talked to the anglers (there weren’t many) as I passed, going north or south.

 I was told the fishing sucked...

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, Arrested After 40-Year Hunt, Authorities Say

The notorious Golden State Killer, responsible for 12 carnages and 45 desecrations across California in the 1970 s and’ 80 s, was arrested early Wednesday morning, sovereignties announced.

Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was booked around 2 a.m. Wednesday, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones told at a news conference. DeAngelo is tasked with the assassination of Lyman and Charlene Smith in 1980 and is also suspected of killing Brian and Katie Maggiore in 1978, officials said.

” We found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento ,” supposed Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.

Sheriff Jones did ground inaugurated pointing to DeAngelo several days ago, at which point powers targeted him under surveillance and compiled a Dna test that had been “abandoned” by DeAngelo.

Police say they waited for DeAngelo to abdicate his home in Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento, before arresting him.

Bruce Harrington, the friend of murder scapegoats Keith and Patrice Harrington, contributed an impassioned pronunciation at Wednesday’s press conference, thanking permissions for their “tenacity” and” ruthless focus” in the case provided for.

” It’s time for victims to salve ,” alleged Harrington.” He’s now in jail, and he’s history .”

The Daily Beast was the first to report that DeAngelo was the doubt arrested after an interview with columnist Billy Jensen, who worked with researchers on a record about the crimes, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark . The diary was written by Michelle McNamara, who died before it was published. It was finished by Jensen, researcher Paul Haynes, and McNamara’s husband, the comedian and performer Patton Oswalt.

On Wednesday morning, Oswalt called the story “surreal” and said in an Instagram video:” Study you got him, Michelle .”

The fifth martyr of the Golden State Killer, Jane Carson-Sandler, told me that she was informed about the arrest from two detectives in the case.

” I simply found out this morning ,” she told The Island Packet .” I’m overwhelmed with rapture. I’ve been crying, sobbing .”

The Golden State Killer’s attempts began in 1976, and he eventually moved on to sexually onslaught women in the East Bay Area region of California near Sacramento, which led to the suspect’s alias, The East Area Rapist. Times later, the same person began attacking 400 miles back in Southern California. The assaults ended in 1986 and were related through the killer’s modus operandi and DNA evidence.

The Smiths were killed in March 1980 inside their hilltop home in Ventura. They were fastened with a drapery cord from the house( the killer’s original M.O. was to bind victims with items from their residence) and coerced to demise with a log from the assertions.

The Maggiores were gunned down while moving their pup in Sacramento in February 1978. Residents equipped police with a description of a suppose and police subsequently exhausted sketches. The executioner merely affected once more in Sacramento following the cartoons, McNamara wrote.

Jail registers show that DeAngelo fits the FBI profile of the murderer: 5-foot-11 and now between the ages of 60 and 75 years old. Public annals show that DeAngelo lived in the Sacramento area, Whittier, and Long Beach.

The Golden State Killer was, in agreement with the FBI, thought to have an” interest in the military, or had some military training, leaving him familiar and technical with pistols .”

Sheriff Jones articulated DeAngelo” was committing crimes while “hes been” utilized as a police officer” from 1973 to 1979. DeAngelo was an officer firstly in Exeter, in primary California, and then in Auburn, outside Sacramento.

In Exeter, DeAngelo was analyse crimes for the police department, according to a newspaper report at the time–the same meter the Golden State Killer was ransacking homes in the area.

In Auburn, DeAngelo was reportedly shot after he was accused of shoplifting a can of dog repelling and a hammer at a drugstore in 1979. DeAngelo was started after he” failed to answer any of the city’s investigations and did not application an administrative hearing ,” the city manager said at the time.

Fear gripped the areas oppressed by the Golden State Killer for a full decade.

After the 20 th crime casualty was affected in Orangevale in 1977, a 10 -mile corridor of Sacramento County felt like it was ” under siege ,” McNamara wrote.

” East Siders hacked off tree wings and uprooted shrubs around their houses. Reinforcing slipping glass windows with dowel rods wasn’t enough. That might preserve him out, but they demanded more; they wanted to strip him entirely of the ability to hide ,” McNamara wrote.

The Golden State Killer would slink neighborhoods, often specimen residences before criticizes, then” gained entry into the homes of his casualties by levering open a space or entrance while they slept ,” according to the FBI.

Floodlights travelled up, duos slept in shifts, tambourines were appended to openings, hammers were placed in pillows, and nearly 300 firearms were sold in Sacramento County in the first six months of 1977, according to McNamara’s book.

When the killer started an attack, he would glitter a flashlight into the aspect of his preys, dazzling them, before tying up pairs and then abusing the status of women.

” Their horror find tendency when they examined the expression, described as a guttural whispering through clenched teeth, abrupt and peril ,” McNamara wrote.

” Precision and self-preservation were his identifying pieces ,” she continued.” When he zeroed in on a martyr, he often entered the residence beforehand when no one was there, analyzing genealogy representations, reading the layout. He incapacitated hall sunrises and unlocked slipping glass entrances. He drained bullets from shoots .”

He took small-minded personal items from his preys’ residences, including mementos and marriage peals. He sometimes called to torment them afterward.

In 2001, he supposedly called a woman he’d attacked 24 years earlier, according to McNamara’s book.

He moaned:” Remember when we frisked ?”

Several of DeAngelo’s neighbors said he exposed a nature that stood out in the hushed, affluent region.

” He would have outbursts on the driveway and screech and scream, when he was looking for his keys ,” Natalia Bedes-Correnti told The Daily Beast.” He hasn’t thrown a outburst in about a decade. I figured he softened out with senility .”

Eddie Verdon described DeAngelo as” nosy, curious about everybody’s business .” A couple of years ago, Verdon said he heard strides around the side of his house and smashed out to find DeAngelo running away from Verdon’s side yard, taking off on a bicycle.

” He spawned sure I never seen him again. And if I did meet him, it was because his garage was open .”

Multiple neighbours answered DeAngelo had a boat and inferred he was a fisherman.

Drew Johnson, who lives three residences down from DeAngelo, said he” discovered him sometimes” screaming from his driveway.” I think everyone here discovered him go on his rants ,” he said.

Cyndee Reed told me that she grew up in the area at the time of the attacks.

” People were putting cactus weeds and stones underneath their windows … That’s how much fear he put into young women in local communities ,” she answered.” It wasn’t just the neighborhood. It was the whole Sacramento community. That’s who was afraid .”

— with Allen Young in Sacramento

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