C. Robert Cargill, an Interview

I recently got a chance to talk to C. Robert Cargill as part of a class assignment. I was very fortunate to have this chance and am happy to post a transcription of the conversation here.

C. Robert Cargill is an Austin Texas artist who has been writing for more than ten years. He was a critic and journalist with Ain’t it Cool News and Spill.com before writing Sinisterwith Scott Derrickson. Since then he has written two novels of gritty urban fantasy,Dreams and Shadows and Queen of the Dark Things. He is also working on the to be released projects: Sinister 2, Deus Ex, and The Outer Limits: Demon with a Glass Hand. He can currently be found once a week dispensing love for the forgotten classics of the silver screen on Junkfood Cinema with Brian Salisbury. He can be found on Twitter at@massawyrm


Questions:
Steve: There seems to be a significant use of poetic and lyrical language in Dreams and Shadows; do you feel that poetry and music are a part of what forms your voice and if so how?

Cargill: Yeah, I believe, very much, that there is a music to language and writing. It’s how we distinguish the difference between good writing and bad writing is that it has its own sounds and rhythms and poetry to it that is almost musical. I very much believe in that and so I’ve always found that listening to how it makes sounds and how it sounds out loud and focusing on that and getting that rhythm. I hate reading books where the author, no matter how good a writer they are, doesn’t have that sense of music and you read passages that just feel clunky. Then you read someone like Neil Gaiman, who clearly hears the music, whose book are almost symphonies in how those words go together.

Roots in poetry and the sounds of how things go together are very much influential on my writing and not just on Dreams and Shadows but even in screen writing dialogue. I recently wrote a screenplay and I was watching scenes being filmed and one of the actors had decided to change around the dialogue to the way they speak. Watching the scene was just so clunky because while it was the way they speak it wasn’t the way the line was supposed to sound. So, it does have a big impact on my work.

Steve: In Dreams and Shadows there is a kiss to Bottle Rocket on the first page and several other little pebbles from film, literature, music, and myth sprinkled all through your story; who are some of the artists that helped influence your style and voice as a writer? I know you named Neil Gaiman in your last answer was he one of them?

Cargill: Not so much. He actually had a direct influence in that I met him when I was a young writer and we had a really great conversation that was very encouraging. He influenced the content of Dreams and Shadows. I had the base core of the story but I wasn’t sure of how to tell it and I met him at a convention. He asked me, “Hey, are you coming to my reading tomorrow?” I said, “Yeah. Sure. Of course I will.” He ended up reading the first half of Dream Hunters, which is a graphic novel that had yet to been released at the time. It was very urban fantasy but it played around with what he was at the time selling as actual myth, which he later admitted was not a real folk tale. But, seeing that, seeing the presentation of that, gave me how to put that content together in a package.

But my voice itself comes from a combination of a number of writers. The most influential ones I could name are William S. Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hess, Robert A. Wilson influenced my comedy and my world view quite a bit, and then I would say, any number of poets, over the years, also influenced me heavily. Stephen King also had a huge influence on me as a child, not only in terms of his writing style, in terms of his pacing, and character building but in terms of genre.

You put all that stuff together, mash it up in a bowl, and you get me.

Steve: You worked for several years as film critic, which is to some extent is deconstructing multiple stories on a weekly basis; when you set out to start your own long-form writing how was your experience as a critic helpful in finding what worked for you in storytelling?

Cargill: I always wanted to be a long-form writer. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was eight and I didn’t know if I wanted to make movies or write books. At one point it dawned on me that there were these people that actually made a living watching movies and writing about movies and I was like, “Oh, I want to do that too.” I happened to meet a film critic, it was total luck, it was not something I was chasing at the time. It was the golden age of the internet, the word blog wasn’t a thing yet, and one of my new friends, Eric worked for Ain’t it Cool News and saw a review I’d written for someone else because I’d seen not only one but two early screenings of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He asked me to write a review. I wrote a review. Eric really liked it and saw some of the stuff I was doing just for fun and asked me to come over to Ain’t it Cool News. I went because it was a chance to write and be read. What I set up to do then was, I was a college drop out, and what I decided to do there was to use the critic career, which was just a hobby at the time, as an extended college experience. Where essentially, I was tasked with watching movies, writing up a paper on it, deconstructing it, and offering it to the masses to be graded. I look at that entire ten year experience as a film critic as a masters class in storytelling.

When I sat down to start writing, it was a chance to expound upon all of the theories I had developed as a film critic. All the things I’d learned, everything I wanted to experiment with, everything I came to believe and preach I put into that first script and that first book as my grand thesis paper. Those were my thesis film and my thesis novel showing what I had learned over my ten years.

So, Yes, everything I did as a critic informed and it continues to inform who I am as a writer.

Steve: How do you feel your years of working as a critic for Ain’t It Cool and Spill effect the way you view criticism of your own work?

Cargill: Absolutely. To actually use a personal experience. I recently was in London for the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention and ended up on a panel with someone who I had worked with for several years at film.com and we were both critics there. I’m very familiar with her writing, she’s very familiar with my writing, and then she saw Sinister and slagged it. She really disliked it. We sat on the panel together and it was the first time we’d ever met. After the panel she leaned over to me and was, “Hey, by the way, I didn’t entirely hate Sinister, I think if you go back and read the review. I hope it didn’t bother you that I negatively reviewed it.” I looked at her and I said, “You know, I’ve read your writing for years. I don’t agree with you on movies that I have no stake in. You and I don’t agree on film as a general rule. How could I ever expect you to like something I wrote? I can’t be offended by that. You and I have had arguments about different films where we both had completely different experiences. We don’t come from the same place, so it’s not a movie I would expect you to like.”

My critical experience very much has a bearing on that. There are a lot of people, a lot of reviewers, whose reviews I just wouldn’t read because I know their opinion differs from mine, or I don’t like where their opinion is rooted, or any number of things. It makes it very easy to discount some reviews and not take them seriously and not have them weigh on you.

At the same time, one of the other things that happens is, having been a critic and spending so long doing it, I’ve learned the difference between a good critic and a bad critic and it has nothing to do with opinion. Opinion has nothing to do with whether you’re a good critic or not. There are just a number of really terrible critics out there. It’s one of the problems you have when you remove the gatekeepers from any system. All of a sudden, without a filter, the thing becomes flooded with people who want to do it but don’t actually know what they’re doing. That’s where criticism is right now. Anybody who enjoys watching movies and has a keyboard at hand, believes they can be a film critic and doesn’t understand what the responsibilities are, doesn’t necessarily have to have a good sense of the history of film, doesn’t understand how films are made, and you end up with people who essentially write book reports. That’s one of the biggest frustrations with having been a critic is going through criticism, especially of your own work, and it’s like looking at the matrix with all the code flowing down. Here’s the introductory paragraph, there’s not going to be anything in there but a thesis statement. Here’s the second paragraph, it’s just work telling us that you watched the movie. Here’s two paragraphs on your opinion of the movie but your not actually deconstructing the movie. Here’s the wrap up paragraph summing up your opinion. You start seeing that stuff and then you juxtapose it against the legitimate critics. The real critics who dig in deep and understand that the job of a film critic is to enrich the experience of the audience who is reading that review. That someone who has seen the movie or is going to see the movie is going to gets a richer experience having read that. They’re not just getting an opinion they’re actually getting something that broadens the film for them and helps them wrap their mind around it, understand it, enjoy it more, gets some of the jokes, or anything.

Having been a critic you and reading criticism of your own work, you’re exposed to so many people who don’t do that latter part and who don’t understand that writing a review of my book or my movie. I should, even as the writer, should come away  seeing something new about the book having seen it through someone else’s eyes. Rather than just saying, “well, I really didn’t like this character and I was kind of hoping the story would go in this direction because I like those kind of stories.” That stuff can be a little bit of a help, sometimes, if enough people make the same comments. You certainly take that to heart. But you really end up sifting through a lot of reviews that just disappoint you and the quality of the reviewer.

I think that’s the greatest curse, having been a reviewer, you then get to step on the other side and see it from the perspective of the people you’ve been criticizing for so long. And seeing that so many people on the other side really don’t have it together.

It’s something you do see when you’re there. When you’re a critic long enough you start to learn who the good critics are and it really doesn’t come down to opinion. Some of my favorite reviews of Sinister were negative reviews, because they were negative reviews written or spoken by guys who really knew horror and deconstructed the movie and told it in a way where I stated examining my own film through their eyes. I was just fascinated by those. There’s one guy in particular who did a five minute radio breakdown of it and I just wish it were twenty minutes. Even though he only had a few nice things to say about it I wanted to hear him tear it apart, take it apart and put it back together because I felt like that would make my next movie better. I was always disappointed that he never did anymore one that.

Steve: You said you listened to people who had negative views, did that alter anything when you set out to do the sequel?

Cargill: Yes and no. One of the things you learn in writing, period, even with your beta readers, the people who read it before anyone else sees it, before even your editors see it, is that when one person makes a complaint it’s an opinion; when five people make the same complaint it’s a problem. That’s what you look for in any sort of criticism. You’re looking for complaints across the board. There were two complaints across the board with Sinister. One of them was something I had actually addressed in the original script but got cut from the film. It was one of those things where after the fact I could say, “I told you guys we needed that scene.” The second part was there were people who were unhappy with the ending. The problem with that was you have a segment of the audience who was like, “That movie was really good up to the ending, I hated the ending.” then they talked to people and other people go, “Wait, what are you talking about that ending, I love that ending. If that movie had ended any other way I would have hated the ending” So, you just have to understand that what we were offering was something to a narrower batch of people. With the sequel I wanted to give something to the other camp, the camp that did not like that ending. We wanted to work an ending where they could have an ending that they were happy with and maybe the other camp wouldn’t be so happy with it. Hopefully, if the other camp doesn’t like the ending, if they’re like, “Oh, man I loved until that ending. Why can’t it have an ending like the first movie?” Then the first camp can be like, “Yeah, well this is the ending I like.” Then I can go, “Well you each have your own movie. You watch Sinister and you watch Sinister 2 and you get the ending that you want.”

What I wanted to do with that was I wanted to make sure people who really enjoyed the film but didn’t enjoy the ending might have something they enjoy this time around. Aside from that, there wasn’t a lot of criticism of Sinister that was really constructive. If you go through the negative published reviews of Sinister, most of them have the phrase, “I really hate found footage movies”, or has the phrase, “there’s nothing new here but…” and then they go on to list a bunch of movies, and they list a completely different bunch of movies from every other review. If you go through the negative reviews of Sinister, you’ll find that we apparently ripped off every horror movie ever made just by collecting those reviews together. Which just tells me that the critics are just naming the three movies off the top of their head that it reminded them of. We actually only visually reference two other horror movies and those are kind of obvious. There wasn’t a whole lot to take from those reviews. It was like, “Okay, if you don’t like found footage movies then your not going to like the sequel.” We can’t really change anything there.

We took what criticism was there that did have some constructive nature too it, and tried to offer the audience that enjoyed most of the first film an experience that hopefully they’ll love this time around. 

Steve: In your film writing with Scott Derrickson; are there certain things you find you do differently when preparing to write with someone else or conversely when you’re writing by yourself?

Cargill: The only difference is you have somebody to bounce things off of and clean up your bullshit early. Scott and I are very structured. When I’m writing on my own I’m not as structured because I’m in my own head and can change things on the fly. I never write anything without knowing the end. I never start on something where I don’t know how it ends, because that’s a terrible, terrible way to write things. I’m not a big fan of what they call pantsing. I’m not as structured, generally when I write a novel I’ll sit down with some note cards and I’ll write each chapter, the basic beats that happen in that chapter and any important notes for that and I’ll put that together and have the book in card form. There’s nothing really specific in that.

When I write with Scott, we sit down, we discuss all the ideas, we kick it around. We discuss for any amount of time, it all depends on how quickly we need to work on the script. Then Scott writes a detailed outline. I give him notes on the outline. He passes me back the adjusted outline, with the understanding that I may not stick to the outline depending on how the writing goes. Then we go from there.

So the preparation is different, but it’s mostly different in that you have somebody else to help clean up a lot of the problems that you would run into and would have to clean up in your editing process. Writing with someone else is a lot different and a lot faster than writing alone.

Steve: As both a screen writer and a novelist, what do you feel is significantly different in the way someone should approach writing for the page as opposed to writing for the screen?

*The following answer contains some spoilers for the novel. In order to read them simply highlight the portion of the text between the Spoilers tags.*

Cargill: Different stories require different mediums. If you have a simple story that can be told in an hour and a half to two and a half hours and it doesn’t have a lot of ideas that you really have to sit and explain then you’ve got yourself a movie. If you’re going to deal with things of a more esoteric nature or have the kind of ending that isn’t cinematically satisfying, that has downer elements to it. When you look at Dreams and Shadows, it could never have existed as a film first because the studio would sit there and stare at you and go “(SPOILERS) Wait you’re seriously going to kill off most of the cast by the end of the movie? Really? That’s a thing you’re doing? You can’t kill the best friend. You can’t kill the girlfriend. Everybody wants to see them live happily ever after.”( END SPOILERS) You can say, “Well that’s the point.” They’ll say, “We’re not making that.” So that’s the type of thing you write in novels.

Then at the same time, I don’t like to make cinematic style novels. I don’t want to sit and write a fast paced, quick read that was clearly meant to be a movie, because I can write a script for that and jump right into making that movie. That’s the crux of it.

I do the same amount of research on every topic. Whether it be a book, whether it be a movie. I usually spend several weeks, if not several months, just reading research materials on whatever it is. Whether it may be folklore encyclopedias or several hundred issues of Doctor Strange. You sit down, you do your research, and then you start putting things together to tell the story.

Steve: In Dreams and Shadows you describe Austin with the practiced care most men reserve for the discussion of old familiar lovers, tell me about Austin and why it’s important to you as a writer.

Cargill: The thing is, originally when I was going to write the book it was going to be set in some nebulous, vague city that could be Chicago, or it could be New York City, we’ll probably just going to end up shooting in Vancouver anyway, type of thing. While I was putting the book together, I realized that’s boring. At first I was fine with that be boring it’s just a setting. Then I realized that nobody really writes stuff about my part of the country. I live in this great town, it’s got an interesting history, it’s got an interesting culture, and it’s exactly the type of setting that would work for this book. Then I was like, “Okay. Let’s write about my town.” Then it was, “Okay, let me write about the town warts and all. Let me talk about the bad parts of town. Let me talk about what’s amazing about it.”

It’s funny, I felt that I put more things in the book that were negative about Austin than were positive. Yet, everybody comes away thinking it’s some love letter to my town. It’s kind of a love letter to my town in which I also call her fat and not the prettiest girl I ever dated. Which is weird, but that’s what it is.

I’ve kind of given myself over to it. You have that point when you start off where you think, “I want to be this erudite, kind of esoteric, well known writer, who could live anywhere.” Or you buy into one of the myths, like the New York City writer, young, hip, living in an apartment in the upper east side, and drinking coffee in some New York coffee house kind of writer. You can buy into that. I finally settled on the idea, I’m a Texan. I spent most of my life living in Texas, I was born here in Texas. I’m from this very interesting, very different part of Texas that’s kind of a mixing of everything that’s great about this state and this part of the country.

I finally realized, I can let that be my voice and I can give over to that. I don’t have to fight against that. I don’t have to try and be more mainstream. By embracing that I come across as more real and a bit more authentic. There comes that point in your life as a writer when you have to figure out what your voice is and finally when I did Dreams and Shadows I figured out I’m an Austin based writer. I’m a central Texas boy. I may as well write that way and so far it’s been working for me.

Steve: In your pod cast with Brian Salisbury, Junkfood Cinema, during the episode on George Lucas’s version of Flash Gordon where you talk briefly about fan fiction and you seem to be against the idea; do you think there is ever a place where fan fiction is useful or do you feel it’s something to be avoided and why?

Cargill: You know what the difference between fan fiction and an adaptation is? It’s whether or not you’ve got permission. I’m fine with people playing around in other people’s universes as long as that other person approves of it. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re borrowing power from somebody else’s work to lend power to your own. Sometimes, you can do really great things with that. Look at what a number of people have done with Arthur Conan Doyle, you look at the BBC series Sherlock and see how they’ve added this great amount of creativity and put a very new twist on these great stories. You look at what Guy Ritchie did with Sherlock Holmes in his films and you can see the performance from Robert Downey Jr. and what great stuff came out of that material.

Then you look at the bulk of fan fiction and the bulk of fan fiction is, somebody had a really good idea that was inspired by something they read. Then they go and they plug in all of these things that have already had this work put into it, into that story and then create this story that can never actually go anywhere and can’t be anything more than something lurking on the internet to be passed around by fans who want to read other fan fiction.

It feels like there is a disconnect from the understanding that every writer does this. We all get inspired by this other work and then we spend all this time disguising where that inspiration came from so that it seems that it came from a fresh original place. Then we put that work out there and it is something else entirely. In that process of disguising our influences you end up with something that is new, fresh, and original that plays to that same audience that loved that stuff that you loved as well. I feel like writing fan fiction is generally robbing yourself of the ability to write that stuff.

There are a lot of great fan fiction writers that by simply taking those ideas they have and plugging them into their own thing and going, “It’s a Harry Potter story but how do I write it without Hermione, Ron, and Harry? How do I do that?” Then they have to make their own characters and those characters can’t look like Hermione, Ron, and Harry or else the jig is up. Now you’ve got to create these new characters. Now you have to create these things to make the magic work right. Now that you’ve done that, this fundamentally alters the villain, so let’s change this. Here’s this cool new thing. Then all of a sudden you’ve got this new fantasy story that bears no resemblance to Harry Potter and it’s kind of awesome. I think that fan fiction writers are robbing themselves of that.

I have two stories I would love to do that are essentially fan fiction. I would love to do if I could get the rights, a movie series and a book series. You know what I’d really like to do? I would love for Suzanne [Collins] to put out a call to other authors, and have other authors write short stories and novels set in the Hunger Games universe. Wrapped around other Hunger Games. I would love to write a Hunger Games story. Not about her characters but sometime in the past or potentially sometime in the future after the third book. That’s a universe I’d love to play around with.

There’s a movie series that I have a shot at potentially doing something with that I think could be really cool and I love that kind of stuff. Playing around with someone else’s ideas, with their permission, when they’re saying, “Here’s my toys. Do something cool with them.” That’s something that can broaden things and go out in the world and be its own thing. There’s nothing wrong with drawing on that creativity but when you do it without permission you paint yourself into a box where you’ve got something that’s absolutely not canon and you’ve got something that can never really be a story with stakes because nobody believes the that outcome is going to mean anything to these characters.

It’s also something that can’t really be passed around in the way other things can and live forever. That’s one of the things about this fan fiction that’s floating around out there. Eventually the forums there on are going to go kaput and be erased. They might live in a Wayback Machine on a file somewhere but it’s never going to be a book. It’s never going to be sitting in the Amazon store indefinitely waiting for someone to come along and discover something that you put a lot of time and effort in to. I feel like it’s a waste of a lot of very real creative potential.

I don’t hate fan fiction but I feel that there’s other better things you could do with your time, especially as a creative. I feel like the big propulsion of fan fiction in this generation is potentially robbing us of some really great stories that had they been massaged properly could have come out really fantastic.

Steve: Looking back over the years you’ve worked as a writer and critic what one lesson did you learn the hard way that you wish someone had told you about going in?

Cargill: The biggest thing is probably about cage rattling and what has become rage porn. I wrote a review of Happy Feet, and a lot of people haven’t actually watched it because it’s, “Ah, it’s dancing penguins.” Happy Feet is an incredibly political movie, that isn’t just liberal, it’s ultra-liberal in how far it leans with its ideas. And I thought it would be funny, at the time, to write a kind of reaction to it, going full retard if you will (A Tropic Thunder reference). And just arguing as if it’s the most offensive thing imaginable and kind of do it from the point of view of an ultra-conservative, who I’m definitely not. A lot of people got the joke and found it very funny and it caused them to go and examine the material and go, “Holy shit. He’s not kidding around, he’s not making anything up, this movie is really, really kind of liberal.”

A lot of people didn’t get the joke, a lot of people took me dead serious. What happened is after I wrote that I received e-mail about that review every day for two and a half months. I’ve never had that happen before or since. I’ve never known anyone who’s had that happen before or since. It was a really absurd anomaly that just hit at the right time on the internet; back before things could really go as viral as they do now.

Someone would write about it on Daily Kos once every few days because they’d just stumbled upon it. It got to the point where Daily Kos had to post a sticky saying, “Please stop writing about this review. There are three other very long threads about it. Go talk about it there.” Conservatives celebrated me as a hero. Fox News saw the review and ended up re-reviewing it because the day it came out they didn’t care about it at all and one of the anchors sent their 65 year old mother to go see the movie and do a review of it. They so didn’t care and then when they found out what the content was they re-reviewed it and went after it. Liberals came after me in a hard way. Most people didn’t get the joke.

I got to see first hand the bubble that people like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly live in because all of the e-mail I got fell into one of three camps. One was the middle of the road, which is, “Hey. Maybe you shouldn’t use so many swear words in your review and more people would read them.” Which is just always funny. Then you have the liberal rants against me which often refer to me with clichés. Calling me, “Jack-booted wearing, Fox News watching, ultra-right winger.” They were all filled with misspellings, leaps in logic, and they were rude and offensive, and written by awful angry people. Then you have the conservative ones, which were always well composed, always very well written eloquent celebrations of me, calling me a hero standing in the face of liberal Hollywood.

The thing is, if you give into that bubble, if you believe in it. You begin to believe that conservatives are smart and well intended and liberals are just angry and ignorant. And really, in truth, the liberals who are more well meaning or get the joke or even read it and just dismiss me and go, “This is just one assholes opinion.” They didn’t send e-mails, it was the angry idiots who sent me e-mails. The only people who sent me e-mail on the conservative side were the people who were, “I want to see more of this. We should encourage this kind of behavior in critics. So, I think I’m going to spend some time writing this guy and letting him know he should do more of this.”

I looked at all of this and I said, “Never again. I do not want to be this guy.” I realized at that moment I could make a career being the guy there still really isn’t. This loud , angry, possibly even funny voice writing for conservatives. I knew that, especially at the time, there was a lot of money flowing into bloggers who were conservative leaning. So, it was a job that could probably pay really well but I’d be selling my soul to do it. I was like, “I don’t want that, I want to be who I am.”

That was the last time I did that gag and from that point on anything I wrote politically was more in tune with really who I am, which is a dyed in the wool moderate. I dealt with everything in moderation and seriousness and wrote much more eloquent things about the importance of the political nature of what the movies are. Of course, none of those ever went viral again because that kind of stuff isn’t what people want. People want the knee-jerk stuff. I learned the hard way just how ugly and insulated that world is.

There’s part of me that wishes that I hadn’t learned that the hard way. That I could have known that before hand and avoided it. Then wrote a more down to Earth, honest, straight up, “hey guys, this is a little messed up, but check this movie out,” kind of review. Spared myself two and a half months of getting yelled at and being a villain online. At the same time, the life lesson I got out of it really, really worked and helped define my voice as a writer and define who I wanted to be.

Steve: I’m now picturing a parallel reality where you’re reviewing movies for Fox News.

Cargill: Well, it would honestly be Breitbart is where I would probably end up. That’s the conservative leaning site that is tied in with that whole. The triangle of ultra-conservatism is Matt Drudge, Rupert Murdoch, and then Breitbart. Who has passed away but whose empire continues to make Republican’s worse everyday. I say that as a Republican. I would probably ended up at one of Breitbart’s blogs or something of that nature.

That would be a weird alternate universe where once a week I show up on Fox News and talk about liberal Hollywood. That’s a strange universe. I kind of want to peer into that universe, but I don’t want to visit that universe.

Steve: As a fan of Junkfood Cinema I have to ask this question; if you could pick any project, film or television, to write the reboot for what would be the best fit for your skill set and how would you do it differently? I will admit I wrote this a week before I heard the last Junkfood Cinema where you talk about your newest project.

Cargill: Yeah, Demon with a Glass Hand is up there. It was on a short list of things that I very much wanted to do. So, when they came to me for doing an Outer Limits movie, I was like, “Can I do Demon with a Glass Hand?” They were like, “okay.” And so it’s like, “All right, well there you go. Bucket list, checked that off.”

The problem is there are two movies that are on that short list, that have always, always been on that short list and I’ve been up for both of them and something happened that pulled me away from both. We were supposed to work on the Changeling, which is one of Scott and my favorite horror films. George C. Scott, 1980, amazing film. The problem is, it’s just a little bit dated, even for 1980. It’s in the era Spielberg and Lucas kind of took over Hollywood. This was still several years behind stylistically, which is part of what I love about it, but it doesn’t totally work with modern audiences. I’d love a crack at that, and we were offered that, and there was a rights issues, and the rights fell through. The company ended up not having the rights, then later the company ended up folding a year or two later. Then I was offered a chance to work on Firestarter, which was the very first novel I read when I was eight years old. Then again it fell into a weird rights issue. Both times, we really wanted to do the project, they were bucket list items of mine, and the production companies we were working with wanted us but there were just things that came up. It’s very hard for me to come up with something else because I’ve had a crack at several of my bucket list movies.

Trying to find something else. You know what I think would be good, let’s go back to one of the original Junkfood Cinema’s, the inspiration for it, I think skill set wise, I’d love to do Battletruck. Battletruck would be a really, really fun movie to tackle because it’s such a great concept and can be updated really well, shot very cheaply, and still be fucking awesome. But everyone would think it was a new movie because nobody’s fucking seen Battletruck.

Steve: Having heard you talk about it, it’s still one of the ones I’d really love to see but have not been able to find.

Cargill: It’s on Youtube. You can find old DVD’s. It was out on DVD for a while as part of a two pack, you can go to Amazon and it should still be available. It’s been on Youtube forever, and nobody seems to care that it’s on Youtube. You can very easily sit down and watch it and it is well worth watching because it is a cool fucking movie.

I have always found the following questions incredibly revealing and decided if I ever gave an interview I would use them. In that sense please answer the following questions originally posed by James Lipton, host of Inside the Studio.

Steve: What is your favorite word?

Cargill: Cyrillian

Steve: What is your least favorite word?

Cargill: Shanker

Steve: What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Cargill: 2 in the morning. I love 2 in the morning.

Steve: What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Cargill: Anger

Steve: What sound or noise do you love?

Cargill: The kettle whistling

Steve: What sound or noise do you hate?

Cargill: My alarm clock

Steve: Everybody hates that.

Cargill: Yeah, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Steve: What is your favorite curse word?

Cargill: My favorite cures word. Bug-fuck. I got to go with the Harlon Ellison creation. Bug-fuck.

Steve: What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Cargill: That’s a hard question. I’ve done most of the jobs I’ve always wanted to do. I’d like to be a theatre owner. I’d like to own my own movie theater

Steve: What profession would you not like to do?

Cargill: Road kill retrieval.

Steve: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Cargill: The first showing is at 7:00 second showing at 9:15.

Steve: What movie is playing?

Cargill: Whatever awesome movie is showing in heaven. I would assume, since this is my heaven and I get to create it, it’s all the movies that should have been made and never got made for one reason or another. All those wish list movies. Like, “Oh my God. We’re going to get to watch this version of this movie. If the movie had been directed by this director. And we get to watch all of these perfect films as they were intended to be made.”

Steve: The old theory of, what if Dumb and Dumber had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock?

Cargill: Something like that. Personally, I’ll go with what I’ve got right here on my wall next to me, but I will say one of the first things that better be playing is Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Steve: As soon as you started talking about a poster I was going to say Dune.

Cargill: I keep this poster next to me as a fantastic reminder and piece of art. It’s a fantastic reminder that you can dump years and years of work into something and it can never happen. And that it even happens to the masters, so don’t take it personally. I keep that right here next to my desk. Up high I’ve got all the movies that I love whether their great or whether people hate them. But right here next to my desk I keep Jodorowsky’s Dune to keep me humble and understanding and get me through the harder nights. As I said, I’ve had a number of projects fall through. I’ve written six scripts professionally, I’ve been this close on half a dozen others. There are a number of alternate realities in which I have these other movies under my belt that are wither great or not. You have to wrap your mind around the fact that some of these things just aren’t going to happen. I keep Dune next to me to remind me, but in Heaven, that’s what’s playing.

I want to thank Cargill for taking time out of his schedule and talking to me. I learned a lot from the interview and in the interest of brevity I will keep my thoughts for later. Thank you all and have a great day.

Let me know what you think. Post below or head over to my Facebook page and leave a message there. You can also follow me on Twitter @stevemayne2. Also feel free to look at my Youtube.

Chocolate Milk and Underdog

I have few memories from my childhood of spending the morning with Dad. He held two jobs and very had few days off, but every year on the 4th Thursday of November he would wake up while my brother, sister, and I were still asleep and sojourn off into the early morning fog and frost to pick up breakfast. I don’t know how he planned it, but when he returned we were always wide awake, sitting huddled before the TV with or flannel superhero pajama’s and woolen blankets wrapped around our shoulders.

He would walk in the front door, wisps of cold air racing around his heels to get inside where the warmth was, carrying two pristine white wax paper bags. He would march them into the dinning room set them on the table and forbid us from opening them ourselves. He would then make a grand show of removing his gloves and placing them in the pockets of his denim jacket. He would then shrug out of the jacket and hang it with extra care in the closet with the scarf my mother had knitted wrapped around the hanger. Then he would sit and with torturous slowness he would undo each of his shoes and place them neatly on the little mat next to the door. And while he did this he ignored our cries of, “Daaaaaadddddd.”

When he was finally ready he would give each of us a job. One of us would go and knock gently on the bedroom door to wake Mom. Another would run to the pantry to get out the paper plates, counting to make sure we had exactly enough. Finally I would be tasked with pouring the milk; this was my job since I was the oldest. Dad would then walk into the dinning room and lift one of the precious wax bags and tear down its seam releasing the sweet sugar coated goodness found inside.

We each would grab our three doughnuts and our tall, cold glasses of milk, usually chocolate, and run back to the living room to sit in front of the TV. Mom would join us later after having showered and dressed, she would get her plate of doughnuts and a cup of tea Dad would make, because we weren’t old enough. She would walk to the TV and at 9:00 A.M. she would turn on NBC and we would watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

It started the same every year, a marching band, in brightly colored uniforms, with glistening brass instruments would march down the street. Powerful music reached out of the TV and burst into our living rooms. They were led buy proud men and women marching in time to the music, carrying flags and banners proudly announcing what school or city they represented. Occasionally some member of the band was a gymnast or acrobat and would flip and twirl their way down the street. They marched proudly, with out fail, regardless of snow, sleet, rain, winds and fog. As they led the way balloons would drop and crowds would cheer, streamers and confetti would spiral down from the rooftops and float amongst them.

Of course following every band there was a float, a great papier-mâché festival of color. Chicken wire, roses, and Crete paper would meld together to bring fantasy worlds and storybooks to life. Actors in costume became the very things of our imagination. Jack and Jill would sit next to a great well from which the frog prince pushed a ball, while Miss Muffet shrieked at a nearby spider. Behind them would be lovely Alice in her blue dress, drinking tea with the Mad Hatter and March Hare.

Then with a shriek of joy we would greet the clowns, tumbling and fumbling down the street. They were bouncing balls, juggling pins, and throwing candy to the children; they would lead the float from the circus. A great cavalcade of wonderment, covered in beautiful women and powerful men. On either side of the float stood two great poles pushing upward into the sky with a willowy net stretched between them as well as a trapeze or high wire, on which pranced and flipped a daring soul.

Of course there were musicians, singers, and dancers parading along each from their own show on the Broadway stage. They would sing and dance and perform powerful songs from their own programs. Celebrity guest from TV and movies would appear to greet the audience and wish us a happy and safe holiday. Then in the middle of it all was the big show stopping moment my parents had been anticipating.
The grand entrance would always be announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, from Radio City Music Hall. The Rockettes.” Out they would come a dozen ladies in beautiful costumes kicking and singing their way across the screen. My parents loved the music and pageantry, clapping and singing along. My siblings and I were less impressed

We would bemoan the loss of our bright colors and happy sounds; awaiting the moment of their return. And of course they would and usually in the grandest way possible. They would come floating over the city streets like a happy cloud. We would cheer our favorites and marvel at who would be chosen to wish for who was missing. Sometimes they would be led in by music and we would become excited by the mere sound of those familiar tones. “When criminals in this world appear and break the laws that they should fear, and frighten all who see and hear, a cry goes out to far and near to..” Every time it happened, my siblings and I would cry out, “Underdog,” just as his proud black nose would round the corner wearing his great red long johns with the white U pinned to his chest, and a great blue cape valiantly flapping in the breeze behind him.

Of course no balloon, not even Superman, could stand up to the pure awe inspiring might of the last float of the day. It would be announced with an all too familiar cry. Children and adults would cheer and scream. My siblings and I would leap to our feet empty plates spilling to the floor. Then it would come into view, covered in mounds of pristine white powder a great red sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. Sitting in the sleigh and running alongside it were happy elves, merrily waving and tossing candy canes to the crowd. Next to them would be the great man himself, sometimes joined by his smiling wife. They would sit there adorned in brilliant crimson coats and hats, flowing white hair whipping around in the wind.

The sleigh would stop in front of the Macy’s store and he would stand with a great cry of Ho. Ho. Ho. He would leave his sleigh and climb the podium to the microphone, shaking the hands of whoever hosted the parade that year. He would then stand at the microphone and cry out, “Happy Thanksgiving.” He waved to all around, joy filling his every movement. And then the announcement every child in the viewing audience waited to hear. “It is my honor,” he would say, “to announce the official start of the Christmas season.” Children would cheer, parents would applaud, balloons and confetti would blanket the earth.

With a cry of, “happy holidays“, he would wave again and return to his sleigh. Gripping the reigns in each hand he would give them a snap and call out, “On Dasher. On Dancer. On Prancer and Vixen. On Comet. On Cupid. On Donner and Blitzen.” Then they would be off with one final Ho. Ho. Ho.

My parents would gather the plates and glasses while my brother and sister and I would go and get dressed and ready to spend the rest of the day with relatives eating turkey and stuffing. But all day long all we could think of was that Christmas was coming soon.

The next day Dad would go into the attic and get out the long boxes of Christmas lights and decorations and we would spend the weekend hanging shinny things and candy canes all over the house. Christmas Cards were purchased and mailed. A wreath would be purchased from the Boy Scouts and hung on our front door. Christmas, an event we waited all year for with baited breath we watched the calendar hoping for Thanksgiving to come so we could see that special moment again.

We would go shopping that weekend and everything was new and different. Every store had magically become Christmas wonderlands. Shinny multi-colored trees popped up like spring daisies. Festive packages appeared under them with the promises of playful mystery. Bright eclectic strings of lights would move across roof tops like ivy. The radio stations would begin playing beautiful songs, extolling the virtues of white Christmas’s and jingling bells.

I’m older now and my childhood is gone, I still watch the parade almost every year. Sometimes I have family with me; sometimes my only company is the extra doughnut waiting in the bag. I smile at the memories from time to time; I keep them safe deep in my heart.

But I stand here today at the beginning of October, and I look out at an aisle filled with candy and witches, pumpkins and candles, and flashlights and costumes. Next to them, at the end of the aisle, set slightly off to one side are Santa’s and wreaths. I look at them and I wonder, just where exactly did we go wrong?

Paranormal S.W.A.T. #8 pt 3.

Hey All, Well another week has gone by and we're up to the final installment of our little story. Today we get to see the culmination of events at a festive woodland tea party. If you want to read from the beginning head over to part 1 or head here for part 2. If you'd like to see the entire team from the beginning head on over to Cul-de-Sac to Hell  for their first adventure.

Paranormal S.W.A.T. 

Supernatural Weapons & Arcane Tactics

Falling

Down the Murder Hole

The velvet explosion of jazz music rolled over them as the they walked in to a large room filled with a Technicolor dinner party. A slender table stretched from in front of the door to other end of the wide oval room. The table was covered with food, drinks, and assorted mismatched center pieces. A set of brass candelabras stood a few feet from a bowl of black wax fruits. A huge bouquet of dead flowers stood with a single vibrant lily rising out of the top.

The chairs that sat around the table were mixes of different eras and styles with no two matching. A once elegant bar stool sat next to a folding lawn chair that was next to a proud Elizabethan armchair with what might have been a wobbly leg. Each was worn and well used, with frayed cushions and faded woods. The only chair of any note was a proud and well-maintained high backed Victorian with crushed velvet upholstery and exquisite hand sewn decorations that sat empty at the head of the table where Sarah and Griffin had entered. At the far end sat an overstuffed easy chair, stained and worn yet more comfortable than anything else in the room; it was also empty.

Around the table sat eclectic clusters of people; eighteen people in all. Every group was a mix of men and women some wearing what Sarah would call typical evening wear, nice suits and expensive dresses. Still some wore things of bizarre nature, style, and color. A large man in pink tartan kilt with a grand violet suede top hat stood arm in arm with a woman who wore a dress that seemed to be made from a rainbow-colored collection of leaves stitched together with thick leather cords.

The room was made to appear a wide forest clearing, the walls set with thick tree trunks to mark the border with an excellently done fresco beyond them to give the illusion of a deeper forest. The light in the room came from a series of multicolored Chinese lanterns strung in a haphazard pattern above the table. To one side sat a trio of men playing instruments with ease and skill; they were in a small area marked off by paving stones to form the border of a stage like area. One of the men noticed Sarah looking at them and nodded a greeting.

Griffin leaned towards her. “Don’t get to close, those are Satyrs and if you cross those paving stones they will lead you into the forest and dance you to death.”

Despite her distance Sarah took a small step away from the band. “So, you’re the guide here, who do you think were looking for?”

Griffin moved his head back and forth for a second then sighed. “I don’t know. Half the people here are human, the rest are various fairies and elves. We should sit and see what we can pick up.”

Sarah started to move to the Victorian before Griffin pulled her gently towards a wooden dinning room chair and a swiveling chair from a computer desk whose wheels were uselessly stuck in the dirt floor. As they sat a young woman seemed to materialize and offer them a tray of drinks. As Griffin turned and began to refuse her offer two glasses were placed before them.

Mr. Goodfellow stood next to her his elegant white tuxedo replaced with a violent orange long coat and an equally ostentatious blue top hat. He turned to the young woman. “Thank you my dear, but they have drinks already.” Looking back at Sarah and Griffin. “These are the drinks you left at the table, when you finish them if you want something else we can deal with it then.” He smiled easily and moved to the Victorian. As he sat down he nodded to Sarah and Griffin.

Sarah turned her attention to the room, everyone was staring at them and Mr. Goodfellow. She made mental notes of each of the people sitting at the table wondering if the fey were the ones in the weird outfits or if they were humans going native. She’d seen some pretty outlandish dresses standing in line for the club outside. As her eyes went from face to face she caught sight of a man sitting at the far end, Tony Abbot.

Tony had been a small time dealer in a larger organization who had been busted on minor drug charges a couple of times over the years. She came in contact with him about a year ago when his supplier was found with his head torn off in Millennium Park under the cloud; they never found the head. Tony was a suspect but was cleared pretty quick when they learned he was in the hospital having his stomach pumped from food poisoning. They never found his suppliers killer or his head and Sarah had never been able to shake the feeling Tony had known more than he was letting on. Looking at him now in a three thousand dollar suit sitting at a fairy table in another world she figured she’d been right.

The music suddenly came to an abrupt halt as a man in dirt brown tuxedo entered the room from what Sarah was certain a part of the fresco, or maybe just a cleverly hidden opening. He was large and blunt with the air of danger and brutality around him. Sarah estimated he was nearly seven foot tall, his wide shoulders and the uneven gait at which he walked made it hard to say for sure. As he lumbered forward Sarah wished she’d called Adam as well.

Several people around the table looked back and forth at him and Mr. Goodfellow then silently excused themselves and left, some through the door and some into the trees; the band exited with out even taking their expensive looking bass.

When the room had mostly cleared it left just Tony and three of his boys plus two young women. All of the men wore suits similar to Tony’s only not quite as nice. One of the women, a lithe brunette with dark eyes, wore a long slinky red evening dress and gently sipped at her drink while keeping only close enough to Tony to let you know she was with him. The other, a model worthy blonde, wore a dress that might have been woven from floral vines and peppered with various colored flowers, leaned up against him to let people know she was with Tony.

Griffin’s shoulders slumped and he turned to Mr. Goodfellow. “Seriously? A tempest raging against the world? You tricked us.”

Mr. Goodfellow smiled. “But I didn‘t lie..” He stood removing his top hat and looking to the new man. “Calabash, it’s nice of you to join us this evening.”

Griffin leaned to Sarah. “I wish you’d called Adam too.”

The newcomer stopped at the table standing next to the large evening chair and smiled. “I was about to say the same to you Robin the Goodfellow. How delightful we are, so formal with our full names, how Puckish. You so rarely join our little parties anymore and after so many years of being the master of the kettle it seems like old times to have you back.” His voice was deep and rumbled like boulders smashing together. He dropped into the easy chair and pulled the stem from a hookah that sat on the table in front of him. He took a deep breath from the end and looked at Sarah. As he spoke the smoke came out in small wisps from the side of his mouth. “And who are your friends?” With a final punctuation he exhaled a cloud of green smoke that formed a into a large question mark that hovered over the table before dissipating and floating away.

“Of course Cal, my manners are atrocious.” Mr. Goodfellow turned his body without ever removing his eyes from Cal. “Allow me to introduce Detective Sarah Parker and her escort the esteemed Doctor Griffin Wells.” He waved his hand in her direction with a showman’s flourish. Then with a bow he sat in his chair once more. “Though, if I’m not mistaken, Detective Parker and Mr. Abbot are already acquainted.”

Tony leaned back in his chair. “We met. What brings you this way detective?”

Sarah looked at the assembled people around the table for a second. She knew she was in the middle of something that was far above her. This was a contest between two mystical beings and she didn’t even know the ground rules. She wished she’d been able to ask Griffin a bit more about what was going on, what she should do, and what could go wrong. She wasn’t sure if she should lie, tell the truth, or avoid the question. As she started to open her mouth she heard a tinny little ding from the door to the hall that had been left open and the sound of the music box floated to her and wove its way into her mind. “I’m here to arrest you for the murder of Danny Jones and the for the production and distribution of Fairy Dust.”

As she said it she blinked realizing that as the words left her lips Tony and his crew had drawn closer. Not because they had moved but because the table had shrunk to fit the new group size. The once massive table was now an intimate setting that they all comfortably fit around. When the sense of movement ended Tony was now seated directly across from her as if the room had arranged itself so that she and Tony were now the focus of everything.

Tony leaned back smiling at her. “You got guts dear. I like that, admire it even, but you can’t touch me. I’m connected.” Tony’s boys, sensing that something was about to happen had already stood and positioned themselves around their boss.

The woman in the flower dress smiled at Sarah and leaned up against Tony. “Why don’t you just let Ripper have them and then we can go back to our party?”

Sarah looked at the young woman. “Excuse me, the adults are talking.”

She focused a hard look at Sarah. “You don’t get to talk to me like that. Nobody talks to me like that.”

“I have more important things to do in my life than worry about a stuck up fairy who wants to experience the wild side of humanity. Go do your slumming somewhere else.”

Both women stood at the same time. The woman in the red dress stepped back from the table and crossed her arms. The girl in the flower dress grabbed her drink off the table and flung it into Sarah’s face.

Griffin jumped to his feet his hand coming out of his pocket the cold steel knuckles fitted over his fingers. The stolen steak knife held easy in his other hand, blade down to protect himself from attack. “The brunette’s an elf, blondes a human.” He kicked off shoving Sarah’s chair sideways.

Red Dress dropped her hands and with a snicker and a snack she easily flipped open two antique walrus-handled straight razors. She moved forward and with a inhuman grace and beauty she somersaulted up onto the table in a single smooth motion. Her razors cut into the air where Sarah had been seated just seconds before. Sarah stood grabbing the tablecloth and yanking it towards her with all she was worth. Red Dress shifted as her feet moved out from underneath her but quickly recovered, rolled over onto her side and then pushed off the table shoving herself up over the hookah as it hurtled past her and crashed onto the floor. As Red Dress twirled into the air she quickly spun herself around and landed facing Griffin with both razors weaving an intricate pattern before her.

Tony’s men began drawing guns and stepping in to protect their boss. Sarah drew the pistol from it’s concealed holster and let off a quick round in their direction. One of the men, a linebacker-looking fellow, cried out and grabbed his shoulder as her shot dug into his flesh. He staggered backwards knocking over his chair and falling to one knee to stop himself from hitting the ground completely.

One of Tony’s other men, wearing sunglasses to make himself look tougher, grabbed Tony and moved towards the door leading back to the club. He was careful to keeping himself in between Tony and Sarah the whole way. Blondie in a panic moved as fast as her inexplicably ridiculous heels would let her.

The third man, a shorter fellow with a flower-patterned tie, aimed a rather serious looking automatic and squeezed off a couple of rounds in Sarah’s direction.

Sarah dove for cover, dropping to the ground behind the table. From her position she grabbed the lip of the table and tried to flip it up to give herself some cover. Try as she would the table stuck fast, refusing to be toppled. She looked down and realized that the legs of the table grew up out of the ground. She heard Flowers stop shooting to reload and briefly considered standing up to take her shot then realized from her vantage point she had a perfect shot.

She put two rounds into his legs dropping him to the ground. She stood to make sure she had finished the job when she noticed Linebacker wobbling to his feet his pistol coming to bear on her. He fired a shot that went wide and destroyed the tea cup held in Mr. Goodfellows hand as he calmly sat at the end of the table. Both he and Cal seemed to be continuing with their drinks as if there was no worry in the world.

Sarah’s attention quickly came back into focus as a bullet whipped by her head. She quickly focused on Linebacker, adjusted her aim, and put two slugs through his chest.

As the man fell backward, his pistol firing two final rounds before silence, Cal moved a small plate of scones a split second before a bullet tore through the table in the exact spot they had been.

Ignoring the oddity of the men she turned to check on Griffin. He was battling against Red Dress moving backwards away from her. His knife sticking out of the ground some distance from where he stood. He was now using the remnants of an old fashioned four legged barstool like a lion tamer to keep her at bay. His coat sleeve had a few cuts in it and Sarah could see blood on his side near a gash in his jacket. Red Dress was moving oddly, she had smoke rising up off her in a couple of places, mostly on her left side, including her cheek.

With a quick jab Red Dress pinned Griffin’s stool with one hand and with the other she knocked it free and tossed it across the clearing. She positioned her leg and stepped forward then spun her body like a ballerinas, her straight razors becoming a flashing swirl of nickel plated flair. Sarah would have marveled at the beauty of the move if not for its intended target. On pure instinct she raised her pistol and fired her last round into Red Dress’ back staggering her and knocking her spin off balance. Griffin took advantage of her momentary lapse and stepped into the fairies movement and with a solid uppercut drove his cold iron knuckles into her jaw flipping the lithe beauty up into the air and slamming her face down onto the ground.

Sarah ran to Griffin. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, go get that bastard.”

Ramming a quickloader into her sidearm Sarah turned and ran to the door and entered the long hall. She started past the statue of Alice taking a moment to step over the decapitated monster head that was now in the middle of the floor. She sprinted into the hall and started up it when she quickly came to Tony and his entourage. Tony was limping badly, his ankle clearly busted, leaning on Blondie and Shades for support. His voice was high pitched and broken. “Stupid statue. This is gonna take forever to heal. Get me to the ER.”

Sarah dropped into a perfect shooters stance. “Freeze Tony!”

Shades let go of his boss and turned raising his pistol to a firing position, Sarah dropped him with one shot straight through his pretty glasses. Then shifted her focus back to Tony.

Tony grabbed Blondie and was now using her as a shield. He’d jerked her in front of him so fast it had dislodged one of her stilettos and left her standing on unsteady feet trying to get out of the way. Tony pulled a switchblade and raised it to Blondie’s throat; once a street punk always a street punk. “Back off or I skewer the bitch.”

Blondie started to protest and Tony shook her hard. He began limping backward sucking breath with each step on his broken ankle.

Sarah matched his movements never letting her aim off of him. “I can’t do that Tony. Let her go; there’s no way out of this for you.”

Tony kept inching up the hall trying to get to the safety of the real world still some fifty feet away. “I’m in charge here. Not you, me. You do what I say or I stick…”

Tony was suddenly cut off as his body leapt backward as if jerked off his feet. He slammed into the tile floor and the with a loud huff the air exited his lungs leaving him grasping on the ground. Sarah quickly moved forward and dropped to the ground next to Tony rolling him over on his stomach. She reached to her side and realized she’d left her purse at the table. Turning to Blondie she reached over grabbed one of the vines from the hem of her dress and yanked it free. Using it as a rope she tied Tony’s hands behind his back.

“Fine arrest me. You aint got nothing. I’ll be free in a couple of hours and then me and the boys’ll come looking for you.”

Blondie having collected herself stomped to Tony and kicked him in the side. “You bastard.” Sarah moved to stop her as she kicked him again. “I’m gonna give them everything. Accounts, dealers, suppliers, all of it.” She kicked him again.

Sarah pulled Blondie off of Tony and backed her away from him. Blondie stood there for a moment her rage boiling over and then as she calmed down slowly the adrenalin faded and she broke down in tears clinging to Sarah.

She looked up the hall to Mr. Goodfellow who stood there sipping at a cup of tea, smiling. “Your friend will be along in a minute.”

After a few minutes Griffin, adjusting his scarf, walked up the hall. Mr. Goodfellow, with a slight raise of his cup as if in salute, turned and walked back to the garden party from where the sound of jazz was beginning to again filter down the hall.

* * *

It took the bouncer a couple of minutes to move Tony and Blondie whose name was Linda to a private boardroom where the bodies of the three guards lay in the positions Sarah had dropped them in. Mr. Goodfellow gave Linda something to drink then very carefully explained the evenings events to her as if retelling the story only this time everything happened in the boardroom and the fey lands weren’t in the story at all.

When the CPD showed up Sarah explained that she had been on a date and Mr. Goodfellow recognizing her as a police officer asked her to intercede in something he thought might have been illegal. He had been right and she discovered Tony and his men discussing their Fairy Dust business.

The story had a few places where bits and pieces didn’t work but everyone seemed to go with the events as they were explained. Sarah wondered how much of it was the coffee the club supplied to the officers. She was worried but Griffin told her it was okay and she trusted him. After a few hours in the club she was allowed to leave and go home to change and get some sleep with orders to report to I.A. in the morning to help work out the details of the case as they related to Danny.

Outside she met Griffin standing off to one side out of the eye line of the local officers. She walked up and hugged him. “Are you okay? I thought I saw you bleeding in there.”

He hugged her back. “I’m fine someone splashed me with raspberry preserves when they flipped the table cloth.” He ran his finger through the mostly dried stain and held it up for her to smell, raspberry preserves.

“Do you think it will change anything.”

Griffin paused for a moment and wiped his finger off against his jacket. “Linda was drinking in the fey lands, I think she’s going to know quite a bit about Tony’s operation that he didn’t realize she knew. I already heard her talking about things that happened out of town, things with Tony’s old boss, and a particularly interesting tale about killing and framing a vice cop less than a week ago.”

She hugged him again and just stood there, letting the early Chicago rain sprinkle the ground around them. She felt him against her and then leaned down and whispered into his ear, “Thank you for everything you did tonight.”

A small cough off to one side caused them to both jerk apart and turn to face the noise. Mr. Goodfellow stepped from the shadows where there wasn’t an opening for someone to hide. “I just wanted to congratulate you on all the good work that was done tonight.” He reached his hand out to shake with Sarah. “A job well done.”

Sarah reached to take his hand when Griffin grabbed her wrist. “We are not done yet. Nor are we even.” He stepped in front of Sarah. “We did quite a bit for you tonight: toppled a rival, saved your club, kept the police from coming back, and improved your position in the Courts. When compared to your offering of clearing her friend I’d say we are far from even.”

Mr. Goodfellow laughed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. What do you want?”

Griffin took a deep breath. “The music box, let her go.”

“I can’t guarantee her final destination.”

“It won’t be there and that’s enough.”

“Very well, done.” He reached his hand out again.

Griffin stepped aside. “Go ahead.”

Sarah shook his hand and felt a small ripple in the air followed by a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach. She stood there for a moment not realizing that Mr. Goodfellow had gone and for no reason at all she started to cry.

Griffin put his hand on her shoulder and moved to look into her eyes. “How do you feel?”

She looked at her reflection in his mirrored sunglasses and met her won eyes. “Happy.”

As the sun cracked over the horizon and warmed their faces he hugged her. “Thank god.”

* * *

Griffin was waiting in Albert’s office sitting in one of the overstuffed office chairs that filled the area. He’d been in the pool when Christine had called him to let him know Albert would be up soon. He threw on his favorite evening robe and grabbed his pipe and a bottle of brandy from the pantry. He’d been waiting all day for Albert to arrive and as he watched the sun set he listened for the door. He was still sore from last night and was happy Doctor Jackson had been able to stop by and  stitch him up a bit.

He heard the door open and listened to the footsteps as Albert crossed the room and sat at his desk. Griffin thought about offering Albert a drink but knew he didn’t drink brandy and decided it would be a wasted nicety.

Albert dropped a pile of folders into a drawer of his desk and looked at Griffin. “What‘s the damage?”

Griffin had dreaded this part, facing off against mad fairies was easy, facing off against Albert, not so much. Griffin took a deep breath and reminded himself not to refer to Goodfellow by name unless he wanted to draw attention to the conversation. He spent the next several minutes going over most of the events of the evening all the events including the arrests afterwards.

Albert sat staring at him listening intently and when he was done whistled quietly. “You sure it was Ripper you fought?”

“The straight razors are unmistakable, it was definitely Jaclyn. She’s down for now, I hit her pretty hard and Sarah put a round in her back, but when she’s up again…”

Albert rubbed his eyes. “It’s worse than that. She’ll hold a grudge forever. It could be years before she comes looking for payback. What’s you final assessment of Him?”

“He knows who we are or at least who Sarah is. She’s important, I’m not sure how, only that there were rune stones involved and apparently every fairy knows about her. The clubs a mess and filled with fey and humans interacting with one another; I don’t know how much the humans know but the fairies are playing pretty fast and loose with the rules.”

Albert leaned back. “They always do that. This isn’t the first time one of these clubs existed and it wont be the last. Was there any good news?”

“I can answer one of the questions from our background check on Sarah, I know what happened to her mother; they had her.”

“Had?”

“She was a music box. Part of the deal freed her.” Albert looked like he was about to say something. “Sarah doesn’t know. She might ask later but she was overwhelmed with joy right after we finished.”

“A good ending. We rarely get those.”

Griffin sat nervously for a second then leaned forward. “Also, and I’m not sure where this falls into good or bad, I can see through their illusions when my eyes are closed.”

“Really?” Albert turned his chair to look out the window. “It’s at least interesting. Do they know?”

“I think He does, or at least he suspected. That’s why he went to such lengths to get us, me there.”

They sat in silence for a while and then the phone rang, Griffin took advantage of the distraction to gather his things and leave.

End.

There's a bit of an epilogue for this piece if you'd like to see how Sarah's weekend went in the end.

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Paranormal S.W.A.T. #8 pt 2.

Hey all, With another week having passed I'm posting the next part of my latest Paranormal S.W.A.T. story as October and the festive season continue. Tonight, we meet the owner of the Wonderland Club and learn why our heroes have been summoned, what could possibly go wrong. If you want to read from the beginning head over to part 1 If you'd like to see the entire team from the beginning head on over to Cul-de-Sac to Hell  for their first adventure.

Paranormal S.W.A.T. 

Supernatural Weapons & Arcane Tactics

Falling

Down the Murder Hole

“Traditionally, you would ask me.” Sarah wasn’t sure where the man in the immaculate white suit had come from but he now sat in the booth with them. If Griffin hadn’t been holding her hand she’d have gone for her sidearm. “After all, I am the clubs owner.” He sat there calmly twisting a glass of what might have been scotch, he seemed to be waiting for something.

Griffin turned to look at the handsome man sitting in the booth with them and instantly tensed. “Mr. Goodfellow, you’ll excuse us if we pay our bill and leave.” He leaned over to Sarah as he took his wallet out of his coat pocket, “Kick off your shoes, we’re going to need to run.”

Mr Goodfellow laughed. “Doctor Wells, you are so transparent. I mean you and Detective Parker no harm.” Sarah stiffened at the use of her name and title. “Keep your wallet, dinner is on me.”

Griffin stopped moving he sat there for a long moment and then very slowly began to speak as if he was choosing his words as carefully as someone stepping through a minefield. “Mr. Goodfellow, while I appreciate your generous and thoughtful gift, I am unworthy of such a fine and welcome consideration. I humbly decline your offer, and thank you for the thought.”

Mr. Goodfellow laughed again, it was crisp and musical. “Griffin, may I call you Griffin?”

Griffin paused again. “Yes, you may call me Griffin.”

“Thank you, and please call me Robin, both of you. The gift was neither generous nor thoughtful. It’s twenty seven dollars in booze and steak that I would have charged you a hundred and thirty dollars for. Besides it would be rude of me to charge you; seeing as I invited you here tonight. Well, I invited Detective Parker.” He turned to Sarah. “May I call you Sarah?”

“Um…sure.“ Sarah was confused. The way Griffin was clutching her hand was as if he was afraid he’d lose her if he let go. He was clearly afraid of this Mr. Goodfellow. She looked at him trying to decide what made him such a threat. He wasn’t particularly imposing; while it was hard to tell with him sitting down she thought he couldn’t be more than five foot six. He was thin, somewhere between sickly and athletic. He didn’t even look particularly threatening; with his tousled blond hair and Errol Flynn goatee he actually looked quite charming.

He smiled at her. “Thank you, dear Sarah.” He leaned back in the booth and sipped his drink.

“What do you mean you invited us?” asked Sarah. “How?”

“As I said, I invited you, the fact that Griffin joined you is a happy circumstance.” Mr. Goodfellow sipped from his glass. “I will admit I had hoped for more of your friends when I sent you officer Jones’ file. It had to be properly amended to include my club but I knew as soon as you received it you’d gather your compatriots and head this way.”

Sarah tried to raise her hand to the table but Griffin wouldn’t let go so she gave up and looked at Mr. Goodfellow. “You sent me that file? How did you get it?”

Griffin spoke before Mr. Goodfellow had a chance. “We don’t need to know that.”

Mr. Goodfellow laughed. “It’s alright, to get what I need I fear I will have to give this information freely.” He sipped at his drink once more. “Though I see that you are knowledgeable to the means and manners of the courts. To ease your mind; I promise in the name of the old Laws that as long as we all sit in the booth I will give any information I can free of charge or deception. Do these conditions meet with your agreement?”
Griffin nodded and let go a Sarah’s hand. For a brief flash Sarah could swear a slight chill swept through the club and was gone. She took a moment to flex her fingers to get the blood flowing back into her hand then leaned forward to look closer at Mr. Goodfellow. “That seems to have handled everything. Do you want to explain what’s going on here?”

“Not particularly, but I see no other way.“ He finished his glass in a single gulp then placed the glass on the table and flicked the rim with his finger, after a second a perfect chime rang out and the glass filled itself with the same liquid he’d been drinking before. Sarah had seen better working with the guys so paid little attention to the act. “As I said this is my club. I love clubs. I’ve owned taverns, brothels, hovels, inns, and way stations. There is nothing like the American invention of the club. Your Prohibition did a wonderful thing inventing clubs. They are crowded with humans at their most decadent; filled with intrigue, excess, lust, pain, passion, pleasure, and a cavalcade of boisterous play.”

Griffin took a bite of his steak. “That’s fascinating, and exactly what does it have to do with what’s going on here?”

“You should have been born earlier. Langston Hughes would have loved you. However, to the point. I’m not the only one who loves these clubs. Thus the King in order to prevent full on war over these fine establishments has declared some of them neutral ground, mine included. I think he’s still angry at the little joke I played on the Queen.”

Griffin placed his fork down and picked up his glass and took a sip through his straw. While he did Sarah noticed as a quick motion of his other hand let him slip his knife up the sleeve of his coat. “You tricked her into falling in love with a Jack Ass.”

“All in good fun.” Mr. Goodfellow look wistful for a moment and sipped at his drink. “Alas as my club is neutral ground I may not act to directly interfere with the actions of other members of the courts. One of them has decided to start using my club to sell a particularly potent Pixie concoction to mortals with the help of a local criminal group. I honestly don’t care what humans choose to put in their bodies, no matter how lethal, but he’s doing it out of my club. And once again, they meet tonight in my own private party grounds to thus taunt me more.”

Sarah leaned forward. “Why not go to the authorities, human or otherwise?”

“I’ve tried. The King doesn’t want to hear my dissatisfaction, and has doubly forbid me from seeking revenge. Were it up to me I would have removed his agents myself, it’s been so long since I’ve been allowed a good flaying. Alas, I may not touch my adversary for he is of noble blood and his vassals have been given his protection as well.”

Griffin leaned forward. “Noble blood? Do you seriously want us to go up against a member of the High Court?”

Mr. Goodfellow laughed a loud. “No, I would sooner send butterflies to stop a hurricane. No, a minor prince, a foolish elemental of by gone years, a foppish boy whose witch mother gave him a title and an island. A bug of a fairy. A Tempest raging against a world that no longer finds him necessary. noble only in tradition not in position.”

“Is there anything you can do to stop him?” asked Sarah.

Mr. Goodfellow glanced down at his glass a dejected look settling over his face. “Anything I did would most certainly cause a war. In and of itself a war could be fun; we haven’t had a good war in so many decades. Even though that sort play would be magnificent, his majesty moves to protect his own plots and practices. So, I am left to find intermediaries.” He let the word drip from his mouth like a snake oozing venom from its fangs. “I thought I had one in your friend when he arrived the other day. Sadly, he was unversed in our ways and quickly revealed himself as an agent of order. They made quite quick work of him. Then they left him for me to be rid of, a hollow husk, broken and forgotten left to my devices as if I were a servant boy.” Mr. Goodfellow clutched his glass in his hand and even over the music Sarah could hear the glass straining and cracking under his grip.

“When I learned who he was it was easy enough to find who his friends were and let information reach the ears necessary for my cause.” He smiled at Sarah. “I was particularly motivated when I learned you were his friend and former lover. I knew you would be immediately drawn to the case. After all, you’re the great Sarah Parker; we all know who you are.”

Sarah felt her mouth go suddenly dry. “What do you mean you all know who I am?”

“I suppose it would be cheating to tell, but I did say I would speak the truth. The stones my dear, it‘s all in the stones…” A sudden burst of thunder outside shook the club and caused the lights to flicker. A long bolt of lightning struck the roof shaking the skylights and causing the copper frames to spark and glow. The club grew quiet and then everyone cheered as the music started up again. Griffin grasped her hand again. Mr. Goodfellow let out a hearty laugh. “What fun. It seems I may have said too much.”

Mr. Goodfellow slapped his hands on the table. “Enough of this. Shall I introduce you to the horrible man who killed your friend?” With that Mr. Goodfellow quickly stood and stepped out of the booth. Sarah felt the shiver of cold once again.

Griffin swore. “Nicely played.”

Sarah looked at both men for a second unsure of what had just happened. “What are you talking about, what stones, and where are you going?”

Griffin released her hand. “Forget it, he left the booth, the deal is over. He won’t answer any more questions. Plus, from the thunder I’m guessing he’s really not allowed to answer some of them.”

Mr. Goodfellow signaled to a waitress to come to the table. “You‘re reading far too much into the weather my friend.” The waitress he’d signaled arrived at the table bearing a serving tray with manila envelope on it. He smiled at the young woman and indicated Griffin. The woman removed the envelope from the tray and placed it in front of Griffin with a heavy thud before smiling sweetly and walking away. “I took the liberty of having one of my people pick that up for you. Before you refuse, it‘s not a gift. It‘s one of yours.”

Griffin gingerly took the package and slowly opened the flap and peered inside as if expecting a snake would leap out a attach itself to his face. With a slight chuckle Griffin tilted the package and poured a pair of black knuckle dusters into his other hand. “Cold iron knuckles. One of the fey’s greatest weaknesses. My God you are a trusting fellow.”

Goodfellow bowed slightly, “I appreciate the compliment. However, I’d say I was more calculating than trusting. I’ll wager even if you wanted to take a swing at me, your friend wants to know who’s in that back room even more.” With that Goodfellow bowed deeply at the waist with a flourish of his hand before straightening and walking away.

They sat there in silence for a long moment and then Griffin looked at Sarah. “It’s up to you. What do you want to do next?”

“Do you think we can trust him?”

“Absolutely not.” He said it with the certainty that rocks are hard and the sky is up.

Sarah sat in silence for a long moment. “If I can find out what happened to Danny back there, I have to go.”

“I thought as much.” Griffin stood from the booth and slipped the cold iron knuckles into his pocket. He offered her his hand and helped her up from the table. They walked towards the mirrored hallway at the back of the club.

Griffin reached down and grasped her right hand and held it as they walked down the hall. The music faded behind them leaving nothing but the clip clop of their own feet on the checkerboard tiled floor. The mirrors on the ceiling reflected the floor causing Sarah to have a momentary flood of vertigo as they advanced. The mirrors reflected their images in an oddly distorted way the caused them to look as if they were both passing and approaching themselves at the same time. They also had the occasional flash of what could be mistaken for a third or fourth person skipping along in some of the mirrors.

The end of the hall split in two directions a small road sign post stood at the end of the hall. The green post of the sign gave the impression of a long green carpet stretching down the hall in the mirror before them. It had an arrow going off to the right that had a silhouette of a woman and read THIS WAY in a loopy gothic script. The sign pointing in the other direction had a silhouette of a man and stated THAT WAY. A third arrow pointed back towards the club and read HITHER.

Griffin began to squeeze her fingers tighter. “Those clever bastards.”

“What?”

“We are about to enter the most dangerous place we have ever been. Don’t do anything unless I tell you, do not touch any thing or one, and most importantly do not eat or drink anything they offer no matter how tempting. These things have made a centuries-long career out of getting mortals to do the wrong thing; remember that.”

“Okay.” Sarah could feel her legs begin to shake as her adrenalin began to race through her veins.

“Take a deep breath.” Griffin had the tone she’d once heard from a member of the bomb squad as he was disarming a particularly nasty device they’d found in a park.

Sarah inhaled and tightened her grip on his hand. Griffin moved forward without any further word and the two stepped towards the mirror at the end of the tunnel. There was no flash, no whiff of magic, they moved towards their reflection and then their reflections were gone. Before them now stretched a long hallway with a small strip of plush green grass like carpet lying up the middle of the floor. A small arrow was attached to the mirrored wall behind them, it read YON and pointed in the direction they now faced.

Sarah looked around for a second and then released Griffin’s hand. “Wait, how did we walk through the sign post if we were holding hands?”

“There never was a sign post, it was always just grass. We just thought it was a sign post.”

Sarah looked at the three inch strip of greenery and realized that Griffin was right, it was a small patch of very well trimmed grass, like the kind she’d seen on putting greens. The tiles on either side of it had been seemed to disappear into the small bit of soil the grass was planted in.

They began walking up the long hallway, the mirrored walls had been replaced with long shelves of books, toys, and other knick-knacks. A small doll that looked like a lost child, a book titled The Indiscrete Roman, a porcelain tea set for four missing a cup. As they moved up the tunnel she studied the items and wondered what they might all be and where they came from. There were things on the shelves that held crude and almost mishandled craftsmanship like a hand-stitched jacket with a third sleeve and a broken zipper stitched together from deep blue leather with one long red seam down the side. Then there were pieces so meticulously intricate that their beauty caught her breath like a cherry red jewelry box lined with a purple silk inlay that held a small hand stitched pillow. On the pillow rested a gold heart shaped locket sitting open with a picture of a young woman looking longingly into the empty panel on the other side.

As they moved slowly down the tunnel she could hear the tinkling of brass notes and sitting just beyond a well-used teddy bear sat a broken and worn music box. A one-legged ballerina twirled in jerking spirals around a warped stand as a nearly familiar song creaked and tumbled it’s way out of the tinny little machinery inside. She found herself slowing to hear the music and as she watched the little ballerina came to an unsteady halt and the music died. She felt her body jerk as Griffin snapped her away from the shelf her hand reaching out to turn the ornate platinum key that twinkled from the boxes side. Sarah felt her eyes focus on the world away from the music box as she looked at Griffin. “What happened? I didn’t mean to touch it.”

“I know. It wasn’t your fault.”

“What is that thing? What are all of these things?”

Griffin sighted and started leading her up the hall again. “People, souls, memories, any and all of those. Sometimes people get lost in the Fey Lands and make the wrong choice, a bad decision, or foolish deal; this is what becomes of them.” He gestured to the shelves around them. “These all represent someone in some very abstract way. An instrument might have been a musician, a clock could be someone obsessed with getting places on time, a plate may have been a cook. Each of these things are a sort of trophy, the quality represents both the skill and value of the person as well as the challenge in tricking them.”

Sarah looked at each of the items that lined the shelves and started doing a series of terrible calculations in her head. They’d walked maybe fifty feet and passed sets of shelves with clusters of items. “There are hundreds of things here.”

“I know, as I said they’ve been doing this for centuries.”

As they continued to walk Sarah watched in horror as more and more items spilled past them, she barely noticed as the strip grass began to widen until it covered the whole of the floor, she took almost no stock in the sounds of conversation and jazz that flowed up the tunnel to them.

Nearing the end of the tunnel Sarah looked forward to see a large antechamber, a great round room in the center of which stood an immense marble statue of a little girl in a dress who couldn‘t have been more than twelve. The statute towered over them standing nearly twelve feet high resting upon a gold base carved with leaves, vines, mushrooms, and playing cards. On top of the pillar, surrounding the girls feet were several animals, humans, and chess pieces. Two long billowing cloud shaped trails carved of ivory rose up over the top of the small child and ended near her shoulders. Over her right shoulder the cloud ended in the front legs and head of feral and vicious looking cat, it’s face contorted into a wicked grin. The other side ended in the upper body and long empty neck of a brutal and muscular demons body with long sharp talons for fingers. It took Sarah a moment before she realized that the head for the creature lay on the ground tucked up against the side of the statue. It was hideous, with empty eyes and long slavering jowls surrounding a mass of razor sharp teeth.

Sarah felt her breath catch in her throat. “That poor girl.”

Griffin put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her to him. “Don’t worry. This is a good one.”

“How can it possibly be good.”

Griffin rubbed her back between her shoulders for a moment. “The fey love their trophies and tricking humans and winning is one of their favorite things in all the world. The thing is for all the vicious cruelty that they unleash upon people they admire and appreciate skill, luck, and talent when they see it. The most magnificent trophies are of the ones that got away. There names and deeds are the ones that go down in the annuls of fey culture. They become so revered and talked about that the stories spill over into the mortal realm. Their trophies become the gatekeepers of the realms so that people are always given warning of what is to come and what they must do to survive. We are in a truly interesting place.”

“Because of who she is?”

“How do you know her?”

“Like you, I’ve heard the stories.” Griffin stepped to the side and bowed before the statue. “It’s a tradition here, it’s hoped that by paying a slight tribute to her we will be aided in the same way she was helped. If you want, you should curtsy.”

Sarah tried her best to comply drawing from the few older movies she’d seen where people did that sort of thing. “Who is she?”

“Isn’t it obvious? This is Alice.”

Sarah looked up at the statue again and wondered if it was what she was expecting from tonight and wondering if she had gotten in over her head. She looked at Griffin as he stared up at the statue and drew strength from his presence. She was certain whatever was coming the two of them could handle it. “What next?”

“We step through the door.” Griffin indicated an odd shaped blue door on the other side of the clearing, it was wider at the top than the bottom and the right side stood taller than the left. Griffin took her hand again and they walked towards it. As they reached the door Griffin took a moment to look back at the door and smile. “I’m told There is a six-foot Adam made of bronze and chrome in a forest by a cave.” With no other words he opened the door and stepped into madness.

end pt. 2
Go here for pt. 3 

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Paranormal S.W.A.T. #8 pt 1.

Hey all, I'm posting a new addition to the Paranormal S.W.A.T. series in honor of the month of October and the festive season ahead. Tonight, a simple request from a friend of the team leads Griffin on a merry adventure. If you'd like to see the team from the beginning head on over to Cul-de-Sac to Hell  for their first adventure.

Paranormal S.W.A.T. 

Supernatural Weapons & Arcane Tactics

Falling

Down the Murder Hole

Lieutenant Sarah Parker of the Chicago PD stood a block from Chicago’s hottest new night club, Wonderland. Cold wind whipped up and blew against her back causing her to push up against the wall. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her felt coat with white fur collar once again wishing she had paid more attention to the weather report that evening.

She wondered how all the women standing in line were able to tolerate the cold; most of them weren’t wearing very much. In fact it was an impressive number of short skirts and loose tops for a Chicago autumn. She wanted to reach down and rub her own exposed legs under the ankle length black cocktail dress with the embroidered silver swirl at the hem she had worn. Either that or go buy a cup of coffee and pour it down her front.

“Hey Sarah.” Dr. Griffin Wells of the Paranormal SWAT team that had set up shop in Chicago a few months ago approached her waving his hand in a friendly manner. He served as the teams scout and forensics expert, Sarah had done some checking the first time she’d worked with them and discovered precious little about most of the team, but Griffin had been the exception.

He’d worked as a cop, a forensic technician, for nearly eight years out in Miami; which was probably why she got along with him better than the rest of the team. In addition to his service behind the badge he’d published several articles on forensic science, chemistry, and even a couple of papers on biochemistry. He also had a couple of minor marksmanship awards, which would normally have made her a little nervous. Most techs who get certified with firearms are doing it so they can think of themselves as butch adventure TV cops. She’d have thought the same of Griffin if she hadn’t already seen him in action a couple of times and was aware of how capable he was.

She smiled at him while brushing her blond hair out of her face. She moved towards him a little too quickly saying, “You made it,” she hugged him and stood up on her toes to whisper in his ear, “thanks for coming, the bouncer was beginning to watch me a little too closely.” She pulled away and spoke again a little louder this time, “Well I hope we can get inside.” She clung to his arm and began walking towards the club.

Griffin started walking with her and let her guide the way. “Well, I’m certain it won’t be to much a problem.” He pulled his arm out of hers and lowered it down on her shoulders then lowered his head on top of hers. “You ask me for a quick favor and take me to a night club,” he whispered, “is there a reason for this?”

“Once were inside I can tell you more. What’s with the Lamont Cranston? I said dress nice.” She was referring to his outfit, a long tan trench coat that brushed the tops of his feet as he walked matching that with a dark fedora and red scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face and tucked into the front of his coat. The entire outfit was completed with a set of thick mirrored wrap around sunglasses that ended up covering his entire face. Dressed as he was she couldn’t see any piece of his face. She was a little disappointed at that. Ever since she had discovered he’d been scarred in an accident and had a prosthetic hand, she had wondered about the extent of the damage to his person.

“Are you even listening,” Griffin’s voice broke her out of her internal musings.

“Sorry, I was looking for a way in that might get us around standing in line.”

“I asked about bribing the bouncer?”

They were only a few feet from the end of the line and she was beginning to worry they wouldn’t find what they needed tonight. “No, he’s running a pretty tight ship, he’s got a list and had let people on it cut in, but has turned down at least three bribes I’ve seen.”

Griffin let out a long slow sigh, “well that’s interesting.”

“What?”

Griffin started leading them towards the front of the line. “When I closed my eyes just then I could see what the bouncer really is.”

As they approached the bouncer, a rather intimidating wall of muscle nearly seven feet tall in an Armani suit, he stepped in front of the red velvet rope that blocked entrance to the club, clipboard in hand.

“You on the list?” His voice was hard and filled with gravel. Sarah couldn’t help the sudden thought of rotten meat that wafted through her mind and couldn’t figure out why.

Griffin untangled himself from Sarah and stepped in-between her and the bouncer, “I don’t know, let’s find out.”

The bouncer spoke with the cadence of the extremely bored or extremely stupid, “Name?”

“Doctor Griffin Wells,” Griffin stepped close to the ropes and angled his body away from the crowd. In a smooth motion he slid up his glasses and tilted his head back to fix on a place about three feet above the bouncers head. “Tell me Grog, am I on the list?”

The bouncer touched his finger to his ear and spoke quietly for a minute, as he did Griffin fixed his glasses back in place and turned to motion to Sarah to come closer. The bouncer finally having finished his conversation moved to unhook the rope, “welcome back Doctor Wells. Your usual table is set up in the back corner of the restaurant. A hostess will show you the way.”

As he let them in Sarah started to pull some money out of her clutch in order to pay the tip when the bouncer raised a hand to stop her. “No tips ma’am. It’s not allowed.”

They were shown inside and a beautiful woman in a forest green dress led them through the club. The room was done up in a mix of old fashioned tavern and acid trip sixties club. The room was filled with heavy oak tables and tall pillars carved with reliefs of the various characters from the Alice and Wonderland stories. The floor was covered in a black and white checkerboard tile. Bright splashes of vibrant colors covered the walls, paintings were hung in expensive frames on the walls and a neon lit bar filled one entire wall. Long mirrors filled a hallway leading to the back of the club and were hung in a way to make the hall look like it went on forever. As her eyes wandered up she saw the roof was covered in a maze of copper framed skylights revealing a starry sky.

The hostess showed them to a private booth near the back of the club. It had plush black velvet cushions that perfectly matched her dress all the way down to the silver swirl at the bottom. The booth would have easily seated half a dozen people comfortably. An old style oak table sat in the middle carved with leaf and vine patterns around the rim. In the middle a raised platform shaped like an open flower holding a lit violet candle was also carved from the wood. As Sarah examined it, she was hard pressed to see where the table ended and the flower began.

Sarah tuned out the conversation between Griffin and the waitress as she scanned the club checking the crowd for anything suspicious. They seemed like your typical club crowd made of that Chicago mix of too young care and too rich to know any better; all dancing to some bizarre band named the Card Soldiers. She spotted a couple of celebrities, the kind that were famous for being famous, two politicians, and several members from local mob families. The mob were the most interesting to her, it was typical to find a family presence in a hot club, they always found a way to muscle into the profits. What made this situation unusual was the four groups of men from different families. A situation like this only ever happened on neutral ground, and hot clubs were rarely the chosen venue.

After a few moments the waitress thanked Griffin and said she’d be right back with their drinks. As she turned she closed a shear silk curtain and left them alone. Sarah turned to Griffin and said, “What in the sweet hoary hell was that. You never told me you’d been here before.”

“Never have.”

“Really, cause when they welcomed you back, in my line of work that’s a called a clue.”

“They probably thought you were my date and I was trying to impress you. So they threw me a nod as part of the price.”

“What price?”

“They don’t care about money, they only want knowledge because that’s power. When I showed him my face, and gave them my name that was information they didn’t have so they owed me a favor.”

“They didn’t ask for anything you just gave it to them.”

“Not really, he asked if I was on the list. Which I didn’t answer, which meant to keep up appearances he had to ask me my name. Since he had to ask he opened a contract, a small social contract, but a contract none the less. I took advantage of this to show him my face and give him my name. Which put him in my debt as I gave more than was required. At that point they owed me, so they let me into the club. They hate owing people, it’s why they don’t except tips.

“Because then they owe you.” Sarah said. “Okay, but who didn’t want to owe you and why did you know this would work.”

“I’m going to have to explain this and I’m not entirely certain I can. If Albert were here he could give you a better answer, I just don’t know all the technical or mystical reasons for it.

“When I close my eyes, I can see what’s really around us.” Sarah stared at him waiting for more. “This is a fairy club.”

“That’s not the most PC statement ever, plus it’s basically wrong.”

Sarah was pretty sure he was smirking at her through the scarf. “No, that’s not what I meant. This club is run by member of the fae, or fairies. You know, like Tinkerbelle.”

“You mean six inches tall and with wings?”

“Some of them.” Griffin took a deep breath, “I’m going to give you a crash course on fairies. There’s another world next to this one ruled by two courts of fairies, doesn’t matter who. It’s called the fairy realm, It’s populated with all things fairy: pixies, nixies, leprechauns, gnomes, elves, ogres, the list goes on for quite a while. Occasionally they manage to cross the divide between this world, the mortal world, and their own.”

“Why bother?”

The curtain parted and the waitress placed their drinks before them and left one straw on the table for Griffin. Griffin thanked her and she departed. Griffin took the straw and placed it in his glass of amber liquid, that looked to Sarah like a cider of some sort. Her own glass was filled with the same liquid. She tentatively took a drink and found it to hold several spices that reminded her of trick-or-treating as a child and warm fall nights gathered around a fire. It made her feel warm and tingle all over and she looked at the glass for a moment trying to figure out exactly what it was.

Griffin answered her unasked question while sipping his through the straw tucked up under his scarf. “It’s the in-house special for October called Autumn Harvest.”

“Lovely, still doesn’t answer my other question.”

“They come here because we fascinate them. The reason this is the mortal realm is because we can die, easily, and we don’t seem to care.”

“I’m pretty sure most people are afraid to die.”

“True, but not on the same level as a fae is. Most fae have an average life span measured in hundreds of years; a few can get to four digits. They can be killed, not harmed, not injured, not wounded, but killed in three maybe four ways depending on the type. They go out of their way to find those things that can kill them and destroy them.

“Mortals on the other hand, live maybe eighty years, can be killed by thousands of different things, and we actively surround ourselves with them.”

“No we don’t.”

“You’re carrying a gun. We’re in a wood booth with a lit candle and silk curtains. We run electricity into our homes. We regularly play with fireworks and explosives. Cars are deathtraps, and we get pissed if we don’t have one.

“Hell, you can beat a human to death. On your best day with a baseball bat, you can’t kill an elf. Sure, you can ruin his next sixty years, but you won’t kill him.”

Sarah stared at Griffin for a long moment. “I never thought about it like that.”

“Few people do.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes until their Griffin asked, “you okay?”

“Yeah. It’s a lot to take in.”

“I know.” He paused to sip at his drink. “When your ready, could you let me know why were here?”

“I’m not sure anymore.”

“What was the initial idea?”

“Two weeks a go a friend of mine, a narcotics officer named Danny Jones died. They found him in a gutter with traces of a new drug called Fairy Dust in his system.”

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Thanks. Anyway, Danny wouldn’t touch drugs. There are a lot of things he would do, including gamble, drink, and anything in a skirt, but he wouldn’t do drugs.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Danny’s dad used to hit the pipe pretty hard. He never said but I’m pretty sure he blamed it for his moms death. His whole childhood was ruined, he’d never use.”

“Fair enough.” Griffin leaned back and picked up his drink and sipped through the straw. “So how is this place connected?”

“Two days ago I got an envelope from Danny; it had all of his notes from his latest case. He was looking into the supplier of Fairy Dust and had followed a few leads to this club. The last entry in his notes was to say that he was coming here to do some looking around. It was dated the day before he died.”

Griffin reached across the table and took Sarah’s hand. “You figure if we came here tonight we might find a reason he died. Maybe even exonerate Danny?”

Sarah reached across the table and gripped his hand. “Yeah.”

Griffin looked around the room. His head slowly pivoting from one side to the other and then back again. After he did this a few times he finally stopped and said, “I don’t know if this will answer your questions but there’s an extra hallway over by the bar down at the end of that mirrored hallway. I can only see it with my eyes closed.”

“How do we get through it?”

“Traditionally, you would ask me.” Sarah wasn’t sure where the man in the immaculate white suit had come from but he now sat in the booth with them. If Griffin hadn’t been holding her hand she’d have gone for her sidearm. “After all, I am the clubs owner.” He sat there calmly twisting a glass of what might have been scotch, he seemed to be waiting for something.

end pt. 1
click here for pt. 2 

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My Six books

Recently I was asked to write a list of the six books that had the greatest effect on my development as a writer. Holding at just six books was a bit difficult, I would loved to have included Shel Silverstein, 13 Reasons Why, and the Three Musketeers for how much I loved them or books like Treasure Island and Lord of the Rings for showing me what I didn’t like in the written word. Paring it down to six, I had to admit that these were the books that most affected my personality as a reader and a writer. Someday I may go back and cover other books and writers, but for today let us stick with what we have.

The Encyclopedia Brown Series
If ever there were books that started me on my way to reading it was these. I was raised at a point where there wasn’t a lot of reading material for teens, the YA designation hadn’t been invented yet. I was given a series of classics to read as a child and I remember starting one. Treasure Island for the record is a story of swashbuckling adventure that doesn’t have anything exciting happen till the very end. As for Encyclopedia, I loved these stories; they were part puzzle, part adventure. Each one was delivered in bite size pieces with a solvable mystery. These have had a huge impact on the future of storytelling for me. I hate any story, mystery or otherwise, that has a twist at the end but never gives the audience all of the information to solve it. Encyclopedia Brown always gave you all the clues.

The Incredible Hulk/Thor/West Coast Avengers
I’m including these as one entry because doing three separate ones would probably be considered cheating and what I learned about storytelling comes from the comparison of the three. As I grew older and wanted more form my stories I turned to comic books. I tried several different ones, other companies and heroes but these three ended up being my go to heroes. Each had its own take on how story telling worked and functioned under the guise of being silly little stories for kids.

The Hulk was a tragic figure trapped in an unwinable situation. Persecuted for being an out of control monster he managed to function of a very basic level as a hero, he reacted on gut level instinct and a need to protect his friends. His greatest desire was either to be left alone when he was the Hulk, or to find a cure for his condition when he was Bruce Banner. In both forms he fought to control his anger and keep his friends safe.

Thor had the distinction of being on of the very few superheroes who liked being a superhero. The three big heroes at the time all had issues: Spider-man was sad all the time about how hard it was to do the right thing and how much he had to sacrifice to be a hero, Batman was a dark depressing mess who lurked in the shadows and grieved for the loss of his childhood while battling inner demons that drove him to be the best, and Superman was a preachy boy scout who spent all of his time lecturing everyone on the right thing to do. Thor was happy to get to fight someone, the bigger and more powerful his opponent the more excited he got. When giants attacked New York he would laugh as he went off to stop them.

The West Coast Avengers was a team of misfits and second string heroes who were relegated to being the other Avenger team. They all had problems and failings and yet still managed to come together to learn how to work as a team. They didn’t always get along but they always stood up for one another. The powered through alien invasions, kidnapped children, and banishment to hell. They faced people far more powerful than themselves and managed by the skin of their teeth to squeak out a victory against all odds.
Even with this these books showed me more in storytelling than almost anything else. I got to see complicated character development and motivations. I got to watch Loki, at the time Thor’s greatest enemy, stand side by side with his brother to defend Asgard from a demon invasion because it was his home too. I watched as the Vision and Scarlet Witch lost their new born twins to a demon lord and how it nearly destroyed them. I watched the heart wrenching moment when the Hulk hugs Betty Banner after she says she’s pregnant.

Certainly over the years I’ve learned to appreciate the daily struggle that Spider-man goes through to protect those around him. How Batman chooses to train different young people as Robin specifically so they grow up and become him. How Superman lives everyday of his life struggling against himself, knowing that if he makes the tiniest mistake turning a corner, opening a door, or patting someone on the back that he will destroy them. I will forever remember the quote, “I live in a world made of cardboard.”
More than anything I think comic books formed my opinion of story telling.

A Spell for Chameleon
This fantasy novel by Piers Anthony was probably my first foray into modern novels. I remember being in love with how the story unfolded in such a way to give me every piece of information that I would need to finish the tale and yet never leave me as if I didn’t know what was going on. I got to see the bitter power struggles of people who fought to save themselves for their own reasons and see how a man could be both a hero and a villain. It set me off on a long journey as I delved into all of these stories and kept then spread out into other novels by the author.

Disk world (all of them)
I fell into these in high school, introduced by a friend. I immediately fell in love with this lengthy series of high fantasy books that took traditional narratives and rolled them on their heads. The very premise of the series was one the set my mind on fire. In an infinite universe there are infinite possibilities, therefore there must exist a flat world that travels through the universe on the back of four giant elephants that are in turn standing on the back of a giant tortoise. Each of the stories is a unique and inventive story that follows the rules of the genre it’s a part of while at the same time pointing out the flaws and foibles of those rules. In one book a chase through mountains ended when the villains horse drawn coach went out of control and sailed off a cliff. Then, because this is how things work, the coach exploded and a flaming wheel rolled down the road. It is also a master class of writing, one of the books, Guards Guards, begins with a scene in which seven unnamed characters all dressed in hooded robes have a conversation and because of the unique vice given to each character you can keep track of who is talking all the way through it.

Storm Front & The Dresden Files 
As a fan of Buffy the Vampire slayer and most everything else Joss Whedon has done this series of hard boiled detective novels about a wizard living in Chicago were and instant hit with me. The series followed all the tropes of modern fantasy and noir fiction in a way I had never seen before. The series that the book spawned gave us a hero who stands up to evil no matter how badly he’s outnumbered and manages to survive by dint of luck and exceptional amounts of support. The series is also unique to some in that Harry and all of the other characters grow and evolve as the story goes on. They learn from their mistakes, reuse old tricks, and have legitimate problems and reconciliations. It’s a series that keeps giving me more and more amazing amounts of things to love.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone & the continuing series
This would be the first modern YA novel I read and I did so begrudgingly. I felt that as a YA novel it was most likely not going to be any kind of challenging story or have any sort of surprise or merit for me as a reader. While I enjoyed some of the humor, and felt several of the characters were decent I was unimpressed for most of my first read of the book. I knew how children’s entertainment worked and because of that I was immediately able to identify the villain. (Spoilers, though honestly I‘m not sure it‘s necessary at this point) As Harry approached the final room I knew full good and well he would find Professor Snape on the other side of the door. When it turned out to be Quirrell I was floored, the fact that they were then able to go through and tell me exactly what clues I had missed I was sold. The fact that the ensuing books were able to continue to keep me guessing and find new ways to fool me was a testament to their quality. It also set me on a new avenue of reading. Since then I have viewed YA as source of very stellar stories with a solid edge.

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How I Think

Recently, people have been asking me how I can possibly have some of the opinions I do. Where most political issues come up I tend to be in the middle. I view both sides as having valuable input and think if we look at the problem just a little bit differently we might notice a couple of inconsistencies in the overall narrative we’re getting from the various media outlets.

I don’t typically enjoy talking about politics anymore because people have become so invested in how they think that by offering even a slightly different opinion it seems to outrage them to a point of frustration. There was one day where I had been engaged in a couple of debates on a single political issue. During the day I was called both a horrible liberal extremist and an overzealous conservative fascist. Which was interesting because I didn’t change my opinion from one debate to the other; I only changed the people I was talking to.

I’ve been trying to look for a way to explain the way I think to people for a while and I wanted to use a news story that was as innocent as possible. I think I found that story. A little while ago a young man tweeted to Dominos Pizza that the pizza he received was completely bare; no sauce, cheese, or toppings there was only crust. Dominos responded however by that time he’d figured out he opened the pizza upside down. Almost everybody had a great laugh. Some people thought how funny it was that this poor fool did this; ruined his pizza. How stupid was he that he opened his pizza upside down. Some people have even accused the young man of pranking Dominos, the scamp.

In order to show my thought process I’m going to work off the basis that this was not a prank. This means he did open his pizza upside down. Which means one three things had to happen. One, he turned the pizza upside down before opening it. Two, the driver gave it to him upside down. Three, the pizza was put in the box upside down. Now let’s look at each of these individually.

First scenario, he flipped the pizza. This is a possibility, except there are a few things that would make this a bit of a challenge. The driver would hand him the pizza upright and he would have had to turn it over on the way to the table and why would any one do that? To be fair he could have been stoned, even still it seems unlikely they would flip the pizza on their way t the table. There’s the added problem of the box, check out a Dominos pizza box, they aren’t designed to be opened upside down, and it would be difficult to pop the tabs on the box that way around. Additionally, there is decoration on the bottom of the box that clearly informs you the pizza is upside down. It seems it would be really hard to open one of these upside down and not notice you had flipped the box. To me this seems unlikely.

Second scenario, the driver gave it to him upside down. While slightly more likely as it does remove the he flipped the box between the door and the table. It’s possible the driver had to slam on the breaks and the warming bag slid off the car seat and flipped over the driver didn’t know which side was up when he grabbed it off the floor of his car and delivered the pizza upside down as an accident. Or they did it on purpose. I have known several pizza delivery drivers over the years and they all have dozens of stories about how they messed with customers who were difficult, didn’t tip, or didn’t tip enough by their standards; I’m not saying it’s right just that they did. We then hit the problem of the bottom of the box. One of them is sure to notice the box is upside down at this point. Maybe the driver didn’t want to say anything because they hoped the customer didn’t notice. Once again this seems unlikely, because of the box.

Our final scenario, they put the pizza in the box upside down. This could happen, especially if you have a new employee, the place has a large number of orders and they are in a hurry to get them all out the door, or they have some grudge against the customer, as I explained earlier. If they put the pizza in the box upside at the restaurant it would avoid the problem of the bottom of the box. It would also be unlikely to get noticed by the customer after they opened the box depending on how they closed the box once they were finished. To me, this is the most likely scenario. In my opinion Dominos owes that man a pizza because the employees at that location screwed up.

That’s how I think. I look at a story and wonder about these things. To be clear, I choose this story because it is fairly innocent. I wanted a news story that people would be familiar with and that I could point to with some accuracy. I also wanted to pick a story that wasn’t politically motivated. It is my hope that you read this and got a couple of chuckles out of this and you may even read the news a little closer in the future. Since this is a story about pizza and not gun control, deficit spending, or any of the other myriad political pieces in the world I think I have a better chance of that.

As for me, I’m off to carry out a pizza for some reason I’ve been craving one for the past few minutes.


Let me know what you think. Post below or head over to my Facebook page and leave a message there. You can also follow me on Twitter @stevemayne2. Also feel free to look at my Youtube.