And Hector springs up from his seat with the same un-self-conscious lemme-at-em attitude inherent in every theatre geek's being and grins at Tamsin. He saunters up to the center of the circle and points out into the audience.
"Never Shuts Up-yuf, you're the man!"
For those laying eyes on him the first time: in his birth form as he is, Echoes of the Lost is a young man of average height, with black hair and dark-brown eyes, looks as if he's wearing every piece of jewelry in his possession. Rings on nearly every finger, a captive bead through the helix of his right ear, a couple of necklaces strung around his neck. He wears heavy black work boots and sturdy jeans and a t-shirt advertising a band whose hey-day came and went before he was born. The sleeves have been cut off.
He about vibrates with energy but the Uktena isn't nervous. His voice projects.
"Alright so let's rewind to the end of June. Real bright sunny day that stayed warm and bright even towards dusk. Singing birds, laughing kids, booming boomboxes. I was on my way out of the Sept of the Cold Crescent when I heard--"
Here, an imitation of Snails and Tails, Fostern Ragabash of the Bone Gnawers:
"New Kid! Do this right and I might remember your name next time!"
Here, a pantomime of whipping around like to ask Who, me? Choreographed-uncoordinated pointing at himself, then over at nobody else, before he shrugs.
"She was concerned. The uncle of the cousin of the boyfriend was missing. One of Rat's, mostly homeless, good guy if you ignore the fact he had acquired a taste for spirits and disappearing when he could find a place to crash long enough to drink a liter of the stuff. I had no idea who he was but Family is Family and this particular family was staying with a human gal named Carlita. Sounded alright: ex-con, graduated from a halfway house to a Section 8 one-bedroom with heat and hot water, used to let Gerhart crash with her when he was fallen harder on his luck than he was used to.
"I can see some of you thinking: alright, that's great, but why's she sending an Uktena to track down a Bone Gnawer? Well, a: what kind of question is that, we're awesome at tracking things down. But b: I wasn't alone. This story isn't about me. You see that humble-looking bag of fur parked over there?"
He points to where Rabid Jack sits beside Cinder Song.
"Looks like a bulldog fell out of the ugly tree and broke every branch on the way down? Snails and Tails-rhya rounds us both up and gives us Carlita's address and sends us on our way. And I'm thinking to myself, great, I'm going to knock on some toothless broad's door with a dude who wouldn't know subtlety if it tiptoed up and tapped him on the shoulder. So we ended up on East Colfax at the walk-up building where this lady lived, and we see someone moving around up there and I'm thinking this is going to be a cakewalk. Optimism, you know.
"Then we went inside."
Dramatic pause. Time enough for Tamsin to appreciate the fact that this is the first time he's told the story without going off on a romantic tangent about Jack and his motorcycle and how that was the baddest of badass things he's ever done in his life.
"That sense, that something you can't point to on this side of the curtain the way you can smell rotting meat or hear buzzing flies and know what you're about to walk into. It bubbles up out of the center of you, that oily warning that Grandfather Serpent is slithering around. Even if you don't have the gift sometimes it comes to you anyway. Law-in-War, man, he smelled it, he knew what was on the other side of the door before it even opened. He smelled the rotten meat and the droning flies, and we knocked anyway.
"She looked as normal as we were expecting. Like a woman, you know, a human woman who'd been through the wringer, but that's how they get you. Other than a glass eye that didn't match the one she had left and a jaw that was a little on the trollish side Carlita looked... you know. Normal. We saw the other one, her daughter, on the couch. She held real still and kept as out-of-sight as she could get, like we would go away if she didn't make any noise.
"And of course Carlita acted like she didn't know where Gerhart was. Said he'd probably gone to church and if we saw him tell him send her back her good china. Grandfather Serpent is like an oil slick, man, and if you aren't paying attention because the light's no good or you're not at the right angle he looks just like water.
"Law-in-War, he looked across the Veil and saw Banes drifting around, three of them, like they were waiting for another soul to latch onto, and he pulled me back into the stairwell. Made like we were going to leave the building altogether, just go back to Gerhart's nephew's cousin's girlfriend and tell her we couldn't find any more of a trace of him than anybody else had so far but then we heard this voice behind the door."
And his voice stays his own but he warps it just-so, leaves it sounding like it's come up from the bottom of a muddy grave:
"You see this, honey? You see what the devil sends? You see why he gives you the gifts you got?"
Back to the voice Gaia gave him:
"And the other woman was begging her to stop, calling her Momma.
"We got out of there, went back down to the sidewalk outside the building, but we didn't leave." Points back to Jack. "This crazy son of a bitch is like No one says we gotta be polite and use the front door!--" Stops pointing. "--So we snuck up the fire escape, right, and I'm thinking they're going to hear us, he's going to make the metal scream the whole way up, maybe knock some bolts loose, be like trying to sneak a cement mixer up the... huh-uh. He was like a spirit. Just... whoosh! Up that rusty ladder, up the rusty stairs, moved an air conditioner that hadn't been touched since about nineteen-ninety-two, squeezed through this fire-trap of a window..."
He projects an air of unawareness as his packsister slinks up from her place in the audience to stand in the fire-shadows, hunched and muttering prayers to a god that does not exist or care if she believes in its existence. As he carries on the story the conservatively-built Uktena holds himself up taller and puffs out his chest, holds his arms out like they're all muscle and Rage, loping, a near-man's posture in a human form. Eventually Hector pantomimes what he witnessed, his voice rising in volume for the adrenaline of the activity a month past, terrible violence laid overtop of duty howling up inside of them.
"... and we heard them, through the bedroom door. They weren't plotting anything, didn't even know we were there. Wouldn't have known we were there or cared if they had known. But Law-in-War wasn't going to knock on the front door, and he didn't knock once we were inside either, he took on the skin of the near-man and he kicked the door in and he walked right up to Carlita and he snapped her neck--"
Hector made Tamsin practice this days ago, the part where Jack went storming into the living room and grabbed the Fomor by the head and twisted savage so a human's neck would have snapped, she raving first at her daughter and then raving louder on her knees about God and His glory and Tamsin echoes what she heard Dorlene say during her interrogation, before they extinguished her own light, and if Carlita who was Gerhart's girlfriend were human her neck would have snapped and she would have lost consciousness and she would have fallen to the floor and she would have stopped talking and breathing, certainly would have stopped praying, but she did not stop praying and Tamsin does not stop with the echoes of the prayer as she falls down on her knees.
"--and he dropped her--"
They had to practice this too because Hector is not an athlete and he could just as easily kick her in the head as pretend to kick her in the head. He pretends to kick her in the head and she does fall then, silent but not dead, and Hector does not lose his breath but he's gaining steam, stalking the circle-center now, pointing at things that only exist in his memory there in the flickering of the fire they can see it in his eyes dark as those oil slicks he mentioned already and revealing nothing that his voice does not reveal but reflecting back the flames and the fury that's sparked up in him recounting this.
"--and her daughter went down fast, throat gone but not the rest of her, and she would have gotten up off that couch and sunk her claws in my neck if Law-in-War weren't paying attention. We were too late though. We didn't save Gerhart that day but we found him. We found what this church is doing to people, what their idea of salvation is: says it right there in the name of the transition program old Carlita went through, rEEntry, but they aren't reentering into light, man. We didn't know it at the time, we didn't even know the name of the church she said he'd gone to, but when the thing that used to be Carlita stopped praying and the thing that used to be her daughter Dorlene lay back on the couch we looked around and Law-in-War found a calendar with the name on it, Church of the Covenant, big old fiery blood-swollen heart right up at the top and the candles in the place couldn't cover up the smell of flesh gone bad and I told you we found him. We found him. We found him under the bed, and we found him in boxes in the closet, and we found him in the icebox, in the oven. We found him in a photograph next to old Carlita and she was smiling then, both her eyes matched then and her teeth weren't fucking fangs."
He takes a breath like to tamp down his own Rage and he told Tamsin he'd tell the ending right. Now he steps back to where she's lain on the dirt and reaches down with his hand to haul her up.
"Next month I'm going to tell you the story about what Law-in-War and Cinder-Song found at the Church of the Covenant and how bad-ass they both were."
[COSTUME CHANGE]
"Never Shuts Up-yuf, you're the man!"
For those laying eyes on him the first time: in his birth form as he is, Echoes of the Lost is a young man of average height, with black hair and dark-brown eyes, looks as if he's wearing every piece of jewelry in his possession. Rings on nearly every finger, a captive bead through the helix of his right ear, a couple of necklaces strung around his neck. He wears heavy black work boots and sturdy jeans and a t-shirt advertising a band whose hey-day came and went before he was born. The sleeves have been cut off.
He about vibrates with energy but the Uktena isn't nervous. His voice projects.
"Alright so let's rewind to the end of June. Real bright sunny day that stayed warm and bright even towards dusk. Singing birds, laughing kids, booming boomboxes. I was on my way out of the Sept of the Cold Crescent when I heard--"
Here, an imitation of Snails and Tails, Fostern Ragabash of the Bone Gnawers:
"New Kid! Do this right and I might remember your name next time!"
Here, a pantomime of whipping around like to ask Who, me? Choreographed-uncoordinated pointing at himself, then over at nobody else, before he shrugs.
"She was concerned. The uncle of the cousin of the boyfriend was missing. One of Rat's, mostly homeless, good guy if you ignore the fact he had acquired a taste for spirits and disappearing when he could find a place to crash long enough to drink a liter of the stuff. I had no idea who he was but Family is Family and this particular family was staying with a human gal named Carlita. Sounded alright: ex-con, graduated from a halfway house to a Section 8 one-bedroom with heat and hot water, used to let Gerhart crash with her when he was fallen harder on his luck than he was used to.
"I can see some of you thinking: alright, that's great, but why's she sending an Uktena to track down a Bone Gnawer? Well, a: what kind of question is that, we're awesome at tracking things down. But b: I wasn't alone. This story isn't about me. You see that humble-looking bag of fur parked over there?"
He points to where Rabid Jack sits beside Cinder Song.
"Looks like a bulldog fell out of the ugly tree and broke every branch on the way down? Snails and Tails-rhya rounds us both up and gives us Carlita's address and sends us on our way. And I'm thinking to myself, great, I'm going to knock on some toothless broad's door with a dude who wouldn't know subtlety if it tiptoed up and tapped him on the shoulder. So we ended up on East Colfax at the walk-up building where this lady lived, and we see someone moving around up there and I'm thinking this is going to be a cakewalk. Optimism, you know.
"Then we went inside."
Dramatic pause. Time enough for Tamsin to appreciate the fact that this is the first time he's told the story without going off on a romantic tangent about Jack and his motorcycle and how that was the baddest of badass things he's ever done in his life.
"That sense, that something you can't point to on this side of the curtain the way you can smell rotting meat or hear buzzing flies and know what you're about to walk into. It bubbles up out of the center of you, that oily warning that Grandfather Serpent is slithering around. Even if you don't have the gift sometimes it comes to you anyway. Law-in-War, man, he smelled it, he knew what was on the other side of the door before it even opened. He smelled the rotten meat and the droning flies, and we knocked anyway.
"She looked as normal as we were expecting. Like a woman, you know, a human woman who'd been through the wringer, but that's how they get you. Other than a glass eye that didn't match the one she had left and a jaw that was a little on the trollish side Carlita looked... you know. Normal. We saw the other one, her daughter, on the couch. She held real still and kept as out-of-sight as she could get, like we would go away if she didn't make any noise.
"And of course Carlita acted like she didn't know where Gerhart was. Said he'd probably gone to church and if we saw him tell him send her back her good china. Grandfather Serpent is like an oil slick, man, and if you aren't paying attention because the light's no good or you're not at the right angle he looks just like water.
"Law-in-War, he looked across the Veil and saw Banes drifting around, three of them, like they were waiting for another soul to latch onto, and he pulled me back into the stairwell. Made like we were going to leave the building altogether, just go back to Gerhart's nephew's cousin's girlfriend and tell her we couldn't find any more of a trace of him than anybody else had so far but then we heard this voice behind the door."
And his voice stays his own but he warps it just-so, leaves it sounding like it's come up from the bottom of a muddy grave:
"You see this, honey? You see what the devil sends? You see why he gives you the gifts you got?"
Back to the voice Gaia gave him:
"And the other woman was begging her to stop, calling her Momma.
"We got out of there, went back down to the sidewalk outside the building, but we didn't leave." Points back to Jack. "This crazy son of a bitch is like No one says we gotta be polite and use the front door!--" Stops pointing. "--So we snuck up the fire escape, right, and I'm thinking they're going to hear us, he's going to make the metal scream the whole way up, maybe knock some bolts loose, be like trying to sneak a cement mixer up the... huh-uh. He was like a spirit. Just... whoosh! Up that rusty ladder, up the rusty stairs, moved an air conditioner that hadn't been touched since about nineteen-ninety-two, squeezed through this fire-trap of a window..."
He projects an air of unawareness as his packsister slinks up from her place in the audience to stand in the fire-shadows, hunched and muttering prayers to a god that does not exist or care if she believes in its existence. As he carries on the story the conservatively-built Uktena holds himself up taller and puffs out his chest, holds his arms out like they're all muscle and Rage, loping, a near-man's posture in a human form. Eventually Hector pantomimes what he witnessed, his voice rising in volume for the adrenaline of the activity a month past, terrible violence laid overtop of duty howling up inside of them.
"... and we heard them, through the bedroom door. They weren't plotting anything, didn't even know we were there. Wouldn't have known we were there or cared if they had known. But Law-in-War wasn't going to knock on the front door, and he didn't knock once we were inside either, he took on the skin of the near-man and he kicked the door in and he walked right up to Carlita and he snapped her neck--"
Hector made Tamsin practice this days ago, the part where Jack went storming into the living room and grabbed the Fomor by the head and twisted savage so a human's neck would have snapped, she raving first at her daughter and then raving louder on her knees about God and His glory and Tamsin echoes what she heard Dorlene say during her interrogation, before they extinguished her own light, and if Carlita who was Gerhart's girlfriend were human her neck would have snapped and she would have lost consciousness and she would have fallen to the floor and she would have stopped talking and breathing, certainly would have stopped praying, but she did not stop praying and Tamsin does not stop with the echoes of the prayer as she falls down on her knees.
"--and he dropped her--"
They had to practice this too because Hector is not an athlete and he could just as easily kick her in the head as pretend to kick her in the head. He pretends to kick her in the head and she does fall then, silent but not dead, and Hector does not lose his breath but he's gaining steam, stalking the circle-center now, pointing at things that only exist in his memory there in the flickering of the fire they can see it in his eyes dark as those oil slicks he mentioned already and revealing nothing that his voice does not reveal but reflecting back the flames and the fury that's sparked up in him recounting this.
"--and her daughter went down fast, throat gone but not the rest of her, and she would have gotten up off that couch and sunk her claws in my neck if Law-in-War weren't paying attention. We were too late though. We didn't save Gerhart that day but we found him. We found what this church is doing to people, what their idea of salvation is: says it right there in the name of the transition program old Carlita went through, rEEntry, but they aren't reentering into light, man. We didn't know it at the time, we didn't even know the name of the church she said he'd gone to, but when the thing that used to be Carlita stopped praying and the thing that used to be her daughter Dorlene lay back on the couch we looked around and Law-in-War found a calendar with the name on it, Church of the Covenant, big old fiery blood-swollen heart right up at the top and the candles in the place couldn't cover up the smell of flesh gone bad and I told you we found him. We found him. We found him under the bed, and we found him in boxes in the closet, and we found him in the icebox, in the oven. We found him in a photograph next to old Carlita and she was smiling then, both her eyes matched then and her teeth weren't fucking fangs."
He takes a breath like to tamp down his own Rage and he told Tamsin he'd tell the ending right. Now he steps back to where she's lain on the dirt and reaches down with his hand to haul her up.
"Next month I'm going to tell you the story about what Law-in-War and Cinder-Song found at the Church of the Covenant and how bad-ass they both were."
[COSTUME CHANGE]