The night of downtown Dallas was dark, but the lands of the dead were even darker. A disheveled soldier was walking through those lands in silence, side by side with the living children of the city, who never knew who he was, or why he had died in a field hospital 55 years ago. But this soul, Joe Serrin, didn’t care. The Citadel of the Necropolis loomed ahead, and tonight was a working night.
Joe entered the Citadel with only a quiet word to the gatekeeper, a squat, butcher-like figure, with a worried expression on his face beneath his rubberish gas mask. The massive Shadowlands structure was silent as always, but even more so that night. Half walking, half drifting, he made his way from the entry hall through the hallway beneath the massive stone stairs towards his room of office. It had been only a few months ago he had been appointed it, as he had proven his worth at the arts of subduing the shadow -always a valuable skill, especially so within the Hierarchy. As he walked, he tried to dismiss the thoughts of the external threats being dead entailed, and to focus on the internal. The thought that met him made him stop in his tracks,and walk quietly back to the gatekeeper.
"Listen,"he explained to the guardian wraith,"if a girl calling herself Melody comes here, she probably wants to see me, Serrin. I can be found in the sixth room of the left hallway under the stairs." The wraith stared at him briefly with empty eyes, and Joe turned around and resumed his way down the hall.
The office he came into was not big, walls covered in white tiles like a bathroom, with a single barred window filling up a good part of the furthest wall. A relic chair was placed in the middle of the room facing directly towards the window. Joe walked silently over to a bench along one wall, nearly touching the central chair, and sat down to gaze out the window at the street outside. From this location the living world was hard to see, the relic walls and window distorting his vision so that the Skin lands street was blurred and ran together with the Shadowlands like runny gray paint when viewed through the bars. Joe took off his mask in silence and stared out with dead unshielded eyes for a while. He only put on the mask again when his inner clock told him his customer was due to arrive.
"Hey," said Melody as she walked in. The young girl had been passed through by the gatekeeper with no troubles, and now she looked at him expectantly. It was a look he’d seen on so many of the strange faces of the waking dead. Save me from myself, it said to him. Joe’s mask covered his own expressions flawlessly. He himself did not even know what they were.
He could feel the angst she’d built up, and her shadow seemed to peer out at him from behind her eyes. She pulled out her knife and handed it to him, handle first. "Here. Use this. She hates that," Melody told him, smiling mirthlessly.
"Have a seat," he told her,gesturing to the relic chair. She sat, twisting her neck around to watch him as he circled her, holding the knife as though it were an athame and he an old fashioned sorcerer.
Melody started bouncing one leg as she had when, before her death, she’d taken stimulants, or had a full bladder. It wasn’t a full bladder now, just impatience, she thought. Wouldn’t he just get on with it, get it over with.
"Please, try to relax." Joe wanted to ask her if she had done this before, if she had had trouble getting in, just chitchat to ease the tension. But her boiling Angst made him more uncomfortable than usual,the way she seemed to mock him with every twitch, the way her eyes tore bloody plasmic chunks out of him with their black radiance.
He was behind her as he always were when castigation began. He judged the strength of her shadow easily, and steeled himself for the fight. Letting his own emotions loose was the hardest part, making them work for him in order to break through her defenses and into direct contact with her dark side. It was impossible not to feel pity for those who had to go through it, baring the deepest recesses of themselves for the sake of their sanity, and it was with remorse he pulled back her head and slit her throat.
Joe caught a glimpse of himself, his fingers digging into Melody’s shoulders,just as his vision disappeared and he found himself somewhere else entirely, a place created by his own conscious will and the malice of the customer in his hands.
What he could perceive around him was a room built up of granite rocks, piles of skulls and books lining the walls, and torches burning with blue-green fire on the walls. Arcane symbols were carved into the stone floor, and invisible incense and essences flooded the air with an ethereal scent. Everything was an illusion, but so were the Shadowlands outside, the line between reality and dream was non-existent for the waking dead. These trances always reminded Joe of that subtle truth.
When he looked up, a figure was standing before him in the twilight. This not-quite Melody… The first thing that struck him was her beauty, the next thing her hatred. She had Melody’s indigo skin and pale hair, but her ears sharply pointed like a faerie’s. In her slender hand she held a heavy silver chain, which wrapped around her waist and terminated in shackles around the wrists and neck of a very young girl. The girl seemed not to notice the bindings; her expression was calm and introverted, as though nothing could disturb her tranquility.
The shadow of Melody smiled. "Another fly caught in my web… well met,brave warrior." She looked over his khaki jacket and gas mask with disdain. "I think it’s time for me to show you that who you’ve found is*not* the childish coward sitting in your little chair…" With a sneer,the Shadow raised her right hand and black-blue fire enveloped it like the striking of a match. Her left hand pulled forth another set of manacles on a chain – this one of blackened metal – and with the hand holding them, she beckoned the Pardoner to come forward and face her. Her eyes burned white as well, and a thin, greenish tongue appeared to loll from her grinning, fanged mouth.
Joe closed his eyes and sighed, and felt the dungeon setting around him go numb as he dictated. When the smell of brimstone and the crackle of flame had faded away, he set his mind to pick apart the anger and shame that was the cause of all this, slicing through the near-solid emotion with his own logic and compassion. Though it was never routine, a job was a job and he had to keep himself from being caught up in whatever illusions the sick and virulent side of the client’s soul could conjure up. It was all Angst – hate, self-loathing,jealousy of the living. That he could wade through the deepest recesses of her instinctive emotional universe untouched was a miracle in itself – but so, some would say, was life after death.
Jonathan could feel Melody’s outward soul turning and whimpering around him, barriers collapsing and pillars snapping and falling apart within her.Everything was a world within a world within a world.
When he opened his eyes again, there were no walls or scrolls or manacles, only the image of Melody’s shadow lying curled up on the ground. Her ears were pointed and her robes black, but her realm was replaced with a gentle calm of non-existence – in her inner world only herself and the man in the mask remained.
Joe broke off the link, and slowly opened his mind outward. His eyes could see,and the thing they saw was the iron frame of the barred window.
His attention was snapped back to his client when she shifted in the chair.Melody sighed a long sigh, and a wispy white cloud floated out of her mouth,dissipating as it left.
"Well, that was fun," she said with an attempt at a smile, and opened her eyes slowly. She held out her hand, wanting her knife back, and he set it in her palm carefully. The wound on her throat had healed, the plasma solidified once more, and she crawled out of the chair. Joe nodded to her when they against stood face to face, and they conducted the exchange of payment in silence. As the girl skipped out of the office and down the hall, her ethereal footsteps sounding like shifting dust, Joe sat down on the bench and considered taking off his mask, to breathe freely a little, before the next client would arrive.