The Red King (Wyrd Book 1) Read online

  WYRD BOOK 1.0

  By

  Nick Cole

  Copyright © 2015 by Nick Cole

  Part One

  ‘Winds in the east, mist coming in.

  Like somethin’ is brewin’ and bout to begin.

  Can’t put my finger on what lies in store,

  But I fear what’s to happen…

  …all happened before.’

  -Bert, Mary Poppins

  How does it begin? It begins with a game. A game for the end of the world is how it will begin. Past, present and future tense all knotted together, but still there, somehow.

  Together.

  The Raggedy Man arrived before dawn but he hadn’t always been there. He was wiry and gangly, like some almost movie star from the age of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. His hair, slate gray and dirty. His face tan and lined. He wore a collection of jewelry chains and battered dog tags looped about his neck like ancient talismans. His jean jacket was faded and adorned with buttons from concerts past and other arcane symbols now made meaningless. He wore a pair of jeans that hung off him loosely, finishing in faded boots; expensive when bygone days of high-end boots were the currency of the realm.

  If you’d been out that cool, misty late spring morning when Laguna Beach wasn’t overrun by the crowds, when the morning mist and gloom mix with the golden sunshine and the salt in the air, you would have tagged him as a member of the tribe known as homeless. Maybe a chieftain. Not a pawn, most definitely not a pawn. A headman. A war leader. A street judge. One who carried weight, though he was invisible to the likes of you and me, passing by that misty morning.

  He set his shamanic staff down beside the stone picnic table and laid out the board and pieces, whistling a tune. The tune was on pitch. “Perfect pitch,” one with an ear for such things would have barely commented as they passed the old men and the homeless who set up their boards on the stone tables in the early morning mist and salt, waiting for the heat of the day and an opponent to distract them from the inevitable march toward death. Once the pieces were arranged and each had been touched the proper amount of times by placing one long and dirty index finger on the very top of each Black piece, The Raggedy Man sat down at the stone bench on his side of the board. The side that faced the seaside town. He liked to watch the people and suggest things as they passed by. A pleasant distraction while he’d wait for his opponent to make his move.

  “It’s important to be distracted,” he said to himself. He had that kind of voice that was world weary, a bit of a grate to it, but mesmerizing nonetheless. The kind any casting director would always be looking for to pitch high-end luxury automobiles. The knowing voice of the urban insider who’s just a step ahead of everyone else in ‘the latest thing’ department. The kind of voice people listen to and don’t question.

  The Raggedy Man folded his hands and waited.

  An hour later his opponent crossed the street, leaving the small seaside town proper of coastal Laguna Beach. His opponent was big. A construction worker type. Wide shoulders and a broad chest. Like that of a knight, or maybe a Viking, a warrior of some type. His opponent wore jeans and big timberlands that made his already looming height even taller. The Opponent crossed the grass verge and the Raggedy Man could see the close shaved sides of his head, the soft blondish-red goatee. The piercing blue eyes. The face of a character actor from the nineteen fifties. The big good natured sunshine smile of the simple everyman, beaming and determined to do the right thing all at once. No matter what.

  The Raggedy Man shook his head slightly and smirked.

  The big man approached, standing over the stone table. The Opponent studied the board for a moment, his blue eyes noting all the pieces, and then in the smoothest of motions, slid onto the stone bench and placed his large feet and massive legs under the table.

  The Raggedy Man held out both hands, just above the chess pieces, fluttering his fingers like a child greedy for chocolate. A prodigy at the piano. Like Liszt must have done to have played that instrument so damned well.

  The Opponent looked up and nodded once at the Raggedy Man.

  “I suppose you want Black.”

  The Raggedy Man rolled his eyes. “I’m always Black.”

  The big man, the Opponent, frowned good naturedly and shrugged slightly, really only to himself but because his features were so large the motions were telegraphed to everyone nearby and anyone watching afar.

  “May I move first?” asked the Raggedy Man.

  “It’s why I’m here,” said the Opponent, not lifting his eyes from the board.

  The Raggedy Man placed a dirty thumb and forefinger on the piece he intended to move. It was a pawn. All the pawns were different. As though each was from a different set. Or a different world. He took the gray, green dead-eyed pawn between his thumb and forefinger and moved it into play. In the distance, the doomsday horn down at San Onofré Nuclear power plant began to wind up into its end of the world wail.

  Chapter One

  He’d known all that day he was going to drink again that night. Holiday saw it coming from a long way off. Like an afternoon storm or a strange town out in the middle of nowhere, off on the horizon, coming at you along the interstate as you speed toward it. Inevitable. But, when things end, reasoned Holiday, there’s nothing left but to get real drunk.

  Some pot clattered to the floor of the coffeehouse, ringing and dinging, hollow and empty, like the sound of some bell greater than itself struck once and now slowly fading.

  He finished the rest of his shift on autopilot. Barely there. The steam from the espresso machine washed over him, leaving him with a feeling that he could just disappear inside all of it. As if that brief cloud was a moment between worlds. A place he could just hide out in for a while and be someone else. But there was a line of order tickets thirty-six mochas deep. Thirty-six mochas real.

  “Are you listening to me?” asked Stephen. His boss. The manager of Ground Zero. “This is what I need…”

  And then he said a bunch of other stuff.

  Holiday couldn’t think.

  I don’t want to think, was what he told himself. Heard himself say to no one inside his head.

  Because to think… was to think about her.

  And she was gone now.

  Had been gone for two weeks.

  Gone for good.

  That’s what she said on the phone that morning. Two weeks ago. He’d gone to an acting class at the community college. He’d called her. She’d sounded tired. Out late the night before.

  When he asked why, why she was tired, she just sighed and said, “It’s over, Holiday.”

  And he’d known then.

  Known he’d drink too much.

  He finished his shift in steam and late afternoon, last of summer, golden, almost orange sunlight, surrounded by the heavy aroma of brewing coffee as Gordon Lightfoot, the coffeehouse guitarist they’d, she and he, had named such, strummed his guitar. She and him when they were together, her and he, their lovers’ secret joke. As Gordon Lightfoot started to play on that last Saturday afternoon of August, Holiday finished his shift.

  Everyone else on the afternoon crew knew it was over between them. She’d worked there also before she’d left for college.

  He took off his apron and made for the exit. The night crew already taking their places. Cash register. Brewer. Pastries. Bar. Milk. Bussing. It was a large coffee house in a high end entertainment complex. It was Saturday night and life was moving on quickly. First dates. Date night. Dinner with friends. Movies. Hanging out. The last mochas at midnight, the bar still thirty-six orders deep as customers raced
in before the night crew got all the doors closed and locked. Outside, Holiday turned one last time in the early twilight of late summer to look back at the store.

  They were all just kids. The ones who worked there. His co-workers.

  He was no longer one of them.

  Had never really been one of them.

  He was almost thirty.

  He was finished.

  They were just starting.

  Like she was. Away at a four year college. A new romance with a new someone, just starting to discover the new and beginning to forget the old.

  I’m that guy, he thought to himself. The guy who gets left behind. The guy who gets forgotten.

  And then he walked away into the crowd, passing through all of it and its life as he forgot that some distant bell was struck.

  Chapter Two

  Holiday pulled into the grocery store parking lot, feeling fuzzy and dull. The last of the day was disappearing into the near west, behind Santa Catalina Island down in the ocean beyond the coast. From the heights of Viejo Verde, the small suburban enclave where he lived, you could see the long island riding out in the middle of the ocean, even though the coast alone was over ten miles away, and then there were another twenty-eight miles, as the song goes, out to Catalina across the sea. Day was over.

  It’s over, thought Holiday as he entered the large grocery store still thinking of the girl he loved. It was quiet. It was Saturday night. The families who populated the large McMansions on the hill above his condo had done their shopping, and now the grocery store would ride out the night until just before two, when the late night crowd would make their last beer runs after partying down in Newport. Even buying food to cook and soak up the booze.

  And then what?

  It was an all-night mega-chain grocery store. The Market Faire. It would go on until dawn. Until the late night crew came in to re-stock what had been purchased and taken away, and to wash down the sidewalk outside in the pre-dawn night. As though the night before had never been. Never was. Never more. He’d gone in to the mega-chain, giant box grocery store every night since she’d gone.

  And even before, when they’d still been an item. Holiday and Taylor. After she’d left his house late. She was only eighteen. She couldn’t stay out past midnight. Her mother’s rule. Hard and fast. But then she’d gone off to college and who knew how late she was out now. But he knew she was out now. With the new whomever. Creating new secrets for just the two of them.

  Holiday stood in front of the beer in the liquor aisle.

  All the beers seemed so fun and inviting. Each bottle a picture of snowcapped mountains or monster truck special advertising. Or ripped dudes jet skiing with hot babes laughing. The last of the summer marketing campaign beers.

  He had a memory. Brief and fleeting. He’d bought one of those special marketing cases of beer at the beginning of summer. A camping trip a bunch of the kids from the coffee house, her age, his co-workers, took for the night, out in a local park backed up to the Cleveland national forest. He remembered hoisting that case, looking at that perfect jet skiing couple and thinking life was good right now. He had a beautiful girl and although they weren’t Jet Ski people, they were having fun in their own way. Life had looked pretty good, then.

  “But that was then,” Holiday muttered to himself and left the rest unsaid.

  On the speakers Rick Astley was crooning about never giving up, never letting someone down. Never running around.

  The one hit wonder burned within Holiday’s soul.

  Holiday moved along to the hard liquors.

  He selected a bottle of store-label vodka. The big plastic liter size.

  Don’t want to have to come back. Don’t want to drive drunk, he thought. No, I don’t want to do that at all.

  Then he was holding a same-sized bottle of store label bourbon.

  “I’ll need cokes. Gotta have some cokes for the bourbon.”

  Juggling cases of beer and liter bottles of liquor, he went in search of a case of coke and then finally made it up to the register.

  Terri the cashier smiled and said, “Hey, Holiday.” She cast a quick glance at his supplies and Holiday knew, even though she was trying to hide it, he knew exactly what she thinking. It wasn’t bad. What she thought wasn’t bad. She didn’t condemn him. She was dating a firefighter. He drank a lot when he had time off too. Times were mostly good, then sometimes the firefighter drank too much. Then, not so good. He blamed it, the firefighter did, when he sobbed, shaking and convulsing in Terri’s arms after he’d drunk all the booze, he blamed it on the job.

  And she just held him.

  Because what else was she gonna do? Who else would have her and her kids? Or at least that’s what she thought. She didn’t see herself as pretty as she was.

  What she did see as she looked at an overloaded Holiday, as some country western gal crooned about being just a shotgun girl devoted to her man, over the blaring speakers of the Market Faire, what she saw in Holiday was a decently good looking guy who was funny and sad at the same time. She knew he had another life besides just working in a coffee house. She knew the pretty little girl he’d run around with for the summer was gone now. Until recently she had had her hunches about the girl being tied to Holiday’s nightly liquor run, but now looking at the two liters of hard liquor and the thirty pack of beer, she knew the girl was indeed gone and that Holiday would be back into the store, alone, again and again, night after night. He’d been like that before the girl, back when he’d had a broken arm and he’d bought a jug of the cheapest wine every night along with a pack of smokes. But he’d been funny, joking about how he’d broken his arm. He’d made them all laugh around the registers and some of the bagger girls thought he was cute, but they all wondered how he drank an entire jug of cheap wine every night.

  He liked to paint, he’d told them.

  “Pack of smokes, please,” he asked Terri. Terri gave her keys to some high school kid who opened the cigarette case and got Holiday’s brand. “Better make it two,” he mumbled.

  He knew this binge would go deep. Long and deep.

  With Terri’s goodbye lost somewhere behind him, he stepped out into the hot summer night and the buzzing sodium lights that loomed over the parking lot. An American flag undulated in a small breeze that would often come up in the first of the night, following the bottoms of the land and the rising hills that led up from the coast along the train tracks. But now, it was still hot. Holiday loaded the supplies into the back of his teal colored MG, and knew that as soon as he went home he’d be alone.

  Maybe forever. Maybe that was it. Maybe he would never have anyone like her again.

  He cut the thought off and opened the case of beer and pulled out a can. Being in the parking lot was like being next to people. Being part of something. If he didn’t leave just yet, he could stay and listen to them as they went into the store. He was still a part of the human race. He popped the beer and took a long gusty swallow. The sudden buzz that followed after a hard Saturday of making endless mochas, steaming milk and clearing tables, was instant.

  He didn’t feel so bad.

  He put the beer down inside the trunk and lit a cigarette after tapping the pack briefly. He took another long pull of the beer, almost finishing it. Then he smoked and watched the parking lot and felt alone and not so bad about it.

  I’ll have to go on now.

  I’ll have to find a way now. On my own.

  He drank, finishing the beer. He had a good buzz.

  A mile later he was home. He pulled into the garage and drank another beer standing under the florescent light inside, fighting the night. He could hear a few of the neighbors, but it was mostly a quiet neighborhood and so he smoked and watched the stars reveal themselves in the blue of deep space above.

  I should find someone new.

  I should find someone now.
/>   I should find someone for right now.

  Once he got inside the townhome, he put the beer away and mixed a bourbon and coke, laid out the ash tray on the coffee table and both packs of cigarettes. The jazz station was still on as he’d left it that morning before work, playing softly from the paint spattered boombox he kept in the kitchen.

  He turned it down low. He’d want to hear it later when he woke up. There was something comforting about listening to jazz all through the night. When he woke up drunk, he’d hear it and feel less alone.

  He opened all the windows and he could smell the night coming on as the fog rose up through the gullies and valleys down toward the coast. He could smell the perfectly manicured and fresh cut landscape right outside his window. A perk of having a homeowners association that paid for community gardeners.

  I should call her, he thought.

  And he thought about that, and all he could hear was her saying to him again, tiredly, “It’s over, Holiday.” He knew that girl who’d so expectantly seduced him last year was gone now. She was expectant for someone else.

  He turned on Forrest Gump. He always kept it saved on the DVR.

  He smoked and drank too much.

  Later, after midnight, he woke up on the couch and caught the last of Saturday Night Live. It was a rerun and the singer of last years ‘it’ band barely warbled his way through last year’s hit.

  No wonder they’d cancelled the tour halfway through the summer.

  He’d passed out somewhere after Vietnam during Forrest Gump. The battle had been especially interesting to him that night. He’d dreamt about it. About being there in ‘nam with Tom Hanks. About organizing a counter attack from the left flank. About overrunning the VC ambush. In his beer soaked dreams he’d been in battle. He’d felt alive. Like it was fun to be in battle even though everyone else was very frightened and dying. It had been fun to him. A game.

  In the deep of the night, on toward 2am, he watched late night cable until he finally turned it off and just drank in the dark listening to jazz and the intermittent musings of the lonely DJ.