viii: my terrible mistake

once again, i met nico rossi. he asked me if i'd seen henry hallack.

 

i lied.

 

i know that was a mistake. i know i cannot fix it. i simply have to wait for the wolves to smell the fear on me. that, or the foxes whose den i share will bring them my carcass.

vii: underworld

i met him. by sheer serendipity, by some miracle, i met giles again for the first time in the 6 years since i took off the mask of my former self and put on that of a mountebank.

he asked me for food, and i gave it to him, saying it was on me. he looked at me strangely. i suddenly realized that he didn't recognize my voice. i nearly took my mask off to show him it was me, that i was okay, but in my mind i could hear adam weiss berate me, and so the mask stayed on.

i was starting to get worried, though. giles kept looking over his shoulder. and i wasn't sure what reason he had to enter the mountebank club. he didn't seem to bear the marks of any lonely hunters or of their servants. was he one of their victims? it's not unheard of for people running from one lonely hunter or another to come to the mountebank club in the hopes of finding a supplier that wouldn't ask too many questions, and the paranoia he was exhibiting certainly fit the bill.

but then i heard that voice. the voice of nico rossi, the timberwolf i've seen twice in recent days. he was calling giles by his surname. giles took the food from me and started walking to nico, and i knew then what was happening.

i asked giles if he needed any weapons, trying to sound casual despite my growing panic. he told me the timberwolves didn't let their members carry any that weren't officially supplied. i tried to think of something to say that would signal to him that i was his old friend without arousing suspicion, but i heard adam weiss call my name before i could come up with anything.

by the time i turned back from the voice of adam weiss, giles' back was turned to me.

 

(i also aided a few runners in getting some supplies. henry and eric, their names were. probably henry hallack and eric zane. i guess they're running together now. they certainly match the descriptions i've heard- one is tall and skinny, with long brown hair and a beard, the other is muscular, with short black hair and stubble. both runners from the archangel.

i guess that's interesting too.

just figured i'd lighten the mood a bit.)

vi: ghosts

jack smith. adam weiss. president and vice president of the mountebank club.

they don't really let us live normal lives.

that probably sounds obvious. the members of a religion of an evil god who probably inspired accounts of faustian bargains aren't especially ordinary? what a shock that is.

what i mean is a little more complicated, though. a lot... well, let's call a spade a spade, a lot worse. i mean they don't let us see our old friends, or partners, or really anyone. they exercise total control over our lives.

adam is a bit more obvious about it. jack usually stays behind the scenes, content to be a figurehead whose publicity comes from his mystique.

or he's just a lazy bastard.

i sometimes wonder about giles. about his uncle markus. about whether giles felt the same way about me as i did about him.

but it doesn't matter anymore. even if i saw him again by some bizarre coincidence, adam wouldn't let me anywhere near him. not close enough to rebuild what we used to have, and certainly not close enough to build something new.

i don't know why my heart aches like this. i don't believe we're really any different than other animals, other objects. i mean, everything is just matter and energy, no matter what mask or facade or persona is hiding it. so why can't i convince myself of that long enough not to feel like this?

or is that the reason why? is it because i know how long infinity is, how crushingly bleak our reality looks when you see through its many disguises, that i feel so empty? or is because i am alone in this world, a husk of a person in the mask of a fox whose only companions are cultists? is it because i can't form the words in my mouth or write them on the page that say i am never returning to the mountebanks for fear of what they would do to someone who knows as much as i do if i tried to leave?

i couldn't say. maybe it's a little bit of everything.

v: hounded

more timberwolves today. nico rossi, rainer kavinsky, and melanie hector.

i asked melanie if she'd ever heard of melinoe, an underworld goddess from ancient greece.

(see, it's funny because the timberwolves worship a lonely hunter called the archangel that turns into dead people.

i mean, not like she seemed to agree.)

they wanted to know if i'd seen a man named henry hallack. apparently he's a runner from the archangel, the brother of a runner they killed called mason hallack.

i told them, honestly, that i hadn't seen him. they didn't seem to believe me.

can't say i blame them for not trusting my word. we mountebanks deal in deceit and misdirection.

but of course we try to keep our customers happy enough that they don't stop coming or, worse yet, pull a stunt like the children of the cold had. customers, of course, being all jack cares about.

i almost want to say i agree with him on that one, though.

lions prowling among men, wolves in sheep's clothing. those are the phrases. that's what they tell you, what they pound into your head, what they never let you forget until the day you die.

lions and people, wolves and sheep. predators and prey, eaters and meat. but lions and wolves? we need to eat.

iv: black and white

liminal spaces. spooky, aren't they, the places between two things? the witching hour. fast food places so late at night it might be morning but it's hard to tell. airports. highway rest stops. hospital waiting rooms, especially at night. empty parking lots at 4 in the morning. melancholy. times and places and feelings that you can't quite pin down one way or another.

we find them deeply strange and, in my experience, deeply uncomfortable as well.

i think it's because they're the points in our lives where the world of polar opposites we've constructed fades, where we're left to confront the reality that nothing is really any different than anything else, that there is no clear difference between a person and a sack of rocks at the subatomic level and we've only tricked ourselves into thinking that we are somehow different from the ants in our homes that we spray with poison because we've decided their lives somehow matter less than our own.

i'm sorry. i know i'm rambling. i just can't stop thinking about this kind of thing, even though it makes my head hurt and my heart hurt worse.

and i had a nightmare. i dreamed i was a fox being hunted by wolves for stealing their food. i could tell by the smell of the place that i was in a forest, but i couldn't see a thing. it was so unimaginably dark. there was no moon and there were no stars. i came to the edge of a cliff. i could hear wind howling all along the space before me, and i knew somehow that the drop was a long one.

i woke up before i found out what happened. but the fear i felt when i realized that i was trapped stuck with me.

iii: hopes and dreams and everything

you know, i wasn't always a mountebank. i used to have a normal life. i was a class clown in high school. made a lot of friends that way. most of them stopped caring about me once my jokes started getting stale, though. then i realized they weren't really my friends at all.

i ended up dropping out of high school my senior year. i didn't care enough to keep going, and my parents didn't care enough to make me.

there was only one person i actually liked at school. giles. we'd been friends since we were pretty young. unfortunately, that also made it... uncomfortable when i realized i was developing a crush on him.

sometimes i wonder if i stopped going to school to avoid having to pretend i didn't love him.

anyways, the point is that i was 18 years old, drinking like a fish at a bar that didn't ask for an id, when i met jack smith.

"what are you doing here?" he asked.
"i want friends. i need money. i just... need to get away from it all." 
"if you feel lonely, you only have to say the word."
"are you trying to be my friend?" i asked, eyeing him.
he laughed. "no. i am not your friend. but the mountebanks are always looking for new recruits."
"mountebanks?"

he gave me a card and a wide smile. i started to say something, but he just got up, patted me on the bank, and winked as he walked out.

i visited the place listed on the card the next day, once my hangover had subsided. i got some strange looks from the people there, but i had long since stopped caring what other people thought of me. someone in a devil mask came up to me and asked me who i was and what i was doing there. i showed him the card and said it had been given to me by a man i assumed was jack smith, judging from the name written on it. the man in the devil mask, whose name i later learned was alan roach, nodded.

i forget what happened after that exactly, but the point is, i became a mountebank. i joined the club.

i think jack considered that interaction of ours a deal. i sincerely hope not.

i don't know how much you know about the lonely hunters, but things like my boss don't really have our best interests at heart. each of them has their own way of doing things, and jack makes deals.

he's not the devil, exactly. i think he might be worse.

ii: snowfall

we were recently raided by some rivals of ours. a faction of the children of the cold, worshipers of a lonely hunter with powers over ice and snow.

we retaliated, and we destroyed them utterly.

some of them tried to surrender, but we had to send a message: we will not make others our enemies, but we will destroy those who make us theirs.