Castor novels:
The Devil You Know
,
Vicious Circle
,
Dead Men’s Boots
,
Thicker Than Water
, and
The Naming of the Beasts
. A power writing about powers, Carey gives us a tale that is anything but what its title implies.
The Non-Event
M IKE C AREY
Ptah! Pfff! Kah!
Nice to have that gag out of my mouth. Got anything to take the taste away? Water, you say? Well, if it’s all you’ve got, I’ll take it. But it’s your choice: I’ll sing a lot louder and clearer if you give me whiskey.
So you want me to talk about Gallo. Sure you do. And you want to hear about how he came to be lying there, with no head on his shoulders, and if I feel any remorse about killing him.
Well, you know, I don’t feel much about it one way or the other. The man was an idiot, and worse than that, an idiot who spat when he talked. A pornography addict who liked to talk about his hobby; a man who fell for pyramid selling schemes and wanted all his acquaintances to join the club; a serial drinker of cheap supermarket beer that made him so flatulent birds fell out of the sky wherever he walked.
But nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Gallo died classy. I’ll give him that. That’s why I agreed to come here. I’m making this statement. I’m cooperating with your dumbfuck investigation, even though I know the conviction is a lead-pipe certainty whether I talk or not.
I’ll tell you the whole story about Gallo’s death. I just feel like somebody should. The rest—the confession and everything—yeah, you can have that too. Take it and choke on it, you fuckers.
So to start with, it was Pete’s idea. Pete Vessell, this is, aka Hyperlink. Not Pete Haig, who is Vessell’s brother-in-law. Haig’s deal is converting base metal into live frogs, which as you’d imagine is not a power that’s in great demand anywhere sane people gather. Vessell has teleportation powers, and even though they’re not as good as the teleportation powers Mass Transit has, say, or even those of Doctor Phase or Little Johnny Blink, they still raise some interesting and suggestive possibilities.
Let me spell it out. Vessell’s deal is that he can instantaneously appear anywhere his name is written down. I know, I know, it’s like a bad joke. You blink out of reality and reappear inside a fucking mailbox, right? Great party trick. And then you stay there for a good half hour, because that’s how long it takes Vessell to recharge. Before he came up with that Hyperlink name, I suggested Return to Sender and Eponymous Boy. He didn’t laugh.
Anyway, Vessell brought me in, because I do the whole talking-to-locks thing. I suggested Naseem Hadid, who goes by Perspective, and George Gruber, the Tin of Rin Tin Skin. Then Naseem brought in Cindy Fellows, aka Guesswork, who I think was her girlfriend at the time. It was a good balance of powers, all things considered. But everything depends on the context, of course. Everything depends on the actual job.
The job in this case was a bank vault: DeJong’s, on Aldwych. It’s technically Dutch soil, by means of some obscure legal switcheroo, so the filthy rich use it as a left-luggage locker for all the stuff they don’t want to pay UK tax on: their Krugerrands and their diamond necklaces, their Fabergé eggs and their bearer bonds. There’s a niceconcentration of obscene and highly portable wealth, and Vessell—who used to be a banker himself before the endoclasm—had scoped it out pretty well.
We met up in his basement—which he’s done up okay, but which still smells of sour milk no matter how many potpourris he puts down there—to go over the logistics and sniff each other’s dog tags. The basement was a necessary part of the equation because it’s lined with lead, which means nobody is going to be reading your lips from five miles off using their X-ray vision. Lead is a nostrum that seems to work against a whole range of superpowers, for reasons nobody has ever been able to explain; but
The Devil You Know
,
Vicious Circle
,
Dead Men’s Boots
,
Thicker Than Water
, and
The Naming of the Beasts
. A power writing about powers, Carey gives us a tale that is anything but what its title implies.
The Non-Event
M IKE C AREY
Ptah! Pfff! Kah!
Nice to have that gag out of my mouth. Got anything to take the taste away? Water, you say? Well, if it’s all you’ve got, I’ll take it. But it’s your choice: I’ll sing a lot louder and clearer if you give me whiskey.
So you want me to talk about Gallo. Sure you do. And you want to hear about how he came to be lying there, with no head on his shoulders, and if I feel any remorse about killing him.
Well, you know, I don’t feel much about it one way or the other. The man was an idiot, and worse than that, an idiot who spat when he talked. A pornography addict who liked to talk about his hobby; a man who fell for pyramid selling schemes and wanted all his acquaintances to join the club; a serial drinker of cheap supermarket beer that made him so flatulent birds fell out of the sky wherever he walked.
But nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Gallo died classy. I’ll give him that. That’s why I agreed to come here. I’m making this statement. I’m cooperating with your dumbfuck investigation, even though I know the conviction is a lead-pipe certainty whether I talk or not.
I’ll tell you the whole story about Gallo’s death. I just feel like somebody should. The rest—the confession and everything—yeah, you can have that too. Take it and choke on it, you fuckers.
So to start with, it was Pete’s idea. Pete Vessell, this is, aka Hyperlink. Not Pete Haig, who is Vessell’s brother-in-law. Haig’s deal is converting base metal into live frogs, which as you’d imagine is not a power that’s in great demand anywhere sane people gather. Vessell has teleportation powers, and even though they’re not as good as the teleportation powers Mass Transit has, say, or even those of Doctor Phase or Little Johnny Blink, they still raise some interesting and suggestive possibilities.
Let me spell it out. Vessell’s deal is that he can instantaneously appear anywhere his name is written down. I know, I know, it’s like a bad joke. You blink out of reality and reappear inside a fucking mailbox, right? Great party trick. And then you stay there for a good half hour, because that’s how long it takes Vessell to recharge. Before he came up with that Hyperlink name, I suggested Return to Sender and Eponymous Boy. He didn’t laugh.
Anyway, Vessell brought me in, because I do the whole talking-to-locks thing. I suggested Naseem Hadid, who goes by Perspective, and George Gruber, the Tin of Rin Tin Skin. Then Naseem brought in Cindy Fellows, aka Guesswork, who I think was her girlfriend at the time. It was a good balance of powers, all things considered. But everything depends on the context, of course. Everything depends on the actual job.
The job in this case was a bank vault: DeJong’s, on Aldwych. It’s technically Dutch soil, by means of some obscure legal switcheroo, so the filthy rich use it as a left-luggage locker for all the stuff they don’t want to pay UK tax on: their Krugerrands and their diamond necklaces, their Fabergé eggs and their bearer bonds. There’s a niceconcentration of obscene and highly portable wealth, and Vessell—who used to be a banker himself before the endoclasm—had scoped it out pretty well.
We met up in his basement—which he’s done up okay, but which still smells of sour milk no matter how many potpourris he puts down there—to go over the logistics and sniff each other’s dog tags. The basement was a necessary part of the equation because it’s lined with lead, which means nobody is going to be reading your lips from five miles off using their X-ray vision. Lead is a nostrum that seems to work against a whole range of superpowers, for reasons nobody has ever been able to explain; but
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