Nobody's Feast

the book of nobody and no one

I. The Chapter of Days

Dark they are and long, as winter turns toward spring. Such nights as these in Denver.

Mondays he wakes to hunger as he always wakes ready once more to go forth out've his hole and navigate this too strange otherworld. Mondays he spends the whole night an unseen presence when the bus doors wick open he drifts inside with the rest of the commuters and he selects a seat in the middle of the bus near the back doors and he watches the people and he learns the route who comes and who goes. He watches the streets slide by and when he leaves the bus it's in a suburb he's canvassed before and he may as well cast no shadow where he walks a gentleman boogeyman all the dogs like him now. 

He has brought them gifts before of bloody dripping meat and the more prosaic easier for him to transport bacon-flavored treats. Hounds won't protect from every monster they won't protect from Jacks not clever Jacks who know that their enchantment requires that he drink the blood of people but he wants them to have pleasant dreams and he has made friends of their protectors and he would protect them too if he found some other shadow on the street in the closets and under the beds. 

Mondays he wakes to hunger as he always wakes.

--

Tuesdays are nights to commemorate a feast for one brave little rat who was so strong and so clever and went to see the naked monster the once and future rat king where the patient tailor waited and waited and what does he do without a suit to tailor Jack might wonder or perhaps they already know the Nosferatu they know that though Gotfred's been unseen his loyal billy blind is gone from what was once an inviolate haven a nest for a family of monstrous-shaped curse-wearers but now. 

Tuesdays are nights to commemorate the passion of one brave little rat and brave little rat friends and their dark fable feast.

This is the dark fable: the rats drank the blood.

The blood stained their yellow teeth and their whiskers as they drank it down. They drank it down and they became more than little rats with their humped backs and fat tails. They became more than inquisitive-eyed scapegoats of Pestilence and his brother-king Death.  

He had set the feast so carefully: little cups of twisted aluminum and sodden crumbs of sweet-bread and little smears of chocolate and other things pleasing to rats pungent things because rats are pleased by pungencies. He'd set the feast so carefully in a hole in the ground where the wash of water was a constant murmur the water has things perhaps to say but it says nothing a hole in the ground where the occasional passage of light in the above world the part of this otherworld that lay on the surface like the roof of a complicated and maze-riddled mystery of a building the occasional passage of light smear of headlights would send shadows chasing across the church [the feast-hall], gliding in smooth curves across concrete then diminishing into darkness and the sound of water. 

How carefully that first feast he'd set out: come you bright eyes, come you clever, clever creatures, come and drink of

Drink of the curse drink of the blood-knot drink deep little rats. Drink deep.

The favored brave little rat he lets drink from his hand from a cut he makes with his teeth. The favored rat who was so determined he lets drink from a cut on his palm that is no stigmata. He is a Jack and Jacks are determined (valiant [perhaps]), but they are not religious in anything but oddities.

Tuesdays are nights to commemorate a feast for the night his devil of a lucky talisman his Tom Cat was told not these rats

and in this fabled world which is real he knows it's real of course it's real but it can't be real everywhere it's separate

in this otherworld the cat will lay down with the rats and they'll not nibble at all.

Tuesdays. Dark they are and long, as winter turns toward spring. Such nights as these in Denver.

--

Wednesdays are secrets. The pages are stuck together. You don’t get to know what happens on Wednesdays. They’re stuck together by old blood. Scabs. That’s the kind of chapter this is. That’s the kind of book that is the book of nobody and no one. That’s the kind of fable — none of these sticky pages are honey, touch your tongue to them if you don’t believe. They can only be read in the dark.

Here. Slip a thumb-nail between this page and that and peel it carefully apart tease it carefully apart and what might be found on the blood-stained page?

What’s under the stain? Wednesdays are secrets, and dark.

— 

Thursdays are for mortality. They’re work days. They’re worked-long days. They’re tired days, slogging toward the weekend. They’re frantic days, starting the weekend early. They’re for mortality, for business with the kine, for the kind of business clever Jack has with those who can affect his world but aren’t in it. They’re like the vision of clouds on the surface of a still pond. They’re a shadow and they’re a coolness but they can’t trouble the waters until they start to weep. 

He’s been playing at Hudson now for a year, for a little over a year. Thursdays are Hudson days, Hudson nights. Hudson who looks nothing like Jack looks and nothing like Jack ever looked. Hudson is a short and slim young man who costs blood to look like who costs attention to look like. Hudson has an uncle connected to a medical company operating in LoDo and that’s what everybody seems to know about Hudson and why Hudson’s making friends at UrgentCare and HealthWorks because while the hospital’s the key these places are good too. That’s why Hudson’s talking to the local Red Cross. That’s why Hudson’s everybody’s genial little pet.

Hudson’s uncle was one of Gregory’s brother-thralls. Hudson’s uncle is never going to return from where-ever it is he went — a fanatic’s gullet or the weight of so many years all caught up to him, once the Brujah disappeared. Hudson’s uncle’s assets are paperwork and paperwork. How easy it is to make paperwork into a new person.

Thursdays Jack works on becoming a new person. Jack tends to his allies. He courts Nancy and he courts Robert. He listens to the slosh-slip of rumors brushing through the world of day which lies palimpsest beneath the world of night but aren't they the same world? They can't be the same world; he knows they're separated by a scrim -- separated somehow.

—

a blood-stuck page revealed!

His second language is German and it was Hungarian once but he hasn’t had to speak Hungarian or heard it spoken in years and years. Before he was a Jack. He wants to speak more languages than two again, but it isn't Hungarian he tries to learn. Not all at once.

This is what one blood-stuck page, peeled apart from the other, might reveal: 

Jack, wearing one of his Faces, sitting in a donut shop, back hard against the wall. How dim the wall is, how dull the paint, how bright the light and how sweet the smell, rolls baking in the oven on broad silver-coloured trays, beaten mirrors that do not reflect anything, coffee brewing, coffee black as a charred bone, and none of it something that the Jack (a Hermit; make him into that card) with his back hard against the wall can take part of. He's an old man tonight, a man who's old and harmless but not quite so old all vitality's leeched from him, and this old man knows everybody, or is getting to know everybody, who comes in --

and what's Jack reading, there in the corner, his back hard against the wall? Watchful and quiet and occasionally holding court, and when he doesn't wish to hold court, less noticed than a fly on the wall?

He's learning Latin. The most interesting Noddiest documents -- they'd be in Spanish, wouldn't they, or Persian, or Aramaic, Hebrew. He'll get there. He's starting with Latin: conjugations.

am-o, am-as, am-at

---

Here are the rolls. Rats! He went with rats. I'm not 100% sure these are the rolls I did before starting that moodpost, but they are the ones I can find, so adjust animal levels accordingly.

fleurs du mal

[First Jack is going to Summon animalz. Maybe rats or mice. Maybe cats. I will decide when I moodpost it. Charisma + Survival.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

fleurs du mal

[Now he is going to tell them to do things. I will say diff: 7, in case it is rats. But if it is cats, it is diff: 6. Why are the bats that are diff 6 specifically 'vampire bats'? Ugh, WW. Anyway. Manipulation + Animal Ken.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

mnemosyne

WITNESSETH.