Brementown

By Deven Balsam

In a city where supernatural creatures walk undetected among humans, magic means survival.

Trolls and changelings, goblins and bavansidhe exist amid the steel towers of Midtown undetected by humans through the aid of a magic called glamour.

When unlikely hero Bill Wyoming and four fellow subway commuters set out to stop a kidnapping, they stumble upon clues which lead them to the domain of one of the underworld's most formidable foes.

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“World-building akin to Tolkien and descriptions reminiscent of Faulkner.”

“A craftsman-like effort.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beaten Track Publishing
• Release date: Feb 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786454010

Deven Balsam

Deven Balsam is a single dad, resident DJ at Asheville North Carolina’s oldest running gay bar, and new author of sci fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction. He weaves a bit of romance, horror, and spirituality into everything he writes. Originally a Yankee from the New York metropolitan area, he currently lives on a mountain at the edge of 250 acres of Pisgah National Forest, and that suits him just fine.

Book preview

Brementown

Brementown

Deven Balsam

Beaten Track Logo

Beaten Track

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

Brementown

SMASHWORDS EDITION

First published 2020 by Beaten Track Publishing

Copyright © 2020 Deven Balsam at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN: 978 1 78645 401 0

Cover: Roe Horvat

Beaten Track Publishing,

Burscough, Lancashire.

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

In a city where supernatural creatures walk undetected among humans, magic means survival.

Trolls and changelings, goblins and bavansidhe exist amid the steel towers of Midtown undetected by humans through the aid of a magic called glamour.

When unlikely hero Bill Wyoming and four fellow subway commuters set out to stop a kidnapping, they stumble upon clues which lead them to the domain of one of the underworld's most formidable foes.

###

World-building akin to Tolkien and descriptions reminiscent of Faulkner.

A craftsman-like effort.

Contents

Prologue

Part I

Heat

Stock

Full Moon Potatoes

Red Nettle

May Butter

Blood

Dead Man’s Tooth

Leeks From A Gravedigger’s Garden

Willow Bark

Meat of a White Rooster

False Verbena

Aguardiente

Annatto

Bloodroot

Foxglove

Horsetail

Suspension of Hemlock

Skeleton Keys

Marshmallow Root

Pata de Vaca

Ginger

Lodestone

Eventide

Midnight

Part II

Dust

Pumpkin Spice

Red String

Slime

Iron Nails

Chicken Bones

Part III

A Pound of Flesh

A Jar of Quartz

Cobwebs

A Pair of Dice

Torn Page of a Sketchbook

Black Glitter Nail Polish

Christmas Candle Wax

Yuletide

New Year’s Eve

Glossary of Terms Used in Brementown

About the Author

By the Author

Beaten Track Publishing

Prologue

I will never disappear

For forever, I’ll be here

Whispering

Morning, keep the streets empty for me

—Fever Ray

Knock on the beams, three sharp raps to dispel the glamour. Why does a knocker’s knock sound different than a human’s? Why does a werewolf’s lipstick turn the edge of a tumbler black, or a nyad’s loose strand of hair become an inchworm when touched by the midworld sun? Who knows?

Just like I need two wristwatches—one for home, one for work—and swap out the one for the other on the train. To us, Midtown is wreathed in ponderous pause. Upworld’s time is bendier, swift.

The end-of-day express to Brementown. Crowded, hot, click-clacking along its unmerry route with everyone’s colognes and body washes having long given up the fight. Just the smell of cooking deodorant and ripe hair now, with a little bit of Cool Water and dollar-store sweet-pea spray to spice up the soup. There’s a guy singing some kind of, I don’t know—opera? In German, I think, standing by the exit door, not the door through which you leave the train but the one you go through to get to the next car. He’s wearing Carhartts and a blue work shirt with a red triangle patch on the pocket, not holding on to anything, just slouched against that little door, dead serious in expression, softly singing German opera. Suddenly the man switches to English.

"Be good or ill the song,

winding the rope thus sing I.

At the world-ash-tree once I wove

when far and wide from the stem out-branched."

I’m crushed between a linebacker-sized midworlder and a tanuki who’s not small. Who’s carrying his pit bull in a shoulder bag. The dog’s staring at me with those big, soft eyes but also licking his chops. It’s either hey, guy, I love you or—

[You might not know about tanukis. They’re a subspecies of the raccoon dog, and folklorically, citizens who can pile-drive you into the earth while winning every wiener-/pie-/pierogi-eating contest the so-called normals put out there regardless of season. Some say they can shapeshift. I wish the one sitting next to me would shapeshift into anything smaller.]

He’s friendly, says the tanuki, staring straight ahead. The glammed version of this tanuki presents as a tall, chubby, round-faced Asian person. Mid-range soft voice, kind of thick, but that makes sense considering their neck’s as big around as my entire body.

Everybody says that. Right before the dog goes for the face.

No, really, he is. Just a big ol’ love bug. Ain’t that right, Mikey?

The dog’s butt wags inside the bag. I reach out to pat Mikey’s head. I pull back my hand intact and dig around for a card in my suit jacket pocket and offer it to the tanuki, who takes it and reads it aloud.

Bill Wyoming, public defender.

The tanuki digs deep into the same bag the dog’s in and pulls out a beaten-up card, hands it to me.

Mr. Mori Koji, line chef, I read aloud. Not to be a dick, but, Koji? Really?

I was the runt when I was young. But I got bigger, says Koji, smiling peacefully. I wonder if anything could make this guy angry.

The train lurches to a stop. The lights flicker then fail completely.

Dammit! Koji slams his head backward against the Plexiglas-covered poster behind him, causing it to crack. Mikey whines.

I stop wondering.

Part I

Heat

He heard the voice, nothing but a faraway scratch on the wrong side of a thick wall, background, unimportant, like another diner in a restaurant talking to their spouse in hushed tones, or the drone of a television from another room.

The rise and fall of it felt familiar though, and in that familiarity rested comfort.

The blanket’s damp weight held him like an anchor holds a boat upon a shifting sea. The stifling heat of the room, cooked by the blast furnace of the rising sun hitting the front of the building, slowed his breath. He was aware of how hot it was but still too sleep-drunk to wake.

Are you listening to me?

The breath of the voice in the dream tickled his ear. He turned on his side and pulled the blanket over his head.

Yes, he tried to whisper, but his mouth felt like a stone.

They sewed

Layers of sleep, dark, heaviness, and stifled breath. He sank deeper.

them in

He kicked the blanket off one leg and felt his leg could do the breathing for him.

But I ripped them out.

He drew the leg quickly back under the cover of the blanket, deciding not to risk the exposure.

They used quick needles.

He tried to whisper a question, but his breath came out choked, high and reedy like the beginning of a tea kettle’s scream.

In the thick dark of the suffocating sleep, a blade clashed with a blade—quick, fast, the sound of a hieroglyph painted on the night sky: sil-ver.

When they come again they’ll cut a piece. A small piece.

Oh, no, he moaned, and felt himself rise from the dream like a bubble from the murk of a pond.

Part of my tit’s gone they cut it off me.

Jimmy.

The bed is red and so is my head.

He opened his eyes, gasping, tears wetting his face.

Stock

The lights snap on and the train grumbles back to life, shuddering to gain its former speed. Secondary stops blur by. The train’s gone express.

Pressed like a well-read paperback between gargantuan bookends, Bill Wyoming the wolpertinger falls asleep.

[You also might not know about wolpertingers. But surely you’ve heard of the jackalope. The wolpertinger is the jackalope’s European cousin, smaller in build, equipped with pheasant wings and blessed with a head as hard as granite. All of this camouflaged by a steady concentration of glamour, glamour being the illusion we Upworlders project around us to trick the human eye and survive among them, unmolested.]

Koji the tanuki fiddles with his dog’s soft, un-cropped ears and looks across the crowded car to his coworker, a banshee named Shivahn. She too has drifted off, her fiery-topped head jerking up every few seconds before flopping back down, chin to chest. Somehow in her sleep she manages to clutch her purse like a shield, her index finger wrapped in a fuscia Band-Aid from when she cut it open slicing cucumber for lunch.

[Might do you good to forget what you know about banshees. They’re pretty harmless, unless you back them into a corner. And quite easy on the eyes usually.]

The train rounds a breakneck turn, and several standing passengers lose their footing.

A black-and-white composition notebook slides across the floor in front of Koji; someone further down the bench mutters oh, no. Koji extends his foot and holds the notebook in place.

Thanks, much thanks, says a cait sidhe, their glamour sporty—gym attire, short-bitten nails painted pink as Shivahn’s Band-Aid.

No problem at all, says Koji.

[A cait sidhe, unglamoured, looks like your standard anthropomorphic black cat, often with a white mark on their chest.]

The train turns another sharp corner and the cait sidhe stumbles away. The lights blink out.

"Oh, come on!" said Koji.

Seriously, again? says Bill.

I just wanted one decent night off. My show starts in twenty minutes. Never gonna make it.

Got Tivo?

Nope.

Sucks.

The lights restore themselves, twitchily.

The cait sidhe’s found their feet and is now holding a child’s backpack and looking ahead with a distressed look.

When’d opera guy leave? asks Bill.

Who?

Guy standing against that door, singing German opera. He was just there a minute ago.

Not sure.

We didn’t make any stops.

"No, we didn’t. And there was just a kid standing by that door, where that yellow poster is. Before the lights went out the second time."

A kid?

A middle-schooler.

Keep your voice down, Smalls, says Bill. The human to his left is staring at them both.

People flip the fuck out these days, says the human.

Sorry? says Koji.

When I was little, I went everywhere by myself and nobody gave a damn. World’s gone crazy.

That it has, says Bill.

The train lurches forward.

In minutes, it reaches the last underground station of its northbound express route. The humans empty the car quickly, as if the doors will close and shut them inside the malfunctioning metal box forever. Now in this car are only Bill, Koji, Shivahn, the cait sidhe, and a petite creature in high heels, wrap dress and tan floppy hat, waiting for the train to continue its course, up from the tunnels of the city and into the still-bright light of a muggy, August Friday evening.

###

Oh, no, why? says a soft voice. The train’s stumbled to a halt a second time, and the lights have failed a third.

Koji lets loose a loud, frustrated sigh. He gently drops Mikey from the bag, and the pit bull click-clacks across the vinyl floor.

Secondary lights flicker to life, and the remaining passengers are bathed in twilight visibility.

This happened last week too, says the banshee. She’s pulled her knees up and sits hugging her legs.

I give up trying to have a life anymore, seriously, says Koji.

"Watching Hero Chef isn’t having a life, Koji," says Shivahn.

It’s all I got, so, thanks.

Believe me, kids, it’s better than what’s out there, says Bill, getting up to stretch his legs. He walks to the front of the train car, knocks on the conductor’s door. Hey. Any idea how much longer?

They’re sending a repair crew. Could be another forty minutes, is the muffled response through the door.

Wow, says the owner of the wide-brimmed hat. That’s ridiculous.

I can see daylight, says Bill, looking out the window at the front of the car.

Fitting end to a terrible week, says Koji.

I’m sorry, says Shivahn. I really am. I suck at matchmaking.

It’s not your fault, Vahnie. You didn’t know.

You deserve someone really nice.

Eh. Maybe I don’t. Koji forces a laugh, and it comes out sounding worse than he intended.

Dating in this city is a horror show, says Bill. I don’t recommend it.

Oh, it’s not all bad, says the hat owner. Bill walks up to them, fishes a business card from his pocket. The hat owner digs in their large purse.

Bill Wyoming, public defender.

The hat owner hands him their own card. Pleasure to meet you, Bill. Ms. Cheli. Dance instructor.

Dance instructor, really? I’ve always wanted to learn to salsa.

And you should learn, says Cheli, getting up from their seat. There’s an obvious,