[Intalgio] There are rumors about this place, one of her contacts told her - some drunk, who smiled a gap-toothed smile at her and commented on the firmness and shape of her rump with a sort of ruined charm. She has had her eye half on it for months, looking out for strange happenings in the vicinity. Maybe she drove by, a street or two out of her way on a gray summer night, a storm on the horizon, frowned at the abandoned home and the inhabited one for a brief, thoughtful moment. She had no reason to come here until now.
Gump, whom she sees on odd occasions and knows to be kin to the Bone Gnawers, he checked the trash for her. Passed through on occasion, hunting cans and salvage, sorting out what he found, looking for something strange when he could. Some handful of nights ago, he found something - an earring - still stuck through the desiccated lower half of an ear.
--
The neighborhood is blasted, half abandoned, almost revived, never again touched, hard against weedy freight railroad corridor long abandoned by the company charged with maintaining the tracks. It looks like a wild place, that incisive dart of green through the ruins of the industrial city, among public housing and old warehouses, the abandoned stockyards, the junk pits.
Marooned between an abandoned industrial hulk, the old tracks, and a flat block of public housing apartments that look like squat storage buildings is Blyth Court. Once, there were maybe eight or ten houses on the court, but time and arson and development have whittled the original development down to these two.
Two wood framed houses, circa 1922. One is white, and one is yellow. They are strange twins - built by the same hands, to the same specs, 2.5 stories tall with two front windows that look like eyes and sagging porches like slaggard mouths, along among the ashes, the burned out remnants of the rest.
Both lean, one to the right, one to the left, as if they were listing closer to hear a secret. The yellow house has broken windows, dark eyes, peeling paint. The siding on the white house is blistered, too, peeling away from the bleached and rotting wood, but the glint of clear glass in the windows gleams intact in the remaining sunlight. There yard is barren, this ruin of dying grass and mud and the front gate is sagging but whole. A small flag on the mailbox is up, reminding the post carrier that a letter inside awaits pickup, and a small pot of pansies sits on the sagging porch, incongruously cheery, yellow and lilac, the dark centers like little eyes winking in the gloom.
[Imogen] Over the years, Imogen has cultivated a web of connections. At first, it was people who simply told her about strange corpses. Gave her a call early, if they could, late if they couldn't. Gave her the heads up she needed to keep the veil as intact as she could.
She paid them through a variety of ways. Alcohol, cigarettes, favours. Some, she actually paid with money, though to be frank, the quality of these contacts were hardly high enough to aspire to cash. There are a few she repays in kindness, but they are far and in between. They make her uncomfortable - touch her "line in the sand" as it were. She lies a hundred, a thousand times a week, but somehow, faking niceties to someone desperate for such things lies uncomfortably against her skin, like a poorly washed woollen sweater.
Anyway. Details.
Over the last year and a half, her requests had changed - her interest shifting slightly. She still went out after strange bodies, which were sometimes truly strange and other times ordinarily strange, but she began to ask around - not just for bodies out of the ordinary, but simply things. People. Garbage. Occurrences. That was not precisely when she began to hunt, actively; in fact, the original intention had been simply another weapon to give the Garou in the war.
Then the Garou disappeared, one by one.
Details.
She walks down the block, dressed in flat shoes and a nondescript jacket, nondescript jeans and nondescript t-shirt. Her pace is deliberately slow, eyes on both houses as she begins to pass.
After a review - she will go around the block, then approach the houses again.
[Intalgio] Blythe Court is inscribed into the block it inhabits like a broken smile, this narrow brick-paved street with grass growing up among the pavers, the remnants of old patch jobs among the bricks, curving through the flat, square block. There is no one out on the narrow Court, which is tucked like a forgotten relic between a squat commercial development circa 1958, mostly abandoned, and the old L&O tracks.
A pair of homeless sit in the lee of the old guard building of the industrial building to the east, and the flat blocks of public housing to the west are ripe with the sort of life one expects in such a place - dealers thugging it up on the corners, addicts staggering out of their squats to score another few hours of peace from their demons, hustlers seeing t-shirts, cheap vuitton knock-offs, cigarettes at twenty cents apiece, teenage mothers carrying kids is sagging diapers, a man in a wheelchair who walks himself forward, foot by foot by foot, sucking on his teeth, an American flag hanging off the back of the wheelchair.
There's no one, though, on Blythe Court. An abandoned Chevy truck, weeds growing up around the tires, is parked in the smoked remains of an old lot, the house long since burned down. A shopping cart from Family Dollar, overturned close to the peeling fence that circles the front yard of the white house. As dusk comes on, light seeps underneath the drawn shades of the white house, but the yellow is still, quiet, the broken windows like dead eyes staring out into the night.
[Imogen] By the time Imogen has made it around the block again, she has made a decision as to what she will do first. Methodical. Cautious maybe. It may well lead to nothing.
But she's made it - weighed the pros and cons, considered the possibilities.
She heads up the steps to the yellow house, her head tilted as if it would help her catch any sound or sigh or sob from within. She'll search it first.
[Imogen] (perception+alertness!)
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 4, 7, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Intalgio] Three cracked concrete steps lead from the front walk to the front porch, which sags in the middle, as if something essential has given way. The floorboards feel soft beneath Imogen's feet. She waits a half-second before trusting her full weight to it, feeling the sag and then the contraction underneath, that tells her that they will hold.
The muffled sound of a television - some bright program, with an announcer's sharp voice - dampened by the wavy glass of the old frame windows in the white house is audible from the porch of the yellow. They are close enough to be kissing cousins, this narrow concrete walkway between the two.
Inside the yellow house is surprisingly dry. The living room is narrow, with a flight of stairs heading up on the left, opening to an L-shaped living/dining room on the right. The air is dusty but not damp, the interior solid. The shadowed ceiling shows no signs of moisture spreading through the old lathe, and a brick-framed wood burning fireplace occupies almost the whole of the right wall.
What is surprising about the place is its emptiness. The odd piece of furniture remains here and there - a sagging china cabinet, dull with age, the glass in the door broken, the wood intact remains in the dining room. An old chrome-and-vinyl table and chairs is in the kitchen. The cabinets are painted metal, open, mostly empty. A cylinder of salt remains in one. In another, a glass jar of white vinegar. Under the sink, a bottle of bleach.
No - what is strange about the yellow house is its emptiness. No one has moved in. The floors are solid and the fireplace is an attractive accoutrement - a few sticks of firewood and one could keep warm in this place, baffle the windows, curl up in the corner. There is none of the usual trash, the detritus of haphazard human habitation. No worm-eaten blankets, no empty cups of cheap gas station coffee, no newspapers piled up as insulation against the cold. The bathrooms are empty, dust but clean enough. She has seen them before in squats spattered with feces. No matter that the water was turned off five years ago, no matter that that the ritual use of a toilet without water or sanitation is pointless - there's none of that.
The place smells of loss, empty and dry, husked like autumn going into winter. She finds a yellowed newspaper on the cracked linoleum of the utility room that was added to the back of the house sometime in the 1940s. September 2, 1968, it says.
That was a bad year.
[Imogen] The house, originally thought to perhaps be a false lead has now become an enigma. She roams the rooms, her eyes flicking to the floor where her feet leave prints in the dust, checking for others. She inhales deeply, catching no smell but dry wood and dust that tickles the back of her throat.
Upstairs, downstairs. Everywhere, there is nothing. It gnaws at her, but eventually, she exits the house - not to head to the white one, not precisely, but instead to head to their garbage, her head cocked to the sounds of television through the glass.
[Intalgio] The white house is neatly kept, with pull-shades in the windows, thick with wavy glass that suggests they are original to the house. There is a narrow sidewalk between the houses, poured concrete, cracked and broken, and the shadows between them are deep, exagerrating the height of the old frame buildings, deepning the shadows. Just a sliver of sky is clear above, framed by the dark eaves.
Something dark flies across between the houses, a pigeon startled from its roost, a small black bat hunting insects in the gloaming. Her steps are quiet, precise. This close to the yellow house, the ubiquitous smarm of Pat Sajack is evident. Someone's watching Wheel of Fortune, the sound damped by the structure of the house. The white house has a square framed utility porch, enclosed, half the width of the house built onto the back of the original structure, mirroring the yellow. As she walks past it, close to the wooden boards of the old siding, she can see the dull glow of aged yellow paint underneath the peeling white.
The back yard is framed by a short chainlink fence, the posts not purpose-made, but welded together out of old pipes, jury-rigged, the chainlink attached to the homemade posts so long ago they are rusting together and seem like one thing. There is a newer structure at the back, a five-foot wooden privacy fence, just long enough to screen the trash cans from the house. An alley of grass and rutted gravel runs along behind, between the house and the old corridor of train tracks. Two metal garbage cans sit listless in a metal cart made to contain them.
The address is painted on the metal in blocky letters, in flat green paint, the sort of shivering hand of an elderly person, or a doctor's scrawl.
[Imogen] She glances at the address, bringing to mind the address of the houses out front, matching her memory to the scrawled green paint on the trash cans. She hazards a guess that it is an elderly person rather than a doctor.
She glances briefly at the house before reaching into an inner pocket of her jacket and retrieving a pair of gloves, slipping them on before she gently lifts the lid of the can. Her nostrils pinch at the smell of refuse - but still, begins to root through the contents.
First one, then the other.
[Imogen] dex+stealth
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 9 (Failure at target 6)
[Imogen] attempt numéro deux!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 7) Re-rolls: 2
[Intalgio] Per + Alertness:
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Intalgio] The lid is old, rusted, but fitted tightly over the metal can. The first time she tries it, metal begins to shriek against metal, this loud, shivered noise as if something essential were shearing off. So Imogen - standing in this filthy old alley, her back to the overgrown weedlot where the old L&O once ran - stops, goes still - waits, in silence.
Now that she's identified the television show, she can hear the rhythms of it even from this distance. That drumming is the clapping as they spine the wheel. That burst of near-static is the crowd, chanting the name of the show. And so on.
A minute, then two. She starts again, moving the lid differently, coaxing it off the trash, twist, move, twist, like a shaker of salt.
There is a bag of garbage in each of the cans, a single bag, white, wrapped with twist-ties. An empty container of cottage cheese tops the first. Underneath, the pit of a prune, a banana peel. A box of Cheerios. An empty package of batteries, and a wadded up handful of papertowels that have the sharp scent of Windex soaked into the fibers. Another, underneath, blocked with blood. Bones like ribs, bleached clean underneath, all the shreds of meat amd muscle fiber gone. A crumpled picture of a girl wearing braces and a graduation cap and gown staring at the camera, giving a peace sign - or maybe a victory sign - grinning, wide.
A smear of coffee grounds, the pit of a peach.
An empty packet of Goody's headache powder.
--
And something else, really. The scent of ash, streaks of carbon on the interior of the can, the faintest scent of accelerant use.
[Imogen] Her jaw is clenched, her heart beating a little faster than it should, has been since the beginning screech of metal, an aborted sound that had lead to silence, broken only by the rhythms of the game-show, and the sound of her heart pumping blood fast enough to make her fingers tingle.
She moves through the items slowly but methodically, but stops altogether over the bones, the blood. Several seconds of stillness follow, before she casts her gaze downward over the ground. It does not need to be clean, nor perfectly even ,but it does need to be more or less dry, and more or less flat.
If it is, she begins to lay out the bones, one after another - the rib bones as it were, more if there are more. She uncrumples the photograph and sets it beside the bones before sinking to a crouch to examine them.
[Intalgio] The verge is dry enough tonight, a rib of grass between the half-graveled ruts of the alleyway. The sky is clear, the air cool but not cold. Imogen lays out the ribs, a fair half-dozen of them. Worn clean, three intact, the others cracked, the marrow sucked away. They are clean, clear except for a smear of barbeque sauce near the point of attachment to the sternum, long since severed.
It would be easy to dismiss them as pork ribs. A rack of them, smoked and then lathed in barbecue sauce, cooked until the meat was falling off the bone, a tidy little meal.
They aren't pork, though.
--
And the photograph is a picture of a girl from the mid-2000s, the frizz of a bad perm peaking out from under her cap. She's young, round-faced, with a bristling mouthful of braces, smiling wide at the camera in spite of them. The sunlight gleams behind her, glistens off the surface of a lake in the background. Otherwise, it's a close up, printed on Kodak paper, a 3" by 5" print. Underneath the broken lines in the printing where it was crumbled, there are hard straight lines of wear, as if it had been folded and tucked away in a wallet for months, years.
[Imogen] Imogen crouches on her heels, her wrists resting on her knees, and straightens from the bones, exhaling her breath slowly as she turns her head to look toward the house. Latex rubs against latex as she rubs her thumb against her index finger, finding a familiar groove of a scar.
She stops the motion a second later, as soon as she's aware of it. Still, her head remains turned, studying the once-yellow house, the tendon in her jaw moving as she grits her teeth.
Then she turns away. The bones are picked up, returned to their current resting place, careful so as to leave no sound.
She replaces the lids carefully on the garbage cans and turns her head toward the house again.
[Intalgio] The backyard is approximately the size of a postage stamp. Wide wooden steps lead down from the utility porch attached to the back of the house. The utility porch is lined with framed in windows, covered with dusty curtains, white going to yellow, or yellow going to white. The windows are dark, the lights near the back of the house were off. She picks up the bones, replaces him, looks back to the house, which leans to one side, as if it were slowly sighing, as if its foundation were sloughing it off, like an old sleeve of dry skin.
She can see the lines of old raised beds against the fence, mostly, though, the back yard is a pit of mud and dying grass, with the broken old aggregate sidewalk winding between the houses, back toward the concrete pad on which the trash cans rest.
The lids of the garbage cans slide back on more easily. She knows where the points of pressure are. When she looks back to the house, though, the lights in the back porch are on, there's movement behind the curtains, and the back door opens with a creak of hinges.
--
The sudden, high-pitched bark of some little dog - a terrier, not a toy - is startling. The animal comes barrelling out of the back porch, its growl rather less than menacing, like someone revving the engine of a 2 cylinder Vespa by way of challenge. It shoots off the back porch like a cannonball, scrabbling down the wooden steps, peeling out across the back yard, barking like it treed some great beast, right for Imogen.
"The hell did you find, Butch? Butch!" The voice is that of an elderly woman. "Come back here!" Then, when the barking continues, intensifies, the command in the tone changes to suspicion. " - who the hell's out there at this time'a - "
The flat barrels of a snub-nosed shotgun precedes her. Imogen can see the dull glint of gunmetal in the darkness. The wielder is somewhere between 72 and 87, with a headful of tightly curled white hair, wearing a floral housedress and a plain white apron.
[Imogen] Briefly, as the dog comes barrelling toward her, Imogen shuts her eyes, wishing briefly for the isolation of rage. She has none, however, will never.
Instead, she opens her eyes again, turning toward the sound of the voice.
"Sorry," she says, abruptly, "I was lookin' fer a shortcut to," a nearby street. "I think I got turned around."
She sees the gun - as if it were for the first time, and draws in a sharp breath. "Wow." A beat. "Guess you can't be too careful out 'ere, eh? Mind -" a smile comes slowly to her lips, "pointing that the other way?"
[Imogen] (manipulation+subterfuge)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Intalgio] Per + Empathy
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 4, 4, 5, 8, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Intalgio] "Couldn't tell you no more," the woman says, holding the shotgun with a certain familiarity that comes from long association. Long practice. Suspicion is written across her features, though mostly she's enshadowed, the light coming from the open door behind her. " - they went and changed all them streets years back. Named 'em after them nigras they done brought in. That one that was killed an that other one, 'cept I can't keep them straight."
Butch continues to bark, the wiry little terrier dances around Imogen like he just flushed out a rat, until the woman says, one more time and sharply now, "PLOTZ" and the little dog just stops abruptly, lying down on the concrete walks, ears swiveled and alert.
The weapon lowers though, goes from ready to almost ready as the old woman squints against the gloom, shading her eyes to block out the glare of the lights behind her. Takes her time looking over Imogen, head to toe, and back again.
"Ain't safe for a little thing like you to be out here, this time'a night. You wanna come in, I'll call you a cab. Never know what's gonna crawl outta the shadows."
Gump, whom she sees on odd occasions and knows to be kin to the Bone Gnawers, he checked the trash for her. Passed through on occasion, hunting cans and salvage, sorting out what he found, looking for something strange when he could. Some handful of nights ago, he found something - an earring - still stuck through the desiccated lower half of an ear.
--
The neighborhood is blasted, half abandoned, almost revived, never again touched, hard against weedy freight railroad corridor long abandoned by the company charged with maintaining the tracks. It looks like a wild place, that incisive dart of green through the ruins of the industrial city, among public housing and old warehouses, the abandoned stockyards, the junk pits.
Marooned between an abandoned industrial hulk, the old tracks, and a flat block of public housing apartments that look like squat storage buildings is Blyth Court. Once, there were maybe eight or ten houses on the court, but time and arson and development have whittled the original development down to these two.
Two wood framed houses, circa 1922. One is white, and one is yellow. They are strange twins - built by the same hands, to the same specs, 2.5 stories tall with two front windows that look like eyes and sagging porches like slaggard mouths, along among the ashes, the burned out remnants of the rest.
Both lean, one to the right, one to the left, as if they were listing closer to hear a secret. The yellow house has broken windows, dark eyes, peeling paint. The siding on the white house is blistered, too, peeling away from the bleached and rotting wood, but the glint of clear glass in the windows gleams intact in the remaining sunlight. There yard is barren, this ruin of dying grass and mud and the front gate is sagging but whole. A small flag on the mailbox is up, reminding the post carrier that a letter inside awaits pickup, and a small pot of pansies sits on the sagging porch, incongruously cheery, yellow and lilac, the dark centers like little eyes winking in the gloom.
[Imogen] Over the years, Imogen has cultivated a web of connections. At first, it was people who simply told her about strange corpses. Gave her a call early, if they could, late if they couldn't. Gave her the heads up she needed to keep the veil as intact as she could.
She paid them through a variety of ways. Alcohol, cigarettes, favours. Some, she actually paid with money, though to be frank, the quality of these contacts were hardly high enough to aspire to cash. There are a few she repays in kindness, but they are far and in between. They make her uncomfortable - touch her "line in the sand" as it were. She lies a hundred, a thousand times a week, but somehow, faking niceties to someone desperate for such things lies uncomfortably against her skin, like a poorly washed woollen sweater.
Anyway. Details.
Over the last year and a half, her requests had changed - her interest shifting slightly. She still went out after strange bodies, which were sometimes truly strange and other times ordinarily strange, but she began to ask around - not just for bodies out of the ordinary, but simply things. People. Garbage. Occurrences. That was not precisely when she began to hunt, actively; in fact, the original intention had been simply another weapon to give the Garou in the war.
Then the Garou disappeared, one by one.
Details.
She walks down the block, dressed in flat shoes and a nondescript jacket, nondescript jeans and nondescript t-shirt. Her pace is deliberately slow, eyes on both houses as she begins to pass.
After a review - she will go around the block, then approach the houses again.
[Intalgio] Blythe Court is inscribed into the block it inhabits like a broken smile, this narrow brick-paved street with grass growing up among the pavers, the remnants of old patch jobs among the bricks, curving through the flat, square block. There is no one out on the narrow Court, which is tucked like a forgotten relic between a squat commercial development circa 1958, mostly abandoned, and the old L&O tracks.
A pair of homeless sit in the lee of the old guard building of the industrial building to the east, and the flat blocks of public housing to the west are ripe with the sort of life one expects in such a place - dealers thugging it up on the corners, addicts staggering out of their squats to score another few hours of peace from their demons, hustlers seeing t-shirts, cheap vuitton knock-offs, cigarettes at twenty cents apiece, teenage mothers carrying kids is sagging diapers, a man in a wheelchair who walks himself forward, foot by foot by foot, sucking on his teeth, an American flag hanging off the back of the wheelchair.
There's no one, though, on Blythe Court. An abandoned Chevy truck, weeds growing up around the tires, is parked in the smoked remains of an old lot, the house long since burned down. A shopping cart from Family Dollar, overturned close to the peeling fence that circles the front yard of the white house. As dusk comes on, light seeps underneath the drawn shades of the white house, but the yellow is still, quiet, the broken windows like dead eyes staring out into the night.
[Imogen] By the time Imogen has made it around the block again, she has made a decision as to what she will do first. Methodical. Cautious maybe. It may well lead to nothing.
But she's made it - weighed the pros and cons, considered the possibilities.
She heads up the steps to the yellow house, her head tilted as if it would help her catch any sound or sigh or sob from within. She'll search it first.
[Imogen] (perception+alertness!)
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 4, 7, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Intalgio] Three cracked concrete steps lead from the front walk to the front porch, which sags in the middle, as if something essential has given way. The floorboards feel soft beneath Imogen's feet. She waits a half-second before trusting her full weight to it, feeling the sag and then the contraction underneath, that tells her that they will hold.
The muffled sound of a television - some bright program, with an announcer's sharp voice - dampened by the wavy glass of the old frame windows in the white house is audible from the porch of the yellow. They are close enough to be kissing cousins, this narrow concrete walkway between the two.
Inside the yellow house is surprisingly dry. The living room is narrow, with a flight of stairs heading up on the left, opening to an L-shaped living/dining room on the right. The air is dusty but not damp, the interior solid. The shadowed ceiling shows no signs of moisture spreading through the old lathe, and a brick-framed wood burning fireplace occupies almost the whole of the right wall.
What is surprising about the place is its emptiness. The odd piece of furniture remains here and there - a sagging china cabinet, dull with age, the glass in the door broken, the wood intact remains in the dining room. An old chrome-and-vinyl table and chairs is in the kitchen. The cabinets are painted metal, open, mostly empty. A cylinder of salt remains in one. In another, a glass jar of white vinegar. Under the sink, a bottle of bleach.
No - what is strange about the yellow house is its emptiness. No one has moved in. The floors are solid and the fireplace is an attractive accoutrement - a few sticks of firewood and one could keep warm in this place, baffle the windows, curl up in the corner. There is none of the usual trash, the detritus of haphazard human habitation. No worm-eaten blankets, no empty cups of cheap gas station coffee, no newspapers piled up as insulation against the cold. The bathrooms are empty, dust but clean enough. She has seen them before in squats spattered with feces. No matter that the water was turned off five years ago, no matter that that the ritual use of a toilet without water or sanitation is pointless - there's none of that.
The place smells of loss, empty and dry, husked like autumn going into winter. She finds a yellowed newspaper on the cracked linoleum of the utility room that was added to the back of the house sometime in the 1940s. September 2, 1968, it says.
That was a bad year.
[Imogen] The house, originally thought to perhaps be a false lead has now become an enigma. She roams the rooms, her eyes flicking to the floor where her feet leave prints in the dust, checking for others. She inhales deeply, catching no smell but dry wood and dust that tickles the back of her throat.
Upstairs, downstairs. Everywhere, there is nothing. It gnaws at her, but eventually, she exits the house - not to head to the white one, not precisely, but instead to head to their garbage, her head cocked to the sounds of television through the glass.
[Intalgio] The white house is neatly kept, with pull-shades in the windows, thick with wavy glass that suggests they are original to the house. There is a narrow sidewalk between the houses, poured concrete, cracked and broken, and the shadows between them are deep, exagerrating the height of the old frame buildings, deepning the shadows. Just a sliver of sky is clear above, framed by the dark eaves.
Something dark flies across between the houses, a pigeon startled from its roost, a small black bat hunting insects in the gloaming. Her steps are quiet, precise. This close to the yellow house, the ubiquitous smarm of Pat Sajack is evident. Someone's watching Wheel of Fortune, the sound damped by the structure of the house. The white house has a square framed utility porch, enclosed, half the width of the house built onto the back of the original structure, mirroring the yellow. As she walks past it, close to the wooden boards of the old siding, she can see the dull glow of aged yellow paint underneath the peeling white.
The back yard is framed by a short chainlink fence, the posts not purpose-made, but welded together out of old pipes, jury-rigged, the chainlink attached to the homemade posts so long ago they are rusting together and seem like one thing. There is a newer structure at the back, a five-foot wooden privacy fence, just long enough to screen the trash cans from the house. An alley of grass and rutted gravel runs along behind, between the house and the old corridor of train tracks. Two metal garbage cans sit listless in a metal cart made to contain them.
The address is painted on the metal in blocky letters, in flat green paint, the sort of shivering hand of an elderly person, or a doctor's scrawl.
[Imogen] She glances at the address, bringing to mind the address of the houses out front, matching her memory to the scrawled green paint on the trash cans. She hazards a guess that it is an elderly person rather than a doctor.
She glances briefly at the house before reaching into an inner pocket of her jacket and retrieving a pair of gloves, slipping them on before she gently lifts the lid of the can. Her nostrils pinch at the smell of refuse - but still, begins to root through the contents.
First one, then the other.
[Imogen] dex+stealth
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 9 (Failure at target 6)
[Imogen] attempt numéro deux!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 7) Re-rolls: 2
[Intalgio] Per + Alertness:
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Intalgio] The lid is old, rusted, but fitted tightly over the metal can. The first time she tries it, metal begins to shriek against metal, this loud, shivered noise as if something essential were shearing off. So Imogen - standing in this filthy old alley, her back to the overgrown weedlot where the old L&O once ran - stops, goes still - waits, in silence.
Now that she's identified the television show, she can hear the rhythms of it even from this distance. That drumming is the clapping as they spine the wheel. That burst of near-static is the crowd, chanting the name of the show. And so on.
A minute, then two. She starts again, moving the lid differently, coaxing it off the trash, twist, move, twist, like a shaker of salt.
There is a bag of garbage in each of the cans, a single bag, white, wrapped with twist-ties. An empty container of cottage cheese tops the first. Underneath, the pit of a prune, a banana peel. A box of Cheerios. An empty package of batteries, and a wadded up handful of papertowels that have the sharp scent of Windex soaked into the fibers. Another, underneath, blocked with blood. Bones like ribs, bleached clean underneath, all the shreds of meat amd muscle fiber gone. A crumpled picture of a girl wearing braces and a graduation cap and gown staring at the camera, giving a peace sign - or maybe a victory sign - grinning, wide.
A smear of coffee grounds, the pit of a peach.
An empty packet of Goody's headache powder.
--
And something else, really. The scent of ash, streaks of carbon on the interior of the can, the faintest scent of accelerant use.
[Imogen] Her jaw is clenched, her heart beating a little faster than it should, has been since the beginning screech of metal, an aborted sound that had lead to silence, broken only by the rhythms of the game-show, and the sound of her heart pumping blood fast enough to make her fingers tingle.
She moves through the items slowly but methodically, but stops altogether over the bones, the blood. Several seconds of stillness follow, before she casts her gaze downward over the ground. It does not need to be clean, nor perfectly even ,but it does need to be more or less dry, and more or less flat.
If it is, she begins to lay out the bones, one after another - the rib bones as it were, more if there are more. She uncrumples the photograph and sets it beside the bones before sinking to a crouch to examine them.
[Intalgio] The verge is dry enough tonight, a rib of grass between the half-graveled ruts of the alleyway. The sky is clear, the air cool but not cold. Imogen lays out the ribs, a fair half-dozen of them. Worn clean, three intact, the others cracked, the marrow sucked away. They are clean, clear except for a smear of barbeque sauce near the point of attachment to the sternum, long since severed.
It would be easy to dismiss them as pork ribs. A rack of them, smoked and then lathed in barbecue sauce, cooked until the meat was falling off the bone, a tidy little meal.
They aren't pork, though.
--
And the photograph is a picture of a girl from the mid-2000s, the frizz of a bad perm peaking out from under her cap. She's young, round-faced, with a bristling mouthful of braces, smiling wide at the camera in spite of them. The sunlight gleams behind her, glistens off the surface of a lake in the background. Otherwise, it's a close up, printed on Kodak paper, a 3" by 5" print. Underneath the broken lines in the printing where it was crumbled, there are hard straight lines of wear, as if it had been folded and tucked away in a wallet for months, years.
[Imogen] Imogen crouches on her heels, her wrists resting on her knees, and straightens from the bones, exhaling her breath slowly as she turns her head to look toward the house. Latex rubs against latex as she rubs her thumb against her index finger, finding a familiar groove of a scar.
She stops the motion a second later, as soon as she's aware of it. Still, her head remains turned, studying the once-yellow house, the tendon in her jaw moving as she grits her teeth.
Then she turns away. The bones are picked up, returned to their current resting place, careful so as to leave no sound.
She replaces the lids carefully on the garbage cans and turns her head toward the house again.
[Intalgio] The backyard is approximately the size of a postage stamp. Wide wooden steps lead down from the utility porch attached to the back of the house. The utility porch is lined with framed in windows, covered with dusty curtains, white going to yellow, or yellow going to white. The windows are dark, the lights near the back of the house were off. She picks up the bones, replaces him, looks back to the house, which leans to one side, as if it were slowly sighing, as if its foundation were sloughing it off, like an old sleeve of dry skin.
She can see the lines of old raised beds against the fence, mostly, though, the back yard is a pit of mud and dying grass, with the broken old aggregate sidewalk winding between the houses, back toward the concrete pad on which the trash cans rest.
The lids of the garbage cans slide back on more easily. She knows where the points of pressure are. When she looks back to the house, though, the lights in the back porch are on, there's movement behind the curtains, and the back door opens with a creak of hinges.
--
The sudden, high-pitched bark of some little dog - a terrier, not a toy - is startling. The animal comes barrelling out of the back porch, its growl rather less than menacing, like someone revving the engine of a 2 cylinder Vespa by way of challenge. It shoots off the back porch like a cannonball, scrabbling down the wooden steps, peeling out across the back yard, barking like it treed some great beast, right for Imogen.
"The hell did you find, Butch? Butch!" The voice is that of an elderly woman. "Come back here!" Then, when the barking continues, intensifies, the command in the tone changes to suspicion. " - who the hell's out there at this time'a - "
The flat barrels of a snub-nosed shotgun precedes her. Imogen can see the dull glint of gunmetal in the darkness. The wielder is somewhere between 72 and 87, with a headful of tightly curled white hair, wearing a floral housedress and a plain white apron.
[Imogen] Briefly, as the dog comes barrelling toward her, Imogen shuts her eyes, wishing briefly for the isolation of rage. She has none, however, will never.
Instead, she opens her eyes again, turning toward the sound of the voice.
"Sorry," she says, abruptly, "I was lookin' fer a shortcut to," a nearby street. "I think I got turned around."
She sees the gun - as if it were for the first time, and draws in a sharp breath. "Wow." A beat. "Guess you can't be too careful out 'ere, eh? Mind -" a smile comes slowly to her lips, "pointing that the other way?"
[Imogen] (manipulation+subterfuge)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Intalgio] Per + Empathy
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 4, 4, 5, 8, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Intalgio] "Couldn't tell you no more," the woman says, holding the shotgun with a certain familiarity that comes from long association. Long practice. Suspicion is written across her features, though mostly she's enshadowed, the light coming from the open door behind her. " - they went and changed all them streets years back. Named 'em after them nigras they done brought in. That one that was killed an that other one, 'cept I can't keep them straight."
Butch continues to bark, the wiry little terrier dances around Imogen like he just flushed out a rat, until the woman says, one more time and sharply now, "PLOTZ" and the little dog just stops abruptly, lying down on the concrete walks, ears swiveled and alert.
The weapon lowers though, goes from ready to almost ready as the old woman squints against the gloom, shading her eyes to block out the glare of the lights behind her. Takes her time looking over Imogen, head to toe, and back again.
"Ain't safe for a little thing like you to be out here, this time'a night. You wanna come in, I'll call you a cab. Never know what's gonna crawl outta the shadows."
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