The Acton

A Serialized Novel

Illustrated by the author

               Mortality is fatal—
              Gentility is fine,
              Rascality, heroic,
              Insolvency, sublime!
 
          - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, stanza 11
           —Emily Dickinson

FORWARD

I am devoted to all things Noir. My teen years were full of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and films like The Big Sleep and The Third Man—well, these and so many others. But here’s the thing: my writing leans towards the weird. I say there’s a giddy feeling in subverting the tropes, like a trained cook who takes a classic recipe and turn it on its head.. With this in mind, I wrote The Acton, for the pure enjoyment of ‘Noir’, but with a twist of ‘la surnaturel’. The demi-monde is louche, but so are the halls of a place called The World Federation of Collateral Trade, and they will be visited by forces that are neither speculative, nor market-bound, something outside time and materiality.

Chapter One — We All Fall

Lars Osborne was coming in from a grinding all-nighter, the deal done to be sure, but there was no triumph in it. He cursed his luck and his employer out loud. No job he’d ever agreed to ever had him running, like a petty criminal, a loser punk.

His phone rang—

          “What… How should I know? I was just following instructions, mate. Back off, will ya?.... You got out, didn’t you?… So don’t complain… Anyway, I have the item. Yeah, we meet up tomorrow.”

He punched ‘end call’ and wiped the cracked screen against his leg. It stank of cigarettes. A three-sixty check of the street showed not a car in sight. And quiet. No voices, no police sirens, not even the bark of a backlot dog. No one would see him unwrap the small package he’d tucked in the inner pocket of his jacket. There had been no time to look at it until now. Lars wadded up the paper wrapping and tossed it. The dynaflex pouch was smooth to the touch. He unzipped it, careful not to damage the contents. Inside was a small, thick book, the edge gilded like a prayer missal. Its cover was made of a supple material he could not place. Neither kid, nor cowhide, nor pigskin, and the color was indeterminate, a peculiar shade of pink that glistened in the light of the street lamps. It felt as soft as human skin, like a baby’s skin.

            “Fucking hell.” He shivered at the thought.

The book was well bound, yet the pages were impossibly thin. Lars opened it slowly and saw a blaze of golden patterns and symbols he did not recognize. It was magnificent. The characters glowed with some inner life he could feel but not account for. The book seemed to draw him into it. So much so that he had to tear his attention away just to scan the street again for passers-by. Then he turned the page. 

He found the second page as mysterious as the first, and maybe even more puzzling. It was a list of names arranged in columns. The letters were painted or printed—he couldn’t tell which—in a luminous golden ochre. He could make out the names of people clearly despite the poor light, even though the letters were miniscule. The longer he stared at the page, the more it seemed to move. It was the damnedest thing, all those names pulsing on the page. He turned to the next, and the next and the next, and there was a sound. Not just of pages turning, but something else, like murmurs. It sounded like praying in a church with a lofty ceiling. He could swear he heard many indistinct voices all out of phase. The sound grew louder. It enveloped him and he felt himself becoming rooted to the spot where he stood. He snapped it shut, gripping it tightly in his hands, frozen, waiting for the shock to subside. He felt torn between showing it to someone and protecting it from all eyes. 

But who in this town would he ever show it to?

Lars slipped it back into the pouch and hid it once more in his jacket, taking a deep breath. He looked up at the sky and then closed his eyes and exhaled. It was time to get to the Acton before anything else could go wrong. He took out his phone and tapped a name from his list.

          “Yeah, it’s me again. Listen, what the fuck is this thing? ... I mean, did you hear anything about it?... because it’s weird...I don’t like this at all, man... It’s… Anyway, I think it’s worth a lot more than they’re letting on... Alright... Yeah... Ok. You’ll take it to her. Four - four-thirty, yeah?...Right. And she'll give us an appraisal, you're sure about that?...Good, okay. And bring my stuff…Okay… G’night.”

Lars walked the last four blocks and went up the steps of the hotel. A clean spot on the entrance façade showed where the star status plaque had been. For all its grandeur, it had no doorman, not anymore. There was no night manager either, not unless you roused him.

As he was entering the lobby, he heard the desk phone ringing off the hook. The concierge was the concern of a guy named Miggi. At five in the morning, it was unmanned. Lars went back behind the desk and got the key for himself, Room 330. Then he swung around to the alcove where the elevators were, and pushed the Up arrow, five times fast. The old clunker was slower than Venus, so he took the stairs. After a night like this one, it was good to be home, if that’s what anyone could call it. Housekeeping they still had. It wouldn’t kill him to get a few hours of sleep on clean sheets. The only problem was that he was wired as hell. The thing he’d stashed away in the closet had him as close to worry as he ever came. He poured himself a drink, and sometime later, he finally dropped off. 

The next day was rough. If it weren’t for the crap he had pending, he would have slept on. Something for the hard going in his head and stomach was in order. The whiskey at arm’s length made its case, but a real breakfast seemed like a better idea. He dressed and gathered his things. He liked nice hotels, bad ones more, this one best.

A review of the agenda. Lars had no intention of handing over the pouch. After Llewellyn’s contact verified the item’s value, Lars would make his calls. Jude was going to be taking all the heat for this, but that was his problem. Lars would wind up this deal and be on his way. A week tops. He’d had enough of this city, and Jude he would bury once and for all. 

He wouldn’t leave until he’d scratched a particular itch, though; there was someone he wanted to patch things up with, and if he was being honest with himself, he’d admit this someone was invading his thoughts more and more of late. A woman, yes. Not worth the trouble if he thought of her as a mere indulgence, except that it was something more than that. Fall he did.

He was just about ready to go when Lars was struck by a sudden apprehension. He went to the closet and looked on the top shelf where he kept the briefcase and his suitcase. The package was not behind them where he had left it. He looked around, then tore the room apart, but it wasn’t anywhere. His mind flipped through all the plausible explanations. He had returned with it. It was on the shelf behind a locked door. The questions were boiling over in his head. Theft? Who? Who knew? Why hadn’t he roused Miggi to open the safe? He was kicking himself.

         “Holy Fuck. No way.”

Lars tumbled down the stairs to the ground floor. Miggi was on duty, passing the time reading the paper, as was his habit.

         “Miggi.”

         “Lars…” He didn’t take his eyes away from the opinion page.

         “Listen, did you find anything strange behind the counter this morning? A small package, like a pouch, on the floor maybe, or on the counter?”

Miggi looked up with one eyebrow slightly raised and shook his head.

         “Nope.”

Of course he hadn’t. That kind of error Lars never made. ‘The thing was pinched; it had to be,’ and this opened up a giant breach in his understanding of the game he was playing. He stood staring out the picture window, a painful rectangle of stark white sky.

When you lose something, there’s that immediate intuition: it will show up, or it’s gone forever. It’s the first thing that went through Lars’s mind. He did his best to stay grounded in facts as opposed to reacting. The question was not so much who took it, because with some time and effort, he was sure he could figure that out. How to get it back was impossible to determine at the moment, but what it would cost him, were it impossible to reclaim, and what they would do, maybe force him to do; these were the right questions to be asking.

Imagining worst-case scenarios was his specialty. There was no point in panicking, but he had every reason to, and now it was forcing his hand. His problem ranking had changed, but he’d deal with this and every other goddamn thing.

‘So help me…’

Lars left the Acton. The smells of the city hit him: old urine, then roasted coffee, a lady's perfume mixed with perspiration, uncollected garbage, then fresh baked bread. Then truck exhaust. Public restroom disinfectant, pizza.

The hours passed like a bullet train as Lars saw to banal stuff. Ear to the ground, there was nothing anyone could tell him, no chatter, and no heat. Instead, a quick late lunch-early dinner and back to the Acton for the evening’s business, but on the way, something was pulling him towards the scene of the heist. The cover of day, he realized, could hide as well as the cover of night.

Just some anonymous guy poking around a building, trying to retrace his steps. He had to know if he or Llewellyn had made a mistake. He saw workmen on ladders, already re-installing the cameras they’d taken out. Just a guy on his lunch break, taking a walk. Unemployed. Idle. Lars didn’t really know what he could hope to find. The pouch would not be there. Back at the hotel, he searched his room again and found nothing. It was puzzling that his phone was so dead quiet, and no call from Jude, that bugged him.

The Acton is a serialized dark fantasy novel. Installments come out every Monday and Wednesday. It is a free publication, so if you would ‘like’ and share it, I would be very grateful.

CHAPTER TWO