Masters in This Hall (eBook)

Marty Smith (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
188 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-7323938-0-6 (ISBN)

Rick Kingsley's younger half-brother Aidan ran away three years ago. During those years, 'ghost trains' - old long-gone streamliners - began reappearing, sometimes even rescuing people in danger. A being called 'the Wizard' started entering peoples' dreams, but offering real-world psychic powers. Rick has inherited, from a mysterious recluse he's never met, a vast fortune and an estate, 'Haw Court.' And the world seems speeding ever closer to apocalypse, with global-warming fires, floods and tornadoes increasing both in numbers and size; along with human evils: 'religious freedom' and Stand Your Ground laws, rampant bigotry online and in person, right-wing sabotages against society, topped by Trump's Presidential bid. Now, on the eve of the election, Aidan's coming home. His return may bring Rick to a possible confrontation with the Wizard himself - with the lives of Rick's family and friends, and his own, at stake.

Rick Kingsley's an everyday guy. True, his dad Linwood Kingsley Sr. is a rising Tea Partier in the North Carolina Senate. His mom's a passionate queer activist lawyer whose wife quit the Navy over "e;Don't Ask, Don't Tell."e; His stepmom Eunice is a small-town Southern belle Fundamentalist, who hires black maids and Christian psychics. Teen half-brother Lin Junior is a dudebro / frat boy jerk-in-training. Younger half-brother Aidan's a train buff; emotional, sensitive and a bully magnet. But Rick's your ordinary twentysomething, overeducated and underemployed, answering Customer Service phones for the power company. Until Aidan runs away, leaving behind hidden-camera videos of his bullyings, at school and from Lin Junior, and of the grownups' refusal to help; then stays missing for three years but keeps mailing back Polaroid selfies. Until Rick, and others, start seeing "e;ghost trains:"e; long-gone streamliners reappearing on their old tracks - and sometimes letting people board, before vanishing again. Until Rick inherits, from a mysterious recluse he's never met, an enormous fortune and the equally enorrmous estate of "e;Haw Court."e; Until mysterious attacks against random terrorists, doxxers and right-wing politicians begin, devastating them with psychic blasts of mind-frying remorse. Until a figure known as "e;the Wizard"e; starts appearing in dreams, but offering real-world powers. Meanwhile, global-warming disasters (heat waves, blizzards, "e;thousand-year"e; floods, tornadoes) are increasing. Man-made ones too: "e;religious freedom"e; and Stand Your Ground laws; right-wing sabotages against elections, science and civil society; Charleston and Flint and Standing Rock; and worst of all, Donald Trump headed for the Presidency. Now, on the eve of the 2016 election, Aidan's coming home. Coincidences and dreams make Rick suspect some connection between Aidan, the "e;ghost trains,"e; the Wizard, and all the rest of the chaos. Is Aidan in danger? Rick's family, friends; Rick himself? He'll have to use all his newfound wealth and power to find outand perhaps confront the Wizard in person.

Now Arriving

The day before his missing brother came back, Rick left Haw Court for his dad’s house in Raleigh. He thought the Wizard’s barrier on as he approached the gates, an action by now as automatic as clicking his seatbelt. No pleaders, protesters, Aidan groupies or general crazies were lying in wait for him. They seemed to have learned, even the most stubborn, that the barrier would always keep them at bay. He honked as he drove through, in case Leslie was watching from the gatehouse.

“Richard Grace Shew-Kingsley,” say his files at the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other, darker agencies. Height, five-eight; weight 170. Hair, dark “copper” red; eyes blue. Clean-shaven, except after vacation when he lets the stubble grow, even though his girlfriend complains it scratches. Born November 10, 1987, to Linwood George Kingsley of Grantsville, N.C., and Beverly Zellman Shew of Upper Darby, PA. Graduate of Jordan High School in Durham, N.C. and North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Bachelor of English with minor in Education; Master’s in English from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. Last job, “Customer Service Representative,” Duke Energy, Durham office. They’ve got his work history, political affiliation (average Democrat), master’s thesis (“The Butler Didn’t Do It: Master / Servant Dynamics in Golden-Age British Mysteries”), e-mails and texts and porn sites visited (hetero, infrequently); even down to the name, origin and breed of his dog (“Baxter,” Independent Animal Rescue, mutt). Yes, they have files on him: because of his dad’s position and his mom’s politics; because he’s the Master of Haw Court; because he has seen a Ghost Train with his own eyes; and because in frustration, they’re obsessed with learning anything they can about anyone who might hold any clue to the mystery of Aidan Stephenson Kingsley.

Women sometimes told him he was handsome. He’d accept the compliment gladly and follow up on it, hoping to steer the conversation bedward, with an average man’s average success. When he looked in the mirror of a morning, though, he couldn’t see the “handsome.” He saw the hair, the freckles, pale skin that always burned when he wanted it to tan (along with the lighter-red bush and quite average set of man parts). He looked like the annoying kid sidekick in an old movie, the one who gets gunned down if it’s a gangster picture or blown up in a war epic, so the star can have a big emotional scene over his death. “Oh my god, they killed Kenny! You bastards!!”

His parents met during law school, he at UNC, she at Duke. Mom was, by her own admission, less self-confident, far from home, stretched almost to snapping by the pressures of school, and coming to terms with the growing certainty that she was lesbian. Dad was charismatic, sexually magnetic, persuasive, handsome enough that Mom’s classmates were envious on seeing him with her. He was completely self-confident in his views on law, politics, society and religion; and on the way his girlfriends were supposed to behave. These views, nine times out of ten, were absolute matter-antimatter opposites of hers. Attempts to combine them did not go well. “When we weren’t fucking, we were fighting,” she once told Rick, when he was teenaged enough to be neither shocked nor grossed out by the information. On Graduation Eve, after one fight too many, she went to a party, drank a whole lot of wine, and took home a member of the Duke womens’ lacrosse team. Dad caught them in flagrante, a possibility she had noted but decided to not give a fuck about. That ended the relationship. She graduated; returned to Philadelphia; and a month later, discovered herself pregnant.

Her family heritage included Quakers, Unitarians, refugees from Hitler, liberal-arts academics, and authentic Sixties hippies. Her sense of fair play, instilled by this heritage, made her call Linwood with the news that he’d be a father. Her self-confidence, strengthening in her family’s loving support, made her state “I’m going to raise the kid myself. I know what you think about gay parents, but tough shit. And if you think about starting trouble, remember two things: what possession is nine-tenths of; and which one of us aced the Family Law exam.” He conceded her the parenting; she conceded him visitations, and that the child would carry both surnames. The following November, Richard Grace Shew-Kingsley arrived.

He had plenty of cousins to play with, aunts and uncles and grandparents to help look after him. The uncles and Mom’s man friends, straight and gay, provided plenty of male role models. “Daddy” was a strange man, from a distant realm called “North Carolina,” whose visits were only slightly more frequent than the Tooth Fairy’s. Neither of them knew quite what to make of the other. A snapshot in a family album shows “Daddy” holding up baby Rick like a football he’s just caught, and grinning with the gleaming charisma he was already making good use of in Republican politics back home. Rick, aged eight months, is regarding him with perplexed concern – Who is this person, and what is he planning to do with me?

Mom, meanwhile, passed the Bar, worked in the Public Defender’s Office, and dated. By the time Rick was nine, she and Annie were a settled couple. Anne Rodriguez had left the Navy in disgust over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and returned to college for a biochem degree. Rick quoted her to fourth-grade classmates: “They can put that ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ where the sun don’t shine.” They were delighted, but a fifth-grader called him a Fag and had to be punched out. Mom gave him an earnest, muddled talk about nonviolence and words versus fists. Annie listened with a smile of quiet amusement. She took him aside later and said “Your mom’s right. But sticking up for people is right too.”

The year Rick turned fifteen, the Public Defender’s Office got reorganized. Many of the colleagues Beverly Shew respected and worked well with were put down, while ones she didn’t approve of – and who didn’t seem to approve of her – were raised to power. Annie, now Ph.D’ed, was offered a job with a pharmaceutical firm near Durham, North Carolina. A law office in the same city, with good progressive credentials, agreed it could use an experienced former public defender. They moved down in early February.

The transplanting turned out to not be that bad. The bus system sucked compared to SEPTA, whose trains and trolleys he’d been navigating on his own since age eleven. On the other hand, spring came earlier, things cost less, the schoolwork wasn’t as hard; and that fall, he lost his cherry to a classmate who thought his Philly “accent” was sexy. A rival for her favors, a boy who smoked unfiltered Marlboros and wore a Confederate-flag trucker cap, called him a Yankee Faggot and had to be punched out. (The grownups didn’t learn of this incident, so Rick escaped more earnest lectures.) Duly punched, the boy turned out to be of a forgiving and even friendly disposition. He admitted that his Uncle Bobby, who’d fought in Afghanistan, was gay; he invited Rick and the girl to a party at his house, where he served authentic North Carolina mountain moonshine. At one a.m., Mom and Annie came out seeking the source of certain strange noises, and found a very unsteady Rick projectile-vomiting into the camellia bush. They both shook with laughter when he managed to explain, and sent him to bed with Annie’s custom-mixed hangover remedy.

Dad had vetoed any publicity of Aidan’s return, with Mr. Boulware and the State Bureau of Investigation in full agreement. It could be another false alarm, another cruel hoax, though the Bureau’s experts were certain the handwriting – a short note on the back of another Polaroid – was Aidan’s. (The photo itself, like all the others, showed nothing from which a location could be deduced. Aidan was seated on a wooden deck, sipping from a steaming mug held in both hands; bare trees in the background, their fallen leaves lightly dusted with snow.) If he did appear, they’d whisk him back to Raleigh, where SBI agents, and therapists who specialized in handling missing / exploited / abused children, awaited Dad’s call. His return would be headline news, as much as, if not more, than his vanishing. Scores of kids might go missing every day…but not all of them left behind a controversial and damning video explaining why. And, not all of them had as their father a controversial Tea Party Republican, and possibly the next Lieutenant Governor; one of many races in the most fiercely argued election the country had ever seen; whose contests were all, from Dad all the way up to President, shadowed by the question of “The Wizard.”

The Wizard, whoever, or whatever, he was. He? – he, she, them, it; nobody knew. Frantic conspiracy theories throbbed like inflamed nerves through the Net’s synapses. Cyber-attacks by terrorists; a cyber-intelligence grown self-aware and rogue like in dystopian sci-fi. Evangelicals were sure he was the Antichrist, come to bring on the End Times, especially after what he’d done (or had he?) to Arlene Hooker. Progressives praised him; but even the...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	5.7.2018
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
ISBN-10	1-7323938-0-X / 173239380X
ISBN-13	978-1-7323938-0-6 / 9781732393806

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