Warble

Cliff Haines is not going anywhere or doing anything all that exciting. For the most part he is content to live set apart from the rest of society in the lonely frontier logging town of Warbly located in the wilds of British Columbia. That all changes one day when trouble crashes into town in the form of something simply irresistible and impossible not to be desired. Join Cliff and see the world from his perspective as his life suddenly becomes turned upside down by a girl who has nothing better to do than to hunt him down. - Man on Fire is the story of a righteous man suddenly put in a predicament of wanting something he knows is not good for him. Arwana Collins is beautiful, wild, and worst of all confident. When she looks at him he knows exactly what she's thinking. Life for her has been a series of lovers one after the next and he's her target of the moment. The problem for her is he isn't a man who wants to be used. He wants her, but he wants her to be his, forever. It's a commitment she's never made to a man, but then he's like no other man she's ever met. He's a complete stud, but the outward side of him is no match for who he is inside. Unlike most he's not ruled by what's in his pants. He resists her where none have before and it leads her to see that maybe just something is wrong with her. How could it not be, when the heaven of his arms beckons like a promise of untold passion. He wants her body, but he cares for her soul. What kind of man was like that anymore?

The marketplace of drugs. The low-rises. The pit. “Got your yellow tops!” Thin drug addicts stumble their way to young black men, who take their wrinkled tens and twenties. A signal sent to the runners—boys waiting fifty feet away who run over, small vials in hand. The cops staked out atop a nearby building, hoping to get a photo of a kingpin on a random visit to the frontlines, are on break and not watching. Enter a man in a trenchcoat, carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Whistling “The Farmer in the Dell,” flanked by two accomplices, he approaches the stash house, an abandoned apartment where the large reserve of drugs is kept. The trio enters the house. He orders the five or six inside to get their hands up. He aims the shotgun at one. “Hey, yo, where it at?” he asks. The man refuses to say. He blasts him in the kneecap. The injured man’s screams convince one of the others to tell him where the stash is. The trenchcoat-wearing figure walks out, having robbed drugs dealers of their drugs. Behold Omar Little. The marketplace of ideas. The three thousand year old history of moral philosophy, the study of right and wrong. The warbling of disagreement, cackle of dialogue. “Good is what Gods says it is.” “Good is what the Law says it is.” “No, good is what realizes the ends of humanity.”

That accursed book had the ability not only to pervert and warp the fabric of space and time but to bend the very mind itself, to twist the psyche to breaking point and then go beyond. It was something not meant for this world. Exiting the motorway we quickly came to the large town of Dungannon, a town that had grown rapidly over the last decade as it had seen an influx of foreign nationals disproportionate to the rest of the country, who brought with them a diverse range of strange theologies and mysticisms. Some of these I knew as off-shoots of more mainstream theologies, others I knew to be cults new or old that barely clung to existence in the world as we know it, and one or two I had heard of only in legend and existed here as anywhere else in rumour. Parapsychology bore little interest to my erstwhile driver who guided us into the car park of some quaint local shopping mall that had served as a linen mill during the industrial revolution an age ago. A surprisingly modern bistro sat on a corner unit of the mall, all glass front with trendy chrome chairs and dark wood throughout and soon we were guided to a table and upon ordering we returned to our conversation about the unusual Valjean. That conversation did not last a great deal of time however as we had discussed at length during the journey the details of my entire communication with the musician and changing tact Professor Davids enquired as to how I was adjusting to life in Belfast after my time spent in Arkham. I confessed that at times I was still caught out by the quirks of European life compared to those of Americans, in the United States life and people were generally simpler in manner but at a faster pace than in European nations. The best descriptor I could think of was that in America politics was an occupation, in Europe it was a lifestyle choice. As the waitress arrived with our food I came to realise that I no longer had the attention of Professor Davids, indeed nothing seemed to be holding his gaze, as if his mind were absent from his body. “It’s the music, ” explained the waitress in answer to the question I had not asked and I then noticed the crackling warble filtering in that I had come to recognise as the work of my reclusive penpal, “AJ Valjean, some people seem to space out listening to his stuff, it really speaks to them.” “That could prove dangerous, ” I said snapping my fingers in the face of my colleague breaking his trance, “it’s like some form of hypnosis.” “I’ve never seen the harm in it, ” the waitress left our food and returned to the kitchen area, passing a waiter who I saw to be moving in an almost robotic fashion, and after that had caught my eye I came to realise that maybe half a dozen of the thirty or so in the room also behaved in the same trance state. “That was quite an unusual experience, ” the Professor spoke, “I felt as though my mind were slowly draining, it was peaceful, very calming. Your friend certainly makes music for the soul.” “It certainly is strange, ” I commented, I found it unsettling how powerful an effect such music could have on a receptive psyche. Clearly there was some subliminal waveform or message in the music that whether intentional or not was at the very least a hazard to drivers and pedestrians, at the worst I would dread to think. I ate my meal in uncomfortable silence, knowing what I know of the interests of AJ Valjean I doubted that the trance state was unintentional and could only hope that it did not exist to serve some hitherto unknown malign purpose. My eyes followed those who had been under the effect, watching to see any peculiarities or behavioural quirks beyond the generally accepted norm of human activity, indeed I kept one eye on my companion for having known academically for some time now he could best serve as a control group.