Yesterday was a bit of a wash, really. I watched the disappointing James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only and just hung around the house, still kind of recovering from Friday afternoon. Today, though, my weekly writing group started back up again, at least for a little while, and I cobbled together this:
When the hurricane came through, the dead wizard came back to life and the ghost hunter was finally released from prison.
You probably have already heard this story, or at least a part of it. The governors of Eld were quick to classify what they could, to quarrantine the northern hills where the storm did its worst, but the basic facts escaped their net. There are few across the great expanse of worlds who have not heard about the wizard, Dead Man Jack, or about the woman, Maribel, the would-be hunter who was forced to kill her father twice.
And yet it’s a story that deserves to be re-told, I think, and this time told beyond the basic facts. I can’t pretend to any special knowledge; I wasn’t on the hills that day, and I wouldn’t even make planetfall on Eld for another week, by which point Maribel and Jack both would be long gone. I was not called here to investigate their crimes, nor to root out the cause of the still as yet unexplained storm. I was just another constable, young and naive and fresh from basic on Eld’s sister moon, Brahms — and yet, as a constable, I did have access to reports I might never have seen otherwise. Reports the governors have long kept secret. I know Jack’s real name, for instance, or at least the one that supposedly brought him back to life, and I think, after all these years, I know where he and his daughter disappeared to. The answers have been there all along on the page. It’s just that so few of us have been encouraged to look at those pages.
Dead Man Jack. He was called that long before the first time he died, long before he had even registered himself as a wizard. The official term, of course, is “technomage,†but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound even sillier than “wizard,†which is what everyone on Eld knew Jack to be. He wasn’t much of one, from all accounts, either not given to show or incapable of it. If it wasn’t for his daughter, and the strange circumstances of her birth, it’s almost certain no one would have remembered Jack before the year of the hurricane.
Then I came home and watched The Stuff, which was interesting but also pretty disappointing.
And that, plus the crossword puzzle and some dreary rain, was my Sunday.