Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

The door hadn’t been attached when Brutus first moved in. A loosely retained collection of rotting wood, crawling with ants had been sitting against the woodstove. For the most part, Brutus didn’t take the time to clean or alter the places in which he stayed. For the money he was paying, it wasn’t worth his effort. But, the door had been a special case. No self respecting detective, regardless of his occasional bent for danger would sleep with an open door to the rats and vermin of the city.

So, when the pounding started and the whisky bounced to the edge of the table along with a thick blanket of dust that tended to gather over things that were not cleaned at least once a month, the door didn’t budge.

It took Brutus about as long to get up from the sodden folds of his bed as it took whoever was outside to vent another trio of hearty pounds on the door. It sounded urgent, which in the mind of a hungry, bored ex-city guard sounded more like the jingle of gold coins. He raked his still booted feet across the dusty floor and grabbed hold of the door’s solid brass lock, the one and only thing in the place that looked like it had been touched in recent memory.

“Yeah, what do you want?”

“Mr. Weaver? Is that you?”

“Could be. Depends…who are you?”

“Reggie Hunter sent me. Said you could help me.”

Brutus didn’t say anything, but the name took him in the stomach with the full force of repressed memory. Reggie was supposed to be dead.

He twisted the heavy bolt free of the door and slowly eased it back open, reigniting the rat-infested alley with what meager light he could afford to live off. “Come in.”

“Thank you very much.” The woman at the door – of course it was a woman; he’d been hoping for trouble hadn’t he – was dripping wet, sodden from head to toe as though it had been raining. Brutus tried to remember if it had rained at all. Maybe a puddle or two when he was outside last, but no rain.

“Plenty of time for thanks later. How did you know Reggie’s name?”

The woman was shivering and had stepped directly in line with the woodstove, rubbing her hands and squeezing her hair to get out some of the water. Not bad looking, this one. She had the look of a woman who was going to wring him dry if he let her – sharp features, long slick nose and thick black eyelashes, flittering nervously above the deep blue of her otherwise bloodshot eyes. She was tired, cold and scared, but be damned if she wasn’t gorgeous. Dressed from head to toe in black, wearing the pleated cloak of either a city guard or a serial killer, the brilliant shock of blond hair stood out even now as it dribbled water onto a swarm of ants that had come out to see the visitor.

“I..I told you…he sent me to see you.”

“Don’t feed me lines, hun. Reggie Hunter is dead. I was standing next to him when that snake put a dagger in his gut. Now, who told you to give me that name?”

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, fiction blog, fiction online, writing novels on the Internet, writing online

Chapter 1

Brutus looked deep into the alleyway, obscured by the dust and detritus of a hundred hungry rats and dozens more of the insects that fed on them. It was a slow night in the back alley office. Forget nights. Nights were always slow. It was a slow month in that back alley and Brutus needed the fresh air. Days on end he’d spent listening for the knock. Not that it mattered much anymore. The nights were growing shorter and in a couple more weeks, he’d be out on his ass, picking old banana peels from the trash with the rats.

No, Brutus was more than just hungry for a bite of clean air, not something he’d find in the smoky confines of the city’s darkest trenches. He wanted a bite of something juicy, anything really. Boredom had stolen over him with the kind of determination he come to expect from despair and the raw thirst for whisky that hit around moonrise each night. He wanted a bit of action and if it wouldn’t come to him, he may as well find it himself.

Not that that would pay the bills though. Brutus Weaver had moved into the back alley room only a year ago. It was a cozy little bungalow, if you fancied the smell of moth balls and urine and didn’t mind a bed made of sewn together burlap sacks. It wasn’t the worst place he’d ever stayed though and he wouldn’t entirely loath the idea of having a few more months there.

The minutes passed and Brutus Weaver finished his cigar; there was only one left now, a final goodbye from an old friend. An old friend that hadn’t been around in a good long time. He snuffed it out and kicked the stub towards a pile of hungry rats, hoping they’d scatter. Pouncing on the smoldering cigar end, they moved closer. Couldn’t even scare the rats in this part of town these days.

The inside of his office/home was fit for a King if you considered the conditions just on the other side of the door. Fortunately, Brutus was about as much of a King as he was a detective these days and the room was workable. Compared to previous locales, it was downright cozy if you discounted the nest of ants living behind the woodstove.

Everything was carved in the cheapest wood the building’s owner could find, quickly fit together with tiny wood nails and unmeasured cuts. His meager bookshelf, ten books wide at best and two shelves high sat crookedly above his tiny, one armed desk. Currently, two editions of the City Guard Manual and three volumes of his youngest daughter’s favorite nursery rhymes sat sideways on the top shelf, hanging precariously over the edge, threatening to fall at any moment. The desk was built for a Scribner, one single slab of wood set atop four feeble legs, barely wide enough to hold a bottle of ink and three sheets of paper. It had a bottle of whiskey and two dead lizard-like creatures on it at the moment.

The latrine was no better than a hole in the ground, carved behind the wall beside his bed. The plumbing in the city had always been a proud addition, trumpeted by the King as a heralding achievement of “civilization”. It worked one in three days and when it did, the room smelled of death. Collapsing backward on the burlap bed, a loose collection of dirty feathers padded into the dirty old sack, Brutus stared at the ceiling, wondering why it was he had not poured the whiskey yet.

The room was almost claustrophobically small when he was sober and the effect was draining much of the ambition he had until recently felt coursing through his veins, telling him to seek danger. The night was dead and his room was trying to crush him and add to the living corpse of the Lower City.

For how long he laid there, staring at the smattered gunk-lined patterns on the ceiling, Brutus wasn’t quite sure, but he was sure of was that in the last thirty seconds or so, he had just heard the most beautiful sound in the world, the dull rapping of a human fist on the outside of his door.

My Fiction blog novel, chapter 1, fiction online, novel writing, online novel, writing a book