[FIC] OC: Nowen Jones and Ruth's Case
Those of you who liked the first Nowen Jones story?
Here's a second one! I had plans for more of this but they seem to have been truncated due to my self-imposed word-limit. It may even work better this way. Tell me what you think- I thrive on feedbax.
Nowen Jones and Ruth's Case
I’m Nowen Jones (it’s pronounced “No-one”). I guess you could call me a dole bludger. Ever since I saved my G.P.’s wife from some sort of quasi-demonic possession, I got a permanent medical exemption from looking for work. He said either I’m crazy or he’s crazy, and he’d prefer to go with the first option. I live in a shitty little flat owned by a shitty little Vietnamese lady somewhere in the western suburbs. It’s all I can afford based on my pay rate for being “the scum of the earth”: that’s what she calls me. It’s probably on account of all the weird stuff that keeps happening around me. It’s usually nothing major or that would ever make the news: just bad things happening to good people, who I get to help: great, huh?
Oh, and I have a cat, sort of. His name is Cretan. He follows me around, everywhere. I figure he’s on some kind of personal journey, so I called him Cretan after Odysseus. It also sounds like “cretin” which is what I think he must be if he’s always following me around. I later found out that Odysseus was from Ithaca, rather than Crete, but there you are. The Odysseus name’s sort of a tie-in to mine; my father died a few months before I was born, and my mum was too busy being cut up about him to think up a name for me. Sure enough, once she’s in the birthing-room, dosed up on pain-killers, she has a vision of Odysseus and the Cyclops: the Cyclops asks his name, he says “Nemo” which means “No one” and then Odysseus stabs him in the eye while he’s sleeping; great stuff. Anyway, once mum comes to, she’s holding me in her arms and for some reason decides she’s been given a sign, calls me “Nowen” because she thinks it’s the modern equivalent. Thanks mum.
You may have noticed that I mentioned a demonic possession in there. You’re not hallucinating (as far as I know); you really did read that. Demons are real, spirits are real, insanity-causing cosmic terrors and all that are real, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Not that I’m happy about it. I found out the hard way, shortly after a wizened old man decided to give me the “You’re the Chosen One” speech. To be completely fair, he was carrying a bottle of port and smelled like he hadn’t washed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the meaning turned out close enough to truth for it to count. It turns out that I’m something like “Buffy”, only less female, less cute and less perky. I’m definitely less perky. I hate this gig, I really do, but how am I supposed to just stand aside and let all those bad things happen? I can’t, but I can do something to help, so I do. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.
*****
I’m somewhere near Glen Waverly, out in the East, arguing with a council worker in a grainy brown suit about my cat. He claims that since I am apparently the owner of said cat, its having opened his pants-leg and several centimetres of skin is my responsibility. I am taking the contrary position that I couldn’t have stopped Cretan if I’d tried.
“If you’d take a minute to listen, mate, “ I begin, before I’m cut off.
“It’s your cat, right? That means it’s your responsibility, simple as that. Now, if you don’t agree to pay for the damage your animal has caused to my very expensive trousers, I am going to have to take you to the magistrate’s court!”
I notice that a vein or two is beginning to stick out around his reddening temples and stifle the beginnings of a laugh so that I can respond without getting my face punched in. “You know what, fine.” I say, “I’ll pay for your bloody pants. I don’t have any money on me though. Hand me your phone or something, I’ll give you my details.”
I watch as the red starts leaving his face and he rummages in his coat pocket for his phone. He finds it and flips it open, but I can tell already that it’s dead. “What the hell?” He asks, of no one in particular. “It was fully charged an hour ago.”
“Bugger,” I say, “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” He gives me a dirty look, then grabs at his suitcase, popping it open to grab out a pen and nice-looking hardbound notepad. I wince on the inside when I think about what’s probably going to happen to the notepad.
Ignoring my expression, he hands over the pen and pad and with a satisfied look, watches as I jot down my name and number. To make sure, he waddles over to a payphone and dials, getting me to wave my ringing mobile in his face before he’s satisfied that I haven’t given him a false number. What he doesn’t know is that that’s not something I’d do. I’ve never needed to. People just forget, or worse, get unlucky.
Finally, he walks away, content that he’ll be able to track me down and get a few hundred dollars for his stupid pants. I look over at Cretan, who had been glaring at the man the whole time from underneath a car parked by the side of the road.
I saw the bastard kick my cat. He deserves whatever’s coming to him.
*****
I knock on the door rather than use the doorbell; I feel it gives me more a more urgent air. The door is answered by two very clean but worried looking people. I give them the old callous “up-and-down” and introduce myself as “Nowen Jones, Exorcist.” Their eyes fill with hope and I know that I’m in the middle of what will probably turn into some sort of shitstorm.
I’m ushered into a disturbingly clean drawing room with leather-upholstered furnishings and offered tea while Cretan looks about disapprovingly. I spy several crucifixes and images of Jesus and have to fight down a chuckle as I ask for “Black with three sugars, thanks.” I get an odd look: at last, something normal about these people. Only people with serious difficulties getting their head screwed on straight wouldn’t look twice at somebody ordering my cuppa. But then, this couple looks finicky enough to give an allergist the irrits.
I ask about their daughter, their only daughter.
“Well Mr Jones,” starts the man of the house, who probably looks at dirty magazines when he thinks God isn’t paying attention and beats off to an image of his lord and saviour every morning, “She’s been acting strangely for almost a year now. Going off with friends to all sorts of places she knows we disapprove of, wearing highly inappropriate clothing, you know the sort of thing-“
I cut him off, relishing the chance to stick one up him, “I’m sure I do. Using this new-fangled internet, chasing boys, wearing make-up, worshipping Satan in secret with her friends? It sounds to me, Mr Kingston, that she’s being a normal teenager up until now. But please, continue.”
His eyes look like they’re about to burst and his wife gives me a look that could etch glass, but he’s persistent. “As I was saying, Mister Jones, we’ve tried to be tolerant-“
“Do unto others, and all that?”
“We’ve tried to be tolerant,” he doesn’t miss a beat, “but this latest episode has given us rise to think that she might be under some sort of infernal influence.” He pauses, perhaps looking for shock or something like it in my expression. I’m unmoved.
“And what, exactly, did she do that makes you think something might be up?” I ask, reclining smoothly as Cretan sits on the rug and licks his own crotch, seemingly unaware of Missus Kingston’s disapproving gaze.
Deadpan, he continues: “She killed the cat and painted the walls with its blood.” I spit tea, trying with little success not to get any on myself. Cretan looks up in alarm and hides under my seat.
Half a second passes and I can practically hear Cretan licking himself to regain his composure. I try something similar: “I’m sorry, she what?” My hand is shaking as I put down a very full saucer and almost empty teacup on the coffee table.
“I said, my daughter ritualistically slaughtered our pet cat and used its blood and entrails to paint her room. Naturally, we called you straight away Mister Jones.”
“Straight away?”
“Yes, Mister Jones. Immediately.”
“You mean, she’s still up there?” I ask hesitantly, trying to hide the shaking in my hands.
“Yes.”
At once I can’t bear it anymore and standing up, I shout: “While we’ve been drinking tea?! What is wrong with you? Get me the hell upstairs now!”
Like a bolt, Missus Kingston is up and leading me along a plush hallway decorated with more images of Christ on the cross. I’m about to piss myself and I have to look at that? Really, I wonder, what is wrong with these people? We run up the stairs and come to a door sporting a picture of Gerard Way and marked out to be “Ruth’s Room” with cheerfully-painted wooden letters. I thank Missus Kingston for leading me upstairs and ask her to head back downstairs or perhaps leave for a drive somewhere.
Hearing her descend the stairs behind me, I look down at Cretan beside me. “Are you sure, mate? It could be pretty nasty in there.” He gives me no hint, but I can see the tension running along his form. “Yeah,” I reply, “I’m pretty scared too.”
I push open the door, expecting red light and the fires of eternity, but instead am confronted with nothing more disturbing that the back of a young woman, sitting at a desk. I hear a car start up outside. Well done, Missus Kingston.
“Ruth?” I ask, tentatively stepping in as Cretan sidles by. “I’m Nowen. Your parents asked me to come.”
She replies perfectly normally: “No one?” I’m expecting a voice befitting a demon or all-consuming thingy from another world, all grating and double-tracked, not a seventeen-year-old’s perfectly normal voice. Somehow, it’s scarier this way. I don’t reply.
“No one is a name for shadows and hollow voices, nothing is what children are told is lying in the dark and you are not no one. I can feel you,” it continues through her mouth, as Cretan’s hair sticks up on end and he backs up against me, “I can feel your presence. You are not no one or nothing. You are an anomaly and you are here to send me away.”
It turns, revealing Ruth’s face and showing me a pair of hollow eyes; black balls of nothing which swallow the light around them.
“So. That’s how it’s going to be, is it? You know everything about me but I know nothing about you. That girl’s parents think she sacrificed the cat and painted this room in its blood but I don’t see anything. What are you that can get into the minds of the faithful?” I’m bluffing for time. I think I have a pretty good idea of what this is and just how much trouble I’m in. Fortunately, it’s the kind of unpleasant thing that likes to boast.
The non-eyes widen in either pleasure or surprise and I’m really not prepared to figure out which. I reckon I have twenty seconds to pull something off before it pulls my consciousness out through my ears. It speaks again, but I’m not listening. I don’t need to hear how it is the spirit of bugalugs brought down from hosephat to slay whatsums. I couldn’t care less about its honour roll of massacres and depravities, and I certainly do not want to hear the details of that one time it spent a week in Geelong. All I need is to look around the room while it yammers on and find something I think Ruth will care about enough to push it out of the way for a moment.
There it is, right by her hand. A little upright frame: a trinket, the tiniest thing. But I can tell that it’s important. It has glitter on it, and nothing in a seventeen-year-old goth’s room has glitter on it unless it’s very, very important to her. It looks like a childhood photo or something.
I dive, hoping that I can reach the frame before the creature in Ruth’s body figures out that I’m not bowing down in supplication. I can feel a wind pick up about my hair as I fall, but my faithful companion leaps across the room and lands in Ruth’s hair just as I wrap a hand around the trinket. I thrust it in Ruth’s face and scream as a hurricane begins to blow: “Get out! Let me talk to Ruth! Let me talk to Ruth!”
I’ve always found that a bit of drama works now and then, and this time it worked a treat. The wind slowed down and Cretan ran off to a corner for grooming, while I found myself staring into a normal pair of eyes.
“Ruth? Is that you?” I only ask because I can’t think of anything better to say. Of course it’s her. The thing in her head was about to bore into my soul and drink my being, so it stands to reason that if I’m not in eternal agony, it’s probably Ruth. We begin a fairly trite conversation about her needing to concentrate to keep out the demon in her mind, but she manages to stun me into silence.
“Kill me.”
I am, needless to say, a little unsure about where to go from here. I settle for asking her to repeat herself: “What?”
“I need you to kill me. There’s no other way. I’ve seen what it can do, I’ve seen what it did to Mittens.”
Sometimes I can’t help myself. “Your cat is called Mittens?”
“I’ve seen what it’s going to do to me, to my family. It got into my head, it wants me to suffer worst of all.” Brave girl; even when being queried about her dead moggy she’s focused and straightforward. “But I’ve seen inside its head too: it needs me to survive. It needs me so that it can do all those terrible things. There’s no other way.”
I ask her if she’s sure: she is.
*****
“Next on Nine, a mild-mannered council worker has been arrested on suspicion of multiple homicide-“
I switch off the telly and give Cretan a scratch between the ears. “I told you he’d get what’s coming to him. Didn’t think he’d be that big a bastard, but there you are. Never even called me about the suit.” I smile to myself and get up off my bean-bag, evicting Cretan from my lap as I rise. I go to the kitchen and pour myself another cup of horrible cask wine.
“Still,” I muse aloud, “It’s not as though anybody ever remembers me, is it Puss?”
I’ve killed three people; four, now. It never gets any easier.
Here's a second one! I had plans for more of this but they seem to have been truncated due to my self-imposed word-limit. It may even work better this way. Tell me what you think- I thrive on feedbax.
Nowen Jones and Ruth's Case
I’m Nowen Jones (it’s pronounced “No-one”). I guess you could call me a dole bludger. Ever since I saved my G.P.’s wife from some sort of quasi-demonic possession, I got a permanent medical exemption from looking for work. He said either I’m crazy or he’s crazy, and he’d prefer to go with the first option. I live in a shitty little flat owned by a shitty little Vietnamese lady somewhere in the western suburbs. It’s all I can afford based on my pay rate for being “the scum of the earth”: that’s what she calls me. It’s probably on account of all the weird stuff that keeps happening around me. It’s usually nothing major or that would ever make the news: just bad things happening to good people, who I get to help: great, huh?
Oh, and I have a cat, sort of. His name is Cretan. He follows me around, everywhere. I figure he’s on some kind of personal journey, so I called him Cretan after Odysseus. It also sounds like “cretin” which is what I think he must be if he’s always following me around. I later found out that Odysseus was from Ithaca, rather than Crete, but there you are. The Odysseus name’s sort of a tie-in to mine; my father died a few months before I was born, and my mum was too busy being cut up about him to think up a name for me. Sure enough, once she’s in the birthing-room, dosed up on pain-killers, she has a vision of Odysseus and the Cyclops: the Cyclops asks his name, he says “Nemo” which means “No one” and then Odysseus stabs him in the eye while he’s sleeping; great stuff. Anyway, once mum comes to, she’s holding me in her arms and for some reason decides she’s been given a sign, calls me “Nowen” because she thinks it’s the modern equivalent. Thanks mum.
You may have noticed that I mentioned a demonic possession in there. You’re not hallucinating (as far as I know); you really did read that. Demons are real, spirits are real, insanity-causing cosmic terrors and all that are real, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Not that I’m happy about it. I found out the hard way, shortly after a wizened old man decided to give me the “You’re the Chosen One” speech. To be completely fair, he was carrying a bottle of port and smelled like he hadn’t washed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the meaning turned out close enough to truth for it to count. It turns out that I’m something like “Buffy”, only less female, less cute and less perky. I’m definitely less perky. I hate this gig, I really do, but how am I supposed to just stand aside and let all those bad things happen? I can’t, but I can do something to help, so I do. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.
*****
I’m somewhere near Glen Waverly, out in the East, arguing with a council worker in a grainy brown suit about my cat. He claims that since I am apparently the owner of said cat, its having opened his pants-leg and several centimetres of skin is my responsibility. I am taking the contrary position that I couldn’t have stopped Cretan if I’d tried.
“If you’d take a minute to listen, mate, “ I begin, before I’m cut off.
“It’s your cat, right? That means it’s your responsibility, simple as that. Now, if you don’t agree to pay for the damage your animal has caused to my very expensive trousers, I am going to have to take you to the magistrate’s court!”
I notice that a vein or two is beginning to stick out around his reddening temples and stifle the beginnings of a laugh so that I can respond without getting my face punched in. “You know what, fine.” I say, “I’ll pay for your bloody pants. I don’t have any money on me though. Hand me your phone or something, I’ll give you my details.”
I watch as the red starts leaving his face and he rummages in his coat pocket for his phone. He finds it and flips it open, but I can tell already that it’s dead. “What the hell?” He asks, of no one in particular. “It was fully charged an hour ago.”
“Bugger,” I say, “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” He gives me a dirty look, then grabs at his suitcase, popping it open to grab out a pen and nice-looking hardbound notepad. I wince on the inside when I think about what’s probably going to happen to the notepad.
Ignoring my expression, he hands over the pen and pad and with a satisfied look, watches as I jot down my name and number. To make sure, he waddles over to a payphone and dials, getting me to wave my ringing mobile in his face before he’s satisfied that I haven’t given him a false number. What he doesn’t know is that that’s not something I’d do. I’ve never needed to. People just forget, or worse, get unlucky.
Finally, he walks away, content that he’ll be able to track me down and get a few hundred dollars for his stupid pants. I look over at Cretan, who had been glaring at the man the whole time from underneath a car parked by the side of the road.
I saw the bastard kick my cat. He deserves whatever’s coming to him.
*****
I knock on the door rather than use the doorbell; I feel it gives me more a more urgent air. The door is answered by two very clean but worried looking people. I give them the old callous “up-and-down” and introduce myself as “Nowen Jones, Exorcist.” Their eyes fill with hope and I know that I’m in the middle of what will probably turn into some sort of shitstorm.
I’m ushered into a disturbingly clean drawing room with leather-upholstered furnishings and offered tea while Cretan looks about disapprovingly. I spy several crucifixes and images of Jesus and have to fight down a chuckle as I ask for “Black with three sugars, thanks.” I get an odd look: at last, something normal about these people. Only people with serious difficulties getting their head screwed on straight wouldn’t look twice at somebody ordering my cuppa. But then, this couple looks finicky enough to give an allergist the irrits.
I ask about their daughter, their only daughter.
“Well Mr Jones,” starts the man of the house, who probably looks at dirty magazines when he thinks God isn’t paying attention and beats off to an image of his lord and saviour every morning, “She’s been acting strangely for almost a year now. Going off with friends to all sorts of places she knows we disapprove of, wearing highly inappropriate clothing, you know the sort of thing-“
I cut him off, relishing the chance to stick one up him, “I’m sure I do. Using this new-fangled internet, chasing boys, wearing make-up, worshipping Satan in secret with her friends? It sounds to me, Mr Kingston, that she’s being a normal teenager up until now. But please, continue.”
His eyes look like they’re about to burst and his wife gives me a look that could etch glass, but he’s persistent. “As I was saying, Mister Jones, we’ve tried to be tolerant-“
“Do unto others, and all that?”
“We’ve tried to be tolerant,” he doesn’t miss a beat, “but this latest episode has given us rise to think that she might be under some sort of infernal influence.” He pauses, perhaps looking for shock or something like it in my expression. I’m unmoved.
“And what, exactly, did she do that makes you think something might be up?” I ask, reclining smoothly as Cretan sits on the rug and licks his own crotch, seemingly unaware of Missus Kingston’s disapproving gaze.
Deadpan, he continues: “She killed the cat and painted the walls with its blood.” I spit tea, trying with little success not to get any on myself. Cretan looks up in alarm and hides under my seat.
Half a second passes and I can practically hear Cretan licking himself to regain his composure. I try something similar: “I’m sorry, she what?” My hand is shaking as I put down a very full saucer and almost empty teacup on the coffee table.
“I said, my daughter ritualistically slaughtered our pet cat and used its blood and entrails to paint her room. Naturally, we called you straight away Mister Jones.”
“Straight away?”
“Yes, Mister Jones. Immediately.”
“You mean, she’s still up there?” I ask hesitantly, trying to hide the shaking in my hands.
“Yes.”
At once I can’t bear it anymore and standing up, I shout: “While we’ve been drinking tea?! What is wrong with you? Get me the hell upstairs now!”
Like a bolt, Missus Kingston is up and leading me along a plush hallway decorated with more images of Christ on the cross. I’m about to piss myself and I have to look at that? Really, I wonder, what is wrong with these people? We run up the stairs and come to a door sporting a picture of Gerard Way and marked out to be “Ruth’s Room” with cheerfully-painted wooden letters. I thank Missus Kingston for leading me upstairs and ask her to head back downstairs or perhaps leave for a drive somewhere.
Hearing her descend the stairs behind me, I look down at Cretan beside me. “Are you sure, mate? It could be pretty nasty in there.” He gives me no hint, but I can see the tension running along his form. “Yeah,” I reply, “I’m pretty scared too.”
I push open the door, expecting red light and the fires of eternity, but instead am confronted with nothing more disturbing that the back of a young woman, sitting at a desk. I hear a car start up outside. Well done, Missus Kingston.
“Ruth?” I ask, tentatively stepping in as Cretan sidles by. “I’m Nowen. Your parents asked me to come.”
She replies perfectly normally: “No one?” I’m expecting a voice befitting a demon or all-consuming thingy from another world, all grating and double-tracked, not a seventeen-year-old’s perfectly normal voice. Somehow, it’s scarier this way. I don’t reply.
“No one is a name for shadows and hollow voices, nothing is what children are told is lying in the dark and you are not no one. I can feel you,” it continues through her mouth, as Cretan’s hair sticks up on end and he backs up against me, “I can feel your presence. You are not no one or nothing. You are an anomaly and you are here to send me away.”
It turns, revealing Ruth’s face and showing me a pair of hollow eyes; black balls of nothing which swallow the light around them.
“So. That’s how it’s going to be, is it? You know everything about me but I know nothing about you. That girl’s parents think she sacrificed the cat and painted this room in its blood but I don’t see anything. What are you that can get into the minds of the faithful?” I’m bluffing for time. I think I have a pretty good idea of what this is and just how much trouble I’m in. Fortunately, it’s the kind of unpleasant thing that likes to boast.
The non-eyes widen in either pleasure or surprise and I’m really not prepared to figure out which. I reckon I have twenty seconds to pull something off before it pulls my consciousness out through my ears. It speaks again, but I’m not listening. I don’t need to hear how it is the spirit of bugalugs brought down from hosephat to slay whatsums. I couldn’t care less about its honour roll of massacres and depravities, and I certainly do not want to hear the details of that one time it spent a week in Geelong. All I need is to look around the room while it yammers on and find something I think Ruth will care about enough to push it out of the way for a moment.
There it is, right by her hand. A little upright frame: a trinket, the tiniest thing. But I can tell that it’s important. It has glitter on it, and nothing in a seventeen-year-old goth’s room has glitter on it unless it’s very, very important to her. It looks like a childhood photo or something.
I dive, hoping that I can reach the frame before the creature in Ruth’s body figures out that I’m not bowing down in supplication. I can feel a wind pick up about my hair as I fall, but my faithful companion leaps across the room and lands in Ruth’s hair just as I wrap a hand around the trinket. I thrust it in Ruth’s face and scream as a hurricane begins to blow: “Get out! Let me talk to Ruth! Let me talk to Ruth!”
I’ve always found that a bit of drama works now and then, and this time it worked a treat. The wind slowed down and Cretan ran off to a corner for grooming, while I found myself staring into a normal pair of eyes.
“Ruth? Is that you?” I only ask because I can’t think of anything better to say. Of course it’s her. The thing in her head was about to bore into my soul and drink my being, so it stands to reason that if I’m not in eternal agony, it’s probably Ruth. We begin a fairly trite conversation about her needing to concentrate to keep out the demon in her mind, but she manages to stun me into silence.
“Kill me.”
I am, needless to say, a little unsure about where to go from here. I settle for asking her to repeat herself: “What?”
“I need you to kill me. There’s no other way. I’ve seen what it can do, I’ve seen what it did to Mittens.”
Sometimes I can’t help myself. “Your cat is called Mittens?”
“I’ve seen what it’s going to do to me, to my family. It got into my head, it wants me to suffer worst of all.” Brave girl; even when being queried about her dead moggy she’s focused and straightforward. “But I’ve seen inside its head too: it needs me to survive. It needs me so that it can do all those terrible things. There’s no other way.”
I ask her if she’s sure: she is.
*****
“Next on Nine, a mild-mannered council worker has been arrested on suspicion of multiple homicide-“
I switch off the telly and give Cretan a scratch between the ears. “I told you he’d get what’s coming to him. Didn’t think he’d be that big a bastard, but there you are. Never even called me about the suit.” I smile to myself and get up off my bean-bag, evicting Cretan from my lap as I rise. I go to the kitchen and pour myself another cup of horrible cask wine.
“Still,” I muse aloud, “It’s not as though anybody ever remembers me, is it Puss?”
I’ve killed three people; four, now. It never gets any easier.