Button Man

Midnight Quatermass 24: Short one this week as promised plus a sort-of ghost story.

Kids went back to school yesterday. This is how peaceful the house was at 10am:

Annoyingly a large pile of admin and business bank account annoyances immediately dropped in my lap that I’m still dealing with. I hate when the grown-up crap reminds of its existence. Probably because I’m an idiot child-thing who still calls it grown-up crap. My hope is that by Friday I should be free and easy and will finally pick up the next section of PANIC to play with.

That’s not to say I haven’t been writing, but it’s mostly been noodling. The equivalent of doodling in the margin. A conversation between two characters that have no names yet, or notes on a  slightly different way to rob a bank or a rough sketch of a gunfight. These often never escape a folder called marginalia, but I never throw anything away.

I was still awake at 2am the other night when one of the more recent noodles wrapped itself around the bare bones of something I’ve been meaning to write for a little while now. I stayed up another hour to check if it really would all fall together as easily as I thought and the upshot is that the next day I started writing my first movie script in a number of years. Damn, those muscles were slow to wake up.

This one old dumb idea has always amused me and while I haven’t pitched it as such because there’s a moment in it that either results in a fist-pump or a fuck-off depending on the audience. As such as I’ve decided to write it on spec. Early on in LA, because I didn’t know any better, I’d often write full length scripts rather than garner the mood of the market before writing a pitch document. When I got busy I stared to forgo that long meandering route and that lead directly to me writing to order - which was still fun and more profitable, but perhaps a little less satisfying.

My instincts, albeit covered in dust now, tell me that the pivot point in this story is where the professional readers in the business will trip up and I’ll be advised to make the whole thing a little easier to digest. A little more traditional. But this first draft at least will be everything turned up to 11 and then we’ll see what my guys in LA think. I trust them and I’m sure we’ll be able to get to to a place where we can send it out, but the next month or so I’m just gonna pound the damn thing with only the one reader to please. Me.

The new unrelated noodle forms the structure and more importantly the genre that will initially get this thing up off the slab and out for at least one stroll before the torches and pitchforks rip it to pieces.

Not much more to say about it at this point, but I’ll share what I can go going forward. The thing doesn’t even have a name yet, but maybe I’ll have cracked that by the next MQ.

Speaking of noodles and doodles I don’t think I’ll get into too much trouble sharing this crop from Dave’s sketch book from when we first started discussing PANIC.

The version I’m writing now has shifted slightly from those conversations, but even Dave’s throwaway stuff is too good to actually throwaway.

Dull paragraph coming up. I’ll try and make it more palatable by sharing my all time favourite joke either side of it.

“My dog has no nose!” “How does it smell?”

Quick admin thing for the newsletter. My aim is to keep this thing free for as long as it exists, but a few subscribers have kindly set up paid subscriptions anyway. That’s lovely and ensures I’m here writing it every Wednesday rain or shine so they don’t feel ripped off. A few folk have also used the BuyMeACoffee page that I’d forgotten about and whenever that happens I immediately head to the nearest cafe to thank them. But I had a couple of people reach out asking about easier regular ways to support Midnight Quatermass outside of Substack which I understand is not everyone’s cup of tea. To that end I set up this link if anyone wants a simple five quid subscription. No obligation to anyone else as I’m just happy you’re here and I’ll shove those links to the bottom of the newsletter where they’re easier to ignore starting next week and never mention them again. Punchline incoming…

“He uses a machine.”

I also accidentally activated a dumb chat-page somewhere over on Substack that I didn’t know would send an annoying email to everyone. I’m a little like David in PROMETHEUS when confronted with a bunch of crap I don’t understand and definitely shouldn’t play with. Not everything is a flute to be fingered you crazy synthetic fuck.

So sorry about that and lesson learned. Going forward I’ll keep things much more simple and bouncy.

I almost caved in and went to see ROMULUS a few weeks ago, but came to my senses at the last moment and purged the tickets out an airlock. I’ll get around to it eventually. I have an itch to write a little more about film and TV again, but I’ll probably only focus on the good and obscure stuff rather than the rampant reboots.

Tomorrow I’m calling a Kindergarten In Copenhagen because a group of their ‘kangaroos’ found what is possibly Jaime’s camera which we lost a month ago.

We’ve since replaced her kit, but it’d be nice to get the memory card back. Mostly I’m hoping the thing still works and then we can gift it to the kids and it’ll have a new life over there. It’s been a fun little travel companion for the last few years and I hated the idea of it being in a landfill somewhere.

Run, rabbit, run!

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

I was talking about Watership Down again this week and found another person who hadn’t read it. I keep multiple copies on my shelf for just this situation so I’m hoping Bigwig is once again kicking ass somewhere out there tonight. Never suffer a copy of your favourite book to languish on the shelf of a second hand book shelf. If you spot one you’re honour-bound to buy it and pass it on. I don’t have many firm rules, but thats one of them.

We’ve created a world that makes it too easy to share the bad stuff so you have to counter that whenever you can. I find rabbits work, but for you it may be iron giants, or spinning police boxes or trees with a slippery slip.

Last week’s thing was a lot to chew through so thanks for that. I did promise a shorter one this week so lets wrap this section up here. Plus it’s midnight again so...

Ghost story time.

THE PHANTASMAMORIOR

Archaic: a haunted vision inextricably linked with death

It takes me an hour to find the place. She shows up just as the guy gets home. We both watch him pull some stuff from his car and head up the stoop. Decent sized place. He seems to be doing okay for himself. No family, no pets. Perfect.

“He must have understanding t‘was me,” says the dead girl.

I knew this was coming, but my eyes roll anyway.

“He doesn’t know you, Becca,” I say. “You were already dead for 300 years before he was born. I guarantee that no-one in his family knows shit about you.”

“It matters not. Please don’t curse, Master James.”

I sigh and start breaking down the rifle.

“Jim. It’s just Jim. Fine. This complicates everything. But whatever. We could finish the deal tonight from here, but if we do it your way it’s gonna take a little more due diligence.”

For a moment the wind catches her and she’s almost solid.

“I have nothing but time, Master Jim.”

Jesus, that sounds worse. But she’s right.

“Give me a week.”

She nods, already fading. Her smile is the last thing to disappear.

Like the Cheshire Cat, but sad as fuck.

~

Takes me a few days to work out the CCTV plus he’s got one of those fucking annoying doorbell cameras. All the time I’m figuring that shit out I’m making notes on the neighbours guessing it was going to be an early hours deal, but weirdly 2pm every Wednesday turns out to be optimal. I don’t need to persuade my way in, but pencil in a UPS uniform anyway.

I’m not planning on being seen, but if I am all anyone will remember is a delivery guy.

The mark’s a designer. Mid twenties. In shape, but far from John Wick. Should be easy enough.

I prefer not having to explain the whole deal to them because a) it sounds fucking stupid and b) close-up work is messy. But fuck it. The client is the boss and it’s all about the pay day.

Speaking of…

~

For this part she chooses midnight of course.

A lot of stuff about ghosts turned out to be bullshit, but boy do they love being fucking theatrical. So as the proverbial clock strikes the witching hour she appears and points the way.

Like literally pointing and refusing to say a word. Floating ahead of me like phantasmagoric GPS as I drag the spade behind me and stifle a yawn.

I forget to bring the flashlight from the car, but don’t need it as she’s lit herself up for effect.

Like I said, theatrical.

She finally stops and points to a patch of dirt that looks exactly like every other patch of dirt.

“You sure?”

She points again. Fine.

I start to dig.

~

I saw my first ghost at 32.

I bet you thought I was gonna say 9 like that kid in The Sixth Sense. Nope. I did see my elderly aunt naked in the shower at 9, but whatever that did to my young psyche had no impact on whatever part of my brain needed a kick to pick this shit up.

The kick came in the form of a 1976 Ford Gran Torino. Same one from Starsky & Hutch. No not the exact same one. I wasn’t fucking run over by Paul Michael Glaser. Plus it was silver. The old fuck driving it wasn’t going that fast, but after bouncing off the windshield my head found the sidewalk pretty quickly and that was the kick.

It rattled something loose and everything changed.

I woke up in hospital. Guess what a good place to avoid is if you’re suddenly privy to the world of the supernatural? Those fucking places are literally crawling with dead people. The very first ghost I saw was a dude sat on an empty bed barking into his huge-ass-phone about the shitty day he was having and how if someone didn’t get off their ass soon he was gonna miss the Oilers game that night. Now I hadn’t been to Houston in a good long while but I was pretty sure they hadn’t tossed a ball there for over twenty years.

That was the first clue there was something off with this guy.

The second was the huge fuck-off moustache and sideburns he was sporting.

The third and fourth were the bullet holes.

One on the side of his head and one straight through the heart. Didn’t seem to slow him down none when he realised I could see him. The bastard proceeded to chew my ear off for the next two days solid as I screamed blue bloody murder until the nurses finally grew tired enough to shoot me up with Midazolam.

When I got the all clear from the accident I then spent two weeks on a psych ward. Luckily it was a few miles from the hospital so the only dead folk I had to deal with were a few suicides who after escaping the place turned out to be too institutionalised to drift anywhere else. I didn’t mind it there. The peace and quiet gave me the opportunity to work this shit out and a chap called Henry (1948-1989) helped to fill in the blanks.

Over the years a few similar people had come through those doors and Henry was a walking - well, floating - archive of knowledge on the subject of mediums, spiritualists and spook-botherers like me.

And when I was ready he also knew the best way to talk the docs into letting me out. Nice guy.

Took me a few months to work out the angle.

~

Thankfully I didn’t have to dig deep. It’s easy to forget how recent our history is here. The pouch was exactly where she had pointed. The string or whatever had held it closed was long gone, but the leather had done its job and I could see the glint of silver.

I beckoned her over as theatrically as possible so I could use the glow from her tattered dress to see how well she’d paid me. Pretty well as it turned out.

I counted thirty coins. They were Massachusetts Pine Tree Shillings all marked 1652.

“Is it enough?”

One side benefit of only taking clients that have been dead for years, decades and centuries is that you become real good, real quick at valuing old currencies. These little bastards in the condition they were in would go for around $3,000 each.

90k for taking out the dude who designed the logo for a start-up called DataDoodie that mines human excrement to provide its users a competitive edge?

“More than enough.”

She smiled. A genuine one this time and it was honestly nice to see.

But then she blinked out of existence and left me in the dark in the hole with no idea where I’d parked the car.

“For fuck’s sake.”

~

Ghosts, and no one will tell you this, are fucking annoying.

The closest I’ve seen in a movie to the real thing is… brace yourself… Patrick fucking Swayze.

Remember the one with the clay cock and Whoopi Goldberg tonguing Bruce Willis’ wife? There’s a scene where Swayze stays up all night annoying the fuck out of Whoopi until she gives in and helps him kill that one asshole.

Mostly everything else you see is bullshit, but they sure know how to push your buttons.

So at first I had it pretty rough. That bit in The Sixth Sense where the ghosts can’t see each other? Bullshit. Nothing they love better than hanging out together and fucking with the few poor bastards that can see them. Took me a while to nip that in the bud, but nip it I did thanks to an old crone called Maggie who tormented me for six months and loved a crowd.

I let her have her laughs and put up with her entourage of dead fuckwits until I worked out where she was buried. Then I dug up her bones and paid a dude at the city morgue to turn the incinerator up to 11 under them.

I had an ice cream while watching her spirit/soul/whatever-the-fuck-she-was burn and scream and finally fall apart never to be seen again.

Her idiot audience watched it happen too, but they weren’t laughing anymore. You think you can’t scare a ghost? Think again. And thanks to them being sociable little dead-bastards word spread pretty quick.

Don’t fuck with the Phantasmamorior.

If I needed business cards that’s what I’d have on my business cards.

Some Spanish spectre with a grudge against the church coined it after I helped him out and nudged a Greyhound full of clergy off a bridge. And once again word-of-mouth did its thing and instead of annoying me the dead folk started to either steer well clear or ask for my services.

Turns out that a lot of people leave this mortal coil with unfinished business. It’s not always the thing that keeps them here, but once they realise they’re sticking around they turn to working out what to do with themselves. Soon enough they find out that all that haunting stuff in stories and movies and tv shows is absolute bullshit.

Hard to give your cheating-ex a heart attack when he has no idea you’re kicking him in the balls.

So most of ‘em forget about revenge and just lay back in some kind of weird eternal retirement. There’s a lot of ghosts in Florida for example and those are the ones that maybe don’t know they’re dead.

How would they tell?

But a few of them have a real fucking grudge and when they hear about me they tend to rack their brains for something they know that I can use to keep my bank manager happy. And once they’ve shown me where the classic car is garaged and forgotten, or revealed the real worth of the bric-a-brac in a local junk store or pointed out a lost grand-master in an attic or let me in on where they stashed the cash from the bank robbery that got them killed… well, then we’re in business and I’m on the clock.

I kill the people they want killing.

~

Like Donald Dillon Pierce who at this moment is eating cereal at two in the afternoon and feeling the cold metal of the suppressor on my Ruger Mark IV at the back of his head.

He assures me he has money as he spits milk and Cheerios into his lap.

I assure him that I do not give a shit as I walk around and take a seat in front of him. I quietly explain the gun pointed at him has absolutely nothing to do with me and to brace himself.

What happens next is the thing I’m really being paid for.

Turns out that I’m what they call a conduit and for a brief moment just prior to a spirit’s fulfilment of everything it has achieved in life and everything it has suffered after life I have the power to make that wretched thing corporal.

Briefly. But that’s all it takes.

The ghost of Miss Rebecca Howe (1671-1692) manifests itself before the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of the superstitious sexist prick that had her hung for no reason at all apart from that it was within his power to do so.

From the look on DD’s face I know he can see her. Becky has gone theatrical with a capital T.

Her dress is aflame. Her eyes are filled with blue electricity. Her hair is alive with the shadows of hell-snakes and her voice is as cold as a witch’s… well, you get the idea.

“Spawn of Mathew Stout… I strike at thee… from the depths of the Hell I was unjustly swept... Feel my wrath… and die a dog!”

Her hand reaches out, touches his chest and I guess if I had to describe it I’d say DD Pierce’s soul was on fire.

Which was my cue.

I love a .22 for short range work. Less mess and when I pull the trigger it sounds like someone tapped a pencil. That noise and a small cloud of red mist mark the passing of DD from here to… well, we’ll find out soon I guess.

“Feel better?”

She nods

“Moving on?”

She shrugs.

This happens a lot. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. But when it’s this fucking old it loses a lot of its flavour.

“Well if you need me…”

She smiles. Nods once. And is gone.

Which leaves me and the corpse.

~

I should have mentioned that I was already in this line of work prior to the hit and run. Working for people that were repellant, but very much alive. This is, in many ways, much better.

I never did like the word assassin. You know the old adage ‘You should never assume because you make an ass out of u and me’? Well the word assassin is double ass. Fuck that.

I liked Button Man, but no one ever called me that. It’d look good on a business card though.

Anyway I had form. So this seemed like a natural fit. Pivoting I think the young folk call it. Been doing it for a while now and it’s pretty sweet. Plus I have even less of a connection to the mark than when I was working for organised crime.

When they put DD on the slab tomorrow it’d take a real Columbo Quincy Kojak Jessica Fletcher motherfucker to trace the motive back to 17th century Salem. The only reason cops catch anyone is because criminals are dumber than they are.

Have you ever spoken to a police detective? Most of them couldn't pour water out of a boot even if you told them the instructions were on the heel.

~

I give it thirty minutes. Nothing. Not everyone comes back and there’s no rhyme or reason to it from what I’ve seen. The conventional wisdom is that if you did everything you could with your life then you get fast-tracked to whatever’s next.

I guess the DataDoodie logo was enough for DD to have fulfilled his purpose on earth. Which was a relief. Dealing with ghosts is bad enough but dealing with ghosts you’re responsible for creating… well it’s a shit-show. Plus it’s not like they can hire me to avenge them.

I’m pretty sure there’s no trace of me apart from the round still stuck in DD’s brain, but just in case I torch the place.

~

My phone pings as I’m passing the first fire truck.

Well whaddayaknow? I usually have a couple of searches running at any one time and a name that I’d been looking for for a few years now just popped up. Christmas came early.

Ken Miloš. This fuck had strangled Henry (1948-1989) in his sleep and made it look like a suicide. About a year after I’d got a handle on this gig I went back to the psych ward and signed in as a visitor so I could speak to Henry. He thanked me all the same for the offer, but said he held no grudge and had no reason to seek revenge on Miloš-the-fuck for murdering him.

Like I said, nice guy. Who was I to argue? I let it go but left the trace running. Just in case.

With the small pile of silver coins secured in the dash I decide to drive to Vegas anyway.

Plenty of time to play the tables after I push Miloš-the-fuck down a lift shaft.

Don’t fuck with the Phantasmamorior’s friends either.

Maybe I’ll get a couple of business cards printed anyway…

Between now and the next MQ I’ll have picked up the puppy. Wish me luck.

Stay safe.

Mike