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My name is Snuff, and I am a watchdog. With my master, Jack, we have guarded the Way for more than two hundred years, and for half of that time we have been accompanied by Jill and Malk. Jill and Malk are not watchdogs, but they help keep the Way closed.
Jill is a friendly and experienced witch. Malk, also called Gray, or Kin, is a cat who is brave and tricksy. I trust her more than any other cats, and more than quite a few non-cats. Jill and Malk were not originally closers, but after their first experience with the way, they were persuaded by Jack's point of view, and we fell into a small, very unconventional family together for the hundred years since.
During the day I guard our flat. I watch for nosy neighbours and, during certain Octobers, I watch for spying companions or players. This year, I also watch the Thing Under the Bed, and the Things in the Old Laptop. And I keep company with the Creature in the Mirror, who Jack says is a Thing who is friendly, but we should still be careful of trusting.
During the day I also watch Jack and his Knife to make sure doesn't forget himself and let it take him over. At night when I sleep I go hunting in Dognappery with Growler. We train younger watchpups, and I guard the boundary between our dreams and the Dreamworld.
It was the 11th of October, in the year of the human Christians' lord 2020, about three weeks before the fullness of the moon. I had had an after-lunch nap and rollicked with some of the watchpups in Dognappery. There hadn't been time to hunt, so I sent them back to their own affairs in their own dreams, and sniffed cautiously around the boundary between the sleeping wood and our waking flat.
There was a dappled shadow nestled in the hollow between a big branch and its trunk. I barked peremptorily, and then I barked again to show I meant it, and watched carefully. The dark outline uncurled to creep along the branch, the moving shadow coalescing into a trim black fox. Her fur was jet black, but with patch of white over her eye, and on her flank, and at the tip of her tail.
She looked down at me. "Snuff?" she asked.
I growled warningly. "Who are you?" I asked.
She gave an affectionate whine. "A friend, this game, I assure you."
"Are you a companion?" I asked directly. Jill knew the Siren had slinky cat. The Thin Man had a wild badger who helped him inconsistently. Hooked Annie had a companion I hadn't identified by species but they weren't a fox or anything like it. The calculations wouldn't work right if the Blue Twins had a companion. My identification of the other players was tentative but there wasn't room in the calculations for a whole other player or companion.
She crept forward to peer down from her branch. As the shadows cleared I finally scented her, a dream-like melange of bosk and dew. "A companion, yes. A player, that is a different question. Perhaps not."
I woofed impatiently. "Say what you have to say."
"My master needs your help," she said. I looked at her. "He wishes to assist the closers this year," she told me.
We looked at each other cautiously. After a moment, she curved her muzzle into a delicate fox-smile and she added "The Count has worked with your master before, I believe."
I sighed. Surprisingly, the Count had been instrumental ending the game to the benefit of the closers in 1887, and again in 1944, and had appeared during the game in 1974 but disappeared before the end. He and Jack enjoyed working together, but Jack said that he was also always pursuing different ends of his own.
"I will pass the message on," I told her. "I suppose you can tell me how to find him?"
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The rich smell of fine beef jelly wafting into my nostrils and the sound of a tin being peeled back pulled me completely into the waking world. I started to shake the sleep from my fur, and then stopped myself just in time as I realised Gray had been sleeping lying half on me. I gently slid her onto the floor before completing my shake. Then I padded into the kitchen.
Jack was opening one of the cans of the good food. I whined appreciatively, but turned away to my bed in the kitchen and nosed my rugged tablet out of the bedding onto the floor. Seeing I had something to communicate, Jack swiftly set the can down and helped prop the tablet against the side of the my bed. I swiped at the screen, and began hitting the big colourful icons.
"Ally." "Danger." "Need." "Help," The electric tablet read out obligingly, in a soft human voice.
"An ally?" asked Jack. He regularly messaged several of the other players, but even the Thin Man and the Siren weren't close we counted them as allies yet.
I swiped open the tab of animals. "Bat".
"The Count," said Jack, before I added any more explanation.
"Fox." "Black." I added. "Help."
"A new companion?" asked Jack.
Impatiently I hit "Yes." And then "Uncertain," which we used a lot in the game for describing allegiances.
Jack ruffled my head appreciatively. "Well done, Snuff."
He glanced at me to check for my permission and reached down to open the map app on my tablet. "Do you know where?"
I started to zoom the map to the mausoleum the fox had told me about. Neither of us entertained the idea that the Count would have an email address, or even a phone number. We'd never had any way of contacting him, and he stayed steadfastly conservative in his personal habits, we only met him if he came to where we were, or we went to where he was.
Jill emerged from her bedroom where she'd been messaging her coven, and moved into the kitchen behind us, Gray perched familiarly on her shoulder. "You're going out?" asked Jill.
"The Count," Jack explained to Jill. "Snuff got a message from his current companion. She said he's in trouble."
She moved closer to see the tablet, Graymalk staring loyally from her shoulder. "The Count's always been able to take care of himself before. Surely you can't risk the curse coming onto you, going out who knows where before sunset?"
Jack glanced at the kitchen window. "If the Count's in trouble, he's at risk of permanent death until sunset," he said. My master grabbed his travelling bag, and beginning to lace his well-worn boots. He looked up for a moment to face Jill. "I don't trust his feeding habits any more than you do, but he's been a good ally to us in the game and we owe him aid for the times he's already helped us, unasked."
Jack swapped legs, and Jill frowned forbiddingly at the thigh of his jeans, where The Knife was concealed. Jack finished his second shoe, and touched the Knife's hiding place thoughtfully. It hummed slightly at his touch.
"It's been a long time since I've had a problem with the curse," he said.
"Because you've been careful," returned Jill worriedly. "You need to keep being careful."
They looked at each other, locked in a dance of familiar steps.
"I'll take the herbs," Jack told her. One of the witches had told her how to make a pouch of herbs which sometimes held off his curse a little longer. "You'll be there for me."
They locked gazes for a moment. "You could ask Anthiny to go," Jill told him. "We don't know where the Thin Man is placed in the game, but he's been helpful." The only player I'd identified for sure lived just across the street, receiving strange packages from hurried delivery companies.
Neither of them suggested that he could go without her, or she could go without him.
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Jack slewed his battered old van to a stop in a deserted industrial lot and quickly killed the headlights and engine. A heavy silence descended onto the winter's night and we all listened carefully, but heard nothing else stirring.
Jill and I were crammed into the adapted seat in the rear of the van, both looking over my tablet sat in her lap. The blue dot of where we are had converged to the point the fox had described to me. I nosed the tablet towards her satchel, and she obligingly slipped it inside. Better we brought it, despite the risk of damage.
Jill slid the door open and we all jumped cautiously out. At the back of the small courtyard a decaying iron fence delineated an overgrown, abandoned, cemetery. Jack set to work on the brambles and shrubs with garden shears from the van's toolbox, until he could hop the fence and cut deeper into the tangle. One particularly solid branch he lopped with his Knife, taking some satisfaction from its utility in this mundane use.
Jill nimbly vaulted the fence and followed close behind him, lopping off any smaller branches.
I wormed my way past them to where I could creep through the undergrowth deeper into the cemetery. I nosed around old gravestones, which stuck up into the tangle at various angles. A few rats and squirrels scuttled away from me as I padded past. Some places the thorn bushes were thinner, and after a couple of minutes I found a small mausoleum of weathered stone.
And sure enough I felt eyes on me, and smelled a dewy earthy smell, and the black fox I'd met before was lying flat to the ground, nose with white splash poking out one side of the doorway. I barked twice, flat and carrying in the late afternoon air, and heard Jack and Jill hurrying towards me.
The fox and I watched each other, and a moment later Jack broke through the matted undergrowth, knife already discreetly concealed, and Jill coming up just behind.
"Is this your friend?" he asked me, and I barked assent.
He addressed the fox guarding the doorway. "May I come inside? I will help your master if I can."
She looked at him, and then slunk to the side leaving the doorway open, and Jack cautiously walked forward. At his thigh, the Knife had started buzzing faintly in the way Jill and I didn't like to admit we'd noticed, but it quietened slightly as Jack stepped out of the watery sunlight.
Inside there was just room for him to edge round a large stone coffin. Its lid was pushed off and shattered into large pieces between the coffin and the other side of the mausoleum. I followed on his heels, and lifted myself up to rest my front paws on the side of the coffin.
Inside, lay the Count. He wore formal clothes and a cloak, only slightly more modern than what he wore the first time I'd seen him.
But his face and hands were withered, and a wooden stake punctured his chest. Jill appeared at the coffin edge behind me. "Is he, dead?" she asked awkwardly.
"People like him don't die so easily," said Jack. He looked down at the Count's figure. "I'm pretty sure if I remove that stake, he'll bounce right back."
Jill grimaced. "Are you sure we should wake him up at all?"
Jack frowned blackly. "We've already talked about that."
"You know he's not innocent," she said. "Do you want to keep on playing this game to keep the way closed, if you need to pay in blood?"
"I'm not innocent either," said Jack in a surprisingly soft voice.
Jill moved up beside him, and gave him a sideways hug. "You are Good, though. Whoever you've been, you do nothing but Good now."
He tried to object and she shushed him. "I know it's an effort for you, but you succeed at it, don't you? I trust you, and that should be enough."
Jack struggled to compose himself. "I'm not so sure you should," he said, with an edge of gruffness.
"Well, I am." she said. "Do you not remember our first game? I thought we were going to heal the world, and you showed me how Opening was not the way to do that."
Jack didn't respond to her words about him, but he pointed out, "And the Count stood to close just as I did."
A silence hung between them. "And he doesn't feed... wantonly," Jack added.
Jill's face said she wasn't so sure. I barked once, to remind the humans that the fox was still carefully listening to them debate the fate of her master. And would presumably relate it all to the Count later, if he survived.
"Fine," said Jill abruptly. "But he better stay responsible in his feeding habits. You know he's only careful in case he offends you."
I could tell from the set of his shoulders Jack thought that wasn't fair, but he didn't argue it. "Do we need to wait until dark?" he asked matter-of-factly.
"I hope not, for your sake" said Jill. She looked back to the fox, still crouched by the doorway watching the human interplay. "Do you know what's safe?" she asked.
The black fox looked back, and yipped negatively. "You don't know?" clarified Jack. She yipped in assent. I whuffed, telling Jack he'd understood correctly.
Uncertainty clouded Jack's face for a second. "You have more learning than me," he told Jill. "What do you think?"
She studied him, and looked down to study the corpse for some seconds. Then she addressed the room carefully. "I don't know if it matters. I think before dark is just as likely to be safe. Sunset could have its own affect on the Count's state."
Jack shrugged, and paused for a minute weighing up. Then he decisively reached forward and one-handed pulled the stake up and out of the Count's corpse's chest.
We all watched nervously for a moment as the Count still lay motionless. And then the corpse twitched a little, and the face became a little more alive, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. The fox yipped, and scampered forward excitedly to leap onto the edge of the coffin and down to curl around the Count's chest and neck. She whimpered a little snarl of thanks to Jack, who bowed politely.
The Count's sunken face, stretched over the bones in his skull, slowly filled out until he was only gaunt. Then his arm flailed and came to rest embracing his new companion.
I'd seen enough to assure me the Count's resurrection was likely to proceed, and hopped down to squeeze round Jill and guard the door of the mausoleum. The humans waited awkwardly while the Count slowly became animate again.
Ten minutes later, the Count was beginning to sit up, and Jack was quizzing him about what had happened. "Hunters," replied the Count urbanely.
He levered himself into a sitting position, pulling the fox onto his lap and stoking her caringly. "Two women. Young, but strong and bold."
"Our run-in was unrelated to this year's iteration of your game," he assured us. I growled in doubt, but the Count ignored it with his universal savoir-fair.
"It's been a long time since you've been caught like that," said Jack.
The Count smiled his inscrutable smile, and Jack let it go. "Why have you come to East London, the first year the game has come so close to the capital since I started playing?"
The Count stroked his companion, his movements slick-smooth without a trace of what he was concealing under his confident exterior. "You must allow a men such as me a little mystery," he chided Jack deadpan, and Jack chuckled roughly, but still held the Count in his stare.
The Count explained smoothly. "My little helper and I learned that the Staff of Kthothethos had been found. And wielded by one of your fellow players. Or one of your competitors, depending how you choose to look at it."
Jill had researched almost all of the tools which could be used in the game, including the ones that had a way of being found at the right time, and the ones that had a way of staying hidden. The Staff of Kthothethos was an artefact powerful in many arenas of magic, and its affinity for opening meant that if it was ever found it could be used as an unusually powerful icon for an opener on the final night in October.
Jill made a noise of disbelief, but I turned back into the room, and whuffed my assent. A powerful opening artefact would make certain approximations in my calculations make a lot more sense. "Really?" asked Jill, and I shrugged. Jack made a gesture towards her satchel with my tablet in, but I shrugged again to show I didn't know any more, and he desisted.
"The staff could be a problem for your closers, could it not?" asked the Count. "None of us wish to have the world opened to those ominous influences which lurk behind the portal, promising so much and giving so little."
Jack looked at his old ally with exasperation. "I know you prefer the world with the portal closed, but you have not competed in the game for some time, Vee."
"The closing of the portal has been assured by the determined toil of you and your compatriots of like mind without need of my swooping to the rescue," the Count told him with a distant twinkle in his voice. "And I have many worthwhile demands on my time without working to close the way, again and again. But the Staff of the Archdemon might change that balance, might it not?"
"We appreciate your aid whenever you visit," said Jack neutrally.
"Since I'm here anyway, I think I will try to aid you in your game," announced the Count.
I barked, sharply. The calculations showed that he had not become a player at the dawn of October. This time the Count nodded as if he could understand me. "Or, I suppose I'm too late to join the game itself," he explained regretfully. "But I might have some uses for the staff myself," he told us disarmingly.
"If I happened to carry the staff away, that would then remove any concern of its affect on the outcome of the game," he continued, scritching the fox behind her ears. "And in my uses -- nothing to concern your sense of morals, I assure you all -- I would ensure it was kept close to me and not stumbled upon by any other openers, which would only help you if you continue to compete in the future iterations of the game."
Jill sighed in exasperation. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? It's not the just the game, the staff is useful, or dangerous, to you, or both. And you want us to help you get it."
The Count sighed sadly. "Oh, my dear patient friend. Do you resent my helping you, if it also helps me? Is helping each other not what friends do for each other?"
Jill hissed, a bit like Gray.
The Count delicately swivelled his legs, preparing to carefully extricate himself from his temporary coffin. "I know you have your own reasons for aiding me. I have my own reasons for closing the way. It doesn't mean we can't like each other."
"Fine," growled Jack with a feral grin. "Buckle up."
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In the evening, the plaza outside the office building was well-lit but deserted. A lead loosely attached me to a set of railings but was designed to breakaway easily, and I sat by the front door looking like the best watchdog I could. A cleaning crew came and went, and several petted me and called me a good boy. One of them worried that I didn't have a human nearby, but I projected that I was well-kept and my human would be back outside in five minutes as strongly as I could, and she fussed me a little and said she didn't have time to worry about me.
More than an hour later, the player I was waiting for scurried from the building. He was dressed like a human manager, and was heavyset and smelled unpleasant, carrying a long sports bag. I leapt to my feet and surged forward, growling menacingly, and he squeaked, very loudly, and terrifiedly scrambled away from me. I advanced rapidly, growling threateningly, and briskly herded him into into the dark space beside the building where the bins and fire exits were.
As soon as he was out of sight from the plaza, and any security cameras at the door, Jack appeared behind him, an arm round his neck, Knife ready nearby, pulling him deeper into the alley. I pushed the sports bag further into the alley with them, then returned to watch the entrance. I didn't smell anyone nearby, and didn't hear anyone moving.
"You don't know what you're interfering with," he told Jack.
"I know pretty well, I reckon," replied Jack, solidifying his hold on the man's throat. "James Something. A bit of a bastard to the people who work for you. The others in the game chat channel call you Technocrat. At least, I hope so, or we're going to have to mug someone else tonight, and I've been cutting down."
James gestured towards the sports bag. "You want the staff? It was expensive. But if you're an opener, why, I'll be on your side come Halloween. And if you're a closer, it won't work for you."
"What I am is no concern of yours yet, friend," Jack told him.
"Its power is bound to me until the moon nears full again," James told him. "I will curse you. I can send a curse anywhere in the world, on net and wire and web, and bring regret untold."
"I'm sure. But I earnestly advise you to consider who will regret it." Jack's tone brought to my mind the Things in the Old Laptop, and what could happen to anyone trying to snoop on us through the computers. And that Jack only had so much room in his body for more curses.
"Good luck", Jack added, and tightened his grip. A minute later, the man had lost his composure, the shape of his nose, his consciousness, and his sports bag.
Jack methodically unzipped the sports bag and extracted a long wooden staff curled with disturbing carvings, and occasionally sparking with a tiny blue glows. He nodded satisfactorily, and briefly dug through the rest of the bag. A few personal items he tossed onto James' unconscious body, but the bones, charms, relics, and notes he left inside and stuffed the staff back in on top of them.
He ruffled the top of my head roughly. "Good job, Snuff," he said, and we briskly made ourselves scarce.
------
Just over two weeks later, to the Count's mild irritation, the staff had been posted to a safe deposit box he maintained in Krakow. The Technocrat had left the area before the end of the game, my calculations had been completed and at the confrontation at the dusk of October, three more closers had fled or switched sides, the Way had been Closed once more. And Jack and Jill and Malk and I moved on to our next cosy home.