Liam McCourt: New Moon Blues

[Macman253]

My name is Liam McCourt, I have a...special talent. I can speak to the dead where as most people can't. No I'm not some freaky fake psychic but in reality I am sort of Psychic. In 1863 I died, I was a soldier in the St. Patricks Brigade during the civil war but the real thing you should know that is right now while you read this there are creatures that look and talk like humans but they aren't. There are certainly things that go bump in the night boys and girls and they all have plans for everyone. Wizards, vampires, werewolves and faeries plus countless others are present and real. Not like you see in crappy horror films or play as in a game of dungeons and dragons but there is a funny story to that but i'll get to that another time.

 

See, during the war I...sort of misplaced my soul. I had brokered a deal with The Dark One, I know sounds corny but I made the deal, i lost my sole in exchange for a few powers and abilities that i'd need to help save my family. In the end, my family died and I lost my soul so you can guess who got the better end of that deal. Now I live in Los Angeles, trust me folks it's not all glamour.

 

Mostly I just drift from job to job working as...whatever because I've learned a variety of skills. Let's just say when you have lived as long as I have you find yourself with a plethora of abilities but none so much as a rather interesting ability as Phasing. See since I don't have a soul I don't technically exist in this plane of existence but I do, breaks every law in the rulebook and more then not astounds most Theologists and Wizards. I once had a friend explain it all to me but I fell asleep so i'll give you the abridged version. I am dead, but I am also alive being so I have the ability to enter Mundus, which is the plane of existence that you and your mother live on, and Terminus; the plane that your great great great grandmother live on. But here's the thing, unlike grandma I can come back to Mundus anytime I want but it does have side effects, when the vomiting and migraines stop I'm normal but in the plane of Terminus i can interact with things in Mundus. Real freaking useful when I lock myself out of my house. Now your asking "hell yes that is what I want! Fort Knox here I come." Firstly, i'm not into doing that, because i'm different i'm on every paranormal watchlist there is, just being what I am has made me enemies. Secondly, I've done the whole Fort Knox thing, nothing there...

 

But needless to say I also have other abilities, Firstly I can read minds...comes in useful but it doesn't seem to work on faeries never could figure out why...Secondly I can talk with the dead, yeah I admit i've used it for seances and palm readings in the past, let me tell you in the forties I made a...oh yeah keep it PG. Well despite taking money from rich widows and socialites. It does give me a few unique perks, mostly what I really do is act as a supernatural bodyguard. Sometimes I even get 'mundane' bodyguard jobs. Regardless of my brief tell-all about myself you came to read about an adventure so here it is, New Moon Blues.

[Macman253]

So I had been in L.A. for about a year, my friend Dawson and ex-bodyguard for the president found me after the whole kennedy assassination and low and behold I became a consultant. And no I'm not telling you guys anything about that. Lets just say I'm sworn to secrecy. Dawson had set himself up as the, quote 'Booking Agent For Bodyguards' in L.A. and he wanted me to come out there. Mind you this was during the eighties so things were...strange. I was mostly living out of a dirty loft apartment over a popular nightclub that I sometimes to take care of my free time worked as a bouncer at. Nothing special but the guy gave me a discount on rent and free beer so I never complained. Well Dawson called me one morning after a night working with a job offer...needless to say I very unhappy with my agent.

 

 

I awoke when the phone started ringing, my head was pounding heavily to the beat of last nights music and the many many beers but I managed to shake it off and answered the phone. It was Dawson saying he had a job for me but he wanted to talk to me personally and i was to swing by his office. I hung up the phone without saying anything and rubbed the sleep and hangover from my eyes, I spent the next ten minutes looking for my pants when I found my fat black cat Rico laying on them while he slept. I walked over and grabbed him and lifted him off and set him on the floor. "Cat." I said, "You need to loose weight." Rico replied with a scorned look and a defiant meow and then leaped up onto my bed and landed on the t.v. remote. He sat down and swished his tail as he watched some kids show with transforming robots.

 

I collected my gear, a laminated piece of ritual parchment, a pack of cigarettes. My silver flask with holy water, my lucky lighter Lucky and Jenny my .45 M1911 colt. I racked the slide on the pistol and checked to make sure the silver flakes and garlic cloves in the hollowpoints were still waxed in good and then tucked the pistol into my holster under my arm and threw on my leather jacket and boots.

 

As I walked out I said "Don't watch it all day it'll rot your brain" to Rico as I walked out, he replied with a distinctive Get Out like meow and with that I left. My car which I love is a '71 dodge charger which back in 71' I bought fresh off the line and with that it wasn't long before I arrived at the lavish and over decorated office of my old friend Dawson. Dawson might have been an old man but his useless layabout son took over the family business. Dawson was once a Templar Knight but noone but him and myself knew of it. After he retired and began to grey he stopped hunting bad wizards and demons and started to guard politicians and socialites. His firm handled various types of booking agents from Actors to Bodyguards and Stuntmen, pretty much everything having to do with hollywood but sometimes Dawson would hand me special files that were done in blue, these were Supernatural cases. Events fed to him through some means, the list of contacts Dawson has is something I never wanted to get into, in this such case I got fed one of these files.

 

"McCourt, get your ass in here." Said the burly grey haired african-american man as he opened the door to see me chatting with the cute little blonde at the reception desk, her name is Stacie by the way. I came in and he smiled that kind of smile you'd see on an english bulldog.

 

"McCourt, ive got two pieces of work for you. Both are blue files but one is a walk in the park and the second is a trip through hell." He said with a emotionless tone. I just smiled and said "Which one pays better?" Dawson wasn't happy with the snarky remark so he just tossed me the 'Trip Through Hell' file. He stood up and closed the door as I opened the file and skimmed it.

 

"The client is a woman by the name of Lenore Dupree, also known as Susan Rhodes. The actress, recently she's been plagued by a Poltergeist, since its something dead I naturally called you first." He explained as I looked over the file, It had a floorplan of her house and the pictures of various items like tables and chairs thrown about and shattered, writing on the wall in blood and pictures of various cuts in the shape of runes on peoples skin. All trade marks of a class five Geist.

 

"Blood writing, vandalism and runing. All trademarks of a Poltergeist infestation." He added as I read, but then he sat down and leaned in closer like he wanted to say something especially strange and secret. "The strangest thing these things only happen during the New Moon." These words put me off the job for a second by made me very interested.

 

I thought for a long hard moment then decided to take it since I needed the money and I was bored mostly, nothing to shake up a stale life like a exorcism of a poltergeist. I grabbed the file and the check for half the payment per my rules of half up front and half on completion. When I left the first thing I did was go out to her estate in beverly hills, when I got there this slab of muscle and meat stopped me, he wore a cheap black polyester suit and gawdy tie with crappy sunglasses.

 

"Miss Rhodes does not take walk-ins or autographs at home sir." He said impassively. I just smiled and pulled out my laminate piece of parchment. A nice little item I recovered from a troll stash under the brooklyn bridge on a past job. It looks like anything the viewer wants to see or the holder wants them to see, downside is anyone that knows of this special parchment knows what it is and to them it just looks like parchment. For this guy I wanted him to see my Dawson Security Consultant I.D.

 

The security guard looked it over and then waved me in. As I got to the house I could hear the music blasting loudly and I noticed she was throwing a pool party. The assortment of children and the clown told me it was a childs birthday party. I walked inside and the place was full of people, the adults mostly as the children were all outside and these people were all talking to one another. The room was fairly loud and active but I looked around and finally asked one of the women next to the door talking with other women, for some reason they all had champagne glasses and cocktail dresses. The two blondes and the brunette which were in their early thirties looked at me oddly but the brunette winked at me when her friends weren't looking.

 

"Can you tell me who is Susan Rhodes?" I asked while trying to keep my place in the overly crowded home filled with rich and snotty people. The blonde to my right just smiled and pointed to the woman wearing a red sun dress and sunglasses by the kitchen table.

 

I waved her over and showed her my 'badge', she came with me into the back room where we could be alone to chat. "So Dawson told me of you, said you specialize in these things..." I smiled and couldn't help but think that Dawson set me up for this. "Sort of, what can you tell me of encounters." I asked, she went on to tell me about how it always happens during the new moon and it seems that they target her specifically but whenever she brings a man home that she had interest in the ghost would scare him off. I thought pretty heavily on this, it sounded like it was a jealous ghost or a dead husband but her ex-husband was alive. "Have you ever had any dead boyfriends?" I asked and she looked at me appallingly like I just kicked a box full of kittens into a dog kennel. Then she looked at me and glared for a minute as if she was trying to make my brain explode by pure thought. "No but what are you, some kind of psychic or something?" I just smiled and said "Sort of."

 

I decided that I'd come back tommorow and left, I got a burger on the way home and when I arrived back at my loft the house was trashed, my furniture was thrown around and every paper and file I had was strewn across the room. Someone searched my house. Rico laid on my bed undisturbed and still watching T.V. like it never happened. I rolled my eyes and took off my jacket, spending the next four hours fixing my place. Rico now more interested in me then MTV began following me as I worked. "Some guard cat you are, your four thousand years old and yet all you do is sit on my bed and do nothing." With that Rico yawned and then spoke.

 

"I may be thousands of years old Liam but I know more about the supernatural world then you ever will. So whats the case that brought in the knights?" He explained in a very thick egyptian accent. See my cat is actually possessed by an ancient egyptian pharoh that bound himself to the body of a cat to escape execution by his subjects, but when it came to supernatural things he was a library that on occassion coughed up hairballs, really powerful magical hairballs that have a bad habit of exploding like nitro glycerin that had just been smashed with a hammer.

 

I just laughed but then the thought donned on me. I explained all I knew and Rico just absorbed it. "Well, this is a powerful geist but I wouldn't look for an external source, poltergeists are spawned from children on the verge of puberty lashing out, specially if they have supernatural abilities. Class Fives mean they have a lot of anger towards the intended target." Rico said expertly and then yawned, his large fangs exposed to look like swords.

 

I thought pretty heavily on that and then decided sleep was better so I crashed. As I slept I kept having dreams about a young boy dressed up like beaver cleaver from that old television show as he played at a park while loud adult voices could be heard in the house behind him. I awoke when the kid started screaming in anger at the house but no noise came through. Rico just sat in my chair and swished his tail. "You're weird." The cat said as he jumped off the chair and strolled into the bathroom to his food dish. I couldn't help bu say "That statement coming from a cat that talks is more than alittle ironic!" As I wiped the sweat from my body, looking around I realized it was daylight so I got ready and went over to the clients house.

 

As I got there Susan was freaking out and cops were everywhere, Right about now I should probably tell you that most of the police force likes me when I recovered about four million dollars worth of cocaine that had been stolen from their evidence but there was this one cop, Detective Sam Lenville, a tall redheaded woman that was all by the book. She was under the impression I was in on the caper but I never was. Just so happens she was working this case so It made a tough job even tougher.

 

As I approached Detective Lenville stopped me and smiled, for an outright *censored* she had beautiful eyes I will admit. "Mr. McCourt, I remember our last conversation. You had just gotten a hefty paycheck for stealing from us?" I just smiled and shrugged. "Prove it and I'll sign that paycheck over to you..." I flashed my badge and walked inside with total impunity when she realized I was the Security Consultant that had been floating around the investigation.

 

Susan pulled me into the bedroom, tears in her eyes and her face red from crying. "Mr. McCourt look my son is missing and I can't find him anywhere!" She explained desperately. She told me that she had been running her lines with her friend and looked over to see the boy sitting on the couch playing, Oh yeah I forgot. The boy is named Trent and he's about seven. Blonde hair like his mom and hes small for his age.

 

But when she had looked back a few minutes later he was gone. I told her to take me to the room she last saw him in and she did, we cleared out the cops and i told her to leave and then locked the door. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Lucky, my silver and ivory zippo that had a shamrock painted on it and firmly grasped it in my hand and concentrated. The room turned black and sitting on the floor in front of me was Trent, sitting next to him was the boy in my dream and they were talking but I couldn't understand them. The other boy placed his hand on Trents shoulder and pointed up then they vanished and I was thrown back into Mundus. When I awoke with a migraine like a circus pounding in my head i realized the pounding was the cops at the door.

 

I opened it and was greeted by a .357 revolver to my face. All I could say to the little surprise from Detective Lenville was "Honey I'm home?" In probably the snarkiest sarcastic tone I had. She turned be around and placed me in hand-cuffs and read my Mirandas. I didn't try to do anything I needed time to think on what I had saw but then as they walked me towards the door it hit me. I quickly phased the cuffs off my hand and made a break for the back room, Sam right behind me but she was too slow cause when I got in there I looked up and saw the hatch. There was a attic over the room she had been practicing in. I grabbed the fireplace poker and pushed it open and just as they tackled me Trents voice could be heard. "Mom!" Much to Lenville's amazement Trent stuck his head through the hole and a pair of uniformed officers helped him down. Much to say my little stunt landed me 24 in the local jail but I needed the time to think anyway.

 

While sitting next to a fat guy named Bubba and a drunk african-american guy named Charlie I pondered the Boy and the poltergeist and my dream. After getting nowhere I was released and had to catch the bus home. On the bus I saw a woman yelling at her son for being bad and the look on his face matched that of Trent in my little vision at the clients house. It hit me like a ton of bricks and when I finally got to her place I kicked in the door, as I did a chair whipped at me and all was black. For the record, that is the seventh time i've been knocked out in my many years of living.

 

When I awoke it was nightfall and the house was torn apart, Susan was bound by extension cord and Trent was crying on the floor. Next to him stood the glowing figure of the boy I saw in my dream. Fighting off the headache I realized what the boy really was.

 

"Hello Marcus..." I said to the boy, the boy abruptly turned and glared at me. "Liam McCourt, last I saw of you you had killed me!" Marcus Blacke was a powerful wizard, he went rogue and became a serial killer by using accidents. I hunted him down and he died in an accidental fall off a balcony. I laughed when I realized he wasn't just targeting this boys mom but he was targeting me when I found my house trashed, he tipped off the Wardens and they just sent me a 'stay the hell out of the way' party but without booze and women they just trashed my house like any decent party, which is why I had none. That and it's kinda hard to explain a talking cat to a room full of normal people.

 

'So Marcus, you trapped your spirit back into your childhood as a way to keep from passing on?" I told him, See when you die a violent death due to external influences, aka Suicide, Accidental or Murder. Known as S.A.M. by most. You have to go through a series of personal trials as a spirit before you can pass on, most complete these as they come to terms with things in their life that they regretted but some spirits hold onto this and regress into Geists. Geists come in six classifications, one through six. One being the average spirit. Mostly harmless little interaction with Mundus, then there are Fives and Sixes, Fives are powerful poltergeists that are very capable of interacting with Mundus but mostly harmless then there is Sixes. Sixes are spirits so malevolent that they are capable and most of the time will injure or even kill the living. "You performed these things during the New Moon because that is the best time to draw energy from the living, you masked them as Poltergeist modus operandi so the investigator would see them as accidents or explainable. But you failed in one regard. You were doing things Sixes do not Fives that is why the Wardens took interest and that brought in me...which was the last thing you wanted wasn't it?" I said as I waited for the inevitable array of monologging that these dark wizards love to do.

 

Marcus smiled "Yes I did, very clever but you were the only one to ever best me. You Half-Dead are just another obstruction in my path to mortality again." With that Marcus just laughed, Trent cried harder trying to waken his mother. "Listen to me Trent, you have to stand up to him. He's formed a link with you and the more you fear him the more powerful he becomes!" Trent looked up at me and then nodded. Marcus laughed harder as his body slowly began to materialize and finally he became solid. "Now crybaby to deal with you" Marcus said as he turned only to take a fist to the cheek that sent him flying, a large door materialized and opened, inside it was a swirling black vortex that sucked Marcus inside and closed, it then vanished and Susan awoke. Relieved this was over I helped her up.

 

She went on to ask what happened and I told her she passed out from stress and That I solved the poltergeist problem. When I left with the second check I headed for the bar and a very tall glass of scotch. I will admit in closing this little journal entry that Susan had a nice ass...

Edited September 30, 2012 by Macman253