Vincenzi: Resurrections I

For those of you (assuming I actually have readers) who know my character Lorenzo Vincenzi, I'm returning to him. He's going through some transitions. First of all, I'm holding off on the first storyarch in order to jump deeper into his life. For this reason, characters and places get a little different mention--and minimal introduction--in this treatment. Second, I'm trying to incorporate a more "found document" style of writing. The style is premised on finding a jumble of documents and trying to put them together. I'm ditching some of Vincenzi's experience in order to just make him speak for himself rather than through exposition.

So here it is. Ideally, the "clippings" pieces would be formatted differently, spaced further down the page, and even appear scanned or copied through an old Xerox machine with gray background and black text. Not all the dates will be clear for stylistic reasons ("Lo" is increasingly lost in his own sense of time and place) but postmarks, clippings, and other markings at the beginning of a section should "remind" readers where different pieces fit together.

For those who have no idea what this is about, Vincenzi is a detective of sorts. He is enmeshed in a world drawn from weird fiction and, to a lesser extent, horror and SF. Vincenzi is uncertain of the extent to which that is the case. For those aware of the work of HPL, then some names and places will ring familiar. That said, it should not be essential to know and enjoy this work if I do it well.

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Community News, April 4
The Church of the New Life opened its doors Monday in the Delta Plaza shopping center. Sister Veronica Gardner, or Ronnie as she prefers, describes the Church's mission as "ecumenical and nondenominational" and "welcome to all the community." Ms. Gardner invites the entire community to visit and meet with her fellow congregants. Services are held daily at 7:00 am and 9:30 am, though morning prayer begins at dawn to "welcome each beautiful day," according to Ms Gardner. Congregants are encouraged to take part and even lead services once they are familiar. The adjacent suites, formerly a Subway and Curves Weight Loss Center, remain vacant but their "For Lease" signs have been removed.

Journal
April 22
    I manage to forget far more than I remember. For example, I have forgotten why it was a good idea to trap myself in a walk in fridge. If only I were lucky enough to forget why I was interested in this fishy smelling strip mall in the first place. Toni had to throw that duffel on my table like we were old friends, going all the way back to the good ole days or something. She could have been nicer about handing me my own detonator.
    So here I am, waiting for my pen to die or hypothermia to shutdown my fingertips and it is all I can do to not break down that damn steel door taunting me with its facelessness because that horrible scrabbling in the walls sounds like some army of rats waiting for loathsome release. Underneath or behind or somehow nestled in it are enough human words that I suspect someone is outside that faceless steel door, but they might as well be coming from the rats or whatever the hell that is while the refrigerator hums mercilessly, shuffling everything into a deck of malice and misfortune. Then there is the smell of brine and squid and bad fish getting into my coat and nostrils and--God help me--underneath my lids. I find myself scratching at my wrists and stomach so I picked up the pen.
    It isn't helping. Well, not much anyway.
    Okay, it is helping. I stopped there and wanted to wrap myself up in cardboard and through semi-frozen tilapia against the wall to hear something besides the rats and the hum and the muffled voices, so it is probably better that I stick to writing. All I can think of is how I got here so I guess that's all I have to write.
   
    Things haven't been going well. That's no surprise coming from someone writing in his notepad from a fridge he's worried he's going to take the big sleep in. And then there is the third person coming up, so yeah, definitely more on the worst of times than the best of times.
    I've been combing personals in the free papers and Sabine's been printing out more from online. Plenty of calls from and waiting by the payphone nestled in the dingy corner at the Bean. I bet you didn't think there was still a payphone working, but not everyone is so luck to be fiddling with a gewgaw. I rely on paper. Silicon doesn't play nice with me. That's that. When I'm not here, I'm sleeping under a mattress held aloft by books across the street. It isn't falling apart and roaches don't scramble the floor, but it doesn't exactly have the heart that makes it a home. Well, maybe it is underneath the neighbor's floorboards, but I haven't checked.
    Speaking of neighbors, I've given up on the crumpled piles of numbers on the floor hours ago and am nursing a headache of hunger and caffeine and eye strain, when Toni Wilcox strolls in and throws a bag full of lead pipes on the table. That's what it sounds like, anyway.
    I moan and refuse to look up, though I can tell its her from the smell of India ink.
    "Need work?" She asks. My ears perk and my eyes move at a Thomas the Tank Engine pace; slow and steady and like veins full of lactic acid. "Figure out where this came from."
    Just as my eyes are about to meet her's, a scrappy hardbound notebook slides into view. My hands are moving and my eyes are trying to catch up, my last coffee suddenly kicking in. The pages are marked with heavy handed lines that carve into the notebook, leaving valleys in subsequent pages. It has a heady smell like papyrus, like something sturdy that has decayed. Despite the weight of the scribe, the words and symbols are elegant and neat, each letter has been marked several times as if the author needed to cement them to the page.
    There is Latin, Greek, Arabic, German. I can't make sense of most it. Many are similar but seem to be archaic spellings, extra letters and flourishes that demand further attention to discern. I consider that with a meal and some rest I made be able to translate some of it. My Arabic is rusty, but any tool needs oiling now and then. I can pick out German, but there are names for people and places and long, winding sentences that challenge my grammatical construction. I think back to Hans and I reading Kant and him remarking on the ease of it compared to the German; it was all I could do to not tear the pages out one by one.
    The words didn't always make sense when I could put them together. I wondered if it was coded when I read "dreaming death" in Latin and "ineffable names" in Portuguese; but coming upon "pages of flesh" in German I knew that it wasn't. Whatever was written here was as plain as day for the person, or persons capable of reading it.
    I was flipping into the middle of the book when I heard Toni's making a shuffling noise.
    "Go on," she said as I looked up at her. She casually fanned a stack of bills, twenties by the look of them. I don't know how much comes in a stack of bills, but it looked like enough to make a deck of cards out of and that meant one grand at least. The duffel was unzipped just enough so I could see it was filled with bound bricks of cash. My eyes jumped from the duffel, to Toni still running her right thumb over the stack in her left hand, and then to the book. Toni was not smiling. I flipped the next page of the book.
    The page and the next one, and the one after that and after that seemed to describe chaotic but mathematical motion, like the trails of subatomic particles that show up in Discover and Scientific American. They suggested space and size that was both immense and minuscule. Small, tight letters captioned the images, though it was not in anything I recognized.
    Going deeper, the charts were abandoned for architectural designs, annotated with numbers suggesting incredible proportions. A pyramid like a ziggurat was raised as high as a mountain, stooped as they were in the background. Jagged towers suggested impossible angles and heights. A whole city seemed inscribed with cuneiform or some similar early script.
    I was turning one more page when Toni's hand came out and covered mine.
    "Save that for later." She said sternly and removed her hand. She had replaced her book into her duffel, though change sat at the table with two cups of coffee and a three hefty looking pastries with speckled poppy sseds. I knew from better days they were filled with leek, lamb, cheese, and spices; a favorite of Sabine's, and of mine. Toni pushed the plate next to me, a fork and knife balancing on the rim.
    I gingerly raised the fork, looked at Toni, then set it down and picked up one of the pastries. I bit into the flaky crust and smelled the spiced lamb underneath, my teeth collided with a hefty potato, and my tongue burned at the heat. It was gone in a moment and I ate the next just somewhat more slowly. The first two sat like billiard balls in my stomach. I straightened up, picked up the fork in left hand and the knife in my right and neatly nibbled on the last pastry.
    "What's the job?"
    "Finding out where this came from," she slid the now closed notebook close to the duffel bag.
    "You don't know?"
    "That's the job."
    I swallow the last of my pastry. As it joins its comrades, I reflect on how glad I am that I ate before saying, "Well, let's get started."