FULL BLEED: LET'S FAKE BELIEVE

So as you all know, I'm working on a Kickstarter campaign for the next Hazeland book, a collection of stories under the name Fake Believe. They're all standalone, though they fit into the greater network of the Hazeland books. In that, Fake Believe makes a good jumping-on point. If you like what you read here, then you can always go pick up the first two books (and indeed, there's deals to do so in the pledges for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign, along with some other fun tiers.)

Here's that link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highway62/fake-believe. It goes live 3/27 but there's a quick preview and a sign-up link to be notified when the campaign goes live.

Here's a quick breakdown/preview of the stories themselves. Stick around for a lengthy preview of one of the stories themselves, "Suicide Jewelry" for those of you following along at home.

A Crate of Bottle-Fed Ghosts A veteran returns to his childhood neighborhood finding it gone but for one house and the ghosts within it need his help.

Cut/Paste

A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown and the fabricated and inhuman residents moving in.

Third Saturdays

A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a place that might not even exist.

In What Furnace

A ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland and instead finds something terrible that wants to be set free.

Suicide Jewelry

An industrial/goth singer flees to LA and finds that someone just like her already blazed that trail and haunts her assumed identity.

Club Closed: Private Party

Two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night and find a witch in need of entertainment.

The Cinderhaus

A book forger attends an auction where her career is one of the featured items.

Okay, there's the basics. Here's the meaty preview. This is from "Suicide Jewelry" which is one of my favorite stories in the book. Yeah, it's hard to choose. All of them do different things that I like. In particular, "Club Closed: Private Party" which recasts one of my favorite characters in a new light.

---

SUICIDE JEWELRY

The first thing Lucy did when she got to Los Angeles was to fix her lipstick. She lay down on the sun-warm sidewalk and got in close to the hubcap of the parked Porsche to check her face in the distorted reflection. The black and severe hair still caught her by surprise. Her lipstick matched at least. She worked it a moment, filling out the curve in the pitted chrome. People flowed around her without even a perceptible change in pace as easily as a river around rock.

Most of them.

“Do you mind?” growled a pinched biddy dressed for Sunday.

Maybe it even was. Lucy wasn’t sure.

“Not at all,” she replied without taking her eyes off the warped reflection. She closed her lipstick and pocketed it.

Sunday schoolmarm harrumphed a reply that sounded more like dry phlegm and trotted off. Lucy stuck out her tongue to the reflection, almost touching the hubcap with the tip. Then she coughed at the smell of the city and gutter damp with something that couldn’t have been rain this time of year. She pushed up off the sidewalk and dusted her palms clean, clutched close by the reckoning that she didn’t know anyone over here. There had been rumors that folks came to LA, sure. There was always talk about it. Rochelle and her boyfriend swore they’d make it someday. Not so much as a postcard or word up the grapevine about her. Or anyone else who’d left home to come here. In more than a year.

But at least they’d done more than talk about going and actually did it. More juice in that than a hundred brave words over beers and Stoli. They’d done it.

Just like Lucy Emerson AKA Lorissa Licht had. Too many nights in shitty bars screaming her lungs out backed up by a band that was barely more enthusiastic than the drunks and deadites in the crowd. All the lights and fog in the world couldn’t make people care, so she saved on stage effects by using those caged work lights, scattering them so they burned there like fallen and guttering comets. She held one in her off hand to light her face from below and turn her mouth not into an instrument but an opening to a smoking Gehenna.

It had almost worked, too. She’d built a small following that would crowd the stage no matter what dingy dive she played in and she’d played them all, gotten stiffed in them all, barely clawed past the hollow gaze of the folks who’d given up life to drink there.

But she wasn’t going to get any further than that unless she struck out for bigger places. Or at least other territories with unknown pleasures.

Trouble with the unknown was being unsure where to start. The crowd continued past her and she took their measure, eyeing the street fashions and how clothes hung differently, folks clutching cups of fast food restaurants she mostly recognized, but didn’t quite remember. Unfamiliar cars sputtered and groaned past her on Broadway, all of them spitting out smog and she wondered how anyone could actually live like this.

She was going to have to learn how to. It almost was home but not, the differences catching her like splinters in her fingertips. She looked at the reflection of her now-raven hair in a square-cut bob, but for a fingers-width that fell past her shoulders out front. She looked at it and was caught outside of her own expectation.

“Right. This is who I am,” she said to the reflection. Then she fixed on the silhouetted figure who hovered off to her left. He’d been standing and watching as long as she had herself. Only his eye was hungrier, more approving but somehow even less believing.

She’d figured there were going to be weirdos but had hoped she’d have gotten more than five minutes before she’d had to deal with one. Without thought, she squared her shoulders under the surplus trench coat she’d dyed bruise purple. The words kein zuhause außer hier were painted out in tight blocks of white strokes. She tightened her fist over a set of keys that she’d never use again.

“Look,” Lucy said. She turned in place and faced the guy “Go find someone else to creep on!”

He didn’t take the step back like she’d wanted. He was motionless but for his eyes. They went wide and green like he’d seen Marilyn Monroe walking the streets in a nighty. Shock overpowered everything else, but she saw a flash of an abstract sort of wanting something beneath it. Maybe not for her exactly, but for a lost something. Brief and terrible recognition took over after, coming through like makeup now wiped off.

“Oh my god.” Baby mice weren’t as quiet.

“What?” She tightened her fist and shook it a little.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a dead ringer for Lux Nova, the singer?” He said the name like it was one Lucy should have known. But there were lots of singers out there. That’s what kept things going – an endless supply of girls willing to do whatever to get ahead.

“I’d be lying if I said ‘yes.’” She shifted her weight but did not release the keys from her right hand. “Who is Lux Nova?”

“Was,” he said.

Lucy imagined that he was dressed fashionably, leather suit jacket but no fringe or beadwork, turtleneck sweater that was too tight and pants that were the same. She thought she saw a scar or welt atop the collar on his left side. It looked itchy, like something picked at and never let to heal.

“She was almost a big thing.”

“That’s too bad. She quit singing?” Lucy tried not to think too deeply about quitting herself.

“She, ah, quit everything.” His expression went from reckoning to a over-cooked dread, graying his complexion.

“You talk like you knew her.”

“I thought I did,” he said. “Toby.” He extended his hand. “Toby Farmer.”

Lucy looked at the hand as if it were holding a still-gasping goldfish in it.

“I’m very sorry I stared at you. That was rude.” He pulled his hand back, dead slow. “I was just caught off-guard.”

Lucy let go of the keys and stuck her hand out where his had been. “Lucy Emerson. I just got into town and am wiped out. I didn’t mean to snap.”

“You meant to, but it’s okay. I deserved it.” He took her hand and his was cool and dry. “It’s good to meet you.”

“Same.” She withdrew and wondered what his story was. He vibed producer or agent, but not one of the successful ones. One of the hungry ones who breathed in air and breathed out promises. But Lucy could breathe promises too. And it might be good to have a friend in a strange town. At least for a little while. “Look, you can make it up to me if you want. Buy me a drink?”

Roaring and backfiring, a couple of bikes rolled down the boulevard, bearded and grimy leather-clad riders whooping wildly. Toby didn’t even flinch at it.

“Yeah, sure. The Criss-Cross is right across the intersection there.” He pointed past a tall, adobe-colored brick building older than Lucy’s grandparents, to a corner lot across Second Street and a once-tony bar that had seen better days.

Lucy though about day drinking and must have made a face unconsciously. She mopped up her expression.

He shrugged, all wobbly. “I mean, it’s a little early, but yeah. Yeah.”

“Delightful.” She patted the fender of the Porsche and said “Thanks for being my mirror,” then followed Toby over to the blinking red neon of the Criss-Cross Club.

Lux Nova was a singer who’d made the rounds, going through backing bands like Janis Joplin had gone through whiskey bottles, draining them dry and tossing the empties into a pile that littered the better part of Sunset Boulevard. That was, if you took Toby’s recounting at face value. Lucy didn’t have a good reason not to. When he talked about Nova, he wasn’t talking about an act that he’d lost by getting signed to a better, more-connected agent. He’d lost a limb, just managed to hide that fact until he got a couple old-fashioned in him. And the bartender had poured like he was mad at the boss.

Nova finally made a connection with a band and reworked material, somewhere between punk anthems spat in the face of lined cops and liturgical material meant to harrow and kiss damnation. She would transfix. She would shatter. And if she felt it that night, she’d rebuild all that was broken. But it wasn’t a thing that could be put on vinyl or tape. It was all magic that happened live. Nova burned like her name and you can’t hold onto something burning for long, Toby joked.

Then he breathed in through broken ribs like he was about to spit blood. In the red cast of the little bar, his tears were sanguine. Lucy pulled out a ragged and lace-trimmed handkerchief, usually a stage prop, and wiped his face with it. If he knew he was crying, he wouldn’t admit it.

“She was really something, huh?”

“More like everything. I just wish… I didn’t know how troubled she was. Or I didn’t want to admit it.”

“So, what, she left? She signed to Harper or maybe Death?”

Toby blinked. “What?”

“You know, another label. I figured…”

“Oh no. Lux Nova killed herself.”

“Holy shit.”

“Sorry. She OD’d,” he added as an afterthought or correction, dabbing over the misstatement. “I knew she used even after I gave it up. I just didn’t know how bad it was. Heroin.”

“Sure,” Lucy lied. “I just thought coke was what the cool kids were doing.”

Toby shook his head without laughing. “Lux didn’t do anything because it was cool. She had a mission. Think she was saving souls one night at a time. Just she needed to work on hers and never found the time or inclination.”

Lucy put her hand atop his, resting on his thigh. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I figured you were maybe her agent or something. Nothing more than professional.”

He swirled the last of the bourbon-washed ice in the glass where it looked like molten glass cooling. Then he drained the drink and chewed the ice thoughtfully.

“I didn’t either. Not until she was gone.” He flexed his fingers under hers.

“Did it happen long ago?”

He stiffened like there was something bitter in the ice. “A couple years. There are people who still scrawl her name on lampposts and call in for ‘Never Forget’ on KXLU or even KROQ. We got that single out the week before she threw it all away.” His hand tensed into a fist and he shot forward, leaning on the bar hard. “Hey, can we get another round here?”

The bartender watched him with his good eye and took a moment to get moving.

“Please,” Toby added. “Just, please.”

The bartender nodded and grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle like he was going to perform some violence with it.

“I better not,” Lucy said.

“Then watch me drink. Or just talk to me while I do.”

“You know I don’t just go into bars with dudes, right?”

“Don’t worry. Neither do I.”

The fresh drinks arrived, looking more like grenadine in the jukebox light.

“So,” Toby asked after a hefty belt. “What do you do, anyways?”

She shrugged and shrank in place. “Do? I just got here. I don’t have a job.”

“Yeah, but you planned to have one, right?” His skin glowed, but at least he wasn’t weeping. “Movies? TV? Dancer?”

Lucy tried not to be hurt by him not asking whether she wanted to sing or not, especially after talking about Lux Nova for the last hour and she’d been thinking about how Lux was doing exactly what Lucy had been trying to. Like there was a space already cut out for her, a road already paved and waiting, just needing someone to walk it.

“I’m a singer,” she said, after taking a hit from the drink. It went down hot.

“You’re a what?” Toby asked, leaning in like the bar noise was too much for her to get over.

“A singer,” she said. Louder this time.

“What?” he all but yelled.

“A SINGERRRRR!” Lucy projected the shout, filling her chest with it, not for tone-shaping, but for raw output.

He laughed and then she did, both slipping out of themselves for a moment. She was just someone new in town and he was just a guy who’d remembered to be nice to her. After being weird to her, but at least he’d tried.

“Yeah, I figured you were. Just wanted to hear you project.” He took his drink to half with a slug. “What sort of stuff you sing? You don’t look ratty enough to do punk. Not angular enough for new wave.”

“Maybe I’m just dressed to be out and not for the goddamn stage.”

“You wanna be famous, you know you gotta be ready to do the stage face all the time. You gotta put it on and keep it on. So what do you wanna do?”

“Scary shit.” Lucy rolled the drink between her two open palms, welling the condensation at its base. “I wanna be a vampire.”

She snatched up the drink and took it down then wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. “I want to shout the truth in someone’s face and scare them to death with it.”

“Tall order.”

“I’ve gotten the regulars at the Nile Club to give up seats they’ve held since the bar opened. I figure that’s a start.”

“Maybe it is at that.” He studied his drink but did not finish it.

***

Toby popped the cassette into the deck at the back of the rehearsal space. The walls were ratty off-white, probably had never been clean, scuffs and marks worn into the paint by frustrated or bored or triumphant musicians over the space’s history.

“You own this place or what?” Lucy asked, setting her bag down. It lay on the industrial carpet like something coughed up by the sea.

“My friends Gary and Ty use this for their band. And I know the guy who runs the place.”

“They’re not gonna mind?” Lucy asked. “I don’t want ‘em just bursting in in the middle of this.”

“I’m not asking you to take off your clothes, Lucy. I just want to hear you sing.”

Something turned around inside her, whispering that this was a mistake and she knew it was. The same thing that had talked her out of shows in the past or even coming out of that little room in the big house she’d rented. The little voice that said no.

“You wish.”

“Figure of speech.” The hatch on the tape machine closed with a plastic CLACK. “I’m not going to mess with the settings or anything. Just go over and let it rip.” He pointed at the stand-up microphone.

Lucy slid the mic down to her level and stood in front of it and froze. She tried to think about what to sing that would make an impression that she could even remember after a couple drinks on an empty stomach. Her skin crawled with worry. She tried to climb over the no in her mind.

“We’ve got all afternoon.” He was joking and not.

She breathed loud enough that it was probably going right to tape, then she let her breaths get deeper, like she was falling not into sleep, but nightmare. Each one ended a little more ragged, with a twitching at the end. Then she drew in a final breath and held it.

That thing you gave me

Won’t ever forget

That thing, going to the grave

I’ll always regret

I’ll always regret

I’ll always regret

Then her voice rose to a scream, one unfamiliar even to herself and she spat the rest of the lines to her own song “Black Gifts” but like she’d never sung it before. She filled it with fear. Here she’d just come to this stupid city with no friends and no plan, desperate to go anywhere other than where she’d been, to leave the familiar behind. She breathed and shouted her song into something new, soaring then growling then begging then holding a blade that could cut through anything and that blade was her voice.

Lucy finished the song and stood there panting for breath even as the back of her throat was bubbling hot tar. She’d given something that she didn’t even know she had.

She looked up over at him and he stared back at her, eyes wide as if he’d been walking through a glittering trainwreck, energy and power and shattering devastation unmaking a thing and leaving beautiful debris in its wake.

“I might’ve fucked up the words some,” she said with a soft rasp. “I just lost myself there.”

“I’d say more like you found yourself.” He stabbed the controls with an extended finger. “Holy shit. Where’d you say you were from?”

“I didn’t.” And she didn’t have an easy way to say it, either, so she left it dead.

“Well, you’re here. And if you can sing like that four nights a week, maybe we can get that somewhere.”

“LA is just fine for a start.”

“LA is not going to be ready for what hit it.” He looked at her, flensing past the skin and going deeper.

“You got a stage name?”

“I’d gone under Lorissa Licht. Kinda goth-y.” She cleared her throat and tried to hum some of the numbness out.

“And?” The expression on his face bled to bored.

She tried to hide behind the mic stand. “Well, that was it. I was worried about the material more than the whole persona.”

“Hmm.” He hit the eject on the tape and maybe it was all over just like that.

“You’re acting like you’ve got a better idea.”

“Maybe I do.” The cassette went into a case and then into a jacket pocket as easily as a lost business card.

“Well, what kind of idea?”

“You know why people dress up and put on makeup and do their hair weird, right? All that punk stuff?” He crossed his arms before him.

“To stand out. To be individual.”

His head shook slowly. “That’s not enough. It’s to make an image. To pretend to be someone else, something else, way bigger than themselves. Then the audience tacks the legend onto that. Ain’t nobody wants to build a myth on just a regular Joe or Jane. They want something bigger. They crave it. They think they can control it, not knowing they themselves made it.”

“Okay, mister psychology. So I work on an image.” She waved her hand from her hair down. “I’m more than halfway there. And I’m not even in makeup.”

“Right. But who are you going to make yourself up to be?”

“I dunno. I’ll figure something out.”

“How about we make you up so that nobody could look away.” He stepped in closer, quicker than she could react. “Then people drop their defenses. They let you in. And then you can melt them with that goddamn voice of yours.” His eyes rested on her throat.

“Okay, but who would that be?”

“This might sound weird, but how about a revival act?”

She shook her head, not getting it yet.

***

Lucy had thought that he’d just been shining her on, that whole thing about Lux Nova and her being dead ringers. But once back at his place in the lower reaches of the Hollywood hills, looking through the collection of flyers and photos and posters he’d kept from managing Lux, the resemblance was more than casual. It clawed its way over to uncanny. Every page turned chiseled out another little detail that Lucy couldn’t shake.

Lux Nova could live again. Why not? What hell could hold her? What heaven would keep her prisoner and not let the destroying angel fly free? The legend wrote itself and ran the headlines.

Lucy traced Lux’s profile in an 8 by 10 glossy and a chill crawled down her spine on a thousand tiny little legs, each of them topped by a little prickling hook that caught and dug. She wanted to throw the book in the fireplace. She wanted to keep looking. Another page turned and there Lux was, only half-draped in flowing white cloth, one breast exposed as she grasped a spear and brandished it across her frame. It was more than the face. Lucy recognized the body and all its markers, but for a weird scar a few inches below her own navel.

She had a cluster of moles across the small of her back that she was acutely conscious of and thankful that no pictures seem to have captured Lux from that angle.

Toby came in with two glasses of wine to join the bagged hamburgers that sat on the low table before her.

“Red for beef, right? I’m sure the burgers are mostly beef.”

“I never drink… wine,” She said with an accent then a giggle, mostly to distract herself from the weird sensation of seeing pictures that could have been her being the performer she could have been if only she was brave enough. The space between her and Lux disappeared for a moment and Lucy felt prickly dry ice fog and the shouts of fans who demanded damnation and release.

She caught herself with a start and grabbed the glass, taking a big enough drink to make her gasp.

“Hey, you okay?” Toby asked.

“Yeah, sorry.” She coughed onto the back of her hand then rubbed it against her t-shirt. “I’m just really tired. Been a longer day than I thought.”

He sat on the couch next to her and it creaked audibly. “Estate sale find. I just love old stuff, odd stuff. Got a history.”

“Might even be haunted?” She took a second drink, this one more measured.

“No such thing as ghosts. Not even in LA. But hey, if you can convince someone to pay more because something’s haunted? That’s all right by me. Elvis acts do big money. People want to see the same thing remade over and over.”

She stared at the page open before her and ate the image up, eyes blue and wide. “You really think that I can do this? I mean, the voice stuff, I can sing like that 45 you played.” She tapped the picture with Lux and the spear, Lux the Impaler, and sighed. “I don’t know about this.”

He slipped a laugh. “You’re kidding me, right? It’s like I’m sitting right next to her again, looking at you.”

Lucy felt herself freeze, despite the bolts of wine. “You and she weren’t…”

Toby caught himself between breaths. “Not like you think.” He took a very focused sip of wine and tilted the glass back, legs sketched out in the kitchenette fluorescents. “Loving her was like loving a tornado. Good way to get ground into the dirt.”

“But you did anyways, right?”

“Yeah. I did.” He sought out her eyes. “This fucks things up, huh?”

“What things? I’m not planning on sleeping with you. You’re cute, but don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Even wanting to be around me, much less letting me manage you.” He set the glass down roughly but didn’t spill it.

“No, that’s fine, Toby. I’m just trying to get a handle on this.” She opened the bag and pulled out the first of the foil-wrapped hamburgers, still warm but cooling quickly. She held it out, waiting for him to reach out. “But you bought drinks and this fancy dinner and you at least act well-connected enough to fool me.”

“I appreciate your confidence.” He took the food from her and she reached back into the bag immediately after.

She waved around with her free hand. “I don’t know this whole world,” she said as she pulled out her dinner and tore into the foil. Something told her that she shouldn’t have said it so she focused on the fast food.

“What?”

She took a bite, unable to wait any longer, not remembering how long ago her last meal had been. “LA. The music scene.” The bite went down all corners somehow.

His expression softened some. “Okay. Hey, it’s okay to be worried about this. It’s a world of difference going from… where did you say you came from?”

“Lawrence, Kansas.” It was a lie but only she knew that.

“Holy cow. Yeah. That’s nowhere.”

“Hey. There’s a college there. It’s not all wheat farms.”

“Sure.”

“There’s soybeans too. And some corn, despite what Iowa would tell you.” She took another quick gulp of wine. She tried to keep the lies neatly stacked.

“Okay, so it’s a place.” He leaned in some. “But it’s not LA, is it?”

“Nope. After being here a bit, I can say that it’s like no place I’ve ever been. And, I’m sorry if I sound like an ungrateful asshole. This all just happened kinda fast. I mean, I was on the Greyhound this morning, stopping in Vegas I think. I’m barely caught up on that.” She stretched the tension out of her back, torqued in ways that she didn’t know had been possible.

He watched the quick contortions, maybe calculating the curve of skin and flesh beneath the ragged black and denim.

“I’m not ready to deal with being Lux Nova and my damage and maybe making your dream come true.”

“Look, let’s just do no pressure, okay? Sleep on it and we figure stuff out.” He finally took a bite into the drippy cheese and burger.

Lucy chewed the bite in her mouth, finally tasting it. She nodded and swallowed. “You know a place where I can stay?”

“Other than here.”

She nodded. “No pressure. You just said it yourself.”

“You don’t believe I’m a perfect gentleman?”

“There aren’t any,” she said grimly. “Not where I came from and I’m sure as hell not here.”

He leaned back on the couch and it creaked like a lab door from a horror movie. “Good. You’re getting smart. Even if you walked right into a bar with a guy you didn’t know today.”

“I didn’t drink that much.”

“And you ended up in his apartment.”

The food boiled in her stomach. He was right. And she’d just fallen right for it. “Not for the night. Besides, he’s kinda cute. Even if he’s a little broken up over falling in love with a genuine star. Just what I saw in the photos gave me chills.”

“You got no idea. And I’ll tell you a little more. After I call my sister make sure you can crash at her pad.” He watched for a response. She saw that out in the open, that he’d let her right off the hook she’d climbed onto.

“That’d be very kind.”

“You say that before seeing the place. It’s downtown. I mean, worse than you’ve seen already. But she’s cool.”

“I don’t know how to repay you for any of this.”

“I’ll think of something.” Then he smiled at her.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “I was almost believing you were a nice guy, then you pull this.”

“Okay, twenty percent.” His smile went billboard bright. It was a good one, charming and disarming enough that Lucy wondered if she was wrong or right about him or even wanted to be. The answer was definitely yes.

“Standard terms?”

“Standard as it comes.” He stood up, leaving the half-eaten burger on the table, far away from any of the precious memorabilia and walked over to the phone hanging on the wall with its weirdly coiled cable.

---

Sure there's more. Lots more. But I already give away enough fiction for free here.

I'll be doing another couple posts on this, but I wanted to get a quick preview and landing page up to direct folks to. Don't worry, I'm not done talking about it. Heck, I'll probably talk about it until I'm sick of it, but hopefully not you.