Rare, p.1
Rare, page 1
RARE
PATRICK DE MOSS
Copyright © 2025
PATRICK DE MOSS
RARE
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
PATRICK DE MOSS
First Edition 2025
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Art by Stefano Buro
Interior Book Design by Walt’s Book Design
www.waltsbookdesign.com
THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT
Words and Music by BOBBY TROUP
© 1956 (Renewed) EMI ROBBINS CATALOG INC.
Exclusive Print Rights Controlled and Administered by ALFRED MUSIC
All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC
For my mother, Linda Routledge.
A Beatles Fan through and through.
Miss you, ma.
More than words can ever seem to say.
Table of Contents
Part I
Intro
Chapter 1
Of Death and Emma
Chapter 2
Of Gwendolyn and the Looking Glass
Chapter 3
Of Emma and Death
Chapter 4
Of 4949-C
Chapter 5
Of a Balmoral Murder
Chapter 6
Of Grandmother’s House
Chapter 7
Of A Kind of Darkness
Chapter 8
Of Lynn Marshall
Chapter 9
Of a Stranger’s Shadow
Chapter 10
Of A White Witch
Chapter 11
Of A Dream of Thanksgiving
Chapter 12
Of Leave-taking
Part II
The Road
Chapter 1
A Hollow Woman
Chapter 2
Fresh Starts and False
Chapter 3
To Wear Flowers in Your Hair
Chapter 4
To Grandmother’s House
Chapter 5
Into the Woods
Chapter 6
Roadhouse Blues
Chapter 7
Capitol Men
Part III
The Duchy and the Law
Chapter 1
Hard Dealings
Chapter 2
Of Dragons
Chapter 3
New Arrivals
Chapter 4
Counsel in the Courtyard
Chapter 5
Once Upon a Time in New York
Chapter 6
The Huntsman
Chapter 7
The Road to Devil Peak
Chapter 8
Nightfall
Chapter 9
For Keeps
Chapter 10
The White Witch
Chapter 11
Desperate Times
Part IV
The Cities on The Plain
Chapter 1
A Study in Scarlett
Chapter 2
Gilded Cages
Chapter 3
The Trial
Chapter 4
A Deal with the Devil
Chapter 5
Law and Order
Chapter 6
Cadence
Part V
Into the Night
Chapter 1
Voices in the Dark
Chapter 2
Ghost Town
Chapter 3
Danse Macabre
Chapter 4
Further Into Darkness
Chapter 5
A Song of Rust and Ashes
Chapter 6
The Spirit of Detroit
Chapter 7
The Dream of Detroit
Part VI
A Song In New York
Chapter 1
New York
Chapter 2
The Last Man Standing
Chapter 3
Death and the Maiden
Chapter 4
A Knight by the Park
Chapter 5
Outro
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Patrick de Moss
Part I
Intro
Chapter 1
Of Death and Emma
S
ometimes people just die, and that is the start of a story, not the end.
At first, there hadn’t been anything wrong. Then Gramma Kathy started getting headaches. She would drink coffee, she would take Tylenol, she would go to sleep in the afternoons, but the sleeping and the Tylenol and the coffee didn’t do anything for the headaches. The headaches came every day, merciless with their hammers, and she said the room would get fuzzy, would warp, and then she would go and lie down. Where before, Emma would come home after school to spend some time with her gramma, cleaning up dishes or watching old movies together in the small living room, now she returned to an absolutely quiet house as her gramma slept in the other room and the hammers fell and fell.
She started to get angry, Gramma Kathy did, all the time. At first Emma blamed the headaches, and then she started to blame her own mom and dad, and then she started to blame herself for the rages Gramma Kathy had about how her grandchild, how her only child, didn’t do anything around the house, and how they were lazy, and how they were good for nothing. A little part of Emma wondered if someone had put a spell over her grandmother, had somehow bewitched her, had turned her angry and confused. And then one morning, after a bang and a clatter, Emma came out to find her gramma Kathy on the kitchen floor, twitching, convulsing, hands opening and closing, moaning, “Gaaa. Gaaah. Gah.”
It wasn’t a spell, no magic of any kind at all. It was a tumor, so they said, right there in the middle of her head—or so they said—and the tumor was quite large. So they said.
Emma’s parents did what they thought was best. They made sure Gramma Kathy was comfortable. They sent out messages for hope, of course, and they posted on all their social media for goodwill and thoughts and prayers, of course, but mostly for help getting through this difficult time. A doctor was willing to perform a “very difficult” operation, but they needed to raise the money. They had donations from a GoFundMe and from all their friends and from all their family. They scrimped, they saved, and one day, they sent Gramma Kathy to the hospital. They prayed; they even prayed.
They went into a chapel, a little chapel inside the hospital, and kneeled in a small room with only a glass bowl full of water in the center, and though Emma had no idea how to pray, what to ask a random deity for or how to even go about the asking, they sat in silence all the same for quite a long time. Emma thought only about Gramma Kathy, about Gramma Kathy getting better.
Everything was fine, afterward. A miracle, they said. Almost full recovery. The thoughts and well-wishes had worked, they said. The prayers had worked, her parents’ more religious friends said. God wasn’t through with old Gramma Kathy yet.
And then Gramma Kathy was hit by a car on her way home from the store. A year later.
Even now, Emma couldn’t remember much of anything between the afternoon she got home from school and heard the news and the funeral. Days passed in between; they always do. But for her, the time vanished, and a long white fuzz, like a veil or a cloud, hung over those days.
The funeral she remembered by its handshakes. People wanted to shake her hand or to embrace her, and she remembered saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” over and over again, until the words lost their meaning in their repetition. Thank you thank you thankyou. Thankyou. Thankyou. Until they ceased being words, thank you. Until they were only the soft sounds an animal makes. Thank you. While the animal circles a room, ’round and ’round it. Thank you. Looking for a place to hide. Thank you. Because something (thank you) has gone terribly horribly wrong inside it (thank you). And every touch thankyou pushes against the hurt thankyou. But the animal is too hurt to even bare its teeth thankyou.
I’m sorry for your loss—
Thank you.
Everyone was in black. A black car came. They rode up to the cemetery and the sun was quite bright and it was mild out and they put the urn they said Kathy was in into the open maw of a concrete box, and then they closed the door.
Her mom cried, but Emma didn’t really notice it. She was still wishing she could crawl someplace to hide, and she didn’t quite know what to do. And though they watched that black car turn down the drive from the cemetery in the early spring afternoon, the car had somehow also set itself up inside Emma’s head. A black car driving very slowly, very steadily. The car made its way through her head in the days after the funeral. Sometimes she was in the back seat of that car, and sometimes she just watched it run through her head.
The thought-car would pick her up in the morning on her way to school, and she would stare down at her shoes as it drove along. Sometimes it was just the feeling of being weighed down, but weighed down on a comfortable seat. At other times, the thought-car wanted to take her places; the thought-car wanted to show her things. And what it showed her, where that thought-car took her, was never very kind. But at every stop along the thought-car’s route they would stay a long, long time.
The thought-car would take her back to the hospital, to the first day after the surgery when they could see Gramma Kathy. Gram would open her eyes, would reach out, and Emma would take her hand. Emma could still feel that hand in hers. But then the car would drive non-stop to the afternoon when she heard about the accident, and then it would go back, circle ’round the block, to the place her gram showed her how to shake it up, baby in the kitchen, doing the twist and shout, and then it would go straight to Kathy doing another dance, a hideous dance on the kitchen floor, twitching, not singing c’mon, c’mon, baby now, but only “Gaaah. Gahhh. Gah.”
That black car, once it got started, sure could take her everywhere.
Things were happening with her parents, between her parents. Emma could hear those things happening from the cool, dark interior of that thought-car, but they were very, very far away. At night, in bed, she could hear those things happening, but the sounds were a far-off thunderstorm. There were bottles now in the kitchen where there hadn’t been bottles before.
The door to the house they had shared with her gramma, that house they had moved into when Things Went Bad for the economy when Emma was only six, that front door was opening and shutting more and more often than it had ever done before. Those openings would be the beginning of a thunderstorm, and the slamming of the door was always the storm’s end. But the sounds and their meaning were beyond Emma at the time. The black car had her very firmly in its grip, and dreadful as it was to be in that car as it ran calmly along the horrible road upon which it took her, it was also blessedly quiet inside. It was so comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that Emma started to sleep in more than she should. Normally, her gram would have been there to wake her up, to let her know it was time for school. But there was no Gramma Kathy anymore, and for three days Emma slept in, and so she missed school.
Her mother came in one night to ask her what was wrong. Emma couldn’t tell her mother about the car. That dreadful, comfortable car. Her mouth was all closed up, she couldn’t make a sound, and the black car came by again the next day, and in she went.
How long was it between that night her mother came in to find out what was wrong and the day they moved out? Emma couldn’t say. The calendar could say it was March at one point and then it was June, but where was the time between? Most days, Emma would go to school and draw circles in her notebook, long endless spirals moving in and in and in toward a point that got very dark, and then got bigger and bigger, a black hole on the page, sucking in all the white space around it. Then school would be over and she would be home. But June was when she looked up to find that somehow the thing that had been happening between her mom and her dad was now over and done, that the house had been sold. They were moving boxes into an apartment just outside San Diego, and her dad was not going to be moving in with them.
In the car outside the building, while men with boxes came and went, Emma’s mother wanted to know if she would be okay. That was the funny part of it. From the outside, Emma was still able to do things. She was still able to put on clothes; she was still able to walk out the door, look at people, and say things to them about what was going on. The words she managed to say didn’t seem to cause any concern, none that she could tell, but inside, inside she was in that car in her head more and more often. And that car . . . that car had started to . . . well, to drift.
Emma told her mother she was fine, she would be fine, everything would be fine. She stepped out of the car onto a sidewalk already shimmering with the heat, but the sunshine, the bright brilliant sparkling sunlight was something she couldn’t feel, didn’t know. Her eyes were only on the sidewalk, and all she felt was the heat and the horribleness of it all.
Chapter 2
Of Gwendolyn and the Looking Glass
“I
s that it? That’s all, huh?”
The clock was ticking. The one on the mantelpiece. Most of the time, Gwen never really noticed the golden click of the metronome of the world, but just right now those bright, cheery, metallic ticks hummed through her like the clink of quarters dropping into a hand. The woman—Laura, Gwen said to herself, it’s Laura. Don’t slip up a second time—Laura was leaning forward in her chair like she was trying to peek over a hand of poker, and Gwen was supposed to be looking. To be seeing. She tried to force her inner eye, that ultraviolet chakra, her moneymaker, open, tried to prop it up with some kind of psychic toothpick. But the only thing she could really see was her own hands holding the mirror.
It was black glass, and she was seeing through it darkly, all right, her eyes running along the pyramids, the hieroglyphs, the fancy gold-gilded edges of the plate of glass that sold for maybe thirty bucks online, but a good witch didn’t even need a mirror most of the time. She could see the future in a cup of coffee when she was hot. Gwen was not hot. Not right now.
“A . . . man?” Gwen’s voice cracked upward in a way she didn’t like hearing, an old croak.
“Are you sure it’s a man?” Guarded. Hooded. Closed eyes on her now. Dammit. The whole session was going so horribly bad, so terribly fast, and there was nothing to see. Nothing to just . . . see. Except her own veined hands on the glass. Actually veined. My mother’s hands, my mother’s paper-thin hands gripping the sides of a metal gurney. Jesus, how did that happen? Did she just wake up old this morning? Was that how it worked? As if she had been ensorcelled, had slipped out of her own body in her sleep and drifted into the shell of a seventy-something woman. Focus. Gwen clamped those gnarled hands tighter around the mirror, and tried to yawn her seeing eye open, to let it widen. The blinds were closed against the heat and the summer sun, but the darkness wasn’t helping her keep her mind on the job. It was, to tell the truth, making her sleepy. Chick-chick-chick, the clock whirred. Gwen cleared her throat.
“Does he work with you?”
“I don’t know. Does he?” Laura’s voice was an iron. Flat, grey, and hot.
Gwen bit her lip. “Try and focus, dear.”
“I thought that’s supposed to be your job.”
“Well, it’s . . . it’s a two-way—”
Laura’s phone buzzed.
“A two-way street—”
And buzzed again.
“So, if we both can just—”
“Sorry, I need to take this.” And she was up out of the faded pink plush chair and in the hall in a rustle of jeans and barely concealed disdain. “Go for Laura.”
Gwen let out a slow breath. There was an envelope with a hundred dollars on the table for her, and that money was going-going-gone with every second Laura was on the phone, unless Gwen could reel this all back somehow. She had another appointment in a few hours, and all she wanted to do was curl up under the covers and die.
Is this how the world ends? Not with a bang but a whimper?
“So, are we done here?” came that tight whip-crack of a soon-to-be ex-client’s voice.
“Lindsay—”
“It’s Laura. We’re done here.” Gwen just sat blankly while Laura, Laura, swept the envelope back into her purse and left in a quick clack of heels and bang of door.
Now, it was just Gwen and the chick-tick of the mantelpiece clock. Sometimes you just have bad days.
She needed air. She needed nicotine with that air. She had to get out for just a minute. Out of herself, out of this room that smelled of old person, and that old person was her. Getting older and smelling more like must and spice with every passing, gold-gilded second.
The early summer heat was just starting, and Gwen could have just slid onto the balcony, but the thought of sitting out on the porch on the shady side of the building smacked too much of retirement, so she went right out the front doors of the Grand Balmoral, lighting a cigarette the moment she hit the pavement and waving the smoke away with one hand as she coughed for a ragged second and peered through the plume at the moving van at the curb.
However bad her day was going, maybe it wasn’t half as bad as what was happening out here.
She didn’t have to be psychic to see this was a divorce move. All the bits and pieces of a now-single woman’s life were still in fresh, flatpack boxes; furniture that had never been assembled, boxes filled so quickly they bulged at tops taped frantically down.
