The Pattern Mafia
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It’s a filthy day. Rain hisses against the metal doors of the garage and a pool of water is creeping underneath and spreading out over the concrete floor. The immaculate Café Racer that stands in a sacred space of its own is out of reach of the slow tide for now. The figure seated at the bench is oblivious to the weather. It's bent low over the Weber carburettor on the battered, vinyl-covered surface of the bench, spot-lit by an old black Anglepoise lamp. The gnarled hands of the old man with the cockatoo crest tremble as he attempts to insert a bronze needle into the aluminium bore. A thin rollup is balanced on the edge of the bench top, the trail of cigarette smoke drifting up towards the brick arch of the garage. An old Marshal PA speaker, hot-wired to the output jack of an ancient white iPod, still makes a crude jukebox playing 'Summertime Blues' with no irony at all. The old man swears softly, sits upright, runs his hands through his grey Teddy boy meets Billy Idol crest, and coughs introspectively. He clenches and unclenches his trembling hand, picks up the thin rollup, and takes a deep draw.
‘I'll get the bloody thing in this time, Betsey love,’ he tells his bike.
There comes the rattle of a Hackney Cab and the squeal of brakes. A cab door slams shut, and a hand bangs on the roller shutter doors as the cab rattles away.
‘Doors open,’ Ed the Ted calls.
Maybe it is the heavy rain. Maybe it is the impatience of the visitor caught in the downpour. The metal door crashes again three times.
‘Sod it,’ Ed swears, gets up from his seat, and marches to the door beside the roller shutters and snatches it open.
It's her.
I scan the office at the back of the garage looking for anomalies, the fine-detail glitches in reality that might confirm my theory one day. So far there are none. There have been none for two years. There have been changes, of course, significant changes. I no longer work for Algebra. I now work at Iron Horse at the bar. I met Miguel all over again at the Horse which was weird. I still meet him there in the morning, at the end of my run. But this time I drink Columbian without the Bourbon. Miguel says nothing about my kidnap by Grey Hair because it never happened. It never does happen. So much has never happened. They, I still don't have a name for them, had made a snip here, a snip there on the meta-graph that is all of reality, and it has evolved into something different.
I didn't know what to expect in London. Perhaps that is why I have taken such a long time to catch the London suborbital. But Ed the Ted is unchanged, a grouchy old man who cannot leave his history behind. So I sit on his office chair with the fungal infection upholstery, holding a tin mug of scalding black Rosy Lea, and he sits on the corpse of his old sofa which, if I am honest, I had hoped had been pruned from reality. But no, here it is, decaying in its corner. He still has maney hair. Still has a rollup glued to his bottom lip. It still scribbles loops in the air when he speaks.
Finally, I ask him the question I have been waiting two years to ask.
‘Is this real?’
‘Far as I can tell. Some things are different, some things the same, but all of it feels kosher.’
‘What's changed for you?’
‘Well, I am fucking alive, aren't I? And my town isn't doing a Nagasaki impression anymore. And the weird bollox, that's gone.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Yeah. First thing I did after checking out the Bear. Drove up the Boneyard and dug the bastard up. Just metal now, no weird bollox.’
I sip at my black tea. It is still too hot to drink, but the pain adds another grain of reality to the mix. Maybe it is real. Maybe we are truly back.
‘You've changed,’ he says, and I shrug.
‘Quiet life. Shitty one roomer downtown and I can't pay the rent but, fuck it, I'm free.’
Skeleton Man takes a deep draw on his roll-up.
‘Yeah, about that.’
‘What about that?’ I snap. I still have that lightning fast defensiveness. I still struggle with it.
‘The Pattern Mafia asked me to choose who I wanted to help with the job. Well, not so much asked me as picked my brains. Spade is my Army, Charles is my bank. You are my genius. That's why you can remember what happened. We haven't been reformatted like the rest.’
I knew, of course. Young Ed had told me enough to fill in the blanks. I just don't want to believe it. Another reason I have waited so long. Putting off the inevitable. So I ask the question.
‘What job?’
‘They struck a deal with me. A deal I couldn't refuse. They'd reformat the recent past, bring us back from the dead, if we do something for them. Reformatting our part of the universe is a very big deal for them, a bit like being asked to perform a lobotomy on a new-born. I got the impression it was causing them a lot of grief. They were prepared to do that, just the one edit. But it comes with conditions.’
And Skeleton Man looks serious in that hard-eyed motionless way he has, that frozen statue of deep intent.
‘What conditions?’
‘The Pattern Mafia have given us another chance. The Pattern Mafia did something to isolate us from the edit. That's why you and Spade and his Lordship still remember what happened.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Did they give you the cancer speech?’
‘Yes.’
‘We are their cure for cancer.’
I hope you enjoyed ‘The Pattern Mafia'.
Ed the Ted and the Burning Bear Crew will return in the next volume of Tales From the Burning Bear ‘Brahmin Blues.’
Steve Kelsey 1/4/2025
Brahmin Blues
Olivia works as a high-end systems engineer by day, placed in Weiss & Cie by an uber-niche head-hunter Bastard Charles has invented. By night she probes the nine circles of hell that make up Weiss & Cie. Dante would have admired Weiss & Cie’s fabulously engineered malice. Olivia’s real job is ripping off Weiss & Cie in thin slices, filleting the company's servers for the failings that give Charles leverage over the human travesties he blackmails. That includes her, Olivia had realised on that chilly Monday morning…
Very good Steve 😊
That was great! Now switching page on to the Brahmin Blues.