Powers

• VI can only power his abilities by taking from the lives of others.
• He can kill someone and take their visage, even at a distance.
• Blackouts as powers get more powerful?

VI are really his initials – Victor Isaac. The Project just mistook the “VI” for the roman numeral six, and the name stuck.

Visions (memories):

• … I can smell the faint stench of decay on her breath, taste notes of it on my lips. Her hair is plastered across her face as my fingers clench. I imagine the soft silkiness of her neck in my hands… (Finding Elizabeth dead after the attack)
• … I can hear water crashing against the rocks as I watch a white bird spiral into the sun. The water sprays against my face like arterial blood, warm and salty, but I don’t wipe it away… (VI at the English seaside while Mister Rich is helping him escape)
• … and now I’m walking on a different concrete floor. I can hear the rumble of a subway train, but there’s white smoke everywhere, and I can just barely make out a rounded wall and the vague forms of people all around me. A man is coughing, trying to yell for everyone to put their hands on the right wall and follow it to the exit. He starts to repeat the order, but his voice collapses into thick, hacking coughs… (July 7 2005 London bombings — Liverpool Street bomb on the Hammersmith and City line to Whitechapel station)

What actually happened:

• July 7, 2005, Victor (“Vic”) Isaac and his wife Elizabeth were traveling on the Hammersmith and City line of the London tube. They got off at Whitechapel station when the bomb went off. Something weird happened there (possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper)
• Elizabeth was killed, but as part of the possession her spirit was dragged into VI’s body.
• VI was taken to the Royal London Hospital. During that time he loses control of his power, and murders someone in the hospital.
• Liz (formerly Rachel Parks) was attacked when VI lost control of his powers, and her face severely mangled. A scrap of VI’s disguise power lodged in her, and she is able to take the form of people who are already dead. She found Elizabeth’s body, and took the form of Liz.
• Lacuna hears about the hospital incident, and Zachary McPhearson arranges extradition.
• Richard Marsh picks him up, and becomes sympathetic to VI’s situation (as his own wife was killed in a Lacuna operation, detailed in “Ghost Story”). He’s the one who gives VI the nickname of “Six.” McPhearson tells Marsh to hand custody over to him, and VI disappears from Lacuna’s records.
• McPhearson finds Dr. Tucci, a specialist in neurobiology. McPhearson creates the Whitechapel Project out of his own money to study how to weaponize VI’s abilities.
• Dr. Tucci puts VI through a series of chemical treatments to wipe his memory, and then starts to experiment with VI’s abilities. After a few years, he realizes that the results aren’t repeatable, and VI is too dangerous to live. He contacts Marsh, because he’s afraid that McPhearson will simply try again with another doctor.
• Dr. Tucci sneaks out of Whitechapel by using a computer program to change the entry/exit card swipes on his door, leaving at the same moment as another person entered VI’s cell for his vitals check (since the guards know that he’s often in his office studying the data at that point). He has previously “lost” his ID badge, so he reprograms his old one to enact the program when he leaves, leaving his new one and his clothing for when he returns after his meeting with Marsh. He drives to the park where he was to meet Marsh, but dies in the car on the way due to VI’s abilities.
• Marsh shows up at the park, and notices Dr. Tucci’s car in the wreck. Drives over to the Whitechapel Project building in order to see what’s happened, and sees VI as Dr. Tucci. He’s not sure which is which, but invites VI in to learn what’s going on.

Elizabeth can only communicate through bringing memories to the surface of VI’s mind, and by writing notes. Sometimes she can possess VI’s body and look like herself for short periods of time. All of this can only be done while he’s unconscious.

• Elizabeth checked VI out of the hospital and into the hotel, but Liz still has Elizabeth’s legal identity and received the phone call as next of kin. She tracked VI to the hotel.

Act Two
14. Confronting the boss (Atonement with the Father)

15. Dying a little inside to grow stronger (Apotheosis)

16. Unlocking the hidden (The Ultimate Book)

Act Three
17. Fighting to keep it under control (Refusal of the Return)

18. Escaping the current circumstances (The Magic Flight)

19. An unlikely rescue (Rescue from Without)

20. Returning to the roots

21. Storming the gates (The Crossing of the Return Threshold)

22. Fighting to the center

23. The final conflict (Master of Two Worlds)

24. Freedom (Freedom to Live)

A couple of months ago, things got busy for me — generally a good busy, but still busy. I figured it was just a bit of a rough patch, so I decided to work through it. I moved some things around with Whitechapel and made it work. No problem — it happens.

Then I got out of that patch of busy into a completely different patch of busy. It was tough, but I decided to put some things on hold until I got through it. Again, I expected it was just a tough spot.

After that, I had a run of computer problems. Okay, that was actually a bad patch. But, chin up, we’ll get through it. I was able to actually get the Q&A episode out, and I figure it would all work out.

Over the past few days, I’ve been asked to take on some additional work responsibilities. It’s an exciting opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to it. However, it does mean that my schedule needs to be a little more flexible, because the days of working weird hours are probably going to continue. Essentially, I’m at a place where I have rebalance my ratio between work and life. So, I had to sit down and think about what things in my life I can reshuffle to make it all work.

Sadly, Whitechapel has to go.

It’s been an amazing run, but the truth of the matter is that my life has changed quite a lot in the past year. I can’t plan around having a run of five days every two weeks in which to write, edit, record, and edit Whitechapel anymore. I can’t even be sure that I can handle just the writing and editing. I’m sure that I’ll be able to get my work/life balance back on track at some point, but I don’t know how long that will take.

So, what’s going to happen to Whitechapel? Honestly, I don’t know. I might sit down and rewrite these episodes, finish it up, and polish it into a novel manuscript at some point. I doubt nothing will ever happen with it, though. It might be weeks, month, or years, but I expect Whitechapel will live again at some point.

Understand that this wasn’t an easy decision to make. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and reexamining for a while, and thinking about very seriously for the past several days. This is just one of a number of overall changes in my life. It’s bittersweet, because I wanted to finish this, and I enjoyed working on it, but the reason why it’s happening is for a lot of really awesome reasons for me personally. There’s just too much good stuff going on for me to be able to give due attention to all of them.

But I do want to take a moment to thank you, my audience. If it wasn’t for you, I probably would have gotten frustrated and dropped this long ago. It’s because of you that this crazy idea that sat in the back of my head became something real. It didn’t go the distance that I hoped for, but it went a hell of a lot further than I could have anticipated because of your support and encouragement. You gave me some constructive criticism, but I never heard a negative word about Whitechapel, which is very rare for an Internet project. You guys have been, and continue to be, amazing.

Thank you.

On a related note, I finally have a new laptop, and I’m getting a chance to catch up on the projects that have been building up over the past month. If all goes well, I should be able to start writing the next episode of Whitechapel this week, and maybe (fingers crossed) have an episode up next week. (I do talk about the delays during the episode, but that was before I had my laptop drama, so just take that and multiply it a couple of times.)

Thank you all for being very patient with this, and I hope this Q&A episode will get you back into the Whitechapel groove.

So, last week I recorded the Q&A episode with Rob Justice of the BearSwarm podcast. I had fully intended to edit it today and post it, and start writing Whitechapel this week.

Last night, the main laptop I use for work and recording started displaying problems with the power cord and battery. I spent all of last night getting everything onto my netbook. It was irritating, but not a huge deal, because the netbook was powerful enough to handle it all (even if it was a touch slow here and there).

A couple of hours ago, I found out that there’s a huge crack on my screen. I have no idea how it got there, but nearly a quarter of my screen is now gone. I talked it over with my family, and we decided that I needed to get a new laptop. That done, I opened up the netbook to see if I could get my files off of it and start the process.

In booting it up, the netbook now refuses to accept that my copy of Windows 7 is genuine (even though I paid for it separately from the computer). I’m not sure how long that will last, but it’s possible that my netbook might just stop working at any point.

So I have no idea what’s going to happen, but things have gone from “slightly irritating” to “trying to find solutions to mission critical work.” I had gotten things mostly caught up in my life, and then this happened, which means that I’m going to be falling behind again while I wait for the new computer to show up and then get it back to the shape I need it in (the usual dance of transferring files and installing new software). At this point, that’ll probably be early to mid June.

I’m going to try and see if I can get at least some stuff onto my wife’s old Mac Air so I can not fall too far behind, but I have no idea how well that’s going to work. I can probably get the writing done, and I might be able to get the recording done through GarageBand, but I can’t guarantee anything.

http://www.bearswarm.com/the-whitechapel-project-question-and-answer-session

Six killed Liz while under the influence of Jack. During a desperate search of her home, he discovered that she was really Rachel Parks, an agent for the mysterious organization Lacuna. His escape from Liz’s home was interrupted by the arrival of one of Lacuna’s agents. Six took Liz’s appearance and tried to bluff the recently arrived Agent Timm into believing that he was the female agent. Six convinced Timm to put him in contact with the head of Lacuna, Zachery McPhearson. Unfortunately, McPhearson wanted Six to come out to the car parked outside and speak to him directly. Six was left with a handful of bad options, and all while trying desperately to keep Jack from taking over again.

Episode Seventeen – Slipping the Leash

I don’t want to kill Timm.

I try to justify the decision. I have to assume that McPhearson is right outside, and any delay in coming out to meet him will arouse suspicion. While I could theoretically kill Timm and take his skin, it’ll make things worse. The smart move is to keep playing along until I can make my move.

But that’s just an excuse. The reality is that I’m sick of killing. As soon as I play this bluff out, I’m going to go far away from all of this and take some time to think about what I’m going to do about Jack.

Jack.

I feel him moving in the back of my head with just the thought of his name. He’s pushing, trying to gain control. The headache is building again, and it’s getting hard to think straight. I put my hands to my head, trying to keep my brains for squirting out of my eye sockets.

Which means I take my gun off of Timm.

In a second, Timm has me by the throat and shoves me back into the closet. The sudden violence takes me by surprise, and I drop the pistol in the scuffle. Timm bounces my head off the back of the closet, and my headache explodes in intensity. I try to get my hands under his so I can pry his fingers off my neck, but it’s getting hard to see, hard to think straight. I’m starting to fade.

My body suddenly goes limp. I’m not unconscious – my muscles all just spontaneously relax against my will. On instinct I follow the impulse, letting the weight of my body draw Timm off balance. He changes his grip and eases me to the floor before looking back to find the pistol.

Stupid move, asshole.

Jack leaps up and grabs Timm’s head in his hands. Jack twists hard, and I can hear a cracking sound before Timm goes limp in my arms. He eases Timm to the ground, in a parody of how Timm eased me to the ground just a moment ago, before scooping up the pistol.

“Time to kill the stupid motherfucker that thinks he can keep me on a leash.”

He looks and sees Liz’s body. I can feel the warmth and pride flooding through his body (my body) at the sight of his handiwork. He notices the patches of missing skin, and my mouth twists into a smirk. “So, you took her skin,” Jack says. “Clever boy. But we make a terrible woman. I like your idea of taking this one’s skin.”

I try to scream, to fight, to stop Jack from what he’s doing, but I can only watch as his hand spasms into a fist. I can feel the knife forming in his hand, heavy and sharp and perfect, before he slices into Timm’s flesh, peeling his skin off in wet, ragged strips. Each time Jack gets a wet strip he slaps it onto my skin, and I watch it twist and wriggle before burrowing under my own flesh. I don’t feel anything, but whenever I try to close my eyes to block out the grotesque sight, Jack opens them again and takes another slice.

“Nice and easy,” Jack murmurs. “Don’t want to bleed this one out, not yet. Plenty of time to gorge on his blood later.”

He unbuttons Timm’s shirt as he continues. “In bouncing around in your head, I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve been sloppy. Not the good kind of sloppy either – the kind involving blood in your mouth and guts in your hands. No, I’m talking about the kind of sloppy that could get us killed. All this time you’ve been play-acting, pretending to be someone else when you take their skin. But there’s a better way – a much, much better way.”

The knife plunges into Timm’s chest. Jack tries to make a slow, careful incision, but soon he’s ripping ragged chunks of flesh out in his eagerness to get to his prize. I want to be disgusted by this butcher shop autopsy, but I’m swept up in the intensity of Jack’s passion and love of murder. Despite the ferocity of the surgery, there’s very little blood as Jack plunges my hands into Timm’s abdomen. I can feel his fingers gripping around something slick and muscular.

“The heart is for amateurs,” he says as he pulls Timm’s stomach out with both hands. “Everyone tells you that the heart is what you need to know a man, but that’s bullshit. A man’s soul is in his stomach; it’s true. Anyone who has had a bad day can tell you that a good meal will make you feel a hell of a lot better than having some blood pumped around the body.”

He transfers the stomach to my left hand, and the knife appears in my right. He casually uses the knife to slice off a chunk of the stomach. “Now’s the part where I would make some bullshit comment about how you are what you eat, but I can tell you’re not in the mood for bad jokes. So let’s get down to business.”

Jack puts the piece of stomach in my mouth and starts to chew.

The taste of bile and blood floods my tongue as Jack bites down on the rubbery muscle. I want to gag, but my body betrays me, luxuriating in the vile sensations as if I were eating the best steak in the world. The thrill and the excitement of the disgusting pleasure overwhelm me, and Jack revels in the meal.

After a few moments, I feel a strange sense of deja vu. It’s not deja vu, but it feels like it – like you’re seeing the same thing you’ve seen before, but with a different level of knowledge that you can’t quite place. Looking at Timm’s body, I know that this house was purchased a few months ago by Lacuna as part of Rachel Parks’ cover story. I know that he was a new recruit, fresh out of college. He is… he was proud and excited to serve his country, to find and take down dangerous criminals, to be on the path toward becoming James Fucking Bond. I reach down and pick up his pistol, the one that Mr. McPhearson gave him in the car.

As I feel the warm metal of the pistol in my hand, I realize that it’s me that has Timm’s pistol in my hand. Not Jack. Maybe something in acquiring Timm’s knowledge pushed Jack back.

It doesn’t matter. The other thing that eating Timm revealed to me is that McPhearson is waiting for confirmation from Timm that everything is normal, and he was expecting it several minutes ago.

What do I do now?

Try continuing the bluff with McPhearson?

Run out to the car and shoot McPhearson?

Let Jack take control, and see what he does?

Try to kill McPhearson from here with my mind?

Or do I just run?

The choice is yours.

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So, I’m still crazy busy, but episode 16 was pretty quick to write, all told. Part of that is because I tried out a new process.

Previous, I would write every draft of the episode in OpenOffice 3. I would write the first 1000 words the first day, and then the next day I would go back and edit that 1000 words before finishing up the episode. While initially this helped me to get back into the swing of writing, more often than not it meant I would dick around with revision, and just when I was getting into the swing of that, I would have to write again. More and more I’m coming to appreciate that my brain really works in different ways when I’m writing and when I’m editing, so I decided to look into options to help me keep those spaces separate when I’m writing.

In the past when I’ve wanted to separate these processes, I needed to change the interface. For a while, I would hand-write the first draft, and the process of entering it into my computer would allow me to revise, and thus comprised the second draft. I would then print the whole thing out, and hand-edit the third time before doing a final tweak on the fourth pass. This means that I would put each draft through three different media, and each time things jumped out at me that I wouldn’t have seen before.

This method also takes a really, really long time. And more and more, I don’t have that kind of time.

So, I looked for alternatives. Many times I end up doing my hand-written edits and final polish while I’m recording, so that part of the process could stay. However, I really needed the first and second drafts to be digital (for a lot of reasons). A stray comment on Twitter led me to WriteMonkey, a plain text word processor with just enough features to be useful, but not so many as to be distracting. It worked really, really well – although I was able to go back and make major changes on the fly (like when I had to rewrite the opening two or three times), but I wasn’t tempted to do fine revision at the time. And while WM can export to a couple of rich text-ish formats, actually copy and pasting the text into OpenOffice forced me to go over each line to correct the formatting, which led naturally to second draft revisions.

Anyhow, one thing I wanted to do with this episode is to move Six from being reactive to active, and I think it came across. I did debate having Michelle record Six’s dialogue as the pseudo-Liz, but after a lot of debate I decided that Six has previously heard himself when he’s masquerading as someone else – he doesn’t think of himself as changed, but other people are reacting as if he had. So I decided to record in my own voice. I did, however, have a chance to use Brendan Hutt as Zachery McPhearson again, and that was awesome. I’m looking forward to McPhearson’s increased role in the story.

I’ve had mixed feelings about Timm in this episode. Timm is really just another one of the black coats that have shown up before, but some have pointed out that he could have been the same person through the course of the story. And that would actually have been really smart of me to do. I think in the rewrite I will make Timm (or whatever name I give him) a more direct presence in the story, humanizing the forces hunting Six/Jack down throughout the story. At this stage, though, it’s too late to retroactively create that, so I’ll just confess that it wasn’t planned that way, and note that as a good idea if and when I revise everything.

Interestingly, there were a few people who are keen to see Jack show back up. It seems he’s become a bit of a fan favorite since episode fourteen, which was kind of a surprise to me, and I think that led to the tied voting between following Timm out to the car and just killing him. (Side note: Timm is actually named after Matt Timm, the translator for the Spanish version of Whitechapel.) I debated having a run-off, but I got some feedback from readers over Facebook and Twitter, and it’s still pretty evenly divided. Some suggested I try to merge the options, but they’re pretty mutually exclusive. Still, I’ll give it a try, or I’ll just pick one.

And no, I’m not going to say which I’ve decided on until I post episode seventeen. Because I’m evil that way.

While under the influence of Jack, Six murdered Liz, the mysterious woman who helped him back in the hotel. In searching the house that Liz brought him to, Six discovered that Liz was working for Lacuna, the secretive government organization that had some connection with the Whitechapel Project. Six discovered Liz’s cell phone in her pocket, which still had a line open to someone named Zachary McPhearson. Someone had heard everything that happened during the murder. Just as Six discovered this, he heard a door open, giving him only moments to make a decision.

Episode Sixteen – Under Her Skin

I glance at the front door, but it’s locked. They must be coming in through a back door. The creak of the hinges is long and low – they know someone’s here, and they’re coming in carefully. That gives me a few extra seconds. I look for a place to hide, somewhere I can see who’s after me before they notice me. The coat closet is the only place that makes any sense, but that’s the first place they’ll look. Still, I don’t have much time – I dive into the closet and leave the door open just a crack to look through. I pull one of the pistols from my jeans and carefully put it against the opening to the door.

Liz’s body is directly in my sight. I’m still disgusted at seeing what Jack has done to her, but the urge to vomit isn’t nearly as strong. I’ve been dealing with a lot of corpses since I woke up in that cell, and I guess I’m getting used to it. Liz, the false Lacuna cops, Dr. Tucci…

An idea leaps into my head. It’s crazy, but I don’t have a lot of options, and no time to think of anything better. I try to imagine what it’s like to be Liz, to move like her and talk like her and think like her. I’m just a young woman who’s trying to do what she thinks is best. The axe is in my hand again, and I can feel Jack’s breath on the back of my neck, ready to take over. He’s ready to go, ready to murder a whole lot of people and revel in the feel of their blood. I push him back and focus, using the axe to hack away at my identity. I imagine wearing her skin.

I open my eyes, and I can see Liz again. Where her clothes don’t cover her, I can see that her skin is gone. Her insides are already starting to ooze a little, mixing with her blood.

Just at that moment, a man steps in front of me, blocking my view of Liz. I instinctively step back, stumbling further into the closet, but he’s facing away from me as he studies Jack’s handiwork. He takes a step forward, and I can see more of him – black coat, gloves, dark hair, the uniform of the men in the black van. He puts his hand to his ear and says, “We found a skinned corpse, sir.”

I take a deep breath. This hiding space won’t last – the only way I might get out of this is if I can bluff this guy long enough to get away. I push open the door and point the gun at the man. “Get out of here, Jack, or I’ll put a bullet in your fucking head.”

The man spins around, pointing his pistol at me in turn. I don’t recognize him, but he seems to recognize me. “Parks?” he asks, the barrel of his gun not moving from my chest.

“Don’t bullshit me, Jack. I can see the skinned corpse. I know it’s you.”

A moment passes, then another. I put a little pressure on the trigger, ready to shoot. Jack whispers in the back of my head, urging me on, telling me how good it would be to feel the splatter of blood over my face. I’m ready to pull the trigger when the man suddenly puts his hands up and relaxes his grip on his pistol, letting it dangle in his hand.

“Relax, Parks. It’s me. We got your phone call, and we’re here to help.”

I ease off the trigger, but keep the gun pointed at his chest. “Prove it. Prove to me that you’re not that fucking psycho.”

He carefully sets the pistol on the ground. “I’m going to reach into my jacket and pull out my ID,” he says.

“Slowly,” I caution. “Very slowly.”

He eases his hand into his coat and pulls out a wallet. With one gloved hand he fumbles with the wallet and flips open a plastic-covered ID card. I don’t recognize the badge, but I can make out the words “Department of Homeland Security” and a name – Matthew Timm.

I take the badge from his hand and look at it before putting it on my pocket. “You could have taken this from Timm’s corpse. This doesn’t prove anything.”

“Call it in. They can vouch for me.”

Fuck. I have no idea what he’s talking about. I can’t tell if he’s testing me in return, or if he’s just trying to prove his identity. I decide to push the bluff. “Jack took my phone after the murder, and I’ve been in here since. You call it in and hand me the phone.”

Another pause before Timm speaks. “I’m going to reach into my coat again, same as before, to get my phone.” He waits until I nod, and he slowly reaches into his coat again, this time pulling out a cell phone. He turns it to face toward me and show that it’s already connected to Zachary McPhearson. “Did you catch that, boss?” he says, but it looks like he’s talking to the open air, not to me. He pauses for a moment, and then touches his ear again. “He wants to talk to you,” he says to me.

I carefully take the phone and put it to my ear. “Parks,” I say.

“We were worried about you.” The voice reminds me of bleak Virginia winters – cold, Southern, and harsh. Zachary McPhearson is the man from my dream, the one who claimed to be my owner.

I swallow my fear and focus on keeping my mask in place. “Prove to me that Timm is who he says he is.”

“He’s been in constant contact with me, Parks. Unlike you.”

“That’s why I left my cell phone call open. Jack was looking for me, but instead he killed someone else, took their face and my phone, and left.”

There was a long pause. Finally, McPhearson says, “Come out to the car. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

I look back at Timm, who’s looking at me expectantly. I don’t know if he overheard the phone call or not. Is McPhearson on to me? Should I try to make a break for it?

What should I do?

Play along and follow Timm out to the car?

Hang up, and convince Timm to leave?

Shoot Timm and run while I have the chance?

Try to kill Timm with my mind, and take his skin?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve had a nasty sinus infection for a week and a half now. It’s slowly getting better, but I’m still struggling with symptoms (at the moment, it’s a runny nose and difficulty in hearing). Further, I’m in the process of packing my house to move near the end of April, and I have to catch up on the work I missed during all of this, while juggling a company-wide trip to Mexico at the end of April. And, of course, it’s at this point in the narrative where I’ll have to start juggling guest voices again, making the recording of the podcast more challenging. (And all while I have to release on certain dates coming up to account for a side project.) So, in order to make it all work, I’m going to give myself two weeks to write episodes 16 and 17, and hope that it gets me back on track.

At this moment, episode 16 will be on Wednesday, April 7th and episode 17 will be on Tuesday, April 27th. As always, keep an eye on your RSS feed, Twitter, or however you get your Whitechapel news.

Not a lot to say about this episode, honestly. The voting was to learn a bit more about Liz, so I did that while seeding another part of the puzzle to come. Really, I’m trying to get things moving to the act three break, which means that things have to get worse for Six before they can get better. I’m getting pretty comfortable with writing scenes where Six is in his own head, so maybe I need to work towars other kinds of scenes going forward. I’ll have to think about that. (To be fair, I’ve been really ill since just after I posted the last episode, so I’m a little spacey right now — if there’s something I’m forgetting about the writing of this episode, I’ll go back and update this entry.)

In other news, I’ve moved my personal blog over to WordPress as well, so you can find that now at http://eddyfate.com. That blog is about writing, game design, gaming, and general geekery, so if any of that’s stuff you like, go ahead and check it out. For those following my LiveJournal, both this blog and eddyfate.com will feed into the LJ, so no need to change your subscriptions if you don’t want to.

Six killed again. This time, his victim was Liz, the mysterious woman who met him in the hotel he woke up in after a hospital stay. The murder was much more intense than previous ones, as he was under the influence of Jack the Ripper while it happened. Six even started thinking of the unnatural urges inside of him collectively as “Jack.” After the murder, Six was covered in blood and had to think of a way to deal with the situation he was now in.

Episode Fifteen – Dead Letter

The first thing I need to do is find out who Liz really is… although “was” would be more accurate, I guess. Maybe if I can figure out who she worked for, that’ll give me something to go on. I briefly consider searching going back into the other room and searching Liz’s body for clues, but my stomach lurches at the thought. I’ll look around the house first.

I take another drink from the bottle, and my eye catches a piece of paper on the counter, partially tucked under a napkin holder. I pull it out, and it’s written in the same handwriting as the note from the hotel.

“Nothing is what it seems. Elizabeth.”

You were fucking right about that, Liz. I drop the note on the counter, leaving red smears all over it. Maybe instead of depositing more forensic evidence around the house, I should clean myself up a bit. I wash my hands quickly in the sink. My hands are still red when I’m done (red with her life, the life I stole), but I don’t have time to be more thorough – I need to get back to work figuring out who Liz really was.

I open the coat closet and find her purse. I bring it back to the kitchen and dump the contents out onto the counter. I go right for her wallet and start digging through her credit cards. Each one seems to have a different name on it, but I notice that the name “Rachel Parks” shows up a few times. The last one is a corporate card – black with silver accents. I’m about to toss it onto the pile with the others when I notice that it’s not in any of her other names, but it’s still a name I recognize.

ZM Lacuna.

God damn it, she lied to me! She was working for Lacuna. This had to all be another attempt to get me back in a fucking cage. On a hunch I quickly shuffle through her business cards, and sure enough one turns up one under the name Rachel Parks for the Whitechapel Project.

Fuck, isn’t anyone who they say they are anymore?

I flip open the wallet and take the cash within – I don’t count it, but I see a couple of hundred dollar bills flash by as I shove the wad into my pocket. I debate taking the credit cards too, but I toss them into the trash instead. If Liz or Rachel or whatever the fuck her name is was right about Lacuna coming after me, they’ll track any transactions made with her cards. Even if she was lying to me about that too, once she turns up dead the police will track her cards anyhow, and thus far I’ve been doing good to stay away from the police since my time in the hospital. I do grab her car keys, though. The rest of the contents are useless – a pack of gum, a couple of cheap pens, a notebook. I open the notebook, hoping for a Hollywood-style clue, like a mysterious phone number scrawled with the words “My Boss” next to it, but it’s just blank. I sweep it all into the garbage.

My headache starts to build up again. I stumble through the living room, trying to find something that resembles a bathroom, and maybe some painkillers. I catch sight of the corpse out of the corner of my eye, and I feel nausea welling up inside me again. I try to force it down when the headache explodes, throwing spots in front of my eyes, and a buzzing noise fills my world again. I stumble down the hallway and yank open a door without looking. I can barely make out a medicine cabinet through the spots. I open the door. I find a bottle of pills. I open the bottle of pills. Buzzing, churning chaos rings in my ears. I can just make out words as I dry-swallow a handful of pills.

Where’s her cell phone?

I blink hard, staring at the mirror in the darkened room. The spots start to fade, and I can think again. I never found a cell phone in her purse, and there wasn’t one anywhere in the kitchen. If I can find it, there might be emails or texts or something on it that will give me a better clue as to who she is. I stumble out of the bathroom and start looking.

Each room is as sterile as the last. The bed looks like it’s never been slept in. All of the books in the library are Reader’s Digest compilations, lined up as neat and orderly as a showroom. I open every drawer and door and look under every chair and couch, not being too careful or subtle in my search. I even looked in the dryer, and was about to close the door when I instinctively checked the top of the empty drum and found two pistols taped there. I ripped the tape off and stuck the guns into the waistband of my jeans.

Now I have money, a car, guns, and some pain pills. Just what a serial killer needs for a night on the town. But where in the hell is her cell phone?

I walk back into the main room. Her corpse is still there, her back to me like a petulant child curled in a ball. I take a deep breath to steady my nerves, but the smell of blood and shit overpowers me. I gag, and cover my face with my hand as I make my way over to her. I try not to look at her as I dig around in her pockets.

I find something hard, about the size of my palm, and I pull it out. It’s her phone. I quickly leave for the safety of the kitchen. My hands are covered in blood again, but I try to smear some off of the phone’s screen. I notice that it’s a single unit, not a flip phone, and I can just make out the name of the last person she called in the glow of screen – Zachary McPhearson.

Wait a minute. I smear the blood off of the screen some more. There’s a timer, and it’s counting up. Looks like something’s been running for the past twenty minutes or so. Maybe she didn’t get a chance to hang up her phone.

Which means that whoever she called last heard everything that happened.

I stab at the button to end the call, just as I hear someone starting to open the door.

What should I do?

Try to find a back door to escape?

Find a place to hide so I can see who it is?

Shoot whoever comes through the door?

Or shoot myself before they can take me?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Episode 14 was both the easiest and hardest episode of Whitechapel I’ve written thus far.

It was easy because, in many ways, it’s an episode I’ve had in mind in some form for months. Even the voting went the way I was hoping (for the first time ever, I might add), so it was great that I didn’t need to think about it or do any planning or try to make it all hold together — I could dive right in and really go to town on a scene I’ve been looking forward to.

It was hard because I made myself incredibly uncomfortable writing it. I’m not sure it’s the scariest or goriest stuff I’ve written, but it’s certainly the most intimate.

I’ve always had a bad relationship with death, because a lot of people in my life have died suddenly and tragically. Some of my first memories are of a cousin of mine who died one night in her sleep. I dumped my step-father’s ashes into Lake Erie after a prolonged fight with cancer. I just buried my grandmom earlier this year, and a friend just died earlier this week. I won’t go so far as to say that death has dogged my every step, but I’m certainly no stranger to it, and it’s been a part of my life more in the past six months than it has ever before in my life.

Maybe that’s the reason why I write horror and crime drama, so that I can try to come to terms with it. Some people block it, some drink, and some just obsess about it for weeks and weeks. I put all that grief and pain and anguish into stories about horrible people doing horrible things. (And I drink.) I think it’s a balance that a lot of horror writers have to come to terms with, that darkness within that they have to tap and spin onto the page. If it works well, you can tell an amazing story, even if you end up with a few sleepless nights as a result. But hey, if I’m going to lose sleep to my inner demons anyhow, might as well entertain some people along the way.

I was still uncomfortable when it came time to record. Rather than shy away from it, I tried to throw myself into the performance, and for the first time I did the whole episode in nearly one take. I recorded and had it edited and up in record time.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on both the writing and the performance, which I greatly appreciate — thank you for the support.

It helps me to come to terms with my own demons.

Today, my distant drinking buddy and fellow asylum inmate Chuck Wendig posted a bit about the search terms people use to find his blog. David, my webmaster, was all like “Oh yeah, we can totally do that too,” and I was like “Well totally do that,” and he was like “totally, I’ll do that.” (Note: That may not be quite how the conversation actually went.) I expected a fair amount of weirdness, just because people might be searching for something in Whitechapel, London, and stumble across my site. But there is some cool, some interesting, and a fair amount of weird. Let’s take a peek into the hits, shall we?

• white chapel sweatpants: This came up a lot. A whole lot. Most of the hits were from Germany. Is there a brand of sweatpants named Whitechapel? (Answer: Kind of. http://www.imperial-clothing.com/shop/catalog/product/view/id/26403/s/whitechapel-logo-sweat-pants)
• mister poll sitting on his face: Whoever Mr. Poll is, I hope he’s feeling better.
• mur woods: I think I referenced Mur Lafferty once on the blog. Do they mean Muir Woods?
• whitechapel you really didnt need to see this: Wow. Thanks a fucking lot, Internet.
• does whitechapel inhale: No. It stabs. It stabs so much.
• chuck wendig: GET OUT OF MY BLOG, CHUCK.
• allyvie.com: A website that doesn’t appear to exist. Again, less with the subtle reminders of obscurity, Internet. Thanks.
• tiger stripes eden ep: I didn’t know this even existed until I looked it up. So… uh… thanks for the free publicity?
• myspace mission to murder
• what happened to assshare.com: Also “candy assshare.” It has to be three s’s. You can guess what kind of site it is. What does it have to do with my story of murder and amnesia?
• The Podge Cast and Bearswarm: Looks like they send a lot of traffic my way. Return the favor and give their podcasts a listen.
• little smiles car wash: This has to be a strip club. Or it should be.
• something changes when she glances: Did I write that line?
• whitechapel underwear: I’m not going to Google this one. I leave that for the reader to pursue if they desire.
• timetopuke.com mr hands: Another website that doesn’t seem to exist. Does Mr. Hands know Mr. Poll? Maybe they can go bowling or something.
• ergofiction: Ergofiction also sends me a lot of traffic. Much love!

The Internet continues to be a strange and magical place.

Six discovered that he was tied to the notorious Jack the Ripper. Liz found him in a local hotel, and took him to a car wash to inform him that his clothing had been bugged by Richard Marsh, a.k.a. Mister Rich, an agent of Lacuna. Once the clothing was disposed of, she drove him to a house that she claimed was theirs. Six didn’t recognize anything on the inside, and a nagging suspicion led him to realize that there were no photos of the two of them together. He suddenly got a headache, the kind that came before a manifestation of his powers. Liz pointed a gun at him, and told him it’s too soon for him to have a headache. She begged Six to not force her to use the gun on him.

Episode Fourteen – Broken Home

I close my eyes as my head throbs. Pain leaks out of my ears, my eyes, my pores. I press my hands to my head, holding in whatever is trying to get out. I can’t move, can’t think.

“Get away from me,” I say through gritted teeth. “You have to get out of here.”

Liz starts to answer me. I open my eyes to look at her.

Big mistake.

My throat suddenly fills up, and I choke. I feel like I’m going to vomit, but as I cough and splutter, my face starts to burn. My hands curl into blunt claws in response to the pain, and a loud buzzing fills my ears. My arms ache with long-repressed activity. Every part of my body is tense, trembling as if ready to burst. The only way I’ll feel normal again is to have someone’s blood washing over my hands.

The axe is in my hand, the phantom axe I used to kill a guard and a police officer. Normally it’s indistinct, more of an idea than a weapon, but this time I can feel it clearly. The heft and weight are comfortably solid. The handle is covered in hard leather, and shaped to feel natural in my hand. As the blade comes into focus, it folds and stretches, going from a heavy axe to a long, thin blade. It’s perfect. It’s a part of me, a part of me that I’ve been missing for so very, very long.

My lips curl into a smile. I look at this bitch, this stupid bitch’s pale, lovely neck, and the tension in my arms shoots up, making the knife tremble with anticipation. I want nothing more than slash at that neck, turning the canvas of white into a red, wet mouth. I can taste the warm saltiness of her blood on my tongue, and my whole body feels warm and comfortable at the thought.

An hour ago, a lifetime ago, I wanted to gently ease her clothing off of her and fuck her. Now, I want to kill her, to leave her blood-soaked body cooling and spent on the carpet. And it will be so good, so good.

I can see that she’s yelling at me, but I can’t hear her over the buzz in my head. The stupid bitch should have shot me and gotten it over with, but her gun just dances in front of her, a useless threat. She doesn’t realize that I’m not who I think I am, and she’s afraid she’ll kill me. Maybe her government loves me, or maybe she loves me, or some stupid bullshit like that, but I don’t care. I put my left hand to my head, keeping my right hand hidden, and I stumble toward her, moaning. She looks confused and worried, and she opens her arms to catch me.

Stupid bitch.

I whip my right hand out from behind my back and punch her in the face, just over her right eye, holding the blade in my fist. Her look of pain and shock is so beautiful as she falls to the ground. I leap onto her, my legs straddling her, holding her down with my weight. I can smell her warm skin next to mine. I can feel her firm body under mine. She tries to scream, to tell me something, but I can only hear the vibrations in my own head.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but what I can take.

I bring my arm down, slicing the blade across her throat. Her skin unzips into two neat halves, and her blood splatters over my face. I revel in the taste of her coppery life as I slash again and again and again. The tension leaves me, filling me with pure, unadulterated joy. I have never felt this alive, this wonderful, this peaceful. I can’t believe I stopped myself from doing this for so long. I never want to stop killing. Not ever.

She thrashes under me, but the stupid bitch doesn’t realize she’s already dead. I slash again and again, and her struggles grow weaker and fade. Finally she stops, so I stop. I’m panting and covered in blood, and I feel like I’ve just had the best sex of my entire life.

And it’s all thanks to you, you stupid bitch. My forgotten lover. I lean down to kiss her cooling lips. I can smell the faint stench of decay on her breath, taste notes of it on my lips. Her hair is plastered across her face as my fingers clench. I imagine the soft silkiness of her neck in my hands.

I imagine…

* * *

I remember.

I remember this image of Liz, this woman, this life. I remember this was part of my dream when I woke up in the cell. I thought it was a memory, a key to my past, but all this time it was a warning of my life to come, of what I was capable of.

Oh my god.

I look down at my hands, covered in blood. There’s no knife, but there’s plenty of blood. The exquisite taste in my mouth turns my stomach, and I gag and choke as I spit out as much of it as I can. I try not to think about what I’ve done, try not to think of myself seeing her as nothing more than an outlet, as nothing more than a stupid bitch, but my eyes are constantly drawn back to her corpse.

I must have blacked out since I… no, since he murdered her. I notice that her face is turned toward the wall of the living room, and her legs are drawn up with the feet close to the wall. Her head is barely held on by what remains of her neck, and I can see that she has an abrasion near her eye from where Jack punched her.

Yes, Jack. Not me. I didn’t do this. I didn’t kill her. It wasn’t me. I’m not a monster. I’m not a monster.

Please, don’t let me be a monster.

I stumble to the kitchen, and find a bottle of whiskey on the counter. I rip off the top and gulp, feeling it burn down my throat. I pretend that it’s washing the blood out of my mouth, but I know I can never escape it. Still, the whiskey calms my nerves. I don’t feel normal, and I don’t feel human, but I feel like I can think again.

I’m in a strange house. I’m covered in blood, blood that I’ve tracked all over. There’s a mangled corpse on the floor in the other room. I’ve got to do something, right now.

What should I do first?

Take the time to clean myself and the house?

Check around to find a clue to Liz’s identity?

Try to find a phone book and call someone for help?

Look for a way to dispose of the body?

Or take her gun and her car and just get the hell out of there?

The choice is yours.

Man, things have been crazy this week. Gained a car, lost a fuel pump on a different car, ended up selling that car only to not be able to sell it, all while shopping for houses and guest-hosting another podcast (the Darker Days podcast for you White Wolf fans). It was only through a few things falling apart tonight that I was even able to have time to write a post-mortem this week. Lucky for all five of you who read it.

Just about every writer I know goes through a phase where they’re just sick of working on a project. It’s usually around the middle of the project, that point where they just look at everything they’ve written, think it’s all crap, and can’t face putting down another word forward. It’s the point where many people just abandon the project and find something else to do, but some force themselves to sit down and crank out just a few hundred more words.

I hit that point with this episode. I threw a null choice at the end of episode 12 just to round out the set, and ended up getting that choice delivered to me. I had no idea how to work a house into the episode. Further, I knew instinctively that I needed to have this episode have some kind of action in it, but wasn’t sure how I was going to get from episode 12 to an exciting end of some kind in episode 13. So, on Sunday, with deadline looming, I just starting throwing down words on paper and hoped that something coherent came out.

As I wrote, I suddenly put a lot of pieces together in my head — things I’ve been sitting on for weeks and months all just clicked in my head. The characters flowed, the scene made sense, and I had a clear picture of how it was all going to end up. (Of course, some revelations made me want to go back and rewrite some earlier episodes, but I held firm. I will continue on with the material I have thus far created.)

Whitechapel is over half over, and I feel for the first time that things are starting to wrap up. I’m already seeing a way ahead (not the way ahead, since I’ve learned never to trust how you bastards will vote), but I’m not entirely sure how it will all end. While I have a bit more insight behind the curtain, in many ways I’ve reached a point where I’m learning about Six as much as you guys are.

And that’s amazingly cool. I’m looking forward to uncovering the next episode.

Previously on Whitechapel

Six woke up in a hotel room. After a few clues, he uncovered the fact that he is somehow tied to the notorious Jack the Ripper. A mysterious woman named Liz found him, and told him to keep quiet as they made their way from the hotel. Six spied a black van that he thought was similar to the one that held the men who knocked him unconscious, but it turned out to be a red herring. Liz drove Six to a car wash in the middle of a bitter Ohio winter, and told Six that his clothing had been bugged. She also revealed that they had been lovers once, and as they pulled out of the car wash, Liz dropped the biggest bombshell of all: that the bugs in his clothing may have come from Richard Marsh, also known as Mister Rich, an agent of the organization that claims to own Six – Lacuna.

Episode Thirteen – Where The Heart Is

I shake my head at her comment. “Mister Rich works for Lacuna? That doesn’t make any sense.”

She shrugs for a second while turning the wheel. “Sense or not, that’s the truth. Your buddy’s a spook.”

I close my eyes and try to work through the pain killers to go back over all the information I have so far. I didn’t remember seeing any reference to any other organization in Dr. Tucci’s files, but the name Lacuna has been ringing a bell since Liz mentioned it. Where have I heard it before?

After a moment, it hits me.

… My mind runs on autopilot. Feeling a sense of déjà vu, I dig around in the remains of my victim, stealing from what’s left of him in order to save myself. I find his wallet and pull it out. The license says “Alex Cochrane,” and he’s got a small stack of hundreds tucked inside the billfold. No police business cards or ID cards, and only one credit card – a corporate one made out to ZM Lacuna….

Those police officers that Mister Rich shot at in the parking lot of the motel had credit cards made out to ZM Lacuna. But that doesn’t make sense. On the one hand, Mister Rich wouldn’t be trying to kill people that work for Lacuna if he worked for them as well. On the other hand, he was almost immediately suspicious of them, so maybe he knew who they were before they noticed him. If what Liz is telling me is true, then it’s likely that the men who knocked me unconscious at the hospital also worked for Lacuna, or at least worked for a group that was run by Lacuna.

But where does Liz fit into this?

“If Mister Rich works for Lacuna, who do you work for?”

She turns and glances at me for a moment, smiling that quirky smile of hers again. “You don’t believe that I rescued you from Lacuna just to keep you for myself?”

“I don’t believe anything right now.”

The quirky smile blooms into a sincere one, and she looks back at the road. “Of course. You’ve always been clever. That’s how you’ve survived this long, and why you’re so valuable to a lot of people.”

“So answer my question. Who do you work for?”

She pauses for a moment, thinking something over. Her eyes dart over to me and then away again before responding. “I work for a different government than Marsh does, but I only joined up so I could find you.”

Government. No, governments. I’m not surprised by that – hell, I’ve suspected it for a while – but it’s still a lot of take in. “So Lacuna is a government organization?”

She nods. “A special section of the Department of Homeland Security. I guess you could say they’re… professional rivals to the people I work for.”

I turn a little in the seat to look at her. “And who do you work for?”

She points at the windshield, indicating something in front of us. “We’re here.”

I’m irritated at her change of topic, but I look to where she’s pointing. During our conversation, she’s brought us to a residential area. It’s not a suburb – we didn’t drive long enough to get out of the city – but the entire street is crammed with slouching houses. The older-model cars dotting the road are covered in snow and ice, but the spots I can make our are clean and in good repair. The road is salted, and the snow has been shoveled into careful piles along the sides. The house she’s pointing at is red brick, and the driveway looks like it hasn’t been cleaned out in a long time.

“What’s that?” I ask.

She pulls the car in front of the snow-covered lawn. “That’s our home.”

* * *

The house is cold as Liz skitters off to turn on the thermostat. The furnishings look comfortable and relatively modern – the kinds of things that would have been popular in Ikea a few years ago. The floors are all hardwood, with rugs carelessly placed under tables and in hallways to provide some traction. The usual domestic clutter that a house accumulates are scattered around – television set, kitchen appliances, coffee tables – all placed with a casualness that feels like they’ve been used before, instead of the careful placement of a showroom floor. The pillows on the couch show some wear, and the rugs have faint divots in them from where a piece of heavy furniture has been moved. It all looks like it’s was lived in at one point, even though the owners haven’t been home in a while.

And I don’t recognize any of it.

Liz comes back into the room. “Sorry – I’ve been overseas for a while, so it’ll take a minute for the house to warm up. Do you want me to make you some tea?”

I nod, and she leaves the room again as I continue my examination.

Something about the house is off – wrong in a way I can’t place. It’s like there’s an itch in the back of my head, or maybe a buzzing sound, like a thousand bees all buzzing in harmony. I can feel a headache start to wash over me as I continue to look around, desperate to find the source of the buzzing, the buzzing that oscillates up and down, sounding…

… sounding almost like words, words forming in my mind as a familiar pain jolts through my head.

Where are the pictures?

I walk around, holding my head. I look at the tables, the shelves, the counters. There aren’t any pictures anywhere – not of me or of Liz. Why wouldn’t there be any pictures of us if this is our house?

Liz comes back with a steaming mug. She frowns as she sees me holding my head. “Do you have a headache?” she asks with concern.

I nod as I take the mug from her. “The pain meds must be wearing off.” I glance at the mug. It’s black tea, with milk and sugar. I sip it carefully while my head splits again. “Maybe I need to sit down.”

Liz bites her lip for a moment, and then takes my arm and leads me to the couch in the living room. “It’s too soon for you to have a headache.”

I take another sip, and the pain in my head doubles, triples. Spots appear before my eyes. I try to set the mug on the table, but I miss. Hot tea splashes all over my hands, but I barely feel it as I grab my head. “What… is going on?”

Liz runs out of the room, and comes back with a gun pointed at me.

“Too soon… it’s all too soon. Please… please don’t make me have to use this.”

What happens next?

Someone unexpected arrives

I lose control of my powers

Liz tries to shoot me

Or does the moment pass uneventfully?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I realized going into this episode that the setup was similar to earlier episodes — a mysterious figure leading Six into a car and driving him around, and having some connection to one of Six’s memories from episode one — so I tried to play with the formula a bit. Since the voting was so overwhelmingly against her being involved in some sort of trap, I not only turned the black van into a red herring, but I also dropped another piece of information I had been holding on to: Mister Rich’s real name, and the organization he works for. Of course, I’m setting up that Liz and Mister Rich are going to be at odds in how they interact with Six.

The car wash thing was something I’ve had in mind for a couple of episodes, once I realized that Six was bugged (or at least, is told he’s bugged). There are times when I can’t even get cell reception in a car wash, and I certainly can barely hear anything in some of them, so it seemed a plausible (if really odd) location.

At one point, I was going to make Liz European. While Michelle can do a decent variety of European accents, they weren’t working for me, so I told her to revert to her normal accent. I had a brief joke about pants/underwear lined up that I had to cut, but the change in accent still works with a few options I had in mind.

The choices at the end of the episode seem a bit random, but I have a few ideas on what will happen next based on them. To take the one that won’t get voted in by the end of the night as an example, if she had gone back to the hotel she would just be in town for a few days, and that would have set up the next encounter. And there will likely be some form of bad encounter soon — Six has been having it easy the past couple of episodes.

Cover of "Close Encounters of the Urban Kind"

Long story short: an anthology I’ve been published in is open for pre-orders. Buying a copy would be awesome.

Details: Pre-ordering opened today for Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, the fiction anthology by Apex Book Company. This anthology features my short story, “Gloomy Sunday.” It’s about a washed-up private detective, his government-employed ex-girlfriend, and a song that kills people. While the story isn’t directly tied to any events in Whitechapel, it does share elements with it (most notably the Lacuna organization, a first-person narration style, and a tendency for me to be really horrible to my protagonists).

The special pre-order price is $15.95, and the book will be available for sale in April 2010. If you’ve been a fan of Whitechapel so far, picking up a copy of this book would be a great way to support me.

The link to the pre-order page is here:

http://www.apexbookstore.com/collections/frontpage/products/close-encounters-of-the-urban-kind-edited-by-jennifer-brozek

Previously on Whitechapel

Mister Rich, Six’s mysterious benefactor, was shot and fell unconscious in a gunfight, before Six himself was stunned with a taser shotgun shell. Three days later, Six awoke in a hotel room under the name “M. John Druitt,” which turned out to be the name of one of the suspects for the notorious Jack the Ripper back in 1888. As Six struggled to cope with the revelation that he’s somehow connected to the serial killer, a strange woman mutely informs him that he’s once again being looked for, and beckons for him to follow her. He goes with her to her rental car, when he hears the engine on a black van start in the hotel parking lot.

Episode Twelve – Lacuna

She puts a key in the ignition and starts the car. I ask her what’s going on, but she revs the engine and puts a finger to her lips again before putting the car in reverse and slowly backing up. Fuck it – I settle back into the passenger’s seat, letting the pain meds settle in me like a fuzzy blanket. Mysterious car rides with mysterious people are almost becoming old hat for me.

She carefully guides the car out of the icy parking lot and onto the main road. I glance at the rearview mirror, watching the black van pull in behind us. I look over to the woman and point it out. She catches the motion and looks up at the mirror herself. She shrugs, and turns left out of the parking lot. I go back to watching the van, and it turns right, away from us. As it turns I catch a glimpse of an advertisement for a carpet company on the side. False alarm. I guess after you get hospitalized for a few days by a couple of guys in a black van, you start seeing enemies in every black van.

I glance over at the woman to see if she noticed my unease, but she’s concentrating on the road. I realize that I don’t even know her name, and I don’t have any way to ask her. I remember the notepad and pencil that I took from the hotel, but they’re in my bag, which I put in the trunk. I open up the glove compartment and rummage around, but all that’s inside is the owner’s manual for the car and a copy of the form from the rental agency. I close it back up and consider looking in the backseat for a pen or something, when I notice that we’ve already pulled in somewhere – an automatic car wash.

A car wash? In winter? I point to the car wash and look at her, trying to ask what’s going on. She just gives me a cute little smile and pulls up to it. The car wash is made up of a huge tunnel covered by a series of dangling plastic strips, with a small screen and touchpad mounted on a thick metal pole off to the side. The driver’s side window purrs down, and she pulls out a credit card, swiping it through a slot on the side of the touchpad. She punches a few keys, and the screen starts flashing the words PULL FORWARD. I hear loud machinery start up inside as the hood of the car parts the plastic strips.

A set of rotating brushes hovers over us, ready to descend on the car like a bristly Sword of Damocles. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel flashing the same instruction as the keypad – PULL FORWARD. As soon as the wheels make it over a bump in the floor, the light changes to read STOP. Something pulls on the wheels, and the car lurches forward to be slowly dragged through the tunnel. The brushes descend, and I can hear the sound of heavy air whipping over the car.

She puts the car in park and turns to me. “A car wash is a great place to have a private conversation, don’t you think?”

I’m surprised when she finally speaks, but the drugs take the edge off my confusion, and I decide that it just doesn’t matter. “Who are you?” I ask.

A look of sadness flickers over her face for a second, but she quickly replaces it with a small smile. “I’m Liz. We used to be… quite close at one point, Jack.”

Jack. The name takes me back to the revelation of my nature, to the images I’m trying to keep buried. I imagine the thick bristles of the car wash wearing the skin off of her face, and shudder. “Don’t call me that,” I say.

“Why not? I think it’s a good name for you,” she purrs.

Power and rage well up inside of me, ready to burst out in a spray of meat and bone. I look into her eyes and speak, very calmly. “I said, don’t call me that.”

She tries to hold my gaze, but soon enough she glances away. I could see that, for a brief moment, she was utterly terrified by what she saw in my eyes. The car feels cramped and stifling, and I try to change the subject. “How close were we? Before, I mean.”

She covers up her fear with the sex kitten act again. “Close enough that you wouldn’t mind taking off your clothes for me if I asked you to.”

“And is that something you’re likely to ask me to do?”

“Yes, but not for the reasons you’re hoping for. I have it on good authority that you have a tracking device in your clothing somewhere. The coat should have dampened the signal a bit, but we need to get it off of you as soon as possible, before Lacuna finds you.”

“Lacuna?”

Liz smirks again. “You can ask me questions as long as you’re changing. There’s a package under your seat with new clothes. You need to be completely changed by the time we get out of here.” She glances to the end of the tunnel. “Which is probably about three minutes.”

The insanity of the situation is overwhelming. I’m sitting in a rental car with a woman I’ve never met before, one who claims I’ve slept with her, and she’s telling me that I need to take my clothes off in an automatic car wash in the middle of winter because some unknown entity may have put a tracking device on me. I try to remember the last time anything was sane in my life, but Liz just glances at her watch and tells me that I have two and a half minutes left.

I struggle with my clothes in the confined space while struggling to keep my thoughts in order. “What’s Lacuna?”

“The organization that thinks they own you. They fund a research group called the Whitechapel Project that was created to study your unique condition.”

“By ‘condition,’ you mean the fact that I’m a serial killer that’s over a hundred years old.”

“More or less,” she says.

I get stripped down to my underwear, and start to reach for the package under the seat, but she motions to my crotch. “Not yet. Take everything off.”

Shit. I try not to look at her as I slide the underwear off. The package under the seat is covered in a large sheet of brown paper that’s been taped together. Inside is an entire outfit of carefully folded clothes that reminds me a little of the stack I found in my hotel room. I dig out the underwear and slip them on, trying to keep my growing erection hidden from Liz. She seems amused by my attempts as she openly watches me work.

I look up. The car wash was almost over. I scramble to finish putting everything on. “So how did they get a tracking device into my clothing?”

She looks back up at me and shrugs. “Not sure. Could be something that Marsh slipped in at some point.”

“Marsh?” I manage to get the shirt over my head just as the car is leaving the tunnel. She takes the pile of hastily discarded clothes and rolls down her window. The clothes land with a muted thump in a metal garbage can just outside the car wash.

“Richard Marsh,” she says as she makes her way out of the car wash. “Also known as Mister Rich. He works for Lacuna.”

Where are we heading now?

Back to the hotel

To a house here in town

To a restaurant

Or to a parking garage?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Not to be outdone, Super Agent of Whitechapel Matt Timm has also started a Whitechapel translation project — this time, into Spanish! If you’ve been looking for your favorite amnesiac psychic killer en espanol, add this baby to your RSS feed:

http://proyectowhitechapel.blogspot.com/

“The Cell” is also already translated and posted:

http://proyectowhitechapel.blogspot.com/2010/01/episodio-01-la-celda.html

http://www.ergofiction.com/2010/01/cafe-wednesday-eddy-webb/

Go check it out!

Before I start, a few pieces of news.

First off, as you’ve no doubt noticed by now, this is nearly a week late, and episode twelve will be similarly behind. I go into some detail over at my personal blog, but the long and the short of it is that my grandmother-in-law passed away very suddenly, and I had to drop everything to deal with that. If all goes well, I should be able to get episode twelve written and up by next Wednesday. Between illness and personal tragedy, 2010 is not off to a great start.

Secondly, I now have a regular Thursday evening obligation, so I’ll be moving these post-mortems back to Wednesday. Since the voting will still be going on, I’m going to drop that segment unless it’s relevant to the episode I’m discussing.

Finally, in a bit of good news, the cover for the anthology Close Encounters of the Urban Kind has been revealed. I’ve sold a story to this (“Gloomy Sunday”), and I’ll pass along the pre-order information once I have it.

Author’s Commentary

This episode was written to work around a problem that didn’t exist.

Specifically, I knew that the woman featured in this episode was likely to stick around for more than an episode, and I had planned for a while that my wife Michelle would end up voicing that character in my podcast. I also knew that she was going to be out of the country for a week, but I had cleverly planned to write and produce this episode before she left.

And then I delayed everything by a week because of the holidays. Crap. And the voting was pretty clearly slanting toward a mystery woman showing up.

So, after a couple of false starts, I decided to make this into a strength. There’s a reason why this woman isn’t speaking, and it’s relevant to the next episode or two. Considering I was ill during the time I was writing this, I was pretty pleased at my clever solution to the problem.

And then I ended up being so ill that I couldn’t record the episode right away. By the time I was ready to record, Michelle was back home, but by that point I would have had to rewrite the entire episode from scratch.

The upside of going to a last-minute funeral was that I got to spend a few hours in Cincinnati again in the winter. We ended up driving by some of the locations already mentioned in Whitechapel, and I got reminded how fucking cold Ohio can get in the winter. I’m sure this will help me in future episodes.

Previously on Whitechapel

After Six escaped from the Whitechapel Project, his mysterious comrade-in-arms, Mister Rich, was shot and fell unconscious. In trying to escape from two unknown men in a black van, Six ended up outside an emergency room before facing down two police officers and being stunned with a taser shotgun shell. After lying unconscious for three days, he awoke in a hotel room under an assumed name – M. John Druitt. A quick Internet search combined with the events of recent days pointed him to a startling conclusion: he is the most notorious serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper. He starts to leave the hotel in a panic when he notices someone watching him.

Episode Eleven – Silent Running

I notice an attractive woman watching me. Long black hair frames her long pale face. She wears a charcoal gray suit that is fitted to her lean frame, and she’s looking at me with a finger to her lips.

My first thought is to marvel at how beautiful her throat would look as blood spills out of it. I imagine the warm, wet slash against her cold, white skin, and I force myself to be revolted. I shove the image down, trying to get rid of it, but another image pops back up, like a balloon in water.

… I can smell the faint stench of decay on her breath, taste notes of it on my lips. Her hair is plastered across her face as my fingers clench. I imagine the soft silkiness of her neck in my hands…

She’s the woman from the vision in my cell!

I open my eyes and start to speak, to ask her why she haunts me, but she frantically waves her hands and puts the finger to her lips again. She’s asking me to be silent. I nod in understanding and draw a question mark in the air. Why do we have to be quiet?

She reaches into the jacket of her suit. I get a quick glimpse of cleavage and a black lacy bra, and the image of her lying dead is finally submerged under a soft wave of vague lust. She puts on a pair of small wire-framed glasses and pretends to look for something in the distance, and then under a nearby chair. I feel like laughing out loud – I just found out I’m a perverted serial killer, and here I am playing charades in a five-star hotel with a woman I’ve never met before. I shake my head in confusion, to let her know that I don’t get what she’s trying to tell me, when it hits me. Someone’s looking for me – maybe the men from the black van.

I change my shake to a nod of understanding. She smiles and grabs my arm, yanking on it urgently. I pull out of her grasp for a moment to grab my bag, but she looks reluctant. I hold the bag up to show it to her, but she shakes her head and waves dismissively at it. I can’t tell if she means that I should leave it here or that she doesn’t care about it, but she’s already leaving the room, so I take it with me.

As I follow her to the car, I wonder if this is the mysterious Elizabeth that left me the notes, my alter ego’s wife carrying the name of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims. It would certainly explain how she found me, and maybe how she knows me. But why the silence? Is she mute? Did something happen to her voice? Did my image of slicing her throat somehow sever her ability to speak?

She leads me to the lobby and then points to the ground. Stay here. I nod and sit in a nearby chair as she goes to the front desk. The table next to the chair I’m sitting in has another notepad of the hotel’s stationary and a small, thin pencil like the ones you find on golf courses. I snatch both of them up and put them into my duffel bag – if we’re going to continue to communicate silently, writing things down will be more efficient than acting them out. In a few moments she comes back with a rolling suitcase with a collapsible handle. She deftly slaps the handle in and lays the suitcase on its back, crouching down on the floor to unzip it. As she’s opening the suitcase, I use the opportunity to take another look down the front of her suit coat. I look back up to notice her looking at me, and she smiles and winks. She leans over a little bit more and goes back to digging through her suitcase.

I can feel myself smile at her flirtatious look. A part of me wants to be embarrassed because this woman I’ve never met noticed my casual lechery, but another part of me is strangely comfortable with the exchange. It feels good to think about something normal like admiring a sexy woman, and as long as I’m thinking about her warm body, I’m not thinking about her cold corpse.

The image of her cut throat bobs to the surface again. I force it back down, but my moment of normalcy is shattered.

The woman hands me a worn brown leather coat with a thick lining. I take it and look at it while she puts on a black leather coat of her own. It looks broken in, but not torn up – someone’s taken care of this jacket. Holding onto it, I casually check the pockets, but they’ve all been carefully cleaned out.

She zips up her coat and notices I haven’t put mine on yet. She points to the front doors and wraps her arms around her in a mock shiver. I look to the glass doors, and can see that the snow has piled up a few inches. I nod and shrug into the coat.

She walks toward the front doors, never looking behind her to see if I’m following. The pretty receptionist smiles at us as we leave, and I smile back, trying to feel as normal as possible. We’re a regular couple checking out of their hotel room and going on their way back home, or to their plane flights. Just a mute mystery woman and a psychic serial killer doped up on pain meds out for a casual drive in the Cincinnati snow.

Speaking of pain meds, I start to feel them kick in. I feel my eyes get heavy, but the bracing cold wind wakes me back up in a second. The snow leaks into my socks as I stomp through it toward the parking lot. She pulls a keychain from her pocket, and a nearby silver sedan flashes its lights and honks. The plates are from Miami, and the sticker on the windshield comes from a local rental car company I recognize from an ad I saw in the hotel. She opens the trunk and tosses her suitcase inside before pointing to my bag. I put the bag in alongside the suitcase, and she slams the trunk shut.

That’s when I hear an engine start. I turn my head at the same time as the woman does, and we both notice a black van in the parking lot with its lights on. Two men are sitting inside the van. I can’t tell if they’re the same men that cornered me at the hospital or not.

The woman looks back and me, smiles, and casually gets into the car as if nothing was wrong. I get into the car as well, and wonder what’s going on.

What’s going on?

She’s leading me into a trap.

She doesn’t know about the men following me.

She’s going to help me escape once we get out of the parking lot.

She has her own plans for me, which have nothing to do with the men in the van.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I know this is the second episode in a row that’s been delayed. I don’t anticipate this becoming a habit — it’s just a weird set of circumstances that’s been hitting me a bit hard recently.

Because of a big plot development in episode ten, I’m putting the entire post-mortem behind a cut. Normally I assume you’ve already read or listened to the episode before you read the post-mortem, but in this case you definitely should if you want to avoid spoilers.

You have been warned.

Author’s Commentary

I’ve planned to have Jack the Ripper involved in this story in some way from the very beginning. While I’ve left lots of elements about the plot open, I did know at some point that Six would learn that he is tied in some way to Jack the Ripper. I do have some ideas on how that would play out, but like with all things with Whitechapel, how it ends up working out is up in the air.

When I offered up the names that Six was called, it actually informed what character would impact this episode on some level. I honestly figured most people wouldn’t pick up on “Druitt” since it wasn’t mentioned in any way on the site (“McPhearson,” for example, was tagged in episode nine), but a few readers picked up the reference pretty quickly. In a very cool move, they kept things to themselves as much as possible, but when I saw that Druitt was chosen, I knew I had to have Jack involved in the episode.

And I admit, I had absolutely no idea how I would do that. That’s part of the reason why I delayed a week — I knew this episode needed me to think about it a bit more than most, and I just wasn’t giving it the time it needed over the holiday.

I actually debated not spilling the beans this episode, because for some reason I had it in my head that the revelation of Six being involved with Jack the Ripper was part of the big reveal. As I thought about it, though, I kept looking back at my roadmap for the story, and this is the point where things get even worse for Six. And what can be worse than thinking you’re the most notorious serial killer in history? So, Six finding out about Jack isn’t really the end of the story, but the part where it gets worse. What he does with the knowledge — that’s the story.

I also confess that this was the one I was most nervous about. I was afraid that it would be too over-the-top, too corny. From the commentary I’ve gotten on the board and the email I’ve received, it seems like I hit the balance well — people who saw it coming a bit didn’t quite see that coming, people who didn’t see it coming were totally floored, and I think folks get that the mystery of Six isn’t resolved yet — not by a long shot.

Voting and Discussion

Voting and discussion was pretty subdued this time, but I’m not surprised — I did just drop a big bomb in people’s laps. There was just no contest in the voting — people love the trope of the mysterious woman walking into the hero’s life. Whether it’s the mysterious “Elizabeth” or not is something I’ll decide on in the next few days. :)

Agent of Whitechapel Alex Cochrane — who I mercilessly murdered in Episode 7 — has started translating all of the Whitechapel episodes in French! I’ll post links to each French version at the bottom of the English episodes, but you can follow along at the blog here:

Projet: Whitechapel

Épisode 01 – La cellule

Previously on Whitechapel

Six escaped from the Whitechapel Project, thanks to the help of the mysterious Mister Rich. Although Six got some clues to the nature of his past, he had more questions than answers when Mister Rich was shot by a man masquerading as a police officer. A high-speed chase with real police officers and a van with two unknown men led to a showdown at a hospital, during which Six was knocked unconscious. He awoke in an expensive hotel room with a note from someone named “Elizabeth” and a wake-up call from the front desk that referred to him by an unfamiliar name.

Episode Ten – Mr. Druitt

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Druitt?”

I say no and hang up before the receptionist could respond. I don’t know any “Mr. Druitt,” but I’m too sore to build up too much hope that it’s my real name – I’ve been burned too many times to think that it’s just that simple. I make my way to the bathroom to find some pain killers to make me feel more human, or as human as a psychic killer can feel.

The bathroom is as big as my cell. It has all the carefully-placed clutter of a high-end hotel – soap bars wrapped in elegant tissue paper, glass glasses covered in plastic wrap, and soft hand towels folded into animal shapes. Next to the elegantly nondescript toiletries is a bottle of white pills and a small stack of neatly-clipped together papers. The top sheet is a pink hospital admission form, and the logo on it matches the one on the pill bottle – Mercy Anderson, the hospital I left Mister Rich at. The hospital I was knocked unconscious at.

Ignoring the bottle for the moment, I snatch up the papers, sit on a small leather couch in the bathroom (who has a couch in a bathroom?) and devour all the information they contain. A John Doe was admitted on January 7^th at around 3am – not too long after the time I dropped Mister Rich off. The person admitting John Doe was listed as “Richard Marsh.” I didn’t give Mister Rich a name when I admitted him, but I didn’t give a name for myself, either, and I certainly don’t remember signing any paperwork.

I puzzle over the names for a moment before it hits me: Mister Rich. “Rich” is short for “Richard.” It’s likely that Mister Rich is Richard Marsh, or at least the pseudonym he gave. That probably makes me John Doe. Did Mister Rich wake up after I admitted him? How did he get me away from the men in the wool coats? I skim the page again, and find a signature from a police officer, and a note that I was a witness of some kind. Looks like the police managed to win the fight with the overcoats somehow.

I turn to the next page. It’s another pink form – a discharge form for January 10^th. The patient’s name is listed as M. John Druitt, discharged by his wife Elizabeth Stride-Druitt. Trying to find the connection, I flip back to the first sheet and compare the two. The patient numbers between John Doe and M. John Druitt are the same – at some point between the time I went in and the time I went out, I gained a name, the same name the receptionist at this hotel called me. The woman claiming to be my wife is also probably the same Elizabeth who left me the note. Now that I see the name written down, “John Druitt” does ring a faint bell, but I don’t get the impression that it’s me – I feel like “Six” is more me than “John Druitt.” Then again, the idea that I’m married seems new to me as well. For all I know, I have a wife and kids somewhere who are wondering where their daddy is. Or worse, they’ve already given up hope and assumed I’m dead.

I shake my head – no point in getting worked up over a family that might be a complete fabrication. I have to focus. The next page is a copy of the doctor’s chart, with a picture of my face stuck in the top right corner. Most of it is gibberish to me (guess I’m not a doctor), but I do notice that I was kept under heavy sedation the entire time. I can’t find anything on the chart to explain why I was sedated, but it looks like they treated me for a variety of minor injuries. No reference to an EKG or any other kind of brain scan – that’s probably for the best.

I look at the last page. It’s an invoice from the hotel for a day of pre-paid Internet time in the name of M. John Druitt. The name – my name, at least for the moment – is circled with an arrow pointing to it, and the word “Internet” is underlined.

Whoever Elizabeth is, she apparently assumes I’m an idiot. That’s fair – most times, I feel like one.

I look at the bottle of pills, and find that it’s Vicodin. I dry-swallow a couple and drop the bottle into my pocket before folding up the pages and putting them in with the bottle. I snatch up the clothing, and find a small black gym bag folded underneath them. I stuff the clothes into the bag and head out of the hotel room.

*     *     *

The front desk is an expanse of marble manned by efficient men and women in dark, pressed suits. I glance at one of the women – a small, pretty thing with short brown hair. My mind flashes back to the man in the cell, the first man I killed, and I feel a strange sense of euphoria at the thought. No. I push the memory away. I take a deep breath. In. Out.

I approach the desk and ask if there’s anything for John Druitt. A moment later I have a brown envelope with “M. John Druitt” written across the front, and the number six in the top left corner. Cute. The envelope is heavy and feels like it has some kind of padding inside, so I tuck it away in my bag to open later in case it’s a gun or a bomb or a severed hand – something that these five-star eager beavers might frown on having displayed in their efficient marble bee hive. I ask where I can get to an Internet terminal, and the cute brunette gives me directions to the business center on the second floor. Within minutes I’m typing in the code from the invoice and pulling up a browser.

I type the words “John Druitt” into the search bar. On a hunch, I add the word “Whitechapel” before I hit Enter. Within seconds, the screen is full of web page links, but I don’t have to click on any of them to know what they’re talking about: The Whitechapel Murders of 1888.

Jack the Ripper.

As I stare at the screen, the information floods into my brain. One of the main leads for the identity of Jack the Ripper was a barrister named Montigue John Druitt (born 15 August 1857, died 1 December 1888). Jack’s third victim was Elizabeth Stride. His victims had many similar cuts – the throat slashed open with two deep cuts, the lower abdomen ripped open with a deep, jagged wound. My mind starts picking out pieces and throwing them in front of my eyes.

The guard in my cell: I can see myself taking the axe out of my head and chopping at his throat; once, twice, until his head flips back like a candy dispenser. In my mind I feel my arm pumping as I slash open his stomach.

Francis, the guard: “Your patient couldn’t have gotten far, but… well, you’ve told us enough times what happens if he starts killing.”

Mister Rich’s threats to me: “If you’re telling the truth, I won’t let that thing inside of you take over. I will kill you first.”

The fake police officer at the motel: The axe slashes across his throat once, twice, nearly severing his head. I see his body fall backwards, as the axe splashes open his abdomen. Loops of intestine spill onto the snow while the frozen air turns white with his escaping heat.

I look down at my hands, hands I’ve seen covered in blood, hands that I’ve imagined around a woman’s throat. They kept me locked up, doped up, chased me down and tried to contain me. All this time, I thought it was because they wanted to use me, that I was some freaky experiment or government project gone rogue. I thought I was the plucky underdog, trying to escape from impossible odds to find my life and go back to being a normal person. I never though that I was the mad dog that needed to be put down. I never thought I would turn out to be the most notorious serial killer in human history.

All this time I’ve been bitching about answers, and now I have one. Are you happy now, Six? Are you happy to know that you’re a fucking monster?

I stumble back from the computer, knocking over the chair in the process. I have to get out of here, now. I have to get away, have to hide, have to think. But where can I go to hide from myself, hide from the thing lurking inside of me, waiting to come out?

I turn around, and see that someone is watching me.

Who is watching me?

Mister Rich?

One of the men from the van?

A woman I’ve never met before?

Or a man I don’t recognize?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Due to work and the holidays, this evening is the first chance I’ve had to sit and even think about Whitechapel, and I’m not likely to get much more time until around Christmas. My options are to try and crank out a shitty episode, or push it back a week, and I’d rather do it right. So, in order to keep my life somewhat sane, I’m going to push back episode 10 to next Wednesday, December 30th.

Quick note before I dive in: yes, there isn’t any post-mortem for episode 8. I was hella busy that week preparing for a LARP event, and I thought I could catch up on that during the Q&A that got canceled. If someone really has a question about the writing process for episode 8, I’ll answer it in the comments, but otherwise I’ll just dive into episode 9 and move forward.

Author’s Commentary

Because of the previously-mentioned LARP event, I only did a couple hundred words on Saturday, and really didn’t have a chance to write a full draft at all until Sunday night. Worse, I really had no idea what was going to happen (aside from laying the tracks to the next plot point). To top it all off, I had a tie vote in the poll. So I did a lot of hasty and heavy writing and rewriting on really short notice. And yet, I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Such is the creative process.

When I decided to make the scene in the cell a flashback, I started with a copy-and-paste of the first few paragraphs and intentionally started building around that language. As I kept writing, though, I found that the structure of the episode as a whole had resonances with the first act, so I rewrote to play those up more. It might be a pointless bit of stylistic nonsense, but it amused me, and got me writing on an episode that almost didn’t happen.

Elizabeth and the man in the cell are both characters I planned to introduce in the early planning stages of this story, and it was nice to start that process.

On the recording, I had two guest voices, and both were remote. The process worked better than I feared, but not as good as I hoped. Still, live and learn. I’m also looking forward to seeing how Brenden Whiny-Butt Brendan handles the man in the cell in future episodes.

Voting and Discussion

On the name poll, I did have four different options on how it would go based on the name (another originally unintentional homage to episode 1). I am pleased that some people caught the subtle reference to “Mr. Druitt,” but now I have to do something with it. Thanks, guys. :)

Back to episode nine

Previously on Whitechapel

Mister Rich rescued Six from the Whitechapel Project and gave him some clues about his past. When the two stopped at an out-of-the-way motel for a shower and new clothes, two men dressed as police officers followed Mister Rich back from a shopping trip. Six reluctantly killed one of the men with his powers, while Mister Rich shot the other (although he ended up injured in the process). A mysterious black van showed up after the altercation, and Six barely managed to get Mister Rich’s unconscious body into his car and drive off before the two men in the van could catch up with him. A chase ensued, and Six managed to get Mister Rich to the hospital before he was knocked down with a taser shotgun shell. Six tried to find out who they were, but he was only told that they were Six’s owners before knocking him unconscious.

Episode Nine – Two Wakings

I wake up just in time to puke all over the concrete floor. I start to wipe away the vomit with my hand, but a plastic loop slaps into my cheek, dangling loosely from my wrist. It’s one of those hospital bracelets with a little piece of paper in it, which has two letters printed on it — VI. I’m back in my cell.

Standing in front of me is a tall man in a suit that looks a couple of decades out of date. His short sandy-blond hair is turning the same shade of gray as his eyes. He looks at me intently – not the soft stare of concern over another human in distress, but the intense stare of someone carefully watching a barking dog straining at the end of its chain.

“I’m glad you’re awake.” His voice reminds me of bleak Virginia winters – cold, Southern, and harsh. “I was worried that the trip would have damaged you in some way.”

I try to stand up, but an ax slams into my head, and I stagger back to my knees.

“No, don’t try to stand up,” he says. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” He squats down, sitting on his heels, and stares directly into my eyes. “You are very valuable to me, Six.”

I stammer, trying to get my mouth to work. “What… what did you call me?”

“Six. It’s something one of my co-workers called you. I think it’s appropriately dehumanizing, don’t you?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m your owner, and you’re my very special attack dog. That’s all you need to know.”

“Own? You can’t own people.”

He casually brushes some imaginary dust off of his sleeve. “And yet I do. How unfortunate for you.”

I close my eyes and try to reach out with my mind to hurt him, but he just slaps my face. “Now now, Six. You may be a rabid dog, but you can’t bite your master’s hand. And I have such plans for you. Such plans.”

After that, all I can remember is screaming…

* * *

I wake up screaming.

I swing my fist at the man in the suit, but he’s not there. Instead, I roll out of bed and land face-first on the floor. I push myself up off of the thin, scratchy carpeting and look around.

I’m in a bedroom of some kind. There’s a large king bed with thick covers and nearly a dozen pillows all over. A couch sits across from the bed, and it’s near an entertainment center with a television and a couple of black boxes plugged into it. There are two nightstands with tasteful lamps on either side of the bed, and there’s an entrance to a huge bathroom full of granite and bamboo. Off in one corner there’s a small desk with a chair. Nobody else is in the room with me.

I’m also completely naked.

I notice a stack of freshly-laundered clothing folded neatly on the couch. As well as the Wal-Mart specials I was wearing when I went unconscious, there are more shirts, jeans, socks, and underwear. I put on the clothes I was wearing before and search the nightstand drawers. They’re both empty. A similar search of the entertainment center reveals a sole remote control. I push the on button a couple of times, but nothing happens, so I throw the control on the couch and keep looking.

The desk is clean except for a phone and a folded piece of paper. It has the letters VI written on it in flowing, elegant handwriting. I unfold it, and it had four words written in the same hand: “Come find me. Elizabeth.”

… I can smell the faint stench of decay on her breath, taste notes of it on my lips. Her hair is plastered across her face as my fingers clench. I imagine the soft silkiness of her neck in my hands…

I shake my head to get rid of the stray memory. The ivory paper is crisp and thick to my touch, and I can make out a few threads in the weave of the paper – expensive stuff. At the top is a small logo that says “The Cincinnatian Hotel” and an address: 601 Vine Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. I sniff the paper, almost expecting a whiff of perfume, but it only smells like paper and ink.

The phone is made of thick molded plastic, but its form is flowing and elegant, matching the décor of the room quite well. Picking up the receiver reveals a small, tasteful plaque in the cradle, giving me the numbers for the front desk and room service. There’s a dial tone, but I’m not sure who to call, so I put the receiver back in the cradle.

It sit back on the bed. One minute, I was in a high-speed chase with police and a bleeding man in a car that wasn’t mine, only to end up shot with a fucking shotgun and knocked out by people who claimed to own me. Next minute, I’m having nightmares about Southern spooks before waking up in a hotel suite that was at least four stars, if not five.

I did a quick list of pros and cons. On the good side, I wasn’t in jail, in the hospital, or in my cell. On the bad side, my only contact is unconscious in the hospital, and I didn’t have a weapon or a car anymore. I also had no idea who put me in the hotel room, or how they related to the Whitechapel Project.

Plus, someone named Elizabeth wanted me to find her. I wasn’t sure whether that should be filed as a pro or a con.

The phone shatters the silence with an ear-piercing ring, and my heart stops for a moment. I look at the phone, dreading what might happen. Who could be calling me? Would it be another person plunging me back into that world of darkness and death? For a moment I consider just not answering it. I imagine opening the door and walking away, leaving behind a string of corpses and a thousand unanswered questions.

I force myself off the bed and pick up the receiver on the third ring.

“This is the front desk with your eight A.M. wake-up call.”

Well, that was disappointing. “I don’t remember asking for a wake-up call.”

The receptionist’s voice sounds apologetic, polite, and professional. “I’m sorry, sir. I have a note to call room 501 at eight A.M. Has there been an error?”

I don’t know, has there been? Whoever put me in this room also left a wake-up call for me. Why? I address the receptionist again. “No, it’s fine. Thank you.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr…?”

And then she called me a name I didn’t recognize.

What name does the receptionist call me?

Mr. Marsh?

Mr. McPhearson?

Mr. Smith?

Or Mr. Druitt?

The choice is yours.

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Author’s Port-mortem

Hey, not all my ideas are good ones.

Looking forward to answering your questions!

Previously on Whitechapel

Mister Rich revealed some tantalizing information about Six’s past, although he was wary of Six’s true intentions. After Six had some food, a shower, and some new clothes, Mister Rich was followed by two police officers to the run-down motel that they were staying at. The situation escalated, and Six killed one of the officers with his mind while Mister Rich was wounded in a gunfire exchange with the second officer. Six realized that the cops were fake, but just as he was pulling Mister Rich’s car around to get him to a hospital, a black van showed up at the other end of the motel parking lot.

Episode Eight – The Van

Fuck this. I’ve killed enough tonight – I can’t let someone else die because of my negligence. I lean over Mister Rich and slide my arms under his armpits. I try to pick him up, but his muscular bulk makes it feel like I’m trying to lift a boulder. I switch to his legs to drag him to the car. The fluffy snow helps to slide him along, leaving a red smear on the frozen ground behind him. It’s slow work, and the whole time I look for some kind of super-strength or telekinesis or something that might be lurking inside my brain, but all I get is a bigger headache.

It feels like hours getting Mister Rich to the car, but the van hasn’t moved. A couple of men are standing on either side of the van, wearing thick, black wool coats over button-down shirts, ties and slacks. One is walking toward the pile of meat that used to be Cochrane, and the other is talking into a cell phone while scanning the area.

I realize that how I’ve parked Mister Rich’s car next to the police cruiser effectively hides me and Mister Rich, as long as I stay low. I finish dragging Mister Rich to the car, wincing at every snap of a twig or bounce of Mister Rich’s skull. Once I get him to the open door, I try to fold his upper body up and shove him into the back seat. I’m sure I’m breaking a thousand medical procedures, but he only might die if I get him into the car, instead of certainly dying if he bleeds to death in the snow.

I keep pushing, and Mister Rich finally flops forward with a solid thump. I breathe a sigh of relief, and quietly close the rear door before crouching toward the front door and opening it softly. I grab the keys from my pocket and slide into the driver’s seat.

Mister Rich’s phone rings. I feel a scream rise in my throat out of surprise, but I manage to clamp it down. I look at it to check the ID of the caller, but the screen just says “ZM Lacuna,” same as on the cop’s credit card. Why would the company that issued the credit card that a fake police officer was carrying be calling Mister Rich?

I throw the cell phone on the passenger seat along with the pistols and the clothes, and I settle into the driver’s seat, crouching low. I put the key in the ignition and turn it just far enough to unlock. I ease the car into reverse and take a deep breath. My hand grabs the key, and starts to turn it.

Suddenly, there’s a pounding on my side window. One of the men from the van is pressing his face against the glass, holding his hand next to his eyes in order to see through the window tinting. I can barely make out a muffled “Marsh? Are you in there?”

I briefly consider taking on the disguise of Mister Rich, but the memory of Dr. Tucci’s skinned corpse comes back. No. No more killing.

I crank the key hard and stomp on the gas. The car shoots back as I turn hard on the steering wheel, and I can feel the back wheels start to slide. The man pounding on the window falls back and rolls out of the car’s way as I hit the breaks. I slam the car into drive and hit the gas again. I can hear the tires spinning for a second before the car lunges for the turn out of the parking lot.

My life becomes nothing but a series of turns. Hard left. Try not to swerve into the trees. Hard right. Watch out for the truck. Hard right again. I try not to think about where I’m going – I just pick random turns and focus on keeping my car on the road and going as fast as I can.

Which is probably why I ended up driving past a police car at 110 miles per hour.

I hear the siren kick in behind me. Fuck. I risk a glance in the rearview mirror, and I can see his lights flashing. Behind the cruiser are a pair of large, bright headlights, but it’s too dark to make out who they belong to.

I glance around the dashboard, looking for inspiration. I notice that Mister Rich has a built-in GPS system, and I get an idea. Quickly tapping the screen, I program in a course for the hospital. If I can get to the hospital before I’m pulled over, maybe the police will help me get Mister Rich inside, and the presence of real police might shelter me from the men in the van long enough for me to think of another way to escape.

I listen to the soothing electronic voice giving directions while I try to keep one eye on the slowly scrolling map glowing in the darkness of the car. Merge right. Straight ahead to the highway. Take this exit. Ignore the police officer screaming for me to pull over through his mounted bullhorn. Another three miles. Two miles. My destination is on the right.

The lights move alongside me, and I can see a cop angrily gesturing for me to pull over. I start to shake my head, but realize he can’t see me. The glowing sign for Mercy Anderson Emergency Room jumps out at me, and I yank the wheel hard into the turn. The cop car speeds past, but I notice out of the corner of my eye that it manages to make another turn into the hospital campus.

I park the car in front of the emergency room drive-up and rush inside the automatic doors. “Help, I have a man bleeding in my car outside!” A few people dressed in scrubs rush out with me, one of them bringing a gurney with him. I turn around and head back outside to lead them to the car.

The police are already there, pointing their guns at me. They start to shout orders, but I raise my hands and point to the car. “Wait! A man is bleeding to death inside my car! Let me open the car for the ER team, please.”

The cops pause for a moment, and then one tells me to throw him the keys to the car. I do so, and he picks them up while his partner covers me with her pistol. I tell him to open the front door and look for a button on the dashboard.

He has the door open when I hear a crack, and I feel like someone has kicked me in the side, knocking me over. I try to scramble back up to see what happened, but my body won’t respond. My muscles are stiff, locked rigid. I can hear the cops shouting at someone else, and something about a taser, but out of the corner of my eye I see one of the men in the black wool coats holding a shotgun and showing some kind of card or badge to the police officers.

I feel myself being rolled onto my back, and I look into the eyes of the other wool overcoat. He’s holding a device in his hand that crackles electricity. I feel my jaw loosen a bit, and I manage to ask “Who are you?”

The man looks bored with the question. “We’re your owners. And you’ve been a very bad dog.”

He presses the device to my flesh, and I black out.

Where will I wake up?

Back in my cell?

In a hospital?

Or in a bedroom?

The choice is yours.

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Episode Nine – Two Wakings

Author’s Commentary

This episode was initially pretty tough — I kind of knew where I wanted to go, but the first time I sat down to write this, it just didn’t come out. I barely got 500 words in before I called it a day. Then I watched some television and movies, just trying to find the vibe of Whitechapel again. The next day, I sat down and banged out the entire episode in pretty much one shot. That’s just how writing is, sometimes.

Anyhow, I came into this with two goals: write Mister Rich out (even for a short time), and kill someone else. The former was for a couple of reasons — to give David (the voice talent for Mister Rich) a break from recording dozens of lines every episode, and because this serial is really about Six, and I wanted to keep the focus there. The latter was because it was a good time to cash in the winner of the second Agent Mission, and the appearance of two unnamed cops was a good opportunity for that.

Beyond that, this was really an episode that was originally all about getting from point A to point B, and then seeing what mess I left myself to clean up. Since not one person voted with the cops, I decided to make them evil police, so even stuff you don’t vote for might inspire me. But I knew this was leading up to the end of Act I (which, by all accounts, looks like it will end on schedule with episode eight), so I had to get something going to lead to roughly where things had to go. This is making things a bit more fast-paced than I originally envisioned, but thus far y’all seem to be enjoying it, so I must be doing something right!

Yes, “ZM Lacuna” means something. But that’s for Act II. And I’ll have a surprise for you between Act I and Act II next week.

Voting and Discussion

One thing I learned — talking about this on Twitter directly relates to voting. I got 30 votes after I started mentioning it on Twitter and Facebook, and a number of people said “Oh, I forgot to vote — thanks for the reminder!” I had known that social media was helping, but this was good to express to me that people prefer the reminders, instead of finding them irritating.

Anyhow, even though I had six options, it quickly centered around taking Mister Rich’s car, so the choice really became whether to take Mister Rich with Six or leave him there. Interestingly, there was some strong movement toward “hide in the woods” in the comments, but it only garnered 12% in the poll. I think that’s the first time that a strong opinion in the comments had a poor showing in the poll, which was interesting to see.

Someone wanted to know when I would be pitching Whitechapel as a TV series. I was sincerely surprised by the idea, but I will admit that a lot of my inspiration comes from British dramas, and I could probably repackage Whitechapel into six one-hour episodes if I ever wanted to go that route. I just didn’t realize any of that until it was pointed out to me.

Back to episode seven

Previously on Whitechapel

Six was picked up from the Whitechapel Project by Mister Rich, a man who knew Six before his memory loss. Mister Rich confronted Six about his disguise as Dr. Tucci, but after Six told Mister Rich the truth, he decided to trust Six for now. They went to a run-down motel, where Mister Rich revealed that Six was found in London, England, and that his powers are as dangerous to Six as they are to everyone around him. After Mister Rich went to get new clothes for Six, he came back saying he was followed. Six leaves the motel, and notices two police officers asking questions of the other motel patrons.

Episode Seven – Fighting the Law

I walk to Mister Rich’s car, forcing myself to look casual and unhurried. The cops are behind me, and I try not to imagine them shooting me in the back as I walk. I start to sweat in the freezing cold, and each step seems to take longer and longer. Left. Right. Left. Right.

After an eternity, I make it to the car, and risk a glance back. The cop in the cruiser is talking into a handset, while the other is shaking the woman’s hand. When they’re not looking, I dart into the trees to stand behind Mister Rich. He puts a finger to his lips and points to the snowy ground. I crouch down next to him, and he looks back to the parking lot, holding his gun ready.

“What’s going on?” I whisper.

He shakes his head. “They’re not cops,” he whispers back.

I try to get another look of the two uniformed officers, but a tree blocks my view where I’m kneeling. “Who are they, then?”

“Not sure, but they’ve been following me since the store. If they were police, they would have pulled me over, or gone undercover if they were investigating me.” He leaned around a tree to get a better view. “They probably recognized my car. Fuck me for keeping it, I guess.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We aren’t going to do anything. You’re going to stay here. I’m going to keep them from following us any further.” He gets up and starts to make his way along the treeline, stalking back to the other end of the parking lot.

One thing I’ve learned since waking up in that cell is that nothing is what it seems. The problem is, I’m never sure which side of the problem is the false one. I consider the options. Maybe Mister Rich is on the run from the law, and this is all just an excuse to keep himself out of jail. Could be the police are after me, and Mister Rich is wrong about them not being who they say they are. Or maybe they just think we’re a couple of drug dealers trying to make a buck. I shift between two trees to see if I can make out the police cruiser.

The second uniform – the one talking to the woman – is gone. I can still see his partner in the car, but the other one isn’t anywhere to be seen. I glance back down the treeline, and I can just make out a flash of orange as Mister Rich moves closer to the cruiser.

“Freeze!”

Looks like I found the other cop. He’s holding his gun at me in both hands, his legs spread on the icy concrete. All I have on me is a plastic bag full of smelly clothes, and Mister Rich is probably too far away to help me. Face it, Six, you’re fucked.

The cop continues to bark orders at me. “Drop the bag and kick it over to me.” I stand up and do what he says in a haze, but my mind is still whirling, trying to think of what I can do.

I think about the man I killed in my cell, and suddenly the mother of all headaches splits my skull in two. I can’t stop myself from falling to the ground and closing my eyes because of the pain. The cop’s voice is coming from far away. I barely notice what he’s saying as I imagine the weight of the axe in my hand. Whether I like it or not, I’m going to kill him.

I remember what Mister Rich told me about the thing inside of me. I remember what the guard said at the Whitechapel Project about what happens if I kill again. Whether this cop is a fake or not, I can’t afford to murder someone else. I scream “Get away from me! If you want to live, get the fuck away from me!”

I close my eyes and try to imagine dropping the axe and walking away, but I can feel my arm swinging down. I hear the cop’s firm orders turn into screams of pain. The axe slashes across his throat once, twice, nearly severing his head. I see his body fall backwards, as the axe splashes open his abdomen. Loops of intestine spill onto the snow while the frozen air turns white with his escaping heat.

My hands shake as I open my eyes. Once again, my dream has become a horrible reality.

A gunshot cracks, and then another. I spin to look over at the police car, and I can make out the other cop. He’s out of the cruiser and slumped against the side of it, his gun lying in a slowly growing pool of his own blood.

My mind runs on autopilot. Feeling a sense of deja vu, I dig around in the remains of my victim, stealing from what’s left of him in order to save myself. I find his wallet and pull it out. The license says “Alex Cochrane,” and he’s got a small stack of hundreds tucked inside the billfold. No police business cards or ID cards, and only one credit card – a corporate one made out to ZM Lacuna.

No time. I shove the wallet into my pocket, and take his pistol and the plastic bag. I quickly mutter “I’m sorry” to Cochrane before I run between the trees to where I last saw Mister Rich.

He’s lying on his back, unconscious. His gun is in his hand, and blood is oozing out of his jacket, near his shoulder. I put my fingers on his wrist and then his throat. His heartbeat is strong.

I go to check on the other cop, the one slumped against the cruiser. The hole in his forehead tells me he probably doesn’t need 911. I take his gun and his wallet as well.

I force myself to take a breath and assess the situation. Even if this is a bad part of town that doesn’t ask a lot of questions, there’s at least one witness to two cops getting shot. Mister Rich needs a hospital, but I don’t know how much time I have. I can’t drag him to a hospital, so I’m going to need a car. I gingerly search Mister Rich’s pockets for keys. They’re there, along with a cheap flip-open cell phone. I take them both and rush back to the black car.

Throwing the pistols and the plastic bag on the seat, I start the car and swerve around the corpses to pull it as close as I can to the trees hiding Mister Rich. I scan the dashboard and find a button marked “Rear Door Lock.” I punch it, and both rear doors pop open with a gentle click. I get out of the car and run over to Mister Rich.

At that moment, a black van slowly pulls into the opposite end of the parking lot. I can just make it out from where I’m crouched over Mister Rich’s body. It’s heavy-looking with tinted windows, and something in the shape or the color reminds me of Mister Rich’s car.

My instincts tell me to run, to get away from this van and whatever it contains. If the passengers are associated with Mister Rich, then I can leave him here, and his own people can take care of him. But he mentioned something about “keeping the car” – what if he’s as much on the run from the Whitechapel Project as I am?

What should I do?

Take Mister Rich’s car, but leave him here. It looks like it’s more armored, and Mister Rich can take care of himself.

Take Mister Rich’s car, and take him with me. He’ll be safe in the car.

Take the police car, but leave Mister Rich here. The police car is probably faster than the black car.

Take the police car, and take Mister Rich with me. I can run the sirens and get him to a hospital faster.

Flag down the black van, and take my chances that they’re sympathetic to Mister Rich.

Or I can hide in the woods until it all blows over.

The choice is yours.

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Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Eight – The Van

Author’s Commentary

This was a weird episode to write in a couple of ways. The first half was really simple, because it was essentially the exposition I expected to get to in episode five, more or less. When that ran out, I also got to address a point that got cut from the last episode — that Six needs a shower.

Once he was in the shower, though, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. I started with him reviewing the information and putting it all together (something I’ve done a lot in previous episodes), but I realized about halfway through that this has got to be wearing on him. I scrapped my original paragraph and starting writing it more emotionally, and I learned a lot about Six. I went back and added in the bit about Six seeing himself in the mirror, and the whole thing ended up being a really nice set-piece in which we all learn more about Six. (The fact that it was episode six I actually didn’t notice until the final draft — also a cool touch.)

The other weird part was trying to keep the whole episode from being an info-dump. I added a lot more action to the exchange between Mister Rich and Six, and tried to humanize Mister Rich a bit more, but I admit I wasn’t sure how well I pulled that off.

One of the harder parts of writing fiction this way is to keep the small details right. The first time, I completely forgot that it was winter, so I added the snow references in to keep reminding myself that, hey, it’s fucking winter in Ohio, moron. I also noticed after I published this that Six hasn’t slept yet, and it’s probably pretty late into the night. Likely he nodded off in the shower.

The episode recording went about the same as last time — I thought I had a faster way to edit, but it turns out I was wrong. Well, there was the fact that I had to completely record the episode over again because Audacity crashed and took my recording with it. Irritating. I think I want to try a different configuration of the microphone to get a different audio quality to my reading, but we’ll see.

Voting and Discussion

I didn’t have as much chance to promote and ride herd on the voting and discussion this time, but it was pretty clear that folks want to stick with Mister Rich for a while yet (although there’s very different opinions on how the Six/Mister Rich relationship will evolve over time). Interestingly, while I think some readers noted the possible utility of working with the police, not one person voted for that option. Ah well. Fuck the police.

Also, the best comment ever was posted last episode.

Back to episode six

Previously on Whitechapel

Six escaped from his cell at the Whitechapel Project, only to be picked up by a black car driven by a man known only as Mister Rich. The mysterious driver seemed to play into Six’s disguise as Dr. Tucci, one of the employees of the Whitechapel Project, but when they arrived at their pre-arranged meeting place of Eden Park, both Six and Mister Rich found a wreck with the skinned body of Dr. Tucci inside. Six confessed to everything that happened, and Mister Rich admitted to knowing Six previously. They drove to a run-down motel, where Mister Rich offered to answer a couple of questions in order to satisfy Six’s curiosity.

Episode Six – Questions

One question jumps to the front. “Why did you call me ‘Six’ back at the park?”

Mister Rich smiles. “It’s a nickname I gave you. When I picked you up at the Royal London Hospital…”

“The what?” My mind reels from this news. The Royal London Hospital is in Whitechapel, London, England.

Mister Rich puts a finger up. “Look, I’m only going to answer a couple of questions, and I’m only going to answer them once, so I suggest you shut up and listen.”

I nod. “I’m sorry. Continue.”

“When I picked you up at the hospital, you were listed as an anonymous patient, with only the letters VI on your file. Due to the nature of your acquisition, I was encouraged to keep your real name a secret, but calling someone VI all the time gets cumbersome, so I started calling you Six.”

“They called me Six at the Project,” I say.

“Yeah. I never told them your real name. Then again, they didn’t ask for your real name.”

I try to keep the emotion out of my voice. “You know who I am.”

He nods. “And that’s not a question I’m going to answer right now. At this point, I think it’s best to keep you a secret from yourself as well.”

I look down at the gun. “If you know so much about me, why don’t you trust me?”

He gets up and starts to pace back and forth in the small hotel room. I notice that he’s pacing on the other side of the bed, away from me, and that he still has his gun in his hand.

“It’s not that easy, Six. If what you say is true, then the amnesia treatments worked.”

“I certainly can’t remember why I was eating old jellybeans, if that’s what you mean,” I say.

He suddenly turns to face me. “That’s exactly your problem,” he says, bringing up the gun and pointing at me with it for emphasis. “It’s bad enough that you’ve killed – twice now – but you’ve always been a little too smart for your own good.” He lowers the gun and continues pacing. “I’m trained by the government to do a lot of things, and one of those things is sniffing out when someone is lying. Not that bullshit training that cops and lie detector people get that’s no better than guessing – I’m talking about the real deal.

“When I picked you up in London, you were always a quick wit. You were able to dance circles around MI-5, but I could tell you were lying. But not because your eyes shifted or your brow clenched or your arms folded, but just because I could put the facts together in a way that Five couldn’t. At one point I knew for a fact that you were completely bullshitting me, but there wasn’t a single twitch in your manner that told me that.”

He turns to face me. “I want to believe you, Six. I do. But you’re too smart, too good. If you’re lying to me, I don’t want to tip my hand and let you know how much I know, let you feed me more subtle lies to draw me in further. And if you’re telling the truth…”

He stops for a moment, and then puts the gun to my head again. “If you’re telling the truth, I won’t let that thing inside of you take over. I’ll kill you first.”

I try to stop myself, but the questions blurt out. “What thing? How am I too smart? Why did I lie to you before I…?”

Mister Rich shoves my head a bit with the gun and walks away. “No. Enough. I’ve told you plenty, probably more than I should have.” He takes a large sniff. “Go take a shower. You smell like dead guy.”

I lift an arm to my face and take a whiff. He’s right – the smell of Dr. Tucci is still haunting me. “Fine. Good idea. Do you have any more clothes for me?”

“What do I look like, Armani? I’ll run out and get you a few essentials from the nearby Wal-Mart.” He motions at me with the gun. “Get in the bathroom, and I’ll lock you in until I get back.”

I head into a small nook with a sink, a cracked mirror, and a door. For a moment, I glance at the mirror. I see a man, Caucasian, with short brown hair and brown eyes. Stubble covers the bottom half of his face. His eyes are hazel, flecked with green, and he has a scar under his right eye. He looks ordinary, plain.

Conceptually, I understand that this is my face, but I don’t recognize it at all.

Mister Rich makes a noise behind me, and I open the door. The bathroom is a tiny closet with a shattered tile floor, a toilet with one hinge broken on its lid, and a shower stall. The plastic curtain has green spots all over it, and the shower head hangs from a ragged hole in the wall. Gaps in the yellowed wallpaper show that most of the walls are brick. No convenient windows to crawl out of. As soon as I step inside, Mister Rich closes the door behind me, and I can hear scraping as something is shoved under the doorknob. I can barely make out what he says before I faintly hear the door to the parking lot slam shut.

I gingerly strip off Tucci’s borrowed clothing. I examine my toe, which still appears to be broken, but it’s not in as much pain. Maybe I can splint it at some point or find a way to keep it from getting worse. I search my head for some kind of magical medical knowledge, but nothing comes up. Great – I can tell you where a hospital is in a foreign country, but I have no idea how to deal with a broken toe. Guess I’m not nearly as smart as Mister Rich thinks I am.

I turn the water up as hot as I can, and step into the shower. The feel of the shower isn’t quite as heavenly as the food was, but it’s certainly up there. I look for the tiny bar of soap and the worn washcloth, and I scrub away the layers of grime and vomit and blood. I try to lose myself in the simple pleasure of the shower, but my mind keeps going back over what I’ve learned.

The fact that I was found in England explains the European currency I found, as well as the name of the Project – there’s probably ongoing communication or research or something happening between England and the United States. Mister Rich admits to be government trained, but didn’t specify which government trained him. But I’m actually further back than I thought with the letters VI – they don’t really stand for the number six, though “Six” is as good a name as any for now. I was or am a fantastic liar, which might explain some of how I got out of the Project. For everything I’ve learned, though, there’s another question. Why was I in England? Why is it so dangerous to reveal who I really am? What happened to me in Whitechapel?

I turn around, and let the scalding water run over my shoulders. I’m avoiding the real problem, the real concern. There’s something inside of me, something that Mister Rich is afraid of. It’s not just that I’m a killer – the way Mister Rich handled dealing with Tucci’s corpse made it clear that he’s seen death – but there’s something that my murders are helping to unravel or reveal or feed or… something.

I punch the wall in frustration. Who the fuck am I? What the hell is going on with me? Why is every answer a doorway to another fucking question? Who the hell is this man in the football jacket? Why am I surrounded by violence and death? Suddenly I realize I’m screaming and pounding the brick over and over again. The pressure of everything going on tightens my chest and claws up my throat, like the monster inside of me wants to get out and murder again.

I sit down in the shower, and I scream and cry until the water runs cold.

* * *

After what seems like hours, I’m out of the shower and toweling myself off when I hear scraping outside. The doorknob shifts and turns, and Mister Rich throws a plastic bag at me full of clothes. “I think I was followed here. You have two minutes to get dressed, and then we’re gone.” He slams the door, but not before I see him pulling his gun out from under his jacket.

I quickly scramble through the bag, yanking off tags and ripping open plastic. The clothing inside is basic – a few pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, packages of boxers and socks, a brown ball cap with a picture of an old video game controller on it. My toe screams again as I shove Tucci’s workout shoes back onto my feet. I’m stuffing my old clothing into the bag when Mister Rich opens the door again.

“Time’s up. Let’s go. Close the room behind you when you leave.”

I step into the room, but it’s already dark. Mister Rich left the door open, and is calmly making his way across the parking lot. Snow starts to swirl into the room. I carry the bag with me as I leave. I turn to close the motel room door behind me, when I see something out of the corner of my eye.

A police cruiser is sitting at the end of the parking lot. Two uniformed cops are outside of a room at the other end of the parking lot, talking to a woman covered in a blanket. Oh shit. Are they looking for me?

I glance back at my roommate, and I see he’s not going right back to the car. He’s walking into the trees by the car, like he’s going to take a piss. As soon as he’s in the woods, he crouches down in the snow and pulls his gun.

I don’t know a thing about Mister Rich, not even his real name. He might have his own reasons to kidnap me. Maybe the police are looking for him, and not for me. It could be that I might have a better chance going with the police, or even trying to make it on my own.

I look back at the cops. One of them is walking back to his cruiser, and the other looks like he’s about done interrogating the woman. I only have a moment to choose.

What should I do?

Should I walk over to Mister Rich and see what he has planned?

Would I be better off attracting the attention of the police and trying to go with them?

Or is it best for me to run away from all of them and try to make it on my own?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Seven – Cop Killer

Thanks to everyone for being patient with the extra week. If you’ve been interested in what’s being going on with my health, you can check out the “health”-tagged entries on my LiveJournal. Otherwise, let’s dive into this.

Author’s Commentary

This episode poured out pretty easily. I had envisioned Mr. Rich acting in some advisory capacity to Six back before I started episode four, and this was a case where the voting just bore out where I was inclined to go anyway. I tried to keep this episode from being a bunch of exposition, but the inherent distrust between the two characters made that pretty easy — so easy, in fact, that I actually never really got to the exposition at all.

This actually ended up working in my favor, because I got to try something I’ve been wanting to do since I saw it on some other serial fiction sites — a poll with multiple options. Selecting what questions to ask Mr. Rich seemed like a natural use of that.

One thing I learned after I posted the episode was that my brain naturally goes to past tense when writing dialogue, and it’s so insidious that I don’t even notice it after several editing passes. I had to do some post-episode tense clean-up, which actually didn’t make it into the recorded episode. Now that I know to look for it, I hope it won’t be an issue in future. Still, it was weird to distinctly remember changing something only to find out that it not only wasn’t changed, but I actually said it incorrectly as well. Frustrating.

Recording actually went a little easier — although there were three times as many lines for Mr. Rich this time around, I found a system that allowed me to insert the lines much more easily. It’s still time-intensive — it takes most of an evening for me to record and edit an episode — but I’m getting better at recording more technically complicated episodes without adding too much more time to my workload.

Voting and Discussion

Voting was pretty light this week — only 29 votes — although people were shocked that they got the chance to vote more than once. Two questions jumped out into the lead pretty early, and stayed there: “Why did you call me Six?” and “If you know me, why don’t you trust me?” No one apparently had any question (or care) about what happened to Dr. Tucci — that question didn’t get a single vote.

This is actually a cool result for me, because these are two questions I fleshed out way back when I was doing the prep work for episode four, so it’ll be nice to have a chance to play with that information some more. I’m still hoping to add more questions to Six’s situation than I answer in episode six, though — we’re still in Act I, more or less, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet.

Back to episode five

A few quick things that Whitechapel readers might be interested in.

• Shadow Freak is the sorry bastard lucky winner of the Agent Mission contest. He (or someone with his name, at least) will be dying in a future episode of Whitechapel. Congrats, Freak!
• I recorded a short Whitechapel promotional piece for The Podge Cast, episode 60. It’s intentionally done in a slightly raw style (similar to my White Wolf Blogcast), but it’s around fifty-eight and a half minutes into the episode, if you’re interested. It was fun and easy to do, so I might send them more “hodges” in future. Many thanks to David Pinilla and the rest for letting me babble a bit about my baby!
• Finally, I’m seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year. However, I’m not entirely sure which novel I’m going to write. If you want to help me out, you can sneak over to my LiveJournal and vote on any options you like.

As a reminder, voting will be two weeks long for Episode 5, so get some friends to come over and vote on which questions Six should ask!

Previously on Whitechapel

Six escaped from his cell at the Whitechapel Project disguised as Dr. Tucci, one of the project’s employees. After leaving his prison, a black car pulled up that seemed strangely familiar, and Six was told to get in. During the ride, the mysterious driver referred to him as Dr. Tucci, but asked some unconnected questions, constantly keeping Six on the ropes. They finally arrived at Eden Park, where the meeting between the driver and Dr. Tucci was supposed to take place, and they found Tucci’s car wrecked on the side of one of the park’s roads. Inside the car was a corpse completely missing its skin. As Six examined the body, the driver shoved him against the car, put a gun to Six’s head, and demanded to know what happened.

Episode Five – Mister Rich

I struggle to put my hands in the air while I’m awkwardly shoved against the side of the wreck. I take a breath to speak, and the cloyingly rotten smell of the corpse assaults my nose again. “Okay, I’m not Dr. Tucci. I’ll explain what I know. Let me up.”

“If you try anything, I won’t hesitate to kill you. Do you understand?” The driver pokes the heavy metal object into my head again for emphasis.

I swallow a smart-ass comment and simply say, “I understand.”

I nearly fall backwards when the hold suddenly vanishes, but the smell doesn’t seem to go away. I grab the side of the car and quickly steady myself before I let go again, my hands back into the air. I close my eyes…

… and I hear the malice in the driver’s voice. “I know what you can do. I said not to try anything.”

I open my eyes in surprise and look at my captor. He’s taller than me and wearing a Cincinnati Bengals jacket, brown slashed with orange stripes. It suits him, since he’s built like a football player – wide shoulders and thick legs encased in fitting jeans and sturdy work boots. His hair is short – it looks like a military cut, but I can’t be sure. He’s certainly not what I expected a partner of Dr. Tucci’s to look like.

He’s also pointing a gun at me. A large gun.

I try to ignore the hand cannon. “How do you know what I can do?”

The man shakes his head. “No. I have the gun, so I get to ask the questions. You don’t have the gun, so you get to answer them.”

I nod. “Fine. Can I at least put my hands down? My arms are tired.”

“Not just yet.” He walks over to his car and opens a door to the back seat before waving the pistol at me. “Get in the back seat, and sit on your hands.”

I carefully walk over to the car, feeling a sense of deja vu. Have I been captured before? A scene explodes into my brain…

… I can taste old jellybeans in my mouth, gummy and dusty. I want to spit them out, but I force myself to swallow as a brown dog with one ear sits next to me, hopefully wagging her tail…

… and I’m on the ground, face-up, frozen grass poking into my neck. My captor, my savior, whatever he is has the gun by his side. His face is surprised, concerned. “Six… is that you?”

My mask. The skin of Dr. Tucci is gone, taken by the stray image in my mind. He doesn’t seem to be shooting me over this revelation, so I risk sitting up. “Do I know you?” I ask, feeling like everything has been a question or a bruise since I woke up.

“Do you know me? I’m…” The man falters for a moment, and his face closes back up. He’s the detached professional again. “For now, I’m Mister Rich.”

Mister Rich. The name rings a bell, a faint one. I get the impression that I know more, but… the moment is gone. I nod slowly. “Okay, Mister Rich. I’m sorry I fell over. I just had an image of eating stale jellybeans, and for some reason it knocked me over.”

Mister Rich laughs. “Yeah, that was the time that I… well, never mind that. Go sit down.” His gun isn’t pointed at me anymore, but it’s still in his hand, ready and available. He seems to know me, but he still doesn’t trust me. That’s fair – I don’t trust myself, either.

I sit back on the hard seat and put my hands under my ass. Mister Rich crouches down on the frozen grass, arms over his knees, his gun dangling from one hand for easy access. I try to think about what to say, what to pass on and what to leave out, but instead I’m telling him all that I know. I describe everything from when I woke up to when I came out of the building. The story pours out of me like fountain, a steady stream of murder and lies and theft that led me to the back seat of his car.

And the whole time he’s looking at me, listening. He never interrupts me or looks distracted. He just sits there, a patient receiver of every impression, every image, every word. Finally, the stream becomes a trickle, and then a drop. I finish the story and look over at the wreck.

Mister Rich notices the look. “Did you realize your disguise would kill him?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t… I was hoping that maybe it was a mistake, that it was someone else’s body in that car. I had this feeling like I was wearing his skin, but I thought it was an abstraction, a way of understanding what’s going on in my head. I didn’t think…”

Mister Rich stands up and looks down at me. “And you don’t remember anything else?”

“No, nothing.”

He looks around at the frozen park. “Okay. This wasn’t how I planned to spend my evening, but what the hell. We need to get out of here.” He opens the passenger side door and reaches inside.

I lean over and start to pull my door shut, but Mister Rich grabs the door before I can. He startles me with how fast he is. His face is close to mine, and for a moment I panic. Maybe it was a lie. Maybe he’s just going to shoot me and cart my body around in the soundproof, air-tight backseat of his car.

He throws a paper bag into the back seat before handing me a paper cup with a straw. “God, you stink. But here’s that food I promised you. We’ll eat on the way.”

I don’t even notice the car glide back out of the park. I devour everything in the bag as if it were the finest meal ever made. Right now, at this exact moment, there aren’t any secret underground hospitals or mysterious gun-totting drivers or amnesiac psychics who can kill people at a distance. All that exists is a hamburger, french fries, and a cup of ice-cold soda. I lose myself in the simple joy of food.

All too soon, I’m left with the cardboard and paper corpses of my meal. I bury them all in the bag when the speaker crackles back to life. “There’s a motel nearby that I know. We’ll be able to find a room for the night.”

I set the bag of trash next to me before leaning back into the seat. “Can you put the divider down?”

“Not just yet, Six. We have a lot to talk about before I trust that you won’t cut me into bloody ribbons.”

“Do you mind if I ask some questions while we drive?”

“We’ll have time for all that at the motel.”

True to his word, within a few minutes we pull into the parking lot of a motel that should have been condemned. He tells me to stay inside before walking into the lobby. Soon the car is parked behind some trees, well away from the street, and he’s leading me to room 339. He pulls out a plastic card to swipe through the lock, and I shiver. It’s not because of the cold.

The room itself is uninspiring – two twin beds with faded comforters, a scratched and worn nightstand between them with a lamp, a dresser across from them with a TV set that looks twenty years old, a chair and a desk that were probably salvaged from a school. Wallpaper flakes off in long, ragged strips, and there are dark stains on the threadbare carpet. Mister Rich motions to one of the beds and sits down on the opposite one. The gun is still in his hand, resting in his lap.

“It seems like you’ve been straight with me, so I’ll try to be straight with you. I don’t completely trust you yet, but it’s clear you’re looking for answers, and I might have some of them. Some questions I won’t answer, but I’ll try to answer a couple that won’t make our immediate relationship more awkward.”

“Who am I?” I blurt out.

“That’s one of those questions I won’t answer,” he says. “Not yet.”

I look at the gun in his lap. “Can you put the gun away, at least?”

He smiles. “That’s oh-for-two.”

I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to wrestle with all of the questions in my head to settle on a couple that Mister Rich might answer.

What two questions should I ask?

“Why were you meeting with Dr. Tucci?”

“Why did you call me Six?”

“What do you know about the Whitechapel Project?”

“If you know me, why don’t you trust me?”

“What do you know about my powers?”

“What happened to Dr. Tucci?”

The choice is yours.

(Author’s Note: There were a couple of tense mistakes that I didn’t notice before recording. I edited them here, but the podcast may not completely sync up as a result.)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Six – Questions

Things still look good for releasing episode 5 of Whitechapel tomorrow. However, I have oral surgery late next week (I’m having four wisdom teeth removed), which means I’m going to be on pain meds and healing when I would normally be writing and recording episode 6. In fact, the oral surgeon specifically said “You’re not going to be able to focus or concentrate for long stretches while you’re recovering, and I’m pretty sure both are required for writing.”

Actually, we were talking about my day job writing, but the principle is the same. Also, I think I need my mouth to be working in order to record podcasts, since I haven’t figured out the “brain to computer” plug-in for Audacity.

On top of that, at the end of the month is the International Camarilla Convention here in Atlanta, which is a show I’m going to be working at all weekend. Even if I somehow kept the schedule on track around my oral surgery, that means I would have to try to write and record episode 7 around ICC, which is also pretty damned unlikely. (Especially since I’m going to try to record material at the show for my other podcast, the White Wolf Blogcast.)

To solve both problems, I’m going to bump the voting period for episode 5 to two weeks instead of one. This means that voting for episode 5 will close at midnight (EST) on Wednesday, October 21st, episode 6 will be available for reading and download on Wednesday, October 28th, voting for that episode will run until November 4th, and so on. I’m going to try to have my usual post-mortem post for episode 5 on the 21st, but we’ll see what shape I’m in at that stage. Think of it as more time to convince your fellow listeners to vote the way you think they should, or as me conducting research into blood, pain, and discomfort to help the story along.

Welcome back, agents. Now that you have completed your basic training, we move to your first field mission.

But first, I want to take a moment to commend some of you on your exemplary initiative. Many agents have gone out of their way to spread the word about Whitechapel. Some have also donated time and resources to the site, and others have volunteered for the future. It’s great to know that we have such an enthusiastic team of agents ready to go, and if any agent is ever at a loss as to how they can help, there’s always the “Like To Help?” link at the top of every page.

Enough with the back-patting. We have some work to do.

Whitechapel has two major initiatives, and today we’re going to focus on the podcast. The podosphere is full of hot zones where thousands of podcasts fight for supremacy (or at least downloads). We’ve established bases at many of these hot zones to assess the situation. And now, we begin the fight in earnest.

The primary goal of each of the two mission objectives below is to spread the word about Whitechapel, by voting five stars (or the highest equivalent) at each site. Normally I’d suggest that everyone vote with their conscience and simply pass the word, but fuck that — this is war! Five stars everywhere you go!

The Strategic Fronts

These three fronts are key to our long-term plans, so visit all of them, sign up as needed (none of them cost anything to join), and vote five stars for Whitechapel at each:

• The iTunes store
• Podcast Alley
• Podcast Pickle

These four fronts are still helpful to our long-term plans, but not as key:

• Podcast Blaster
• PodcastPUP
• AmigoFish
• mirPod

If you can spread the word about our benevolent dictatorship at four of these fronts, you have a chance to have your name immortalized in the annals of war!

Eddy, cut the shit. What the hell do you need us to do?

Okay, okay. Sometimes I let the whole “agents” metaphor get away from me. In plain English:

• Go to the three key sites listed above, and at least one of the other sites listed, and vote five stars or the highest equivalent at each. You can do all seven if you like, but you only need to do four.
• Once you’ve done that, email me at whitechapelproject@gmail.com and tell me which sites you visited and voted at. I don’t have any way of checking, so this is all on the honor system — don’t be a douche.
• If I get your email before midnight (EST) on Thursday, October 8th, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a fabulous prize.

What prize?

If you win the drawing, I’m going to kill you off.

Uh, what?

Seriously. The winner (or, in a pinch, someone the winner loves) will give their name to a character in a future episode of Whitechapel, who will then die at a later point. The more enthusiastic the voting at the podcast sites, the more gruesome and bloody the death will be. I might even have you die at VI’s hands directly, but we’ll see how the voting pans out in future.

Good luck, soldier! Report back when you’ve spread the word about Whitechapel!

Update: Since some people can’t or don’t want to install iTunes to vote at the iTunes Store, as long as you vote at at least four sites, you’re eligable.

Author’s Commentary

Over the past few episodes, I had fallen into a rhythm with writing episodes of Whitechapel: post-mortem on Wednesday (which, after last episode’s close voting, I’m going to probably bump to Thursdays to let the poll close before I comment), first 1000 words on Thursday, revision and last 500-1000 words on Friday, let it sit for two days to think over, and final revision on Monday before recording on Tuesday.

This time, Thursday was right out, and most of Friday was out too. I had a little time to jot some ideas in my notebook, but as I started putting things together, I realized that I needed to actually determine some of the story’s back history (at least enough so that I could move forward). I took some initial notes, but I spent Saturday sketching it all out. Sunday I plowed through an entire first draft, and Monday I spent revising it. Tuesday I was ill and just not in the right frame of mind to record, so I did it on Wednesday.

Of course, very little of the material I came up with on Saturday actually ended up in the episode, but at least it helped me to think about this upcoming episode, so it wasn’t wasted. Just hectic.

To top it all off, I had planned to introduce a guest voice into the podcast this episode — the mysterious driver, played by David Bounds. We actually came up with a good system: he records his lines in Garageband on his laptop, each as a separate file, and then uploads them to our shared drive. I import each file and line it up with the appropriate part of my reading. It took a little longer to produce, but he really nailed the sound I wanted for that character better than I could have, so it was totally worth it. And based on the voting, this character will be around for at least another episode.

As for the writing, it was pretty straightforward once I had a plan. I knew this was going to be a slower piece after three episodes of “get VI the hell out of the Whitechapel Project.” It was pretty easy to change the mystery focus from VI’s amnesia and surroundings to that of the car and the driver, so I played with that some this time.

The scene with the fast food originally came about because the episode seemed a bit rushed and needed something to stretch it out, but it ended up accentuating the core conflict of the episode (“who is the driver?”), so I was very pleased with it.

A quick note of thanks to my wife, Michelle, for helping me out on what happens to people when they lose their skin. I had to pause when writing that scene because I disturbed myself with the imagery. I also had to rewrite it a fair bit, because the first draft was kind of wimpy, and I really wanted to sell the grossness of the situation.

Voting and Discussion

The choice actually took me a while to word, because I wanted to be honest, but not too honest. Specifically “try to incapacitate or kill my assailant” had an emphasis on try. As one of the readers pointed out (I think it was Rob Justice), not everything VI tries necessarily has to succeed, and this was the first time that I put out an option that was probably doomed to failure. I debated for a while on it, but I was confident that the story would definitely have taken a different turn if he tried (and failed) to attack the driver then if he had tried to talk his way out of it.

Also, wow. The number of votes went from 37 to 46, tying the number of votes from episode one. Next week, let’s see if we can go for 50!

The voting itself was pretty much the inverse of last episode — it started off very, very close at the start (even holding a three-way tie for most of a day) before one option slowly but steadily pulled into the lead. So, next episode VI will be dropping his Tucci disguise and telling the driver the truth about what’s going on.

The discussion was more subdued this time, but most people seemed to like the twist of the (circumstantial so far) consequences of VI’s ability to disguise himself, which I’m very pleased by. Given that this episode was mostly tension with a bit of violence at the end, I’m not too surprised that the chatter was a bit lower this week.

Back to Episode Four

Previously on Whitechapel

Six wakes up with amnesia, and escapes from his cell after killing a guard with his mind. He breaks into the office of Dr. Harold Tucci and learns that he’s part of something called the Whitechapel Project. Using a different aspect of his powers, he disguises himself as Dr. Tucci and manages to convince another guard to help him escape. As Six is enjoying the winter air, a mysterious black car pulls up and opens one of its doors invitingly.

Episode Four – Eden

I study the car for a moment. The dark glass and the rapidly fading dusk makes it impossible to see who is inside, or how many people are waiting for me. The car is clearly too expensive to be a police vehicle, and it doesn’t have government plates. Its arrival is too much of a coincidence to be unrelated to my escape, so the people inside either have something to do with the Project or something to do with me. And if they were out to get me, they wouldn’t invite me inside a car when we’re so close to the place I just escaped from – they could just as easily jump out and take me down right now. So, odds are pretty good that they’re here to help me, or at least here to help Dr. Tucci.

But what if I’m wrong? I can’t risk it.

I start walking past, acting as if I don’t recognize the car. I’m near the bumper when the lights flash and I hear a window roll down. “Get in before they see us,” the driver says. His voice is deep, male, and used to giving orders.

I don’t have any more options. I can’t outrun a car or a bullet, and those guards will eventually figure out that I’m not inside. I get into the car and close the door.

The warmth inside is a blessing at first, but the heated leather seats are hard under me, and soon all of my aches and pains come flooding back. The black frosted glass divider keeps me from seeing my driver, and there’s no sound coming from the small speaker set beneath it. I try to relax as the vehicle pulls away and I watch the small building that imprisoned me smoothly fade into the winter night.

The car pulls left onto the main road, as the speaker clicks to life. “You missed our arranged meeting, Dr. Tucci. I was getting worried. Is everything all right?”

My hands fly instinctively to my face, as if to straighten my mask. He sees me as Tucci. I’m still wearing my borrowed skin. But I don’t have any cues to work from with this man, no way of sensing how he knows Tucci. I close my eyes and try to feel the skin again.

“I ran into a few unexpected complications, that’s all.”

This seems to satisfy my mysterious driver for the moment. The frozen river slowly unrolls on my left, while snow-covered trees and the occasional railroad crossing crawl past on the right. After a while, houses and gas stations start to break up the landscape, and cars start to show up on the road. Gas prices are in dollars to the gallon, and I find more Ohio and Kentucky plates. It looks like I’m on the border between Ohio and Kentucky, so the river to my left is likely the Ohio River. That puts me in Cincinnati or Florence.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the strange collection of bills. If I’m American, why am I so surprised to be in America? Then again, if I’m in America, why did Dr. Tucci have a handful of European currency? For that matter, why is the project named after a district in London? I put the money in my pocket and lean back into the seat. The adrenaline starts to fade, and I feel drowsy from the heat and the exertion.

My silent contemplation is broken by the speaker clicking to life again. “I’m surprised you chose Eden Park to meet at. It’s a pretty big place.”

Eden Park? I try to search my scattered memories, but nothing about an Eden Park comes up. Is it a park? It could be the name of an office building or a gated community, or even a small rural town for all I know. I force myself to sit back up and focus on the conversation. “Well, I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be disturbed.”

The driver grunts noncommittally, and our drive continues. I feel my stomach growl. I haven’t eaten since I woke up, and my last meal is probably still on the floor of my cell. Now that I think about it, I’m utterly starving, and my hands tremble with the thought of food.

“Hey, could we stop and get something to eat? I…” I stop, realizing that I was about to admit that I haven’t eaten in a long time. I remind myself that I shouldn’t add any details that I don’t need to. “I’m hungry,” I finish awkwardly.

There’s a long pause. I start to wonder if I’ve overplayed my hand when the speaker clicks back on. “Yeah. There’s a drive-through up ahead. I’ll get you the usual, and then we can eat at the park.”

I reach into my pocket again and pull out a few of the dollar bills. “I have money. Can you put down the divider so I can give it to you?”

A chuckle comes from the speaker. “Don’t worry. I think I can spare a few bucks. Just relax – we’re almost there.”

I sit back again. So Eden Park is a park. Why would Dr. Tucci be meeting this mysterious man in a park on a cold winter evening? It seems likely that the driver isn’t directly related to the Whitechapel Project. Otherwise, they could have met in Dr. Tucci’s office, or at least someplace more comfortable.

I sit in silence as the car pulls up to the window of some local chain that I don’t recognize – all I can make out are splashes of red interspersed with black-and-white checkered bars. I see an arm lean out of the driver’s side window as the order is placed. The hand is pale, and the jacket arm is orange with black stripes, like a tiger’s. Certainly not government issue. A brief glimpse of his wrist reveals that he’s not wearing a watch. I can’t make out anything that’s said, but he pays in cash before receiving a couple of drinks and a bag of food. My mouth starts to water, but after a moment I realize that I can’t actually smell the food at all.

A soundproof and air-tight divider. The owner of this car is definitely expecting trouble.

I go over possible escape plans in my head, but nothing comes to mind. I could try and see if I have another ability to deal with this, but I don’t know if that means I’ll stop being Dr. Tucci. I suppose I could try and kill my driver like I did with the guard in the cell, but that might cause us to crash, which could also kill me. Although with a car this well-built, I’d probably survive the crash. On the other hand, this driver has been the only ally I’ve come across so far, even if he’s only allied with me because he thinks I’m someone else.

I look out the window again, and I can see trees and a small lake. We’re driving through a park. Panic starts to set in, but I try to look as calm as possible. I go over the complete lack of plans I have a second time, as we start to slow down near a car smashed into a sturdy tree just off the road. Smoke is still rising from the demolished hood of the wreck. My driver stops our car next to the crash, and the speaker comes to life. “Someone might be hurt. You should check it out.” I hear the door next to me click open.

For an insane moment I consider just slamming open the door and running for it, but I force myself to calmly step out. The cold smacks me in the face again, and I savor the feeling for a second before I head over to the site of the crash. I can just make out the wreck’s driver slumped over the wheel. I kneel down and try to get a better look, ignoring the sound of another car door closing behind me.

The smell is almost palpable. The black wool coat that the driver wore is brittle and cracked, like it had been burned, but the rest of the interior of the car doesn’t show any signs of a fire. The driver’s gloved hands are still clutched around the wheel, but the arms of the coat bulge strangely, like the driver’s arms are broken in a hundred different places. I reach in to touch his wrist and feel for a pulse, but I quickly jerk my hand back. Blood and slime cover my fingertips, remnants of my would-be patient. He’s certainly dead.

I grab the corpse’s shoulder and try to push it back from the wheel. Blood and viscera stick to the steering column as I shove the sack of meat into the seat. Unlidded eyes stare at me behind shattered eyeglasses.

For some insane reason, this corpse is completely without skin.

A heavy metal object is shoved into the back of my skull, pushing me closer to the corpse. I frantically push on the side of the car to get away from the body, from the smell, but another hand holds me firmly against the door of the wreck.

“You’d better tell me right fucking now why there’s a skinned corpse in Dr. Tucci’s car, or so help me God I’ll blow your brains all over this wreck.”

How can I get out of this?

Do I tell him the truth, and drop my disguise as Tucci?

Can I continue my role and talk my way out of this?

Or should I try to incapacitate or kill my assailant?

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Five – Mister Rich

Author’s Commentary

I wasn’t entirely sure how this episode was going to turn out, to be honest. When the vote was firmly cast for bluffing, I had to think about how he could actually do that in a plausible way. I did have a note that VI had the potential for changing his appearance, but I didn’t expect to have to trot it out so soon. Plus, I do have a firm vision for VI’s powers and how they work (in case you haven’t noticed, they all have intentionally violent overtones), so I had to make that all hang together while also being internally consistant. It was a lot to juggle.

It took about three drafts, but early on I was inspired by the “wearing Tucci’s skin” idea. Originally it was just a flavorful way to talk about the illusion of being someone else, but it really worked well with the feel of his powers so far, so I kept that, and I actually have some ideas on where that will end up.

The line about what happens when VI starts killing was a sudden inspiration, and I have no idea where it’s going to go at this point, but damn it was cool.

I wasn’t sure until the chapter break where the Whitechapel Project was located. I even debated changing it before the recording, because it could have just as easily been in London, England. At the 11th hour, though, I decided to stick with Ohio for a couple of reasons. First, I’m from Ohio, so that means I have a lot more material to draw from when things go in a direction I didn’t expect. Secondly, similar to my post-mortem last episode, the recordings are going to primarily be in American English, so keeping the story within the United States means less disconnect from the podcast.

I did know from episode one that one of the visions related to a car. It seemed a good place to tie back to that vision. Also, I needed something to happen to force a decision point.

The recording was a bit weak for my tastes — I was trying to record around a sick cat and a very barky dog, and I was getting frustrated — but it was a (self-imposed) deadline that I had to meet, so I got in there and recorded it. I didn’t stumble as much this time, and the editing went a little easier, but when I listened to snippets of it the next day, I felt it could have been better.

Let’s talk about my outline for a bit. Before I started, I had 24 phrases written down that detail a rough plot progression. Episode 2′s phrase was “Escape,” and yet here I am at episode 3 with the escape still not quite done yet. It might not be until episode 5 before I can get to what I planned for episode 3. It’s more exciting than irritating, honestly — I feel like this story is going to end up with a lot more depth than I originally anticipated.

Also, it was pointed out to me by my wife (who is also a reader and voter) that this is just as much a mystery as a horror story. I admit that VI is a bit of a detective (at least when it comes to finding out his own identity), but I really expected that the mystery elements would be secondary to the action and horror elements. Instead, I’m seeing comments to the effect of “I don’t want to find out the mystery just yet,” which I did not expect.

As a result, I might consider rewriting my rough outline at some point in the future. I think there are some areas that I can move around to make it more mystery-like and follow the current flow more closely. I might be able to get it back to 24 episodes, but I’m not going to force it if it needs more legs.

Voting and Discussion

All I can say is “holy shit.” You guys are awesome.

We did beat the number of votes from last episode, but at the time I’m writing this, three options are all tied for first place — “run for it,” “get in the car,” and “just keep walking.”  I was asked what would happen if two options tied, and I joked about just picking one or flipping a coin, but now with the real possibility of three options all tying, I’m torn. Ideally, I’d like to incorporate as much as I can of all winning options, but most times that’s just not possible (such as in this case). I’m still up in the air about whether I’ll just choose or I’ll determine it randomly — I’m leaning more toward randomly, to keep with the spirit of the voting (i.e., that it’s out of my control).

I was really surprised by the popularity of “just keep walking,” which actually had the lead for much of the time. It ties a bit into some people wanting to preserve the mystery, but there was also a vibe that some readers thought the other options were a little too convenient. Interestingly, I threw that option in as a kind of “non-option,” something that would make for five possible choices but was one I didn’t seriously expect people to choose, and yet there were a lot of really sound and engaging reasons why it was compelling to a number of readers (at least 10 of you).

I’m really excited about how tense and passionate the voting (and the discussion) was this time around. You guys are really inspiring me to push this story in new directions.

Back to episode three

Previously on Whitechapel

A man known only by the roman numeral six wakes up in a padded cell. He discovers he has strange abilities when he turns his guard into a bloody mess just by thinking about it. Six makes his way into the empty office of a Dr. Harold Tucci, who turns out to be part of something called the Whitechapel Project. Six also discovers a stack of currency from a number of countries, as well as a pistol. He’s about to leave when an alarm goes off, and someone is knocking at the door.

Episode Three — Escape

My heart is hammering in my chest as I try to think. If there’s a guard on the other side of the door, he probably wouldn’t be scared of a pistol, and I’m not sure I would be on the winning end of a gun fight. I also don’t know enough about my powers to be able to use them on command. As I consider killing him, I remember the thick smell of blood from the guard in my cell, and for a second the nausea returns. I force myself to push the thought out of my mind; I have to try and talk my way out of this.

Ignoring the gun, I look down at Harold Tucci’s ID card sitting on the desk. He has thinning brown hair, hazel eyes and thick bushy eyebrows. There’s no other pictures of family or girlfriends around the office. He’s probably a man married to his job or his country.

Another knock. I scramble to think of something convincing, but the screeching of the alarm and the thumping on the door conspire with the pounding in my head, and every thought feels like it’s going to fall onto the floor. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, trying to steal a single moment so I can think clearly.

My heart slows a little as I take in the feel of the soft fabric against my skin. I imagine that these clothes are the most natural thing in the world for me to wear. I’m just a middle-aged man who’s trying to stay healthy. I try to eat the right things, and every day I jog around the complex to get some exercise in. Sometimes I work late, but I live alone, so it doesn’t bother anyone. The work is what’s most important. The axe swings again, buried in my brain, and my head starts to throb with the pain. I visualize taking the ax and hacking away at myself, at my identity, killing anything that doesn’t fit into the mold of Dr. Tucci. I imagine wearing the skin of a man I’ve never met.

The knocking is louder, firmer, more insistent. “Dr. Tucci? I’m coming in.”

I open my eyes, and I can feel the skin speak for me.

“No, no… I’m sorry. I’ve just been having so much trouble with this computer, and I got frustrated. I…”

The voice cuts me off. “Why didn’t you respond earlier?”

“I kicked my desk in frustration, and I broke my toe. I… I might have passed out for a bit. I’m sorry. I’m okay now.”

“I can give you medical attention.”

Fear sends my heart racing again, but I force myself to take a breath. “That won’t be necessary. I’m just going to pack up a few things and head home.”

A moment passes, and then I hear the magnetic lock click. The door starts to swing open. I look back at the gun and consider making a grab for it, but it’s already too late. Another man in a button-down shirt and slacks is in the doorway – a larger, more muscular version of the corpse in my cell. He’s got a gun, and he’s looking right at me. I’m wearing Tucci’s skin, but I’m afraid he can see right through it, see right into me, and I’m never going to find out who I am or what’s going on, and oh my god I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to…

The guard blinks, and his eyes look like they’re out of focus before he smiles and puts his gun back in the holster. “Sorry to disturb you, sir. Reynolds didn’t report in from his vitals check on Six, even though the key card shows he went in and left again. I went to check it out, and… he’s dead, sir. Six is gone, so I have to do a room-by-room search.”

My eyes catch the ID card clipped to his shirt. It’s similar to the one on the desk, but his reads “Blake Francis.” “I understand, Francis. Do you need me to stay here, or can I leave?”

Francis looks into the hallway, then back at me (no, not me, Dr. Tucci, remember I’m Dr. Tucci). “Your patient couldn’t have gotten far, but… well, you’ve told us enough times what happens if he starts killing.”

I nod and try to look concerned, but all I want to do is grab his shirt and scream What happens when I start killing? Dr. Tucci speaks again. “Perhaps you’re right. I’m sure I can find someplace to sleep here tonight.”

“No offense, doc, but I wouldn’t wish a night in your office on my worst enemy. Come on – I’ll escort you out, and let Simmons finish the search.”

I nod, and start to walk toward the door when Francis suddenly says “Wait a minute!” I freeze, and out of the corner of my eye I see him reaching for the gun on the desk. I try to remember how to kill him when he grabs the pistol by the barrel and presses it into my hand. “You might need this.”

I thank him and follow him down the tunnel. I force myself to stand tall as the ax keeps swinging. The tunnels curve around to an old freight elevator, one with a lever instead of buttons and a flimsy metal gate instead of a door. Francis coaxes the ancient device up three floors before the gate rattles open onto another metal door with another keycard slot. I step out of the cage and Francis gives me a quick salute before closing the gate and heading back down. My hands tremble as I slide the card through the slot. The light turns from green to red, and I push open the door.

* * *

Free. I’m free. Inhale. Exhale.

My breath comes out as a white cloud as the cold starts to nip at my face. The sky is just turning dark as the last rays of the sun dip beyond the horizon. There are a few small clumps of melted snow that have frozen into shiny gray chunks of modern art. The grass crunches under my feet as I make my way to the small parking lot. There are a few cars neatly lined up on the concrete – a small green car, a blue minivan, a tan SUV. They all have Ohio plates. The lot has no lights, but I can still see a short road connecting it with a two-lane street up ahead. Beyond that, parallel to the street, I can make out a large body of water – maybe a lake or a river of some kind. Behind me, the unmarked metal door I walked through is set into a small concrete bunker with no signs on it. It could be a small electrical building or storage shed in any Midwestern town. The cold takes away my pain for the moment, and I enjoy the simple sensation of being free.

I can see headlights going down the street as the sky turns to night. Ice chunks in the water dance in stray beams of light before the car turns into the parking lot. The headlights blind me, and I instinctively put my hands in front of my face. I can feel my grip on Dr. Tucci’s skin slipping, and I look for somewhere to run.

The lights swerve out of my eyes again. I lower my hands and blink a few times, trying to get the spots out of my vision. The headlights are now pointed off to my right, reflecting off the frozen grass and melted snow. It’s a black sedan, still running…

… I can see metal and plastic and leather and glass, all in a thousand different shades of black. My body aches, throbbing in time with the vibrations of finely-tuned machinery…

I recognize this car from my dreams, or my visions, or whatever I was having before I woke up in that cell. But what is it doing here?

I hear the soft ca-chunk sound of automatic car door locks, and the rear door opens slightly.

Are these the people that captured me? Maybe I should run for it.

Maybe they’re here to rescue me. Should I get into the car?

They could just be showing up for work, and I can pretend to be Dr. Tucci before taking their car.

On the other hand, they could be police, investigating the alarm. I could tell them what I’ve found.

Or maybe they have nothing to do with me, and I should just keep walking.

The choice is yours.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Three in French

Episode Four – Eden

Congratulations! Each of you reading this has a unique opportunity to join a very elite group, a chance to become one of the mythical and awe-inspiring Agents of Whitechapel. Your duty is a dangerous one, and should you be captured…

Okay, okay. It’s not all that dangerous. But some of you were interested in promoting Whitechapel and have asked for ways in which you can help out, so I’m starting this program up. Anyone can be an Agent of Whitechapel, and all you have to do to be one is to fulfill a variety of missions for me to help promote the story. And down the road, there may be Fabulous Prizes(tm) for some of my Agents.

Mmmm. Prizes.

But let’s start off with an easy mission, to prepare you for the months ahead. As an Agent of Whitechapel, you’ll need to be in constant contact with Mission Control (that’s me). As such, you need to establish a method in which you can instantly get the latest situation updates.

So, this is mission one: Subscribe to Whitechapel if you haven’t already. There’s a few different ways in which you can do it:

• You can subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed. The easiest way is to use a feed aggragator like Google Reader or FeedDemon. Also, some email clients allow you to read RSS feeds. Odds are there’s something on your computer that can read RSS feeds, even if it’s your web browser.
• You can have individual emails sent right to you via Feedburner.
• If you have a LiveJournal account, you can friend the syndication feed, or just friend my personal journal. (There’s also a way to get both of those via RSS feeds, but that’s just getting a bit silly.)
• You can also subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or through Feedburner, if you want to get the audio version on your computer as soon as they’re live.

If you have questions on how to do any of this, you can submit a field report in the comment section below, or by email at whitechapelproject@gmail.com. I or another Agent will be happy to help you.

If you’ve already subscribed to Whitechapel or you’re just really itching to score some extra points, there’s a bonus secondary objective: Get a friend to subscribe to Whitechapel. The secondary objective is just that — secondary — so don’t feel bad if you can’t accomplish it this time. There will be plenty of upcoming missions in which you can do that later.

Also, I have no way of knowing whether any of you are doing this or not, so you’re on the honor system. On the other hand, I don’t have anything for Agents aside from my sincere appreciation.

Yet. Remember, Fabulous Prizes in the future.

Good luck, Agents!

P.S. Ignore this bit. It’s for Podcast Alley.

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-8db49f2721653eab094e8a22d282ad6d}

As a side note, about half-way through the voting I heard a couple of concerns that the IP and cookie tracking I had implemented made it hard for businesses and multi-reader households to vote separately. So, I changed it to just cookie tracking, so multiple computers on the same IP can vote. This means that some of you might have had the chance to vote multiple times. If so… eh, I’m cool. If people are so passionate that they check back and vote as often as I can, I’m totally okay with it. I just don’t want people writing vote-bots or spamming the polls.

Author’s Commentary

This episode started off as one episode, and ended up becoming quite another.

I’ll be honest — I had a rough idea how this would go when I first started planning Whitechapel, although a lot of the details were solely dependent on the voting from episode one. I knew that he was going to escape into an empty corridor, and that VI would find another office in which there would be some information and supplies. Interestingly, this structure came about because I briefly considered making Whitechapel a text adventure game, and there were some game design reasons why that scene had to happen, but either way the core of the scene was in my head.

The bit with the flashback? Totally out of the blue. I have no idea where it came from, or even entirely what it means (though I get a sense it relates to the flashbacks at the beginning of episode one). I just know that I wanted to work in a bit I learned a long time ago about finding your way out of a maze, which also happened to be the same advice for finding your way out of a building when you can’t see where you’re going.

Dr. Tucci? Fucked if I know. I can’t even say where the last name came from, let alone what role he has to play.

Why Dr. Tucci’s workout clothes are all gray? Not entirely sure, but I have some ideas.

The picture on the wall? I actually have an idea for this, but I found a very similar picture in a random Google image search, and thought it was too cool not to use.

Whitechapel Project? Although it’s the name for the website, it wasn’t actually my original idea for the group that kept VI hostage. I wrote it down as a placeholder, and when I went through to revise, it seemed so natural that I kept it.

VI as an American was just prudence — since I’m recording the podcast in my normal speaking voice (in an American accent), it made sense to make VI American as well. However, finding a way to prove that in the story proved tricky. In an early draft I had VI speaking to himself, but that was hard to explain in the first person (and even harder to read), so I revised it to a written English word. I picked “honor” arbitrarily, but it ended up being a great little bit, so I kept it.

The alarm was part of my plan, but I didn’t know how to push that to a voting point, so that’s when I went with Raymond Chandler‘s advice and brought in a guy with a gun. Well, a guy and the gun are in different rooms, but the theory’s there.

I can certainly say that half of the episode I had pre-planned, but the other half came out from a combination of ideas from the conversation on episode one as well as random bits bouncing around in my head.

The recording was a bit trickier this time. I actually had to rewrite some bits because I had trouble speaking them (like the phrase “silently swings shut,” apparently — I gave up after a dozen tries and just rewrote the bitch), and a few times saying the lines out loud helped me find places where it was redundant or just badly phrased. When I finished recording and started editing, I found that the final few lines were just mysteriously gone from my recording, so I had to re-record those. It was really weird.

Voting and Discussion

Unless 15 people all vote in the next six hours and all vote exactly the same way, it looks like VI will bluff. What’s interesting is the rationale is all over the place — some readers are already emotional invested in VI and don’t want him to be a cold-blooded killer, while others think that VI might not actually be sane right now, so bluffing may help to show how much of his world is real and how much is fantasy. Like last episode, there’s a lot of insightful and diverse commentary on the choices, and it’s really helping me with lots of cool ideas for future episodes. This is an unexpected but really, really, really cool side benefit of the blog.

Voting seems a bit lower than last episode. I’d like to get some more people involved, so hopefully next week I’ll have a little “special mission” to increase reader size. Stay tuned.

Back to episode two

A hospital patient wakes up in a padded room with a massive headache. The only clue he has to his identity is a plastic bracelet with the letters “VI” printed on it. As he tries to figure out who he is and what’s happened to him, a man dressed in business casual clothing steps into the cell. The patient realizes that the well-dressed man is his captor and imagines slashing at him, only to find the jailer in a bloody mess at his feet. The patient steals a card key from the corpse and opens the cell door, all the time trying to understand this ability to kill with his mind.

Episode Two – Honor

I push open the door to my cell and look out. The hallway is a rounded tunnel of crumbling brick, stretching to the left and right under the faint glow of a few naked bulbs. There’s a rusty metal door in front of me, a solid plane except for a curved handle and small empty frame for a sign of some kind. I step out onto the floor, which is just as cold and gritty as the one in my cell. I don’t notice the door swinging shut behind me until I hear the dull click of the magnetic lock. The frame on my door says “Subject VI,” and the card reader looks much newer than anything else in this tunnel.

I look down at the card in my hands. It’s a plain white card with a black magnetic strip on one side. Idly flipping it over, I only find the words “Whitechapel Project” printed in the same font as the letters on my bracelet. What is the Whitechapel Project? Some kind of government experiment? A medical study? A corporate project?

I almost fall to the ground as the headache comes again…

… and now I’m walking on a different concrete floor. I can hear the rumble of a subway train, but there’s white smoke everywhere, and I can just barely make out a rounded wall and the vague forms of people all around me. A man is coughing, trying to yell for everyone to put their hands on the right wall and follow it to the exit. He starts to repeat the order, but his voice collapses into thick, hacking coughs…

I bend over, taking huge, deep breaths, trying to avoid choking. I barely notice the nausea creeping back into my throat before it fades away again, along with the migraine. A couple more deep breaths and I’m upright, if a little wobbly. The plastic bracelet slips down my arm as I put my hand on the right wall and start walking toward the next pool of light in the tunnel.

The walls curve slightly to the right, and soon I can see another pair of doors facing each other in the tunnel. Both are shut, but the one on the right has a card reader like the one by my cell. I swipe the card and open the door, only to run right into the impenetrable darkness of the room. I slap blindly on the inside walls, looking for a light switch. No luck.

I haven’t seen anyone else, but it’s probably only a matter of time before someone notices that I’m gone. I put my hands out and shuffle carefully into the room, looking for something, anything that provides light. My toe slams into something hard. I hear it crack, and the sudden unexpected pain fills my leg. It feels almost cleansing after the slick, nauseous pain of the migraine. I start to fall over, but my hands land flat on a large object — a table or something — and I’m able to stop my fall. I grope around until I nearly knock over something heavy and metal, which feels like a lamp. I find a switch and push it in with a solid click.

I’ve run into a desk. Not some flimsy balsa wood desk from Ikea, but a big mahogany monstrosity that’s right out of a Victorian study. The computer on the desk isn’t much more modern, a boxy slab of tan plastic connected to a keyboard with a curly wire that reminds me of an old telephone. Pain shoots with each step as I stumble back and close the door — apparently this one doesn’t swing shut like my cell door did. My toe is already turning dark red and purple — probably broken. Fuck. I shuffle back behind the desk and slump into the black leather chair to rest for a second.

The office looks to be the same rough shape as my cell, though the padding has been replaced with a pale green color that keep the hospital theme in my mind going. The floor is covered in a thin ivory-colored carpet. There’s a small table with a couple of chairs off in the corner, and a framed black-and-white photo of some soldiers from World War I or World War II wearing those huge gas masks that make you look like an insect. They’re crouched in a trench, holding rifles against some unseen enemy. Next to one is what looks like a wiry black dog wearing its own gas mask, which is little more than a canvas bag with glass lenses. It looks equal parts terrifying and ridiculous.

I stab at the power button on the computer a few times, but nothing happens, so I start to search the desk. There’s a black duffel bag underneath that I pull out. It’s a workout bag — gray towel, gray socks, gray sweat pants, and a plain gray T-shirt. There are even a pair of gray sneakers at the bottom. I dump everything out on the desk and quickly rip off the flimsy gown so I can use the towel to wipe off the blood and vomit still sticking to my skin. My toe screams as I try to put on the shoes, but I ignore it. It feels so good to wear real clothing again.

The first drawer I open has the usual office detritus — discarded black binder clips, half-used pens, scissors, and a nearly-empty bottle of pain killers that I quickly snatch up. The pills taste dusty as I dry-swallow them. There’s also a small key on a thin wire loop that I take.

The next drawer is locked, but the key smoothly opens it. All praise human laziness. Inside is a stack of blank paper with no letterhead. On top of it is a worn leather case, zippered shut. I pull the metal tongue smoothly along its track, and open it to find a small stack of currency. I recognize American and Canadian dollars, British pound notes and a couple of Euros, but the rest of the money is foreign to me.

I also find a Whitechapel Project ID card with a picture of a balding man and the name “Harold Tucci.” He has some gray business cards that just have his name and a phone number. It’s depressing that the mint green walls are the most colorful thing I’ve found so far.

I sit back and take a moment to think. I know Whitechapel is a neighborhood in London. (How do I know that? Best not to dwell on that too much right now.) Is this facility somewhere in England? Am I English? I look back at the stack of money. Some of this looks vaguely European, so wouldn’t I know what they are if I was English? On a hunch, I grab one of the pieces of paper and a pen from the drawers, and write a single word across it:

HONOR

Not “honour” with a “u,” which would be the British or Canadian spelling. I guess I’m American, then. Maybe I should have a cheeseburger to celebrate.

I start to take the money out of the case, and I find a scrap of paper mixed in the stack. It looks like a to-do list — file paperwork, update report, update Six’s vitals…

I look back at the bracelet. VI is the roman numeral for six. Is that my name? Probably not, but that’s what this project is calling me. So why am I called Six? Were there five more like me? Is it some kind of codename? Or do these people just have an unhealthy obsession with sci-fi television? I snatch the scissors from the desk and hack the bracelet off of my wrist. I’m tired of looking at it. I’m tired of asking myself questions that I don’t have the answer to.

The bottom drawer is also locked, and the key doesn’t work. I check the desk again for another key, but there’s nothing. Out of frustration I kicked the drawer with my non-broken foot. The crack sounds like a gunshot in the silent office, and the drawer slides open a little. I pull it out the rest of the way and reach inside, and I touch cool metal.

I carefully pull the pistol out of the drawer. It feels heavy, awkward and uncomfortable in my hand. I look it over, but nothing looks familiar about it. I wonder if it’s loaded.

Suddenly I hear a clanging sound outside the office. Some kind of alarm. I don’t know if it was from kicking the desk or someone noticing I’m not in my cell, but I have to go, now. I set the heavy gun on the desk and start stuffing the bills into the pockets of the sweat pants. The pain in my foot is fading a bit, so I stand up, ready to move toward the door.

Knock, knock, knock. Someone’s at the door.

“Dr. Tucci?” I can’t make out the voice, but it sounds American. “The alarm’s going off. I need to come in and check on things.”

Damn it, damn it, damn it. Now what do I do?

Should I try to bluff my way out of this?

Can I scare him with the gun?

Or should I try and kill him?

The choice is yours.

Episode Two in Spanish

Episode Two in French

Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Three – Escape

After each episode’s voting closes, I plan to do a “post-mortem” post. This will be a combination of author’s notes on the episode (kind of like DVD commentary) and my thoughts on the voting and discussion of the previous episode.

Author’s Commentary

I’ve had the idea for the opening scene of Whitechapel for years now. At one point it was a set-up for a game of GURPS The Prisoner, then it was a set-up for a whole new role-playing game, then a one-shot LARP, then a novel, then a comic book, then back to a LARP (which almost happened for ICC 2008), then a few other things that came and went so fast that I don’t even remember. I never found the perfect use for it, but the idea of an amnesiac with a de-humanizing plastic armband in a padded cell was always in the back of my head, scratching at me.

Recently, I had a lengthy conversation with my friends Russell and Joseph (both of White Wolf Vampire fame) about the future of interactive fiction via the Internet. We all agreed that the increase in social networking technology had to have an impact on how people told stories to each other, and we spent a lot of time talking about ideas on how this could happen. This led to an idea I kicked around a few years ago through LiveJournal of writing a story based on reader feedback. A talk with my roommate (David Bounds) about the versatility and ease of using WordPress to do what I wanted got the idea firmly planted in my head, and I decided on Whitechapel as a title. For some reason this title brought back the image in the padded cell, and from there it was just a matter of planning out the logistics.

The podcast element was a lark at first — I’ve been a fan of audiobooks for years (and podcast fiction especially), and I always wanted to do a fiction podcast. Running an audio blog podcast for a few months has just made me realize how easy it was to do. I originally discounted the idea because I was afraid it would take too long to produce each episode, but some initial testing proved that as long as I did a lot of the initial planning before the project launched, it should be just a couple of hours to record, edit, and compile each reading.

There isn’t much to talk about the original episode writing itself — it really all came together from a confluence of things I had been thinking about long before the project actually came into being.

Voting and Discussion

As I mentioned while I was at GenCon, the voting was 54% in favor of “it’s the roman numeral for six,” which was an overwhelming majority of the 46 votes. Interestingly, there was a lot of conversation around the three choices, including a belief that there the other two choices weren’t really choices at all. While I have asserted a couple of times that all choices will be meaningful even if they don’t appear to be, some people pointed out (and validly, I think) that it’s hard to make a choice in a vacuum. While I won’t say that I won’t have any more opaque or blind choices, I will try to do them less often than I originally planned.

However, I did have some strongly different ideas in mind. If, for example, people voted that “VI” were the narrator’s initials, I had planned that the padded room was actually disguised as an exclusive resort for the rich and famous where they can hide away from the public and clean up. Obviously, things would have gone very wrong for Victor Ingham. On the other hand, I had a few, more vague ideas for a case of mistaken identity, which would have revolved around the narrator being accused of a crime he didn’t commit and being the recipient of some new experimental corrective procedure.

As an interesting side note, I had three different people come up to me at GenCon and remark on Whitechapel and tell me they were enjoying it so far. That’s amazing for a serial that’s just on it’s first episode! Thanks to all of you who have promoted it on your Twitter accounts and blogs and podcasts and Facebook accounts — this project is already becoming something amazing as a result of your hard work.

I have some ideas on how to keep this momentum going, but that’s for later. Right now, I have to spend the next few days figuring out how to get “Six” out of the situation he’s in.

Back to episode one

Just a quick note on the scheduling of Whitechapel, and how I’m going to fuck it up right out of the gate.

Currently I’m planning to post something at least once a week — one week will be an episode of Whitechapel, then when the voting closes the following week I’ll do a set of author’s notes on the previous episode, as well as some thoughts on the voting. It’ll be kind of a post-mortem of the episode and the week’s voting wrapped into one entry. Then the following week will be the next episode, and back and forth like that until the novella’s done.

However, next week I’ll be at GenCon just when the voting wraps up, and I won’t be getting back until the following Monday. Then I’ll have to catch up on work, which will be crazy. So, I’m going to do the author’s notes around August 19th, and the second episode will be up August 26th. I’m hoping that once I get Whitechapel‘s schedule going at a steady pace that I’ll be able to sneak some other fiction in once in a while as well — I have a couple more Mosaic stories nearly ready to go, an Agent Patriot story to finish up (from four fucking years ago) and some initial ideas for the first few parts of a Katrina Night serial.

But that’s in the future. For now, it’s all about getting over this GenCon hump.

P.S., 40 votes already on episode one! Kick ass!

… I can see metal and plastic and leather and glass, all in a thousand different shades of black. My body aches, throbbing in time with the vibrations of finely-tuned machinery…

… I can hear water crashing against the rocks as I watch a white bird spiral into the sun. The water sprays against my face like arterial blood, warm and salty, but I don’t wipe it away…

… I can taste old jellybeans in my mouth, gummy and dusty. I want to spit them out, but I force myself to swallow as a brown dog with one ear sits next to me, hopefully wagging her tail…

… I can feel cold, sticky, gritty stone on the side of my face. An axe splits my skull as my throat suddenly fills up and I start to gag…

I wake up just in time to puke all over the floor, adding to the puddle I’m laying in. Vomit splashes on the concrete floor, and the stench fills my nostrils. My eyes tear up, and for a moment my world is nothing but the smell of puke, the sound of my own gagging cough and the feel of someone trying to cut my skull in half.

A lifetime passes, and I can breathe again. I start to wipe away the tears and the vomit with my hand, but even moving my arm brings a swing of the axe and a wave of nausea. A plastic loop slaps into my cheek, dangling loosely from my wrist. I blink my eyes open to focus on it. It’s one of those hospital bracelets with a little piece of paper in it, neatly filing patients into a system of bruised, bleeding and broken victims. Only I’m not last name, first name, middle initial, not a room number or a case number or any number at all. Two letters in Times New Roman stare up at me — VI. Out of curiosity I spin the bracelet around my wrist, but the only other thing on it is one of those one-way, one-time-use fasteners, a white ring of mockery next to a jagged cut where the excess plastic was snipped off.

I rub my face against the sleeve of my shirt, but I don’t have a sleeve. Or a shirt, for that matter. Looking down, I’m wearing one of those thin backwards gowns that tie closed behind you but never quite cover you in the back, so you feel like you’re always going to fall out of it. Still, at least it matches the bracelet’s story; I’m in some kind of hospital.

The walls don’t fit into the story, though. They’re covered in thick rectangles of foam, each one sheathed in ivory cloth and quilted with thick gray stitches. It looks like someone nailed a couple dozen used motel mattresses to the walls. It’s a shame they didn’t have any left for the canvas cot sitting in the corner next to the metal toilet. I notice that my pool of vomit isn’t anywhere near the toilet, and feel vaguely annoyed about that.

If this is a hospital, I’m guessing it doesn’t get any awards for customer care.

The axe takes another swing, and my brain is about to explode out of my ears. My eyes water up again as I press my hands to my skull, trying to keep it from splitting apart. Somewhere in the distance I can hear one of the mattresses open up, and I can barely make out a man coming in before it closes again. He’s wearing a white shirt and black slacks and he’s saying something, but all I can hear is my skull creaking from the pressure.

I just want it to end. I want to curl up on the floor and beg for release. I want to scream that I’ll do anything to make it stop. I want to get the fuck away from this concrete box covered in mattresses.

And suddenly, I know that this unknown jailer with his mysterious mumbling is the one that’s keeping me here. I don’t know why, but I understand that everything he does is designed to make me stay in this room, in the same way that I understand that my own puke is still dripping off my face. This man, this thing in business-casual dress is keeping me caged.

I close my eyes, and I want him to hurt.  I want him to scream and bleed and fall to pieces so I can walk over his broken body and reclaim my life. I can see myself taking the axe out of my head and chopping at his throat; once, twice, until his head flips back like a candy dispenser. In my mind I feel my arm pumping as I slash open his stomach, his chest, his sides. Every time I cut him, more of the pain bleeds out of me, and my mind becomes a little clearer. Every slash makes me feel more human, more powerful, more everything.

I hear something fall to the ground with a wet thud, and I realize that it’s not in my head.

I open my eyes. Blood quickly spreads all over the corpse’s white shirt and black slacks. His neck is nearly severed, and his chest is a mess of flesh and nylon scraps. I look at the floor, at my hands, but there’s no axe anywhere to be seen, no gore-covered blade to explain how my captor is lying in bloody chunks at my feet. There’s no way I could have done this, but I know, I know that I’m responsible. He’s dead and I’m not, and it’s because of me.

I look at the wall where he came from, and I’m pissed. The fucker couldn’t even keep the door open or leave it unlocked before he died. I check the bloody mess of my former captor, and manage to fish out a plastic card attached to a chain. I try to ignore the sticky warmth covering my hands as I yank hard on the flimsy chain, breaking it. A quick look at the door, and I find a discreet slot and a tiny red light hidden behind a quilted flap. I have to keep smearing the blood off the card and swiping it before I can see the light change from red to green. The mattress swings open, less than an inch.

What the hell is going on? What kind of person can cut someone into pieces in his dreams? How can I casually search a pile of gore that used to be a man and be more irritated at the blood on my hands than the loss of a human life?

The bracelet slips down my arm, and I see the letters VI looking up at me through a smear of blood. I realize that I don’t know what kind of person I am, and I don’t know why I can do the things I just did. I don’t even know what these letters represent.

Do the letters VI stand for my initials?

Is it the roman numeral for six?

Or am I not the person they think I am?

The choice is yours.

Author’s Post-Mortem

Episode Two – Honor

Episode One in French

Episode One in Spanish

“Questions” is an older microfiction piece of mine, and it’s been through a number of revisions (including one version that made it onto the “Pseudopod” podcast). I also used a different version as a test script for my audio work on the Collection of Horrors for White Wolf Publishing. But all in all, I’ve never been satisfied with it. Today I had a frank talk with my eternal editrix and beta reader Genevieve Podleski, and I hammered out a final version. I’m probably still not going to be entirely happy with it, but I’m finally done fucking with it. (Until I change my mind, of course.)

This piece actually has a few similarities to Whitechapel. Both are first person perspective (I tend to be about fifty/fifty on first and third-person pieces), both are horror, and both came about from online input — “Questions” was written from a post where I collected words and phrases from my readers. While I think my style has matured since I wrote this, there’s enough similarities that it works as a nice aperitif. I’m not intending this piece to have anything to do with the story in Whitechapel, but it’s entirely possible that Claude could come into the story at some point. We’ll have to see how the voting goes.

… Cold. So cold. I can’t feel my hands. They’re a couple of twitching lumps of meat at the end of my arms, uncaring about my needs or desires. I push them closer to the fire sputtering in a rusted oil drum, but the heat is as unconcerned about me as my hands are.

Across from me, the man with the long, diamond-shaped scar covering his cheek smiles, his teeth as black and broken as the ancient blacktop around us. “It’s cold tonight,” he says. I nod and look away to avoid gagging on breath that smells like cigarettes stubbed out in used cat litter. The lumps twitch toward the illusion of warmth again.

“Name’s Claude,” he says. “You’re new.”

I nod again, still looking out into the empty street near the alley. It’s bad enough that I lost everything – my job, my home, my family. But now I’m going to be trapped in this alleyway, snow melting into my shoes, listening to a disfigured man with breath as stale as his conversation forever. This isn’t just another November night. It’s a pit of hell that I’m trapped in, a punishment for unknown crimes against the universe.

“Sometimes the innocent are put in jail, and the guilty go free.”

Surprised by the comment, I turn back to him. “What?”

Claude’s face twists into a grin, his scar stretched into a new, more hideous shape. “That’s what I like about new guys. They ask questions.”

I shove my hands under my arms, giving up on the fire. “What are you talking about?”

“Questions. You have them. I don’t.”

“You don’t ask questions?”

“I don’t have them. Questions are energy. At some point, you reach a zero point of energy, and the questions run out.”

“Where does this energy go?” I’m drawn into the conversation. Not out of any real interest, but to keep my mind from going numb.

Claude smiles again, stroking his scar. “To the monsters.”

“Monsters,” I say flatly.

Claude laughs. “You’re going to have to do better than that. Already they’re sucking the energy out of you.”

I shake my head. “Just leave me alone. I’ve lost everything I cared about, and I don’t want to die listening to some insane homeless person.”

“You’re wrong. I’m not insane, nor am I a person.”

“Not a person? Then what the hell are you?”

“Again.”

“What?”

“More. Ask me more.”

“You want me to ask you more questions?”

“Yes.” He licks his lips.

“Like ‘where’ve you been?’ and ‘what time is it?’ and ‘where’s the cat?’”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

Claude starts to shake. His voice is suddenly feeble, whispering “yes, yes” over and over to himself. His smile grows and the scar stretches further and further before it suddenly splits.  Something oozes out of the wound, but it’s not blood. It’s a thick, bright red sludge, like melting red lipstick. I watch in horror as the slime slides down Claude’s face while he twitches in some private fit. It falls to the ground with a wet squelch into the watery snow.

And then the ooze slides over the ground, coming for me.

I back away from it, but my feet slip on the slush. My head slams against the slick concrete with a wet thud, and my vision blurs into a haze. I squeeze my eyes shut as I try to shove myself backwards, but my palms just slap against the broken asphalt. I can feel the ooze slide into my shoes.

The cold sogginess fades to nothing. I can’t feel my feet at all now. I use my legs to throw my heels against the ground, desperate to shake the ooze out of my shoes, desperate to feel something. My feet bounce once on the concrete, twice, and then my legs start to go numb as well.

I can see Claude curled up in a ball near me, between my clouds of breath. He’s staring at me, his eyes wide and glittering in the faint light of the fire. The skin of his cheek hangs down, quivering as he mouths the words “yes, yes.”

I don’t feel so cold. Not so cold… anymore. I don’t feel… much of… anything.

I…

I open my mouth to… to ask Claude what he is… why he’s doing this… why I have to die.

I try… I try to speak, but there isn’t… I don’t…

I don’t have the energy to ask the questions.

* * *

Author’s Notes

Jet Pack is a central point for the fiction of three extremely talented writers: Chuck Wendig, Will Hindmarch and Wood Ingham. I’m particularly into Wood’s sci-fi novella “Memory Sticks.”

And if you can’t get enough Chuck Wendig, he and Marty Henley just launched The Storyverse, a dueling serial that trades off between Chuck and Marty every week. It’s… well it’s… there’s kind of a sci-fi thing… with pirates… and pulp… kinda. It’s awesome, and they’re big supporters of the Project (they even changed their release date so as not to conflict with the launch of Whitechapel), so go check out their work.

I’ve always been a fan of Mur Lafferty, and she’s been doing some of her own serial work in a multimedia story called “Her Side.” I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably start catching up really soon. I understand it can be a bit disturbing, but if you’re waiting for horror goodness from me, you’ll probably like Mur’s work just fine.

Finally, I have been ordered by Filamena Young to go check out Tim Pratt’s Bone Shop. It’s a donation-funded urban fantasy novella that’s only a few weeks old, so now is a good time to check it out.

Once you’ve read all that, come back here and get ready for episode 1!

I did want to take a moment to point out that the Whitechapel Project site is, in fact, more than just the Whitechapel novella (although I anticipate it will likely be the majority of the site’s focus — hence the name). I had been considering a blog for my fiction for quite some time, but it wasn’t until Whitechapel that I had a project big enough to warrant the initial start-up work¹. But I always expected that other fiction would cluster around this site — in fact, if you check out the “About the Project” page, I’ve already got a couple of other projects in mind.

What I didn’t expect is that I would start getting more ideas right away.

While my family and I were our running errands this morning, we went into a bookstore (not actually to buy books, interestingly enough). I remarked that it seemed like every day there was another “bad girl gets involved with the supernatural” series on the shelves, and I joked about how White Wolf was doing that long before it was cool². This led to us talking about the tropes of the emerging genre, and me saying that I could probably write something like that easily enough. We laughed about it and continued on our errands.

For the last couple of hours, it’s been poking at the back of my brain, and now I have some ideas for Katrina Night, Vampire Hunter. I’m getting ready to put some stuff down into a Google Doc after I finish this post, so it’s entirely possible that some Katrina Night stuff might show up here on the blog, along with other projects like the adventures of Agent Patriot and Mosaic.

For ease, I’m going to break each series up into its own category, and I’ll try to tag accordingly, so you can choose what you want to follow as well as search more easily for it on the site. If, for example, you really only give a shit about Whitechapel, you can just follow the “Whitechapel” category (for those reading on my LiveJournal, you can also follow the “Whitechapel” tag). I’ll tag rambling posts about my writing process like this one under “Author’s Notes,” news about the site and the project as a whole under “Site News,” and so on. I don’t expect everyone will like everything on here, but I want to make it as easy as possible for many people to follow what they do like.

By the way, everything I put up here is free in cost, but I’m always appreciative of financial donations. I’m not asking for people to drop a massive amount of money on me (though I certainly won’t turn it down!), but I do want people to have the opportunity to buy me a beer after hearing a good story, or at least the Web 2.0 equivalent. If you’d like to donate, feel free to check out the “Buy Me A Beer” link at the top of every page.

Footnote 1. To be fair, David Bounds is responsible for the majority of the technical heavy-lifting. He was able to get my WordPress installation up and running in no time, and even helped the site through a few initial hiccups during testing.

Footnote 2. Sonya Blue, among other titles.

A man wakes up in a padded cell with a headache, no memories and the ability to kill with his mind. The only clue he has to his past is a plastic bracelet printed with the letters VI. From there, he enters a strange and twisted world. What happens next?

The choice is yours.

Whitechapel is an interactive horror novella in which you, the reader, can vote after each episode to direct the flow of the story. You can read the story so far, subscribe to the podcast, find places to talk to other fans and much more at whitechapelproject.com.

Whitechapel – the choice is yours.

Whitechapel is an interactive serialized horror novella published both in text and as an audio podcast (read by me, the author). It’ll be primarily hosted on this website (whitechapelproject.com), but I have a lot of avenues to get it in front of your eyes and into your ears as time goes on. Every two weeks, a new episode will be released, which will end with a plot point unresolved and a poll in which readers can vote on how they want the story to proceed. After a week of voting, the most popular option is used to help write the next episode.

The first episode is written, and I’m hoping to have it recorded in time for release on Wednesday, August 5th, but that’s just a hopeful target, not a firm release date.

I tried to predict a lot of potential questions, which I’ve placed below the cut. There will also be an evolving FAQ on the main site.

Where can I vote?

At this time, you can only vote directly on the polls at whitechapelproject.com. I want all the votes to show up in one place, not only for my ease of reference, but also so other readers can accurately see how the voting is going at any particular time. You don’t need to be a member of the site to vote.

How often can I vote?

Once. The site has some rudimentary safeguards to stop casual and accidental submission of multiple votes, but through intentional misdirection or unintentional error it’s possible to vote multiple times. If it’s a mistake, don’t worry about it. If you’re intentionally trying to flood the voting, then I hope you enjoy your petty accomplishment. I’m sure your mother is so proud of you.

Are the votes meaningful to the story?

The short answer is “yes.” Although I do have a vague plot structure (just in order to keep this story from going on and on without any focus), a lot of the plot will depend on the voting. That isn’t to say that votes will always be obviously meaningful – sometimes a fairly trivial choice will have larger repercussions, either through a string of associated elements in my mind as I write, or as part of the plot at some point in the future.

Plus, sometimes I’ll skip over the obvious plot choice to offer a different one. Sometimes its a pacing issue — I have some rough targets each episode that I’ll want to hit, and once in a while the episode might end up being too short or too long if I go with the obvious choice. That doesn’t mean that the choice readers will have won’t be meaningful, but it does mean that sometimes it won’t be the more expected one.

So I’ll try to make the choices important, but they won’t always be explicit and won’t always be the expected ones.

How long will Whitechapel run?

I’m going to try for a run of 24 episodes, possibly breaking down into three eight-episode acts. Due to the nature of the project, the story will almost certainly deviate from my intentions, but I’d like to wrap it up after a year.

What’s up with the audio readings/podcast?

I’ve been a fan of podcast audio fiction for a couple of years now, and I’ve always wanted to try my hand at it. I’ve been doing a podcast for White Wolf Publishing for a while now, and I thought it was time to do one for fiction. Further, not everyone has time to read a story online, but they can listen to short episodes of audio fiction much more easily. Finally, the idea of interactive audio fiction has been in my head for over a decade, and this was one way to scratch that itch. So, I decided to marry the written fiction with audiobook-style readings. I may do some Q&A episodes in the podcast, since it’s much easier to answer questions verbally than to write them out, but everything else will be mirrored in text on the site.

Where else can I experience Whitechapel?

Because I want as many people to read Whitechapel as I can, there are a number of ways you can follow along with Whitechapel and other Whitechapel Project stories besides just reading this site.

• You can read it via RSS feed or Atom feed to a feed aggragator such as Google Reader.
• You can read it on my personal blog, where most entries will be crossposted (episodes will be posted under the “whitechapel” tag).
• You can read it on the syndication feed on LiveJournal.
• You can listen to individual episodes on MP3 from each entry.
• You can listen to the podcast feed using a podcatcher.
• You can also use Feedburner to subscribe (which gives you another group of subscription options).
• You can listen to the podcast with your iTunes software or your Zune software.
• You can keep up to date with the Whitechapel Project on my Twitter feed (or searching on the #whitechapelproject tag).
• You can keep up to date on the Whitechapel Project Facebook fan page.