The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

So this came from a prompt to find a random book, turn to a random chapter, and take the first sentence as the opening line and the title as the title. Obviously, this is from a chapter from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I've never read that book, which made it easy to take the story in an original direction.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The men called on Liz the same evening. They were snappish and tired, the result of a long, failed search for a man who would not be found. Liz had known they would undoubtedly call on her. There were few in the city who’d been as close to George as she’d been, and now that he’d been revealed as an agent for the Enemy, of course they’d ask her. She knew nothing, though. She’d never known anything about him, really, and she was only just realizing that now. She sent them away clueless, because she had nothing to give them.

It was a quiet evening, after they left. Liz sat in her living room, surrounded by full suitcases she no longer wanted to use, staring blankly at the silent TV. She wasn’t sure what to think, anymore – everything had been turned upside-down, because of a single revelation – a single person wasn’t whom she’d thought. Suddenly everything was under examination now. The postman who smiled at her every day suddenly seemed like a sinister character, even though she’d known him for years. The woman down at the pharmacy was under suspicion of being an Enemy Aggressor, sabotaging the country silently and slowly by adultering their medicines. Even her TV was suspect – the Enemy were said to be extraordinarily good at infiltration. Who was to say they hadn’t infiltrated the television channels? After all, that was just acting, and George had managed to actually live another life.

She was distracted from her reverie by a knock at the door; at the back door. It wasn’t the men again. They were too stuffy, too proper, to ever come to the back door of a house. Actually, no one much ever came to her back door. Only George.

She was up and racing towards the door before she was even aware of it. She hauled the door open, and stared at a surprised George, who still had a hand raised to knock.

A beat passed, then George said, “It’s not what you think.”

“Then what should I think?” Liz asked. “You’re being hounded by the police, for God’s sake. There’s nothing else I can think.”

“Maybe that I’m innocent?” George said, stepping inside and shaking the snow off his jacket.

Liz just looked at him for a moment. George sighed. “Fine. I’m not.”

“And you’re getting water all over my floor, too,” Liz snapped.

George looked down, guiltily. “Sorry,” he said. Then he looked back up at her. “Come on, Liz, you know me.”

“How do I know?” Liz asked. “Apparently you’ve lied to me about your basic side in the war for however many years. How do I know you?”

“Remember the time I had the flu?” he asked. “When I was delirious and half-dead from fever?” Liz nodded, grudgingly. “You probably heard me going on about everything and anything. Things I’ve not told anyone else. Therefore you know me – the actual me, not the spy whose been blackmailed into this – better than anyone on the planet.”

“I also know you have an unholy obsession with grapefruit,” Liz told him. She was slipping back into the easy banter that they’d developed, she realized. That had to stop. “The whole ‘foreign enemy spy’ bit is sort of a big exception, though, don’t you think?”

“I repeat, I was blackmailed,” George protested. Liz realized they’d been moving further into her house as they talked, and George was now leaning on her kitchen counter. She shooed him into the living room. “Look, I need to hide for the night, and tomorrow morning I’m leaving. For good, probably. You’ll never have to deal with me again. Can I stay here for the night? Please?”

He gave her puppy dog eyes. She’d never been able to withstand his puppy dog eyes. “Fine,” she told him. “But only for tonight. And you’ll sleep on the couch. And I’m not making you breakfast.”

“Duly noted,” he said, and fell down on the sofa.

She had a strange night. She was awake for what seemed like hours, tossing and turning, trying to decide what to do. George was a traitor, obviously. He admitted it. He should be arrested and thrown in jail, maybe deported or even executed for treason, eventually. But she couldn’t imagine ‘George’ and ‘Evil’ in the same sentence. He hadn’t even been in a particularly high-ranking spot. He knew troop movements, but as far as Liz knew, the only thing that had been done with that knowledge by the enemy was to avoid surprise attacks. That was saving lives, not ending them. Turning George over would be wrong, in that context – punishing someone who was helping both sides.

Once she finally did fall asleep, her dreams were tormented. Visions of George in prison, of thousands of people dead, of guilt, of pain, permeated her sleep. When she inevitably woke up, it was gasping amidst tangled sheets, her heart pounding. She couldn’t turn him in.

But even as she struggled to calm down, she knew that she couldn’t remain and not say anything. She was an absolutely awful liar, and her sense of national guilt would get the better of her eventually. For her to be silent and for her to remain here were mutually exclusive goals. But to her surprise, she didn’t feel any strong desire to remain here, in her home town. Seeing how everyone had turned against each other in the past several days had soured the town she’d formerly thought of as quaint. Now it was just backwards. Mulling over this new thought, she slept fitfully until morning

She did end up making breakfast for him. He was sprawled on the sofa, an arm dangling over the edge, snoring like a buzz saw, fit to wake the dead (though there were fewer now, because of him). He woke up slowly at the scent of frying ham and the sound of dishes clinking. “Whuzzit?” he asked blearily, in the time-honored tradition of people awoken from a long sleep that was nevertheless not enough.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she told him, sitting down on the chair across from his erstwhile bed.

“About what?” he asked, struggling upright. “Is that bacon?”

“It is indeed, and I’m coming with you.” She watched George eat ravenously for a moment or so, before he paused, fork hanging in the air.

“What?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not,” he told her. “You’re going to stay here and tell them you never saw me.”

“You’ve got two options,” Liz said, calmly. “Either you take me with you, and no one is ever the wiser – I was to take a vacation today, no one will be worried – or you leave me here and I tell the entire town you came here, broke into my house, demanded that I shelter you at gunpoint, then ran off in whatever direction you go when you leave.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Have you always been this conniving?”

“More or less,” she said, then got up to get her own plate of food. She heard his fork clink on the plate, and turned to find him behind her.

“Look,” George said. “This is going to be dangerous. More dangerous than you could really understand. I’m a wanted man in two countries, and most of the world has extradition treaties with one, if not both of them. You coming with me means that you’re going to get dragged into all of this, too, and I can’t guarantee your protection.”

“I’ve thought I was safe for the past who-knows-how-long, and it turns out that there was a foreign spy who could call down fire on my head should he have so chosen,” Liz said. “Safe doesn’t mean much anymore. And you need someone who can actually cook something edible and make sure you don’t run yourself into the ground.”

“Point, set, match,” George said, and shook his head. “You’ve got about fifteen minutes to pack, though. We need to leave ASAP.”

She grabbed the case she’d held her basics in, and said, “Ready. I was going on vacation anyway, remember?”

He grinned, and said, “Well, come on, then.” And so the Spy and the Lady went back out into the cold.

A Picture Prompt Post

So Jasper, the blogger of the writing blog The Critical Psychopath, is doing a monthly writing prompt now. Which is awesome, because it's been all of a day and I'm already in withdrawal from Camp NaNo. The first prompt came out today, and because I have nothing to do (except tutor people in math, but that's not exactly the most time consuming thing), I wrote and finished the piece today.

This was the prompt:

Midnight by Delano-Laramie

This is the result:

Everyone knows that the city is a strange place. Whenever visitors arrive, they stop and stare, jaws dropping like flies and eyes wide as saucers. They tell everyone they meet - be it fellow tourist or hapless native - that the place is completely different, like nowhere they've ever seen. The citizens of the city are used to this, although they pretend otherwise,  and claim that every generation of outsiders is worse than the last. There is truth in that claim, though, although few are old enough to really know it from experience. The city has grown stranger as the years passed, and does so still, so that what it is now is worlds different from what it was at the beginning of the day. 

Everyone knows that the city is a dark place. Which isn't to say that there is no light. The city itself is full of light, stars captured from the heavens and placed on every street corner, stranger sky-beasts glowing and pulsing in lanterns, or following children on leashes, signs flickering and calling for someone to enter. Everything in the city has light, to make up for the sky without a sun. The sun itself has not been seen in centuries - or perhaps it is seen all the time, a single star in the night sky that has yet to be captured. No one is sure about this anymore.

Everyone knows that the city breeds stranger people. No true denizen of the city will blink an eye at people who have extra arms, or extra eyes, or fewer fingers, than might be considered normal. (In the city, there is an average of two and a quarter eyes, eight and a half fingers fingers, and two and a third arms. Normal is relative.) No one will look twice at a person who glows brighter than the stars in their glass prisons at every corner, except perhaps to call them over so as to read a bit of news by their light. Some people have scales. Some have fur, or feathers. Some people are ten inches high. Some people are twenty feet high. The city welcomes them and creates them all, and few ever want to leave.

Everyone knows that the city is impossible. It harvests stars and constellations. (Capturing the Great Whale, which can only be seen from the star Betelgeuse, was the biggest haul ever; tales of the catch are still told, a part of the city's legend). It is an island that is only in the same place twice if you have a rooster feather in your hat and throw a pinch of salt in the air before you look for it. It exists on a planet that has been mapped, and studied, and photographed into a static oblivion, yet cannot be found by someone who doesn't know where it is. It grows and changes by itself, it seems, or by the machinations of some strange race that lives in the sewers, or by those of angels, or maybe it is an angel. Every person who's ever gone to the city with evil intent towards it, or even simply wanting to study it, wakes up in the middle of the ocean, alone, floating on a piece of drift wood. At least, the ones that are found.

Everyone knows that the city is alive. If a person manages to find a quiet spot on the street at some point, and simply stands there, listening, they will eventually feel a low, slow vibration, through the soles of their feet. Not a pulse, but the rush of life beneath. The pulse is so huge and ancient and slow that there are holidays to celebrate it, every ten years when it rumbles beneath the pavement.

No one knows the city, though. It is unknowable, ineffable. It is a force unto itself, a vast, living thing that ebbs and flows with the lives of the people within. It is itself, and knows itself truly, and therefore nothing and no one else can. It is known about, but unknown.