The 7 Secrets of Mr. Magpie - Ch. 01

The Seven Secrets of Mr. Magpie

a seven part story by Corrupting Power

Part One - Sorrow

Sunday mornings were usually the time I hated the most, but this particular Sunday morning was even worse than normal, because I was out in my driveway, trying to clean puke out of my car. I'd left it in the driveway for the night. My house was up in the high hills of San Jose, and while that meant the house was worth quite a bit of money, it was the only damn asset I had in the world, beyond the car.

My 2014 Honda Civic was the thing I'd bought with the bonus I'd gotten from Arcadia Games after we'd shipped Blackweather Bastards, a third-person action-adventure game that had gone on to sell three million copies. A month after we'd shipped it, they'd given us all large bonuses. Five months after that, they'd laid every single fucking one of us off, claiming the sequel was going to be done by a team in the Phillipines, and now that we'd put the basic formula together, we were 'redundant.'

I'd been a 3D modeler, rigger and animator for Arcadia Games, but 2014 was the year when everything crashed, and a dozen videogame studios in the Bay area went tits up, and the market for talent was over saturated and people were hiring talent for pennies on the dollar. So despite the fact that I was incredibly talented and had one of the best portfolios in the business, there was shit all for me to do, because no one wanted my services at a rate that would let me continue to get by, or they wanted me to move half way across the country, to make half of what I'd been making before.

So to make ends meet, I'd taken up driving for Uber, using my Honda Civic as the only asset I had to make money. I was mostly driving the weekend shift, hauling mindless twenty-somethings up to the city, or downtown, then back home again when they're shitfaced beyond what anyone can tolerate. There's surge pricing that's supposed to make up for it, but then, from time to time, things would go sideways and I'd get stuck holding the bag.

Last night, the last group of passengers I'd picked up had been incredibly dodgy, but the surge pricing had been high, and I hoped I could get them home fast enough that it wasn't going to go south. I couldn't have been more wrong, because half way through the forty-minute drive, one of them had blown chunks all over my back seat, and because they'd had the window down and didn't understand how airflow worked, it had blasted all over the back window and even gotten into my speaker grills. It was fucking horrible.

That wasn't even the worst of it.

"Mr. Magpie!" the voice of my neighbor, Mrs. Choi, said to me, walking from her driveway to mine. There was a large moving truck parked in her driveway, and men were heading into her house. "Mr. Magpie, what so ever are you doing to your car?"

My name's Rafael Corvis. My family is from some combination of Italy, Turkey, Greece and any other Mediterranean country you can think of, which means I have dark enough skin for people to think I'm Persian. My last name means crow, which means my lovely old neighbor Mrs. Choi calls me...

"Mr. Magpie!" she said, stepping over to look into my car, shaking her head. "What has happened here?"

"Some kids puked all over the back of my car last night while I was driving for Uber, Mrs. Choi," I sighed.

"Does not this Uber company pay you for this sort of thing?" she said. Mrs. Choi was an Asian woman in what had to be her seventies or eighties. She was well dressed, but had a slight hunch to her, although she refused to use a cane, even though she probably needed it. She also had the thickest glasses I'd ever seen on a real person before. "It is a horrible business you are part of. I know it is not your fault. You are simply unlucky, Mr. Magpie."

"Uber bills the passengers for some of it, but they're only billed like a hundred bucks, and it costs at least a couple hundred to get a good detailing job, and it's money out of my pocket, so instead I'm here on a Sunday morning cleaning all the shit out of my car."

"You do not deserve this horrible mistreatment, Mr. Magpie." She leaned her head into the backseat of my car, and suddenly reeled her head back in horror. "How much have these children been drinking? It reeks of hooch and death in there. These children are awful people."

"You don't know the half of it, Mrs. Choi," I said with a sigh.

"Tell me, Mr. Magpie. You must tell me."

I clenched my hand into a fist around the sponge, crushing it in my hand before forcibly letting out a deep breath. I didn't want to tell her, I didn't want her to know how awful people can be when they're drunk, but for some reason, I felt compelled to tell her. "The fucking punk called me a... he called me a sand n-word."

Mrs. Choi looked aghast, raising a hand to her mouth. "This is unacceptable."

I glanced back over my shoulder, seeing the men starting to carry things out of her house, loading them onto the truck. "Mrs. Choi, I would've helped you pack things up," I told her. "You should've told me you were leaving. Decided you just didn't want to stay up here after Mr. Choi died last year?"

She waved a hand in my direction. "When he passed, there was nothing left for me here, so I am moving in with my granddaughter down south. Too many ghosts walking these hills for my liking. I know the ghosts like you, Mr. Magpie, but I am a walker of the old ways, and those of us who keep secrets do not do well in the hills."

"Still, I could've helped you get things squared away, Mrs. Choi."

She laughed at that, looking at me with a soft smile. "I cannot believe you, Mr. Magpie. Even when you have vomit on your hands and a mess at your feet, you are still volunteering to help others by doing more work you do not have to do... I do not understand how you can be so dogged and relentless with even more labor when you have... all of this."

I smiled at her softly. "I liked you as a neighbor, Mrs. Choi. You and Mr. Choi were always nice to me, even when you didn't have to be. You could've kept to yourselves, like the Wilsons on the other side..."

"Fah!" Mrs. Choi scoffed. "Edgar and Janet Wilson are a pair of reclusive pensioners who are afraid anyone under the age of 60 is a hippie or a drug addict or both. They liked your grandfather, Arturo, the one who left you the house, but they were afraid you were too young for the neighborhood. But I liked how you reached out to me and my husband when you moved in, how you were trying to do everything you could to make the transition easy on us. You never had loud parties, you never brought your drama out onto our street. You were a very good neighbor, Mr. Magpie, and you do not deserve all the misery life has given to you."

I shrugged a little bit, tucking some of my feathery black hair behind one of my ears. "This is the life I live, Mrs. Choi. Not really much I can do about it, as far as I know."

"Well, Mr. Magpie, you have not been living up to your name, so before I go, I am going to help you," she said, walking closer to him. "Give me your hand, Mr. Magpie."

"I don't know that..."

"Your hand, Mr. Magpie," she said to me in a tone that made it clear I was not to argue with her. I had only heard that tone a few times from her in the four years since I'd moved into the house, and it wasn't one I liked hearing.

"Okay, Mrs. Choi." I dropped the sponge into the bucket of water, shook my hand to get the water droplets off it, then extended it out to her.

Her old, wrinkled fingers curled around my wrist and fingers, one hand holding onto my arm, the other onto the hand itself. Her voice grew quiet and I had to listen carefully to hear what she was saying beneath her breath. "One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told."

There was a feeling of electricity racing up my arm as the words left her mouth, like I was holding onto a live wire, or one of those old carnival arcade endurance tests. You ever see those things? The "hold on for as long as you can" volt-o-matic or whatever.

When she released my arm, I felt a rush tingle up it before it dissipate, as I looked up at her. "What... what just happened?"

Mrs. Choi smiled at me, almost smiled through me, in a way that I found more than a little unsettling. "I have given you seven secrets, Mr. Magpie, seven secret ways and paths that will bring your karma back into alignment. You were surrounded by seven demons of pain and suffering, and I have shooed them away and replaced them with seven secrets to... course correct for you. You have helped so many others in your time," she sighed. "You deserve to have someone help you. So I have done this. These secrets, they will expire in time, and I hope that will be enough to keep the ghosts of the hills from bothering you. If not, well, they are only ghosts, and the worst they are capable of is only the worst you are capable of doing to yourself. You will be fine. Better than fine. You will find your life returning to a good place once more."

"How will I know what these secrets are, Mrs. Choi?"

She laughed, a laugh as old as time and as powerful a hurricane wind. "My dear Mr. Magpie, you would not be able to miss them for all the world. Thank you again for all you have done for me over the years," she said, moving to hug me. "This does not even our ledger, but perhaps it puts me most of the way out of the red. Take care of yourself, Mr. Magpie. And enjoy seeing your karma finally return from the pits it has been cast into."

I tried to get her to tell me more about this, or anything, but she simply laughed it off, changing the subject to her, her granddaughter or the state of my car before the movers came over to ask her to come and tell her whether some things needed to be loaded or were to remain with the house.

My work on the car continued for at least another hour, trying everything I could to get every last bit of vomit cleaned up, but it took me another half an hour to pry off the grills on my speakers so I could spend fifteen minutes cleaning out the speakers themselves.

I didn't even notice Mrs. Choi driving off, although I did see the truck take off after her, the "For Sale" sign sitting on the lawn. In the coming days, I'd find out she didn't leave a change of address form with the post office, and that I didn't know where her granddaughter lived other than 'down south.' That could've been as close as Santa Cruz or as far as San Diego or anywhere in-between.

California is too long.

There isn't much for an Uber driver to do on Sunday if you aren't doing the walk-of-shame drive homes from people who've hooked up with someone they don't want to talk to in the morning, and I lost all of that time cleaning, disinfecting and trying to get the fucking smell out of my car, using enough Fabreeze that my car reeked of piña coladas,

I didn't know what else to do other than let the car sort of naturally air itself out, and I figured I'd just start in again on Monday morning, doing the commuters in the morning and the evening, a bunch of people taking a digital carpool to their jobs up the peninsula or to a BART station because they didn't want to leave their precious Beamers at the parking lot for day.

For the next few hours, I spent just puttering away on my computer, building a new model, getting it textured and rigged. It was a mecha like the Gundams I'd grown up watching, and Arcadia Games had been just starting to do concept and prototypes for new projects when they'd laid us off a year or so ago. I'd decided to keep fiddling with some of the ideas I'd been playing with back then. I was just starting to do preliminary animation with it when there was a knock at the door.

I so didn't want to answer it but the knocking continued and continued, and eventually I decided I just couldn't ignore it any longer, so I got up and walked out of the bedroom I'd converted into my little workspace studio, down the hall and opened my front door to the shock of a lifetime.

Standing on my front porch was the asshole who'd thrown up in my car last night, dressed in a hoodie with an Oxford College patch on it and track pants, but I could see there was someone behind him, despite his tall frame blocking most of my doorway. His name was Alistair. "Hey, you're Raff right? I don't even remember a bit of what happened last night, but apparently I threw up in your car?" Now that he was sober, I could tell he had a British accent layered in his voice. Proper London posh, I thought. It made me hate him even more. "I'm, ah, I'm here to make restitution for my poor actions, and to try and compensate for the sorrow I brought you last night."

I wanted to punch this fucking prick in the face right now, but I had a thousand questions running through my head, not the least of which was how the fuck did he find out where I lived? There was supposed to be a layer of removal between Uber passengers and Uber drivers. There was no fucking way for him to know where I was.

"Well, they billed you a cleaning fee for the car," I told him.

"It wasn't even as much as one of my bloody handkerchiefs," he said. "That isn't proper. It's embarrassing. Can we come in? We... we want to make this right."

I still didn't know who was standing behind him, but the look on this guy's face said he wasn't going to leave until we'd seen this through to the end, so I stepped back, giving a shrug. "C'mon in, I guess," I said, walking from the entryway over towards the living room just off to the side.

Alistair moved in first and walking in directly behind him were two young women, both of whom had been with him last night. The shorter of the two girls was a Chinese girl dressed in high fashion, looking like she was preparing to walk a runway in front of cameras more than having a conversation with someone, a loose red silk blouse, a black leather skirt and leather thigh high boots. The taller of the two was a redhead, dressed very similar to Alistair, a zip-up hoodie and a pair of black track pants.

The Chinese girl had seemed so hideously embarrassed by Alistair's behavior last night that she'd tried to apologize for him, but she hadn't given me a cash tip or anything, even after he'd thrown up all over the back of my car. She, naturally, had been sitting up front, so she hadn't gotten almost any puke on her tight red dress that had put her sizable tits out on front street.

"Hey, Raff," the Chinese girl said to me. "I'm Madi. I don't think I introduced myself last night. This is Alistair's sister, Saffron."

"Hey," the redhead said, trying not to keep eye contact for long. She was cute, in her early twenties, with lots of freckles all over her face, sky blue eyes looking down at her hands. Last night, she'd been in the back with Alistair, and she'd also been throwing up, although she'd managed to get at least some of it into a bag she'd brought with her. Last night she'd been dolled up in a little cocktail dress designed to draw the eye to any one of her considerable assets, from her slender thighs to her toned ass to her ample bosom, all of which seemed like they were also covered in freckles.

I moved to sit down in my arm chair, and the three of them took the couch, Alistair on one end, Saffron on the other with Madi in the middle. "So why are you here?"

"When..." Madi started, then stopped then started again. "When Alistair called you... when he said what he said last night, I fucking dumped his ass." Madi was gorgeous, wearing a sort of frilly top that showed plenty of cleavage, and her ass was killing that poor skirt. "I had to dump him all over again this morning when he woke up, because he was fucking blackout drunk when he said it, but the fact that he said it at all, that he even thought it at all, that's so fucking sketch I can't even fucking handle it."

"I want to-"

"Shut the fuck up, Alistair," Madi said to him, shoving a finger in his face. "Don't you think you've fucking said more than enough, motherfucker?"

"Sorry," Alistair mumbled.

"So, he needs to learn some fucking humility, so he's gonna have to get punished, and I don't mean, like, some minor shit, I mean some major fucking abuse and shame," Madi said. "That's what I'm gonna do. That's what she's gonna do."

"What the hell does that mean?" I said. This whole thing was strange, especially the way Saffron kept fidgeting, and how Alistair's expression read like he was unwilling to do or say anything unless he was told to do so.

Madi sighed and stood up, reaching across Alistair to extend her hand out to Saffron, helping her to her feet. "For the next seven months, we are your girls," she said, extending a hand towards him before closing her fingers in, those long nails of hers clicking a little as they got together. "No, that's not entirely accurate. I'm your girl, and she," she said, gesturing to Saffron, "is your plaything."

"Excuse me?"

Saffron unzipped her top and slipped it off, tossing it aside, revealing she didn't have anything on underneath it, her perky tits dusted with loads of freckles, her small nipples a rosy shade of pink, her skin pale and almost completely untouched by the sun. Then she kicked off her shoes and pushed her pants down to her ankles, exposing the rest of her body, a small, neatly trimmed garden of burnished copper curls over her pussy.

"Any time you want someone to fuck, you can call me," Madi said, "you can call her, or you can call both of us, and we will come running." She licked her lips, a wicked smile widening on her face. "And no matter which of us you call, this asshole," she said, gesturing to Alistair, "is going to have to come and watch."

I glanced over at Alistair, whose face had turned a dark shade of red, almost matching his sister's bush, but he didn't speak. No one had asked him to.

"Alistair doesn't learn until something's shoved in his face, so he's going to watch you have your way with either or even both of us," Madi said. "And we're two different flavors, because we want you to have all the options you need and deserve. If you want someone who's going to be your equal in the sex, you should look to me. If you want someone who's just something for you to shove your dick into, you should look to Saffron. I'm the girlfriend experience. She's going to be a good little fucktoy, a sweaty, sticky fuckhole cum catcher, aren't you Saff?"

"Yes ma'am," Saffron said, folding her arms behind her back, to make sure I had an unobstructed view of her entire body, keeping her legs partially apart, another deliberate choice in her posture.

"I don't-"

Madi moved over to me and put her fingertip to my lips, shushing me. "You think this is all some kind of joke, don't you? Some kind of dare or something?"

I nodded at her.

"Well, it's not. It's... it's a balancing of the scales, a setting right of horrible wrongs. Not just the wrongs he inflicted on you, but all the other people he's hurt since him and his sister showed up here three years ago. They've been a right pair of twats, and they need to settle their debts. Hers aren't anywhere near as bad as his are, but they're still rather atrocious. So by using her, degrading her, debasing her, treating her as a series of holes for you to fill with your cum, you'd actually be doing her a favor. With this much karmic horror in her ledger, she'd be an absolutely fright if you let her walk out of here."

Mrs. Choi had been talking about her ledger just a few hours ago, and for a moment, I wondered if this was related to what she'd said to me then.

"And you agree with her?" I said to Saffron.

Her voice had this weird mix of posh English and vaguely Scottish undertones. "Aye, sir. I've been a right cunt, and I need someone to abuse me like I have been abusive to others," she said, looking down at me, trying to lean in, as if to make her tits hang a little more, to draw my eyes to her supple flesh. "She hasn't even told you the worst of it..."