Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

actually his password that would entirely be his fault that is a shitty password.

His password was some crawling alphanumeric horror no sane human being could remember but once Charlie has your bank’s dongle and an idea how the whole thing works that is not really much help.

—

Hans Eiger will check out Ronnie Flamingo and he will find out that there really was such a guy and that he knew Jack Price. But then he will also find out that Jack Price was not then known as Jack Price and then he will find out that Ronnie Flamingo died in Gozo in ’06 before Jack ever went by Jack.

I do not know what the fuck a dazzling urbanite like Ronnie Flamingo was doing in Gozo I am guessing it is not a good story.

Gozo is the island next door to Malta which is where Banjo Telemark is from.

The guy who just got Frida Kahlo’d is an actor I flew in who now includes on his résumé the information that he worked four years ago on a live project by the famous Ambiguitionist artist Banjo Govinder Telemark.

Eiger will find all of this out.

And it will drive him batshit.

It is totally ambiguous. Banjo Telemark is an actual prankster. A known international bullshit merchant who specializes in fucking with you in the name of art and that is precisely the kind of art Hans Eiger particularly hates. Art should be painted on canvas and have ballet dancers or squares of red and yellow and blue that is just what is right.

All this means I am obviously not Jack Price even if Hans Eiger and Evil Hansel did not kill Jack Price last week, which demonstrably they did. I am some hairy asshole bullshitting my way into the art scene to make money and get laid and right now I am bullshitting Hans Eiger because he hosts the festival. It is obvious.

And yet he knows in his bones he knows it in every fucking crag of his craggy fucking mountain face that I am Jack Price and now he has to kill me again. He just knows it because of course he does he’s not a fucking idiot.

Now that he has thought it he cannot ignore it and at the same time he knows he fucking knows that my whole jam the whole entire thing that Banjo Telemark does—Banjo’s entire bullshit—is the creation of ambiguity and if there is one thing Hans Eiger fucking hates it is ambiguity and now Mr. The Art Of Ambiguous is fucking with him and he cannot he absolutely cannot fucking overreact right now because if—oh God if—if this is a demented fucking art-house prank and he goes for it and he somehow gets Candid Camera’d firing a long gun at a chortling anarchist reject with gold teeth—then o God—o God all that reputational zing and boom he has just murdered his way to will burn up like mist on a summer day and—and—and—

Soon he will also find out that all around the world men and women called Jack Price are committing crimes because there is money to be made in doing so and he will know that this is something the Demons have done because Jack Price is dead and they want to hide that fact.

Or I did it to make him think that.

Does that mean Banjo IS Jack Price or that Banjo is part of some conspiracy BY Jack Price or that Banjo has tapped into the Pricegeist or or or—

But the thing about Banjo is Banjo is this obvious tremendous try-hard asshole. Banjo is in Hans Eiger’s face. In the macro Hans Eiger needs to be strategic and wise and he can do that but in the micro—

In the micro he has to beat Banjo Telemark.

He has to beat Banjo so that the river of the world can resume its course.

And the only way he can possibly do that is by playing Banjo back at his own game. Roll with the joke. Be funny. Funny is not his natural home but he can be funny of course he can be funny fucking otters do it on the Internet all the time. Cats climb on Roombas how fucking hard can it be for a man like him?

He can roll with the joke.

This will make perfect sense to him it will seem like a message from God. Because right now the whole world is fucking with Hans Eiger and there is nothing he wants to do more than fuck it right back. It is like a dare. It is everything he is.

Security. Strength. Certainty.

He is going to make two mistakes right now. The first one is actually not a mistake it is a sensible thing to do but this is my oeuvre. He is going to phone a friend.

That is fine and dandy. It will hurt him in the end because I am a fucking artiste but that is not his fault that is me. But the second…oh Mr. Eiger oh in his soul he knows it is wrong and yet he cannot but do it anyway.

He is going to let me put bulldozers on his mountain.

Not today.

Probably not tomorrow.

But soon and for the rest of his life.

EIGHT

THIS IS THE CALM BEFORE THE YOU KNOW WHAT. We are waiting for Mr. Friday to come through. While we do this we are in a resting state of readiness. I am the stillness I am the lake water the river the sea I am—

I am very bored.

In fact although I fucking hate this part I approve of it enormously because robbing a bank is what? It is PROCESS Uncle Jack yes that is right. It is not fucking black suits and guns and spooky masks it is process and it is HOMER and process and that is how we do not die. Doc is arranging aerosol-dispersal anesthetic for elephant conservation in India, which coincidentally is also useful for wide-area pacification of security forces on mountains. Doc wants