2. tail“gat”er n. Slang. To follow closely behind (another person), as in gaining access to an area requiring the use of an electronic identification card.
– American Heritage Dictionary

MiAmi 515 – a mirical is about to happun!

So read the words, scrawled in red crayon in a child’s hand, on the tatty and damp sheet of paper that the wind blows under David Crawford’s left shoe. David doubts that it refers to the only miracle in which he’s interested and lets the wind take it from him again. His miracle can’t and won’t happen; no one gets their dead loved one back again, no matter how much they hope and pray. Some have tried, he’s heard, but none has succeeded.
David briefly wonders if the child will get its miracle. Someone should. The message – now halfway down the street - probably refers to the rapidly approaching millenium and he doesn’t much care about the celebration, or the-end-of-the-world predictions that accompany it.
His own world ended at three twenty two on March 15th 1998 when Susan’s American heritage killed her; when she looked the wrong way before running out into a busy London Street. The thing that the white Scania truck had left behind hadn’t looked a bit like his wife.
She hadn’t come back, of course. Not yet and she wouldn’t ever. They never do. But life goes on, inconsiderate bastard that it is. And David goes on with it, now half the man he used to be.
Stephie, his assistant manager at the bank, introduces him to the internet and its “chat” programs and “channels” - places where you can meet people from all over the world and “talk” to them by typing lines they can see instantaneously. David quickly finds a home in a channel where wannabe writers meet and lies that he’s working on a thriller. As Stephie says: you can be whoever you want to be on the internet: no one knows who you really are but you. And David begins to enjoy being someone else.
Until a stranger turns up online and begins to talk to him. Her internet nickname is “Suzie” and she tries to convince him that she’s his Suzie. And she’s very convincing.
At first David cuts her off, thinking someone who knows him - and who knew his wife - is playing a tasteless and cruel trick on him, but “Suzie” keeps coming back, using his wife’s patterns of speech, her pet names for him, her incredibly detailed knowledge of him until he’s no longer certain whether he’s talking to his wife across the void or whether someone is doing an amazing job of mimicking her, or if he’s going crazy.
Then he becomes certain he’s going insane because once Suzie thinks she has his confidence, she begins to tell him he never wanted to know about death and rebirth and “tailgaters” and convinces him he can help her come back.

Never smile at a crocodile, You can’t get friendly with a crocodile…

In Southern England, twenty four year old Meg Jackson is being kept under lock and key. Again. She’s had another episode.
The difference this time, Meg knows, is that her schizophrenia is gone and the voice is real. This isn’t the voice of VS – Victor Santorini, the vampire slayer, imploring her to slay the undead, or the voice of MM – Mother Mary whispering to her about she ought to put herself out of Mary’s misery with cold steel or large quantities of chemicals; this is the clear voice of an angel. It isn’t telling her to pack her bags and leave, but the command is implicit in the message it imparts: “Miami Five Fifteen,” the voice says, over and over. “Miami Five Fifteen.”
But Meg is incarcerated and there’s no way to get out. And the drugs they are giving her are muffling the voice – and causing it to babble inanities while somehow making it sound like a combination of MM and VS. Eventually, as the medication increases, the babble ceases.
And then a new and seductive voice begins to whisper to her: the voice of the crocodile. There are indeed vampires out there that need to be slain. And once she has performed the killings and worked off her debt the voice of the crocodile promises, (although she isn’t yet sure what her debt actually is, except the crocodile keeps saying it’s something to do with the “therapist”), she will be released and made whole and sane.
One of the three vampires, she understands, is posing as a bank manager called Deefis, or Teefits Cawfit – the crocodile’s sibilant voice and, she supposes, the shape of its mouth makes its speech difficult to interpret. Then there’s Deekerdamnhim and finally, her last job before she’s allowed to retire, Hook. Hook is the only word the crocodile is able to say with utter clarity and emotion (fear and loathing, Meg thinks) but she’s never read Peter Pan and in here, she can’t get a copy, so she doesn’t know why.
What she does know is that Hook and the others are all in different places in America and that she’s going to have to use her tracking skills to hunt them down. And she’s got until New Year’s Eve 1999 to do it.
It’s a tall order for a weak girl who’s being drugged and kept locked up, but Meg is sure she’ll find a way.

The Fists of Fury

“Lightning” Luke Dekker, European Middleweight Champion, younger brother of Paul Dekker (a car thief) is being groomed for stardom. The man with the quickest punch ever recorded and a sure-fire fast track to World Champion and riches beyond belief is about to break his recent contract with Don King, punch four people’s lights out and stride out of the Kronk Gymnasium in New York with his career in flames behind him. He’ll probably never work again (unless it’s as a pump attendant, or a brick-layer, or a thief like his big brother) and he’ll almost certainly never be rich, but he doesn’t care. All he wants is to get away from New York where he appears to be under some kind of mental attack from sources unknown.
For the first three months of the summer things all go along beautifully: he is as fit as he’s ever been, people fall over themselves to be good to him, he’s been fixed up with a nice apartment in a good area, details are being worked out for a huge payoff challenge against the number two contender and last, but by no means least, he’s fallen in love with Kirstie a beautiful black girl from up in Queens and she’s moved in with him.
And then the world changes – as if it’s suddenly jumped tracks. The first thing is small and while not insignificant, it’s hardly the stuff of nightmares: on the day his sparring partner finally lands a punch on him (a dizzying one) he finds a code stitched into the back of his boxing shorts, like a juju charm. “M-515” the tiny code says, embroidered neatly in red silk thread. It wasn’t there before today (and he could swear it wasn’t even there when he put on the shorts) and it isn’t on any of his other clothing.
And suddenly New York seems as if it doesn’t want him around anymore. People seem to be cooling towards him. And then to be irritated by him. He begins to overhear snippets of conversation which seem to explain his code. Everywhere he goes he can hear the words “Miami” and “five fifteen” picked out from the jumble of conversations. And then he does start to have nightmares. And M515 seems like it’s a message being broadcast everywhere especially for him.
His boxing suffers, his relationship goes belly-up and his temper flares.
In a few days he’ll be taking an extended vacation and heading south where he seems to be being dragged hoping to get the words Miami Five Fifteen out of his head.

Put a Bean-O in it

A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy, an angry man called Guy Fawkes once said, and like Fawkes before him, the dangerous remedy angry Earl Hook has for his disease is murder.
Murder is a big step for a fifty five year old confidence trickster from New Jersey whose largest crimes so far have been petty theft and pretending to be a psychic, but it’s a step he’s prepared to take.
Earl doesn’t even count carrying on a trade as a psychic as a crime because in his opinion there are thousands of others doing exactly the same. And Earl Hook, way back in his teenage years, did once have a genuine psychic experience. It shook him so much that he went down to Miami to study under the only genuine 22 carat psychic he’s ever met, a man called Aaron Spreadbury.
The man he now intends to murder.
Given that Spreadbury is truly psychic, the killing might be difficult to perpetrate, Earl guesses, because the man may well know he’s coming. But he’s put up with his disease for as long as he can bear it and now intends to get rid of it.
Thirty seven years ago, eighteen year old Earl Hook fell out with Aaron Spreadbury and left Miami. Spreadbury had been so incensed, Earl guessed, that he did the dirty deed and cursed his protege’s life.
The sick joke that fate, or God is playing on Earl’s life is that everything revolves around his surname. He’d lost his right hand to a tank’s track three weeks into basic training in the army and it’d been replaced with a hook. And merely because his name is Hook, he assumes, the celestial powers have given him a dreadful fear of crocodiles.
And, surprise, surprise, Spreadbury cursed him with a crocodile.
But now it’s payback time and Earl will soon be on his way south to do a murder.
What he doesn’t know is that Spreadbury is dead and wasn’t even responsible for sending his nemesis after him all those years ago.
Earl is ready to leave when he begins to dream about a book. The title page of a book, to be precise. Earl can’t make out the title or the author, but neither of those things seem significant. What hooks his mind is the other thing on the title page beside the typography. In his experience it’s unheard of to have a photograph on a book’s title page, but there’s one here. A square head-and-shoulders colour shot of sick-looking woman wearing a red bandanna over her hair. Inscribed beneath the picture is the legend: Put a bean-O in it!
The crocodile is closing in again, but Earl thinks the dreams are some kind of a warning and doesn’t want to leave until he understand the message he’s being sent.

Miami Five Fifteen – the gates are going to be opened for someone special to come through.

Down in Marathon Key there’s a little girl who has been dying of leukemia for five of her eight years. Celeste is about ready to give up and “go back to God” but her dearest wish is to visit Disney World before she leaves this earth. This Christmas, her parents are going to give her the time of her life because there probably won’t be any more Christmases for her. They’re going to take her to Disney, and if she’s well enough, to Seaworld, Universal, and maybe the Kennedy Space Centre, too. Then they’ll drive south and spend Christmas and New Year in a hotel in Miami. They’re pretending they don’t know what will happen after that, but of course they do. But they’ll make their faces brave and hold on for their child.

NOTES

Portals
There are certain places on Earth where portals between worlds can be opened. Delphi’s omphalos is one. There is another (now ruined) on a hill on the Greek Island of Skiathos and another twelve scattered around the world. As we shall see, one of these is in the back lot of the run-down Snow Queen Tropical Resort Motel on the outskirts of Miami. Not all of these portals link to the same elsewhere but some of them (including the one in question) contain a nexus linking to other worlds.
The gates are only ever opened under exceptional circumstances (usually to allow a special-case being - an avatar - from one world through to another – usually from the world we often call “heaven” back to this world). There are several reasons these gateways are not often used. The stability of the fabric of this world can be disrupted (possibly causing worldwide devastation e.g. “The Flood”) upon the arrival of a being from the next. Also there is a strong possibility that the avatar will be “tailgated”, either by life from its own world, or from other elsewheres.

Avatars
Disembodied life from other realms can exist only for a very limited time in our own world; under normal circumstances, from mere seconds to a few minutes, depending on conditions at transfer. This means that avatars intending to stay long enough to do something more than impart a brief message need a living host body.
It is not possible for an avatar to take a body by force and while it is possible to share a body, the avatar is forced to work through the personality inhabiting it, which is not ideal. It is also possible to acquire a recently vacated body, but there are many complications (having a dead person suddenly come back to life and then start to change shape into another person entirely as they become the avatar has been known to raise a lot of questions).
So a deal is normally struck with a living person who is keen to “go home” and whose rate of vibration closely matches that of the incoming being. The living person will be released from his or her body and the avatar will take it. This is most successful with children since those changes in body structure that will take place over time are less likely to be perceived as anything other than natural changes as they grow up.

The Second Coming
There are many “worlds” beyond this one, some stacked around this one like layers of an onion, some lagging behind on the same track and some linked from afar, but it’s the closest one to ours - the place to which we effortlessly slip after death – which is our “parent” world. Prior to the “Jesus” appearance, there were many crossings, some of which worked faultlessly, some of which failed miserably. Conditions aren’t kind to travellers and every world has its enemies and its traitors: many attempts at placing an avatar on this world have been sabotaged. Enemies often place their own avatars on the planet, in synchronization with a crossing in order to disrupt the avatar’s work.
Since Jesus successfully crossed and took the body of the twelve year old boy, there have been fifteen attempts at placing another “Son of God” on earth all of them foiled. But is has been predicted that two thousand years after the last avatar another will appear. This one will be female and will appear in Miami, Florida at five fifteen in the morning on the first day of the year 2,000.