Richard Entexure - Gentleman Witch Doctor

Just as the train pulls into the station, I feel the slight pull to my left as the train shifts from one side of the tracks to the other. My weight shifts to the left as the train shunts rightward as I sit in the sunshine, the still-dark winter morning or the rainy grey in-between of Spring and Autumn.

It doesn’t matter when it is or how bad the weather is, that tiny pull of the carriage shuffling from one train always feels good… it means you’re there and it doesn’t matter where there is as long as you’re no longer just in transit.

I’m not normally one to rail against states of being, but I find that I tend to oscillate between a profound love, and an entirely unwarranted hatred, for liminality depending on the day that’s in it. There are times when the fact that I will spend X amount of time in a day simply between the locations of my various appointments grate against me tremendously. Conversely, there are occasions when the intermediary state is really the only state you can be in, own, make a part of yourself.

I am on the train. I am a man, wearing a coat on a train. For the next twenty minutes, there are no features about me that anyone else will notice. There is a comfort in that, a stability almost.

Ironically enough, I have made it a professional interest to spend a great deal of my time between two spaces. It is the nature of a detective to be engaged by members of the public to investigate the private lives of others. Moreover, it is my place to employ techniques that are seen as less than reputable, less than reliable, super or sub-natural… in short, a little odd.

I have apprehended a killer based solely on the smell of his dreams, the taste of his future and the gradual decay of his aura. I have woken to the sound of a soul being bought. I have felt a gypsy curse an innocent man from an alleyway a hundred yards from me and known to keep clear.

It’s hard to know if everyone has a vocation, but I like to think detective is a job I was cut out for.

Richard Entexure