My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Maybe you've heard of me.
I'm dead, and in purgatory, the sixth layer of the Nevernever if you're interested in looking me up, on a corner of what appears to be Chicago, albeit deserted and with unceasing rain like the mother of all film noir settings, and I'm thinking. I do it surprisingly often, yet people are always surprised.
At the moment, I am hacking my way through something of an existential crisis, and making very little in the way of progress. When you get right down to it, down to the brass tacks if you will, what I call myself is a wizard. And that's really who I am, toss in a bit of pop-culture geek and Private Detective who's read too many Raymond Chandler novels if you must, but in the end, it all leads up to wizard.
But magic doesn't exist, I hear you say. Well, could have fooled me. And if you're so smart, what are you doing here standing in the most disappointing afterlife imaginable talking to a long dead man? No answer? Good. Now be quiet, I'm trying to tell you how I wound up here.
So I'm a member of the part of the world that knows the truth, the secrets hidden from the rest. I'm not part of the Inquisition who actually forces all the various agencies to keep the secret on pain of pain, which I am very thankful for, they all seem like pretty boring guys so I doubt they'd have me if I applied, but just the same, I'm one of the lucky few who are in the know. I'm in on the secret, if you get my meaning. At least, that's what I believed until a week before I died, in which I learned that no, I'm just as ignorant as everyone else on the insignificant speck I come from. Moreso, perhaps.
It was humbling, which would normally be good for me, but in context if just felt excessively cruel.
Now, at the time I was too angry, flat-out terrified and otherwise emotional to really sit down and have a think about where it left me, and besides I didn't have time to, but I can now say without any doubt whatsoever that the universe is even bigger than imagination. And that scares me almost as much as some of the people who live in it.
The first thing to hit me was my smart-alec tendencies, and I suddenly don't feel so clever anymore. Calling someone a Ringwriath seems funny until you cross paths with the real thing and just about wet yourself in terror, then start crying for your mother. I'd seen some bad things up until that point, make no mistake, I'd love to forget all of them, but little compares. And once you do see that sort of thing, and are hit with the realization that it's all true, then you stop feeling oh so clever with your insults and start feeling like a little boy alone in the woods whistling in the dark to keep his mind off the shapes his imagination keeps on populating the murk with.
Comparing someone to a ridiculous super-villain seems funny, and then one of those super-vilains walks in out of nowhere after suddenly having been there all along, and takes over the country in a fair election. I wasn't there to actually see it, but we get a few souls on their way to their final destination who keep us appraised of the situation before they move on, but it's still enough to make me feel like climbing a tower and screaming defiance at the heavens who seem to enjoy insulting me.
The other thing is why I'm still hanging around, why I don't just bit the bullet and cross the curtain to joint the choir invisible, instead of hanging around here with a bunch of other cops accosting passing spirits and keeping them safe from demons and other nasties who plan to steal them on the way to their final journey up the river. It would be so easy, but I keep on holding myself back, and resigning myself to the fact that I would be here for a long, long time.
Why? Because, like Clint Eastwood before me, I had unfinished business. His name was Randall Flagg, or at least it was most of the time. And he was responsible for everything wrong with the universe at the moment, at least as far as I could see.
Melodramatic? Shut up and listen. What do you know. A while ago, he'd found the nexus that was the center of all the infinite universes. And he'd decided to use that to take over everything. I'm not sure what his plans were after that, he didn't seem to think I'd understand them, but his execution was pretty good. Find another badguy with plenty of power and intelligence but not much good old fashioned insight and an ego to match, glue his lips firmly to said badguys arse while passing on some advice, and take him to the Dark Tower. That way, his patsy would serve as a fallguy who would take all the heat while he could sit back and experiment, as well as get rid of the band of unlikely heroes that would try and stop him.
Oh, and be an evil bastard, too. Mustn't forget that. I've been hit while I'm down, but never like he hit me. He had my friends killed. Almost all of them. He raped my apprentice, then handed her over to a man just as soulless and sadistically evil as he. He killed my brother, along with most of my friends that he didn't get the first time. And that's just the start of it. All to get me following him.
Well, I came to the Tower, much good it did me. I climbed to the top, and there were three rooms. One led to God, but none of us were up to meeting him in the end. I did catch a glimpse, though, while I was watching the universe end in the third room along. And don't ask me to tell you about either the end of everything or about God, because I still haven't figured it out.
So I caught a hold of life again, but in the end? He's still out there, still plotting, and we didn't stop him. I'm not even convinced we slowed him down. And I'm dead. A point his way. But I have no intention of letting that stop me. Because I mightn't have his perspective, his power or any of the rest, but I intend to get him back.
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Look me up. I'm not going anywhere.