Another good day. Laid in almost all that remains of Alice's backstory, except for a reveal further down the line, brought the talking raven onstage, and introduced Stillman Waters. Got to the part where he explains the secret history of occult spies in the 20th Century and decided it was time to call it a day.

132,924 / 150,000 (88.6%)

(Shh. No one tell my editor, but I just had to nudge the goal-posts out a little more. But I don't think it's going to end up much longer than 150K. Honest!)

One of the nice things about writing something more or less in the modern day, as I mentioned yesterday, is getting to use contemporary references. I wanted to get across that Stillman Waters looks like Michael Caine, at about age fifty. Solution? Simple. I just say he looks like Michael Caine. Problem solved...

Alice ran as fast as she could, but given how drunk she was, it probably wasn’t very fast. She wasn’t sure where she was going, didn’t even know what she was running from, just that she had to get away.

She rounded the corner at the end of the street, and plowed right into somebody.

Whoever it was that Alice had run into was surer on their feet than she was, since they were still standing when she rebounded and fell sprawled on the pavement.

“Hey, watch it!”

Alice looked up from the pavement, breathless. There was an old man standing over her. Old as in fifty, not one hundred.

“You okay, love?”

The guy looked like Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but talked like Michael Caine in Hanna & Her Sisters. Naomi had always had a thing for the actor, and Alice must have seen every one of his movies growing up.

The guy reached out a hand to help Alice to her feet, and she couldn’t help but think he looked familiar somehow, beyond the resemblance to her grandmother's favorite actor.

Alice looked at his proffered hand like it was a dead fish.

He chuckled. “Don’t worry, love, I won’t bite. Trust me, you’re not my type.”

The guy pulled Alice to her feet, and she got a better look at him. He looked a little less like Michael Caine than she’d though. He was wearing a gray suit that had seen better days, his shirt open at the collar with no tie, and over this a ratty looking trench-coat.. Blonde hair gone to gray, a week’s worth of beard on his chin. But his eyes. His eyes, they were the color of the iceberg in the nighttime shots of Titanic, ice-chip blue.

Ice-chip blue eyes.

“Still waters,” Alice said, scarcely above a whisper.

The guy narrowed his eyes, and regarded her with surprise and suspicion. “Yeah, my name’s Stillman Waters. Who told you that?”