February 19, 2025

Mr. Silver, Mr. Quicksilver
by Nenad Pavlović

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.



    The man spots me standing in the deep, rain-soaked shadows of the car park. He is reluctant, looking around nervously. He is as afraid of me as he is of the police. He has probably heard rumors, about me killing customers on a whim, because of a bad mood, or because I just didn’t like them. And he is right to be afraid - as all of those rumors are true.

Still, he advances. 

He stands by me in a way he deems inconspicuous. 

“Are you… him?” he says, anxiously, and clears his throat. Scrawny, desperate-looking creature. Most of them are. “Mr… Quicksilver?”

I nod. No theatrics, just business.

Mr Quicksilver. I took his name. And why not? I took his name as I took his boon. 

He took everything from me.

                                                                ***

The gravel of the path crunched and glistened beneath our steps. Even past midnight, the stretch of the land was bright as noon under the miraculously luminous pale shine of the full moon. The air was damp, fragrant and brisk this close to the river.

We walked in silence for a while. Then Ronan started talking again.

It was his idea, us coming there that night. 

Ronan’s family is a strange one. All of them are strange. I’m pretty good at reading people, but I could never get heads nor tails of his folks. They are smart, but erratic somehow, eccentric, acting like aristocracy one moment then like paupers the next. I know that Ronan’s father once wrote some big scientific paper. He got rich and popular for a while, constantly swarmed by news crews, and then just gave it all up one day to open a quail farm. Ronan’s mother made potions and poultices from local herbs and sold them to women at the town market. She made “witch” potions, like the ones that made girls get rid of their unwanted babies. She also sold hand-crafted Jesus-figurines. Ronan’s sister was a pole-dancer in the local strip-joint, even though she was ugly as sin and cold as ice, until she gave it all up and left for a Christian mission in Africa. 

Ronan himself was no less of an enigma. He left high-school, and then came back again several years later, offering no explanation. He liked comic books and philosophy, but was also the captain of the local rugby team. After high-school, he got hooked on smack, only to get completely clean a year later, claiming he “got bored with it”. 

Ronan was my friend, because we shared something in common: we were both outcasts, and we both disliked being at our homes. So we hung out, catching dreams in the dreamless nights.

That night, Ronan took me to perform some kind of folk ritual. Sure, why not, I answered. It's not like I had anything better to do that evening, anyway. Not in our Culchie town. All the pubs were closed, all the tarts taken, and all the bottles emptied. Reenacting a folk custom sounded as a good of an idea as any.

Actually, it was the story of it that got my attention. I was in no way a local history buff, but I heard my share of town legends and stories from my Nana and other old wives, and I was pretty sure I have never heard the one Ronan told me about that night.

“What is this... Mr Silver?” I asked.

“I believe he is some kind of a demon,” Ronan answered matter-of-factly, as I was inquiring about a particular bird species.

“’Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!’ that’s what you need to say. It’s very important that you focus…”

I stopped listening to him immediately, immersed in my own fantasy.

A local legend, not commonly known? One could write a scientific paper about this! One being me! I could write a book about it! Or, it could be a doctorate thesis, or maybe just an article for the papers, those pay good, don’t they? I slipped into my fantasies of ever-diminishing effort, not listening to his prattle about clear intent or what not. In the end, I paid dearly for my lack of attention.

I will always remember that night. The silvery shine that bathed all around us in surreal bright gray light. The crunch of the gravel: Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! The smell of the river, of watery decay and damp shoots and foliage. I have never seen moonlight so bright, I remember myself saying. 

“It’s special moonlight,” Ronan answered, cryptically. “Comes around only once in a decade.”

We stopped at White Rock. White Rock already had its share of well-known legends circulating around it: A boy once drowned here. There were mammoth catfish prowling its depths. There was a whirlpool that sometimes appeared and sucked even the craftiest swimmers to the bottom.

I never heard the story of Mr Silver, though. Nor of anything like it.

Apparently, the trick was that, on a special night, in a special year, when the stars are right, one could stand by the bank, throw some old silver into the depths and chant “Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!”, and then the titular Mr Silver would appear and present you with ten times the weight in silver of what you threw in the water.

 It was all ridiculous, of course, but hey, it beat late night television.

I threw an old silver pin in the murky waters. Ronan threw something much larger and heavier, judging by the splash.

“Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!” chanted Ronan.

“Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!” I chanted too, between cigarette drags. I was getting cold suddenly, I noticed by the goosebumps on my arms.

I was deep in thought that whole day. I thought about home, about my sick Ma, and the fact that she was dying slowly. About my Pa, coming home from work drunk and going after the bottle as soon as he had his boots off. My girlfriend, who I hated because she wasn’t kinky in bed, even though she was a cracker in every other way imaginable. I was deep in those same thoughts that evening, too. I must have been, to lose the grip on reality as easy as I did. 

It all… melted, around me. The moon, the river, the fields… It all flowed and ebbed, not so much as silver as… Quicksilver. Mercury. 

It was like a dream, like a fantasy frozen in time. The stars stopped. Ronan was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear his voice, nor did I care.

There was a third person with us now. I didn’t know who it was, but his presence was equal part strange and comforting. At that time, I thought it was some passerby, a friend stopping to say hello. He gave something to Ronan, something he put in his burlap sack. Then, he turned to me. Looking at him was kind of hazy, like looking at the sun. I found it easier to look at his reflection in the water instead. A silvery gleam, running down the waters. Quicksilver, I thought, like a drip from a broken thermometer. He gave me something, too, a cigarette, or a cigarette case, or perhaps a Zippo lighter.

“Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!”

“Mr Silver, Mr Quicksilver, give us your boon!”

It was a daze. I felt high, or perhaps drunk, much more than I was before coming to the place.

And then it was over, as abruptly as it began.  

Ronan said something more to me, tied the threads of his sack, and declared that he must return home now. We walked back towards the town together, but he paced faster, and soon I found myself walking alone.

I unlocked the door and crept inside, not wanting to wake up anyone. Pa was snoring loudly and Ma was sobbing quietly, and I ignored both sounds, as usual. A peculiar gleam shone from every which way, silvery remains of my night by the river: inside my water glass, on the window pane, on the hands of the old clock. I ignored them all and went to sleep.

In hindsight, I recollect seeing the first clues of my oncoming curse even in those early days. A silvery bead rolling away and hiding behind a piece of food on my plate. A gleam, like from a misplaced confetti, shining from the corners and cracks in the floorboards. Metallic bubbles in my water bottle that stood out from the others. I see them all clearly now, but back then, they were less than a flight of fancy.

It wasn’t before the first demise that I noticed something was amiss. The first victim of the curse was my sort-of-girlfriend, Marilyn. It was our date night, or, in truth, our fuck night, when we would meet in the stables of her homestead for a hurried clandestine bout of lovemaking.

“You can finish inside,” she said, spreading her legs in the hay. “I’m on a pill.”

I didn’t need any further convincing. Those words by themselves made me finish even quicker than usual. Right now, I’m wondering if it would even have helped if I had used a condom. 

I didn’t know that something was wrong until the next week. When she wouldn’t answer her cell, I called her land-line and got her father on the wire.

“Marry is ill,” the old man said. He sounded genuinely concerned, so much that he didn’t even express his usual displeasure of my ringing his daughter. “They drove her to the community hospital yesterday. She’s twitching and turning… You didn’t do any drugs, by any chance? You can tell me, I won’t even get mad. I just want her to get well.”

I told him that we didn’t, which was the truth. But truth, no-truth, Marilyn Rose passed away the very next day. The diagnosis was high-dose mercury poisoning. At that time, I thought of it just as of a sad, freakish accident. People died of sillier things in our burg. Like being kicked by a mule, or drowning in their own vomit.

The event that made me think that there might be something more nefarious afoot happened a couple of days after Marilyn Rose’s death. 

I’ve often heard stories of sleep paralysis demons, but I always dismissed them as pure attention-seeking bollocks. Until it happened to me. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling squashed. I dreamed that some fat bloke was sitting on my chest, and when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anybody, but the crushing feeling remained. I couldn’t get a lungful of air, and my limbs were pinned to the mattress. The only part of my body that I could move were my eyeballs, and, once pointed upwards, they spotted something odd: a large, shimmering, metallic bubble, floating near the ceiling, with several smaller ones orbiting around it. The ball projected a strong force which pinned me to the bed, and suddenly, for the first time in my life, I thought of Jesus, and made a prayer to him, to move that demon away from me so I could breathe. The last thing I remember of that night was the mirror-surfaced ball floating along the ceiling towards my mother’s room, and that all that I thought in that moment was: “Thank you, God! Thank God!” 

My mother died the very next day.

It came as no huge surprise to anyone, as she was very sick and on the brink of death for quite a few times now. The medics came quietly, covered her, and wheeled her away, as if already prepared for this exact moment. We phoned some cousins and friends of hers, and some phoned us back.

 I didn’t know how to react, so I did as my father: I got piss-drunk on whiskey. As we were drinking at the pub, drowning in tides of sappy loud music and cigarette smoke, a thought kept popping into my head: I didn’t deserve this. It was all my Pa’s fault. It was he that was responsible for Ma dying. At that moment, I hated him, even more than usual. He was blind-drunk, singing and swaying with his crowd. “He’s grieving in his own way”, a friend of his said, detecting my judgmental stare, but to me, he looked like he did every other day in the pub.

The morning after, I woke up with a killer hangover. Pa didn’t wake up at all.
If you would to inquire around town, all the gossipers would say that he died from alcohol abuse. “He drank too much. The booze got him at the end”. But I knew my Pa. What he drank that night was about half his maximal capacity. And when, almost a month later, I read the coroner’s report about mercury poisoning, I started to put two and two together.

I never was a superstitious person. I wasn’t exactly a man of science, but I was pretty grounded about what was real and what was only make-believe. The idea of a quicksilver man was definitely outside my boundaries of believable before.
 
I was alone now, an orphan, in the house haunted by memories, both bad and good. There were times, before, especially bad times, when Ma was very sick and Pa was very drunk and violent, when I wished for this: for them to die and leave the house to me. I daydreamed about what I’d do, about the parties I’d throw, the girls I’d bring… But now, all those thoughts felt childish and crass. So I moped around, trying to do some sorting and cleaning, but never actually putting any effort into any of it. It all felt pointless. My muscles slackened and my thoughts escaped, stopping me dead in my work. 

“Mr Quicksilver, Mr Quicksilver, give me your boon”. These words echoed in my head in such moments, feeling strange, foreign, as if not mine at all. They would make me stop and stare at nothing, catching metallic glimpses in the corners of my eyes, which would promptly dispense at the slightest attempt of scrutiny.  

Not knowing what to do with myself, I called Ronan, for the first time since our excursion that strange moonlit night.

“Ronan ain’t here,” his father replied.

“Where is he?”

“He went to his girlfriend’s. He said that he got some money and that he was going to help her with her lavender plantation.”

I had a notion about where that money came from.

“That’s funny, I don’t remember him mentioning any girlfriends.”

I could hear the old man scribbling with an old-fashioned pen on a piece of paper in the background.

“Neither have I, but, you know our Ronan…”

“Alright, did he leave an address, or...” 

    “Oh, I believe he said something about Serbia…”

    “Serbia? Where the fuck is that?”

    More scribbling. 

    “I believe it’s in the Balkans. Now, Steve, was it?”
    “Martin!”

    “Listen, Martin, I’m kind of in the middle of something. I’ve just had a breakthrough idea.

 I’ll… If Ronan calls, I’ll say that you were asking for him, alright?”

    “Right,” I almost sighed into the receiver. “Oh, Mr McCormick,” I stammered, “Do you perchance know anything about… Mr Silver?”

    “And who is Mr Silver?” the man asked, with exactly one ounce of interest.
    “Oh, no one. Just forget it. Bye.”

    It was a stupid idea, but it was also the only one on my mind. I asked around some more. No one had ever heard of this Mr Silver. It seemed that Ronan had made the whole thing up.

    I even went back to the same spot at White Rock, twice, once during the day, once at midnight, but there was nothing there. The magical silvery glow was absent, and the place looked like any other up and down the river. I tried throwing a silver earring into the water, tried calling both Mr Silver and Mr Quicksilver’s names, but the only response I got was the murring of the waters.
 
    The idea that it was all in my head also crossed my mind. I was in shock, I thought to myself. There had happened a series of unfortunate, bizarre accidents, and my mind was in overdrive, making up stories to make sense of all of it. It was only natural that I would make a connection between that strange night and all the terrible things that happened afterwards, that’s the way human brain worked. It was all logical.

    And I didn’t believe one bit of it.

    I started drinking. I was always drinking, even before, but not like this. Now, I drank like Pa used to. I drank until I was no longer conscious. In the few moments of sobriety between my binges, I tried making sense of it all, but thoughts kept escaping, like the small mercury drops I sometimes spotted in my delirious states.

    One night, I awoke at the pub table. The place was closed. Old Mr Smith left me sleeping in my chair, not wanting to throw me out in the cold winter night, or more probably, not wanting to deal with my plastered ass. Across the table from me was Finley, the town drunk, who often kept me company in my benders. And between me and him, there were two strands of thin silvery moonlight. At least, that was what I thought they were, until I wiped my nose and smeared one of it. 

    In an instant, I was at my feet. I realized momentarily that the metallic stripes on the table weren’t beams of light, but streams of liquid. Liquid metal.

    I pushed the table, making it crash on the floor loudly. Finley grunted and turned, falling right back to sleep. The mercury strings were severed. I vomited profusely, forced open the door, and got out of the pub, and then out of town.

    I never returned.

    The years following were pure hell. I was on the brink of insanity and famine, traveling all the way from Galway to Dover, hitchhiking, sleeping on the streets, eating out of the rubbish bins. And avoiding people. But, no matter how much I steered clear, some died, and that drove me further away from the society, and deeper into madness. 

    I tried getting rid of the curse, don’t think I haven’t. I tried prayers and meditations, exorcisms and incantations, and even living healthy, but nothing worked. I even tried tracking Ronan down, but it turned out to be even less fruitful than tracking the curse he brought into my life. Eventually, I gave up and decided to make friends with my demons, or demon. 

    For many nights, I wondered if I deserved this fate. And eventually, I accepted that I had. I took all of my life for granted, never once paying attention or trying to understand the people and the world around me. It all existed just as a backdrop for my existence. That was my sin, and I accepted it.  

    Gradually, I learned to control my manifestations. And I learned how to use them. Turns out, there actually was a practical purpose for my boon.

                                                                       ***

    I walked behind the young yuppie, hunting for a cab in the rain. He sipped on his overpriced coffee, not giving me a second glance as he entered the vehicle. What he didn’t know was that he had enemies, people who hated him enough to sick an urban legend assassin on his trail. And that he had just ingested a lethal amount of liquid mercury. 

    He would die, and no clues to his poisoning would be found. The whole case would be written off as a freak accident. And for all that, I was fifty thousand pounds richer. I, Mr Quicksilver. The walking modern fable. The walking death.

    One might ask, how did I live with myself, for all that I’ve done? And I’d answer, easy. I had a lot of dosh now, to cushion up my life. Life is much more bearable with luxury and copious amounts of drugs, booze, and easy women. And for the rest, the everlasting feeling of gnawing guilt, well, there was a solution to that, too. My control over my powers was good now, but not total. It could never be total. The demon was in the driver’s seat this whole time. I wonder if Ronan was paying some kind of price for his boon, too. 
​
    The mercury was slowly entering my bloodstream, a smidge more every day. I didn’t have long, and I welcomed the sweet release. 

                                                            💀💀💀

Nenad Pavlovic was born in 1983. in a mid-sized city in Eastern Europe. He majored in English language and literature and eventually moved to the north of Norway, where he still resides, working as a teacher and scribbling away every Friday night with a pint of ale at his side. His short fiction (mostly fantasy, sci-fi and horror, with a few exception) was featured in many magazines and short story collections published throughout the Balkans, and a few of them even managed to get published abroad (Jersey Devil Press, Piker Press, Schlock!, Lovecraftiana, Kaidankai, Dark Horses, Underside Stories...). His first novel, Hokus Lokvud, won the Mali Nemo Best Novel Award in 2013, and his latest novel, Salvation on Peril Island, published under a pen-name Nash Knight, is currently available on Amazon. ​