Lake of Darkness

by Scott Kenemore

  Flip sucked a series of three quick breaths, then charged around the corner and into the garage, 1911 raised.

  Immediately, there was a mechanical click and Flip was rendered totally blind—not by a darkness, but by light. The brightest light he could remember seeing hit him squarely in the face. And from a source so close he could feel the heat.

  Flip’s reaction occurred too quickly for it to have been based on any series of proper, conscious deductions. Something told him that the pile of mechanical equipment stacked haphazardly behind the couch must contain one of the security lights from the stockyard guard towers. And, further, that Nash had blinded him with it . . . either to escape, or to. . .

  Shielding his eyes with his free hand, Flip dove to the side of the garage and landed hard on his stomach. An instant later, gunfire began to pour from behind the light source. A handgun, fired repeatedly.

  Rising to his knees as quickly as he could, Flip leveled his 1911 and shot back.

  The noise of the reports inside such a small space was thunderous. Flip pulled his trigger with maniacal intensity. One of his bullets must have struck the spotlight, for the garage was suddenly plunged back into darkness. As his eyes adjusted, Flip momentarily saw the outline of Nash, ducking in and out of cover behind the couch. Then there was another loud report, and Flip felt something like a brick thrown impossibly hard slam into his shoulder. He rocked backwards and his head connected with a wall. Then he fell forward into a darker, deeper blackness.

  In that place, he saw and heard nothing more.

  FIFTEEN

  A horror of a smell. A caustic, chemical stench that seemed to crawl up through his nose and mouth and enter his very brain.

  Flip’s head jerked violently away.

  Smelling salts, he realized. These were smelling salts.

  He opened his eyes.

  Flip was on his back. Time had passed. He was still inside Nash’s garage, but now the place was full of people. People wearing blue.

  A police surgeon hovered over him, holding the salts in one hand and a lantern in the other. Nearby on the ground was a black medical bag with a fine rattan handle. Flip tested his eyes and took a wide scan of the garage. He saw several other police milling about. He also saw Tark and Sally—waiting in a corner, looking on intently.

  Flip found that his shoulder had been bound.

  And also that it hurt like the dickens.

  “He’s coming ‘round,” the police surgeon announced to the room.

  Heads turned. Faces smiled. Flip felt too weak to sit up properly, but he managed to grin back at this new audience.

  Sally stayed silent, but nodded like she was trying to tell Flip something good. Tark flashed a thumbs up.

  “The man you shot . . .” the surgeon explained slowly and loudly, as though Flip were a bit deaf. “During the gun battle, his bullet passed through part of your shoulder muscle. You fell back and hit your head twice—once against the wall, and then again on the floor. I’ve treated your shoulder with carbolic acid and sewn it shut. Later in the week, you must go to the hospital to have it further examined. I’ll write you a note to take to a Walgreen. They will give you something for the pain. Do you understand me? Can you nod if you do?”

  Though the act of moving his head seemed a supreme effort, Flip managed to bob it up and down. And then to wheeze: “Man I shot . . . ?”

  A friendly, familiar voice came from somewhere above.

  “Stone dead,” Salvatore Crespo announced with great satisfaction. “You got him, Flip.”

  The surgeon’s face seemed to narrow, as though he were fighting against a bad memory. Flip leaned further back and looked up. Crespo was there, and he exchanged a glance with the surgeon. More than a glance. Crespo positively stared the man down. The surgeon relented, looking away as he placed his smelling salts and thread back into his bag.

  “Need to see. . .” Flip wheezed.

  “What you need is bed rest,” the surgeon said as he packed his equipment. “A man who hits his head hard enough can fall down dead an hour later if he doesn’t rest. But those are only my medical opinions. Which, clearly, you men can take or leave. . .”

  Crespo gave the surgeon another stern look. Flip understood immediately that the two had had words. The physician gathered up his bag and stormed out. Flip wanted to ask what was the matter, but knew he would have to gather the strength first. His head rang like a bell.

  Tark began to approach Flip. A policeman stopped the magician with a forceful hand to the shoulder. Tark whispered something into the policeman’s ear. The officer smiled, nodded, and allowed the magician to proceed.

  While a beaming Crespo stood over them, Tark took a knee beside Flip and produced a small flask from his coat.

  “Here,” he said, unscrewing the top and tilting it up to Flip’s mouth. “Trust me. This’ll do you good. It’s quality stuff. I swiped it from Sally’s place before.”

  Flip hesitated; then—figuring nothing could make him feel worse than he already did—opened his parched lips and took a sip. Swallowing was more difficult than he had anticipated. He coughed a couple of times, and spat up as much of the gin as he downed.

  “There’s a good man,” Crespo pronounced from above.

  Flip leaned in toward the magician.

  “Tark,” he said with great strain. “What happened?”

  The magician looked up to Crespo, as if for permission. When the Italian nodded, Tark began to speak.

  “I was watching the garage from down the street, like you said to do. I watched you creep up and open the door. I watched you jump inside. As soon as you did, he hit you in the face with that spotlight. ‘Fore I knew what was happening, you two had a shootout. I saw you go down and I thought you were dead. Sally and I ran on over and we found you, but you were still breathing. Then we looked behind the spotlight, and we saw that you’d shot him, Flip. You shot and killed that man from your photo. The white man, Durkin.”

  Flip widened his eyes and blinked them rapidly.

  “That’s right,” Crespo clarified. “You got him. There was a basement room underneath that old couch. Trap door. We think Durkin had been living down there.”

  This was too much to take anybody’s word on. Flip had to see for himself.

  Despite the strain, he attempted to right his body. It was wobbly going, but he made it as far as sitting up.

  “Tark, Crespo . . . can you help me to my feet?”

  “Easy now,” Tark said. “You heard the doc.”

  “Eh, what do croakers know?” Crespo responded, gripping Flip hard by the armpit and pulling. “Help me out, magician.”

  They pulled him up. Flip felt as though he had been kicked by a horse (which he actually had been once, so he knew the sensation). Nonetheless, he managed to pick his way across the room to the broken spotlight. The policemen inventorying the grim contents of the garage gave him a wide berth.

  The spotlight had been completely shattered by rounds from his 1911. Several of his bullets had also made holes in the cinderblock wall. Flip saw a dark shadow of a man on the ground behind the couch. He crept to it. Crespo, following behind, shone a dim lantern upon the body.

  There was Durkin. No question about it. He wore the same suit from the photograph. He had indeed been shot twice in the chest, just as in the photograph. Beside him on the ground was an ancient Colt SAA revolver.

  And it looked wrong. All wrong.

  Flip did not know how long he had been unconscious—it had likely been an hour or more—but he had seen men recently shot. He knew how their bodies looked in the hours passing after. This was different. Durkin already looked like a medical cadaver. Something dead for days or weeks, kept on ice. He looked drowned and suffocated. His hair was the hair of a body washed ashore from Lake Michigan, all soaked to nothing.

  Crespo moved his light away quickly, as if he did not wish Flip’s gaze to linger.

  “The person I followed here. . .” Flip began, leaning against the couch
for support. “Negro man named Nash. . .”

  “Yes, this garage is rented to a person by that name,” Crespo said loudly. “The yard foreman confirmed it. We think Durkin had paid Nash to use the place.”

  “I never saw. . .” Flip began, but trailed off.

  “Relax; we’ve put out a call on Nash as well,” Crespo said. “We’ll get him. If he was involved in this, we’ll find out how. But I hope you understand what you did here, Flip. You got him. Do you realize that? You got the man we wanted.”

  Flip stepped to the side and looked down into the trapdoor in the floor beside the couch. It was open, and there were steep, rung-like steps leading down.

  Then the pain swelled and Flip felt as though he might pass out or lose his lunch. He steadied himself against the couch.

  “Can I see down there?” Flip asked when the sensation passed.

  Crespo exchanged a glance with two of the nearby officers.

  “In your condition, I wouldn’t try those stairs,” Crespo said.

  “Yeah,” one of the policemen added. “Almost slipped going down there myself . . . and I didn’t just get shot.”

  “We’ll search it thoroughly,” Crespo said to Flip, leaning close. “Do a full inventory. If we discover anything interesting, I promise to let you know.”

  “All right,” Flip said.

  Wooziness overtook him. Involuntarily, he sat down on the filthy couch.

  “Whoa now,” Crespo said. “This looks like a man who needs a good night’s sleep. And he’s earned it if ever a Chicago policeman has.”

  Some of the other police seconded this with jocular calls of “Hear, hear!” A couple gave applause with their leather-gloved hands.

  “Jimmy, can you give Flip a ride home in the wagon?” Crespo asked an officer.

  Jimmy confirmed that he could.

  “And my friends. . .” Flip said softly, gesturing to Sally and Tark.

  “Of course,” Crespo said. “We’ll get them home as well.”

  In such pain and stupor, Flip found it difficult to further contemplate what had happened.

  He knew the man at whom he had been shooting had been Nash. He felt certain of this beyond any room to doubt. It had been Nash. Yet there was Durkin—the man from the photo, plain as day—in Nash’s place. Was there a connection Flip did not see? Perhaps it was an obvious one, and he would be embarrassed, later, to have not discerned it immediately.

  But thinking along these lines felt perilously close to resisting. And Flip was now too weak to resist anything. He wanted only to collapse and to vomit. His body commanded him to rest. It felt as though a full month of sleeping—give or take—was probably called for.

  Flip slumped forward and moaned. His head fell between his legs.

  “That’s it,” he heard Crespo say. “Give me a hand with him, boys.”

  Amid additional calls of congratulation, Flip was helped outside toward a waiting police wagon. Flip found enough strength to lift his head and turn it one last time toward Sally and Tark. Sally made a kind of praying motion with her hands. Flip realized it was a ‘Thank you.’ Tark extended a wrist and seemed to toast Flip with an invisible gin. Then Flip’s head fell once more to his chest, and he was loaded into the wagon.

  He did not remember the ride home.

  When the wagon stopped, Flip was able to look up enough to see that they had reached the building where he lived. He could smell dawn in the air, though the sky was still pitch dark. A pair of indistinct policemen, like strong animated shadows, helped Flip to the doorway of his home. One asked if he was well enough to go the rest of the way on his own. Flip said he was.

  Flip crept up his stairs on all fours like a dog, and managed to let himself into his apartment. He had felt this weak only once before, when a bout of pneumonia had leveled him completely for the better part of a winter.

  Flip removed his clothes and found them sticky with sweat.

  Before he headed for his bed, he took a long look out his front window. The police wagon had not moved. The pair of shadowy officers stood to either side of the flagstone walk leading up to his building. They were already joking and funning with one another the way policemen do when they are settling into an easy, safe assignment. Flip was under watch tonight, like a visiting dignitary.

  With the wonder of this rushing through his head, Flip crashed into his pillow.

  He did not fall immediately to sleep.

  It was not the wound in his shoulder or the exhilaration of the shootout that kept him awake. Rather, it was the vision of the corpse of Durkin. That man had been dead for longer than an hour. Flip had seen every kind of dead man there was to see, and he knew what kind Durkin was. As the sun began to rise, Flip felt surer and surer that something was amiss.

  When he did fall asleep—wondering if the intense pains in his shoulder were the first encroachments of death—Flip dreamed of walking dead men.

  He had heard tales of zombies from those who had come up to Chicago from the Caribbean. (Zombies were as old as the city. Du Sable himself had probably known of them.) Zombies were men who could be commanded to walk after death. But they came from a place stepped in so much murder and horror that this likely seemed unremarkable. It was a place where Caribs had murdered Indians, and British and French and had murdered Caribs, Negroes had been enslaved and brought in, and then the British, French, and Negroes had taken turns murdering one another for the next hundred years. Straight through, no stopping.

  A place like that. . . What export would it develop? What would it cultivate to give to the world?

  Walking dead men sounded about right to Flip.

  Flip dreamed that he was standing in the Loop among the tall buildings, surrounded by men in fine clothes who walked the streets and sidewalks. Yet when he looked closely at these men, he saw that each man was dead. That each man had a face like Durkin’s—expired for days, and half-frozen in lake water. Each man looked with eyes that did not see. And each man was a copy of the one beside him.

  A twin.

  Identical.

  There was a knock on Flip’s door late the next morning.

  He had not locked it. Someone turned the handle and walked right inside. By the time Flip had maneuvered his torso upright enough to reach for his gun, Crespo was already striding into the room. The Italian had a jolly look on his face.

  “You survived the night,” he said.

  Flip nodded and set his gun back down.

  “How do you feel?”

  Flip made an expression indicating the answer should be obvious.

  “It happens,” Crespo said. “We had our fair share in the Black Hand Squad.”

  “You said they never touched you,” Flip hissed with a voice like sandpaper.

  With a supreme effort of will, he brought his feet around to the floor.

  “They never killed us,” Crespo happily clarified. “But plenty of us got ‘touched’ the way you did last night. That includes me. Can you walk?”

  “Let’s see,” Flip said, rising shakily to his feet.

  He took one step, then another. The pain was manageable. It appeared walking, at least, would be no trouble. He inspected his bandage. The wound was still tender. The wrapping was covered with dried blood, but the wound was not bleeding more. The surgeon’s stitches had held.

  Flip walked to his kitchen sink, carefully poured a glass of water, and drank it down.

  “I don’t see any leaks,” Crespo said. “They must’ve sewed you up good.”

  Flip set down the glass.

  “That surgeon last night was mad at you,” Flip observed.

  “We had different opinions. . .” Crespo began, then started over. “Let’s say, he thought we weren’t taking in to account that that body. . . maybe, in a way. . . looked like it had been dead for a while before you shot it.”

  At least the Italian would be honest.

  “Then what do you think I shot?” Flip asked, his voice gradually returning to normal. “You think that w
as a dead man walking around?”

  “All I know is what you did last night seems an awful lot like what the mayor asked you to do. And that’s our job. To do what the mayor says.”

  Flip stared hard at the Italian, unmoving, until the pain in his shoulder forced him to wince.

  “Where is Nash? You at least have some men on his house . . . like you do on mine?”

  Crespo nodded.

  “No sign of him yet.”

  “And what did you find in that basement room, beneath the couch?” Flip asked.

  “Enough to know we got our man,” Crespo answered. “It was like a little smuggler’s den, filled with horrors. There were weapons. Boning knives. Blades. And then metal tanks filled with blood. Others filled with ice water. And body parts too. Things so mutilated they’re never gonna be identified.”

  “Jesus,” said Flip.

  “It’s our own H. H. Holmes,” Crespo told him. “Holmes of the Stockyards. That’s what the papers would call him if they knew about this. But they’re never gonna know, are they Flip? Are they. . .”

  “You find out I talked to some people at the Defender?”

  Crespo did not answer.

  “Don’t worry about that. Abbott will have to run something, but I’ll make sure it’s not too. . . spectacular.”

  “Good,” Crespo said. “Do you feel well enough to go downtown?”

  “Today? Now?”

  The Italian nodded.

  “I ain’t sure,” Flip answered honestly.

  “Come on; this is the fun part,” Crespo cajoled. “You’ve run the race. Now you’ve only got to stand on the platform while they do the medal ceremony.”

  Flip cocked an eye.

  “You make it sound so nice. Why do I get the feeling that the mayor told you to drag me out of bed no matter how I felt?”

  “You can put it in those terms if you like, I suppose,” Crespo allowed. “C’mon.”