Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  What had broken that damn mirror? He stretched his hand forward to touch the glass, then yanked it back. For just a moment, he thought he’d spotted a haze of fine red-black hairs on his hands, that his fingers were ever-so-slightly elongated. He closed his eyes, then carefully stared at his hand. Nothing.

  What in the hell had he seen? He shook off the thought. It was a vision, a carryover of a bad dream. He prayed it wasn’t a psychotic episode, reviewed the medication he’d distributed to patients that day, calculating whether he might have exposed himself to some of it, causing his dreams, the hallucination in the mirror.

  Nothing.

  He looked at his watch. Just past 3 a.m. He was past sleep, though, could still imagine the drowning light, falling into it, Jazz’s blood-filled eyes, the fine hairs sprouting on his body. He took a shower, first very hot, then icy cold, then dressed for work. He stared briefly at the remains of the mirror, shook his head, and headed for the asylum.

  “Crime in Devil’s Cape is like no place else. Well, Sicily, maybe. But way more diverse, you take my meaning? And Sicily don’t like those masks the way Devil’s Cape does.

  “It’s set up like a feudal system, you see. F-E-U-D-A-L, like medieval, not futile, though I guess it’s that, too. You got your average skels on the street, they’re like the peasants. They owe so much up the food chain they’re never getting their heads out. Then you got your little lords, your overseers or what have you. Then you got your big lords—or earls or viscounts or dukes or whatever. Like Tony Ferazzoli or whoever’s running the Pang Hui tong these days, or your Uncle Costas.

  “Yeah, I know who you are. You think you walk through this door without me knowing who and what you are? You probably know more about this shit than me.

  “So anyway, you got your big lords and most of the time they hate each other and play off each other. They’ll slit each other’s throats, you give them half the chance. But they only fuck with each other within certain parameters. Certain things they can do, certain things they can’t. And that all boils down to the king and what he lets them get away with.

  “You got some knights, too, now, running around. The ones who wear masks. And sometimes they report up to the big lords and sometimes the little lords and sometimes straight to the king.

  “And of course you know that no matter how much he throws at local charities and how much he tries to pretend his shit don’t stink, that king right now is the Robber Baron. And before him, there was the Hangman, whose death the Baron probably arranged. And back in the days of old Eliot Ness, there was John Dusk. And when someone kills off the Robber Baron, may that day be today, someone else will step in, sure as anything. And long live the king.

  “Of course everything I just said is off the record. Probably slanderous. True, though.”

  —FBI agent Stan Reuler, excerpted from an interview with WTDC News’s Jason Kale

  Chapter Eighteen

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Three days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  3 a.m.

  Jason Kale took another sip of bitterly strong coffee from the paper cup in his hand, resisting the temptation to look at his watch again. A warm breeze fluttered his red silk tie, and he absently pressed it back down. The street was dark and empty. Someone—maybe kids, maybe vandals, maybe one of the warring gangs that fought endlessly over this piece of turf—had smashed the streetlight. Anyone else would have been nearly blind in the dark, but Jason could see the streets as clearly as at any other time of day—the windows with their dirt and peeling paint, the trickle of oily water making its way to the sewer grate, the misshapen rat scratching its way along the edge of a dumpster. Somewhere off in the distance, he could hear an ambulance siren.

  His cameraman, Dexter Koo, was squinting off into the darkness, smacking loudly on a piece of grape bubble gum, the video camera on the ground at his feet. Every once in a while, Koo would say “shit” softly, but that had been the extent of their conversation for the past half-hour.

  Jason finally looked at his watch. Another five minutes and he’d give up. They were long past making the eleven o’clock news.

  His source, a pinch-faced man named Lenny Buchholz, was a leg-breaker who’d lost both his earlobes when a pimp yanked his hoop earrings out of his ears during a shakedown. Lenny had promised Jason a scoop on the Troll, a monstrous, shadowy figure who some people said weighed nearly 600 pounds and who had once decapitated an elderly woman with a baseball bat, then fed her head to the pack of dogs he kept with him. The Troll was supposed to be the leader of a gang called the Concrete Executioners.

  But Lenny wasn’t here.

  “You’ve been had, man,” Koo said. “Not the first time.” He looked down at the ground, at the satchel Jason had brought along with him, but not opened.

  Jason shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. He pushed the satchel over to one side with his foot. Koo had asked him about it earlier and he’d shrugged it off. “Change of clothes,” he’d said. It was accurate, but it had been clear he didn’t want to talk about it and that had gotten the cameraman’s curiosity up.

  A sudden noise startled them. At first Jason thought Lenny had finally arrived. But then he heard the heavy footfalls of a near-giant and the baying of dogs. He stared down the street and saw a hulking form that could only be the Troll. The man—if he were even human—was even more grotesque than Jason had heard. He had green skin and yellow eyes without irises. Huge, curving horns like a ram’s sprouted from the sides of his head. He was easily eight feet tall and covered with short fur. He wore a leather coat that seemed to be several jackets stitched together, and he carried a huge club in one hand, six feet long and covered with steel and metal studs at the top. His other hand held a writhing mass of leashes, each barely holding back a fierce mongrel dog, the smallest of them weighing at least 80 pounds. They sniffed and salivated and growled and tugged hard at the leashes, even when hooked barbs in their collars drew blood on their throats. When the Troll cleared his throat, half a block away, it sounded like he was crushing rats in his chest.

  “Fuck me blue,” Koo said. The gum fell out of his mouth. He ran, a mad, crazy sprint that took him out of the dead-end alley where they stood and on down the street. He stumbled once, pulling himself to his feet on a metal trash can that clattered over to one side, and then he was gone. But there was no way that the Troll hadn’t heard the noise, and he was closing fast.

  Jason’s only blessing was that the Troll was still distant enough not to have spotted him. But he was in a dead-end alley. There was no way for a normal man to escape without running into the street after Koo, where the dogs would surely run him down. Carefully, quietly, Jason set down the cup of coffee, picked up Koo’s camera and his own satchel, and flew in shadows to the rooftop.

  The smart thing would be to run away. He’d been set up, and obviously the Troll was looking for him. But if he didn’t interfere, the dogs would run Koo down. And Jason Kale had never liked to run.

  Quickly, he huddled there on the rooftop, the snarling of the dogs coming steadily closer, though the Troll was clearly in no hurry. Jason zipped open his satchel and pulled out the uniform that had haunted his dreams.

  The bodysuit was navy blue, like the deepest waters of the Aegean. The shoulders and upper chest were reinforced with leather and threaded with gold. He stripped and pulled it on, shoving his other clothes into the satchel. Then he pulled on brown leather gloves and boots and a wide belt of the same leather, studded and buckled with gold. He threw a long, flowing blue cape onto his back, fastening it in front. And then he reached for the mask. It was formed to cover his whole head, leaving only his chin and mouth visible. Tinted glass lenses shrouded his eyes, both to make it harder to recognize him and to keep the wind from obscuring his vision when he flew. He stared at the mask for the space of several breaths, thinking of the step he was about to take. The quiet moment felt like a prayer. And then he pulled it on.

  Jason set Koo’s camera on a ledge
and carefully aimed it at the street below. His shot set, he flew high into the air, then landed in front of the Troll, his heart thundering and his cape billowing out around him.

  The Troll’s yellowed eyes widened, a snarl drawing up the corners of his mouth. “And what are you, exactly?” he asked.

  “I’m Argonaut,” Jason replied. “And I’m tired of people like you running my city.”

  The Troll snorted and released the leashes, letting his dogs swarm forward. He gripped his huge club in both hands, swinging it backward, and rushed forward, his footsteps shattering paving stones that had decorated the street for more than a century.

  Jason rolled forward and to one side. His cape fluttered in front of the dogs, enraging and distracting them, and he snatched several of the loose leashes. One dog bit his arm, but howled in surprise as some of its teeth broke. The dogs’ breath was hot and fetid. They smelled like rotten meat. Jason yanked hard on the leashes, pulling the baying dogs down and toward the street, then rapidly knotted the leashes together. The dogs snarled and yapped at him and each other, but they were pulling each other over, unable to move together to get at him. They howled, scratching and biting at each other in frustration, but all their movement only served to cinch the leashes tighter together.

  But two of the dogs were still loose, and the Troll loomed closer. He kicked one of the trapped dogs to the side, stepped in toward Jason, and then swung the huge club hard toward Jason like a batter aiming to rip the cover off the ball.

  Jason dropped flat to the ground, inches from the cracked mortar and cobblestones, and felt the club swing by just overhead. One of the dogs lunged in, trying to bite Jason in the face, but Jason reached up and elbowed its lower jaw. Its mouth slammed shut, blood spurting through its teeth as the tip of its tongue was severed. It whined, dropping backward, and Jason shoved it into the other loose dog with his foot, sending both spinning back down into the alley. Not even having time to figure out where the Troll was, he rolled to the side, then heard a thunderous crash as the club slammed down to the point where he’d just been.

  “I’ll kill you!” the Troll shouted.

  “I don’t think so,” Jason said. He sprang to his feet. For Jason, the problem with the huge club was that it gave the long-armed Troll tremendous range. For the Troll, the problem with it was that it was next to useless in close.

  Jason stepped in near the Troll, tight enough to smell the unwashed, animal stench of his body odor, tight enough to make out the uneven stitching in the coat that the Troll had sewn together for himself. He jumped upward, smashing the crown of his head in to the Troll’s flat, wide nose, then punched the Troll five times in quick succession just under the breastbone. They were fast, hard punches with little momentum but lots of strength, and the Troll gasped and wheezed as the air rushed out of his lungs.

  The Troll dropped the club and reached around Jason to squeeze him and crush him in his arms, but Jason was much stronger and tougher than he’d expected, and while he trying to crush Jason with his trunklike arms, Jason was grabbing him back, keeping him from taking another breath.

  It only took a few seconds before the Troll began to topple, starved for oxygen. Jason let him start to fall, then punched him hard in the back of the head, forcing him to the street.

  Jason pulled the Troll’s jacket off and tied his arms together with it. Then he got to one knee, put his arms under the Troll’s huge frame, and lifted him over his head, onto his shoulders. The gleam of a streetlamp made the gold threads on his chest shine.

  As Jason flew into the air, directly in view of the video camera he’d put in place, his cape fluttered behind him and the Troll’s dogs howled.

  Let them stay here, then. They are as acclimated and as content as their afflicted minds will allow. Let the whole haunt be devoted to them, to preserving what sanity they retain. And keep the place lit bright. Its shadows are fierce and fearsome.

  — Excerpted from a letter written by Janus Holingbroke to the caretaker of his children and nephew, 1900

  Chapter Nineteen

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Three days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  4:30 a.m.

  Devil’s Cape was no place to drive just before dawn. The smog hung over its streets and the glitter of predawn had a way of sucking the light out of the city’s streetlights, headlights, and neon, turning the world an impenetrable, smoky gray. The stragglers on the streets at that hour were drunk as often as not, driving as though alone in the world, uncaring of the darkness, unconcerned for each other. The city had more DWIs per capita than any other in the United States, and its bars were open 24 hours a day. A former Devil’s Cape fireman had purchased a retired firetruck after he’d put in his twenty years and did a good business contracting with the city to spray blood off city streets after fatality wrecks.

  Dr. Cain Ducett was usually a cautious, meticulous driver. He drove no more than ten miles over the speed limit. He signaled. He came to a full and complete stop at stop signs. But not this night. On the night of his dream, he drove toward the Holingbroke Psychological Institute like a bat out of . . . well . . .

  “Like a bat out of hell,” he said.

  After tearing out of his apartment garage, windows down, air roaring around his head, he blew through a red light at Ayers Boulevard without even tapping the brakes of his Chrysler Crossfire. He swerved around a beer delivery truck and had driven three miles in two minutes and ten seconds before realizing that he hadn’t turned his lights on yet. He flipped on his lights in time to see a line of cars up ahead and slammed on his brakes, skidding through a patch of oil and nearly smashing into the rear end of a Harley Davidson. When the biker turned around to give him the finger, Cain saw Jazz again, her face staring at him from the reflection in the biker’s helmet. The half moon he’d carved in her cheek with his switchblade glittered bright red.

  “Hallucination,” he muttered. “Hypnopompic. Visual. Auditory. Gustatory. Olfactory. Tactile. Stress. Sleep deprivation. Projection.”

  In the dim interior lights, his fingertips seemed to end in claws. Reddish fur bristled on the backs of his arms. He pulled the Crossfire into the oncoming lane, gunning it through the intersection with Lockheardt Street. The scent of burned rubber ripped through the night air.

  He spotted Jazz twice more before he made it to the asylum. Once standing on a bridge overlooking Chien Jaune River, the mists and smog swirling up to her waist, a beatific smile on her face, a halo of blood around her head illuminated by the moonlight. And once staring out at him through the plate glass window of a sawdust-floored bar called Smith’s Roadhouse, sipping from an open thermos, letting the liquid pour down her throat like she’d opened a vein. That time, after he’d driven past, he heard her whispering in his ear. “Cain,” she said. “It’s time, Cain.”

  When he jerked his head around, there was nothing there.

  He tried to calm himself, tried to slow his hammering heart. He slipped a Debussy album into his CD player, keyed up “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” Hypnotic music. But it was distant background noise. His mind drifted back to twenty-two years earlier and Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk This Way” blasting out of 5-D’s speakers. He smelled blood and hot asphalt. He couldn’t help but floor the accelerator.

  When he reached Holingbroke’s parking lot, he squealed into a parking space, then forced himself to hold still for a moment. The skin under his arms itched and he remembered when he’d imagined he had wings. He could hear the buzzing of mosquitoes.

  The Holingbroke Psychological Institute had begun its life in 1884 as a huge, brooding gothic structure, the home of the eccentric brothers Harvey and Janus Holingbroke, who’d made a fortune in the West claiming bounties and striking gold. By the turn of the century, the brothers had headed back to California, leaving behind three adopted children—all of them psychologically disturbed—and a provision for caretakers. Over the years, that caretaking evolved into full psychological treatment facilities and a
broad base of patients. More modern wings had been added in the 1960s—they increased the number of patients the institute could treat and augmented the building’s ability to treat dangerous patients safely. But the jutting white and gray arms of the new wings with their reductive, modern lines were an eyesore in the old building, alien and disquieting.

  Cain forced himself to be still for thirty seconds, forced himself to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth. His face didn’t feel like his own, and he was terrified to check the mirror. Reaching into his medical bag, he cut his eyes around the parking lot, making sure it was empty. He debated between Haldol and Thorazine, between pills and injection. On the one hand, the last thing he needed was to be caught shooting up in the institute parking lot. On the other, he needed fast results, needed to make this psychotic incident stop. He rolled up his pants leg, then filled his syringe with a strong dose of Thorazine. Checking the parking lot once more for others, he carefully placed the syringe into a vein on the underside of his knee and drove the plunger home.

  The pain was good. Sharp and distracting. But it didn’t last long. He carefully disposed of the syringe and needle in his bag, took deep breaths, calculated the paths the drug would take through his circulatory system. He needed to get in to his office. He turned off the Debussy and raised his windows. When he looked through the driver’s window to make sure, once more, that there was no one in the parking lot to see him, he saw the monster in his reflection. His face was twisted and elongated, covered with dark scarlet fur. His irises gleamed red in the parking lot’s lights. Huge fangs jutted from his lower jaw. “No!” he shouted, closing his eyes, jamming his hands against his face to block his vision. But he could still feel the fur, bristling against his face and his palms.