The Clarity

by Keith Thomas

KOJO OMABOE: Are you feeling okay, right now? Do you think there might be anything affecting your ability to think clearly at the moment?

  MATILDA DEACON: Other than seeing someone I know—knew—very well have his throat cut right in front of my face?

  KOJO OMABOE: I understand. It’s a formality, Dr. Deacon.

  MATILDA DEACON: Sorry. I— It’s been a stressful day.

  KOJO OMABOE: You are a professor here, at the university. How long have you been teaching?

  MATILDA DEACON: In the psychology department, it’ll be six years. I did my graduate work here too, though.

  KOJO OMABOE: Outside of teaching, you do research? There’s a lab listed here in your file from HR.

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes, in conjunction with the medical school. Neurology. It’s basic research. Nothing clinical.

  KOJO OMABOE: But you do see patients? Says here you go to the Marcy-Lansing Apartments once a month.

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes.

  KOJO OMABOE: That’s how you came to meet Ashanique Walters?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes.

  KOJO OMABOE: When did you first meet her?

  MATILDA DEACON: Um, a day ago. I was at the apartments, seeing patients with Todd—

  KOJO OMABOE: Dr. Garcia-Araez?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes. We usually go together. We were wrapping up the day when I was approached by a woman, uh, Carol. Don’t know her last name. She asked me to look in on a girl she was sitting. She said the girl was sick.

  KOJO OMABOE: This was Ashanique?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes.

  KOJO OMABOE: And, in your determination, was she sick?

  (PAUSE)

  MATILDA DEACON: Possibly. We talked for only a little while. I found her to be a very smart, very convincing young woman. If she’s mentally ill, I’m not sure what the diagnosis would be. It’s too early to say.

  KOJO OMABOE: Do you think, uh, Carol had a good reason to ask you to see Ashanique?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes.

  KOJO OMABOE: You said she’s not obviously mentally ill.

  MATILDA DEACON: It’s a complicated situation. Diagnoses like these take time. I would have to run a number of tests. This isn’t like doing a swab and prescribing a pill. But, uh, but there’s something very special about the girl. . . .

  KOJO OMABOE: I understand. And you also met Janice, the mother, at this interview?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes.

  KOJO OMABOE: I was told that the girl’s babysitter, a, uh, Mrs. Carol Malone, said Janice was not happy that you were talking to her daughter. She kicked you out?

  MATILDA DEACON: She was furious.

  KOJO OMABOE: Why do you think that was?

  MATILDA DEACON: I’m not really sure. At the time—

  KOJO OMABOE: But looking back, knowing what you know from the incident this morning, why do you think Janice Walters was so upset that you were talking to her daughter?

  MATILDA DEACON: She was involved in something. I can see that now. Ashanique was wrapped up in it, not directly but . . . Janice was convinced that my talking to Ashanique had exposed her to some mortal danger. She was deeply paranoid.

  KOJO OMABOE: And that’s why you told the other officers that Janice asked you to delete all the files related to Ashanique from your computer?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes. I think so. She had a gun too.

  KOJO OMABOE: Can you tell me what your relationship with Dr. Clark Liptak was?

  MATILDA DEACON: He was a colleague—my boss, in certain aspects. He oversaw a lot of the research I’ve been doing.

  KOJO OMABOE: And you got along? You weren’t angry at him about anything?

  MATILDA DEACON: Not at all. . . .

  (PAUSE)

  KOJO OMABOE: I’m sorry. Do you need a tissue?

  MATILDA DEACON: No, I’m okay.

  KOJO OMABOE: And the man who killed him, have you seen this man before?

  MATILDA DEACON: No. Never.

  KOJO OMABOE: Thinking back, do you recall him saying anything to either Janice or Ashanique?

  MATILDA DEACON: Like I told the officers, he only said one thing. He said, “Where’s Fifty-One?”

  KOJO OMABOE: Does that mean anything to you?

  MATILDA DEACON: No.

  KOJO OMABOE: Do you think that this man had anything to do with Janice’s paranoid statements? That, perhaps, this man was part of the conspiracy she was convinced was out to get her and Ashanique? Why she wanted names deleted from the university files?

  MATILDA DEACON: I don’t know. It’s possible. But that’s your job, right? To find Janice, find the killer.

  KOJO OMABOE: Yes, of course. And I take it very seriously.

  MATILDA DEACON: Ashanique needs to be admitted to the hospital, okay? Her mother was giving her an experimental cancer drug. I have no idea why. But it— She needs to be evaluated by a physician. Kept under watch at the hospital.

  KOJO OMABOE: Social services is already involved. Some good, very caring people. Trained just for situations like these. We’re going to take good care of her, Doctor. If she needs medical attention, she’ll get it.

  MATILDA DEACON: She does. Trust me. When can I see her again? Can I come by this evening?

  KOJO OMABOE: Let’s talk about that later. I can see you and the girl have a bond. But after a thing like this—there is a lot to discuss.

  MATILDA DEACON: I understand. Just, uh, please let me know when I can visit.

  KOJO OMABOE: Will do. (Pause as Det. Omaboe writes something down.) Earlier, you said there is something special about Ashanique. Why do you feel that way?

  MATILDA DEACON: I . . . Well, I don’t know exactly. Like I said, she’s a complicated case but there’s something unusual in her demeanor, in her understanding of her own condition. That sounds like academic speak but . . . I’d very much like to talk to her again.

  KOJO OMABOE: I’m leaving you my business card. Feel free to call me anytime, okay? If something comes up. If you remember something you wanted to mention. Or you’re worried. There will be an officer doing regular patrols near your residence for the next forty—

  MATILDA DEACON: You don’t actually think—

  KOJO OMABOE: I want to take every precaution, okay?

  MATILDA DEACON: Okay. . . . Do you have— I don’t know how to ask this without sounding cheesy but—

  KOJO OMABOE: Leads? We’re following up on everything we have. There are a lot of cameras in the university. We’ll find this guy, okay? We’ll get him.

  MATILDA DEACON: There is one other thing.

  KOJO OMABOE: Okay.

  MATILDA DEACON: The man who killed Clark, he winked.

  KOJO OMABOE: Winked?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes.

  KOJO OMABOE: He winked at you?

  MATILDA DEACON: Yes. After he killed . . . Why? Why do you think he would have done that? I’ve never seen him.

  KOJO OMABOE: I don’t know, Dr. Deacon. I don’t know.

  27

  12:30 P.M.

  DECEMBER 12, 1761

  TROITSKE ESTATE

  MOSCOW, RUSSIAN EMPIRE

  SNOW FALLS ON the elm trees lining the entrance to the vast Troitske Estate.

  Smoke curls from the squat chimneys of the numerous thatched houses that border the estate. Despite the high humidity and numbing cold, peasants from the villages around Troitske are working their fields, their tools scratching at the cold soil to prepare it for spring. In a field, workhorses whinny. A dog’s bark pierces the brutal sky. Every living thing knows the coming winter will be harsh.

  There is movement along the road to the estate. A carriage, ornate in its decorative elements, speeds toward the massive main house. The driver is a narrow-shouldered man with a face beaten by scars. Inside the carriage: a single occupant. Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova is twenty-eight and resplendent in royal garb. She was widowed two years ago, when her husband, Gleb, died. Though he left her the wealthiest widow in the empire, she never really loved him. She was just a child when they were married, and she found
him, the nobleman, cold. He was always brusque with his advances. Never touching her, never kissing her, just forcing her legs apart and using her the way he used the village whores. He was nothing like Nicholas. Nicholas appreciated her. He read her poetry and tasted her sex.

  Before Nicholas she was a ghost, an empty woman haunting her own life, a shadow trailing behind her sons. Nicholas brought her to life. For the first time, she felt a passion for something—a hunger that only he satisfied. It was wicked and she knew it. When they were together, her flesh became frenzied. Her sex throbbed and burned. She needed to consume him entirely. To pull him so close that they would merge, melting into each other the way a steel bar vanishes into the smelter’s pot. . . .

  But Nicholas is gone. Gone five months now. Run off with the girl, the one with full lips that all the servants gossiped over. She was seventeen and her body was taut. Nicholas was supposed to die. The cunt was supposed to bleed at his feet before he was set alight. It didn’t happen. Her servants failed, and now Nicholas and his child bride were as far away as Saint Petersburg or Paris.

  When Darya had learned of his infidelity, she fell to the floor of her sitting room. Her eyes rolled into her skull and her mouth spat and her limbs writhed like serpents. Darya’s closest servant ran for the physician, who later diagnosed her with the “shaking disease.”

  It was born of ill humors, so he bled her. For two days and nights, she lay in bed with leeches growing like blackberries on her arms. Then came the honey and the vodka. Darya was sick, vomiting every few hours, for another two days. Though she recovered, she was not the same. The seizures had broken something inside her body. She thought of a large clock, its insides so complex and everything about it perfectly weighted and balanced. If just one gear were to shift, the whole thing would be off. A gear had shifted within Darya.

  Even now, five months later, Darya thinks of Nicholas and the lust returns. There is a heartbeat between her legs. As the carriage bumps along the road, jostling her, she feels the heartbeat quicken. She knows she’ll have to slake its thirst. And only blood can satisfy this fire. The Slavs have legends of blood drinkers. They call them upyrs and say these unclean souls roam the countryside, preying on people traveling alone or unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Darya does not believe in such fairy tales. Her need is not supernatural. For her, blood is power. Pain is pleasure.

  She scans the passing fields. Many peasant girls work the soil. Most of them are thick creatures made heavy by toil. But there is one young girl, with glossy red hair, leading a goat along the elm trees. She is singing. Darya tells the coachman to stop the carriage. Immediately. He obeys; he has done this many times before.

  Seeing Darya, the girl pulls the goat closer and stops her singing.

  Darya opens the carriage door and leans out.

  “Hello. Do you know who I am?”

  The girl, shy, hangs her head. The goat bleats.

  “Come now. Don’t be shy.”

  “You are the mistress,” the red-haired girl says, “from the estate.”

  Darya smiles. “I have need for a new servant girl. Someone to care for the animals. Do you love your goat? I have many that need caring for. You should come to the house with me. Over lunch we will discuss the animals. I love them dearly, but I have had so much trouble finding someone whose heart is as pure as yours. I need someone to sing to them and show them love. Does that sound like something you would enjoy?”

  The red-haired girl glances back over at the fields.

  “Yes,” she says, turning to Darya. “That sounds beautiful.”

  “Excellent. Tie your goat to a tree. I won’t keep you long. We will go and sup at my house and you can tell me of the songs you like to sing. I may be a widow, but I am not that much older than you. Most of my servants are hags. They don’t care about singing or animals. I long for a friend to share my passions.”

  The peasant girl ties her goat to the nearest elm tree and pats it on the head. She whispers something in its ear. The goat bleats before turning to the grass at its feet. With the scarred coachman’s assistance, the red-haired girl climbs into the carriage and sits down beside Darya. As the coach lurches into motion, the girl looks down at her filthy clothes. Darya notices and leans forward and pats the girl on her knee.

  “Don’t worry,” Darya says, “we’ll get you cleaned up. Tell me your name.”

  “Liliya,” the girl says.

  The ride to the house takes another twenty-seven minutes. During that time, Liliya sings the folk stories her mother taught her. Her voice is good; it’s high-pitched and ethereal and fills the interior of the carriage. The coachman weeps silently hearing the red-haired girl’s voice.

  At the house, the coachman stops the carriage and opens the door for Darya and her companion. A coterie of servants greets them at the stairs. Once inside, hot tea is poured and incense is burned. Darya knows Liliya has never seen such wealth. She stands in the enormous house’s foyer, staring up at walls that seem to rise into the very sky. Paintings hang in abundance. A thousand gold and silver candles burn in glistening chandeliers. An army of servants stands at the ready, their eyes cast at the red-haired girl’s feet.

  “I have a music room,” Darya tells the girl. “Do you want to see it?”

  Darya leads her down a long corridor, to a staircase that descends into the very earth. In the basement, torches burn and light dances on the arched ceiling. Darya shows the girl to a small room, and she steps inside with a smile that quickly disappears.

  The room is empty, with only a drain in the center of the floor. No music books. No instruments. Liliya turns around. There is confusion on her pretty face, but it soon gives way to fear. Darya knows what Liliya sees in her eyes.

  Cornered, Liliya screams and claws the wall behind her. Darya closes the door. She pulls a fire poker from a rack on the wall and strikes the girl, beating her until the skin of her palms tears and Liliya’s back is split open, her white spine gleaming.

  The murder is over in only a matter of seconds.

  Darya drops the fire poker to the floor and then, her arms and legs shaking with an orgasmic pulse, she opens the door to the room. Her servants are waiting. They come into the room with towels and buckets.

  Satiated, Darya walks slowly back upstairs to one of the palace’s showers. There, standing on the ornately tiled floor, she allows her servants to undress her. Then, stepping onto stools so they stand above her, the servants wring the bloody towels over Darya’s face and arms. She bathes in the coagulating blood. Moaning in ecstasy, soaking up the intense cocktail of chemicals bathing her brain.

  Darya closes her eyes.

  28

  10:23 A.M.

  NOVEMBER 14, 2018

  FOUNTAIN LAKE APARTMENTS

  VERNON HILLS, ILLINOIS

  WHEN DARYA’S EYES opened, they were Rade’s eyes.

  The same bottomless black, the same alien gaze.

  Rade splashed water on his face and leaned in close to the bathroom mirror, the only finished bathroom in the entire apartment complex, and stared through the protective plastic warping his image. He noticed that he had missed a hair, a tiny, fragile thing barely the length of an aphid’s antenna, on the left corner of his upper lip.

  Rade considered taking off his gloves and plucking it by hand but didn’t want to risk having the hair break off. That would be a pain, and he’d make a mess of his skin if he went digging for it later.

  Fuck.

  Goddamned body was always fighting back. Even as close as he was, even with his power at a monumental swell, he was being fucked with.

  As Rade walked back to the bedroom where Janice waited, he considered undressing her. He liked the way her shirt hugged her chest, the way her breasts ballooned up and over the top of her bra. When he was tying her up, he watched them wobble beneath the fabric of her shirt; globules like one would see floating effortlessly in a lava lamp. His body was desperate for the shimmering warmth that flooded his legs when he ejaculat
ed. When he released, the surge of endorphins and dopamine made the animal he’d beaten into submission cry with joy.

  He had to admit, he’d indulged his body before.

  Such decadence. Such deliciousness.

  Stepping into a bedroom, Rade found Janice exactly as he left her: strapped with zip ties to a straight-back chair. She had run from the pharmacy during their shootout. He tracked her easily, though, and caught her in a parking garage at the university. She’d tried to shoot him after he found her trying to hot-wire a Prius. But she was too slow, too emotional, and he got the gun from her and sucker punched her into unconsciousness. Twenty years of looking and it was as easy as that. Knocked out, Janice’s head hit the steering wheel. The horn blared before he dragged her out toward his rental car. It was sloppy work, nothing he was particularly proud of, but his body had been quite excited.

  It was a thrilling moment.

  The bedroom was on the second floor of an unfinished house. It stood on the edge of a brand-new development. Most of the houses were skeletal, their yards just rectangles of dry dirt. Tiny sprigs of trees had been planted in the yards. One day, Rade imagined, this might be a beautiful place. And the family who lived in the house would never know how much of Janice’s blood had soaked into its floors.

  Looking Janice over, Rade let his brain wander back through the fields of his memory. There were so many bodies there. He remembered fumbling in darkness on rain-soaked soil. His shape was hairier two hundred generations back, his limbs shorter and knotted with muscle. And his mind was a thing of simplicity, driven solely by the basest needs: to fill his gullet and fuck his balls empty. A few lives ago, as a young girl, he toyed with his genitals endlessly, could never scratch a desperate itch; her clitoris and labia were singed off by her grandmother in a strange ritual. Beyond that, the memories continued to tumble fast and loose. There were the mother and daughter whores in London who stank of spoiled milk. He drank up their scent as he sodomized them together. One with his cock, the other with a fat carrot the mother had delicately chiseled into the shape of a phallus. There was the young African man, who sucked on his cock with a violence he’d never before experienced. His previous self killed the man and wore his teeth around his neck. That blood, that power, it was Rade’s first true taste of destruction. The ensuing addiction coursed through Darya and the lives that followed. Over a dozen lives, he whipped writhing bodies, pissed into the mouth of a fat woman with inverted nipples, and drank the blood of a Scandinavian prince, waking up with clotted blood matted in his pubic hair.