Deeper into Darkness

by James, Russell

  Hobbs slipped his bayonet from its scabbard and fixed it on his rifle. He stepped off the porch.

  Geary turned to the right. His perspiring palm slipped against the pistol’s slick butt. His heart pounded hard in his chest. Their little excursion wasn’t fun and games anymore. It would take someone big, or several someones, to drag off an armed man and kill three horses.

  He crept around the side of the house, listening. Dry grass crushed beneath his feet. Beads of cold sweat rolled down the sides of his face. He turned the corner at the house’s rear. The back yard stood empty and silent. Weeds studded the earth of an abandoned garden. By now, Hobbs should have…

  “Hobbs!”

  Geary ran to the far corner of the house. He turned it. Hobbs’ rifle lay on the ground.

  “Goddamn it.” Panic set in. He spun in a circle, terrified that something was about to sweep him off the face of the earth like his two fellow soldiers.

  A door slammed behind him. He whirled in time to see the man door to the distant barn shudder on its hinges. No breeze blew that door shut.

  Terror cast all caution to the wind. He ran across the fallow garden to the barn door and yanked it open. The stale air carried the scent of long-dried dung. Rows of vacant stalls stretched out in front of him, doors wide open. To the left rose steps that led up to a full loft. Boards creaked up above in the loft.

  “Dobrey! Hobbs!”

  Boards creaked again, followed by a scuttling noise.

  Geary ascended the stairs with wary steps, quaking pistol pointed straight ahead. Halfway up, the musty smell of the stalls dissipated, replaced by a sharp smell like pickled beets. Skylights lit the loft better than the barn, and each step up was a step out of darkness.

  At the top of the stairs, the smell of vinegar, and now alcohol, was near overpowering. Coffin-sized glass enclosures butted up against the loft walls. Liquid filled each like an oversized aquarium. A long, dark shape floated within each box. Geary approached one. Two steps away, he paused. The dark form within the pickling solution was a human being.

  He tucked his pistol in his waistband and sidled over to the glass enclosure. He held his nose against the rising fumes’ assault and looked down into the still liquid.

  A nude male slave lay in permanent slumber, though Geary doubted he rested easy. His arms were at his side, but his hands were not. At the end of each arm, the hand had been amputated, and the man’s foot sewn in its place. His hands were reattached to his ankles. The thick, black string that sutured the switched parts into place still encircled the limbs.

  Geary moved to the next of the score of tanks in the loft. A young female slave had a man’s penis and scrotum transplanted between her legs. The desiccated results did not speak well of this operation’s success. Geary shuddered to think the opposite experiment no doubt floated elsewhere.

  Geary was afraid to move forward, to see what the next tank held, but the temptation was too great. He stepped up and looked down.

  Inside laid a man, or at least two halves of one. A right and left portion of two similarly sized men were sewn together, the thick, jagged sutures starting between the legs and running up over the missing genitalia. The conjoined chest split into a wide V that had mismatched arms on either side, and two heads, the necks sewn together at the central base. The two faces were frozen in looks of wide-eyed, abject agony.

  Bile rose fast and hard in Geary’s throat. These were just coloreds, but still, even animals deserved better than this.

  The floor creaked at the loft’s far end. Geary whipped out his pistol. Something moved, low and in the shadows.

  “Hobbs?” he said. The name came out all wavering and nasal with his fingers still pinching his nose shut.

  A dark form crawled under a table at the far end. Geary trained his pistol in that direction and advanced one slow step at a time.

  The creature shot out into the light. Geary froze and dropped his pistol in fright. The creature was a human slave, or had started out that way. It crawled on all fours, but its limbs were splayed out to the side, in a way no man could ever move, like a spider. Its head looked straight forward, its neck curved in a permanent J-shape. Madness shone in its eyes. It opened its mouth and croaked out an unintelligible, angry gurgle.

  Strong hands grabbed Geary’s arms from behind. A tart-smelling rag clamped over his mouth and nose. His head swooned and he passed out.

  ♦♦♦

  Geary came to on a table in the loft. It was tilted up, so he was nearly at a standing position, arms, legs and waist bound with thick leather straps. The room swam into focus and a stout man in a blood-stained leather smock stood in front of him. His long, thinning gray hair was swept straight back from a receding hairline. The clear skin of his round face glowed, like a porcelain doll. Geary’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the man’s eyes; one green, one blue.

  The Devil’s eyes. Doc Piercy.

  “What the hell—”

  Doc Piercy hushed Geary with a finger to the soldier’s lips. The Doc’s skin was soft, supple, like a woman’s.

  “So many questions,” Doc said, “and so little time.”

  His voice was high, and he almost sang the words with his Southern lilt. Geary’s skin crawled.

  “Now, you’ve seen some of my handiwork, my creations. As a sculptor must start with the finest of stone, so my art must start with the Lord’s finest design, the human form. I’ve had learned along the way, seen failure and near success. On display you saw Lawrence/Laura, not my best work, and Hans Footman.” Doc suppressed a girlish giggle with a hand to his mouth. “A little joke. Get it, Hans…Footman? Anyway, Hans was almost a success. Lasted three days.”

  The spider creature scurried forward to Doc’s feet like an obedient hound dog.

  “And you’ve met Arachnius. Oh, the time this one took, breaking and resetting bones to get things just right. If I’d had to use anesthetic each time, who knows how long it would have taken.”

  Two slaves entered the loft. Black, curved scars marred the skin on both slaves’ left temples. They rolled two wheeled tables down the loft to Geary’s feet. Dobrey and Hobbs lay bound tight to the tables. The raw cotton gags jammed into their mouths muffled their panicked screams. Dobrey’s gurney went a bit sideways and smacked a table full of operating instruments. Dobrey’s head jerked up higher and he screeched through the cotton. Doc winced.

  “My apologies. My brain incisions make my boys more docile, but motor skills take a small loss in the process.”

  “You can’t kill us,” Geary said. “We’re Federal soldiers. They’ll come a-looking for us.”

  “Riding stolen horses? Stealing a man’s silverware? You’re hardly soldiers. And this far from the main body? No one knows where you are, and I’ll wager no one cares. Men of your caliber have probably already been written off as deserters.”

  Doc’s doeskin fingertips caressed the bridge of Geary’s nose. A shiver raced up Geary’s spine.

  “And you don’t need to worry about me killing you three. That’s the last thing on my mind. You’ll be my ultimate creations. You see, I know the root cause of my failures.”

  Doc tapped the tip of Geary’s nose with a scalpel and smiled.

  “I was using inferior genetic material. I need to use white men.”

  ♦♦♦

  1970

  Students packed Professor Driscoll’s darkened lecture hall. On the screen beside the podium, a 35 mm slide projector displayed a picture of an enormous, rough-hewn stone carving of a prone man.

  “So on the list of famous hoaxes we covered today, this Cardiff Giant is arguably the most famous. But we need not look all the way to England for a great hoax. We have one that occurred just one county over from our campus. Its hundredth anniversary inspired this special lecture.”

  The projector clicked and thunked. The Cardiff Giant disappeared and a picture of Sugar Hill Plantation took its place. The oil painting showed the plantation at its antebellum peak.

  �
��Sugar Hill Plantation wasn’t much different from most Georgia plantations in the 1860s. Records show nothing unusual about it. But after the war, rumors began to circulate about the owner, Doctor Rutherford Piercy, who supposedly did human vivisection experiments during the Civil War. Never mind that this was at a time when medical knowledge could barely handle an amputation without blood loss or infection killing the patient.”

  The slide changed to a black and white picture of Sugar Hill, gutted and burned.

  “The plantation burned to the ground in 1870 with Dr. Piercy inside. It was no coincidence that one week later, purported photographic evidence of the doctor’s alleged work surfaced. It’s believed that a neighboring landowner wanted to drive the price of the ‘cursed’ land down so he could make a cheap purchase.

  “The story was that a photographer happened through about 1867 on the way west and took a picture of the doctor’s supposed work. Now for multiple reasons, like the long exposures of the period, the sharpness of the picture, the complete implausibility, we know this is a laughable fake. But it was a sensation at the time.”

  Click. Click. Thunk.

  The new black and white picture was of the Sugar Hill corral. Inside it stood three mules, or most of three mules. In place of a neck and head, each mule bore the torso, arms and head of a white man. Two were shirtless, one wore the faded rags of a Union soldier’s shirt. The picture was crisp enough to detail the lobotomy scars on the temples of each of the pseudo-centaurs.

  The class roared with laughter.

  I heard the unsubstantiated tale of a haunted house in New Orleans where vivisection experiments on slaves supposedly occurred. The wheels started turning. As you can read, no good came of it. So was born a story that deserved and received no sympathetic characters.

  Ω

  Wages of Sin

  Holy Thursday was the wrong day for this confrontation. It was almost 4:00 pm. Frank Murphy only had an hour before meeting his family for the Vigil Mass tonight. But he didn’t have a choice. For weeks, he’d worried about the accounting irregularities he’d found. He couldn’t take it anymore. Mr. DiAngelo had to be told.

  Frank sat in a hard plastic chair outside the door to his boss’s office, an unmarked manila folder in his lap. Sunrise Charities didn’t splurge on furniture, or office amenities, or staff for that matter. The office was tucked into a rundown strip mall on Miami’s Tamiani Trail. That frugality was one reason Frank had sought the job here, even though it was a pay cut from his position at Wachovia. Sunrise Charities’ money went to help the homeless, feed the hungry, cure the sick. Frank wanted to be part of that, to use his CPA to make a difference in something other than a shareholder’s report. All the more reason the potential fraud he’d uncovered had to be exposed.

  Frank massaged the Knights of Columbus ring on his right hand, a nervous habit he’d been trying to break. The hour hand hit twelve on the big wall clock. 4:00. Showtime.

  Frank stood and straightened his tie. The rest of the office was empty, getting an early start to the Easter holiday. Just as well. The fewer people that overheard the allegations, the better. He hoped Mr. DiAngelo would explain them all. He knocked on the boss’s door and entered.

  Mr. DiAngelo sat at his desk, a well-worn wooden model that looked like a cast off classroom teacher’s desk. Haphazard piles of papers and books lay on dented filing cabinets. The sole narrow window had a fine view of an adjacent brick wall. A high backed chair faced the desk’s front. White fuzz blossomed from the split across the leather seat.

  Mr. DiAngelo’s clothing was as unpretentious as his surroundings. Unless the boss was pitching a donor, he never wore a suit. Today, he wore a long sleeve denim shirt over a pair of far more faded jeans. As usual, his shirt’s top button was buttoned, a quirk Frank always thought had to be uncomfortable. Mr. DiAngelo’s trademark thick black sandals stuck out near the front of the desk. He looked about thirty, with olive skin. His black hair was parted on the right with razor sharpness and slicked back. He looked up at Frank with a smile.

  “Right on time,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “A punctual accountant. It should go without saying. Have a seat.”

  Frank nodded and took the seat in front of the desk. He placed the manila envelope in his lap. “Thanks for making time for me, Mr. DiAngelo.”

  “I usually work late on this day each year,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “But even if I didn’t, I’d make time for you, Frank. In the six months you’ve been here, you’ve made an impact. Our balance sheet finally balances and the flow of cash to the needy has really accelerated.”

  “Well, it’s that flow I wanted to talk about,” Frank began. “I’ve found a few irregularities…”

  The smile on Mr. DiAngelo’s face froze in place. “What do you mean?”

  Frank fiddled with the envelope. He reassured himself that Mr. DiAngelo didn’t have anything to do with the envelope’s contents. He couldn’t know all about the day-to-day operations, especially in the complicated financials.

  “Well,” Frank said. “I was hired to get the cash flowing more expeditiously, so I’ve been tracking every dollar we spend.” He pulled out a copy of a ledger page with two rows highlighted. He slowly pushed it onto Mr. DiAngelo’s desk like it might trip a booby trap. “The two entries I’ve highlighted are listed as purchases of cleaning supplies.”

  Mr. DiAngelo peered at the page. “The downtown shelter needs a lot of cleaning.”

  “But those debits are for $9,500 each, three weeks apart,” Frank said. “Nobody uses that much Mr. Clean. And that amount is also just under the government reporting limit. That made me suspicious.”

  Frank took a deep breath and pulled out a copy of the backs of two cancelled checks. He nudged it over to Mr. DiAngelo.

  “This is a copy of the endorsements of the two checks,” he said. “Receiving made them out to Woodrow Industrial Supplies. But if you look at the stamps and account numbers on the back, the bank where they were cashed is in New York City.”

  “Woodrow could do all their national banking in New York.”

  “But Woodrow isn’t national and the bank account number isn’t either,” Frank said. “It’s international. These checks were cashed by Al Tharwa Aska, an organization in Lebanon.”

  “I believe that’s a humanitarian organization,” Mr. DiAngelo said. Any trace of a smile had long since disappeared.

  “But its finances are shadowy,” Frank said. “A friend of mine with overseas experience says that the government is keeping an eye on it for possible terrorist connections.”

  Mr. DiAngelo put down the paper. “Thanks for telling me about this, Frank. I’ll sit down with the Mary Connelly in Receiving on Monday and get to the bottom of this.”

  Frank was surprised that Mr. DiAngelo took the news so well. He didn’t ask any follow up questions. Maybe he didn’t understand the implications for his organization, and for his personal standing.

  “I wish that were all,” Frank said. He dropped a half dozen more ledger pages on the desk. “I looked for other suspicious transactions over the past year. There are dozens of them, all for amounts just under $10,000. I tracked a number of them to two non-profits in North America.”

  Mr. DiAngelo had no reaction to the news. Frank sighed. His boss still didn’t get it.

  “So I looked into the organizations,” Frank continued. “They all have overlapping ties, either financial or managerial. One is recorded as being founded in 1850 in Boston to aid Irish immigrants, the other in 1882 to support missionary work in the Southwest. Since both of those causes have long ago disappeared, I’m afraid the organizations are scams.”

  “So you think someone is stealing?” Mr. DiAngelo said.

  “No, I know they are,” Frank said. “Someone, or more likely a few people, are siphoning off funds from our company to front organizations. It may just be theft, but the money could also be financing drug running, weapons or terrorism. If Sunrise gets caught up in that, your reputation will be ruined, even if you kne
w nothing about it.”

  Mr. DiAngelo stood up behind his desk. He gathered Frank’s papers and folded them in half. He went to the slit window and stared out at the bricks.

  “These are serious accusations,” he said. “Your paper trail backs them up?”

  “Completely.”

  “And as a CPA you are bound to report these irregularities to your employer, which you have done,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “You would also be bound to report them to the police if we took no action, correct?”

  “No, no,” Frank said. “Well, yes I would have to, but that won’t be necessary. I’ll help you find out who’s behind this and we’ll put an end to it. We won’t have to get the government involved.”

  Mr. DiAngelo turned and looked at Frank’s right hand. “I see you are a Knight of Columbus. They do many good works in the name of Christ. What was your most recent project?”

  Frank paused at this bizarre change of conversational direction.

  “We sponsored a Christmas toy drive,” Frank answered with apprehension.

  “You understand the rewards of doing good,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “That will help. I’ll explain a few things to you, Frank. In the end, you tell me what steps we need to take.”

  Frank leaned back in his chair, a bit afraid that Mr. DiAngelo might be more involved than he had assumed. His boss sat back down at his desk. He gave the papers in his hands another fold.

  “Tell me Frank, of the sins outlined in the Ten Commandments, which do you think is the worst?”

  Frank wondered where this was going. If it was some rationalization for breaking the law, it wasn’t going to wash.

  “Murder,” Frank said off the top of his head.

  “And the most severe punishment for that crime?” Mr. DiAngelo said.

  “Death.”

  “So one would think,” Mr. DiAngelo said. He unfolded the papers and laid out the one with the Lebanese transactions. “First let me assure you that Al Tharwa Aska has no terrorist ties. All their money goes to help Maronite Christians in Lebanon, a shrinking minority. I also assure you that I authorized that transfer, however backhanded it might have been.”