by Dan O'Brien
A moment of clarity seemed to cross Davis’ face. “He isn’t going to stab me.” Then turning to the homeless man, he posed the question with a wide grin. “You aren’t going to stab me, are you?”
The homeless man continued to glare at Ken as he shook his head slowly. It was not exactly a vote of confidence.
Davis, unperturbed by the possible danger, raised his voice and addressed the entire street populated by inebriated and glittering youth. “Hey! This homeless gentleman here is harmless. He isn’t going to be stabbing anyone. Anybody wanna do some blow? Come one, come all! Enjoy the bright lights of…”
Ken reached down and grabbed his friend’s arm, giving it a hard squeeze. “Stay here and don’t wander off. I’m going across the street. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Davis nodded and waved his friend away.
Without another look, he turned back to the homeless man and returned to his idle chatter. Ken hesitated a moment longer before crossing the street and walking through the brightly lit doors of the pizza parlor.
LAUREN COULD NOT RECALL her apartment in Oak Park with great detail; it seemed like it was a million miles away and decades ago. Spending time in hotels had become a home of sorts. She waved at Detective Lawrence inside his cruiser as he sped away from the trendy hotel.
Crossing the hotel’s courtyard, Lauren walked around a small, deserted swimming pool––not unusual given the time of night and the chill in the air––then passed some tables just beyond the swimming pool’s iron fence. Bundled in fashionable sweaters and wool caps, the couples sipped wine. They tipped their glasses and offered salutations as she walked by. Not wishing to be rude, Lauren smiled politely, then ascended the stairs to the second floor and entered her small sanctuary for the night.
Locking out the world, she reached into her jacket and retrieved the book. It felt odd. The texture felt coarser than paper. Lauren could not place it, but the book smelled different as well. Throwing it onto the bed, she surveyed the room: a single desk sat opposite a bed and nightstand. Lights from the street shone through the darkness of the bathroom at the back. Walking around the bed, she pulled a beaded string and the lamp on the nightstand fluttered to life.
“When was the last time I ate?” she grumbled to herself.
She opened the nightstand drawer and removed a glossy pamphlet with local sights, then lifted the phonebook free. She liked using phonebooks. She supposed that a smart phone could do the work much quicker, but it lacked the scavenger hunt feel that leafing through white, then yellow, pages created.
She decided on Chinese food, and twenty-three minutes later there was a knock on the door.
Taking a box of chow mein and a pair of chopsticks out of the takeout bag, she looked at the book. She had not yet opened it, uncertain whether that would be a good idea.
Part of her felt like she had been careless in Locke.
She had almost given up the most important thing: control.
Looking at the strange book and the depression it made in the covers of the bed, she could almost hear the whispers of obsession once more. As she dug into her chow mein, she paced the small room, mentally sorting the details of 865 Union Street and the circumstances that had brought her from suburban Illinois to the cold forest of Minnesota and finally to San Francisco. She had always been fortunate to be able to connect disparate pieces of information into a web that made sense––that afforded her some level of control.
Placing the chow mein on top of the nightstand, she approached the bed the way she would a rattlesnake. Instinct told her that there was something in this book that was dangerous.
Opening the front cover, she held her breath.
Scrawling script, each in a different hand, covered the pages of the journal. Some passages were written in English, while others looked like Latin and Greek. However, there was one piece of legible handwriting that she did recognize––and for the life of her, she could not imagine why he would have written in this book.
WHEN KEN RETURNED to the street corner, Davis was gone. It did not come as much of a surprise given his friend’s intoxicated state. Rounding the block, he noticed a trail of trash and torn parcels of newspaper leading away from the spot where he had left his friend. The homeless man was nowhere in sight and Ken had a pretty good idea where Davis had gone: back to the motel.
They had stayed in the Tenderloin at a rundown motel to create the illusion of a vacation. If he were being truthful, he could not remember the last time he had taken a vacation. NeuroTech had been working them day and night for the past eight months in preparation for the launch of a massive, new program, whose details were only known to the top executives.
Sighing and grabbing a piece of pizza from the box he carried, Ken munched absently as he crossed the street and started up the next block toward a bed and some relative quiet––unless, of course, Davis had skipped straight to the throwing-up portion of the night.
Most of the stores were still illuminated from the inside.
Ken looked inside at the patrons wearing wrinkly jeans, odd-looking boots, and the worst throwback coats and sweaters one could imagine. As he turned his gaze back toward the sidewalk, his eye caught the reflection of a woman standing under a streetlamp across the street. Beautiful with long legs, accented by a tight shimmering dress, she seemed to be looking right at Ken. He looked around, wondering who might be standing near him. Perhaps she was looking for someone in the establishment behind him?
After doing a series of jerky turns, he finally settled on the obvious: she was looking at him. Ken was no slouch with the ladies; in fact, he was known as quite the Casanova around the office.
However, this woman was beautiful.
Beautiful the way rare art or a pristine sculpture in MOMA is beautiful, and he could not fathom why a woman who looked like that would be walking alone.
He pointed at himself and mouthed a few unintelligible words.
She smiled and wrung her hands nervously. Waving ever so slightly with one hand, she shook her hair with the other.
Ken did not need more of an invitation than that. He looked both ways, then jogged across the street, all thoughts of Davis abandoned for lust.
As he got closer, he realized that his estimation of her beauty had not even scratched the surface. Her features were perfect. Captivated by her unblemished skin and her blue eyes, he struggled to find the right words.
“Pretty night,” he managed with a stupid grin.
She grabbed his hand gently; Ken allowed himself to be pulled down the street by her. He could not help but stare, mesmerized by something beyond her elegant beauty.
He felt enraptured, caught in the web of her being.
They rounded a far corner. Only her porcelain skin was visible in the light as he followed her through the streets and into an alley. His heart thundered in his chest, and he began to sweat in anticipation.
Ken stopped abruptly as the woman disappeared and the alley was plunged into darkness. “Hey, where’d you go?”
He heard shuffling farther up the alley, but could only make out a shadowy figure. As he craned his neck forward, something viscous struck him in the face. Reaching up with one of his hands, he wiped away the discharge and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, but could not figure out what it was.
Did she just expectorate on me?
“This isn’t funny….”
He blinked, feeling disoriented.
As he opened his eyes, he could feel hot, fetid, breath on his face. He thrust out his arms and felt something hard and unyielding in front of him. Horrified, he pushed away from it, stumbling backward.
Looking around, the world was still.
There was no movement of any kind.
“What’s going on here?” he mumbled.
His tongue felt heavy in his mouth.
Did she drug me?
Suddenly, there were four women right in front him, their faces contorted in irritation. The words from their mouths were labor
ed and bloated, like a record that had caught a groove and was lengthening out each syllable with a frightening syncopation.
He closed his eyes.
After a few moments, he opened them again, but the women were gone.
He staggered aimlessly as he looked around. Several cars were stopped in the streets; their drivers looked ahead with doll’s eyes. As he brushed up against a car, he felt a deep pain in his hip and side. He stumbled a few more steps, and then collapsed to the ground. He breathed heavily and fluttered his eyes, watching as the cars disappeared and the woman he had followed into the alley appeared across the street.
Her long legs were distorted by the darkness, giving them a bowed and carapace-like appearance. Her blue eyes looked like darkened globes. A street light illuminated the flawless skin on one of her hands as it rested against a wall; but as her arms became consumed by the darkness, they changed––morphed into something frightening.
Fear crawled down Ken’s spine.
Something was wrong.
Looking from side to side, the world became a series of jagged images without real motion. People stood in stasis, trapped mid-motion only to have changed position after he blinked.
He could not stop looking at the woman.
She moved across the street in a series of jagged, surreal, movements. Her features alternated between ethereal and nightmarish as she slipped in and out of the false lights of the city. She moved in a disjointed and frightening manner, as if she were walking on two legs and then many legs.
It couldn’t be real.
Crab-walking into the alley behind him, he could feel that his heart rate was slowing despite his fear. His head began to spin as numbness spread across his chest and into his left arm.
Am I having a heart attack?
Something bumped against his leg. As he turned to look at it, he saw an overturned garbage can; pieces of trash were scattered all about the alleyway, appearing in sudden clumps and piles.
Even though his vision had betrayed him, his hearing had not.
He could hear the heaviness of the woman’s breathing. He jerked his head around, then stared wide-eyed as he saw it.
Looking down on him was something terrifying, something drawn from nightmares.
III
Lauren had not slept well. The lingering thoughts of sleep clung to the edges of her mind, as the alarm in her room droned on. She looked at the desk across the room and grimaced at the open takeout containers and the small glass with a murky liquid on the bottom. The presence of familiar handwriting in the odd book had made a few fingers of the brown stuff a necessity. Beside the glass lay her cell phone, undisturbed. It did not surprise her. Very few people had that number and she was not particularly keen on letting just anyone have it. Although, there was one person she wished would call.
With a groan, she pushed herself from the bed and made it with as much enthusiasm as a teenager on the weekend. She then trudged to the small bathroom, hoping there would be a tub so she could have a relaxing soak, but her hopes were dashed when she saw there was only a tiled shower with opaque sliding doors.
After pulling her hair back into a tight ponytail, she undressed. She turned on the faucet and let the hot water run as she opened the window that overlooked the busy street below. Steam soon filled the room and Lauren resisted the childish urge to write things on the bathroom mirror.
Stepping beneath the warm water, she let the flight and her time spent in San Francisco thus far wash off her. This was not what she had envisioned when she thought about visiting California; she had imagined more jazz clubs and brunch by the ocean.
The room telephone blared over the drone of the water.
Lauren ignored it, content to imagine that it was the striking detective with an update or a new series of questions about her presence at the house on Union Street. The little piece of information that she had yet to share weighed on her mind.
The journal was an enigma.
Aside from the individual entries of hundreds of different scribes, the book contained references to things that Lauren was not yet certain she understood. There were disconcerting symbols and unintelligible diagrams of machines and phylacteries as well as a massive narrative written by a single author that catalogued a recipe or an incantation. She knew what happened on Union Street had something to do with this journal.
She turned off the faucet and toweled herself off slowly. Rubbing her face until she saw stars, she walked over to the nightstand and stared at the phone. A throbbing red light pulsed: apparently, a message waited. Picking up the receiver, she depressed the button and listened as Detective Lawrence’s voice, crisp and succinct, let her know that he would be coming by.
He wanted to discuss the case.
Lauren busied herself with getting dressed, donning a white blouse, black pants, and a beige vest. She pulled her dark coat around her shoulders and looked over at the journal on the desk. She could not risk losing it, not when she had yet to discover what it was about the collection of writings that mattered.
Stuffing it into one of the long pockets of her jacket, she surveyed the room one last time before shutting the door behind her. Clouds created a gray ceiling overhead and a brisk wind assailed her as she lowered her head and marched into the enclosed stairwell.
A few tourists sat at the outdoor tables, beginning their day with mimosas and little baskets of breads and muffins. Feeling a distinct grumble in her stomach, she made her way to the lobby. A table was laid out with fresh coffee and little bins of stacked pastries and breads. Squeezing between the other guests crowding around the table, Lauren grabbed a hefty muffin and took a satisfying bite. As she munched away without thought, a voice startled her.
“Good morning, Agent Westlake.”
Detective Lawrence stood behind her, though at a comfortable and unintimidating distance given his size. In the station he had loomed large, but in the small hotel lobby he appeared even wider in the shoulders. His smooth face and well-developed muscularity belied his age. If Lauren were forced to guess, she would have placed him in his mid-forties.
“Detective.”
Motioning outside, the detective smiled warmly. “If we can be on our way, I have something I would like to show you.”
Lauren looked at the complimentary breakfast spread and decided on a cup of coffee. She grabbed a quick cup and sipped it as she followed the detective out the door to his dark sedan.
Rounding the driver’s side, Lawrence got in without a word. Lauren opened the passenger door and slipped in, continuing to munch on the muffin. “So where are we going?” she asked as she grimaced at the flat taste of the coffee.
Lawrence was a serious driver. Despite his relaxed demeanor, his hands remained firmly on the steering wheel and he did not take his eyes off the road as he pulled out of the parking lot. “I made it a point to check out the local papers in northern Minnesota. Your case made a front-page story in several of the local publications.”
Lauren felt anxiety creep over her. Her stomach turned, banishing any thoughts she had of finishing her muffin. “Oh yeah?”
“It seems you have an interest in the weird.”
Lauren looked out the window. “You could say that.”
“What would you call it?”
She sighed, an irrational irritation building inside her. Something about Lawrence’s demeanor made her ill at ease. Perhaps it was his inquisitive manner, constantly digging and questioning. Lauren could relate, even if she did not like being on the receiving end.
“I like cases that are a bit off the beaten path.”
Lawrence smiled.
“I believe I might have something for you then, Agent Westlake.”
THE TENDERLOIN LOOKED very different during the day. Lawrence parked behind a beat-up early-90s Corolla. A crowd of people stood outside a perimeter of sawhorses with SFPD printed on them.
Lawrence turned off the engine and looked at the crime scene. “Homicide. One of the strangest I have
seen here in all my time with SFPD.”
“How can I help, detective?”
Lawrence sighed. “Your interest in odd cases and your presence at our unsolved case on Union Street presents an interesting opportunity for me.”
“How so?”
“I believe this homicide is connected to another murder.”
Lauren looked around the area. “From the looks of this place, I imagine your two deaths were drug related.”
“That’s not a bad guess.”
“I’m guessing you think it’s more than that.”
He nodded. “The other body was found in a different part of the city, but the circumstances and manner of death are quite similar.”
Lauren squinted as she looked farther down the block. Several gawkers were standing at the edge of an alley, taking pictures with their cell phones. “I’m still not certain how I can help, detective. San Francisco is not my city. I would imagine that my presence would muddy the process, not make it easier.”
“Federal involvement does come with a certain level of muddiness. But, I’m not looking for the Bureau’s help. I’m looking for your help.”
Lauren opened the passenger door and stepped out.
The air had grown steadily colder. The gray sky threatened rain. Looking at the crime scene, she wondered if this murder, or the other murder Lawrence mentioned, had anything to do with her being in San Francisco.
She knocked on the windshield as she spoke. “You coming?”
Lawrence exited the car as Lauren traversed the short distance to the perimeter of yellow tape and sawhorses. She flashed her badge. “Agent Westlake. I was invited here by Detective Lawrence,” she added, pointing at the approaching detective.
The uniformed officer looked confused. “Agent Westlake?”
Lauren cocked her head. “That’s what I said.”
Pushing back his cap and revealing curly brown hair, the man scratched his head. “Did they send two of you?”