Sins of the Flash

by David Niall Wilson

  Chapters

  SINS OF THE FLASH

  Acknowledgments:

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SINS OF THE FLASH

  by David Niall Wilson

  Copyright 2010 David Niall Wilson

  &

  Macabre Ink Digital Publications

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your preferred distribution outlet and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  Acknowledgments:

  The author would like to acknowledge, as always, the support of the love of his life, Patricia Lee Macomber, and their children Stephanie, Billy, Zach, Zane, and Katie, for support and inspiration. This novel would not have been possible without details provided by the Photographers Mates on board the USS Bainbridge in the late 1990s. The cover Art for this novel is provided by the talented team of Harry O. and Christine Morris. Harry has been incredibly patient with me as publisher after publisher died without bringing this book to life.

  PROLOGUE

  Tommy Doyle leaned into the worn vinyl of the booth and sighed. Across from him, his partner, “Big Mac” Markum was sipping a cup of coffee and staring out at the street. Tommy stared glumly at the dingy windows. The afternoon sunlight shattered against bird droppings and streaked grease-paint advertisements for “specials” and lowered visibility to almost nothing. It suited Tommy fine, he wanted to be alone, and to think. If he couldn’t have both, he could count on Mac to let him think.

  He glanced out the window. Across the street, a family of four pulled up to the curb, left their battered station wagon behind, bravely locked against the world, and walked down the sidewalk in a group. Downtown in late afternoon was an amalgam of suited businessmen, prostitutes, drunks, and everyday people with errands that had drawn them from their quiet, safe neighborhoods and brightly lit homes into the bowels of the city.

  The family moved quickly and efficiently. The father glanced over his shoulder ever few steps, covering their rear. Tommy would have smiled if it hadn’t been so sad. Families shouldn’t have to walk the streets like they were a military formation. Parents shouldn’t have to study every new face and every new situation and weigh the possibility they were on a collision course with some psycho.

  The family stopped in front of a dingy window. Above the window a sign proclaimed, very simply, “Photography.” There were black and white and color portraits in the window, and some other objects, but Tommy couldn’t make them out through the grimy window and across the street. All he saw was the sign, and the family disappearing into that darkened doorway.

  He thought about photographs. There wasn’t anyone in his life he wanted a picture of badly enough to snap the button down, and those that he already possessed were images he needed to forget. His father. His mother. His cousin. All gone. All dead. He wondered briefly if the guy at the photo studio would give him a discount if he went in and explained that he wanted a family photo, threw his arms wide, and proclaimed “this is it.”

  Tommy turned his gaze to the interior of the diner and left the street to Mac, who hadn’t moved or spoken.

  Two tables away, an old guy sat and read the newspaper. Across the top it read San Valencez Chronicle in bold, gothic type. Beneath that were a slightly smaller headline and a series of photos. Tommy didn’t need to read the headline, he’d memorized it. He didn’t need to see the photographs, either. They hung in the gallery he called a mind, winking and whispering at him constantly.

  Tommy sipped his coffee and stared into the cup. The swirling froth erased the diner for a moment. Tommy saw the photographs, one after the other, falling like dead leaves onto the blotter of his desk. Dead children, each with horrible deformities. The huge basement complex beneath The Colossus Food Mart stretching endlessly into a putrid, shadowed pit. Philip Barnett’s face, gleaming with sweat, and his voice rose in that unholy, hellish freaking chant.

  Something brushed his arm. Tommy snapped back to the present. The old man from two tables over had risen and stood too close to Tommy’s table. He gripped his newspaper like a club in trembling, liver-spotted hands. Eyes gleaming, he jabbed the paper at Tommy, who had to fight not to smack it aside, or back away.

  “It’s you,” the old man said. “Damned if it isn’t you, just like in the paper.” He shook the offending object accusingly and jabbed it at Tommy again. “Just like in here. You’re that cop. The ‘Psychos-r-Us‘ guy.”

  Tommy didn’t speak. He clutched his coffee more tightly.

  Mac’s voice rumbled low. “Move on, friend” he said softly. Soft for Mac was like the roar of a distant train rattling windows and shaking dime store china off the walls of brownstone apartments. Tommy heard the china crashing in his mind, and thought of bones. He saw tiny skeletons, bundled in rags. The coffee swirled in his gut, a pool of acidic bile. In defiance, or self-defense, he raised his cup and drank.

  The old man backed up half a step in deference to Mac, but then he held his ground and brandished his paper again. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you hit that reporter? He never hurt you. He never hurt them kids, ‘neither. Just doin’ his job.”

  Mac rose and turned toward the man.

  “I said move it along, buddy. Don’t make me ask you again.”

  The old guy glared first at Mac, then at Tommy again, then turned and shuffled toward the door. As he went, he talked to himself, loudly enough to be heard.

  “Psychos-r-Us. That’s right. Just might BE right.”

  The door closed, slowly at first on a cushion of air, then finishing with a snap. Mac laid a couple of bills on the table, and the two of them rose. Mac started to say something, thought better of it, and held his peace.

  The walls of the diner were lined with ranks of photos chronicling San Valencez’s past. Streetcars, trains, ships, actors and sports stars glared and stared and peered down from hundreds of identical black wooden frames. Tommy tried not to picture those other photographs in a line over the counter. He tried not to see the expression on the diner’s owner’s face if he presented them as a gift, along with the framed proclamation that “Psychos are everywhere. Never forget.”

  A splash of color beside the door caught his eye. It was a Beer poster with a pretty young woman smiling out at him. She clutched a condensation damp bottle of beer in her hand. The caption read, “Drink Surf Beer, brewed and bottled locally.” In a bubble over the girl’s head it said “Feeling down? Surf’s up!”

  “Swell,” Tommy muttered. He pushed through the rickety door and onto the street. The family was just exiting the photo shop across the street. Now that their mission was complete, they were all as furtive and hurried as the father had been on his way in. They huddled close together, and it seemed only seconds from the time they left that shadowed doorway and slammed the doors of their car. A thin figure stood framed, just for a moment, in the doorway of the shop, watching them depart.

  Tommy and Mac climbed into the unmarked car at the curb and pulled into traffic. The city swallowed them whole.

/>   PART ONE

  “What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.”

  –Pablo Picasso

  ONE

  It was hot, it was late, and Christian was very near the snapping point. He needed to be out of the studio and into the dark room. He smiled at the young girl seated on the stool before him. He held up a stuffed bear and shook it at her invitingly. He watched as her tiny eyes followed it, first in suspicion, then in glee. Her smile widened, her teeth flashed white and brilliant, and he pushed the button and snapped off two quick shots in succession. Without a pause, he moved the bear downward, then to the right.

  Each time the bear stopped moving, the camera flashed. The girl paid little or no attention to either Christian, or to the camera. The bear was her focus, and Christian breathed an inward sigh of relief. He had no patience for recalcitrant brats who didn't want their picture taken. He had no patience, in fact, for much of anything. Christian snapped the last of the pictures on the roll, barely managing to maintain his thin smile. He turned to the heavy-set, crooning woman in the corner, already slipping forward to scoop up her child.

  The little girl's gaze was still locked on the teddy bear, and seeing this Christian grinned viciously. He twisted the bear’s head violently, tearing the cloth and sending a small puff of stuffing into the air, then gave it a quick, deliberate flip through the air. It landed in a box atop a dozen or so other juvenile distractions, the head sliding off to one side and disappearing into the shadowed depths of the box.

  The child, whose mother had her back turned and let out a wail. The mother turned first to her daughter, and then to Christian, but by the time she met his gaze he was smiling serenely. He gave her a little shrug, as if to say, “Who knows what kids are thinking?”

  She returned the smile, and Christian beckoned her to follow him into his small office. His entire business would have fit nicely into a normal-sized mobile home, and he was painfully aware of the shabbiness of the building, and the austere, almost monkish decor. It was all he could do to keep his ears from reddening in shame as he watched the woman, who appeared to have about one functioning brain cell to her name, glancing at his drab walls in disapproval.

  He slipped behind the counter, reached for the ledger he kept below the cash register, and turned back to the woman. She stood there, a vacant smile on her face, the little girl now placidly draped across her left shoulder, supported by one flabby, meaty arm, and it was all Christian could do to repress a shudder.

  "She's a little angel, don't you think, Mr. Greve?" She said, as though the only thought that could possibly be passing through his mind was to agree. "Got her momma's looks, don't you think?"

  Christian nodded, still feebly attempting to maintain his smile. What he was thinking was that, if there were truly a God in heaven, that he would never give a cute, innocent girl a curse like this woman's looks.

  Aloud he said, "Pretty as a picture, Mrs. Blake. You'll want copies for the whole family, I imagine? The special this week is two big, glossy 8 X 10 portraits, four 5 X 7's, and sixteen wallets."

  The practiced speech rolled forth in one long, monotonous stream. It wasn't the weekly special; it was the only special. It was a ridiculously low price, but it was all he could get them to pay. That was the fact. It was just cheap enough to entice customers into his studio, and just steep enough to keep him from being evicted or starving

  The woman nodded and made clucking sounds at the little girl, who was now playing with her mother’s hair in fascination and drooling on the woman’s blouse. Christian averted his eyes from this grotesque spectacle as the proper papers and releases were signed.

  As he worked over the forms, adding the prices and putting check marks into the appropriate blanks, the woman wandered over to the far wall, her eyes wide and curious. Lining that wall were bookshelves, the only real furniture in the room other than the battered file cabinet and his cluttered desk. On one shelf a row of tiny porcelain masks was displayed. Some were clowns, others women or children. Each was painted exquisitely, makeup and expression rendered in minute detail. Each was a perfect rendition of a captured emotion, a stolen sample of someone's face.

  "Where did you get these, Mr. Greve?" she asked, not really wanting to know, but drawn to them anyway. He was used to it.

  "I've collected them, off and on, here and there," he said, hurrying his fingers at their task. His fingers trembled, and he clutched the pen tightly as she grew nearer to his treasures, swaying to quiet her brat and endangering his work. What if she touched them? What if the child spit?

  He felt the hard lump in his pocket, centered on it, suppressing the sudden panic and intense anger seething just below the surface of his pained smile.

  "They look hand painted." The woman commented, reaching out as if she might actually touch one.

  Christian bit his lip. The paperwork was done, and his obligation for conversation was complete. He smiled as patiently as he could manage, cleared his throat to turn her attention back to the business and hand, and gestured at the forms on the counter. She signed them quickly, not reading to check and see that they said what he'd claimed they would. No one ever read the forms, and more than once Christian had considered adding a check box that would bequeath him their immortal soul, just to prove the point.

  When the forms were signed, she turned back to the shelves. After staring for what seemed an unbearably long time, she gave a little shrug and turned to the door.

  "Wave goodbye to the nice man, Chastity," she instructed, her voice caked with saccharine.

  The little girl, Chastity, turned and gave Christian a long, hard look. She did not wave, nor did she smile. She stared. She saw more than her moron mother ever would, and he returned her gaze, putting every bit of intensity and bile into his expression that he could muster. She turned away and hid her face in her mother’s hair.

  You'd better hide you little shit, Christian was thinking as the door opened, then closed behind them. If Mommy weren’t here, I'd have gotten some damned good shots.

  Christian hated children. He'd hated being one, he'd hated growing up with them, and he found them, if anything, even more distasteful now that he’d escaped into the world of adults. As a boy, he’d never had friends, and children seemed to sense this, reaching out at every opportunity to push his buttons. Behind their innocent, ignorant smiles, they laughed at him; they always had.

  He moved about the studio, straightening up and closing out the cash register, locking the door and each window carefully and methodically. What was his was his, and he was not going to make a mistake that would change that. No matter what he was doing, he never forgot that there were eyes watching, minds working. Someone always wanted what you had, no matter how worthless it might be. That was the way of the world.

  It was true of his lunch money on the school playground, years before, and it was true now. Only the size of the bullies and the depth of their anger had changed. It had grown.

  Christian took particular care with the small masks and carved faces on his shelves. They looked hand-painted because they were. He'd worked hard on each of them. There was something of himself in every expression, every tint and hue. The masks were reflections of his passion – the perfection of image. Again, the warm, malleable lump in his pocket pressed into his flesh, reaching out to him. Christian shivered.

  Photography was the ultimate realization of his talent. His dream was to transfer his vision through his camera, to achieve the perfection of image that flashed through his mind when he came across a suitable model indelibly onto film. The models were the problem. He saw the images in his mind. He could transfer those images to the faces of the models and blend his talent with their beauty, but only in his mind. Their physical form was beyond his control. They sensed his attempts at manipulation, and they fought
the changes. It was their selfishness – their failure to recognize his genius for what it was, that had cost him a career in fine art. Christian knew they laughed at him too. His hell was populated with models and children.

  Christian locked up the front, sealed his office, and worked his way back through the studio. He performed a mental check-off as he went, sealing each window, each door, putting away anything and everything he found that was not exactly where it belonged. When he was satisfied, he slipped through the final door in the rear and energized the first zone of the alarm system. The back room of the studio was where his real work took place; it was his darkroom.

  In the darkroom no bulbs shone down on him like searching spotlights; no eyes pried into his secrets, and no fingers pointed at him in mockery or accusation. In the darkroom he was king. He could close the door, settle into the small space with its reek of chemicals and its gloomy solitude, and release his genius. The images formed in his mind with deeper clarity in the dark, and it was in that room that his vision was most pure.

  Christian had never fooled himself. What he did for a living was snap photographs, plain and simple. Any fool, he knew, could be taught to point a camera, get the lighting and focus right and come out of the mess with serviceable photographs. This was not art, but a mechanical trade, a pastime.

  He hated the limitation of it; he believed that he should be “creating” the images, not just recording them. Each bit of background, each tilt of the head and shift in the subtle shades of the lighting brought out dynamics in his models, emotions and effects that were unattainable without his expert fingers at the controls. Even in the mundane, everyday grind he'd fallen into, he tried to put a bit of this into his work, though it went largely unappreciated. It was all that kept him sane.

  These simple portraits, little girls, drooling babies, moronic families with shit-eating grins that were genetically imprinted on their entire brood, even these were art when he finished with them. He sifted the day's negatives through the chemicals, hung them to dry, and watched carefully as each color and line appeared on the photo-paper like magic, his own magic, filling print after print with his wasted talent.