by Rick Wayne
The shamans have played an essential role
in the defense of the community. They are
pre-eminently antidemonic champions;
they combat not only demons and disease,
but also the black magicians.
~
Every genuinely shamanic séance ends as a
spectacle unequaled in the world of daily
experience. The fire tricks, the exhibition of
magical feats, reveal another world—the
fabulous world of the gods and magicians,
the world in which everything seems possible.
-Mircea Eliade,
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
For my lifelong friend, Adrean,
the mathematical traveler.
FEAST OF SHADOWS is interactive.
This story includes a number of digital extras linked directly from this e-book. Readers can easily find the full collection online at:
RickWayne.com/bonus-features
You can start with the soundtrack to this book.
[Just click here]
Contents
Title
Dedication
Interactive
Le Menu
(Hors d'oeuvre) Agony in Violet
(La Soupe) Curse of the Red Dagger
(Amuse-bouche) Upon a yellow-stained tablet the words
(L'Entrée) To the White of the Bone
Continue the Adventure
Explore THE MINUS FACTION
Credits
(Hors d'oeuvre) Agony in Violet
Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
No one called it murder. I suppose that’s what I remember most. They all went out of their way to avoid words that could’ve implied prior humanity, like “dead” or “body.” The incident report, which stuttered out of an archaic fax machine just after 3:00 on a Friday, referred simply to “suspicious foreign remains.” There was an outburst of impatient shuffling in the office as the machine woke everyone from their dreams of going home early. I remember it waited three piercing rings before answering the line, then hummed to itself warmly for a further few minutes before it was finally prepared to print. For all that work, a single sheet slipped from the tray to the carpet. And no one moved.
“Isn’t that important?” I asked.
One of my colleagues shrugged. After a slight pause, I got up and walked over.
The fax machine, separate from the department switchboard, was attached to a dedicated landline whose cord hung free from the tall ceiling—like a hard line to God. Someone had told me my first week that it was a federally mandated redundancy in case of terrorist attack or natural disaster, which I thought was ironic considering that’s what the internet was meant to be.
Tucker Davis, a fellow federal appointee, beat me to the paper. He sported a sweater vest and a coiffed head of blond hair. He read the alert as he sipped his coffee. Then he handed it to me. I saw the letters EAP printed in bold at the top.
“Why don’t you take it?” he suggested. “You can use it to get Dr. Waxman off that conference call.”
He raised his mug to a pale office near the back on whose door I knocked a moment later. When there was no response, I cracked it open and slapped the Emergency Action Procedure, face up, against the inside surface with my palm.
Ollie didn’t miss a beat. “Looks like we just got an EAP. I’ll have to catch you all later.” He hung up before anyone could object. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s some unidentified inverse correlation between what people have to say and how long they take to say it. Have you noticed that?”
He grabbed the paper from me and scowled at it while donning his coat with one hand. “Suspicious foreign remains,” he read.
“Problem with your meeting?” I asked.
“Huh? Oh. No. The usual. But something occurred to me the other day.” He handed the EAP back to me. “The more important the message, the shorter it is. Fire!” he blurted. Several heads turned. “See? But if someone has something very unimportant to say, they can’t just out with it.”
“Who’s driving?” I asked as we walked together to the stairs and down to the hall to the parking garage.
“You are. Wait, where’re we going?”
“Uh . . .“ I scanned the paper. “Flushing?”
“Shit. Never mind. I’ll drive. I’ll drop you at the station after.”
“Ditching school on a Friday?”
“Har, har. Naw, I gotta pick up my kid. She’s getting into nature shows. Did I mention that?”
“You mean like David Attenborough?”
“All of it. Him, old Discovery Channel stuff, you name it. She streams them on her tablet. She watched this one the other day. All these baboons—it was in Ethiopia, I think—they were scooting on their asses across this field picking grass with their fingers. Hundreds of them, all spread out, chattering to each other while they ate.”
“Chattering?”
“Yeah, like . . . Eh eh eh eh.” The noise resounded off the concrete-block walls of the stairwell. “On and on like that. Eh eh eh. Nonstop. So my daughter asks me ‘What are they talking about?’ And I say I don’t think they’re talking about anything, monkeys don’t have language. And she says ‘No, Dad. They’re talking. You can hear them.’ And what can I say? From a distance, it really does sound like a crowd of people. I doubt a blind man could’ve spot the difference.”
I pushed through the doors to the garage and held them open.
“My car’s on two,” he said.
“So what did you tell her?”
He waved me off. “You know kids. I just said ‘that’s nice, sweetheart’ or something like that. But I’m thinking, how far removed are we from baboons? They chatter to each other, but they don’t really say anything. It’s gotta be an instinct, right? This is us.” He pointed to a maroon sedan and produced his keys.
“So why do they do it?”
“The man on the TV said it was to make each other feel good,” he said inside the car. “You know, reassurance, bonding—or anger, in the case of a squabble. And it occurs to me that’s what my kid did when she was a baby. She’d lay in her crib and make sounds like she was asking her stuffed animals a question or telling them an interesting anecdote, but it was all just gibberish.”
“My step-dad had a dog like that,” I said. “When I was a kid. If people were around, she wouldn’t shut up. Not barking. It was like she was trying to tell you something.”
“Maybe she was.” He started the engine. “If you think about it, what’s the meaning of most of what we say? Like with my daughter. I said ‘that’s nice sweetheart.’ What did my response mean, as far as the actual words? I wasn’t agreeing. I wasn’t disagreeing. I didn’t say her comment was interesting or express a contrary thought. I said it was ‘nice,’ which means nothing, and then I called her a pet name, which is basically just me expressing a feeling of closeness. She didn’t get anything more from it than you did from that dog. Words were entirely unnecessary. I could’ve grunted sounds that had the same meaning. Shit, half the time, that’s exactly what I do with my wife. Speaking of, how are things with yours?”
“Nice segue.”
“Don’t make word
-noises. I want the truth.”
“Are you and me keepin’ it real now, Ollie?”
“I didn’t say that. I just want you to feel like you can talk to me.”
“Oh, I see.” I nodded sagely. “This is our obligatory weekly mentor-mentee chat. Smart. Get it out of the way now and you can avoid buying me lunch next week. Also justifies leaving early.”
“Fine. I’ll owe you a frickin’ sandwich.”
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing’s changed, Oll. If I hear differently, I’ll let you know.”
“Well . . . how long’s it gonna take?”
I laughed. “Ain’t up to me, man.”
“You’re gonna be home in a few weeks. What then?”
I shook my head. “Dunno.” I turned to him a moment later. “But a job’d be nice.”
He just snorted, like that wasn’t up to him either.
Signs for Flushing appeared and he asked where we had to get off. I brought up a map on my phone and directed him under a train trellis and through a couple turns.
“Should be on the left here.” I pointed. “I think. Shit.” All the signs were in Chinese—even the municipal warnings taped to the blue wood barrier around a nest of construction.
We showed our credentials at a police barricade and were directed onto a one-way side street.
“Dang . . .” I whispered.
The entire block was packed with eyes. They stared unblinking from the shop signs that poked over door frames and from under windows, one in front of the other, like electric gawkers jockeying for a better view of the crime scene. Printed on each, next to the same pair of Chinese characters, was a single monochrome eye.
Ollie saw the look on my face. “First time out here?”
I nodded.
“It’s some kinda traditional medicine,” he explained. “Oculists, or so I was told.”
He said it like it was a rare species of beetle.
We opened our doors at the same time. It was just going dusk then, and several of the signs clicked on.
“Oculists,” I repeated, looking at the eye over my head.
The shop it was attached to didn’t look much different than a nail salon. It was dark. The CLOSED sign had been hastily hung and dangled precariously sideways. The whole street was like that—deserted. Other than the police, there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Whole neighborhood’s like this,” he said with a hint of relish. “This is kind of a city center. Acupuncture guys are around the corner. Two blocks over are the herbalists. Fuckers have more illegal shark fin than you can imagine. Stacks and stacks of it. All sizes, shriveled and dried. Don’t even bother to hide it. So much, you’d think there wasn’t a shark left in the ocean.”
“If it’s illegal, why don’t we shut them down?”
“If you figure that out, let me know.”
The autumn breeze took his comb-over and I watched him press it flat. I scanned the third- and fourth-story windows around us for any hint of the residents, but all the curtains and shades were drawn, which meant the people on that street were all experienced non-witnesses. Our colleagues in law enforcement milled like cattle in a pen of yellow caution tape. A small but resolute band of smokers, ostracized by the others, huddled on the far side. I saw several lightweight jackets emblazoned with the letters ICE. Everyone else was in plain clothes.
An NYPD detective nodded to us as we approached and excused himself from the conversation. “You the guys from Health and Hygiene?” he called.
“What, we don’t look like cops?” Ollie joked, tugging primly at his overcoat.
He stepped ahead of me and shook the man’s hand. Then I did the same. The cop introduced himself as Detective Rigdon. He was about like you’d expect. Mid 50s. African American. A little short. Loose suit. Prominent belly. Seemed decent enough.
He motioned to the front door of an Asian grocer’s. “It’s this way.”
“What is?” I asked.
“You don’t know?” He seemed genuinely surprised.
I held up the EAP, which I had folded in my pocket.
He shook his head. “Jesus. It’s not all that. Someone important’s probably trying to keep it quiet—as long as they can anyway.”
I turned to the roadblock we had just passed. I hadn’t noticed, but there weren’t any reporters. Given the scale of the slow-motion operation unfolding around us, I guessed that wouldn’t last long.
“No obvious signs of violence,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t say for sure if they were trapped down there or not.”
“Trapped?”
Detective Rigdon held the door.
The market was a kind of co-op. The central hall was flanked on both sides by pairs of open-front stores. On the left, a butcher and a greengrocer. On the right, a fishmonger and general store. The air smelled faintly of fire, as if the building had burned in the recent past. Roast ducks hung by the neck in a glass case. A few accordion lanterns were strung from the hallway ceiling, as if left from a recent festival. They seemed out of place.
“All the way to the back.” Rigdon pointed.
A pair of men in white hazmat suits and blue latex gloves emerged from a dark doorway carrying white plastic tool cases. They nodded at our host, who seemed to be the officer in charge.
“ICE got here first,” he said. “They claim both the front door and the door to the stairs were wide open when they arrived.”
“Like someone got spooked and ran?” Ollie asked.
Rigdon shrugged. “Maybe.”
I stopped at a stack of open-topped crates and lifted a kind of hairy fruit I didn’t recognize. Yellow handwritten placards had been stuck into all the crates, presumably advertising the contents and cost, but I couldn’t read any of them. They even used Chinese numerals.
“You say that like you don’t believe them,” I said.
He shrugged again. “Nothing here contradicts their story.”
“Which is?”
“While executing a lawful search in the early hours of the afternoon, they discovered the hole downstairs and called us. Not much else to say. We were about to wrap up when dispatch said something about you guys requesting everyone to be on the lookout for this kind of thing.”
Ollie flashed me a smirk. He leaned in as soon as Rigdon was out of earshot. “So this is all your doing,” he joked.
A cluster of open-topped aquariums bubbled noisily at the back of the linoleum-floored hall. Each held a handful of unusually striped fish who swam as if numbed. Through the door at the back, a wood-plank staircase fell steeply down to the basement. Rigdon stopped at the threshold.
“What is it?” I asked, nodding to the stairs.
“Besides creepy as hell,” Ollie added.
“Storage, it looks like. To be honest, we’re not even sure who owns the place. The shopkeepers keep pointing to each other and shouting in Chinese. You guys aren’t the only ones late to the party.”
He nodded to the produce section, where a uniformed officer had detained the elderly grocer and his wife, both of whom looked terrified.
“We’ve been waiting three hours for an interpreter.”
“Fifty bucks says they speak English just fine,” Ollie mocked in his “Oh, did I say that out loud” voice.
Detective Rigdon flashed him a knowing look but didn’t take the bait.
“You first,” Ollie told me, motioning to the stairs.
“You’re not coming?”
“I trust your evaluation. Good experience for you.”
“You’ll need this.” Rigdon handed me a tubular LED flashlight, barely bigger than a pair of AA batteries. Then he waved a big hand to one of the techs, who walked over and handed me a medical mask and gloves.
“Our thing isn’t contagious,” I said.
“And if it’s not your thing?”
I dropped my shoulder bag by the door. I put the mask over my beard and pulled on the gloves as I walked down the dark steps. It smelled like my grandmother’s farmhouse baseme
nt. The single bare bulb suspended over the landing wasn’t enough to light the steep staircase, let alone the cramped room at the bottom. I clicked the button on the flashlight and ran the beam over cardboard boxes stacked like pillars in the dark. Green Chinese lettering. Perishables, it looked like. We’d have to catalog it all. I thought that sounded like a good job for someone who wouldn’t be lead on the case, if it turned into one. Tucker, maybe.
I reached the uneven brick wall at the back in five steps. Rigdon must have been listening, because just then he called down.
“On your right!”
I swung the light and found a jagged hole chiseled in the concrete floor. It looked like the gasping mouth of someone just about to drop under the surface and drown. Four uneven slats, studded with screw heads, had been affixed—apparently by a madman—to the wall below, making a simple if uneven ladder. I shined the light to the bottom and saw another concrete floor, rough and stained with age. It could’ve easily predated the upper floors of the building. Since the mask covered my teeth, I stuck the flashlight in my armpit before getting down on my hands and climbing in.
The room was a good thirty feet long. Near the ladder, it was just tall enough for me to stand, but the floor sloped upward gradually, as if to make sure everything at the back tumbled forward. A coal bin, maybe. The beam from my flashlight caught bits of dust hanging in the air like the particulates you see in deep-sea footage. My every movement stirred them into eddies. I smelled sawdust and sweat under the stench of days-old diarrhea, which tickled the back of my throat like pepper. I coughed once and my eyes watered.
As my irises adjusted to the dark, I caught the symbol spray-painted on the far wall. It commanded attention, like a crucifix over an altar. But it wasn’t a crucifix. It was a kind of uneven circle with a shape inside, sort of like a tilted ax with an ankh for a handle. The paint glowed a faint yellow-green. On the floor below were five motionless figures: two women, a man, and what looked like a pair of kids—all Asian, aged 12 to 60, roughly. Easy enough to peg as undocumented. Their teeth were bad, they were malnourished, and they each wore an odd mix of castoff clothing. That at least explained the secrecy. I guessed someone in the mayor’s office wanted a chance to craft the message before the media did. A crop of dead illegals might even make national coverage.