by Zachary Adam
manufacture, but then, what wasn’t, these days? He paused at the doorframe of the room he was presuming to be the bathroom by the glimpse of linoleum beyond it, brought the weapon up into his customary single-handed grip, and with his now-free left hand, pushed the door the rest of the way open. He lead into the room with the pistol, eyes watering as soon as he hit the cloud of invisible ammonia that had built up inside it.
Or at least, that’s what he would have assumed, were he not almost used to the psychological impact of the truly horrific. He ducked out of the room as quickly as he had entered it. No need to discharge his firearm, for his brain told him well enough there was nothing to follow him. Still, that didn’t stop him from backing back down the hallway with his weapon, now in more orthodox twohanded grip, trained on the door he had just slammed.
Later, in the cool and calm of his air-conditioned and very well-sanitized office, Vidcund would be able to rationalize and explain what he had seen. For now, the shapeless, black mass in the bathtub was all the excuse he needed to slip his Bluetooth headset back onto his ear as he picked through the other rooms, periodically peering over his shoulder or blindly gesturing his still-drawn handgun at the door which happened to be in the most direct line to the bathroom.
“Call Central,” he murmured, the Bluetooth amplifying it for his phone’s speech processor to pick up. Both civilian inventions – Agency often saw no reason to reinvent the wheel.
--
Misdirection; a magician’s trick so old that even the most naive of non-magicians knew it existed and how to do it. We do it all the time, when we ask about the price of cigarettes while the cashier is ringing through our condoms, when we pick up the phone so that our boss doesn’t notice us hurriedly closing browser tabs.
Misdirection could even be used to divert the entire machinery of a city police department, if you waved a big enough handkerchief.
Agency cleaning crews worked in pairs – one group arriving on the scene to relieve the agent who’d called them, and the other racing off to cause whatever distracting non-crisis was the order of the day. Think about that, the next time you hear of a bomb threat with no actual bomb involved in it, or a bank getting robbed by robbers with pepper-guns or rubber bullets. It happens, and it happens more often than you think.
However, such misdirection did not work on the truly dogged. While the headstrong were rare in police departments, at least highly-enough placed to be a problem for the Agency, they did, on occasion, occur. Sometimes, when the stars were right, a new actor could wander onto the stage and steal the show.
Such a man could be found in Niles Clayton. He had a list of accolades as long as his arms (not an inconsiderable distance, being as he was a tall man), and a list of official condemnations to match. With overall meritocratic seniority over all other Detective officers of the National Police Force in the precinct, he was free to ignore calls of a mystery package on the State University campus. If it was going to be a problem, it was something for another department, and he wasn’t about to let an all-hands crowd control call stop him from doing what he felt was his actual job.
The hand that wasn’t holding the paper cup of cheap black-tar coffee fished a cast-iron Cheater Key from his pocket. They were a common enough tool, in the hands of most police officers and postal workers, and supported by a variety of electro-lock manufacturers. It was a good way to enjoy secure buildings without having to give up basic rights like police protection and mail delivery.
He passed the blonde man in the tiny “lobby” – a small ten foot cube with mail delivery, a waste-paper basket, and access to the stairwells. The guy was dressed too well for the area – (International Standard Business Attire, to use the technical term), not in terms of the level of formality, but tailored suits and Augmented Reality sunglasses didn’t come cheap, and this half-gentrified rathole wasn’t in that income bracket.
The two men exchanged nods and no more. Being overdressed wasn’t a crime. Guy could have had a brother in the projects he was visiting. Could have financed his wardrobe with drug money. Either way, Niles had bigger fish to fry.
He sipped at the cup of asphalt he was carrying to avoid conversation and carried on. Traffic had been hell. The extra cigarillo in transit, the pall of which still hung around him like a poorly-chosen cologne, left a taste in his mouth so bitter that half-burnt coffee was nearly sweet by comparison. It killed him, but he needed it. Needed his vices, to keep from becoming a being of pure labour.
He reached the Professor’s door, police condemnation and tampering-seal tape still securely in place on the door. Niles checked it carefully, all around its edges and circumference, to make sure it was secure. It took a good shove on the door to pull the cellophane taught and snap it.
Satisfied he was the first person to be here since the Sheriff’s Deputies who had removed the body, he nodded and stepped inside. The smell was overwhelming. Ammonia stood out. More than just urine – that was a smell somewhat more nuanced, somewhat more complex.
Decay didn’t bother him. He picked his way across the litter of take-away boxes, milk-gone-kefir, and coffeestained finals projects. A thorough examination of the house was likely unnecessary. Initial findings at the subject’s autopsy attributed his death to a
cardiopulmonary embolism. A more thorough survey was being conducted – at Niles’ insistence – but the overall consensus at the depot was that Johnson had dropped dead of more or less natural causes.
Worse for the prospect of anything interesting going on here, Johnson’s embolism had been pneumatic. An air bubble in the blood. Could happen to absolutely anyone, and while it seemed simple to just introduce a bit of air via injection to stage a murder, in practice, that was a much harder technique to execute fatally than the movies would have you think.
Why, then, was this bathroom, of all rooms in this house, perfectly immaculate? It was impossible to believe that someone could live in such squalor without that impacting the one room of the house it should have hit the hardest.
--Isolation tanks, already rising in popularity among the latest wave of hippies and new-age devotees, were a common feature of Agency installations. Nowhere was this truism the truer than at the H. R. Abject Institute for the Criminally Insane. The installation, dug five stories in beneath the institute of the same name, was a major hub of Agency activity, housing a number of Special Research Programs such as Project MOSES II and Project RAINBOW BRIDGE.
Vidcund Därk considered Abject Centre to be the closest thing he had to a permanent home. He went through identities and addresses like most people go through business cards, after all, and kept most of his actual possessions – to the extent that he had any – in an apartment at the installation equipped with just such a device. The large, heavy tank – this model specially reinforced – recycled filtered and treated water silently inside a soundproof, ventilated pod.
It was a favourite hiding-place for Vidcund. He could lounge in the water for hours at a time, allowing the extreme sensory deprivation in the soundless, lightless, conditioned space to stimulate senses otherwise deep and buried inside him.
In such a state, he could perform prodigious mental feats of calculation and inference. He became, as his fellow members of the apparently re-born Project Moses, a living computer, in essence, processing data far faster (and far more adeptly) than thought previously possible.
There was a hiss of air as the pressure between his room and the tank suddenly equalized, and he returned from his trance with the bewilderment of someone sharply awakened, as the lid suddenly slid open.
“Something for you upstairs. Get dressed.”
--Niles had never seen anything like it. He brooded at the periphery of the crime scene, taking in the vast scope of its grotesqueness.
Ritual murder and suicide, in this part of the world, was nothing new. Everyone remembered the previous event distinctly, and as the next one came three, four, ten years down the road, the old was pushed out of mind. It wasn’t co
mmonplace, but police officers were trained in how to handle and cope with the extreme ferocity with which zealots could inflict violence on themselves and others.
Such violence was why Gloria Creena had been locked up in the first place. Seventeen years ago, she had inspired a group of followers to such a height in an attack on a middle school that had left fifteen children and two teachers dead. It was, to date, one of the deadliest acts of domestic terror since the revolutionary war. Creena was the only prisoner ever taken by the anti-terrorist Police Support Group of the Zaxtonian Ground Self-Defence Forces. She claimed to be thirty seven at the time.
The trial that followed was a long and protracted battle. State prosecutors pushed for life in prison without parole
– the nation’s then-strongest penalty for such crimes. Defence attorneys hired an expensive psychiatrist named Dyson Grey who had diagnosed Creena with a series of increasingly-dire dissociative conditions, until it became questionable whether Creena was even aware of being awake. A conviction was a sure thing, but thanks to Grey, rather than being kept in a prison and rotting for the rest of her life, Creena had enjoyed the comparatively cushy environment here at Abject.
Studying her expression as she lay in a pool of her own blood on the floor of her cell, Niles wondered if she’d aged even a day since being confined here. He remembered a rumour that began to circulate shortly after the trial that her lawyers had not hired Grey – rather, they had been approached by him.
While a proper medical examination would have to confirm or refute his suspicions, Niles was beginning to doubt a suicide – which the whole room pointed to. The victim had lacerations on her hands consistent with selfinflicted wounds – such wounds could happen on purpose, but were common injuries when defending yourself from a knife as well. The chaotic smear patterns on the floor were suggestive of careful planning on the part of the victim – focusing on that title helped him to remember that no case should be thought of as openand-shut, however reviled the victim was in life – though the bloody glyphs could have been laid in after the fact.
“Inspector, someone new for your team, here.” Niles turned aside from his morbid contemplations, and transferred his coffee to his left hand to shake the hand that was offered. The new guy, introduced by a constable that had walked him to the scene from the entrance, was looking at the body – but his expression would have given Niles’ composure a run for its money. “Niles Clayton, you are?”
“Donny Mallard,” The blonde man offered a slight smile and finally got around to removing his sunglasses. “I’ve been brought in as your criminal anthropologist.”
“What the hell is a criminal anthropologist?”
Donny gestured to the bloody mess in the cell. “An expert in the sort of thing you’re dealing with today.”
02 – Answers
Poor Guy, Niles thought. Ifmy parents were that stupid, I’d change my name at 18. Strictly speaking, Niles’ present project wasn’t legal, but it was a matter so routine that even the zealots at Internal Affairs didn’t usually kick up a stink about it, unless whatever illegal thing you were otherwise involved in merited having the book thrown at you.
The National Police Force worked heavily with Agency Division, since Agency’s expertise at espionage and surveillance was not, strictly speaking, supposed to be turned inward. The NPF tacitly went after the internal threats the Agency identified, trusting its own discretion in that regard, and taking quite a big chunk out of their resources in the process. One such resource, perhaps the most important, was the Registry of Significant and Semisignificant Subjects - an inter-agency database search-able about a hundred and twenty seven ways, full of anyone and everyone that Agency considered important enough to have even glanced at.
A name like Donny Mallard – being a hideously obvious play on Donald Duck – was just asking to be searched in the database. Niles wasn’t shocked to get a hit, since Aliases were included in the list of search terms, but he was surprised to find someone with that legal name.
He had a printout of the record in front of him, complete with a QR code that was supposed to include facial recognition data. It was reasonably complete. Graduated from University Kraterburg. PhD from University Tererra. Post-Doctorate Research Fellowship in... King’s College of Galba Roy?
Odd. Agency didn’t usually hire employees from foreign institutes.
--“So, you’re telling me that this sort of behavior isn’t unusual.”
Dr. Mallard took a sip of his milkshake before replying. “It’s not unusual in the context.”
Niles had been made to drag along Dr. Mallard all the way back to his favourite diner and usual thinking-place – a greasy spoon joint named LeStapps. The coffee was rank, the burgers were charcoal-coated grease, and the milkshakes – which Donny seemed to prefer – had the thickness and texture of unset cement. It was, in a word, perfect.
He was somewhat pleased to find the academic uncomfortable in such a setting. “You’re telling me that ritualistic suicide only after painting the walls with your own blood is contextually normal.”
Donny looked at the waitress, who was glaring at them behind the counter. “Please keep your voice down. If this case isn’t under a publication ban, it will be soon.”
Niles shrugged. “All I’m saying, Detective, is that it’s not unusual behaviour for highly-radicalized members of the cult to which Ms. Creena nominally belongs. It’s fallen out of vogue, certainly, but so has her cult.”
“Agency Division numbers suggest there’s probably about a hundred more of them out there, somewhere,” Niles muttered.
“It used to be a major subset of the Tererran Ethnic Religion. Which I would have thought you’d known, being Tererran yourself.”
The detective gave a defensive shrug, sipping his coffee as he glanced aside. Overly defensive, from his guest's point of view. “I grew up in Kraterburg and the 20th century. What exactly are we looking at here, then? Another rash of suicides?”
“I don’t want to sensationalize it. If the details get out, certainly, it could be a mass suicide. Then again, if it only leaks in part…”
“Terror attacks. Like ‘98.”
“Very likely. Either way, we need to solve this. Soon.“
Niles frowned. There was something familiar about his new technical specialist, and frankly he didn’t like it.
--Kraterburg, etymologically speaking, was the City in the Volcano. Historically, this was actually true – it, or rather, the Old City, was constructed on the only solid rock for miles among the lowland fens which surrounded it, using the natural crater walls of a mostly-dormant caldera for their protection.
Nowadays, very little of the old city infrastructure, except the access tunnels (the Jupiter Gate having been widened into a three-lane thoroughfare serving government workers, mostly, and the Mars Gate, which remained a ceremonial passage for certain events) remained. The same war that had created the Union had flattened much of her ancient capital, leaving most of the structures no more heritage than the turn of the 20th century would allow, with one exception – the campus of the College of Judges.
Sparing the longer and more tedious political science discussions, the College served as the three major branches of governance in the Union – the Executive Council, the so-called Jury of Peers (which functioned as a Legislative rather than Judicial Body), and the actual Judiciary itself. It was also the location of the
headquarters of the entirety of Agency Division.
Agency had taken as its own the warren of tunnels – both natural cavern-systems of the volcano and the
excavations of the previous governments – that honeycombed the area beneath the campus, beneath even the sewers. The complex network was so extensive that there were sections of it entirely unmapped – agency simply walled off the area they were using, expanding only as necessary.
The ability to be headquartered on the very sites where you were undertaking Preventative Archaeology exercises had been a source of powe
r, all dangers aside. Many and perverse were the ancient secrets uncovered here. Like the off-gassing of rotting life at the base of a lake, the influences of such knowledge bubbled up into the Old City, where sensitive and inquisitive minds could catch fleeting glimpses of knowledge better left forgotten. With them, the knowledge had spread like blight. Spores lodged in the fur, so to speak.
Agency was there to contain this, and other poisons. Nobody, yet, had the truth of the origins of the Cult of the Eye, but it was known that their bleak magic was drawn from many of the same long-abandoned sources.
Beneath the Zaxtonian Union, it was beyond dispute that something lay dreaming. Nobody was quite sure what. However, Agency was not the only authority on such matters, though they certainly considered themselves the only legitimate one. Niles had bid his (probably-) Agency handler goodbye in Kraterburg the day before, overnighted on one of the slower (and cheaper) passenger trains, and was now “slumming it” in a rental in one of the poorer sections of the new city, outside the confines of the caldera.
He pulled the car around behind an old warehouse. It was occupied and leased by a small-time automotive repair concern, surrounded by a few blocks worth of junkyard. The company was so old and had such a poor reputation that people simultaneously dismissed concerns of how it could possibly still be operating, while being unable to claim having ever hired the place.
The company itself was a front, having changed hands about a dozen times before it was finally acquired by the current owners, who used the warehouse and its extensive basements for their own private functions. Niles had never before been allowed below the ground floor, where he met – often in one of a dozen storage rooms – with his contact.