Dressed in a maroon smoking jacket and green pajamas, moccasins on his feet, the silver-haired man with drooping mustache sipped his tea and now held forth on his situation. Hatch, in dry clothes the older man had given him, was willing to listen, almost certain Munro knew the way back to dry land.
"I'm in Drowned Town, but not of it. Do you understand?" he said.
Hatch nodded, and noticed what a relief it was to have the pressure of the sea off him.
Isaac Munro lowered his gaze and said, as if making a confession, "My wife Rotzy went under some years ago. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. She came down here, and on the day she left me, I determined I would find the means to follow her and rescue her from Drowned Town. My imagination, fired by the desire to simply hold her again, gave birth to all these many inventions that allow me to keep from getting my feet wet, so to speak." He chuckled, and then made a face as if he were admonishing himself.
Hatch smiled. "How long have you been looking for her?"
"Years," said Munro, placing his teacup on the table.
"I'm trying to get back. My wife Rose is coming for me in the car."
"Yes, your old neighbor Bob Gordon told me you might be looking for an out," said the older man. "I was on the prowl for you when we encountered that cutpurse Leviathan."
"You know Bob?"
"He does some legwork for me from time to time."
"I saw him at the grocery today."
"He has a bizarre fascination with that lobster tank. In any event, your wife won't make it through, I'm sorry to say. Not with a car."
"How can I get out?" asked Hatch. "I can't offer you a lot of money, but something else perhaps?"
"Perish the thought," said Munro. "I have an escape hatch back to the surface in case of emergencies. You're welcome to use it if you'll just observe some cautionary measures."
"Absolutely," said Hatch, and moved to the edge of his chair.
"I take it you'd like to leave immediately?"
Both men stood and Hatch followed through a hallway lined with framed photographs, which opened into a larger space; an old ballroom with peeling flowered wallpaper. Across the vast wooden floor, scratched and littered with, of all things, old leaves and pages of a newspaper, they came to a door. When Munro turned around, Hatch noticed that the older man had taken one of the photos off the wall in the hallway.
"Here she is," said Isaac. "This is Rotzy."
Hatch leaned down for a better look at the portrait. He gave only the slightest grunt of surprise and hoped his host hadn't noticed, but Rotzy was the woman at the phone booth, the half-faced horror mishandled by Madame Mutandis.
"You haven't seen her, have you?" asked Munro.
Hatch knew he should have tried to help the old man, but he thought only of escape and didn't want to complicate things. He felt that the door in front of him was to be the portal back. "No," he said.
Munro nodded and then reached into the side pocket of his jacket and retrieved an old-fashioned key. He held it in the air but did not place it in Hatch's outstretched palm. "Listen carefully," he said. "You will pass through a series of rooms. Upon entering each room, you must lock the door behind you with this key before opening the next door to exit into the following room. Once you've started you can't turn back. The key only works to open doors forward and lock doors backward. A door can not be opened without a door being locked. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Munro placed the key in Hatch's hand. "Then be on your way and Godspeed. Kiss the sky for me when you arrive."
"I will."
Isaac opened the door and Hatch stepped through. The door closed and he locked it behind him. He crossed the room in a hurry, unlocked the next door and then passing through, locked it behind him. This process went on for twenty minutes before Hatch noticed that it took less and less steps to traverse each room to the next door. One of the rooms had a window, and he paused to look out on some watery side street falling into night. The loneliness of the scene spurred him forward. In the following room he had to duck down so as not to skin his head against the ceiling. He locked its door and moved forward into a room where he had to duck even lower.
Eventually, he was forced to crawl from room to room, and there wasn't much room for turning around to lock the door behind him. As each door swept open before him, he thought he might see the sky or feel a breeze in his face. There was always another door but there was also hope. That is until he entered a compartment so small, he couldn't turn around to use the key but had to do it with his hands behind his back. His chin against his chest. "This has got to be the last one," he thought, unsure if he could squeeze his shoulders through the next opening. Before he could insert the key into the lock on the tiny door before him, a steel plate fell and blocked access to it. He heard a swoosh and a bang behind him and knew another metal plate had covered the door going back. He was trapped.
"How are you doing, Mr. Hatch?" he heard Munro's voice say. By dipping one shoulder he was able to turn his head and see a speaker built into the wall.
"How do I get through these last rooms?" Hatch yelled. "They're too small and metal guards have fallen in front of the doors."
"That's the point," called Munro, "you don't. You, my friend, are trapped, and will remain trapped forever in that tight uncomfortable place."
"What are you talking about? Why?" Hatch was frantic. He tried to lunge his body against the walls but there was nowhere for it to go.
"My wife, Rotzy. You know how she went under? What sunk her? She was ill, Mr. Hatch. She was seriously ill but her health insurance denied her coverage. You, Mr. Hatch, personally said No."
This time what flared before Hatch's inner eye was not his life, but all the many pleading, frustrating, angry voices that had traveled in one of his ears and out the other in his service to the HMO. "I'm not responsible," was all he could think to say in his defense.
"My wife used to tell me, 'Isaac, we're all responsible.' Now you can wait, as she waited for relief, for what was rightly due her. You'll wait forever, Hatch."
There was a period where he struggled. He couldn't tell how long it lasted, but nothing came of it, so he closed his eyes, made his breathing more steady and shallow, and went into his brain, across the first floor to the basement door. He opened it and could smell the scent of the dark wood wafting up the steps. Locking the door behind him, he descended into the dark.
Seven
The woods were frightening, but he'd take anything over the claustrophobia of Munro's trap. Each dim light bulb he came to was a godsend, and he put his hands up to it for the little warmth it offered against the wind. He noticed that the creatures prowled around the bulbs like waterholes. They darted behind the trees, spying on him, pale specters whose faces were like masks made of bone. One he was sure was his cousin Martin, a malevolent boy who'd cut the head off a kitten. He'd not seen him in over thirty years. He also spotted his mother-in-law, who was his mother-in-law with no hair and short tusks. She grunted orders to him from the shadows. He kept moving and tried to ignore them.
When Hatch couldn't walk any further, he came to a clearing in the forest. There, in the middle of nowhere, in the basement of his brain, sat twenty yards of street with a brownstone situated behind a wide sidewalk. There were steps leading up to twin doors and an electric light glowed next to the entrance. As he drew near, he could make out the address in brass numerals on the base of the banister that led up the right side of the front steps.
He stumbled over to the bottom step and dropped down onto it. Hatch leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands covering his face. "That's not me," he said, "it's not me," and he tried to weep till his eyes closed out of exhaustion. What seemed a second later, he heard a car horn and looked up.
"There's no crying in baseball, asshole," said Rose. She was leaning her head out the driver's side window of their SUV. There was a light on in the car and he could see both their sons were in the back seat, laughin
g and pointing at Hatch.
"How'd you find me?" he asked.
"The internet," said Rose. "Will showed me MapQuest has this new feature where you don't need the address anymore, just a person's name, and it gives you directions to wherever they are in the continental United States."
"Oh, my god," he said, and walked toward Rose to give her a hug.
"Not now Barnacle Bill, there's some pale creeps coming this way. We just passed them and one lunged for the car. Get in, Mr. Drowned Town."
Hatch got in and saw his sons. He wanted to hug them but they motioned for him to hurry and shut the door. As soon as he did, Rose pulled away from the curb.
"So, Hatch, you went under?" asked his older son, Will.
Hatch wished he could explain but couldn't find the words.
"What a pile," said Ned.
"Yeah," said Will.
"Don't do it again, Hatch," said Rose. "Next time we're not coming for you."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I love you all."
Rose wasn't one to admonish more than once. She turned on the radio and changed the subject. "We had the directions, but they were a bitch to follow. At one point I had to cut across two lanes of traffic in the middle of the Holland Tunnel and take a left down a side tunnel that for more than a mile was the pitchest pitch-black."
"Listen to this, Hatch," said Ned, and leaned into the front seat to turn up the radio.
"Oh, they've been playing this all day," said Rose. "This young woman soldier was captured by insurgents and they made a video of them cutting her head off."
"On the radio, you only get the screams, though," said Will. "Check it out."
The sound, at first, was like from a musical instrument, and then it became human—steady, piercing shrieks in desperate bursts that ended in the gurgle of someone going under.
Rose changed the channel and the screams came from the new station. She hit the button again, and the same screaming. Hatch turned to look at his family. Their eyes were slightly droopy and they were very pale. Their shoulders were somehow out of whack and their grins were vacant. Rose had a big bump on her forehead and a rash across her neck, but at least they were together.
"Watch for the sign for the Holland Tunnel," she said amid the dying soldier's screams as they drove on into the dark. Hatch kept careful watch, knowing they'd never find it.
TOOTHER
Terry Dowling
As Dan Truswell gave his signature three-three knock on the door in the modest hospital tower of Everton Psychiatric Facility that Friday morning, he couldn't help but glance through the second-floor window at the new sign down in the turning circle. Everton Psychiatric Facility, it said. He'd never get used to it. That was the more politically correct name for Blackwater Psychiatric Hospital, just as words like client and guest had completely replaced patient and inmate.
"Peter, it's Dan."
Dan didn't enter Peter Rait's room, of course. That wasn't their arrangement. He just waited, looking at his reflection in the small mirror Peter kept hanging outside his door, surprised not so much by the slate-grey eyes and flyaway hair but by how white that hair had become. He was fifty-nine, for heaven's sake! It was something else he'd never get used to.
Finally the door opened and Peter stood there in his pyjamas.
"Careful, Doctor Dan. That's a dangerous one."
"They all are, Peter. Carla said you've been yelling. Another nightmare?"
Peter looked tired, troubled. His black hair was tousled from sleep. "They don't usually come this often now. Harry's going to phone."
"Harry Badman?" Dear industrious Harry was two years out of his life, distanced by the usual string of promotions, secondments and strategic sidelining that marked the lives of so many career detectives in the New South Wales Police Force. "All right, Peter, so how does this dream relate?"
"Ask Harry about the teeth, Doctor Dan."
Dan's thoughts went at once to the recent desecration at Sydney's Rookwood Cemetery. "Is this about—?"
"Ask him."
"What do you have, Peter?"
"I can't say till he confirms it. Ask him. He'll know."
Dan made himself hold back the rush of questions. "It's been a while."
Peter did finally manage a smile, something of one. "It has, Doctor Dan."
Dan smiled too. "Phil knows?"
"Some of it. I'll give him an update at breakfast. But it's important. Very important."
"Tell me the rest, Peter."
"I really can't."
"There are voices?"
"God, yes. But strange." Neither of them smiled at the bathos. What internal voices weren't? "They're coming over time."
Dan frowned. This was something new. "Across years?"
"The first is from the sixties."
"More, Peter."
"Let Harry start it."
You've started it! Dan almost said, but knew to hold back, just as Peter had known how much to use as a tease.
"Listen, Peter—"
"Talk later. I'll leave you two alone."
And he closed the door. Dan, of course, looked straight into Peter's mirror again, had the good grace to laugh, then headed downstairs.
Forty-nine minutes later, as Dan sat in his office reviewing the patient database, Harry Badman phoned from Sydney. There was the inevitable small-talk, the polite and awkward minimum that let them stitch up the years as best they could. Dan Truswell and Harry Badman liked one another a great deal, but their friendship had never been easy far from where their respective careers met: for Harry, pursuing the more dangerous exponents of extraordinary human behaviour; for Dan, fathoming the often extraordinary reasons for it.
Finally Harry's tone changed. "I need to see you, Dan."
"It's about what happened at Rookwood last Saturday night, isn't it?"
"What have you heard?"
"What was in the news. A grave was desecrated. A recent burial." Dan said nothing about teeth. This had been one of Peter Rait's dreams after all, and it had been a while since the intense, still-young man had been "active" like this. More importantly it was Dan's way of testing Peter's special talent after all this time.
"Samantha Reid. Aged forty-one. Buried on Friday, dug up on Sunday sometime between two and four in the morning. Cold rainy night. No one saw anything. The body was hauled from the coffin and left lying beside the grave."
"So, not just a grave 'tampered with,' like the papers said. Your people are good, Harry. Why the call?"
"Things were removed from the scene. I'd like your take on it."
"Stop being coy. What was 'removed'?"
"The teeth, Dan. All the teeth."
Dan had an odd rush of emotion: revulsion, fascination, the familiar numb amazement he always felt whenever one of Peter's predictions played out like this. And there was the usual excess of rationalism as if to compensate. "What do the deceased's dental records show? Were there gold fillings?"
"Dan, all the teeth. And it's not the first desecration. Just the first to make the news."
Dan knew he'd been slow this time, but allowed that he was out of practice too. "There were others?"
"From secluded and disused parts of the cemetery. Much older graves."
"But recent desecrations?"
"Hard to tell conclusively. Not all were reported back then. It didn't look good for the cemetery authorities. The graves were tidied up; nothing was said. We would have assumed these earlier violations were unrelated except . . ." He actually paused. Had the subject been less serious, it would have been comical.
"Come on, Harry. Someone's collecting teeth. What else do you have?"
"That Rattigan murder in Darlinghurst a month back. The pensioner, remember?"
"Go on."
"She wasn't strangled like the media said."
"No?"
"She was bitten to death."
Dan was surprised to find that his mouth had fallen open in astonishment. "Bitten?"
"At least two hundred
times. Increasing severity."
"These could be different crimes, Harry. What makes you think they're related?"
"Teeth fragments were found in some of the wounds. Very old teeth."
But not in very old mouths, Dan realized. "Dentures made from these older desecrations?"
"Exactly."
"Surely there was saliva DNA from whoever wore them."
"No," Harry said.
Dan grasped the implications. "So, not necessarily biting as such. Someone made dentures from these older corpse teeth and—what?—killed the Rattigan woman using some sort of hand-held prosthesis?"
"Spring-loaded and vicious. All we can think of. And that's several sets of dentures, Dan. We've traced teeth fragments back to the occupants of three older desecrations: graves from 1894, 1906 and 1911. All female. No fragments from newer teeth—"
"Too new to shatter."
"Exactly. But there could be other teeth used, from other desecrations we don't know of. There are some very old graves there; we wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. So all we have is a major fetish angle. Something ritualistic."
"My phone number hasn't changed, Harry." The accusation hung there. You didn't call sooner!
"You've got your life, Dan. Annie. Phil." The barest hesitation. "Peter. I didn't want to intrude."
Dan stared at the midmorning light through his office windows and nodded to himself. "You've profiled it as what?"
"I'd rather not say. That's what this is about. Getting another take."
"Official?"
"Can be. You want the file? I'll email a PDF right now. Drive up tomorrow first thing."
"See you at the Imperial Hotel at eleven."
"See you then."
Seventeen hours later they were sitting with light beers in a quiet corner of the Imperial on Bennet Street trying to make the small-talk thing work face to face. They did well enough for six minutes before Harry put them both out of their misery.
Eclipse One Page 10