by Mark Davis
On a summer’s morning, seven healthy and successful people hike in darkness to the summit of Norway’s Pulpit Rock, a cliff outthrust 2,000 feet above the scenic Lysefjord. As the rising sun inflames cliffs on the opposite side of the fjord, they join hands, walk to the edge and leap together into the void.
Dr. Elizabeth Barrett Browne, world-renowned expert in suicide, follows the digital breadcrumbs to the mastermind behind these deaths—the goddess Freyja, a wickedly clever woman or man who hides behind a convincing, full-motion digital persona on the dark web to lure people into conversation, winnow out the vulnerable, and prey on their psyches with a deadly mixture of hallucinogens and perverted psychotherapy.
The closer Elizabeth gets to unmasking Freyja, the deeper Freyja gets into Elizabeth’s own life and secrets… a woman haunted by family suicide, desperately worried about the well-being of her college-age son, and fearful that one day she, too, might succumb to the ledge.
DARWIN’S ARROW
“Darwin’s Arrow is that rarest of all animals—a first-rate thriller that also manages to be a provocative novel of ideas.”
—Josh Gilder, author of Ghost Image
“Darwin’s Arrow is hard science fiction with an intensely human touch. Davis’s writing is vivid, smart and memorable. A tremendous read.”
—Michael Dobson, author of MacArthur’s War and Fox on the Rhine
“The dialogue is blissfully human, and the characters feel fresh. The writing about the ‘technical stuff’ comes effortlessly, and is entirely understandable. The character dynamics help drive the story in unexpected ways… a stand-alone story, and ripping good, at that.”
—Donald Hannaford
BRUNO’S RELIC
“Fascinating, gripping, thought provoking! Davis’ attention to detail is remarkable. You won’t be disappointed.”
—Greg B. Drew
“A creative mixture of Hard Science Fiction, religious history, conspiracy, and edge-of-your seat action. Very well researched.”
—Alan Filipski
MARK DAVIS BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiction:
Darwin’s Arrow (2015)
Bruno’s Relic (2017)
Non-Fiction:
Digital Assassination: How To Protect Your
Reputation, Brand or Business Against Online Attacks
(with Richard Torrenzano, 2011)
SEVEN SHOES
Published by Stark House Press
1315 H Street
Eureka, CA 95501, USA
[email protected]
www.starkhousepress.com
SEVEN SHOES copyright © 2020 by Mark Davis. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Published by Stark House Press by arrangement with the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1-944520-97-7
Book and cover design by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com
Proofreading by Bill Kelly
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
First Stark House Press Edition: March 2020
She strides out of her office into the shadow canyons of downtown wearing a new cashmere sweater—perfect for a spring day—and a pair of woven, low-top walking shoes to break in on her way to meet an old friend for lunch. With the ice finally vanished from the sidewalks, Elizabeth looks forward to stretching her legs and feeling the warmth of the sun on her face and hands.
A screech of car brakes.
An SUV lurches to a stop on Vermont Avenue, then more screeches and mechanical shrieks as the cars behind it chain-react. A fraction of a second later a high-pitched squeal of tires lances her eardrums and Elizabeth’s whole body clenches as if she expects to be struck.
The car that stopped the noontime traffic is a big, blue box of an SUV in the middle of the street. Horns blare in an angry chorus.
The driver emerges from the other side, shirtless. He walks around the front of his car and she sees that he is naked. The driver is a young man, around thirty, his white skin mottled with pink blotches in the cool spring air.
He walks toward her at an even, unhurried pace.
Elizabeth laughs to herself, incredulous, fingernails at her lips.
The naked man’s arms swing and his hips twist slightly as he walks. He is rangy, with long, hairy legs, a sunken chest, and a white stomach cut inward from years of wearing a belt. His penis, shrunken into the bird’s nest of his pubis, bounces slightly as he strides forward. He has a light beard and a round face framed by stringy, unwashed hair.
Elizabeth focuses on his face—the faint smile, the bland look of an intelligent man whose mind has gone vacant—and recognition hits her like a flush of ice water through her heart. She doesn’t know the man, but she knows that expression from a thousand faces.
I’m on deck.
Passersby on the sidewalk keep their distance, watching the naked man silently, warily. A petite Asian woman listening to music on her earphones is slow to notice. When the woman finally does see the naked man, she makes a little pip and jumps backwards into a protective crouch.
All the bystanders stay back, afraid that the naked man might come over and touch them.
“Excuse me,” the man says, stepping around Elizabeth to pass through the glass door and into the foyer.
Last line of defense.
Elizabeth spins around and follows him.
When the naked man passes the security desk, the guard looks up from her reading. She is a middle-aged black woman with dreadlocks that contrast with her starched, white shirt with a corporate logo.
“Sir. Sir? Sir!” The guard pulls her walkie-talkie and barks commands into it.
The naked man keeps his even stride into the massive glass and teakwood lobby that rises 10 stories to a rounded, white cupola—a modernist comment on the dome of the U.S. Capitol just two miles away.
The naked man heads toward the elevator.
“You can always do this, at any hour of any day,” Elizabeth says, keeping pace behind him, trying her best to sound conversational. “But first, let’s talk options.”
“I know there are other options,” he says. “But none of them appeal to me.”
He gently pushes the ‘up’ button.
“Look at me.”
She pulls on his bare shoulder and he turns to look at her.
His eyes stare into hers, but without intensity. He is not interested in discussion or negotiation.
“Come up to three,” Elizabeth says. “We can go to my office and talk.”
He laughs, a natural and calm laugh that sets Elizabeth back on her heels.
“You a shrink?” he asks.
“Yeah, sort of.”
He laughs again.
“That would be quite a sight. Me naked, talking about my dreams on your couch.”
Elizabeth gets the picture, a New Yorker cartoon brought to life, and laughs as well. And that is a good thing, making a connection like this. She tries to hold his eye contact, but his gaze keeps shifting downward, then to the sides.
Personalize it. Keep ’em talking.
“What’s your name?”
The man gives a wan smile, a naturally shy person now walking naked in public.
“Jeremy.”
Ding.
The brass door slide
s open to a woman holding a stack of folders. She does not see Jeremy until she is halfway out. The woman screams and steps back inside the elevator. Jeremy follows her into the elevator, and Elizabeth jumps in right behind him. The woman eases around the naked man in an exaggerated bend to keep from grazing his shoulder. As soon as she comes out of the elevator she trips, goes down to her knees, and spills her folders across the marble floor.
Elizabeth hits three.
Jeremy hits nine.
“There’s no coming back from something like this Jeremy,” she says. “We can fix whatever is wrong.”
Jeremy stares at the two illuminated buttons.
“I am what is wrong. And I don’t want to come back.”
He is the calm one. It is Elizabeth who feels light-headed and flustered. She had talked down patients hundreds of times before. She had the playbook of questions and discussion points, all the best practices. And yet this time, for some reason, she can’t think of a thing to say.
So Elizabeth slaps both hands on Jeremy’s right wrist.
The young man gives her a look of indolent contempt.
The elevator chimes and the door opens at three.
She pulls on his wrists, leaning back, straining her slender body into a fulcrum. Jeremy, surprised at her strength and sudden ferocity, leans backward. Elizabeth wrests him toward the open elevator door, and manages to pull him off balance and a few inches forward.
“I’m not letting you do this, I’m not, so you might as well . . .”
She puffs out the words until she is breathless.
A man pushing a handcart shouts something when he sees a naked man wrestling with a woman at the door of the elevator. His shout is just enough distraction for Elizabeth to weaken her grip for a fatal instant. The elevator door slides to a close and they fall away from one another, riding upwards again. Elizabeth is exhausted by exertion and fear, like a boxer after several tough rounds, the muscles of her legs trembling. Jeremy leans against the elevator wall.
He looks relieved.
They ride in silence for a few seconds as the floors chime by.
“Really, I am fine,” he says. “I’m cool with this.”
“Is it a job or a woman?” Elizabeth asks.
“You know how they say you should never shit where you eat? They were right.”
“There is so much more for you, Jeremy, so much better to come. Believe me, I know.”
Jeremy looks her in the eyes again.
“Do you really believe that?” he says and glances up at the changing digits of the floor indicator. “Or are you just trying to keep yourself from holding my hand on the way down?”
Elizabeth feels heat rise into her eyes. A blush always blooms against her pale skin like strawberries on cream. This was going so wrong. You never let them get inside your head. Elizabeth stares back at him, trying to make his eyes connect with hers again, trying to control him by force of will.
Jeremy looks away from her.
“Stay with me Jeremy. Stay with me, please.”
After a beat, Jeremy returns her gaze.
“Look, lady, this is hard, but I am actually in a place where I can kind of enjoy it, the release you know. Don’t ruin it for me.”
The door opens at nine. Jeremy saunters toward a wall of plate glass with a keypad by a door. Behind the glass is a large desk of white quartz that looks like the bridge of a television starship. The young woman is wearing an ear bud and in mid-conversation when she sees Jeremy and screams.
Jeremy punches four digits into the entry keypad. Elizabeth grabs the edge of the glass door and follows him inside.
“Is Belinda here?” Jeremy asks.
The woman, wide-eyed, shakes her head ‘no.’
He is at a slow trot now. As he passes each cubicle, Jeremy creates a wave of reaction from former office mates who shout or scream. The staffers peek out from their cubicles at their former colleague, now naked in public like an anxiety dream made flesh. Some point, some laugh, some just stare in mute incomprehension.
Jeremy turns a corner toward the darkened conference room and runs through it. He grabs a black, ergonomic chair from the head of the long faux-mahogany desk and pulls it along the carpet and out onto the balcony.
Elizabeth follows him outside. They are out in the cool spring air again. Nearby office buildings cast a permanent shadow on the balcony and muffle the sounds of downtown traffic.
“You might kill someone on the way down, did you ever think of that?”
“I did,” Jeremy says. “On this side it’s all alley.”
He is breathing rapidly. An artery pulses in his neck.
Jeremy balances himself awkwardly on one foot on the chair and heaves himself up to the ledge, where he stands precariously, arms flapping in the air for balance, like a comedian pantomiming flight.
His face has a beatific cast—the expression of saints. But this young man is not about to be beatified.
“My brother!”
Elizabeth screams so loudly it feels as if someone raked a key across her larynx.
Jeremy turns to look at her, astonished and displeased at the interruption of his last act.
“He killed himself when we were in college.”
Jeremy wavers and flaps on the ledge some more, and then turns his gaze straight ahead, saying nothing.
“When Mike and I were kids, our father had done it as well. Do you know what that did to us? What it did to Mike, and what he did to me? Do you know what it will do to your—”
But Jeremy had already closed his eyes and gone over the edge with a hop. She hears him slap the pavement an instant later.
“Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e., the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.”
David Foster Wallace
ONE
The American ambassador to the United Kingdom was a cheerful man, bald and rosy cheeked.
“Our planner had you pegged as a salad and salmon girl,” he said from Elizabeth’s right while she surveyed the room from the head table of the ornate ballroom of the London Savoy. Elizabeth smiled at the ambassador and cut into her Beef Wellington. She generally didn’t eat a heavy meal before a speech, but this cut of meat with its soft, red center looked too delicious to resist. She generally did not drink before a speech, either, but the claret went well with the beef.
“I’ll keep your introduction mercifully brief,” the ambassador said. “How has your day been?”
“I met with some psych students from King’s College this morning,” Elizabeth said, holding a napkin in front of her mouth. “The rest of my days are spent reading and doing research.”
“You’re an academic,” the ambassador said. “Such a summer must be your idea of heaven.”
Elizabeth’s summer was off to a glorious start, a three-month grant to plum meta-studies and share her findings with colleagues at the University of London. Practically speaking, this meant that she had nothing to do but to read things that interested her, delve into deep conversations and take long walks in Regent’s Park. Who knows what else could happen in the days to come?
A buzz in her purse.
Elizabeth pulled her smartphone and glanced down at it in her lap.
>Lizzie!<
Only Max, her 19-year-old son and a rising sophomore at Rutgers, ca
lled her that. Then—
>Hi mom how r u?<
She knew, of course, that Max really wanted to tell her how he was. Elizabeth looked down into her lap as discreetly as possible while she texted.
>About to give a speech how are you?<
She set the phone down and ate another forkful of the Beef Wellington and took a sip of wine. Another buzz.
>Still lonely here a little weird to tell the truth<
>Will you be okay tonight?<
>Yes, Mom, definitely<
>Be sure and take your meds<
>OK, never forget, you know<
>Got to go, talk tomorrow<
“A significant other?” the ambassador said.
“Very significant,” Elizabeth said. “My son. He’s staying at Rutgers over the summer to redo the math class he bombed out of last semester. The dorms are largely empty now, so he gets lonely.”
“And then he remembers how much he needs mom,” the ambassador said, smiling and resting his hand on her arm in a solicitous gesture—or was he flirting? She glanced at his hand and the thick, gold band on one finger.
“I’ve got one like that myself,” he said. “A little needy.”
“They all are. Some show it more than others.”
The ambassador withdrew his hand.
Five minutes later, the ambassador introduced Dr. Elizabeth B. Browne of Georgetown University and Georgetown School of Medicine to the Royal Council for the Prevention of Suicide, a ballroom full of psychologists, psychiatrists and activists, many of them the parents, siblings, widows and widowers of suicides. Elizabeth did a mental inventory of her speaking points while the ambassador rattled off her resume . . . Smith College and Harvard Medical School, board certified at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a fellow at the National Institutes of Health.