The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  Nico and I had been reviewing the photos the sheriff’s department had taken last night and reading their reports. “Her body was placed in a Y shape,” Nico said. “The sea to her left hand, the land to her right. Rocks were placed around her feet, which were facing east. It feels ritualistic, but I have no clue what mystic tradition.”

  “It could be a psychopath,” Rosaleen said, “an offender with his own internal cosmology and mythology, acting it out on the victim.”

  “Then he’s a magical psychopath,” Nico said. “The real stuff was flying around at the scene. It wasn’t a spell to call anything over, but it was legit magic.”

  I looked at the grainy, black-and-white photo of Jane’s body on the beach. Her arms were raised above her head; even her fingers were each meticulously spread like … I sorted through the pile of pictures until I came to the one of her feet, the rocks piled around them and over them … over them as if her feet had been …

  “Okay, let’s see if she can help us any on this,” Nico said to Rosaleen. “You good with that, Rosie?”

  “Of course,” Rosaleen said, but I heard the ice crack, the hesitation slip into her voice. I was walking over to Jane’s body. I felt the fragments of memory shift and slip.

  “Laytham, get the door … Laytham?” Nico’s voice. I was looking at the deep, savage wounds on Jane’s body. The placing. They began at her throat … Then next was a hole where her heart used to be. The next was at her solar plexus; it bordered between the floor of her lungs and the top of her intestines.

  I heard the door click and lock. Nico adjusted the blinds on the glass of the door to obscure the room. He stood near the door to guard it. He was giving me an odd look but said nothing. Rosaleen removed several bones from her forensic bag. Each was wrapped in a different color of silk cloth. The cloths were embroidered with complex symbols around a circle. The first bone she removed was a human skull. She placed the cloth it was wrapped in on the steel table, on the circle side up above Jane’s head, and then carefully placed the skull on the cloth. She repeated the process. Each bone was human and placed at specific spots around Jane’s body. Long bones for arms and legs and then small spinal vertebrae opposite the skull, at the feet, completing the circuit of marrow around the dead girl. Rosaleen stepped around me as I stood looking at wounds.

  “Laytham,” she asked, “is everything okay?”

  “I think I know why she’s mutilated the way she is,” I said, “at least in part. These big, serious wounds, here and here, all the way down her body.”

  “Yes?” Rosaleen said, standing beside me. Nico was listening, arms crossed, still guarding the door.

  “These wounds correspond pretty accurately to the traditional locations on the body of the chakras,” I said.

  “That New Age bullshit?” Nico grunted.

  “Look,” I said, “you are always talking about me visualizing, focusing; well, I’ve been playing around with using chakras for visualizing workings. And that book I was telling you about, the one I’m reading? It’s talking about this, plexuses of power running through the body. What if the killer wanted to, I don’t know, take her power away?”

  “You think she was one of us, a magic worker?” Nico said.

  I shrugged.

  “Not a clue, supposedly every human has chakras, and they are connected to our mental, physical, and spiritual health. This guy may just want to … deface them in her for some reason.”

  “It’s a valid theory,” Rosaleen said. “I’ve read some works equating the chakra system to the Kabbalic Tree of Life, so Laytham may be onto something here, Nico.”

  Nico sighed and made the raspberry sound in frustration as he did.

  “’Cept that there are supposed to be two chakras on the head, right? One at the crown and another at the forehead. He left her head alone, kept it perfect, not a bruise, not a mark. Shit, even her hair is not messed up too bad. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, let’s see if you can wake her up, Rosie, and we’ll see if she was killed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” Nico said. I stepped away from Jane’s body and let Rosaleen begin her working. Besides a formal and impressive education in the forensic sciences and criminalistics, Rosaleen had discovered early in her life that she had an affinity for the dead. She was one of the most powerful and prominent necromancers and necropaths in the world. I watched and tried to keep up. Rosaleen took wide, squat black candles out of her case, placed them meticulously around Jane, and lit them with a lighter. She also took a small glass vial from her case; it almost looked like a cocaine grinder. Rosaleen uttered something in Arabic, standing at the head of the table, gesturing over the skull and the candle behind it.

  “تأتي من الخروج من الظلام و الغبار. ترك القاعات التي لا نهاية لها من ذوي القربى الجديد الخاص بك. يأتي الى النور أقدم لكم. التحدث مع اللسان البارد بك في فمي, ورأيي. التحدث معي, الظل .”

  She sniffed from the vial as she repeated the incantation. I was pretty certain it was grave dust. I felt the power build around her, move through her like she was a breathing window. The temperature dropped in the already cool room, and all the metal drawers of the morgue cabinets began to shudder, as if they were being pushed against from within. Rosaleen, her eyes closed, cocked her head quizzically and motioned with her hands as if she were coaxing some unseen force up and out of Jane’s still form.

  “إذا كنت لن تأتي بحرية, وأنا آمرك, أطالب تتكلم, وإعطاء اسمه الحقيقي كا ل لي. هل هذا الآن.”

  The candles’ flames shot up, and the room was now arctic, yet Jane remained still and silent. After a few moments of her power surging and crashing against the walls between worlds, Rosaleen’s hands swept out, and all the candles snuffed out. The pall began to depart the room. Rosaleen opened her eyes. She looked confused and perhaps a bit frightened.

  “Rosie, you okay?” Nico asked, stepping toward the necromancer. Rosaleen waved him off.

  “Fine, I’m fine,” she said. She looked at both Nico and me and shook her head in disbelief. “Gone, she’s completely gone.”

  “Gone?” I said.

  “Her life force, her soul,” Rosaleen said, “every single thing she was, or ever might be again, is gone, devoured. The bastard ate her soul, Laytham.”

  * * *

  We found the one place to drink and eat at Bombay Beach; it was a dive called the Ski Inn. The food smelled good, but none of us was much in the mood to eat. The beer was cold, and the shots weren’t watered. I tossed back my second shot of tequila. Rosaleen and Nico kept pace with me. The smoky heat of the drink swirled in my chest.

  “How is it even possible?” I asked. We all looked at each other; we all knew the answer. Someone in the Life, someone with real power could mess up a soul, tear it, break it, but to completely remove every trace of a human soul, that took a degree of power and malice that it was almost impossible for me to comprehend.

  “We’re looking for a seriously twisted fuck,” Nico said, and raised his beer. “Doubtful it’s a Satanist, or those Elder God freaks; those guys send the power down a hole. The crime scene doesn’t show any signs of that.” He drained his beer and ordered another round of shots.

  “I really shouldn’t,” Rosaleen said. “I have to drive back to L.A. tomorrow.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I’m running the beach in the morning.” Nico laughed and lit a cigarette.

  “Okay, kids. One more each and then you two can go back to the flop, brush your teeth, put on your jammies, and hop in bed. Me, I plan on having trouble sleeping tonight.”

  “So where did her energy go?” Rosaleen asked. “If it had been destroyed, it would have bled over into the scene. It didn’t. A healthy, whole human soul can’t just be snuffed out without leaving some residue, like those shadows of the people who were atomized at Hiroshima.”

  “A
whole, healthy soul,” I said, and drained the shot Nico put in front of me. “She had been tortured, drugged, raped over a long period of time. What if … what if he kept her … and slowly … wore her down, degraded her, corrupted her? What if he rotted out her soul before the son of a bitch killed her and pulled it out like a bad tooth?” Everyone at the table was silent. Nico had a look I rarely saw; he looked afraid. He buried it quickly.

  “That is one of the sickest things I’ve ever fucking heard,” Nico said, and downed his shot. I nodded and motioned for the waitress to bring me another. Rosaleen slid her drink to me.

  “I thought you were done, Laytham?” she said. I said nothing but downed her tequila. “If your theory is correct,” she continued, “that would mean our suspect spent years working on her, ritually degrading her, tormenting her. The human soul is a paradox; it’s fragile, but it’s enduring.”

  “Not enduring enough for what Jane went through,” I said as the waitress placed another drink in front of me. “I’m going to find him. I’m going to make him pay for Jane.”

  “We will,” Nico said. We tapped shot glasses and drained them. I was flush with anger, with booze. “Something you have to be ready for, though, kid, is that it may be a very long haul. Riddle me this, what kind of sick-ass fuck can do something like this to a person day in and day out for years: focus their attention on a single human being, provide drugs, provide everything it takes to keep themselves and this other person alive, not just alive, but to live in a way that this kind of abuse is never reported, never comes back to karmically bitch-slap him? Tell me who owns a boat to leave his handiwork lying on a beach?”

  “Someone rich,” I said. Rosaleen was looking at me; she moved her eyes back to Nico when I looked at her.

  “And powerful often ass-drags along after rich,” Nico said. “I’ve worked enough of these, Laytham. They break your fucking heart. They’ll make you weep like a little child, because most times there is no end to it, no resolution, and the fucking skell gets away with it.”

  “That’s a terribly bleak way to see the world, Nico,” Rosaleen said.

  “Yeah, Rosie,” Nico said, “it is. I’m just trying to get him ready for it, if it happens on this one.”

  “Not this time,” I said. “I’m going to find this fucking monster, and I’m going to stop him.”

  “And that is what keeps us in the game, kid,” he said. “Gets us up out of the bed and keeps us out of the fucking loony bin. ‘Not this time.’ It’s why we took up the Brilliant Badge.”

  We drank a final, quiet round.

  * * *

  It was four in the morning when the knock came at my motel room door. I had passed out with a mangled copy of a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker on my chest. I rolled over, jumped up, almost fell on my face as the tequila and the gravity conspired against me. I opened the door expecting to see Nico, to hear there was another body. It was Rosaleen. She was in an oversized and faded Star Wars T-shirt, and she wore knee socks. Her face was freshly scrubbed, and her eyes were red.

  “May I come in for a moment?” she asked. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “Please,” I said and opened the door wider. She walked in, and I closed the door. “You didn’t wake me. I was pretty zoned out from the drinks.”

  “Nico was snoring so loudly he was rattling the door to his room,” she said. “I … I’m sorry to trouble you. I’ve been thinking about your theory and … it’s horrible, Laytham, just horrible, for someone to do that to another person, to ruin them and then just snuff them out. You’d think dealing with the dead every day, learning the craft I’ve learned, would somehow … callous me, but it hasn’t. Death is … natural, organic, if that makes any sense? It’s part of the universal cycle of learning and unlearning, of growth and closure. This poor girl, what was done to her is the most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen. It’s monstrous.” She blinked, and I saw her eyes glisten. “That poor girl.”

  I pulled her to me and let her sob into my chest. Her hair smelled good, and she was warm and soft against me. I felt my body responding in spite of myself. “We’ll get him, darlin’,” I said. Something angry and proud tightened in me. “I’ll get him.” She looked up at me, behind her glasses.

  “It won’t bring her back; it won’t renew her soul,” Rosaleen said. “Part of the cycle of creation was murdered with that girl, Ballard. The … thing … that did that to her didn’t just kill a human being, he killed part of … everything.”

  I cupped her chin. Our eyes searched, trying to look past, look inside. I felt her body shift around mine, molding to me. She lifted up on tiptoe, and we kissed. At first it was gentle. I tasted her tears on her lips. Time became blurry at the edges. We kissed for a long time, then it became hungry, urgent, tongues finding each other, moans. We bumped into the bed and fell onto it as we surrendered to the relentless need, as we tried to devour one another. I removed her glasses and placed them on the nightstand next to the clock radio I had left on when I passed out. It was softly playing “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood from some far-off, ghostly, static-filled station.

  I pulled her nightshirt off and she fumbled, reaching into my running shorts, as we scooted farther back onto my bed. Her breasts were apple-sized, and I ran my fingers over her nipples, softly. She gasped and pulled my shorts down and off. I was immutable diamond and yielding silk, and she explored me, cupping and caressing. She climbed on top of me, and her hair fell down like a curtain, hiding our faces as we kissed again. I kissed the tears away from her eyes. She came up, and we both murmured in pleasure as we fell into a rhythm, my hands on her hips, hers on my chest.

  “Wait,” I said. “Stop, we have to stop. I have to stop. I’m sorry.” My hands stilled her hips, and her eyes opened. She looked down, concerned.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Me,” I said. “I’m wrong. I’m sorry, Rosaleen, I shouldn’t be doing this.” She rolled over next to me in the bed and kissed my cheek. We were both breathless. Our eyes met again.

  “I…” I tried to find the right words. “I’m in love with someone, still in love with someone, and I shouldn’t be with you or anyone else, until I get my head straight. It’s unfair to you, it’s unfair to me, and in my head, it’s unfair to her.”

  “This the girl you were with before you came out here six months ago?” she asked me. I nodded.

  “Yeah. Her name’s Torri, Torri Lyn, and the last time I saw her, I said terrible things to her. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be with her, but … I’m still with her.” I turned onto my side, still facing her. “I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you,” I said.

  “I wanted you too,” she said. “I hope you know it wasn’t my intention for all this. I just couldn’t sleep and I was so sad, and I needed to talk. I wanted to talk to you. You’ve always seemed to understand, to empathize with the plight of the victim. They’re not just ‘DBs’—dead bodies—to you. I think your compassion, your passion, those things are your strength. That’s where all that power in you comes from.”

  “I did bad when I was young,” I said. “I ruined the life, the soul, of someone who was the world to me, who believed in me when no one else did.” I told her what happened with Granny, how I damned her, how I destroyed her soul and every wonderful, shining, brilliant part of her, forever. Rosaleen held me tight and listened. She brushed the hair out of my eyes.

  “So the legend is true,” she said. “Laytham, you were a child. You didn’t know what you were doing, the implications. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “I did it,” I said. “Exactly what this bastard did to Jane. I’m the same as him, at my core. I’m selfish and careless, weak … evil, and guilty.”

  “No,” Rosaleen said, “far from it, darling boy.”

  “I’ve been reading a lot about the samurai,” I said, “their code, their self-discipline. For them, it was better to be dead than to live without honor. Joining the Nightwise i
s my chance to master myself, master all that hateful tar deep down in me, to change before it’s too late. To prove I can be good, can do good; I can make it right.”

  She kissed me very lightly on the cheek. Rosaleen pulled the covers around herself and around me. Alphaville’s “Forever Young” was whispering through the fog of static on the radio. “You thought it wouldn’t be honorable to be with me with another woman in your heart and your head,” she said. “You had the integrity to stop even though things had gotten as far as they had. You are a good man, Laytham Ballard, an honorable man. You could have used me to ease your own loneliness, and later I would have been hurt and confused by why you were acting cold and guilty. You didn’t. Thank you, and thank you for telling me why.”

  “You deserved that,” I said.

  “Do you mind if I stay here, with you?” she asked. “Just to sleep, to not be alone?”

  “Please,” I said, “please stay.”

  I turned off the lights, and we held each other tightly, listening to the tinny music on the radio until we slept. My last thoughts before sleep swallowed me were of Jane Doe, lost in all but memory, and only a dim shade there, and the promise I made to her.

  THIRTEEN

  Thrashing through an opiate fever dream, infection, pain, through hot, black, claustrophobic oblivion, the darkness like a coffin too close all around me, my breath bumping against it. The cold, silver bite of needles pinching at my elbow joint, in my forearm, on the back of my hand. Brief flutters of awareness. I was in a bed, in a room, not a hospital, not a prison infirmary.

  Painful daylight stabbing my eyes, making me want to retch. Shadowed night, too cramped, out of sync with the humming cadence of the living world. The dead visit me. Dusan Slorzack crouched beside me, his breath smelled of shit and cum; his body was covered in safety-pinned wounds. He tells me he’s waiting for me in the ceramic room with no doors, the sound of cockroach legs scratching on filthy tile engulfs me. I think I manage to flip him off. August Hyde was there too, pale and bloated from the water, his skin splitting, gasses leaking from him, telling me he forgave me for what I did to him. I was a kid and I didn’t understand. I’m positive I flipped him off, too.