Eric kept smiling his crazy smile as he moved the mask towards my face. There was a bit where the mouth was, so I wouldn’t be able to speak once it was on. I knew what the holes were for, and what I’d thought was rust wasn’t.
He was still smiling when something small and cold pricked against the side of my head and what could only have been a hammer connected with it.
The bit reduced my screams to choked gobbles and sobs, and when the hammer stopped, they filled in the eyes.
I’ve watched the young couple living in my house, though I haven’t looked with my eyes. I don’t need them to see anymore. Able to reach out from the lakeshore, except it’s not a lake I’m standing next to, I can feel she is more open than he is. All it takes is time.
Carcosa is beyond death, and time is all we have.
One of the women wore a necklace of scalpels and syringes around her neck.
Borderland
After the fire, they found rooms in the house that were absent from the original plans. Although the dead were badly burned, the investigators identified both male and female among them. The oldest was nineteen. The way they’d been found — the rooms they were kept in — suggested the reason they were there.
Wade handed me a thick file. She was agent in charge for this part of the border.
“There are three dozen reports in there,” she said. “As many missing person cases as we can fit to what we have.”
I was surprised they got that many and told her so.
“A coyote turned state’s evidence,” she said, passing another folder over. “Unrelated case, but what she told us fits.”
“King. Carcosa and Qassilda…you think they’re involved?”
“Beyond owning the building, we can’t prove they knew about anything that went on inside that place.”
That place. Everyone knew about “that place” and enough of the details about what went on inside. The rest could be filled in, which was worse than bare fact.
It was hard to credit King, Carcosa, and Qassilda with not knowing about any of it.
Officially, the three were partners in the law firm that carried their names, but reality was murkier.
This side of the border, there wasn’t much they didn’t have their hands in. Rather than lawyers, the three were like little emperors. Nothing moved without their knowing about it. Legal or illegal, it was all the same to them. No one ever proved it, was all. “They’ll know why I’m there,” I muttered.
“Yeah, can’t be helped at this point. You’ll be alone as far as they know.” I didn’t like that, but let her explain.
“Local sheriff knows, man by the name of Carr. A surveillance team will shadow you. The less visible our profile is, the more at ease they’ll be.”
I still didn’t like it, but I couldn’t fault her — not really. If they thought it was a full-blown investigation, then they would shut down whatever business they were doing. In terms of waiting games, they could outlast us and they knew it.
One agent with local support would make them wary, but not overly so — at least in theory. It would suggest the bureau wasn’t looking too closely at them, but more at the events surrounding the house itself.
“What happens if it goes to the wall?”
Wade looked at me and offered the only answer people in her position can at times like this. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
I arrived in town near sun up, when the light from the dawn was turning the sand and hills a deep shade of terracotta. I’d been to places like this all along the border. In my experience, each is the same, but different in subtle ways.
Each has its own kind of bleakness, standing at an edge I find most places in when they can’t seem to decide where they should begin or end. For the people who live in them, the rest of the world may as well not exist. There’s only the borderland, and it’s a place where the normal rules don’t always apply.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of a diner near a patch of wasteland. Carr’s SMS told me I couldn’t miss the sign, and he was right.
He was waiting for me, leaning against the side of his cruiser and sipping from a plastic cup. A second cup was resting on the hood; for me, I assumed. Carr wasn’t what I expected. Tall, but wiry where a lot of local law I met along the border were beefy older men, almost all sporting some kind of handle-tache.
Wade never gave me his file, only a contact number. To be honest, he looked too young to be the sheriff of a border town. A soul patch dotted his chin, of all things. Couldn’t help but wonder how that went over with some of the locals, but then, he was an elected official. I figured he was doing something right.
“Agent Schrader,” he greeted me.
I took his hand, but wasn’t surprised by the grip. Something had to offset his offbeat look — offbeat at least in terms of small-town lawmen.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Call me Jack,” I told him. “Most people do.” “Will do, most people just call me Carr.”
He handed me the untouched cup. It was still warm despite the chill in the morning air. I knew by midday the temp would be pushing higher, enough to make people slow and maybe a little irritable.
“Your chief was a little vague on the details of how you’re to go about your business down here.”
It was better for him if it stayed that way. He seemed like an easy guy to like, and Wade wouldn’t have brought him into the loop unless she knew something about him. Time to see why, I thought.
“How do you know her?” I asked.
Carr pushed his hat back on his head and smiled laconically. It was a gesture meant for an older man, but it seemed to fit his features.
“Worked DEA taskforce for a while,” he said, tapping his tin star. “Didn’t always wear this, but most of my files are probably still redacted.”
A phone call to Wade could confirm it, but she probably wouldn’t offer much else beyond what he said. I dropped it and got back to the case. “What do you have on King and his associates?”
“Not enough juice to spit,” he replied, tipping his coffee back. “They’re good at staying squeaky clean, aside from a few accusations here and there. No investigations stick to those fuckers, and it’s not for lack of trying.”
The picture he painted was that everyone knew exactly what they did, but proving it in a court of law was another matter.
“You ever see anything like what they found in the house?”
His cup was halfway to his mouth when I asked. Carr held it where it was and looked inside, as though he was searching for the right way to answer.
“Saw some things the cartels did along the corridor, but nothing quite like that.”
Carr was probably undercover before he dropped out to see out the rest of his useful time in a sleepy border town. I wondered if he’d thought about what could happen in a place like this, or if he just wanted a way out.
“Disappearances?” I prompted.
“No.” He shook his head and finished bringing his cup to his lips. “At least nothing since I came here. I’m still looking through the files from the last sheriff.”
“You know him?”
“Nah, but he died, from what I hear. Heart attack.”
Wade hadn’t told me if the overwatch team would arrive ahead of me or on my heels. There was no way I could actually know there was a team following me. Contacting them wasn’t in the plan for this.
The whole thing was a risk. I wasn’t unsupported, but this was about as far from normal procedure as I could imagine.
“Where do we start?” he asked me. “The scene, can you take me there?”
Carr nodded and gestured at his cruiser. “You wanna follow me, or hop in?” “I’ll follow. Best we don’t seem too chummy.”
“Fair point,” he agreed, flicking his eyes left and right quickly. “Never know who’s watching, especially where these fucks are concerned.”
It occurred to me then tha
t I didn’t entirely know if I could trust Carr. Sealed records and Wade’s apparent trust aside, he could’ve been gotten to. I didn’t have the luxury to question it, though. I just went with what I felt — that he was a good man despite all the shit he carried now.
The house was a charred wreck. Blackened timbers and brickwork all tumbled together as though a child kicked it over before dousing it and tossing a match. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the morning breeze; streamers flapping and snapping open to let anyone inside. The place felt profane.
That’s not the right word for it, exactly, but there was nothing good about it.
Out of the way and shielded by scraggly hills on three sides, it was just the sort of place where something horrific could happen without anyone knowing. Carr must’ve read something in my face.
“Creeps me out too,” he said, pushing his hat back from his forehead. “Bad place to end up, given what’s inside.”
“You ever get much traffic through town heading this way?”
“No, there are dirt roads snaking all around here,” he said, pointing west and east for emphasis. “If you knew where to go, you could slip in and out without anyone noticing.”
I imagined that was just what happened. I doubted the men who came here to do the things they did knew each other’s names.
“What’s the play here, boss?”
I thought for a moment, knelt, and scooped up a handful of loose sand. “As far as anyone’s concerned, there’s an investigation.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming on the end of that.”
“It’s stalled because of lack of evidence…no manpower, yadda, yadda.” The grains drifted through my fingers to be snatched away by the wind.
“It’ll fly,” he said behind me, accompanied by the snap of a lighter and the crackle of a cigarette. “Sure I can manage to spread that around the station and the Lantern.”
“Lantern?” I brushed my hands together. “Local bar.”
Nodding, I rose and walked forward towards the house, but stopped where the ground started to blacken.
It felt wrong to be here.
I’ve been to dozens of scenes, most about as bad as you can imagine. This was different for some reason. The idea of what this place had been reached inside me and pulled. I was glad I didn’t have time for anything but coffee.
“Got you set up in the Southway Inn just on the edge of town. Only place there is.”
Habit said I should’ve gone inside, but the idea felt worn through here, like the place was fraying it at the edges. The ruined walls seemed to give off a kind of static charge; I could almost hear it like the drone of flies.
“Got one of those to spare?” I asked him, and he fished out the crumpled pack and handed me one along with a lighter. I’d given up a few years ago, but one wasn’t going to kill me.
Need felt excited here; underneath the taste of the cigarette, I felt an urge for a drink. More than one, in fact.
That night, I sat perched on the end of the bed in my hotel room. The room was small, but it served.
Staring out the window at the parking lot, I watched a stray dog amble past. It stopped and stared at me for what felt like a long time, but was probably only minutes.
The look in its eyes was a hungry one, and its body testified to that.
I thought of that place and what those kids must’ve been through. Years on the job don’t stop those kinds of thoughts; if anything, they only get worse.
It’s a cliché because it’s true: you try to understand the mindset of people who would do such things. Your mind rebels at the prospect, and a hole opens somewhere inside you. The hole is black, like a chasm, but the wind that billows up from it is hot as though an animal waits in the depths.
There’s a kind of call in it, urging you to jump, but if you do that you’ll never find your way out again. There is no bottom to that abyss. I saw more than one friend fall in. It was usually the last thing they did before quitting the job or ending up in the cemetery.
This town was like a hundred other black holes along the border, except this one opened deeper than most.
Why this town?
The answer was obvious, but if the three fuckers — as Carr had called them — were involved, it was a ballsy move for them. It left them exposed to all manner of scrutiny, notwithstanding their past ability to shrug it off.
Either they no longer cared, or they were certain nothing could be connected to them.
I was raw inside, like someone had run wire wool through my veins. There was a bad taste in my mouth — faintly metallic and chalky. Ants crawled behind my eyes and I couldn’t reach them to make it stop.
The bed was too hard, but right then and there, it felt like the comfiest thing in the world.
When I fell into it, it was like being swallowed, and the darkness of the room caved in around me in a cascading pool as I drifted off.
The town had one street of any worth, and most of it was boarded up. I’d read the same story in other places, staining and scrawled across the plywood covering windows and doors.
When people saw me, they looked away. Whether shame or fear or just indifference was hard to say, but they weren’t why I was here. Not really, at any rate.
Carr’s officer fit the stereotype, even if he didn’t. Papers piled high and an army of coffee mugs with dark runnels smudging the rims and sides. His hair was bound up in a tail, worked so he could hide it under his hat. Shot through with grey streaks, it made him look older than I’d first thought.
“Find your way around okay?” Carr asked as I walked in.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said as I shifted a stack of folders from the only other chair and sat down. “I got a call this morning.” He pushed one of the less grimy cups towards me. It was teaming, so I assumed it was more or less safe to drink from. “They’re coming to town.”
He didn’t need to say who ‘they’ were. My interest was piqued, but the feeling from the previous day crept back in behind my eyes. The bitter coffee did something to push it down.
“When?”
“Around one. Said they want to meet for a bite and offer reassurances.”
Wearing a wire crossed my mind, but I decided against it. What would be the point except to record their rehearsed spiel? There were similar recordings in storage; enough to fill days, if you had the time to listen.
“This place have somewhere up-market enough for them?”
Carr smirked and shrugged. “No chance, but I don’t reckon they’re the picky sort.” That was true; each of them had come from nothing in the beginning.
“Would’ve packed a better set of clothes if I’d known.”
They came in a black Town Car; about what I expected. Not that a different choice would’ve changed anything. People around here knew who these men were, even if they’d never met them. They drove themselves, which spoke to a power of a sort you don’t normally see. Men like these don’t drive themselves, but they did.
Everyone knew them.
King was the tallest. Six-six, easily, but bald and with a face that might have been battered to pieces and put back together over months.
Qassilda was next. Dark hair and darker skin, but blue eyes set into almost sunken sockets. He oiled his hair back and tried to hide a limp; the result of an accident years ago that no one quite knew the details about.
Carcosa came last. No one could work out if his name was Italian or Spanish, and he never said either way. Compared to the other two, he was an albino: creamy skin and fair hair. His file said his mother was Swedish, and it seemed his name was about all he’d got from his father.
We met at the diner where I’d shared coffee with Carr. All formality, we shook hands in turn and exchanged polite hellos.
Each of them carried themselves easily enough when they walked inside, nodding to the waitresses. I saw Qassilda flash a smile. His teeth were a set of pearls, almost gleaming in the fluorescent light. It was the kind of smile which promised much, but could thre
aten more.
We sat in a booth roughly in the middle of the diner, our three guests opting to sit facing the door. A waitress came.
“Special’s meatloaf with mash potatoes and green beans,” she said. There was a slight slur to her words, but she wasn’t drunk.
“Sounds good,” King said and waved a finger at everyone. “Drinks too?” “Coffee,” I said.
Carr nodded for the same.
“Scotch, neat,” Qassilda said. Carcosa asked for the same, while King ordered water.
Squeaky clean in front of the law, not that I think Carr or me would’ve pulled them over for a DUI.
The waitress left with our order and returned with the drinks a few minutes later, and only when we’d all sipped did they start in on their spiel. Guess the act of sharing a drink made us all friends for the next while.
“Terrible,” King offered. “I know things like this happen, but it doesn’t make it any less shocking.”
He was so good, you could almost believe him.
“Can we ask how far along the investigation is?” Qassilda asked over the rim of his glass. “At this point, there’s not a lot to tell beyond what’s already been printed,” I said. About the standard response, which they would understand to be stonewalling.
“We will, of course, cooperate in any way,” Carcosa said. “Really, anything you need from us, we can give you.”
For a certain class of people, I knew what he said would be completely true, but they couldn’t give me what I needed. I didn’t think they’d agree to admit any wrongdoing.
The meal passed like that, more or less. They would offer empty platitudes because it was expected of them. False promises of assistance and help; even the occasional joke was cracked, and in those moments, I was almost able to forget who I was sitting with in that diner.
No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) Page 7