A Latent Dark

by Martin Kee

  Then it looked at her with solid black orbs.

  Skyla ran. She ran until her sides ached and her heart felt as if it would burst. She tumbled into the tall dry grass panting when she could run no further. She pulled the goggles up and the world went white with mist. She lay on her back, catching her breath. There was no sound but the gentle rustle of nearby stalks. Her hair was matted against her neck. All around her were the tiny sounds of insects. Once she recovered, Skyla continued to run until morning.

  Chapter 22

  The gears of Harold’s clockwork world were stripped and broken beyond repair. The tinkerers of religion tried to help, prescribing remedies as black and white as the clockwork machinery that had betrayed him. They consoled and preached as Harry clung to his bottle of whiskey.

  “They are in heaven now,” they told him. “They are dancing through the streets with Jesus!”

  “Do the streets have names?” Harold asked.

  The priest blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”

  “The streets,” Harold said, taking a swig. “Do they have names? Addresses?”

  “I… I’m sure they do—”

  “And when people send mail to each other, what address to they use? Do they use numbers? Roman numerals perhaps? Do they have an address for each person? Or do they simply pick things up at a post office?”

  “I… I only meant that they are no longer suffering,” the priest said, his voice soft. “They are beyond death.”

  “I’ll tell you about death,” he spat at the man, his breath thick with whiskey. “Death is a smile that splits your throat from ear to ear. It’s a spray of blood on your sheets as you hack out your last breath.”

  But the bottle, now that was something that truly made the pain go away. Harry kissed its glassy throat as he stood on the street, staring at the blackened outline of the house that wasn’t there. This was where his daughter had gone. The place nobody else could bear to look at, not even him. He tossed the newspaper to the ground.

  WITCH BURNING IN BOLLINGBROOK’S INDUSTRIAL WEDGE

  It was written in tall, triumphant letters. He wasn’t the only person who had come by to look at it. The lot was practically a tourist attraction.

  What did they do to her? What hex did that witch child and her mother place on Melissa at the end? God, her face…it was…

  Harry took another swig of the bottle. It blurred the pain and memories just enough for him to imagine they were gone. He stumbled into the wreckage of the house as the surrounding grass and weeds reclaimed it at nature’s pace.

  Wouldn’t it be grand, he thought, if I could just lie here and die cursing them the way they cursed me. If only I had something sharp enough.

  He tossed his bottle. It rolled on the grass and bounced up against the far wall. Harry swore and stumbled over to pick it up. He emptied the contents into his belly.

  Can’t even kill myself properly, he thought.

  The worst part about all this was the lack of interest from the constable’s office. They ignored his calls. The case was closed. Inconclusive.

  Then this whole ridiculous trade war with Lassimir happened and the entire city forgot that he had even existed, or his daughter for that matter. Suddenly he was as invisible as this house that lay in ruins around him.

  He threw the bottle again; it bounced and rolled but did not break. Harold Montegut stumbled home amid wary glances of pity.

  *

  There was a note on his door. He pulled it off and carried it upstairs without reading it. He placed it on the sink and drew himself a warm bath. In the shattered medicine cabinet—the victim of a thrown shoe—he pulled out his straight razor. He hadn’t shaved in a week. Tonight he planned on shaving very close.

  Stripping off his stained suit, Harold eased himself into the tub and groaned. He picked up the straight razor and twisted it in his hand. The light bounced off of the sharpened blade, dancing on the wall.

  Harold wondered if he would even feel it in the warm water. He pressed it against his thigh. It felt cold.

  This little piece of metal, he thought, this would end everything I know.

  He held it there for a few moments until a small drop of blood appeared from the edge, spreading in the water like ink. The thought of that second smile in his daughter’s throat, dashed through his mind.

  He pulled the blade away and raised it to his neck. Very slowly, Harold Montegut began to shave. He read the note afterward and was glad he had waited. It was from the constable’s office.

  *

  The office of Assistant Investigator Gansworth was little more than a broom closet. The little plaque on the desk where they sat across from one another read A.I. Gansworth. It was written in pen and looked as though it had been glued on top of another nameplate. The writing was very neat nonetheless.

  Between them on the tiny desk were a small brass lamp and an open file. Harold was looking at the top of Gansworth’s head as the boy—no older than twenty if he was a day—read through the file on the desk. His hair was black, slick and separated by a neat part down the center. Harold couldn’t see his lips, but occasionally the boy would speak what he was reading out loud. Harold thought that at one point he had heard the boy struggle with the word “epidermal.”

  The office was being run on a skeleton staff when Harry arrived and he had waited for an hour or more before he could be helped. Now it felt as though he would be waiting even longer while A.I. Gansworth struggled with such words as “procedural” and “lacerations.”

  Harry cleared his throat. Gansworth looked up; he was a child.

  “Do you have any suspects?” Harry said, swallowing his irritation.

  “I… uh… no,” Gansworth said. “None yet.”

  Harry shifted in his seat. He began to wish he had brought that straight razor with him now.

  “You did leave me a message at my house,” he said.

  “Uh… yes, that was I.” His voice was soft and polite. Gansworth turned back to the file and continued reading where his finger had been.

  “Do you suppose,” Harry said, “That you could explain to me, why it is that you summoned me here then?”

  The boy looked up at him as if he had forgotten the man was there. His face was so youthful, so polite.

  “Oh… yes,” Gansworth said, clearing his throat. “The file was missing a signature. I needed you to sign off on the photograph. Just a minor filing mistake. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  Harry felt a vein pulse on his forehead. Not only were the staff incompetent, but now they wanted him to sign the photograph. But didn’t he do that at the morgue? He thought he had. It had all been a blur, a horrible nightmarish blur. But he remembered holding a pen. Maybe he had thrown it.

  “Very well,” he said, steeling against seeing the awful images again.

  Their knees were nearly touching as they sat across from one other. He waited as the boy shuffled his foot, occasionally tapping Harry’s. Several minutes went by and Gansworth was still reading the report.

  “Whenever you are ready,” Montegut said curtly.

  The Assistant Investigator looked up again. “Oh… Sorry… I…” He turned a bright shade of red. “It’s just that… well this report.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well,” The boy said, his eyes fixed on the page. “It seems sort of a mystery why this was misfiled.”

  Harry shifted in his seat. “Go on.”

  “Well,” said Gansworth, wiping his brow. “I’m looking at this and it seems that the coroner filed it as in-con-clusive.” He spoke the word as if it were the first time.

  “Inconclusive.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Harry tried to relax his hand that had balled itself into a fist.

  “Do you suppose,” Harry said between labored breaths, “that you could explain why the murder of a child would be listed as inconclusive?”

  “Well,” Gansworth took a deep breath, “I have to admit that it seems a mys
tery to me as well.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what the coroner’s report states,” Harry said.

  “It doesn’t say anything really,” the boy said, nose buried in the report. “It says that she drowned… that the ep-i-derm-al lac-er-a-tions were caused post-mortem by possible scavengers or other wildlife. They never filed it as a murder.”

  Harry was speechless. He leaned forward in his chair.

  “Her throat was slit,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “Your report is wrong. I was in the room, looking at my daughter on the table. I saw the… the damage that had been inflicted…” He paused for a moment and cleared his throat. “I saw what had been done to her. No doctor in his right mind would have concluded that.”

  Gansworth listened to him like a schoolboy being lectured by a dean. When Harry was done, he spun the file around on the desk.

  “Well,” said Gansworth. “It’s all right here in the report, sir. I… I have to agree that if you look at the picture yourself you can see that… well… here.”

  Harry glared at the Assistant Investigator as the boy spun the file around. It was only after the boy met his gaze that he looked down to the desk. His stomach knotted up, prepared to see the nightmare that had been made of his—

  “That’s not my daughter,” Harry said. He looked back up at the Assistant Investigator, who spun the picture back around, flustered.

  “That… but it says right here on the back,” he said, flipping the picture over. “Melissa Eleanor Montegut. See?”

  “Oh I see what the text says, Assistant Investigator.” He spat the title. “And I am telling you that that”—he tapped the page—“is not my daughter.”

  The image was of a dead girl, her face pale and puffy. Dark wet hair lay streaked across her forehead. Her face was as peaceful as if she had been sleeping. But more importantly, she had a face.

  Gansworth looked as though he had just been told that Santa Clause was a myth. “I don’t understand,” he said, his voice trembling.

  “Really?” said Harry. “Because it seems fairly obvious to me. Someone in your department has made a very grave error in their filing. This picture is not of my daughter.”

  “But…”said Gansworth. “All our evidence is signed for and… and checked against records. I was just doing an audit of some of… of the files that had been piling up…” He slouched in his chair, staring bewildered at the picture.

  “Who signs these forms?” Harry asked.

  “Oh… well you can see here…” He pointed to one. “Whoever is present, usually. We were running a bit thin lately, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “I have.”

  “Well… now that’s odd,” Gansworth said, looking again at the form.

  “What is?”

  “Oh… it’s just that I don’t recognize this signature. I don’t know who Lauren Saunders is.”

  Harry slid the form from under the boy’s finger and spun it around. He felt his ears grow hot as he looked at the signature. While the name meant nothing to him, the handwriting was familiar. Very familiar.

  There was a dramatic flair to the L and the S that he had seen scrawled across countless certificates and bonds. He had been in the same room with the man until sunrise, watching him sign those initials. He cleared his throat and looked up at A.I. Gansworth.

  “Do you suppose,” he said. “That someone could have signed this paperwork, say, before the department cleared out?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Someone signed these death certificates before they did the autopsy. They inserted the picture afterwards—the wrong picture, I might add.”

  The young man looked at the form, then went through the file. He gave Harry a puzzled look. “But who would do that?”

  “Who in the department knows you have that file, Mr. Gansworth?”

  “Nobody, sir,” Gansworth said. “Like I told you… I was just clearing up some filing while the majority of the department was dealing with the Lassimir detainees… I…” The young man put his face in his hands. “I don’t know how this happened,” Gansworth wailed.

  Harry placed the paperwork back into the file and gave it a couple of taps. He handed it back to the boy. “I think you should come with me, Assistant Investigator,” he said. “I believe I have a case for you.”

  *

  The hotel room was unlived in, but still decorated. The two men gaped at the paintings around the room. The Reverend Lyle Summers had left the room neat and tidy as if he would return at any moment. The walls were covered in some of the worst paintings Harold had ever seen, and even he was no connoisseur of the arts. The nightmare pictures stared back at them with blackened eyes and stretched faces.

  Too many arms, thought Harry, far too many arms.

  In the center of the room was a black trunk, turned onto one end, its lid unlatched. Harold reached into the bottom, underneath the solid block of hanging white suits. He found a small black case. He opened it.

  The two men looked at the silver instruments, still stained as if returned in a hurry. They looked at one another.

  “Sir,” Gansworth said. “I think you’d better leave that with me.”

  Harold laughed at him, closing the case again.

  “Sir,” the boy said. “You must. That’s evidence.”

  “I’ve seen what your department has done with evidence, son,” Harry said, poking him in his chest with the case.

  “But… sir.”

  “Let me tell you something,” said Harry, leaning in toward Gansworth. “I am a man who not three hours ago nearly bled himself to death in the bath. The one thing I ask of you is that you grant me this.”

  “But we have to follow the proper channels,” the boy’s voice cracked. “There are procedures.”

  “You listen to me, Gans—what is your first name?”

  The boy looked down. “Arthur, sir.”

  “Listen to me Arthur,” Harry said, his voice becoming softer. “One day you will meet someone who will constitute the very air you breathe. They will be your entire reason for waking up each morning. If you are very lucky, that person will marry you and she will bear your children.”—he was holding the case like a preacher with a bible—“I pray, Arthur that you never go through what I have, but I’ll tell you this much: if you ever did, and you knew what we know about this city, you would want to take a more… direct approach.”

  Arthur stared at his shoes. “But, it’s wrong, sir.”

  “Wrong?” Harold snapped. “If you want to see wrong we can dig up my daughter and you can see the way this,”—he opened the case and pointed to a long scalpel, its blade darkened—“opened her throat.”

  “But you don’t know!” Arthur glared at him, his eyes wet with frustration.

  Harold let out a breath. “You’re right Arthur,” he folded the case back up and tucked it under his arm. “But I’d like you to show me one police officer willing to find The Reverend Lyle Summers and arrest him.”

  Arthur Gansworth opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Harold was right, of course. Any guards not off raiding a city miles away were too busy trying to maintain order in Bollingbrook.

  “The Reverend Lyle Summers knew this,” he said. “He knew the city would be too busy with its war to care about something as petty as a missing girl. Why do you think he didn’t even bother hiding this?”

  Arthur looked at the case. “But… why?”

  Harold dropped his hands to his side. “I don’t know Arthur. But I do know where he went.”

  “But how?” The boy’s eyes were wide.

  “The same way I knew it was his signature on those books. The same way I know now why he chose to keep me so close to him.”

  Harold started toward the door. Arthur stumbled after him, too powerless to stop him and too confused to stop himself. Arthur hadn’t even been issued a gun. They got to the door and Harold looked at him with cold, dark eyes.

  “Arthur,” he said. “I am going to go to the bank,
so that you can see what I know. Then I am going to Lassimir. After that I am going to Rhinewall. You can come along if you intend to stop me, but I’d like to see you try.”

  Arthur ran to catch up as the man turned and headed down the hallway.

  “But how will you—”

  Harold explained everything as they left the hotel.

  Chapter 23

  In Marley’s mind they were no longer people, just targets: Guard One and Guard Two. They stood quivering as the Reverend Summers stepped out the door.

  He was furious, but not at the Reverend. Marley was furious with himself.

  Poison. You really thought subtlety would work for a change. Idiot. It sure didn’t work last time.

  Guard Two on the right fired almost as soon as the Reverend Summers exited the tavern, but the bullet only buzzed by Marley, already in motion. The bullet passed his cheek as he swung, sinking his ringed fist into the front of Guard One’s helmet. There was momentary resistance as the armor gave and snapped, followed by a meatier snap from within. He compressed the man’s face hard enough to dislodge an eye, shatter the nose, and crush the jaw. Guard One did something resembling a backwards somersault and landed under a table.

  As he retracted his arm, he noticed two things: first, Guard Two was raising the rifle to fire again, and second, two more soldiers were entering in through the front door. Marley grinned at Guard Three and Four wolfishly as they stormed in.

  Leaping over the bar and grabbing the barrel of the gun, Marley swung Guard Two into the entering soldiers. Guard Two screamed as Guard Three’s bayonet lodged in his back. The rifle flying free, spun in the air and Marley heard the sound of shattering glass.

  Through the windows and past the guards, Marley saw the Reverend walking away. Outside and above, a ladder fell from the sky beneath an enormous shadow.

  While Guards Two and Three tried to untangle themselves, Marley leaned past Guard Four’s barrel as it rose up, grabbing the man’s arm and twisting. At the same time, he spun to face the others. The man’s arm snapped and bent—a splitting branch. He finished Guard Four with an elbow to the chest, feeling a rib give.