by Lee, Edward
“A singer, I think,” she replied from the round hole in her red-polyester anti-hairfall pullovers. “The name’s familiar from college. Some singer who killed himself…or, maybe it was a sports star. Not sure. Some basketball player at Maryland, maybe?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What is that you’re—”
Cordesman’s upraised palm cut her off. He was reading with an intentness that was desperate. Locke’s a poet, his poetry is his guts.
EXIT by R. Locke
Low moon above the state house
smiles wanly as the pallid
light of rage.
When I close my eyes
I think I can see you
shredding every page
of the paper of my heart.
Yes, I can see you
tear it all apart.
I can see you gut the animals,
smash amethyst and silver chain
to bury me in this sepulcher
of extraordinary pain.
Reaper, reap! Confessor, save me!
And pluck me up into your arms above,
or you can leave me here on Pike Street
—to rot—dying of providence,
dying of love.
So there’s little else left
for me to misconstrue—
just the dying of memory.
I’m dying of you.
“Captain?”
Cordesman looked over, an ash falling off the Camel in his lips. “What?”
Brock looked preposterous in her red overalls, especially when she was mad. “What do you mean, what? Locke’s bed has the same red feem pubes we’ve found on every other 64 site? No offense, Captain, but are you dense?”
“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’m reading poetry.”
Here was another one with the same title, “Exit.”
EXIT
Cenote or ziggurat,
so shall it be
to end this riven hatred
which beckons me
like torture into
the Light of the past.
The dreams of some are
the nightmares of others:
blessings assigned
or black lots cast
in the most retched adieu…
I glimpsed the Light,
the Light went out.
All my dreams came true.
“Not too bad,” Cordesman whispered to himself.
“What, Captain?”
“Nothing!” he turned around and shouted. “What? You need me to hold your hand and tell you what to do? You’re the Big Tech Boss, so do your tech shit and report to me when you have something. I’m busy!”
“That guy’s an asshole,” somebody said. “I don’t care if he’s a captain with more raps than anyone in the department’s history. I’ll give him a wood shampoo, the prick.”
“Who said that?” Cordesman bellowed. He stamped out into the middle of the room. The problem with these TSD people was they weren’t technically sworn cops—they were just civilian subcontractors—hence not subject to the orders of actual department officers. “You tech punks ain’t worth dick, just a bunch of union talk. Whoever said that, I’ll bet’cha ain’t got the nuts to say so.”
Another figure in red utilities stood up without hesitation, and glared at Cordesman through a thick beard.
His voice cracked like dropped trees. “I said it.”
Cordesman winced. The guy stood six-nine, probably two-ninety, with arms thicker than Cordesman’s legs. “Oh. A lot of Wheaties, huh?”
“Hey, I’ve got offers from Tacoma and Kirkland for more money, so write me up, you pencil-neck. I’ll clean your clock, I don’t give a shit. Ms. Brock deserves some respect. I’ll tie your hippie hair to the back of my El Dorado and foot it down I-5.”
Then more guys stood up, just like at the church.
“Hey, Jill, you wanna call off your wrecking crew? Christ.”
“R.A., get back to work, please.” Brock stepped carefully through the bedroom. “Captain, we’ve got hairfall linking Richard Locke to sixteen 64s. I don’t think I’m out of line in asking what you make of the landfill of evidence me and my people have dumped on your head. If Richard Locke isn’t the murderer, then he’s at the very least an accomplice.”
“Locke didn’t kill anybody—”
“How can you say that!”
Cordesman lit another Camel, hoping Brock would bitch about smoking on her crime scene. Well, it wasn’t really a crime scene, just a scene. “You wanna know how, Jill? I can tell by his aura. He’s not a killer—that’s right, I said aura. So put that in your mass-photo-spectrometer and smoke it.” He glared at her. “Tell me something I can use, or don’t bother me till you can.”
Brock gaped. “Auras, huh?”
“That’s right. Locke has a hazy one, no color, really—it’s rare, but they’re the easier to read.”
Brock’s shoulders slumped, a Sirchie UV sensor in her gloved hand. “Where’s Kerr?”
“Waking people up under bridges, showing them mugshots. Probably also eating fish & chips.”
“Why don’t you, uh, call him, let him take over so you can go home and…get some rest.”
She thinks I’ve lost my oars. That had always been a problem. Cordesman worked better alone because then there was never anyone trying to decrypt him. Any time he got a partner, it wasn’t long after that people started giving him long looks.
“Then will you at least put an all-points out on Locke?” Brock huffed.
“Locke’s not in the city.” Cordesman’s gut told him; it was only wrong when it came to baseball. All the while, the report he’d read at Fredrick’s office kept flushing in and out of his head. Cordesman didn’t believe it, but—
The oldest mythology, one that predated written record. Pre-Adamics. A handful of angelic heirarchs who didn’t buy Lucifer’s pitch…and slipped out between the ethereal cracks. But they were still in hell so they infused their own phony mythology to coerce the peasants of the earth to resurrect them, to…incarnate them.
Sciftan.
Shifters.
Parahuman entities with the power to turn the fantasies of humankind—and the fears—into a reality.
But there was more:
The most powerful of such entities was named after the only river through Hades, the river of oblivion, of forgetfulness.
The River Lethe.
Once the closest confidantes of Lucifer, they opted out—just as Lucifer had to God—and had used the gullibility of mankind to bring him unto the earth.
But not just the monster named for the river. Others too. A handful whom Lethe himself had scourged the earth to wipe out. And he did.
All but one…
His love, Cordesman thought, upon reading all of Locke’s poetry about the same topic: love, and the failure thereof. Like Satan abandoning God, Lethe had abandoned Satan, cheating the Lord of the Air out of his own curse. He’d stalked the earth, inventing the fears which would plague man forever. Until…
Until what? Cordesman entertained.
There must be a final confrontation, and this one had been waiting to happen for fifty centuries. Perhaps it would wait fifty more. But even Cordesman knew—in the guise of the myth—what the confrontation must entail. The Prince of Oblivion had spent the entirety of at least five thousand years hunting down his own kind. But there was one he couldn’t slay and send back to hell.
The last fallen angel.
This flawed deity had no name according to the references of Hadrian’s archives. Only that she was the most beautiful woman that a human mind could conceive. Coincidentally, a woman with red hair. The Prince of the River had fallen in love with her, but there was a problem.
This deity, this angel, had slithered between the gaps of even the fingers of God. The evil that Satan’s masses had bound allegiance to was rejected by the same angel.
Sciftan, Cordesman thought. Shifter.
The trans
lation was sketchy, because the translation pre-dated human language. All that the miners of history had to go by—such as men like Fredrick—were decipherments based on second-hand translations from the linguists of the Roman emperor who had decreed an end to further imperialism—hence Hadrian’s Wall.
“But there’s no blood here,” Jill Brock informed, to fracture Cordesman’s thoughts.
“What?”
“There’s no blood anywhere in the apartment, which might support your insistence that the only identifiable link to the murders is possessed of some divergence,” Brock finished.
Cordesman didn’t care what she thought. Locke wasn’t the killer, there must be something else to explain the hairs in his bed. Cordesman couldn’t explain it even to himself, but that had happened quite a bit in his past. What it all boiled down to was following the hunch.
And if there was anything better than his conviction record it was his hunch record.
“What did that college professor tell you?” Brock asked. “The one who got tagged by your MAC search?”
“Vampires,” Cordesman said, looking at more of Locke’s scrap-paper rough drafts. He rewrote a lot.
“Pardon me?”
VAMPIRE by Richard Locke
All that I’m waiting for is
to be sucked and drained
to exorcise this pain, my
Clare.
My heart is a monster in bright white,
and I can see it in the mirror’s light
to show me the mythic beasts that
transpire.
All of love, and all of fondness—
sucking my blood.
A vampire.
“They were vampires, Jill.”
The room hushed.
“Captain, have you been drinking?”
Cordesman hadn’t consumed alcohol since August, 1991. He’d cut it loose like an evil siamese twin, had dropped that brother into the shredder without a tear. Sure, once in a blue moon he missed that first hit of Fiddich or Maker’s Mark, and its luscious spread of heat in the gut. Good, yes, but not good enough to sell his soul for.
A drone filled his head, something reminiscent to a clattery machine-sound in an airy warehouse.
“Vampires but not vampires,” he said, staring at the limp sheet of paper. “They created our deepest fears and then turned them—shifted them—in our minds. They’re devils older than…deviltry.”
Brock gaped at him.
More of Fredrick’s report surfaced into the detective’s contemplations, while he himself kept his eyes on the title of the poem he held between his fingers.
“They invented every myth, Jill. They created the things that scared us down to our most primordial genes. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts… It was all manufactured by the oldest devils.”
“Captain,” Brock cited, “I think you’re having some kind of retrograde flashback. I don’t have the authority to relieve you of duty, but, as a friend, I think I can suggest that you seek some kind of substance-abuse ther—”
Cordesman didn’t hear her. And even if he did, he could get his job back in Ann Arundel County in a heartbeat. Maryland was dying for investigators with high arrest/conviction rates. Shit, look at the murder rates there compared to here…
No, Locke wasn’t around, he wasn’t in the city. Cordesman knew the vibe. Now I gotta find the guy, he thought. He’d dropped Locke’s last poem, turned to face Brock but had then seen something on a tall dresser—
The Prince of the River of Oblivion, he thought. The Prince of the only river in Hell.
The River Lethe…
What he’d seen, and picked up off the dresser, was a spartan business card which read:
A. Lethe
Todesfall Rd.
North Bend, WA
888-0776
“Jill,” he said, walking out. “You’re cool, a good ev-chief, maybe the best I’ve worked with.”
“Captain, what are you—”
“Tell Kerr I’ll write him up for his step-raise, will ya? And do me a favor—tell the North Preek D.C. that I’ve resigned. I gotta get out of here.”
“Captain! You can’t—”
Yes, he could. Cordesman didn’t care. Murder was relative; in fact it was often all too easy to solve. But this was more than murder. It was something intricate and rich, something cabalistic. Follow your gut, Cordesman reminded himself. The vibes were whispering to him. And for now…
He had some driving to do.
(ii)
“Welcome to the interstice.”
Lethe looked at Locke from the end of the long hall. Light which wavered scarlet seemed to stand atop the tall man’s head. “Do come in, Mr., Locke,” Lethe intoned. The words echoed like rocks bounced against the high walls. “I thought you’d be easy, but you weren’t—and that delights me. Too often, it’s the opposite.”
Locke walked forward, back into the dining room in which he’d sat earlier. The same room, yes, but not the same. Instead of classy coats-of-arms, original oil paintings, and flats of rare Meissen ware, the room extended as a plane of gray dust. Something more like bloodless human skin adorned the walls instead of the fancy paneling and wallpaper. And the skin was going gangrenous.
“Enlightenment. Accentuation. Paramount properties of human desire, correct?” Lethe intoned.
Locke wasn’t afraid, even after all he’d seen on his way here…and even in knowing that it was all real. Real in some other facet of reality.
But what did Lethe mean?
“Enlighten me,” Locke said. “Cos I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Oh, please. Tell me I’m wrong. Your pitiable horde of mankind, trudging without end in its desultory plight. Where is the difference between expectation and hope? Is there a difference?”
Locke looked upon the malefactor through thinned eyes. “Tell me more. I’m stupid today.”
“Hey!”
Locke nearly shrieked, an arm grabbed him aside, and the face grinning into his was Martin’s, the tattooed and ring-pierced chest all asweat. He remained naked, save for his bloody Keds. The drooping genitals glittered in their chrome-studded gore, Locke was at least attentive enough to note. And he noted something else: two inch-long fangs sprouted from the painter’s grin.
“You don’t look so hot,” Martin observed. “Here, man, have one of these. Real tasty, it’ll perk ya up.” He slapped something thin and wet into Locke’s hand.
A small severed breast.
Locke looked at it, then flung the thing away. “I’m not afraid.”
“But it’s real,” Lethe said. “You know that now.”
“Yeah, I know. But that’s not what this is about.”
Lethe’s eyes were lime-green. He grinned through fangs similar to Martin’s only they were longer.
“And I also know this,” Locke challenged. “You’re not a vampire.”
A blink-like flash, and Lethe grinned without the green eyes or the fangs. “There are many layers to truth, Mr. Locke, and many doors to perception. But the means to swing those doors open are precious few. You’ve found one of those ways, and I commend you. Perhaps we’ll talk at greater length later.” Lethe turned in his fine suit, but came to a sudden halt. Without refacing Locke, he said, “And you’re quite right. I’m not a vampire… But Martin is.”
Lethe left the dust-plagued room.
“Deal with it,” Martin said through his drooling, fanged grin.
(iii)
Enlightenment, accentuations. What the malefactor accuses mankind of, so too is he guilty, and I.
Moreso.
Faith is truth. Truth is power. That which allows me to prowl for my instinct. But for Locke? Only the veil of dreams.
My enemy’s strength trebles mine. I know that. I’m just a better hider.
I hide in your brain. I hide in your hatred. I hide in the shadows under your bed.
Why do I do this?
Because you let me.
««�
��»»
Carry me away…
A line from one of Locke’s poems? A line from the pen of every poet to ever walk the face of the earth? I guess I’m selfish, because I don’t care.
And I guess I know what’s happening now…
But I don’t care.
(iv)
Locke thought of more doors opening but to what, he wasn’t sure. Martin had flecks of what appeared to be blood clots on the tips of his fangs, and clots of even less savory things smudging the sharpened edges of the chrome rings hooked into his penis. Locke felt a pang of jealousy—not that Martin could be a better artist but that he had, well, a bigger dick.
At least mine’s not full of fishing tackle, Locke thought.
“Where’s your faith now, poet?” Martin asked. “I’m immortal.”