by Justin Bloch
Things leveled off, however, and then began to cool. Leo liked to work alone and spent more time on solitary walks down the beach, looking for driftwood he could shape into sculpture. Carli never seemed to be able to find the right opportunity to bring up the discussion they’d had in early-July about moving in together when they returned to Philadelphia. By the end of the summer they were more like good friends than lovers, the passion that had burned between them faded like a photograph left to lie in the sun. When the new school year began, they saw less and less of each other until being together felt more awkward than intimate. Carli started dating again, heard that Leo was seeing some painter, and that was the end of it.
She had never been able to understand exactly what had happened, how they had drifted apart so completely. Leo had been the single love of her life, the only person with whom she’d ever felt a real connection. She still kept the love letters he had sent, tied in a neat bundle at the back of her nightstand drawer.
She lived in Center City in a comfortable apartment just off Broad Street, not far from the accounting firm where she worked. Ever since a class trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art during her sophomore year of high school, she’d been entranced by the city, by the mix of classic and modern architecture, the street-side seafood in Chinatown, the murals covering the walls of buildings. She’d based her decision to attend college there on that trip, and just after things ended with Leo, she made a business contact that secured her an internship at the firm that she’d eventually parlayed into her current job. She had a talent with numbers and had progressed steadily up through the ranks of the company since she’d joined, her salary climbing with each step. She was respected at work by both her bosses and coworkers and she liked what she did, enjoyed the puzzle of numbers, the crisp, undeniable results.
She was walking home from work now, a rare Saturday shift to help catch up on an account. She valued her weekends but had volunteered to come in: she was up for another promotion soon. The sky was clear, lit royal purple by the sunset and the city lights.
On an impulse, she detoured down South Street, heading toward a favorite bar. She’d had a stressful week at work and thought she deserved an evening out. The streets were thronged with people pushing past each other and cars waiting in thick lines with their bass turned loud. Guys catcalled from open car windows and women giggled and kept walking or fired back retorts. Completely different genres of music blared out of the bars and mixed in the street like a weekend dinner made from the week’s assorted leftovers. Half-hidden in shadow down an alley, against a wall, a man and woman kissed like they were competing with each other. Carli stood and watched unnoticed, the crowds swirling by her. After a moment she moved on, began to pick out faces and play her instant history game, creating life stories for strangers.
Here was a girl whose boyfriend had just asked her to marry him, getting down on one knee and offering her his love and devotion and a gorgeous ring. Her name was Ivy and she drove a blue Ford Taurus and when she was twelve, she had refused to leave her burning house until she’d found and saved her dog Muskrat.
There was a woman named Joanna who worked as a rodeo clown in Cowtown, New Jersey. She had read every Charles Dickens book and had written some of the most beautiful love poems ever penned in her secret journal, which she would never, ever show to anyone.
Here was a man who was an accomplished jewel thief and had stolen over five million dollars worth of precious gems in the past three years. He fancied himself a pagan and could put both of his legs behind his head, provided he had stretched and drank copiously beforehand.
The faces floated by, materializing out of the crowd, and she gave them lives and shaped them. People she knew had tried to convince her to write her histories down, that she would make an amazing writer, but she dismissed the idea. Books were heavy, detailed monstrosities, filled with thousands of little complexities, and she produced only fragments of people before her attention wandered.
She ducked into the bar, just off the chaos of South Street, a little dive with poor lighting and cheap, strong drinks. The place was crowded with people jostling back and forth in the dim, narrow room, shooting pool, shouting above the din of the music. Behind the bar, the bottles of liquor sat on shelves that sagged in the middle, lit from beneath like horror movie monsters. The sound of beer bottles being pitched into the trash echoed the tolling of poorly-made bells.
Carli pushed her way to the bar and ordered a Seven and Seven, dropped a few bills on the bar when the drink came and turned to scan the faces around her, sipping her drink. The couple grinding on the street had left her lonely.
She picked out two guys in the tightly packed bar, considered them both for several moments. One was dark haired and sitting at the end of the bar by himself, the other blond and surrounded by a small group of friends. Her mind created.
The dark haired one had five cats and had built and flown model airplanes when he was a kid. His name was Ivan and he visited his sick grandmother in the nursing home every Saturday and had a collection of one hundred and twenty-one pornographic video tapes.
The blond one was Colin, a geophysicist who attended church every Sunday morning. He washed his hands nineteen times a day and had once had an exhibition of his paintings shown in a gallery in New York City.
She deliberated carefully and decided on Ivan. Though she’d always held a soft spot in her heart for an artistic man, she adored a cat lover, and the thing about his grandmother was sweet.
She caught her target’s attention and made eyes at him from across the bar as she finished her drink. She wove her way down and pushed into the tight space between him and the guy he was sitting next to, pressed her breasts against his arm to make sure she had his attention. She smiled at him and brushed some hair back from her face, looking at him through long eyelashes.
“Buy me a drink, Ivan?” she asked, leaning close.
He gave her an incredulous look. “I’m sorry, I think you’ve got me confused with someone else. My name’s Ray,” he shouted.
“No, you’re definitely who I’m looking for.” She pushed tighter against him, pretending that she was bumped from behind, and she caught his eyes flicking down to her chest as it swelled upward. She was coming on strong, and she knew that it was a risk, that it sometimes frightened men away, but she couldn’t help herself. Now that she was talking to him, she couldn’t imagine going home without him.
He smiled up at her, showing a row of straight white teeth. She noticed that he had the most interesting eyes, a shade of pale gray she’d never seen before. “What are you drinking?” he asked, motioning to the bartender.
“Seven and Seven,” she replied. When it came and she had taken a long drink, she kissed him on the cheek. She could feel the liquor beginning to warm her body, loosening her muscles. “Thanks,” she yelled. “I’m Carli.”
They chitchatted above the din of the music for a few minutes, flirting, drinking, sizing each other up. She touched him often, steered the situation in the direction she wanted it to go. She’d lost track of how many drinks she’d gone through, and the fog rolling through her mind didn’t make it any easier to tally. It occurred to her that she had skipped dinner this evening as she struggled to get out of work, but it was too late to worry about that now.
She kissed the gray-eyed man full on the mouth, surprising herself. She felt out of control, yanked along by a rope she didn’t even know had been looped around her waist, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. She pulled back and gestured for the bartender. He refilled her drink and she took a gulp of it. She kissed Ivan again, then slapped him playfully on the cheek and looked affronted. “You don’t even know me,” she said.
“Why don’t we get to know each other better then?” he asked.
The line was corny, awful, but it was what Carli was waiting for. She leaned close to his ear, inhaling subtle cologne. “Let’s go to the bathroom,” she whispered.
His grin grew wide, exposing his tee
th again. She finished her drink, took him by the hand and led him back to the bathrooms, both single occupancy. One was empty and she pulled him in behind her, shot the bolt and pounced on him. The bathroom was small, little more than a toilet, sink, and large, scratched mirror with a fluorescent light flickering overhead. The soap dispenser drizzled pink goop onto the countertop, and the trashcan overflowed with used paper towels.
They kissed, their mouths smashed together, hands everywhere. He lifted her shirt over her head in one deft motion and cupped her breasts. She moaned, arched her back, and he flicked a fingertip over one nipple, sending shivers through her body. She began grinding against him, wondered if anyone had ever had sex in this bathroom before or if she was the first. The possibility thrilled her, and she raked her nails down his back, sucked his earlobe. He began kissing her neck, and she fumbled at his belt, at the catch on his pants, got them open, pushed them off his slim hips.
He tilted her head back suddenly and bit her throat. His lips squeezed tight to her skin, and she felt a dizzying pull as he sucked at the wound. She cried out, jerked away from him, swiped at her neck and came away with a bloody hand. Terror clawed at her and she scrambled for the bolt, frantic to free herself from the bathroom. He laughed, his white teeth rimmed with red, slapped her hands away, threw her away from the door. She caught her forehead on the sharp edge of the paper towel dispenser, tangled herself and crumpled to the floor between the wall and the toilet, blood blotting her vision. He descended on her, pinned her arms, put sharp teeth to throat and tore. She screamed, struggled, kicked at the door over and over.
In the bar, the pounding vanished beneath the music, and no one knew Carli Barker was dying.
Chapter VIII
They ran, the karma policeman leading with the Cipher just behind. Sol’s long jacket flowed behind him like a matador’s cape, and Nathaniel trained his eye on it so that he wouldn’t focus on how close, or far, the forest was. He was in decent shape, but his heartbeat was persistent and heavy in his ears and he could feel his stamina waning. Beads of sweat gathered at his hairline, swelled and slipped down his forehead, but he only wiped them away when they threatened his eyes. Sol was setting a furious pace, giving Nathaniel no choice but to keep up.
The ground flattened out as they neared the borders of the Elysian Fields and the grass grew shorter, as it had in the ring valley of Limbo. The trees loomed up in front of them, scraping the clouds, giant redwoods and pines. Sol did not slow their frantic pace until they had actually passed into the forest, where the temperature dropped ten degrees instantly. When they came to a small clearing Nathaniel halted and bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, his shirt plastered to his back. The policeman whirled around, kicking through the bushes surrounding the clearing until he found a long, thick stick. He drew a circle in the powdery dirt and then stood inside it, evaluating.
“Come on, quickly,” he barked, motioning for Nathaniel to join him within the circle.
Nathaniel stepped inside and Sol grasped him by the wrist as he had in Nathaniel’s apartment, ages ago, eons ago now. The cop was quiet, his eyes closed, and Nathaniel felt the power build, felt the world going shimmery and thin. The first surge was gigantic, and Nathaniel felt his heart hesitate in its frenzied recovery rhythm; the pause before the second pulse was miniscule. Nathaniel felt himself dislodge from the world beside his own. The void swelled up around him, blacking out all of existence save himself, and he drifted, and then there was wind on his face. A tiny dot of light in front of him expanded and then he was in the shelter space once more, the colors dazzling, and he turned and looked at Sol. Nathaniel marveled at the fact that the seraph was able to keep such power inside when not in the shelter space. It was still frightening, that power, but knowing that it was Sol in control of it assuaged some of his fears. He worried more for those that Sol turned it against.
They were moving much faster this time, the iridescent clouds flashing past too quickly to appreciate. The edge of the shelter space shot past in a few short moments, and the seraph faded away. Nathaniel noticed a subtle change in the environment, more intuited than felt, and then there was substance beneath his feet and the world, his own world, became around him as if a drape had suddenly been yanked away from a window to illuminate the unseen contents of a pitch black room.
Night, and the sounds of a city. Car horns blared and engines rumbled and subway trains thundered by underground, shaking the earth. The roads were lit by cones of light from the yellow glare of sodium-arc streetlamps, but reds and blues stuttered against the walls of the buildings, the characteristic spin of police lights. They were in an alley, Nathaniel doubled over, clutching his stomach, Sol beside him, his foot tapping impatiently on the filthy asphalt.
After a few moments, Nathaniel straightened up and wobbled to the end of the alley, peeked at the commotion half a block down. Uniformed officers milled around outside a bar, talking to civilians who stood with their arms wrapped around their chests and shifted their weight from foot to foot. They had the frightened eyes of cornered prey and shot nervous glances over their shoulders.
And they were all glowing.
Each person Nathaniel could see was surrounded by a faint outline of color, each unique from the others. He watched as one of the cops, his color the exact blue of his uniform, crossed the street and offered a crying girl a handkerchief. The blue faded slowly to a leafy green. Other people’s colors changed too as they moved and interacted. Nathaniel watched transfixed for a few moments before he sensed Sol standing beside him, observing the crowd.
“All the people have colors,” he whispered in wonder.
“Karmic auras. All Residents have them. They respond to an individual’s karma.” He glanced at him, then back down the street. “Your abilities are beginning to manifest themselves.”
“Why? Why now?”
The karma policeman’s face was set in grim determination. “Because things are coming to a head, I think.”
Nathaniel swallowed, nodded. “Where are we?”
“Philadelphia. The Allamagoosalum killed someone in that bar,” he said, pointing. “We’re going to investigate.”
“What about the cops? They’re not going to just let us walk right in to a crime scene.”
“They won’t even notice us unless we want them to. And they won’t find anything anyway. Come on.” He stepped out of the shadows of the alley and began to walk toward the bar. His heels clicked loudly on the pavement. Nathaniel followed. “The Allamagoosalum may still be here, in the crowd somewhere. I want you to observe everyone out here while I start asking questions inside, see if you notice anyone out of the ordinary. It won’t have an aura like everyone else.”
“What do I do if I see it?” Nathaniel asked, eyeing the crowd half-heartedly. He wasn’t sure whether spotting the Allamagoosalum would be a good thing or not.
“Let me know right away. But discreetly. We don’t want it to know it’s been sighted.” They reached the yellow police tape and ducked under it, walked to the front of the bar. It was empty save for a few cops gathered inside, poking around. They had brought spotlights with them, and the interior was lit like a night game at a ballpark. “Wait here,” Sol said.
Nathaniel watched him through the plate glass window for a moment, then turned to look at the crowd. Each person moved in an envelope of color and Nathaniel had made three passes before he finally picked out the lone figure who stood without an aura. He was in his mid-thirties, hulking and thick with broad shoulders and dark skin and a black ruff of beard and mustache. He watched everything that went on within the police tape with an avid interest, ignorant of Nathaniel’s stares. His black suit was stylish, expertly tailored, and he wore a rakish panama hat perched on his head. Nathaniel turned and knocked a knuckle lightly against the bar’s front window, then flicked his head toward the street when he caught the karma policeman’s attention.
Sol spoke a few words to the cop he had been talking to, then left the
bar and stood beside Nathaniel, both facing the window. The cops inside the bar moved around busily, uselessly. “What is it? Is it still here?”
“Maybe. There’s a guy standing in doorway of the third building down from the intersection. Just standing there in the shadows.”
“And he doesn’t have an aura?” the karma policeman asked, his soft voice tinged with hope.
“No.”
Sol stood silent for a moment, then turned, searching the crowd. After a moment, he muttered, “Oh, him,” in a slightly disappointed voice and started off in the stranger’s direction.
Nathaniel trailed behind, confused. Sol dipped under the police tape, wove through the crowd and up the steps to the doorway of what turned out to be a hair salon.
“What are you doing here?” Sol asked.
The man shrugged his shoulders and nodded across the street. Up close, Nathaniel could smell his cologne, something light and expensive. “Only the fifth Allamagoosalum of all time. I wouldn’t miss one of its attacks,” he said, craning his neck for a better look. He spoke with an African accent. “Find anything?”
“No, no one saw or noticed anything. The bartender remembers the victim sitting at the end of the bar and downing a few drinks, but he says he’s pretty sure she was alone. The police know it was the serial killer, but that’s all they know.”
“I expected nothing more,” smiled the stranger, dusting some fuzz from one shoulder of his suit coat. His eyes caught the light from the streetlamp and twinkled.