by Glen Krisch
A knock came to the door. He thought it might be the officer telling him that the bathroom was off limits to him unless accompanied by a chaperone. Someone to hold back his hair as he vomited, making sure he didn't touch anything that might be evidence.
"Maury, I found something. Possibly a clue. Maury, are you okay?"
Carin didn't know what to think of it. It wasn't exactly evidence, she supposed. Could something be evidence if it was missing? Maybe the fact she didn't find Kevin's windbreaker only meant something to her. A mother-thing, a mother-clue. It wasn't on the back of his desk chair or in his closet. He had taken it with him. It could only mean that he had prepared his escape into the night and hadn't been stolen away by some vile beast.
"Maury?"
She waited at the bathroom door, her attending officer never more than a couple steps away.
"Ma'am, if you have any information, you should tell the investigators."
"It's nothing. I just didn't see my son's jacket. It's a red windbreaker."
The officer took a nub of pencil from his pocket and jotted something in a small black notebook. He didn't press her for anything more. He put away his notebook and looked quite bored. "I'll pass it on."
The door opened, and Maury stepped out. His face was blanched, his eyes watery. "Sorry. I… I don't know, I just didn't feel well."
"Kevin's windbreaker is gone."
"So? Perhaps it's in the living room." Maury immediately regretted the words. He didn't want to go back to search for the jacket. He wanted to go outside, even with the rain-soaked skies making it seem more like the middle of the night than dusk, he wanted to go outside and get some fresh air.
Carin spoke quietly, but excitedly, "Kevin knew. Somehow, he knew Mr. Freakshow would come for him."
"He could have seen something on T.V. about what happened at Lucidity."
"What exactly happened at the museum?"
Maury wasn't about to tell Carin that his mind was foggy and not so sharp because he had just lost his virginity, at thirty-five years old he had just slept with a dream-woman.
Oh yeah, Mr. Freakshow, your son's nightmare, tricked me into opening his enclosure. Now your son will most likely die a horrible death.
"Some kind of containment failure. Not sure yet. But that's not important right now. We need to find Kevin."
"If that's the case and it was on T.V., he didn't see it. We rented a movie. He went to bed right after." She approached an officer. "Can I pack a bag? I don't want to stay here. If anything, I'm getting a hotel room." The idea that her son was out there somewhere, aware enough to run from Mr. Freakshow, aware enough that he should fight for his life, brought her a strange sense of calm. For the time being, she buried any thoughts of her mother. It was cold of her to do, but Kevin still needed her. She couldn't be weak now.
"Just don't disturb anything. It looks cut and dry. Everything took place out in the living room. Nothing appears to be stolen…" the officer trailed off. He was going to carry on, Carin realized. Without thinking, the officer was going to say her mother's murder was routine. The look on his face said it all. The officers, all the investigators, they could all see the blood and gore spread throughout the living room and divine the killer's intentions, his motives. Just that quickly. They didn't know what they were getting themselves into. They weren't dealing with an ordinary sadistic killer. They were dealing with a nightmare.
Carin shook her head at the officer as she went to her room to gather a change of clothes. She had to be honest with herself. She wasn't going to rest until she found her son, and she was never coming back here again. This was the beginning of some kind of end game. A game in which she didn't know the rules.
She took her credit cards from the top drawer of her dresser and put them in her wallet. She saw Kevin's smiling face inside the bifold. His class picture from last year. It was the best picture she had of him. It showed his innocent eyes. His warm smile. As she slipped the picture from her wallet, she noticed her hands were shaking. She grabbed clothes at random from her dresser and tossed them into a gym bag. She took one last look at the room. Her cheerleading trophies were on a nearby shelf and she felt like she was robbing some girl's bedroom.
Maury leaned against the doorframe, watching her as she gathered her belongings. "Can you think of where he might be? A safe place he might go?" His cheeks had returned to their normal color, but he still looked nauseated.
"No. I don't. Kevin doesn't know the city. Well… maybe the park. He's played baseball a couple of blocks from here." She carried the gym bag as she walked by Maury. "This is the best picture of my son. I trust you can make copies?" She handed the picture to the officer who had given them the ride to her mother's house. He nodded grimly.
Carin continued down the hall, and using the gym bag to block her view of the living room, she left the house. She didn't wait for Maury. She ran through the rain and was inside her Explorer before Maury had even reached the front door. She turned on the engine and put the heat on high.
While she waited for Maury, she wondered why she was with him. Why would he want to help Carin? He had always struck her as odd. It wasn't just his appearance, his scars, his worn baseball cap. Maury seemed twitchy, like something was wriggling inside of him, trying to get loose, and he had to use all of his will just to suppress whatever it was.
She thought of the night she found Kevin outside the garage, in the throes of a terrifying dream. As she and her mother tried to calm him, Carin had noted the clutter on her father's workbench. Kevin had nailed wooden blocks together in peculiar formations. She first thought someone had desecrated her father's favorite place. The place where he had made toys and dollhouses for Carin and the bookshelves lining her bedroom walls. With Kevin's cries weakening, Carin had realized what he had been building in the middle of the night. The odd formations of wood blocks, in a crude way, reminded her of their old house.
If there was one place where Kevin would feel safe, it was their old house in Warren Cove. She felt an urgency to drive there as soon as possible. But Maury Bennett. Something just wasn't right.
Maury ran to the Explorer and waited outside the locked passenger door, getting wetter by the second, before Carin decided to unlock it.
"Sorry about that. My mind's elsewhere."
"Should we go to the park first?" Water dripped from his face.
"I have a better idea."
Their breath quickly clouded the windshield. She didn't know what bothered her about Maury, but if he could in some way help with Mr. Freakshow, she realized it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered to her anymore was the safety of her son.
"We're going to Warren Cove." She backed the Explorer onto the street, pausing after she shifted into drive. She looked at her childhood home, with the officers standing in her mother's front lawn, cupping their cigarettes from the rain, the investigators inside searching the living room's bloody carpet fibers for extraneous information. It was as if she was staring at a stranger's house.
They're having a block party.
The mingling policemen were partygoers and the investigators were the overworked hosts of the party, so busy that they didn't know what was going on. She drove away, certain she would never see her childhood home again.
That bitch-whore. Barring the door. Keeping him from entering her home. Mr. Freakshow was livid over what happened at Sophie Marigold's apartment. And the shear amount of dream energy the place contained. It had confused him, temporarily making him lose contact with the boy. He would definitely pay another visit to that bitch-whore's apartment.
Just as soon as--
Tires squealed from the street as a driver tried to control his fishtailing car in the rain. The car jumped the curb and was barreling down on Mr. Freakshow. The rain had chased away most of the pedestrians. He was alone on the sidewalk.
Leaping into the air, he ripped off his tan overcoat, exposing his limp wings. The car hurtled by below him, crashing into the brick wall of a bakery.
Blood filled his wings, and he swept through the air, cutting through the rain, feeling alive, alert, and oh so ready to kill.
He flew in a small arc, getting used to his wings in the human world. He landed on the hood of the car that had nearly splattered him. The car horn blared, and people from inside the bakery spilled out into the rain. One man held a cell phone to his ear. Another used his phone to snap photos of the wreck. As soon as they saw the Freak without pretense of disguise, with his clawed feet piercing the hood of the car, his wings fluttering behind him, they ran back into the building.
Mr. Freakshow jumped down to the sidewalk. The driver was bleeding from several wounds--his forehead, nose, mouth--and was holding a newspaper in his lap, trying to catch the blood before it could stain the car's interior.
The driver gave Mr. Freakshow a defensive smile. "It's a rental. I… I just want… I have to get my deposit back…" he said with a short laugh. A gob of blood burst from his ruined nose as he coughed, a blackish splatter hitting the steering wheel. Still, the horn blared.
"Don't worry about that deposit. I'm afraid it's lost already." Mr. Freakshow took hold of the driver's head, slamming it into the steering column. With the force of the blow, the man's face compressed the steering column and silenced the annoying horn.
The car's engine continued to sputter, stuck in idle, smashed against the brick wall of the bakery. Otherwise, the rainy dusk was peaceful. Blissfully quiet. The Freak leapt into the air, glancing over his shoulder at his glorious wings. He flexed the muscles in his back, pumping his wings, and gained distance from the ground, the rain beating down on his face, feeling cold against his deadman-blue skin. He flew higher; passing the roofs of buildings, passing the antennae towers and ventilation grates spilling plumes of white smoke to the sky.
Mr. Freakshow glided on the thermals given off by the humans. Their heat cast off like waste, like some kind of fecal matter. The limitless sky spread before him, an uncharted map for him to explore.
But the boy… How could he have forgotten the boy?
As he flew higher into the heavens, the rain freezing pinpricks into his skin, Mr. Freakshow reached out to Kevin. With the tenuous strand of energy connecting them, he reached out, finding a confused and addled mass of raw misery. Kevin was on the move again. He had been with Sophie, there was no doubt. But afterwards, when he left the old bitch-whore's welcoming embrace… ah, Mr. Freakshow knew the answer, his destination.
He changed directions, finding joy in every motion of his flight. He pumped his wings, launching toward the horizon, a pale blue streak. He knew where Kevin wanted to hide out, and he would make sure he was there when Kevin arrived.
Chapter 22
While Kevin was riding the greyhound to Warren Cove, and while his mother and Maury were driving to intercept him, the city of Chicago was suffering under the weight of uncertainty and fear.
A fender bender brought a section of mid afternoon traffic to a standstill as drivers gawked at a group of four dream-children flying through the concrete and steel skyscraper valleys, chasing one another in a spirited game of tag. Most people stared, some shouted. Even the policewoman directing traffic had to stop and stare at the sight. Drivers climbed from cars, shouting, taunting, soon punching and gouging. Anger welled to the brink of anarchy, then quickly flooded its banks…
A small percentage of the citizenry, bound to slip a bearing at the slightest provocation, took up arms against their fellow man. Shameful displays of violence and exploitation spread throughout the city. Humans attacking humans, using the dreams running amuck to leverage their own advantage. They raided, pilfered, smashed to bits convenience stores, pawn shops, delicatessens. Thieves were filmed in broad daylight by security and tourist cameras alike, carrying armloads of snack food, old worn guitars, foot-long hoagies, anything worth a penny's worth of their spite. These thieves, rioters, no-good, take-it-when-you-can-get-it parasites wore smiles, snubbed their noses at the confused and overworked police force.
The mayor--his beady eyes stinging with sweat, and sporting the expression of a querulous brat--read from a prepared statement during a press conference:
"As you already know, the city of Chicago has instituted a citywide 8 p.m. curfew. All businesses will be closed by the indicated time, including restaurants and taverns, and the streets will remain vacated until 4 a.m." The mayor stopped reading from the slip of paper and spoke directly to the camera, "Let me stress, this is a short term thing. Until we can assess the nature of this situation, until we can mobilize and stabilize this situation, it is in the best interest of the city to move forward in this fashion…"
The mayor mopped his brow with his omnipresent kerchief, and spoke to an advisor off to the side. He addressed the crowd of reporters again, the small conference room awash in cascading camera flashes, "Now, we have a job to do. I will speak again when we learn anything more." He bunched his lips in a way the seasoned reporters knew to be his punctuation at the end of a press conference. It meant, don't mess with me. You all love me because you know my name, you vote for me, even though I'm as charismatic as a weeklong flu.
He might have underestimated the reporters' vehemence on the subject. It's not every day a major city has dozens of embodied dreams wreaking havoc. They clamored after the mayor, even as he mopped his brow with his kerchief, sighing the sigh of relief of a man who doesn't feel comfortable speaking in public. Before he could reach the door of the conference room and the security blanket of his awaiting staff of advisors, one reporter's pleading questions rang truer and louder than all the others:
"Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor! Will this change how we live, as Chicagoans, can we expect this to change how others think of us?"
The mayor stopped in his tracks, without turning around, thinking about what the young reporter said. He turned and received a face full of flash bulbs. He waited for the room to quiet down. "What's your name, son?"
"Quentin de la Santa, sir."
"Mr. Santo… say, are you related to Ron? No? Well anyway, all I can say is we're working on it. We're setting up a communications network throughout the city… it'll be like a web. We'll have full-blown communications… I'm talking the police and fire departments, local F.B.I., neighborhood watch programs, everything, and we won't stop until this thing is contained. You want to know how this effects how others see us? I can't say for certain Mr. Santo, but I know Chicagoans. We work hard. We're blue collar people, and we do whatever it takes."
The mayor turned and exited into the arms of his advisors. The conference room erupted in shouts and flashbulbs. The room quickly cleared, and the reporters took to the street, intent on making or maintaining their status in the local and national media. They took to the streets ready to cover one of the most unimaginable and perplexing stories anyone could ever remember.
The mayor called upon the chief of police who called upon all of his reserve officers… no one was permitted even an hour off from work. The overtime budget was thrown out the window. Shortly after the press conference, the mayor received a phone call on a secure line. The president's dry tone was a welcome sound. The mayor was assured of national resources to help clear up the mayor's little local problem.
The hub of the communication network was a hastily thrown together office in a closed down cooling shelter. During the wicked heat of summer, the large, open ground floor of the centrally located office building had been a place for people to recoup from the draining summer sun. The ground floor was vacated a week prior, the worst of the heat gone for the year. In no time at all, the dimly lit vastness of the space was buzzing with people trying to figure out this little local problem.
All they had to do was figure out how the dreams could have escaped in the first place, and figure out who was responsible. A couple of names surfaced in their initial investigations as possible people of interest: a local businessman named Nolan Gage, and a psychiatrist named Maury Bennett. An extensively detailed list of the dreams, including their descriptions and tende
ncies, was circulating throughout the police force and other law enforcement assets.
A handful of dream-creatures had already been rounded up, and were being held in secure cells under armed guard. No one knew what they would do with the dream-creatures once they had them all in custody, but they agreed they could worry about that later.
One of the mayor's first actions was to set up an information hotline. The city officials permitted anonymity, but that didn't prevent them from secretly logging and tracing the calls. Two long conference tables were set up with a bank of phones to sift through the distressed calls. As far as anyone knew, the situation was limited to the heart of the city. Public service announcements had gone out almost immediately to the television stations, newspapers and any other news outlet.
Initially, it seemed like everything was under control. There were FBI representatives, the highest police officials, and the mayor himself had a cubicle off to one side. The spindly threads of order were torn apart within a few hours. A bright flash illuminated the street side of the office as a Molotov cocktail smashed just above the window frame.
"What in the world?" The police chief, a man who regularly wondered why he took the position when it was offered to him earlier in the year (his gout was no good, and his feet swelled, and God damn it, he wanted to see Disney World before he died for Christ's sake), the police chief could only stare out the window at the mounting chaos outside.
"Maybe… how do we get the national guard in here?" a slightly less gray-haired policeman asked, a man waiting in line for the top spot.