The Syndrome

by John Case

  After a few minutes, she couldn’t stand the cold any longer. Returning inside, she got down to business. The apartment was depressing; its untidiness seemed in some way disrespectful to Nikki. She was going to have to clean this up some day and she thought it might make her feel better to do it now. The refrigerator was a mess, reeking of sour milk and some fishy remains in Chinese take-out cartons. There were orange peels with puckered skins, and yogurt containers bristling with a sort of fur. She swept it all into a green garbage bag, and carried it out to the trash compactor in the hall. Then she went from room to room with a spray bottle of Fantastik and a roll of paper towels, wiping the dust from tables and counters. That done, she gritted her teeth and went into the bathroom—which the police had left in a mess. Fingerprint powder was everywhere because, as the police had explained, until her sister’s death was ruled a suicide, the crime scene had to be treated as if a murder had occurred.

  The plants on the balcony were dead but Adrienne didn’t have the energy to drag them to the trash room. So she did the next best thing, compacting them into a corner of the terrace, where they looked neat, at least.

  Which left the gun. She’d been thinking a lot about the gun. If Nikki herself had bought it, where and when? Maybe it could be traced. There must be a serial number or something. Crossing the room to her sister’s closet, she opened the door and reached inside for the lime-green carrying case.

  But it wasn’t there.

  At first she thought she’d forgotten where it had been. Lifting the bed skirt on her sister’s bed she looked on the floor and saw… a tangle of dust bunnies and a couple of paperbacks. Getting back to her feet, she went into the hall and looked through the closet there, then into the living room and under the couches, searching everywhere. But it was gone. It was big and green and you couldn’t miss it… and now it was gone.

  Or what was more to the point: it was stolen. As much as she hated the idea of dealing with the gun, the notion that someone had come into Nikki’s apartment and taken it… that gave her the creeps.

  It was like what happened in Duran’s apartment, when Bonilla’s body disappeared.

  It made everything seem precarious and insubstantial, a kind of existential first draft subject to constant, but invisible amendment. It made her queasy to think about it, as if her mind—her world—was a staging area for someone else’s possibilities.

  Ramon reminded her about the mail (which in fact, she’d left upstairs), and then, when she came back down, waved her on her way. She thought about going to her own apartment, if only to pick up Nikki’s ashes, but decided it was just too dangerous. In the end, she got back to Bethany just after six.

  Duran was in a good mood. She told him about cleaning Nikki’s apartment and the rifle’s disappearance, but not about her meeting with Slough. She sent him to the supermarket for a prepackaged salad and some Paul Newman dressing. They cooked the steaks out back on a Weber Grill, and opened the bottle of Glass Mountain Cabernet that he’d bought earlier in the day.

  He was in an expansive mood, looking forward to the answers that the operation must certainly provide. And he’d had an insight: for as long as he could remember, he’d felt uncomfortable whenever he left his apartment. He told her about the panic attacks that he’d suffered, and the agoraphobia he sometimes felt. “It’s gone, now,” he said. “It hasn’t been there for days—not since we went to the Comfort Inn.”

  “And what do you think that’s all about?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. But you saw all that stuff in the apartment next door, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Well,” he asked, “what if that was having… I don’t know… some kind of effect on me?”

  She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I just know that I feel a lot different. Better. More myself.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, but couldn’t resist: “And that would be… ?”

  Duran smiled. “Whomever.”

  She was in bed when she heard it, and it was amazing that she did. If the sea had not been so calm and flat, the sound of the surf would have masked it. But the night was breathless, the sea inert, and she was restless and half-awake, her mind at the races.

  The sound that woke her—a faint but distinct metallic squeak—seemed to rise through the floorboards. And for some reason, it alarmed her. Someone’s under the bed, she thought. But, no, that was crazy. Lying there in the dark, unmoving, yet straining to hear, she realized that the sound had come from farther away. Someone’s in the basement.

  Then a long time passed—a minute or two—when nothing could be heard. She’d almost decided that she was imagining things when, suddenly, she realized that someone was standing outside her bedroom door. How she knew this, she couldn’t have said. There wasn’t any sound. There was nothing with the light. It was just… a fact.

  And then the door was opening. She kept her eyes closed, but she could feel the other person watching her. Duran? Had to be. And yet, it didn’t feel like Duran. She’d just had dinner with him, and whatever else you might say about the guy, this wasn’t his style at all. It was someone else. But who?

  What seemed like a long time passed—though she had no way of knowing if it was one minute or five. She thought she heard another sound—not from the door, but from the basement again. Was she hallucinating? Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever… It was driving her crazy to stay so still. And yet… it was her only advantage—the secret that she was awake.

  After a while, she slotted her eyes in a glance, fluttering her lashes in a semblance of REM sleep. The look revealed a slash of light where the door met the jamb, and a backlit shoulder. Then the door eased shut with a whispered snickkk and the light was gone.

  And that was it. She could hear the sea, the listless thudding of the surf. She could even hear the distant thrum of traffic from the A-1, six blocks away. She listened for footsteps in the house, for sounds from the basement, for the sound of the front door closing. But there was nothing, just the white noise of the surf and distant traffic. She might just as easily have been in a sealed vault.

  So she lay there, watching the minutes tick by on the luminous dial of her bedside clock. Finally, when six minutes had passed, she heard the faintest crunch of gravel from outside the window. Getting to her feet, she ran to the window, inserted a finger between the flexible slats of the blinds, and peered out toward the sound that she’d heard.

  It was coming from up the block. Footsteps on the gravelly walk. The thunk of a car door. And an engine, growling to life. Straining her eyes to peer through the watery moonlight, she saw the glint of metal as a car ghosted around the corner of the alley and disappeared.

  “D’you hear something?”

  She turned like a dervish, startled to see Duran standing in the doorway to her bedroom. He was barefoot and looked sleepy, although she noticed that he was dressed.

  “There was someone here,” she said.

  “In the house?”

  “In the basement,” she told him. “And then in the house. I think he was after the computer.”

  Duran nodded.

  “Well?”

  “What?”

  “Did he get it?” What was the matter with him?

  “I don’t know. I’ll take a look.”

  Then he gave her a sort of loopy grin—Oh for chrissake, she thought, I’m in my underwear—and went into the living room. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater, as Duran called out, “It’s right where it was—on the table!”

  Coming into the living room, she saw that the house was as she’d left it when she went to bed. Nothing had been moved, or touched, as far as she could tell. Going to the window, she saw that the car was in its parking place, just as it had been. “Maybe I was mistaken,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” he told her. “I heard something, too.”

  “I thought it was in the basement, but… now, I’m not sure.”


  They looked in all the rooms again, but nothing seemed to be disturbed—or even touched. Finally, Duran slipped into his shoes and grabbed a coat. Together, they went outside and around the house to the metal doors that gave access to the basement. “We might as well take a look,” he said, and lifted one of the doors.

  “That was the noise!” she whispered, as the doors opened with a distinct creak. “That’s what woke me up.”

  “Hnnnh,” he said.

  She followed him down the steps into the darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, he began walking forward, waving his arms in search of the light cord that hung from the ceiling. Finding it, he snapped on the lights, and glanced around.

  It was more of a cellar than a basement, with a spooky-looking crawl space angling off under the front porch. Aluminum-tube deck chairs with webbed seats were folded and stacked against one wall. Ropes, and a few garden tools hung from another, along with a selection of mildewed life jackets and beach toys.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “Me either.” They walked past the furnace, then the water heater. The ceiling was so low that Duran had to duck, swags of cobwebs catching his hair. Peering into the crawl space, Duran cocked his head, and reached out to put a hand on her arm.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Do you smell gas?”

  “I’m kind of stuffed up,” she told him. “All the dust at Nikki’s.”

  Duran grunted. “I think it’s gas,” he said. And a few seconds later. “It is gas.”

  “Let’s call the real estate agent,” she suggested, turning toward the door. “Gas scares me. They should fix it.”.

  Irritated, she pulled sharply on the light cord and started up the steps.

  “Hey!” Duran called out. “Wait up! I can’t see a thing.”

  She apologized with a giggle. “I thought you were right behind me.” Turning, she swung her arm through the air, hoping to hit the light cord. It was amazing how elusive the damn things were. Then she found it, and yanked.

  He was standing there with a thoughtful squint, as if he were about to sneeze. “Wait a second,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Turn it off.”

  “What?”

  “Just turn it off!”

  She did, this time taking care to keep the cord in her grasp.

  “That’s weird,” Duran said, his voice loud in the darkness. “There’s like a… glow… coming from the crawl space. Turn the light back on.”

  She did and crossed the cellar to the corner where he was standing. He was in a crouch, leaning on a concrete abutment, looking into the crawl space. Her eyes followed his gaze.

  And then she saw what he saw: a votive candle, flickering in the darkness.

  Neither of them knew what to say. So they stared, and watched as the candle’s flame seemed to change and grow brighter, lengthening into an elongated blue pillar, the orange wick glowing within. And then the flame evaporated and it was just the glowing wick. Duran grabbed her by the arm and, straightening, yanked her toward the basement doors. The ferocity of his grip scared her and, for a moment, she remembered the night before, when he’d seized her wrist and wrestled the plastic overlay out of her hand. Only now, he was even more violent, pulling her toward the door.

  “Hey,” she said, “wait a minute!”

  Her feet were scrabbling for purchase, more or less bouncing up the cement steps, her ankles and shins barking painfully on the edges. Then they were out in the air, and he was hustling her down the alley toward the ocean, moving so fast that she was barely in contact with the ground.

  That’s when the sound came—a rolling growl that exploded into a concussive whummmmp, followed by a pressure drop that made her ears pop. Then the air behind them dissolved into a cloud of fiery foam, ballooning outwards. Now, she was running on her own, the heat surging at her back. Not till they reached the beach did it seem safe to stop. Turning, they saw a column of fire roaring through the roof of the house.

  “But… how did you know?” she asked.

  “You saw the light… the candle… get brighter—right?”

  She nodded.

  “Propane’s heavier than air, so it lays on the floor, and it just sorta… builds up. They had the candle up in the elevated crawl space, so when the gas reached the flame, a lot of it had accumulated. You saw how the flame went out; that’s because there was no oxygen left. It was all gas. We were lucky.”

  Duran’s attention was reclaimed by the house. There were new sounds now, sharp cracks as the windows exploded, the shriek of metal coming apart in the heat. Every once in a while, a fresh roar told them that the fire had discovered new territory, new fuel. Then they heard an enormous siren wail, summoning the volunteer firefighters.

  Adrienne started to shiver, from cold or shock, she couldn’t be sure. They tried to kill us both, she thought. They turned on the gas, and shut off the pilot light. Or something. A column of sparks blasted into the air. Then they lighted a candle, as if it were a mass. That’s what I heard, she thought, the noise in the cellar. And then they checked—they checked to make sure I was there.

  “They tried to kill us,” she said, her voice dull, her face flushed from the fire.

  Duran nodded.

  He put his arm around her and, together, they walked back toward the house. There were sirens all over town now, wailing closer. Suddenly, Duran tensed, stopped, and slapped his hips. Then he smiled with relief. “Car keys,” he said.

  It was getting hotter now. In the intervals between the houses, they could see the first fire truck roaring down the street, siren screaming, lights whirling. The sky fluttered with the wheeling lights—yellow, red, yellow, red. They walked past a man whose pajama bottoms were visible below the puffy parka he wore. He stood with his arm around a woman in a bathrobe and furry slippers. They were staring at the house as Adrienne and Duran walked by. “Like a torch,” the man said, his voice hushed. Then a part of the roof collapsed, falling into the house with a soft thud that sent up geysers of fire and sparks.

  Duran unlocked the door to the car, and flicked the button inside. Adrienne heard the snap of the locks as she stood there, staring at what was now an architectural skeleton, with flames dancing along its blackened ribs. The temperature must have been 130 degrees on one side of the street, and 35 on the other.

  Duran got out and came around to open the door for her, his feet crunching in the gravel. As he reached for the door’s handle, he cursed and yanked his hand away. “Slide in the driver’s side,” he told her. “The door’s like an oven.”

  As they drove away, she turned in the seat, and said, “I think the police station’s somewhere around the water tower.”

  “We’re not going there,” he told her.

  She looked at him as if he were insane (which, of course, was a theory). “We have to,” she insisted. “We can’t just keep running around—”

  “It’s better we don’t go there,” he said, turning onto the highway out of town.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re better off dead.”

  She turned her head, and looked at his reflection in the window. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, if they think they killed us, that’s good. We’ll live longer that way.”

  Chapter 29

  “It won’t work,” she announced.

  “What won’t?”

  “Playing dead.”

  Duran adjusted the rearview mirror, dimming the sunrise. “Why not?”

  “Because the car’s gone. Which suggests we weren’t in the house. And the newspapers will say no one was killed.”

  Duran shrugged. “At least it gives us a day.”

  Another couple of miles rolled by, and Adrienne turned to Duran. “So let’s go to Washington,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because we have time, and because I want to go to my apartment. Get some things.”

  He gave her a skeptical look.

  “You said it
gave us a day.”

  “Yeah, but… what if I’m wrong? I mean, I don’t even know how they found us in the first place.”

  “I do,” Adrienne told him.

  Duran gave her a suspicious look. “You do? How?”

  “You told them.”

  “I what? Told who?”

  “You told them where we were,” she said. “You were online… in a chat room or something.”

  Duran glanced at her, to see if she was kidding. But she wasn’t. She was dead serious. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “The night before last. You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I did?”

  “You were on some crazy Web site. All these images were flashing by, and then… it was like one of those instant messages on AOL.”

  “What!?”

  “Trust me.”

  “So… what did it say?”

  It was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know: good-morning, or something.”

  “That’s it?”

  She shook her head. “No. It said: ‘Hello Jeffrey.’ Then it asked where you were. And you typed something.”

  “What did I type?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t come up on the screen. But they asked, and you answered. You could have given them the zip code and parking directions, for all I know.”

  “Get out!”

  “I’m serious,” she insisted.

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I tried! And it was like… I don’t know. It was like you were gone. Way gone. I had to call Doctor Shaw.”

  “What?!”

  “I was afraid of you! So he hypnotized you over the phone,” she told him. “You don’t remember this?”

  Duran shook his head, thinking, It didn’t happen. Or I’d remember it. Because my short-term memory is fine. Shaw said so. Which means Adrienne’s lying or… there’s more than one me. Jekyll and Hyde. MPD. Christ—The dashboard emitted a warning beep, and his eyes went to the gas gauge. “We have to stop,” he told her.