“I guess this is the first time she has ditched us for casual sex with a stranger.”
Amber cocked her head at Jessica. “Do you have to be so literal? And it’s not her going off last night I’m upset about. It’s her not coming back this morning.”
“That’s good,” Jessica snapped, “you wouldn’t have much of a leg to stand on if you were upset with her for going off with that doctor.”
Amber blushed. A one-night stand with a cute army guy was no more in her normal pattern of behaviour than Sam’s hooking up with a doctor had been. But it had happened. Her embarrassment and anger rolled together for a moment and she said, “Hey, as near as I can tell I was the only one who wasn’t planning on hooking up with a stranger. Unless you want me to believe you had those condoms because you were expecting to meet someone you already knew down here.”
Now it was Jessica’s turn to be insulted. “You mean the ones you borrowed from me? Just because I had them doesn’t mean I was planning on using them. When I get in the car I put on my seat belt, even when I’m not planning on running into a tree.” She paused for a moment and added, “Why are we fighting? I’m not angry at you.”
“Sorry, I’m not angry at you either. I guess I’m just cranky – too much to drink last night, and not enough sleep.”
“I know what we need, a couple of cups of coffee, maybe a doughnut – beignet – whatever they call the damned things down here, and then a whole bunch more Hurricanes.”
Her “Whoo” was weak and tired, but Amber’s smile was real. “When you are right, you are right. We came to party, so let’s get back into it.”
Saturday February 15th
3:00 p.m.
Aldous left Jeremy’s house slightly shaken, but quite excited. He wasn’t going to act rashly. He had spent too many years being cautious to act without a plan. Certainly it seemed that haste was in order, but he felt that waiting until late at night to collect Jeremy and Sarah would be prudent.
What to do in the meantime? Nothing unusual. Doing things out of the ordinary made people notice that something was going on, so Aldous knew he had to appear to be living a normal day to the rest of the world. That meant go to work, spend the late afternoon and early evening giving tours. Then he would be free to pursue his other interests.
Aldous had a dilemma: once he took Sarah, he felt it would be time for him to leave New Orleans, but his game with Dexter wasn’t quite finished. Compared to his overall goal, ruining Dexter’s life was trivial, but he hated to leave any project uncomplete.
The answer suddenly came together for him. It would all work if he sped up his timetable. After work, but before it was late enough to get Jeremy and Sarah, he would have enough time to finish laying the trap for Dexter. No, not finish, there would be one detail that would have to wait until Dexter’s wife and kid got back from that swim meet, but leaving town could wait for one day. Tonight he could both have some fun and also begin his transformation into God. After all, what would be the point of being divine if he wasn’t having fun?
The tour office was busy, and there was good news: Dexter had called in sick to work. How perfect. To the world it would make great sense – after committing two murders last night and planning to commit another one tonight, of course Dexter wouldn’t feel up to coming in. Oh, it was just such an ideal time for Dexter to get the flu, to be home alone with no witnesses and no alibi.
Aldous took his first group out to the usual haunts. He started out a little more mechanical than usual, but by the time he got to the LaLaurie mansion he was in good form. He had always liked the LaLauries; they had style. Amputations, flayings, eviscerations, lobotomizations, reshaping bodies by breaking bones and re-setting them – the LaLauries were true connoisseurs of cruelty. Aldous loved giving the tourists graphic descriptions of some of the LaLauries’ atrocities. Aldous was such a fan that he considered buying the mansion when he first moved to New Orleans but decided it was just too high profile.
His second tour went better than the first, and then it was ten o’clock, time to play.
Several months earlier he had stolen Dexter’s cloak and hidden it above the ceiling in the tour office’s bathroom. Dexter had long since replaced it, but the old cloak still had some of Dexter on it, maybe a little dandruff on the shoulders, perhaps a used tissue in the pocket, and that was what mattered to Aldous. It had been safe and sound in a nice tape-sealed garbage bag for months, but now Aldous was going to put it into play.
Saturday February 15th
10:00 p.m.
Joan was a pretty girl, though most people would never realize it by looking at her. Most people would only see a goth. Part of the reason that Joan dressed the way she did was because she had always been judged by her appearance. By the time she was sixteen, nobody could see anything but a beautiful, petite blonde. Nobody, including her parents, ever seemed to notice her 4.0 GPA. The guys with brains all seemed to be scared to talk to her, leaving her her choice of arrogant, stupid, good looking guys. She wasn’t interested.
At the age of seventeen she had had enough, so she decided to change her good looks by putting on a front that most people wouldn’t look beyond. She dyed her hair black and started to follow a non-mainstream aesthetic. At first she put on what she thought was the uniform of goth culture – all black. But once she started associating with other goths, she realized that the notion of a ‘goth uniform’ was baseless. Part of being goth, at least for the ones she knew, was the pursuit of an individual and highly personalized beauty. She took to wearing dark colors and rich textures.
She quickly grew to feel that her new friends were the first real friends she had ever had. They not only noticed her intelligence, they cherished it. There was nothing she couldn’t say to them. For the first time in her life, she felt like she was being herself.
Her parents thought she had skipped the part of the road to hell that is paved in good intentions and jumped straight into the inferno. It seemed obvious that the change in appearance would be accompanied with all manner of ruinous behaviours. They were expecting her announcement that she was HIV positive, strung out on both heroin and crack, and pregnant at any time. Though she told them repeatedly that she had no interest in any form of intoxication and that she was a virgin, they refused to believe her. If they noticed that her grades remained exceptional, they never mentioned it to her.
They banned her from seeing any of her new friends. At this she rebelled only slightly, seeing them at school and keeping in close contact via email and instant messaging. Other than that, which was more a question of following the exact wording of her parent’s edict than outright rebellion, she believed that as long as she was living in their house, she had to follow their rules.
She was dismayed at her parents’ refusal to look past the surface of her friends. She was even more dismayed at their refusal to look past their stereotypes of that surface. Her parents accused her of dressing like a slut, when most of her attire was actually more modest than what she had worn before her metamorphosis. They couldn’t grasp that her skirts were longer, and if her hose had black and purple stripes, it meant they concealed both the color and the outline of the curves of her legs.
It came as no surprise to anyone that she moved out shortly after her eighteenth birthday. The tattoos that appeared soon after that date were also no surprise; they were just another bit of proof to her parents that she was throwing her life away. The only slight surprise to her parents was that she moved to New Orleans to major in architecture at Tulane. They quickly assumed that she had chosen the college so she could live in the most decadent town in the United States and that she would flunk out in short order, due to excessive partying.
Three years later, on her twenty-first birthday, she tried alcohol for the first time. She didn’t enjoy it much. Her only two vices were coffee and tobacco, and she was considering quitting the tobacco. At twenty-one she was still a virgin; She
wasn’t saving herself for marriage, but she was waiting for love and she was very picky.
Her best friend was a gay man named Bob. Bob had a thing for chain mail. Though he never dressed in it exclusively, it seemed like every outfit had at least a small patch of the stuff on it somewhere. His favorite jacket was an early-eighties-vintage rip-off of Michael Jackson’s Thriller-era jacket. The only real difference was that Bob’s was black (though he liked to joke it was really navy blue).
Most Saturday nights she accompanied Bob and a couple of other friends as a ‘designated walker’ when they went out drinking. They would cruise the bars on Bourbon Street, gawking at the tourists gawking at them, while waiting for The Dungeon to open up. The Dungeon was too close to Bourbon Street to be a purely goth club, but that was okay. They played good music, and any club that hid its restrooms behind bookcases got a lot of style points.
At about eleven o’clock, Joan got separated from Bob and company. Sometimes the Bourbon Street crowds become impenetrable and seem to move with a life of their own. In this case, a woman on a balcony had been showing some of her more unusual piercings and, in trying to get a good look, the crowd had blocked off the street.
One bad thing about being tiny was that once Joan was lost in a crowd, she was pretty much lost in the crowd. Sometimes she’d get mad at Bob because he wouldn’t always look for her. He said it was like looking for a golf ball in tall grass. This time she wasn’t worried about anything but being trampled. She knew where Bob and crew were going, and when they would get there. It would be easy enough to meet up with them at The Dungeon.
When the girl on the balcony finally left, the crowd dissipated somewhat, and Joan could start moving. Killing time, she wandered down Bourbon Street.
It was a little after eleven when a guy in a Victorian cloak and carnival mask offered her some beads for a kiss. Not really intending to kiss him, but interested in the attention, she stepped closer so she could at least talk to him over the din of the street.
In one smooth gesture the cloak flowed around her and his mouth found hers.
Saturday February 15th
10:15 p.m.
Aldous stopped at his apartment to change into his latex, and to take a quick shower to remove any blatant forensic evidence. He wasn’t going to worry too much about the tiny evidence tonight; there would be so much floating about that he would be impossible to pull from it. He probably didn’t need the latex at all, but it just felt more right.
Once again he put cheap but brand-new work clothes on over the latex, and wore the thin-soled shoes with Dexter’s footprints on them. He grabbed a few more things, all protectively wrapped in garbage bags, and headed down the alley from his Royal Street courtyard apartment.
He stopped at a payphone and called Dexter. He was certain that if Dexter was at home, he would be alone with no witnesses to corroborate his whereabouts. The phone rang three times before Dexter answered. It sounded like he had been asleep. It was too perfect. Aldous hung up without saying a word.
He retrieved the GTO from the parking garage and drove to Rampart Street, the northern border of the French Quarter.
In a bar’s restroom on Bourbon Street he ditched the work clothes, and donned the cloak. To complete his outfit, he put on the baseball cap with fake hair, and a rather tacky carnival mask.
Wearing the latex body suit, cloak, mask and cap, Aldous didn’t stand out in the Saturday night, early Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street crowd. He kept his knees bent and his stride short to make himself seem a bit shorter.
He positioned himself across the street from The Cat’s Meow, a bar that had a twenty-four-hour live webcam broadcast. He positioned himself as far from the camera as he could, while still being fairly certain of being on camera, at least some of the time. He wanted to leave some evidence.
He was looking for just the right sort of prey – a small, drunk, solitary female. He didn’t have to wait too long before one came by. She was about five feet tall, skinny, with jet black hair. If it weren’t for her tattoos she could have passed for fourteen.
He called to her. He asked her name. She said it was Joan. He offered her a rather nice strand of beads for a kiss. She stepped closer. He wrapped the cloak around her, and in one motion sealed his lips over her mouth and nose and drove a cooking knife into her heart. He used the same half circular stroke he had used on the last several killings – consistency was important when trying to make sure the authorities would tie the killings together.
Joan died without a struggle. Her soul felt tiny in Aldous’ lungs, but it still gave him an electric rush.
There was, of course, a good deal of blood; anyone could see it if they looked. He shoved a rag into the wound to slow her leaking.
Holding her body close to him under the cloak, Aldous walked away from Bourbon Street. He spent as much time as possible walking in the street close to the curb. There was nasty fluid collected there, a mix of water, beer, urine, and other bodily fluids. He used it to obscure his gory trail. Nobody seemed to be screaming or pointing or chasing him. Things were going well.
He made it to the GTO with no incident. He entered through the passenger-side door, and slid across into the driver’s seat, dragging her body next to him. After a moment of adjusting her position, he started the car and drove off. If anyone had been watching, it would have looked like he was taking his drunk girlfriend home.
Aldous drove until he found some place darkish and secluded. He got out of the car, wrapped the girl in the cloak, made sure that there were a few synthetic hairs wrapped in with her, and put her in the trunk. From the trunk he pulled a couple of gallons of slightly bleachy water and a few stolen hotel towels. He wiped as much blood off himself and the car’s interior as he could. The towels went in a garbage bag for later disposal.
It was a little after midnight. Probably not late enough to pay his special visit to Jeremy’s house, but getting close. He’d find some way to kill the time.
Saturday February 15th
11:45 p.m.
There was someone at the foot of Dexter’s bed. His eyes were closed, but there was something, the sound of the room maybe, that told him he was not alone. He should have been alone. His wife and child were still at the swim meet, but he wasn’t alone. He didn’t know how, but he knew it. He didn’t want to open his eyes. Maybe if he just lay there, whoever it was would go away, go back to burglarizing his house or whatever else it might be that they were up to. If they were some sort of pervert who got their jollies by watching a little old guy sleep, well that was okay by Dexter, as long as he didn’t have to confront them.
Part of Dexter felt he was being wise by playing possum, part was cursing himself for being a coward. He tried to tell himself that he was imagining things, that he wasn’t hearing anything. Which was kind of true: he wasn’t hearing anything, but the nothing he was hearing was speaking volumes to him.
It was either bravery or the desire to prove himself foolish so he could go back to sleep that made him open his eyes. He had been right. He wasn’t alone. There was a black woman standing at the foot of his bed. In the dim light of the bedroom details were sketchy, her dark skin almost indistinguishable from shadow. Yet somehow, he knew that she was beautiful. Everything he could see about her clothes, from the cloth tied around her head to her striped apron, seemed out of place in time. Her garb would have been in place on a syrup bottle, or a woodcut illustration from the mid-1800s .
He realized that somehow the fear had gone as he opened his eyes. He wasn’t alone, but he wasn’t scared.
She turned and glided silently from the room.
She was in his study. He was standing behind her. She was pulling books out of a bookcase and putting them back in, but in the wrong places. The fear that had left him when he opened his eyes came crushing back. A sense of dread gripped him, as well as a sense of puzzlement.
He was terrified, but couldn�
�t understand why his books being out of order would scare him. Annoy him, certainly, but scare him? It made no sense to him. It made no sense to him that he wasn’t afraid of the stranger in his house, but was afraid of his own books. It made no sense to him that he had no recollection of following her to the study. Things weren’t right.
The realization that things weren’t right was enough to wake him up. It had been a long time since he had sleepwalked, but the pattern was always the same; a time of stress, a dream that seemed real until it somehow stopped making sense, and then utter confusion when he woke.
The dream was still fresh in his head. He understood that it had just been a dream, but wasn’t sure how to convince himself that he wasn’t still dreaming. He had had nested dreams before, where he would wake from a dream into a dream. He was horrified that he might be in one of those now. The fear from the dream was still crushing him, as well as the fear he might still be dreaming. Partly, he was afraid of whatever might happen next if he was still dreaming. Partly he was just afraid. He told himself that he was full of adrenaline and that it would fade.
He turned on his bedside light, and it helped his fear a little. Or at least it pushed its boundaries back. The dark hallway suddenly seemed ominous, and he didn’t have the courage to stick his hand into that darkness to turn on the hall light. He would worry about that in a little while, for the moment he would rather be less afraid in his puddle of light.
There was nothing in the bedroom he was even remotely afraid of, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. The fear wasn’t fading. He had to go to the study to look at the bookcase.
He turned on the overhead light, which threw enough light into the hall that he could bring himself to turn on the hall light. He was angry with himself for fearing the dark like a toddler. The hall held no menace. It was only a few steps down the hall to the study.
The Whisper Garden Page 12