by Joey Ruff
Then I burned the son-of-a-bitch out. All that remained was a ring of bricks and a still pool, the surface of which shone like black ice. I set the lantern down next to the door and walked towards the ring.
As I neared, the dark surface began to hum, awakening, and the dark portal began to glow, much like turning on a television set. I stood at its edge for a moment, staring down into it, and I watched the mist that swirled inside like primordial ooze before it took the form of a little girl.
She was sitting with her eyes closed, her dark hair pulled back into pigtails with ribbons and bows. She was dressed as if for Sunday school in a white and black polka-dotted dress and baby doll shoes.
Anna.
For a moment, she was the only thing visible, perfectly illuminated and surrounded in darkness, and then the dark faded and she was sitting in the bleachers of a stadium.
The first time I’d seen her like this, I was entranced. It was my little girl. While I didn’t understand the thing that held her, I’d spent so much time with her that there was no longer any weirdness.
Ape and Nadia didn’t trust it. They didn’t know what the pool was, hadn’t been able to find anything in their research that was even remotely close to describing it. I didn’t need to know what it was called. I’d suffered the loss that every father fears. The placid waters gave me my daughter back, in a manner of speaking, and that was enough to quell the ache in my heart. The pool was my wishing well.
I sat on the edge of the stone circle, rested my back against the wall, and pulled the leather-bound book from my jacket. I held the book open for a moment, but I didn’t look at it. I just watched Anna, and I felt a smile spread across my face. I’d been smiling a lot lately, but only here.
“Alright,” I said. “I told you I’d be back. What are we reading today?” I glanced down at the book in my hands, and the poem. “Oh. You remember this one.”
I glanced at her, half-expecting her to answer.
“It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea,” I read. “That a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee.”
Faintly, I heard Anna giggle in childlike glee. “That’s like my name,” she said sweetly.
I stopped reading for a second, and I looked at her, calm and serene, eyes closed as in slumber. I took a deep breath and let the memory overtake me.
“That’s like my name,” she said in a playful tone.
Draped in a nightgown, Anna was tucked snugly into the blankets of her bed, pillows propping her into a sitting position. Dark hair framed her angelic face and rested on her shoulders, and her big eyes shone brightly. Apart from the breathing tubes in her nose, the way she occasionally wheezed as she talked, and the pink-flowered bandages on her inner arm from the needle punctures, she didn’t look that sick. She was almost five then, and we were still in our loft in London.
“Like your name?” I said, a broad smile sweeping across her lovingly. “It is your name: Anna, my Belle.”
She eyed me curiously, perhaps trying to see what I was up to. “My name’s not Belle,” she said.
“Belle means beauty. Cause you’re my beautiful girl.” She turned her eyes down with mock-embarrassment. She was silent, and I looked down at the book once more and read: “And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me. I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea.”
She giggled, and I looked up at her.
“What is so funny?”
“You’re not a child, Daddy.”
“That’s not what your Momma says.”
She laughed again, light and innocent, with a joy untouched by the sickness that ravaged her.
“But we loved with a love that was more than love – I and my Anna, my Belle…”
“Daddy!” she squealed, and I leaned over her, and we giggled together.
Then I blinked, and the only light still shone from Anna, but she was silent again, serene. “This was the reason,” I said, and my voice echoed faintly in the empty stone room, “that, long ago, in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out of a cloud, chilling and…” My voice caught with the word, and then I said, “My Belle, Anna…”
The smooth surface of the pool rippled with the teardrop, and I felt anger boil up inside. Anger, that I was weak, that I wasn’t able to keep her with me. I wasn’t enough when she was alive, and even now, my tears, in my weakness, sought to distort her image maintained by the pool. For a moment, a flickering fear threatened that the rippling would wipe the pool’s image clear like an Etch-a-sketch.
I knew from experience, the long months sitting in the dark room on the lonely stones, watching my daughter, that the pool’s depths weren’t bothered by disturbing the surface. I had shed so many tears…and a couple of times, in my mad desperation – at my fucking weakest, most pathetic – I reached out for her. I’d plunged my hands into the water, felt the glacial cold that I imagined was death, snake its way past my elbows, splash against my face. Only in the sobering cold did I regain my composure, did I understand that Anna wasn’t in the pool itself, that the pool was only a window of sorts to wherever she actually was. And also, that the swirling, crystal liquid inside I had mistaken for water was actually as thick and syrupy as oil. Once out of the pool, I didn’t feel wet at all, not on my skin, not on my clothes. I just felt…cold.
Anna was dead, I knew that. I held her as she breathed her last. I buried her too-small body. I carried her bloody casket. But I thought I retained enough from my days as a priest to know that where Anna sat wasn’t Heaven. Of course, it wasn’t Hell, either. Although she never changed, the room around her constantly shifted. Sometimes it was a cinema, a sports stadium, an opera house…as though she had gathered to watch a show, perhaps life. In my more existential moments, I allowed myself to believe that she watched me in a pool of her own, saw me watching her, which in return, she saw herself, which was watching me watching her. It was an infinity mirror that continued on forever into unfathomable depths with no beginning and no end.
Other times, the room in which she sat took on the appearance of an airport terminal, a bus depot, a hospital waiting room (something I knew the look of very well). I didn’t exactly see the significance of those images, just that she was waiting for something, but what? The show to start, I guess.
Maybe she was waiting for me, I don’t know. For what, though? Me to be the man I never was where she was concerned? To be the father she deserved? Waiting for me to figure out what in fuck’s sake was wrong with her so I could save my baby girl? I was never strong enough for her. I was never enough, never what she needed. And I was so much fucking weaker these days than I ever had been. I just got very good at hiding it well and staying busy. I was good at channeling my pain into rage when on a case, and I took cases to stay busy. It helped me cope.
But I hadn’t taken many since I’d found Anna again. Sure, they kept me busy, but they kept me away from her. I didn’t need to forget about her when I could be with her.
I blinked the tears from my vision and massaged the palms of my hands into my eyes. Then I stared down at Anna as the ripples smoothed. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. Anna didn’t say anything. She didn’t move at all or give any indication that she heard me in any way, yet still, as if in response, my phone rang.
I hadn’t had a cell phone for long. I hated the damned thing, but Ape bought it so he could get hold of me. He said I spent too much time with Anna, and he didn’t want to drive his arse all the way down there if he needed to talk to me.
I slid it out of my pocket slowly. I was in no hurry to answer it. I never was when it was Ape. As far as he was concerned, I didn’t have reception in the Underground, and in most places, I didn’t. Occasionally, though, a call came through.
I glanced at the screen, and I didn’t recognize the number. If it was important, they could leave a voicemail. Of course, I didn’t know how to check it if they did.
When it stopped ringing, I set it on th
e stone ring and picked the book back up. “Neither the angels in heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea,” I read. “Can ever dissever my soul from the soul….” I sighed. “Let’s skip to the end, shall we? “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee….”
The phone rang again. I set the book down and picked it up. It was the same number as before. I wasn’t supposed to meet Ape anywhere, I was sure of that. I thought for a moment, but my memory was a little foggy. The digital clock on the phone said it was just before eleven. I wasn’t meeting anyone.
I rejected the call, but before I could slide the phone back into my pocket, it rang again. “What the fuck?”
I sighed and answered the phone. “Look. Can’t you see the time? Can’t a guy get any sodding peace?”
“Swyftt?” came a familiar, female voice. She sounded confused.
“Uh…Stone?”
Special Agent Natasha Stone of the FBI wasn’t exactly my number one fan.
“It is you,” she said.
“I didn’t realize you had my number, love. Is this a booty call?”
“This is just great.” I could hear noises behind her, people shuffling, muted conversations. Stone turned away from the phone, and I could just hear, “You’ll never believe who this is. It’s Swyftt.” Someone answered her in a mumble, and into the phone again, she said, “Swyftt, get dressed. I’m gonna need you to come down here.”
“Right,” I said.
“There’s been a murder.”
Fucking work. “Alright. Give me the address.”
She did. “How soon can you be here?”
“Fifteen minutes. I’m kinda in the area.”
“Good. Because this can’t wait.”
She hung up.
4
The address Stone had given me was for a mortgage company a block from Union Square. The place hadn’t been open for several hours, but it was quite obvious as I neared the building that the real action was the circus in the parking lot.
Among the police vans, ambulances, fire trucks, and several squad cars with their flashing lights, I could see Stone’s black Sedan.
Stone herself was in the middle of the parking lot, roped in by yellow caution tape, speaking with a man I knew to be her partner and a guy in a jacket that bore the letters M.E. – medical examiner. At their feet was a body, but who, I couldn’t tell. It had been covered with a sheet that was probably white at one point, but now looked almost camouflaged with splotches of something dark and wet. The same pockmarked the ground along with the gathered puddles of rain water.
Stone saw me as I approached and drew nearer to the tape, yelling to the uniformed officer who tried to keep me away. He looked at her, shrugged, and held the tape up for me as I slid under.
I smiled at Stone and said, “So what do we got?”
“What do you mean?” Her face soured just being near me. She started to walk back towards her partner, and I followed.
“If you’re bringing me in on a consult, love, it would be helpful to know the details.”
She stopped in front of her partner, and he smiled when he saw me. “Jono,” he beamed. “Been a while. You doing okay?”
I nodded at him. “Doing okay, Chuck. Last case was – what? – two months ago, the warlock’s chatroom?” I’d done a bit of consulting work for the feds and locals in months past. Obviously, it was at Chuck’s request, not Stone’s. She didn’t believe in the paranormal, or at least, that’s what she kept telling me. Chuck, on the other hand, had witnessed the bizarre shit I faced about eight months back with the boogeyman and missing kids.
Chuck turned to the medical examiner beside him. “Do you know Swyftt?”
The ME nodded at me. “Reputation only. How are you?”
“Confused,” I said and looked at Stone. “Who’s the stiff?”
She eyed me suspiciously. “I think you misunderstood the call, Swyftt. We didn’t bring you in as a consult.”
“Then what am I…?”
“A potential witness.”
“What?!”
She held up a small, torn slip of paper that bore ten digits and a couple dashes in a barely legible hand. “Recognize this?”
I studied the numbers a moment and then shook my head.
“You don’t?” she said skeptically.
“Should I?”
In a more annoyed tone, she said, “This is your cell phone number, Swyftt. It’s the number I called to invite you down here.”
“Okay…?”
“We found it on the vic.”
I glanced at Chuck who motioned to the body at our feet. The Medical Examiner next to him was a stocky, bald, black man with glasses who looked completely detached from the situation, bored even.
I glanced at the sheet on the ground and suddenly felt my stomach sink. I didn’t have many people I would consider friends, but only friends would have had my phone number.
I looked up at Stone. “Natasha,” I said calmly. “Who’s the victim?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.” For a moment, she looked almost sympathetic. After what looked like a moment’s pause for internal reflection, she said to the men standing behind her, “Show him.”
The ME gripped a corner of the sheet in one hand and held it aloft. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see anything. I took a deep breath to steady myself and moved around for a better look.
In life, the victim had been a man. The way the sheet draped over his body, I could only make out the head and the broken arms that had fallen into a contorted, almost swastika-like pattern to either side. His right eye had caved in, and the sallow bruising on the cheek, brow and bridge of his nose was camouflaged by a hideous fingerpainting of various shades of purple and grey. The bottom half of his jaw was missing, and the hole in his throat and the dangling, earthworm tendons of flesh that hung limply were coated in the same purple fluid – so deep and dark it appeared almost brown – that covered the ground and the blanket.
“What’s on him?” Stone asked reverently.
“That’s his blood,” I said, and the ME stifled some instinctive reaction, maybe disbelief.
“How is that possible?” he asked.
“Simple,” I said. “He wasn’t human.” I glanced at the ME, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Can you lift the sheet a little more?”
He did. The fluid that clung to it was darker here, sticky and as thick as motor oil, stringing between the tatters of what remained of the man’s shirt and the ME’s sheet. Stone and Chuck looked away, and I took a knee to examine the man’s torso more closely.
Three deep craters were sunk into the flesh, wider in the middle and narrowing to a point at either end, extending from left shoulder to right hip. The marks looked like slashes at first glance, but they were darker and deeper than what was humanly possible. The most remarkable thing about the wounds was the way so little of the purplish-brown blood had collected inside. The edges of the markings were blackened, almost burnt, and likewise, the interior walls of the cuts were clean, if not a little charred.
“The wounds appear to have been cauterized,” the ME said, as if reading my thoughts.
“Then where’d all the blood come from?” I asked.
“From this,” he said, and he lifted the rest of the sheet up.
I had to fight my gag reflex and look away as the soft exposed tissue not only looked disgusting, but bore the odor of bad cheese. The bottom of his stomach was shredded into ribbons and he was hollowed out.
“Where’s the rest of him?” I asked.
“We found his entrails,” Stone said, and pointed across the parking lot, “Over there.”
I nodded at the ME, and he covered the body again. I stood, rubbed my eyes for a moment, and then I looked at Stone.
“Jesus,” she said softly, and I couldn’t tell if it was a prayer or a swear. “You ever see anything like this?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Whatever did this was very
strong, judging from the wounds. And very angry.”
“Do you know who he was?”
I bent down again and pulled the sheet back to his jawline, studying his features: the receding hair line, the wiry bristles of a mustache. His nose was obviously broken and leaned to the side, but I tried to imagine what it would look like if it were straight. The eyes were large and bulgy, much the way DeNobb’s had been when he’d greeted me, except this man’s eyes were that way normally and at rest.
I sighed. “His name was Seven,” I said, shaking my head. “He was an informant.”
“Informant?”
“Yeah. I went to him for information.” I covered his face and stood. “Don’t you guys have those? Or is that just in the movies?”
She rolled her eyes. “I know what an informant is, Swyftt. I just have a hard time believing you rely on anyone else.”
I ignored her. “The wounds on his chest look too deep and too close together to be a knife.”
“What makes you say that?” Chuck asked.
“He’s right,” the ME offered. “For one, the wounds are too wide. The blade would have had to be like…a pick axe, and the force required for something like that, to be able to carry through with the knife-like stroke and sweeping motion…”
“Okay,” Stone said. She looked at me seriously. “So what then? Dracula?”
I was silent for a moment, maybe too long.
“What are you thinking?” Chuck asked.
“Claws.”
“Like a werewolf? Isn’t that what it always is in the movies when it looks like an animal attack?”
“You watch too many movies.”
Without moving, I stole a look around the parking lot, trying to see anything of interest between the shuffling people. “I assume you searched the area?”
“Yes,” Stone said, her tone even more irritated than normal. I wasn’t trying to tell her how to do her job, but apparently, that’s what she took from it.
I scanned the skyline of the nearby buildings. Most of them weren’t over a few stories tall. “Did you check those roofs over there?”