Personal Effects

by J. C. Hutchins

  For the next thirty years, the quarry lay quiet, a black dragon with its maw wide open, occasionally claiming the life of a curious child or soused thrill-seeker. But in 1875, the hole caught the interest of overwhelmed alienists desperate for a quiet locale, out of the public eye, in which to house the city’s growing population of criminal lunatics. These were patients either too crazy for prison or too dangerous for the city’s modest sanitariums. In the end, even cannibals, serial rapists, necrophiles, blood drinkers, ultra-violent schizoids and charismatic occult leaders need a place to sleep.

  Brinkvale Psychiatric was not built over the quarry, but in it. Nine stories of howling, brain-boiling madness, stacked two hundred feet into the bedrock. The hospital was so large, so secluded, so wonderfully forgettable, it soon housed more than the howl-at-the-moon types. Brinkvale became an Ellis Island of the damned, an oubliette not just for the dangerous and deranged, but also the misunderstood and unwanted. Homosexuals. Troublemaking non-Christians. Ideologues. Opponents of the status quo. Bring me your angry, your rebellious, your nonconformist masses yearning to speak freely … and bury the wretches in a place where no one can hear them scream …

  You won’t find windows beneath the topside “attic” level, here at The Brink. There are only cracked walls, wildly uneven floors and a great many cramped, lightless places. The Brink has no sympathy for claustrophobes or nyctophobes, people who are afraid of the dark. People like me.

  This is the place where I’d planted my flag to help people. This was where I’d been appointed to get answers from a blind killer.

  And the room I finally entered—my fantastically disorganized office, more than sixty feet underground—was where I finally opened the manila folder in my hand, and suddenly realized how desperately I wanted to see the sun.

  My office is my refuge, the one place in Brinkvale where I can let my personality shine. One wall, covered in wall-to-ceiling corkboard, is the Me Wall, dedicated to people and things I love: many photos of my tattooed goddess, Rachael; pics of my slang-slinging, living spring of a brother Lucas and my father, Will; a faded, folded photo of my mother, Claire; a painting from my police lab-tech pal Ida “Eye” Jean-Phillipe (who had lent a more-than-helpful hand in achieving Spindle’s breakthrough last week); a cover of the ’80s Creepshow movie-adaptation comic (signed by both Stephen King and—an artist who I think walks on water—Bernie Wrightson); a half-dozen Salvador Dali postcards; some sci-fi memorabilia; and my own artwork. Charcoal sketches on cream-colored Stonehenge drawing paper, mostly.

  Another wall—similarly swathed in corkboard—features my patients’ art. Far less cheerful fare. Manic splotches of lush watercolors, pastel scribbles, wordless agony made visible. I use this gallery to showcase their progress, and to gain perspective on what I’m doing here. Strangers might see violent lost causes on this wall. I see glimmers, tiny penlights, of hope. If my patients trust me enough to craft these images, they might trust me enough, someday, to share their stories and secrets.

  The rest of the wall space is dedicated to overflowing filing cabinets, bookshelves and sacks of art supplies. Clean freaks wince when they bear witness to my unique “organizational system,” but even the fussiest anal retentives admit that the place projects an optimistic, cheerful vibe. That’s a good thing, because it’s a reflection of me.

  But there was no solace for me here, not now. Martin Grace was whispering his past to me, whispering from papers and photos spread out on my desk. I sipped my coffee in silence, slipping further and further into the man’s world.

  According to his vitals, Grace was fifty-six years old, white, nearly as tall as Emilio, but slender. Single, lived alone, no children. An arrest mug shot revealed a pale, lean, curiously blank face. His green eyes stared impassively into the camera lens. I found this odd; aside from an acquaintance in middle school, I’d never personally known a blind person. But I vividly remembered that kind’s eyes all those years ago, remembered the cloudy discoloration. And sometimes the eyes jitter; nystagmus, it’s called. The kid back in school had a severe, stomach-churning nystagmus.

  But Grace’s eyes had none of this visible damage, no milky cloudlike appearance. Just a clear pine green. I kept reading, plucking a Berol pencil from the jumble on my desk.

  Since his incarceration six months ago, Grace had been uncooperative with cops, lawyers and headshrinkers alike. The personal details in the admittance papers came by proxy, from police interviews with neighbors and colleagues. Martin Grace had lived in Brooklyn for two years, after living in Queens for three. He was a transplant from Buffalo. Before Buffalo, he’d spent a year in Albany … and before that, one in Conquest, a town not too far from Syracuse. Before that, some time in Rochester, right across Lake Ontario from Canada. And before that, and before that, and before that … the dude got around.

  His most recent job was in the city, as an audio engineer. According to his coworkers at The Jam Factory, a music studio housed in a renovated jellies cannery, Grace was a quiet, talented technician with an uncanny ear for production and editing. He’d apparently memorized the studio’s vast engineering consoles with dead-certain precision, manipulating hundreds of knobs and dials by touch alone. He also did some studio work as a keyboardist, the reports said. One employee called Grace “the forbidden love child of Stevie Wonder and Ronnie Milsap.”

  I actually chuckled at that.

  Grace had worked at The Jam Factory for the same three years that he’d lived in Brooklyn. He was tremendously gifted, but remained aloof toward his coworkers. He was described as “cool” and “distant” and “off in his own world.”

  I flipped forward to the psychologists’ verdict.

  This is where the shit got weird.

  Martin Grace had been blind for only two years. Stranger still, he wasn’t physically blind at all. His diagnosis was “conversion disorder,” something the rest of the world calls psychosomatic blindness. The man’s eyes were perfectly healthy, according to an ophthalmologist hired by the city. Grace himself … or rather, Grace’s mind … had simply turned his eyes off. I wasn’t an expert in conversion disorders, but I knew that they could represent unresolved psychological conflicts, or a broken mind’s way of willfully ignoring conflicts.

  I pulled over my satchel and unzipped its main pouch. Out came my well-worn Moleskine sketchpad. I flipped to a fresh page and wrote.

  PSYCHOSOMATIC = PAST CONFLICT? KEY?

  I gazed at the words, rolling the Berol with my fingertips.

  RESOLVING CONFLICT = SIGHT. HE NEEDS TO SEE TO TELL HIS STORY.

  I flipped the pencil in my hand, the rubber eraser now facing the desk. I tapped out a beat on the metal as I continued to read. I made it a half-sentence before I realized what I was drumming: “Love Is Blindness” from U2’s Achtung Baby.

  Love is blindness, I don’t want to see … Won’t you wrap the night around me?

  Odd. I’d always preferred the cover version by The Devlins.

  I kept tapping out the rhythm, kept reading. Martin Grace was a suspect in a dozen deaths, dating back at least ten years. More than half had been horrific homicides; the others, previously ruled as suicides or accidental deaths. But a pattern began to emerge. That’s what happens to serial killers; at least that’s what the movies say. They get lazy. They fall prey to routine, just like the rest of us.

  The victims had a common connection: Martin Grace. One of the vics had been a lover, but the rest had been Grace’s colleagues and friends, along with some strangers. According to these papers, Grace was practically a traveling salesman of death, bebopping from one city to the next in New York state, leaving a body (or sometimes two) in the rearview mirror.

  He’d been running, that much was clear. But from what? Himself?

  I scratched this into my notebook, then resumed drumming.

  There was another twist: Grace seemed to have airtight alibis. Dinners with friends, drinks with the boss … hell, even manning the cotton candy stand at a church fish fr
y. It didn’t make any sense. Why did the cops have a hard-on for this guy? Did Grace simply have bad luck picking friends? Was he moving from city to city to start anew, get past the grief?

  I flipped the page.

  No.

  The hairs on my arms spiked as icy gooseflesh rippled across my skin. Martin Grace had seen things, the report said. Seen things before they’d happened. Visions of death. According to recent interviews, at least a third of the victims’ families said that Grace had told the victims that they were going to die before they actually did. And he didn’t just tell them they were going to die. He told them how they were going to die.

  And he was right.

  Martin Grace would soon stand trial for the rape and murder of vocalist Tanya Gold, once a rising star in New York’s hip-hop scene. According to the police report, Tanya Gold met Grace once—and only once—at Screamin’ Soundz Studioz, a production house where Grace worked five years ago. There, Tanya recorded her contribution to a guest appearance on another artist’s record. After the session, a panicked Grace pulled the woman aside, warned her that she was in danger … that she would soon be “raped and ripped to shreds.”

  Understandably, the singer reported this to the police as a threat on her life. Motivated by pressure from Tanya Gold’s headline-making manager (and whatever incentive he may have provided), New York’s finest issued a restraining order and monitored both Gold’s and Grace’s residence that evening. Martin Grace went to bed at around 10:30. Tanya Gold turned in a few hours later.

  Per their orders, cops attempted to contact Gold the next morning. When she didn’t answer her apartment door, officers entered and found a sight in the living room so freakish, one of the cops later reported that he thought it was “a reality show gag.”

  It wasn’t.

  Tanya Gold—a twenty-one-year-old who was as business-savvy and beautiful as she was talented—had been torn literally limb from limb. Ropes had been tied to her wrists and ankles. Those ropes had been looped through metal hoops in the living room’s four corners … hoops presumably bolted to the walls the night before. Either man or machine—Forensics was as baffled as the reporting cops—had pulled these ropes tauter and tauter, until Tanya Gold’s body was ripped apart.

  Coroner reports confirmed that Tanya Gold had been raped. Blood spatter analysis and the position of Tanya’s torso (which had remained connected to her left leg, sweet Jesus) implied the rape likely occurred after the rending.

  Martin Grace was arrested in his apartment that morning as he was dressing for work. He was questioned, mercilessly. There was no evidence that he’d left the apartment the night before, and—aside from his warning to the singer—no evidence linked him to Tanya Gold’s murder.

  From what I could surmise from other reports, it was Grace’s town-hopping trail of terror that empowered the district attorney’s office to prosecute the Tanya Gold case five years after the fact. The “visions” of death Grace experienced were numerous—and, according to the prosecution, damning.

  He didn’t just inform twenty-four-year-old musician Rosemary Chapel of Rochester that she’d hang herself. He told her which belt she’d use—her favorite, silver-studded black leather. Three hours later, those metal studs tore Rosemary’s throat open as her legs kicked and twitched in space, suspended in her parents’ garage.

  Conquest resident Jerome Stringer was warned he’d lose not just a finger but a hand on his woodshop saw, and would pass out from the shock before he could call an ambulance. It happened three days later.

  Robbery gone wrong. Car accident. A horrifying (and preposterous, were it not true) homicide involving javelins. Martin Grace had precognitively seen them all, the families said. And in Grace’s last interview with a psychologist at Rockland a month ago, the man finally corroborated this.

  “Patient states he has a lifelong ‘preternatural disposition’ for clairvoyance, which recently transformed into precognitive ‘visions’ of victims’ deaths,” wrote the last doctor to work with Grace. “Likely suffers from delusions of reference/schizotypal personality disorder. Paradoxically, patient insists he did not kill these people, but is nonetheless personally responsible for their deaths. He calls himself an unwitting psychic sniper, ‘the crosshairs for Death. For the dark.’”

  My mouth went dry. I took a quick pull from my mug and read on, not blinking.

  “Patient believes he is an earthbound ‘catalyst’ for human suffering and death,” the doctor wrote. “His interaction with others incurs the interest and wrath of an otherworldy, monstrous entity he calls several names: ‘The Inkstain,’ ‘Chernobog’ … and, most commonly, ‘The Dark Man.’”

  I shuddered at this, and at something vague and wicked and smiling very far away in my mind—and at the lyric I’d been absently tapping on the desk as I’d read.

  A little death without mourning, no call and no warning. Baby, a dangerous idea. That almost makes sense …

  A dark man.

  I placed the pencil on the desk. I read another page.

  The murders had ended two years ago. The same year Grace went blind.

  3

  There were more pages in Grace’s report, most of them from the district attorney’s office—that gothic letterhead was as familiar to me as the lines on my palms—but I didn’t get to them. The silence of my office was shattered by skeleton song.

  I jerked, nearly knocking the papers to the floor. I fumbled for my satchel. My cell phone played another round of cheerful xylophone music—I call it skeleton song, since bone-white rib cages are always used as xylophones in the cartoons—and then it went silent. I rummaged in the canvas bag, retrieved the phone and looked at its screen. Lucas had sent me a text message. I was thankful for the interruption. I flipped the device lengthwise and slid out its tiny keyboard. His IM flashed on the LCD.

  STILL ON FOR GRAM? MEET AT Well7 @ 5?

  “Yeah,” I sighed, again brushing the hair from my eyes. “You bet, bro.”

  I typed this on the pad, added the words IT’LL WORK OUT, CALL IF YOU NEED ANYTHING and hit “OK.” An animated pinwheel spun on-screen as my little phone talked to the cell tower sixty feet above and a half-block away. That blessed thing is the only reason we Morlocks get phone reception in the bowels of The Brink.

  The phone beeped. Message sent. I slid the thing closed.

  I leaned back in my chair, exhaling through my lips, feeling my body deflate as another emotion swept over me. The chair’s springs squealed. I barely noticed.

  Gram. She had warred with her cancer for four agonizing years—a physical and mental Hatfield-and-McCoy feud inside her—and then six months ago she’d emotionally checked out. She never told the family this, never told “her boys” that the pain was too much, that she finally wanted to join Grandpa Howard (who’d been gone for nearly twenty years), that she simply didn’t have the steel for it anymore. No. She never confessed. But I knew. That mischievous, defiant glimmer in her gray eyes had vanished a half-year ago. I think my father knew, too.

  But Lucas was different. Maybe it was his youth or his wide-eyed, adventurous soul that stopped him just short of understanding this truth, like a happy dog on a chain bolted to a doghouse. To that end, Lucas had clutched the hope, as bright as it was bittersweet, that Gram would recover, that the treatments would work, that the radiation and the chemo pumping into her veins would eventually do some goddamned good.

  Gram gave up six months ago. But her body held on, driven by either Taylor Family Loyalty or sheer stubbornness (these things are not mutually exclusive) until last week. She wasn’t talking at the end. She was just breathing. Sleeping and breathing.

  And then, she was just asleep.

  My boundless, bouncing baby brother was dealing with her death the best way he knew how—by channeling his frustration and emotions into his two current passions: filmmaking and parkour. Gram was cremated today, and her memorial service was tonight, at Selznick and Sons in the Upper East Side, near where my father lived.
I would meet Lucas at “Well7”—my brother’s peculiar nickname for Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park—at five o’clock. We’d stop by my apartment for brisk showers and shaves, and get to the service by seven. Rachael would meet us there. My father would likely arrive an hour after that, freshly stressed from his day at One Hogan Place, where he would undoubtedly have unleashed appropriately hellish retribution upon deserving ne’er-do-wells.

  Dad had called last night and left a voicemail on my cell phone, telling me he might be late to the service. I swear to God, if he’s late to his mother’s funeral, it’s a done deal he’ll be late to his own. I hadn’t yet shared this news with Rachael, who was baffled by my father’s workaholic tendencies. She had good reason to be; my dad once told me he was so busy, he’d never even changed the passcode to his telephone messages from the “1234” default.

  I turned back to the reports on my desk and shuffled through the papers until I again spotted that distinctive letterhead. These documents gave a macro view of the prosecution’s position for the upcoming trial—thankfully, there was no legalese to bulldoze through—and they confirmed what Dr. Peterson had told me. Martin Grace was staring down a howitzer barrel: one count of homicide, and circumstantial evidence indicating eleven others. With Grace’s alibis, I doubted the lawyers could pin all of the deaths on him, but they were giving it their fear-of-John-Houseman Paper Chase all. Things were not looking good for the blind man.

  Hell. Come to think of it, things weren’t looking good for me, either.

  I glanced up at the letterhead.

  New York County District Attorney’s Office.