The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  “What’s with these fuckers?” she says, and he says, “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Thanks,” she yells to the phone when it’s already halfway to the cradle. Then she pesters Josh to get her intel on the email—Undertown@hushmail.com—and phone number. He takes a look at the slip of paper and says he can’t.

  “Can’t? Can’t? What’s with this can’t?”

  “Hushmail is an encrypted service, and if you’re serious about privacy, you’re probably using TOR, a network within a network that bounces all traffic through multiple servers making it impossible to figure out who you are, where you’re from.”

  “Wait—what? English please.”

  He says, “Cavewoman translation: it’s secret email.”

  “Why would you want secret email?”

  “Because you’ve got secrets?”

  “Okay,” she says. “Then look up the phone.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Again,” she says, “this can’t. I don’t like it.”

  He taps the area code, 473. “It’s fake. The one most scammers use. That’s not a real place. It’s the area code to nowhere. Probably a Blackphone. Or else they’re using encryption software.”

  “How do you know all this crap?”

  He throws up his arms and lets them fall. “I don’t know. I’m friends with nerds. I wasn’t born during the Civil War. Et cetera.”

  “Who are these nerd friends?”

  “Okay, friend. Singular. A hacker buddy of mine. He’s deep into this kind of stuff.”

  She tells Josh he can go, but not far. She might need him. She lets her hand sit a moment on the phone before lifting the receiver, checking the dial tone, dialing.

  The first time someone answers, there is no Hello, no How can I help you? “To whom am I speaking?” That’s what the man on the other end of the line says. He speaks in a baritone broken by an accent that makes his mouth sound full of glass. Eastern European, she guesses, but what does she know? She’s a reporter. She’s an expert on nothing because she knows a little of everything.

  She is rarely at a loss for words. But something about the voice—its deep, almost otherworldly register—unsettles her. She clicks her pen a few times before telling him her name, her position, asking if he might be willing to spend a few minutes talking to her about Undertown for an article she’s writing about the Pearl District, the urban renaissance in Portland.

  There is a gust of breath. Then a click followed by a dial tone that fills her ear like a siren.

  She hangs up the phone and tries again. The ringing goes on for two minutes and never changes over to voicemail. She tries again, and again, and again, until her ear grows hot with the phone mashed against it.

  From a good height, she drops the phone into the cradle. The clattery dong of it makes a few people pop up in the cubicles around her. She gives them the finger, and they drop down again. She clicks her pen a few more times, then tucks it in her pocket, grabs her purse, drains her coffee, and starts for the door.

  The cubicles are arranged like a gray-combed hive, and she navigates their alleys. Computer screens flash in her passing. She spots one of the Arts reporters contorting her body into a yoga stretch, a Sports columnist watching two televisions at once. Many of the desks are unoccupied, empty except for a balled-up sheet of paper, a broken keyboard. Every year they lose more ads, more subscribers, and every year their staff shrinks, so that one person scrambles to cover the work of six.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she spots him. Brandon, her editor. Everyone else wears jeans and fleece, but he slinks into the office every day in an Oxford pinstripe with a tie noosed around his neck. “Where you going? Lela?”

  “Out.”

  She races along a long line of file cabinets. One of the Sports clerks turns the corner. He carries a tall pile of Hot Lips Pizza boxes. She flattens against the cabinets and dodges past him and through a warm cloud of pepperoni.

  Brandon gets slowed down by the clerk, but catches up before she reaches the hallway, the bank of elevators. “What are you chasing?”

  “A story.”

  “This for tomorrow?”

  “Definitely not, but it might be hot.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Can’t tell. Too early. Bad luck to share.”

  “I still need copy for Sunday.”

  “The fall farmers’ market and the Willamette 10K. You’ll get it.”

  “I better.”

  He will, but barely. She’s behind on everything—she’s always behind, always chasing a deadline that is instantly replaced by another—and soon enough she’s going to lose more time to family. Tomorrow she’s scheduled to have a celebratory lunch with her niece, Hannah, who is getting fitted today for a retinal prosthetic. Lela hopes it works. For her niece, of course, but also for herself, for the story.

  She could pitch it any number of ways—human interest if she pushes the personal, Metro if she pushes innovation at OHSU, Science if she pushes the biotech boom. No matter which direction, the story has legs, front-page potential, the kind of feature that could get picked up for syndication.

  Her sister, Cheryl, is always giving her a hard time about this kind of thinking. “Can’t you ever have a thought that’s unpublished?” she says. “Don’t you ever feel like a vulture?” No. Yes. Maybe. Whatever. Her sister will never understand. They aren’t hard-wired the same. That’s what it means to be a writer: everything is material. You are never not paying attention. There is nothing that is not worth learning and processing into a story. And if somebody feels used, gets their feelings hurt, too fucking bad. That’s the business.

  At the elevators she punches the DOWN button and watches the numbers—red and dotted, like needled skin—click their way up to the fourth floor. Brandon is winded from chasing her and breathes forcefully through his nose. She refuses to look at him, though he stands so close she can smell him, his standard odor of Barbasol and chai tea. She hates his face, the weak chin, the eyebrows constantly knotting over his nose, his forehead rising high into a receding hairline—and she hates his edits, the way he double-checks her sources and trims away all her good, meaty descriptions. The elevator dings and the doors open, and she walks through them and hits simultaneously the LOBBY and CLOSE DOOR buttons.

  “What about a follow on the OES choir? Their experience singing at Carnegie Hall with all those other private high schools?”

  “That doesn’t deserve a follow.”

  The doors start to close, and he puts out a hand to stop them. “I’m getting pressure from above. The reader survey says people want more stories that make them feel good.”

  “I didn’t get into this business to make drooling idiots feel good.”

  “Then maybe you should get out, Lela. Apply for a staff position at a magazine.”

  She pushes the button again. “Not until I accomplish my goal of frustrating you into a heart attack.”

  The doors start to close, and Brandon puts out a hand to stop them again. “Oh, and the Halloween parade. You’re on that?”

  She raises a hand in a swatting gesture. “On it. I guess.”

  “And the storm—do you know about the storm that’s headed our—”

  His words are clipped by the closing doors. The elevator sinks.

  ❖

  She drives a beater Volvo station wagon that used to belong to her parents. She never locks the door. The radio was stolen years ago, a black rectangle with wires dangling from it. Now there is nothing to steal but gum wrappers and coffee cups. She ripped out the backseat to make room for her dog, a German shepherd named Hemingway, and the car is shagged over with his hair. It takes a few cranks to turn the engine over. She hears her phone buzzing in her purse and doesn’t bother answering it, knowing it is likely Brandon pestering her further. She doesn’t own a smartphone. She owns what her friends call a Flintstone phone, whatever the rep at Paradise Wireless offered her for free five years ago. It looks a little like a scarred b
ullet. The numbers are worn off the keypad. When she is having a conversation, other voices ghost in and out, due to some echoey distortion or a faulty antenna that pirates other calls.

  She does not text. She does not Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of that other digital nonsense, the many online whirlpools that seem to encourage boasting and bitching. She doesn’t care about your crazy cat, your ugly baby, your Cancún vacation, your Ethiopian meal, your political outrage and micro-complaints and competitive victimhood. She doesn’t want social media eroding her privacy or advertisers assaulting her with customized commercials. There’s too much noise and too little solitude in the world. Everybody should shut the fuck up and get back to work.

  The Oregonian assigned her an email address, but she hates to use it, prefers to call or write letters. She likes things that are tactile. That might be one of the reasons she became a reporter: the memory of her father reading the newspaper at the kitchen table every morning until his coffee went cold and his finger pads blackened with ink. Last Christmas her sister, Cheryl, bought her an e-reader, and Lela held it with the tips of her fingers like something found moldering in the back of the fridge. She returned it and used the money at REI on a Gerber belt knife, a fleece headband, a pair of SmartWools.

  Now she drives to the Pearl District, the semi-industrial area that has been, over the past fifteen years, slowly redeveloped. There are homeless men slumped on benches and pushing grocery carts, muttering to themselves. There are shelters and psychic readers and soup kitchens and tattoo parlors. But alongside the cracked windows and boarded-up doorways, there are lofts and theaters, Peruvian restaurants and French bakeries, bars and coffee shops, so many coffee shops, as if the city were under some narcoleptic spell. Old buildings of marble, cream brick, red brick are interrupted by new buildings of glass that jut up sharply. Bronze water fountains—called Benson Bubblers—burble on almost every street corner, making it sound as if it were raining even when it is not.

  A man stands on a milk crate. He raises his arms to the sky and talks about damnation, hellish torment, the doom of the world. This is Lump. So named because of the warts that cover every inch of him. Even his tongue—she has noticed—carries a gray jewel of flesh at the tip. He wears layers of black, sweatshirts and jeans and jackets that have been scissored and torn and resewn in such a way that they appear like one ragged complicated cloak. The crows keep him company. One perches on his shoulder now—two others rest on a nearby sill. She once saw him on a park bench surrounded by twenty or more. They are his eyes, he says. Like spores he hurls to the wind to know the news of the city. She has used Lump as a source more than once. The street sometimes knows things before the rest of us.

  The sidewalks are wet, the same dark gray as the buildings and the clouds above, the gray of Portland, its defining color. The sun tries to bully through but can’t manage more than a white splotch. This is early afternoon, and with the noon rush over, only a few people scatter the streets. A woman in low-slung jeans and knee-high leather boots walks a tiny dog. Two androgynous hipsters—one with blue hair, the other cardinal red, both of them skinny-jeaned and nose-ringed—lean into each other for a kiss. She spots a homeless teen—you can always recognize them, no matter their clothes, by their soiled backpacks—and a man in a black fleece talking excitedly into his Bluetooth headset. A bus knocks through puddles. Pigeons explode from a maple stripped of leaves. She heads to the north end of the Pearl between the Fremont Bridge and the Broadway Bridge, and finds a parking spot a block away from the Rue. Before she gets out of the Volvo, she pulls out a bottle of Adderall and strangles off the cap. She shakes out one pill. Then, after a moment’s pause, another. She drops them into the cup holder and crushes them with the butt of the bottle. She digs around on the floor for an empty fountain drink. She slides the straw from it. Bites it in half. Then uses it to snort the pills. Her eyes water and she sneezes. It would be easier to swallow them for sure, but she likes the brain-burning jolt she gets from sniffing them. She kicks open the door, checks her reflection in the side mirror, and wipes her nose before setting off. She drags her purse with her. It is fat-bottomed, made from canvas, the size of a small suitcase. She jokes that she could pull a lamp from it, a pogo stick, five dwarves, and a trampoline, like some demented Mary Poppins. Due to the shouldered weight of it, she has a habit of leaning to the left. She burrows through it now to make sure she has what she needs: pen, notebook, camera.

  She can hear a MAX train rattling down a nearby street, and she can smell the mossy funk of the Willamette River, and she can see up ahead the cavernous space where the Rue once stood. She slows her pace. She wears a pair of hard-soled Keens, and they clop the pavement and make her realize how quiet the street is. In the times she visited this place before, she noticed the same, the quiet, as if some mourning shawl surrounded the block. But now it is a construction zone and ought to be filled with the steady tock of hammers, the boom of dropped pallets, the growl of backhoes and bulldozers.

  A crow caws. She looks up to see five of them watching her, roosting on telephone wires, appearing against the gray sky like notes on an old piece of sheet music. She gives them a wave and wonders if they’ll pass the message along to Lump.

  Now she stands before a temporary wall—made from tall sheets of plywood—that surrounds the acre lot. There is a Dumpster, two pickups, and a trailer. When she cocks an ear, faintly she hears what at first sounds like whispering. Or feathery breathing. She listens another moment and the sound clarifies into digging. The shush and clink of shovels, the heavy plop of dirt filling wheelbarrows.

  When she wrote the article about the Rue—about its famous tenant, Jeremy Tusk—she rounded up some of the old neighbors, the ones who were willing to talk. They said they noticed the sounds long before they noticed the smell. The sounds of what turned out to be saws drawn along bones, cleavers severing joints. Some guessed Jeremy a hobbyist, a woodworker toying with some project. When the police kicked down his door, they found four plastic storage bins full of hydrofluoric acid with as many bodies bathing in them, dissolving slowly. More were stored in the fridge and freezer. Ten skulls grinned on the bookshelves. And a lampshade glowed on a side table and a jacket hung in the closet and curtains hung from the windows—all stitched from tanned flesh. There were designs chalked and painted on the floors and walls and ceiling. Black and red candles burned down to nubs. Gemstones, eggs, antlers, daggers. A crow mask and a deer mask and a wolf mask sitting on a shelf. He ritualized murder, communed with a darker frequency.

  Lela walks the length of the barricade, past rain-smeared posters and black-and-white tangles of graffiti. Someone has spray-painted what looks like a hand, a red right hand, with fangs coming out of the palm, across the door. A padlock hangs loose on the latch. She slides the tooth of it out. She creaks open the door—with the same slowness and care that she opened the fridge in Jeremy’s apartment so long ago. It was still there, as though waiting for someone to plug it in, fill it with a gallon of milk, a bag of red apples. The interior released a smell so profoundly rotten, she felt fouled for days for having drawn it into her body.

  Inside the construction site, she discovers a roughly hewn crater, several stories deep. The walls of it are cut flat and striped with concrete and stone and gravel and clay that looks like the firm red muscle of a heart. At the bottom of the pit, grayed by shadow, a dozen men lean on shovels or kneel with trowels and whisks. They are digging, unearthing, working around mounds of varying heights. An archaeological dig. This happens often. Construction begins and one of the workers discovers a shattered pot or seed cache or an atlatl dart, and a team of UO scholars drives up from Eugene to excavate.

  Every mound glints with whites and yellows and browns, as if shellacked. It is then she recognizes the bones. They poke from the dirt, tangles of them, puzzles of ribs and femurs and skulls. She is looking at a graveyard, and she is looking at it now through the eye of her camera. She has drawn it from her purse, and she has thumbed
the cap and twisted the focus without even thinking. It is ingrained in her, a part of her muscle memory, her constant need to document what she finds compelling.

  Though it’s dark at the bottom of the pit, she turns off the flash. She doesn’t want to be noticed. Not yet. The camera clicks as she takes shot after shot, but none of the men turn toward her, focused on their task.

  One of them—small, appearing almost like a child except for his old man’s face—wanders among the burial mounds. He looks so delicate and different from the other blockish men. She guesses him their supervisor. He is as bald as an infant, and what little hair he has springs in downy tufts around his ears. He says something—in a language she does not recognize, his words sharp with consonants—to one of the workers. Something reproachful that makes him hand over his trowel and step away from the mound.

  The small man leans in and blows away a puff of dust. Then, with surgical precision, he removes what appears to be a skull, maybe human, though it seems too long. Some dirt falls from its hollows when he holds it up for everyone to see. Then he carries it to a table made from a sheet of plywood laid over sawhorses. Here it joins an arrangement of bones.

  She has visited two archaeological sites for stories. A weeklong OMSI camp, themed around Lewis and Clark, that dug into a section of Fort Clatsop. And a summer class with UO that excavated a Paiute village in Christmas Valley. In both instances, the sites were gridded with string. The archaeologists were exacting about measurements, the precise location of every obsidian flake and broken bone and fibrous sandal found within the grid. She was expecting Indiana Jones, but it felt more like the slow disarrangement of a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

  That isn’t the case here. No grid. No map. No sifting screens. Not even a ponytailed grad student in cargo shorts drinking from a Nalgene bottle covered with National Park stickers. Here instead is trouble—of this she feels certain.

  Whoever Undertown is—whatever they’re building—they don’t want their project shut down by this discovery. So they must have erected high walls around the site in order to take care of it secretly. Actual walls that matched the privacy of their digital walls.