The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  Instead he leans in. And listens to what Lump has to tell him. While he speaks, the crow takes a short flight around the room before returning to its master. It fluffs its feathers, casting off the raindrops that jewel them.

  “You’re sure?” Juniper says. “A red right hand?”

  Lump nods and draws up his hood. “I thought you should know,” he says before ripping open the door and heading once more into the night. “Demons walk among us.”

  ❖

  Then the power goes out for the second time that night. The lightning recedes at the same time the lights sputter off, on, ebbing to a brownish dusk, then full dark. The ceiling fan in the lounge slows its rotation. The light of the blue cross fades. The heater gives a dying gasp. The whole building seems to momentarily shrink.

  He waits for everything to buzz back to life, and when that doesn’t happen, he snaps on a Maglite fetched from the reception desk. He has a generator out back, but that can wait. He shouldn’t put this off any longer. He goes first to the kitchen, past the big-basined sink, the industrial-sized oven, to the open stretch of counter where he keeps the knives. They dangle from a magnetized strip screwed into the wall. He pulls down the biggest one, a butcher knife, with a snick. Iron or silver would be better, but steel will have to do.

  His fingers gnarl around it. His hands are big, meaty, but blood can slip the strongest grip. He opens the supply cabinet and balances the Maglite on a shelf and pulls down a roll of duct tape and picks at it, peeling away a strip to stick to the knife’s hilt. He then wraps his hand several times over, until it is silver-mittened. He bites the tape, tears it off the roll, pats it in place. The blade points at the floor, his arm a scythe. He gashes the air experimentally. Good enough.

  Without the heater whirring and the fridge droning, everything seems terribly quiet. Except for the throb and lap of the rain. The dark is broken by the occasional lightning flash, and the silence punctuated by the mutter of thunder. His shoes, still wet from his time outside, squeak as he makes his way toward the walk-in freezer at the far end of the kitchen.

  He reaches for the handle, then stops his hand. He leans his head against the door, mashing his cheek up against the stainless steel. It’s cold, echoey, like an arctic seashell. Maybe he hears something, or maybe not. The night plays tricks on your senses. He changes his grip on the Maglite, so that it will double as a club, then takes a deep breath.

  The Maglite concentrates into an orange eye when he reaches again for the handle—and then he springs the latch and pulls back the door, and the light opens up into a yellow funnel that illuminates the floor of the freezer.

  Empty. Except for a tub of ice cream fallen off a shelf. The warm air crashes up against the cold and steam swirls, obscuring the dark even further. He steps forward, raising the hand that grips the knife. In the back corner, beyond a crate, two eyes catch the light and spark like candle flames.

  He might cry out, but the sound is lost against the snarl of the hound. The steam whirls when it leaps, its body missiling through the air. It knocks its paws into his chest. He falls flat on his back, unaware of any distance traveled. One instant his breastbone is battered, the next moment his back slams the floor. The Maglite goes clattering off, wheeling the air with shadows.

  He holds up his free hand just in time to brace its neck. He cannot see much of anything. Just flashes of teeth, tongue, eyes, paws. In its breath he smells death. The hot, paralyzing reek of carrion. Its jaws clack together, gnashing the air, then close around his arm, shaking it, piercing and tearing the flesh.

  Lightning might as well have struck him. The interface between his brain and his body feels sputtery as though his nerves have grown frayed. The past few seconds he has been demanding his right arm into action—to slash, damn it, stab—but only now does it respond, arcing through the air, plunging into the hound’s neck, and then again, clacking against its ribs, and then again again again, until at last the thing goes still. It collapses its weight onto him, soaking him with blood he knows runs black.

  He rolls the hound off. The knife scrapes the floor when he gets on his hands and knees. He tries to settle his pulse. He reaches for the counter. He pulls himself into a crouch. Then a standing position.

  The pain hasn’t arrived yet, but he knows his arm is in bad shape, in need of stitches, maybe even a cast. He retrieves the Maglite. He runs some cold water over the wound while he chews away the tape binding his hand and frees the knife. Then he burrows around for the vodka he keeps at the rear of the spice cabinet. He splashes the wound before wrapping it in a flour-sack cloth and then with a quarter roll of cellophane.

  “Hello?”

  He goes still. It must be one of his clients, maybe drawn downstairs by the disturbance. Again—from the hallway, closer now—“Hello?” This time he registers the voice as a woman’s. Plenty of women stay regularly at the shelter—Meg, Hettie, Jan, among others—but none tonight.

  That’s when he remembers the front door. When he overrode the locks and allowed Lump inside, he never reset security. His eyes jog between the dead hound, bleeding out a black puddle, and the door that leads to the hallway.

  “Just a minute,” he says, trying to keep his voice calm. “Just stay where you are, please. I’ll be right there.”

  Whoever she is, she doesn’t listen. She steps into the kitchen just as he swings the Maglite. The yellow beam cuts the dark and strikes her face, and she holds up a hand and squints her eyes. “Are you here for a bed? I normally don’t check anyone in after nine.” He keeps the light steadily trained on her as he approaches, trying to blind her, blocking her view of the hound with his body.

  She retreats into the hallway—trying to evade the light or keep some distance between them—and only then does he drop the shine from her face. She blinks, hard, as though she has sand in her eyes. “I’m not looking for a bed.”

  “Clothes? Food? A shower? What?” His voice comes out more severely than he intended.

  “Information,” she says.

  It’s only then that he really sees her. Auburn hair pulled back in a braid. Mossy-green eyes. Nose dusted with freckles. A North Face shell and Keen hiking shoes. A giant canvas purse that bulges at her side. She looks like she should be leading nature walks at Multnomah Falls, not pushing her way into a shelter late at night. “No one came when I knocked.”

  “But you decided you were welcome anyway?”

  She shrugs. No apology.

  “It’s fine. You startled me—that’s all.” He starts toward the lounge and hopes she’ll follow.

  She does. Her voice trails close behind him. “I’m pretty sure that’s a health code violation.”

  He turns on her and she nearly runs into him. How much did she see? And what kind of excuse can there possibly be for a hairless hound—the size of a pony—stabbed to death on a kitchen floor?

  She trades her purse from one shoulder to the other. “Your arm. It looks like it got carved up for a snack.” Her eyes stare directly into his. She leans in and he can’t help but feel shoved around by her intensity. “What happened?”

  “Oh, this.” He raises his arm, and it hangs in the air between them. “It’s nothing.” The blood has spotted through the makeshift tourniquet. It throbs in time with his pulse.

  “But what happened?”

  He starts once more for the lounge. It’s easier to lie with his back to her. “There are no pets allowed here, but sometimes someone will try to sneak one in. A dog took a bite out of me. I’m glad no one else got hurt.”

  “Where’s the dog?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you got bit by a dog—and that wound is fresh—so where’s the dog?”

  His eyes jog back toward the kitchen, and he motions to one of the chairs before plopping onto the couch. The springs shriek beneath his weight. He balances the Maglite on an end table as if it were a lamp. “I’m sorry—who are you? What are you doing here?”

  She doesn’t take a seat but stands o
ver him. She clutches the purse as though worried he might snatch it. “We’ve met before,” she says. “I interviewed you two years ago. An article about how the recession surged the homeless population.”

  It takes him a moment. The darkness of the room—the pain in his arm—the questions whirling through his head. She’s a reporter. A reporter at The Oregonian. She stopped by unannounced and got annoyed when he wouldn’t pose for a photo. When she asked him, “Why not? Everybody likes to get their picture in the paper,” he had to lie to her then, too. The truth is, he couldn’t risk being recognized, no matter how many years had passed.

  “Right,” he says. “You. That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “The way you barge in here and assault me with all these questions.”

  She doesn’t flinch. If anything a smile bends the corners of her mouth.

  She’s silent. She’s trying to get him to say something. Another reporter trick. Hit your subject with a thousand questions or shut up and make them uncomfortable enough to answer. “Are you here for another story?” he says. “What do you want from me?”

  She says she’s looking for someone. A homeless man. The street preacher most everyone refers to as Lump. She thinks he might know something about a story she’s chasing. She wants to ask him a few questions. “I tried following him earlier. I was in my car; he was on foot. Lost him down an alley.” She drove around another fifteen minutes before spotting something in her rearview—a black figure darting away from the shelter. “Was it him? Was he here? What did you talk about?”

  Juniper wishes he could turn his back to her again. Her eyes feel like they’re inside him. “Haven’t seen him,” he says.

  “Did he tell you about the murder?”

  Now he leans forward. “You think Lump killed someone?”

  “No. I don’t think Lump killed anyone. But I think he might have some information. And he was certainly in a rush to share it with you.”

  “You’re wrong. He wasn’t here.” Juniper checks his arm again—the pain now jolting, electrical. “Afraid I can’t help you.”

  She nods longer than she needs to. “I see,” she says.

  “You see what?”

  “I see.” She reaches down and picks up a black feather from the floor. She strokes the length of it. “When I say the following, does it trigger anything for you? The Rue building, Jeremy Tusk, Carrie Wunderlich. Anything? Even the slightest connection or recollection?”

  She’ll know he’s lying, but he might as well keep it up. “No. Nothing.”

  Her unblinking stare continues. Accompanied by another one of those deliberate silences meant to make him uncomfortable. It’s working. But he holds her eyes and doesn’t say anything more.

  She snatches the Maglite off the table and runs. For the kitchen. Her shoes clopping the linoleum. The beam rising and falling with every arm swing. He’s too slow to catch her, though he tries. When he catches up to her in the kitchen, she has the light trained on the hound. Or what used to be the hound, now a black pile of ash.

  Chapter 6

  ASK SOMEONE IN PORTLAND where the Hadal District is, they’ll look at you funny, say they don’t know. Every city has a place like this. A place unmapped. A place the GPS goes dark. A place people don’t go, except by accident, and then they’ll drive fast to escape it.

  On the east side of the Willamette River, among the graffiti-riddled warehouses and bridge stanchions, there are unlit streets that sparkle with broken glass, that flutter and scuttle with sun-blanched newspapers and plastic bags like desiccated jellyfish. There are rusted-out shopping carts, boarded-up windows, and the occasional figure cutting in and out of the shadows.

  Puddles reach across the roads, retreating slowly into drains clogged with trash. Juniper splashes through one now. He wears a black ball cap and a black shell with the collar turned up. He’s a big enough man that when he walks the streets, no one bothers him, though he hears voices in doorways whispering, sees the silver flash of a knife blade. The power zaps back on across Portland—and the sudden glow is like the blue hint of dawn—but all the streetlamps in the Hadal remain black, knocked out by bullets or bricks.

  He turns down an alley so dark the shadows feel palpable, like something cool that licks and caresses. A pile of garbage bags oozes something foul. A rat scuttles away from his tromping approach. A distant yowling makes him go still—listening—until he is satisfied it is a dog he hears, not a hound.

  He turns the corner and finds what he’s looking for. In between a moneylender and a pawnshop sits a squat brick building with moss springing from the mortar joints. BLOOD BANK, the sign reads in red lettering. “O Negative, Be Positive,” “U Give Blood, We Give $.”

  You let them prick you with a needle and fill a pint bag, you get fifty bucks. Officially, you can’t do it unless you test clean, unless you’re eighteen, unless you show your license, your social security card, your proof of address. Unofficially, as long as your blood isn’t diseased, you’re welcome. This isn’t exactly the Red Cross.

  A woman walks out the door. The side of her head is buzzed and tattoos reach down her legs in the design of fishnet stockings. Her arm is bandaged at the elbow. She goes to the bodega on the corner. It sells everything from ice cream to coffee to booze, pretzels, candy, bananas, decorative bongs, Lotto scratch tickets, T-shirts silk-screened with wolves and marijuana leaves. The shelves behind the register are stacked with cigarettes as brightly and neatly arranged as crayons. Juniper knows how it works. You knock on the counter—two slow raps followed by a fast one—and the clerk will know what you’re there for. Skulls. He’ll push you an Altoids tin crammed with little white pills blackened at their center. They’re supposed to make every nerve in your body feel like it’s having a mellow orgasm that lasts twenty-four hours.

  The bodega and Blood Bank are owned by the same person. That’s who Juniper is here to see. He pushes into the brightly lit space. The walls are decorated with graffiti art that shows monsters eating each other. The waiting area is empty except for an old man snoring in a corner chair. A flat-screen TV mounted on the wall plays music videos with the sound off. A clerk stands behind the counter, smiling vaguely. He is as hairless as a mannequin. No eyebrows even. His cheeks are pierced on either side so that you can see his molars. A sketchbook lies open before him, and he has scrawled in it, with a black pen, a portrait of himself. “Have you given to us before, or are you a first-time donor? Can I get you a form?”

  “I need to talk to Sarin.”

  The man’s teeth are too long and black-rooted. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you mean.”

  Juniper knows how he looks. Old and oversize and squarely dressed, so that people guess him a preacher or a cop. In a way he supposes he’s both. “I’m not police, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  The receptionist cocks his head. Juniper thinks he sees a flutter of movement in the corner of his eye, like a worm peeking out and then retreating. “Then, what are you?”

  Juniper almost says, Friend, I’m a friend, but catches himself. He isn’t sure what to call Sarin. “We go way back.”

  “If I knew a woman by the name of Sarin, I would not presume her to be here, in a place like this, on a night like this.”

  Two doors frame either side of the desk. The left hallway leads to a large room in which a nurse moves on slippered feet from padded table to padded table, tapping veins, checking bags, asking donors to squeeze a racquetball to get the blood flowing and telling them they’re welcome to treat themselves to the complimentary apple juice and cookies. The right hallway leads to the refrigerators stacked with blood bags, an accountant’s office with a walk-in safe, and finally, at the end of the hall, a black door. Both entries are controlled by wireless locks and keyless remotes.

  “It’s urgent.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Yes, she is. I need to talk to her. It’s an emergency.”

  The holes in the receptionist’s
cheeks bunch up, each one toothy, his grin a grin of many mouths. “Don’t you think you’re a little out of your element?”

  “I’m only telling you as a courtesy. You can ignore me or you can warn her. Either way, I’m going through that door.”

  The man’s hands are pale, the fingers like knitting needles, and they slip off the counter, reaching somewhere below, likely to a mounted spring holster.

  Juniper throws his body across the desk—quick for a big man—and with both hands he takes hold of the receptionist by the head. He then slams his face down onto the sketchpad—once, twice, three times—until he goes limp and slumps to the floor. A splat of blood brightens the nose of his self-portrait. “Sorry,” Juniper says. “No time to argue.”

  The old man in the corner keeps snoring. Juniper leans over the desk and spots the remote switches. He flips them both, and the doors give a metallic shout as they come unlocked. He yanks the right one open and heads down the hallway to its end.

  Here a black door awaits. The knob of it is a brass knob shaped like a skull. He hesitates only a second before twisting it.

  ❖

  She sits in the center of the room. The adjustable chair—like something out of a dentist’s office—is upholstered in cracked black leather that matches the color of her tank top and pants and motorcycle boots. At first glance, she appears fifty, maybe sixty—her skin creased and beginning to droop, her hair white except for a stripe of black that runs back from her temple—but she is older by decades. Her voice is rough and deep-throated, the sound smoke should make rising from a chimney. “What’s it been? A year?”

  “Something like that.”