The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  She drops her purse. She lost her knife in Powell’s, so she pulls out her pepper spray, pops the safety cap. The apartment is small, only four hundred square feet, but she can’t see all of it from here. The entryway opens into the living room, which runs into the kitchen and dinette. A short hallway leads to the bedroom and bathroom. She tries to make no noise, but that’s nearly impossible, given the old hardwood floors that groan with every step. That’s the only sound, aside from the swish and hum of traffic passing outside.

  The rear entrance has an oversize doggie door that leads to a rotten patio that drops into a staircase that leads to the fenced backyard. That way Hemingway can do his business whenever he pleases. She’s gone too often to walk him with any regularity. The doggie door—she can see now—has been ripped away, and the wood around it appears chewed.

  “Hemingway?” she says softly, and hears a whine come from the bathroom. When she opens the door, she finds the inside of it crosshatched with his claw marks. He rushes her and smashes his head into her groin, her stomach, her hip, desperate for contact, comfort. She tucks away the pepper spray and holds his head in both her hands. One of his teeth appears broken from where he must have attacked the doorknob. He licks her with his warm rough tongue, and she scratches him over with her fingernails until he yips and flinches. Her hand comes away bloody. He’s been cut. Or bitten. It’s difficult to tell. But he’s missing a patch of white-gray fur along his shoulder, a crater deep enough to reveal candy-slick muscle.

  “Oh, my poor boy, my beautiful boy.” She talks to him the way she can’t seem to talk to anyone else, with gushing vulnerability. A few months ago, she dated a guy who claimed she never wanted to talk. “You’re a writer,” he said. “How do you have so few words?” She tried to explain. Speaking was careless and fleeting in its effect. Writing was deliberate, permanent, more meaningful. But he left her anyway. Said dating her was like dating an autistic.

  Hemingway licks her cheek, and she buries her face in his fur and breathes in his skunky odor and says, “I love you, I love you, I love you, you stupid dog.”

  ❖

  Half an hour later, after she cleans the wound with water and smears it with ointment, she clips on the leash and leads Hemingway to the bus stop. She doesn’t feel safe at home. She wants to be surrounded by people. She stares at the back of her hand—where she has written BR12 with a Sharpie—and wonders briefly what it refers to, but then the bus pulls up with a shriek of brakes and a cloud of exhaust, and she forgets all about it.

  At The Oregonian, she scans her ID, but the security guard—not Steve, another guy she doesn’t know so well—holds up his hand. “No dogs allowed.”

  She tells him, with a straight face, that Hemingway is a service animal, and he says, “Where’s his little vest, then? Service animals are always wearing those little vests.”

  “It’s dirty.”

  “It’s dirty?”

  “Yes. I’m having it cleaned. In the washing machine.”

  “Why you need a service animal all of a sudden? I’ve never seen you with one before.”

  “I’ve been diagnosed with epilepsy, if you must know,” she says, and he shakes his head and says, “All right, all right, have it your way,” and waves her through to the elevators.

  It’s Saturday afternoon and the office is now mostly empty, so she sneaks Hemingway through the cubicles and under her desk without any trouble. She tells him to be a good boy and tosses him a treat from her purse, and he slurps it up and crunches it damply.

  Only now does she feel safe enough to think. The person who broke into her apartment was clearly looking for something specific; it has to be the skull.

  After she ran from the construction site, after she climbed into the Volvo and sped away, she could see the men in her rearview mirror. They obviously spotted her plates, figured out who she was, where she lived and worked. They could have brought charges against her for what she did—trespassing, looting—but they didn’t. Which confirms they’re up to something illegal. She doesn’t know how to puzzle together the murder and the hounds. But the slashed tires and the break-in and the late-night query as to her whereabouts all point to the fact that she’s up to her neck in some dangerously deep shit.

  She pulls the camera out of her satchel and stands and peers into the next cubicle. Josh, the intern, types at a keyboard and wears a set of earbuds that connect to a smartphone. “Hey,” she says, and he doesn’t hear her, so she says, “Hey!” again, louder this time, and when he still doesn’t hear her, she throws a pencil at him.

  “What?” he says, too loud, with the earbuds still in.

  She motions at him to shut off whatever he’s listening to, and when he does, she says, “What are you doing?”

  “Copyedits and fact-checking on your pieces and a few others. Then I’ve got to log an interview. So don’t ask me to do anything.”

  “Is Brandon here?”

  “I haven’t seen him for an hour or so.”

  “I need help with my camera.”

  “You really are pathetic, you know. My grandmother understands technology better than you, and she still has an AOL address.”

  “What’s wrong with AOL?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Get over here.”

  He sighs and saves his document and wanders over to her cubicle entrance. He’s been wearing the same pair of pleated khakis all week, and they’re stained along the pocket with ink, the knee with mustard. His cheeks are so flushed with acne that he appears permanently embarrassed. “What?”

  She tells him she wants him to bring the photo up on the screen, so that they can zoom in and out, study the details.

  He tells her to get up and she does and he sits down and then startles at the sight of the dog between his legs. “What the hell? Are you allowed to bring that thing in here?”

  “Don’t worry. He won’t bite unless I tell him to.”

  Josh gives Hemingway a tentative scratch behind the ears—“Hey, buddy”—before knocking the mouse around and lighting up the monitor screen. Their computers are all hopelessly outdated, slow to load, regularly freezing up, not that she really cares. Hers whirs and ticks and groans now, and Josh says, “You can’t leave this many windows open. You’re asking for a crash.”

  As he closes out the browser—and the thirty-some websites tabbed there—her inbox comes into view. Josh comments on the ten thousand unread messages listed there, and she says, “If I actually read and answered all those things, I’d be a professional emailer.”

  “Your address must have gotten shared among some spambots,” he says, and scrolls through the inbox, pointing out the number of messages flowing in since last night, hundreds, all of them with attachments. He lingers a moment, as if tempted by their solicitations. Every attachment is indicated by the symbol of a black paper clip, stacked up on the screen like tarry hoof prints. The computer makes a strained, choked noise, and he breaks from his spell. “Don’t open any of this stuff, okay? It’ll just infect your computer.”

  “The camera.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He plugs in the camera, and the computer takes a long minute to recognize it. He clicks on the external drive and opens up the storage. “There’s like fifty million pictures on this thing that you have obviously never backed up. How far back does this go? Birth? Is your mother’s ultrasound of you in here?”

  “Open the most recent,” she says. “Not today, not the stuff from the farmers’ market or the race, but yesterday.”

  He scrolls through and spots the date stamp on the photos taken at the Rue. He clicks on the first of them—and the image takes over the screen. The carved-out square, maybe thirty feet deep, of the construction site. Busy with workers who shovel and trowel and whisk away the dirt.

  “Zoom in on one of those graves,” she tells him, and he magnifies by 200 percent, then 250 percent when she asks for more. He readjusts the frame so that the mound is centered. It takes a few seconds for the pixels to clarif
y. The screen is riddled with bones. Bones that do and do not appear human. Here are the long arms and legs of a man, but the fingers appear too long and the giant skull appears pointed, elongated, like that of a mastiff or cow.

  She asks him to go to another mound, and he does. The skull is all teeth. And its vertebrae appear to extend into a tail. She notices markings along them. Runes and ciphers akin to those found on the skull in her purse.

  Josh’s voice is barely a whisper when he says, “Dude . . . what is this?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  She tells him to pull up the next photo. This one focuses on a construction worker. Black-bearded. Minutes later he would be the one to chase up the ladder while she took the ramp. She remembers his face then—on its way toward rage—but here he appears smudged, indistinct, greased over with charcoal. The other photos are similar. Every face fogged. She asks Josh to clean up their faces if he can.

  He can’t. “Must be something off with the focus.” Yet everything else remains clear. He calls up the final photo. Of the small man. His face, too, is nothing but a fleshy smear.

  Lela leans against the desk and gnaws at her thumbnail, peeling away a sliver, sucking on it. Her mind retreats to the Rue, the way it felt shadowed even in sun. The bodies found in the apartment there—sawed-up in the fridge, treated into lampshades and curtains, dissolving in buckets of lye—and now more bodies buried beneath. How could one place nest so much darkness?

  Josh gives up on the computer and leans back in the chair to study her. “My dad said that anyone who writes on the back of their hand is a moron.”

  “Huh?” She holds up her hand, the edge of her thumbnail peeled away to reveal the angry red beneath. Her knuckles are always inked with reminders. But today there is only the one, BR12, whatever that referred to. “Oh yeah. I am my own notebook and calendar.” And that’s when she remembers. BR12. Benedikt’s Restaurant, twelve o’clock. Her sister and her niece. She was supposed to meet them there to celebrate Hannah’s eye surgery. The Mirage prosthetic that would supposedly restore her sight. She checks the clock—late by hours. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Every family has a terrorist—her sister, Cheryl, says—an emotional terrorist. And Lela is it. Lela ruins everything, drains and upsets everyone with her pessimism and selfishness, the whole world revolving around her job. Maybe her sister’s right, Lela thinks at moments like this, moments when she’s clearly screwed up, but it’s always been easy for her to move on, shrug off, forget, concentrate on the future, and forget about the past.

  She’s already there—already looking ahead—saying to Josh, “That interview you have to transcribe? Forget it. I need you on this.” She taps the screen so hard that the monitor wobbles. “I asked you earlier to do some digging on the company that bought the Rue property. Undertown. What do you have on them for me?”

  “Brandon told me not to—”

  “Forget Brandon. He’s a shit-for-brains clown. I want Undertown. Everything you can find on Undertown. Dig deep on the Rue. Look at the site before it was the Rue. That address. And the surrounding blocks in the Pearl District. I know college students are lazy and like to do all of their research on Google. Forget that. Get your ass out of the chair and check the physical archives at the library, historical society, City Hall. Dig through the stacks, crank some microfilm.”

  “What am I looking for? Do you think something happened there?”

  “I have no idea. I’m following an itch. You feel an itch, you scratch till it bleeds. Understand, intern? This is me mentoring your ass.”

  “I guess.”

  She collects her purse, snaps her fingers for Hemingway to follow, and with the dog at her side, starts down the aisle of cubicles.

  “Where are you going?” Josh calls after her.

  “To apologize.”

  Chapter 11

  HANNAH LOVES THE HEAVY spiced sausages, the tangy shredded bundles of sauerkraut. Reuben rolls, pork shanks, baked onion soup, liver dumpling soup, potato dumplings. The German restaurant, Benedikt’s, has always been her favorite. It is a white-walled, dark-roofed, heavy-timbered building located at the edge of Forest Park. She and her mother come here on special occasions—birthdays, holidays—and today is a special occasion. The Mirage works. She can see.

  But today is special for another reason as well, though they do not realize it before pulling into the parking lot and finding it nearly full. An Oktoberfest banner hangs across the entry. Outside, on the patio, a huddle of men and women raise their steins in a toast and laugh too loud. “Maybe we should come back another time,” Hannah says, and her mother says, “We will do no such thing. This is your day.”

  Clouds scud across the sky, and the sun winks in and out of sight. The air still smells damp and minerally from last night’s storm, like a stone pulled from a river. The wind hushes and pushes the trees around. Tall firs rise around the restaurant and make it appear like a squat mushroom growing out of their roots.

  Normally her mother leads her everywhere, taking her by the hand, maybe directing her by some pressure at the small of her back. On their way across the parking lot, they reach for each other out of habit, and then Hannah pulls away. “I’m okay.”

  Her mother’s hand hangs between them before falling to her side. “Of course you are.”

  Hannah appreciates her mother. She does. But her eagerness to help feels like a kind of smothering. That might have something to do with why her mother never goes on more than one or two dates with a man. The intensity and weird doggish neediness of her affection.

  They walk slowly, through the broad double doors, through the stone entry, to the hostess station, behind which stands a blond woman in a dark green dirndl. She asks, with a mouth full of too-white teeth, if they’d like a table for two.

  “For three actually. Maybe she’s already here? Lela Falcon? Red-haired? Thirtyish?”

  “I don’t think so, no. But I’ll send her your way when she arrives.” The hostess’s eyes linger for a moment on Hannah, the Mirage, before tucking three leather menus into her armpit. She asks them to please follow her, and they do, through the crush of tables. Hannah lifts her feet high to avoid tripping on something she can’t see. She holds out her hands to brush the gauntlet of wooden chairs and bent backs. She avoids the big blur of the restaurant and concentrates all of her attention on the head of the hostess, bright gold, like a sun rolling away from her. She can sense her mother behind her, her hands no doubt outstretched, ready to catch Hannah if she falls. At last they find themselves safely tucked into a booth.

  It’s easier to see when rooted in place, a stable view. Hannah concentrates first on her silverware, unrolling it from the linen napkin, setting it neatly on the table. Then she takes in the restaurant. Her mother has described the interior dozens of times. The crossbows that hang from the walls. The murals of mustached, leather-vested men raising foam-topped pints or hunting in dark forests. The deer mounts and decorative steins. The stained-glass windows that color the restaurant gold and red and blue. Sometimes, like today, a band will play polkas on a short stage in the corner. Her mother is not a drinker, but when they come to Benedikt’s, she usually permits herself one beer, a Hefeweizen served in a tall glass stein with an orange slice floating below the foam. Hannah likes to run her fingers across the glass, smear the cold moisture off it, and smell deeply of the yeasty drink.

  Smells, tastes, touches, sounds—until now that is how she has known Benedikt’s, the sight of it a ghostly smear. Until now she never believed it to be such a truly dark space. The blackly polished wainscoting. The scarred timbers that rafter the ceiling and column the dining area. She feels like a hand has closed around her with only a little light peeking through the fingers.

  “How are you doing? Are you doing all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “It’s just—some things don’t look like I expect them to. I’m havi
ng a little trouble processing.” Like her mother, who looks older than she should, her hair threaded gray and her eyes hollowed and her chin doubled. Hannah knows the past few years have been hard on them both, but it’s one thing to hear stress in her mother’s voice, another to see it clearly in her face.

  A figure appears beside the table, a man who asks, “How are you ladies doing today?” Her mother smiles sadly at Hannah, then looks up at the waiter—and screams.

  He does not have the face of a man but a gray-skinned warthog, a fat snout spiked with whiskers and jammed with crooked teeth. A bright red hood surrounds his head and spills down his shoulders.

  Her scream is not deep-lunged, but loud enough that several people swivel to stare at them. And then she laughs with both hands pressed between her breasts. “Oh,” she says. “Oh my. You scared me.”

  It is a mask, a wooden mask. Beyond the hollowed eyes, a smaller, brighter set of eyes watch them. “Sorry.” His voice muffled.

  “It’s not Fasching Day,” her mother says. “Why on earth are you wearing that?”

  “I know.” He shrugs, a rise and fall of the red hood. “The owner thought it would be fun. It’s Oktoberfest, you know. He bought the masks in Germany.”

  It is then that they notice, all around the restaurant, sneaking between tables, carrying trays weighed down by foaming beers and steaming platters, nodding and scribbling down orders, other waiters, all of them wearing masks. One wears a bear mask and one wears a badger mask. One wears a rabbit mask and another a wolf.

  “Hey,” the warthog asks, “are those Google Glass?” He points his pen at the Mirage. “I’ve read about those.”