The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  Hannah responds before her mother decides whether to be offended or not. “It’s called Mirage. I’m blind. It helps me see.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Really? Wow, that’s so cool. And kind of awkward on my part. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” And it is. Intrigue is far better than the pity she earns when tapping around with a cane.

  “So the glasses,” the warthog says. “How exactly do they—?”

  Her mother interrupts him. “Can I get a Hefeweizen? And water.”

  “You bet,” the warthog says. “And for the young lady?”

  “Coke, please.”

  He departs and Hannah says, “We should have asked for another water. For Aunt Lela.”

  Her mother says, “Hmmm,” and fusses with her napkin.

  “What? You don’t think she’s coming?”

  “We’ll see. She doesn’t have the best track record.”

  Hannah looks toward the entry, hoping to catch Lela wandering in that very moment. With every shift of her head, it takes her brain a moment to get into conversation with the Mirage, to compute how close and far away everything is, how the colors and contours jumble together into objects she can identify. A table, a chair, a plate, a beer stein. Perspective challenges her more than anything, the depth and distance of things. The dining room slowly solidifies. Hands lift forks; mouths mash food and expel laughter and conversation. She looks for Lela, but then again, how will she know her? She is a grassy smell, a hard hug, a voice that speaks machine-gun fast, a presence that comforts her and relates to her so much better than her mother. Hannah would rather spend time with her than just about anyone, yet she doesn’t even know her face.

  Her eyes settle on the man with the wolf mask. When she spotted him earlier, she assumed he was a waiter, but now she isn’t so certain. He hasn’t moved. He stands by the bar. Facing them. Watching them? It’s impossible to tell, but she’s bothered by his stillness.

  There is something different about him, something Hannah didn’t process before. Not just his body, which is blockish, and not just the mask, coarse hair tufting from its top, a long snout needled with teeth, but . . . a darkness. As if he is enveloped in shadow, surrounded by a black shawl. Hannah holds her breath, scoots back in the booth.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t like that one.”

  “Which one?”

  “The wolf one.”

  “Where?”

  She points. And he sees her pointing. His head cocks as he studies her curiously. The dark shawl seems to flare red at the edges. Only then does he move, nudging between two tables, departing the dining area, heading for the door.

  “Huh,” her mother says. “Well, he’s gone now.”

  Hannah tries to focus on something else, the menu. She splits it open. She can’t shut her eyes, can’t stop seeing, unless she powers off the device. She’s tempted to now, but it was more than what she saw—it was what she felt when she looked at the wolf. Cold, and vulnerable, as if a knife were pressed to her neck.

  “Hannah?” her mother says.

  “It’s nothing. I’m just getting used to seeing, I guess.” It was just a man. A man in a mask. Dressed up like all the rest of them. Nothing to worry about.

  The waiter returns with their drinks. “Any interest in some appetizers? Or are we holding out until the other guest arrives?”

  “I think we can order,” her mother says.

  To be blind is to be habitual. To set the water glass in a precise location, meal after meal, so that when she reaches for it, her fingers don’t fumble it to the floor. To try on clothes for her mother or her aunt, to learn which tops go with which pants or skirts, to hang them in the closet at four-inch intervals so that she can count the hangers right to left and find what she’s looking for without delay. There is always something springing out of the dark otherwise, surprising, injuring, humiliating her. If a drawer is left open, it will bruise her hip. If a chair isn’t pushed under the table completely, its leg will catch her foot and she’ll tumble. If the knives aren’t placed down in the dishwasher, she’ll stab her hand when she empties it. A place for everything and everything in its place, her mother often says. Routines define Hannah, and they’ve come to define her mother as well. Her mother guessed Lela would somehow screw up this celebration. That the prediction has come true grimly satisfies her somehow. Hannah hates this. Hates the depressingly rutted patterns of their life. So when the waiter turns to her and she orders the Wiener schnitzel instead of her standard bockwurst, when her mother stares at her a moment in surprise and says, “Are you sure?” she says, with biting certainty, “Yes.”

  ❖

  An hour later, when the waiter brings them their dessert, an apple strudel and Bavarian cream, he tells them about the goat heads. Carved wooden goat heads hidden in the forest behind the restaurant. If you find one, you win a prize. “Free meals, free river cruises, free movie passes, free tickets to go see the Trailblazers. All sorts of things.”

  Hannah finishes the strudel before she tells her mother she wants to do it.

  “Are you sure?” her mother says, in the same unsettled voice as before, as if she hardly recognizes her own daughter.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’ll come with you,” her mother says. “We’ll do it together.”

  “No.” Hannah wipes her mouth and drops her napkin on her plate. “I want to go alone.”

  It feels right and wrong to say. The kind of scary she can deal with. Her mother opens her mouth to protest, then pinches her lips together and sighs through her nose and nods. “If it will make you happy.”

  ❖

  Hannah makes her way outside, where the clouds have thickened along with the shadows among the trees. The music from the band and the laughter from the beer garden fade as she whispers through the grass and then crunches through the pine needles, entering the forest. She touches trees as she passes them, palming the rough bark, and she wobbles her feet over roots and rocks. She kneels now and then to part the branches of a bush, to comb aside fern fronds. She covers ten feet of ground, then twenty, not rushing.

  She feels it before she sees it, the goat head, tucked into a decayed stump. She peels back a damp clump of moss to reveal the sculpture, the size of a pool ball and made from dark polished wood, horned with slanted eyes and sharp teeth.

  Her smile fails when she hears footsteps behind her. “I told you I was fine,” she says. “I don’t need your help. See?”

  She holds up the goat head to the figure, and only then does he come into focus. The man from the restaurant. The one dressed as a wolf. He stands in a clump of sword ferns. The black aura surrounds him as though he carries the night like a shawl.

  “Your aunt is Lela Falcon?” His voice is accented. His eyes are lost to the shadows inside the mask. The teeth of the snout seem to grin.

  “How do you know that? Who are you?”

  He says nothing, and she drops the goat head with a thud as the wolf starts toward her.

  Chapter 12

  THE WEARY TRAVELER has a basement. Concrete floor, whitewashed walls stained green and black with mold. A few bare light bulbs. At the bottom of the staircase lean two scabby bicycles Mike Juniper loans out to his clients. The furnace squats in one corner. Next to it are bins packed with Christmas and Easter decorations. The far side of the room—farthest from the staircase—Juniper uses as a makeshift gym with a bench press and dumbbells, a pull-up bar bolted to the studs of the open ceiling.

  Here, against the wall, hangs a life-size crucifix that Juniper bought at a church garage sale. Jesus’s body is sunken-bellied and crowned with thorns, roughly carved from the same wood as the cross. It is hideous. Meant to disgust and terrify. Which is why he put it here. To keep people away.

  Juniper stands before it now with a Coke can and a plate stacked with sandwiches, grapes, a chocolate bar. He reaches out and the nail that pierces Christ’s right hand depresses with a click. The wall gives
way, swinging back—to reveal a stone passage. It curls downward, twenty steps altogether, lit by a bare bulb that fights the dark. The staircase ends at a locked iron door. Next to it a tablet is anchored. The passcode—1318—the chapter and verse in the book of Revelation where the number of the beast is mentioned. The screen becomes a pulsing red, like a heartbeat, as it awaits the next key.

  The same sort of system that controls so many phones controls the shelter. The lighting, the heating and cooling, the smoke alarms and locks and general security, are all tied in to a controlling intelligence. Its voice is a mellow baritone. “Hello, Mike Juniper.”

  “Hello, Shelter.”

  The voice recognition activates and the tablet screen goes green. A deadbolt shucks from its sleeve. He pushes through the unlocked door.

  Beyond it, the room. Stone-walled, cement-floored, windowless. Speakers nested in every corner. Cupboards and tables and pegboards busy with curious tools. The air thick with the stink of mildew and bready gas. The door auto-locks behind him.

  Sarin paid for the security system and this subbasement, what she likes to call The Dungeon. She waits for him here and snatches away the plate he offers. She can’t seem to crack the Coke quickly enough to guzzle. She rips open the candy bar. “All this excitement,” she says, around a bite. “I’ve worked up an appetite.” Her voice is boastful, but he can see the strain in her face, the black circles beneath her eyes offsetting the paleness of her skin. Her blood sugar is low. Normally she needs a transfusion every few hours to feel like herself, but they’ve been busy. A fly lands on her sandwich and she shoos it away, and it joins the dozens of others dirtying the air. They come from him.

  He sits in a massive chair made from ash and situated in the center of the floor. He is manacled in place at the wrists and ankles. The wood is old, scarred. His hair is long and orange, and sweaty strands of it cling to his cheeks. One of his eyes is bruised and swollen. His shoulder is gun shot, a weeping red mound purpled along the edges. He smells faintly of sulfur. He is shirtless, revealing his hairless sack of a belly and the pale breasts that rest atop it. His pants are damp from where he pissed himself. His wallet revealed his name was Cheston—and a quick Internet search uncovered his web-hosting service as well an old article in Reed College’s newspaper about the Disciplinary Committee hearing that concerned his involvement in a music and video piracy network. But none of that matters because he is no longer the same person.

  ❖

  Late last night, in the tunnels below Portland, at The Oubliette, behind the bar, they pushed through the red door and discovered they were too late. For Babs. The owner of the club was already dead.

  His office was brick-floored. Roots and coax cables and Christmas lights threaded from the ceiling. Modems and routers and hard drives blinked with blue and green light. One wall was lined with file cabinets. The other with screens that streamed footage of the prostitutes he employed. Every john was unknowingly recorded by a hidden camera, the video stored here for later blackmail and extortion.

  Manila envelopes and brown shipping boxes were stacked everywhere. Babs dealt some on the streets, but these days he got almost all his play online, shipping Molly and H and oxy off in boxes of jelly beans to mask the smell. All paid for with bitcoins on the Dark Net. He told Sarin repeatedly that the Internet was the future—for life, for commerce, for entertainment, for crime and for justice, for the balance—and she always shrugged and said, “Old dog, new tricks.”

  “You’re going to get left behind, girl,” he said. “You’re going to be extinct before you know it.”

  But now he was the one on the floor, dead, the blood still pumping out of him, steaming in the chill air. He wore a neon-yellow tracksuit. The jacket had slid up to reveal the swollen brown wedge of his belly. Cheston hunched over him. One of his hands clenched the remains of Babs’s torn-out throat.

  Juniper closed the door, muffling the noise of the bar behind them.

  Cheston’s eyes jogged between them and settled on Sarin. “You.” He stood and wiped his hand on his polo shirt with a red smear. “I remember you.”

  She answered with a gunshot.

  ❖

  Now, in the basement of the shelter, Sarin focuses on her sandwich, tucking a lettuce leaf into her mouth mid-chew, following this up with a handful of grapes, washing it all down with a fizzy gulp of soda.

  Cheston says nothing, but his breathing is like its own conversation, ragged and guttural, like a bear after a hard run.

  Juniper walks over to a workbench stacked with hammers and saws and pliers. He selects a ten-foot length of chain that he loops around his knuckles. He does not carry the rest, but drags it across the floor with a clank and rattle. “Tell us your name.”

  “Cheston.”

  “Cheston is the body. Tell us the name beneath the name.”

  “Guess.”

  “Baal.”

  “No.”

  “Eligos.”

  “No.”

  “Astaroth.”

  “Guess, guess, guess, and keep guessing. Guess until your throat is sore. The Zero Day will come before then.”

  “Zero Day? What the hell is Zero Day?”

  No response.

  “Why did you kill Babs?”

  “Because that fat bitch was in my way.”

  “In your way how? Why are you here?”

  When Cheston doesn’t respond, Juniper says again, “Why are you here?”

  “I go where I want.”

  Sarin speaks up now, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Not here. Not in my city.”

  “Your city?” Cheston laughs and the laugh becomes a cough. He hacks up a few flies. They ooze down his chest, sleeved in a yellowish drool that they crawl from. They tremble their wings dry before taking flight, joining the others that hover in the air like a black net. “Your city. If it ever was yours, it won’t be much longer.”

  “Because of Zero Day? What will happen then? Why are you here, what do you want?”

  “Everything wants the same thing. To feast. To fuck.” Cheston’s eyes are bloodshot and dilated, ringed red and bullet-hole black. He is smiling, but not for long. “To grow.”

  Juniper withdraws from his breast pocket two foam earplugs. He tucks them into place and makes sure Sarin has done the same. He sees Cheston’s mouth move with the words: “Wait. Don’t do—”

  Then Juniper gathers the chain and pivots quickly, hoisting it and lashing out an arm so that the metal untangles—striking Cheston’s shoulder, then wrapping around the chair’s back, before swinging around the other side to bite his chest. It’s more than the pain of impact. It’s the iron. The iron burns.

  Cheston throws back his head and screams. Even with the earplugs in, it is a disturbingly harsh sound, like someone blowing through a gashed tuba. The chain falls away, and his skin blisters and weeps where the links touched his skin.

  “Why are you here?” Juniper asks again, and when he receives no answer, he gathers the chain and circles Cheston, draping it over his shoulders, mashing it into his face, cramming it down his pants. The screams are so powerful he can feel them, like a terrible wind, and dust falls from the ceiling and the lights ebb and a hairline crack creeps along the concrete floor.

  Sarin continues to eat through all of this. She shakes the Coke can empty and cleans the plate of every crumb with a licked thumb.

  Juniper removes the chain, letting it puddle on the floor before the chair, and then plucks out the earplugs. He knows pain will never be enough, not for the answers he seeks, but pain readies the way for emotional frailty. He will begin with an appeal to vanity. “You’re weak. It was easy to find you and it’s easy to hurt you. Of course you’re not Baal. Of course you’re not Astaroth. You’re a name no one knows. You’re an errand boy, aren’t you? What are you here for, slave?”

  He mewls. Tears of blood run down his cheeks. “You’re not a good man. You’re a sadist. You enjoy hurting me, I know it.”

  “You�
�re not the only one, are you?” Juniper says. “You’re not special enough to be the only one. You’re just the stupidest, the sloppiest. The one who got caught. Are there more? Tell me. Or I’ll work you over with the chain again.”

  “There are more, there are more.” His voice gurgles, his lips sputter. “There will be many more to come. A whole fucking battalion.” His words give way to a coughing fit that makes him retch another pond of flies.

  “Legion,” Juniper says. “You’re supposed to say legion. Didn’t you ever read the Bible?” He slaps the man’s belly, takes hold of the fat there, gives it a hard yank. “Are you sure they’re not stashed inside of you? This battalion? Because it looks like you’ve got a lot of storage space.” His belly button is as big as a mouth, and Juniper shoves a few fingers in it. “No? Not in there? Then where are they? Where’d you come from? Where are your buddies coming from?” He starts to lean all his weight onto the belly, up to his forearm in slippery fat.

  His answer comes as a pained shriek. “From the Dark Net!”

  Juniper leans back, gives the belly a gentle pat. “There we go. See how easy this can be. Now explain what you mean by the Dark Net.”

  Sarin says, “That’s where Babs was doing business.”

  “Is that why you killed Babs?” Juniper says. “Because of some shit going down on the Dark Net?”

  “He already has the tunnels wired. The Oubliette is located beneath a Paradise data center. We wanted to work with him—we promised he would be rewarded for helping us—but he refused.” He smiles weakly. “Told us to go to hell.”

  Juniper walks away and plunges his hands in a barrel, now half-empty and speckled with dead flies. He rubs his palms together, scrubs between the knuckles. He’s not sure any amount of soap would help him feel clean. His reflection ripples on the surface of the water. “Why do you need the tunnels wired? Why the data center?”

  “To open the door.” His voice wheezes and cracks around the edges, so that it sounds like other voices folded into it. “To ready the way.”

  Chapter 13