Beyond the Pale

by Mark Anthony

  The vision slowed, and each moment, each movement, was protracted into agonizing slowness. Everything around her seemed flat and distorted, like a wide-angle film compressed onto a square television screen. Leon opened his mouth, as if to tell her something, but only a rumble issued forth. Her mind reeled. Leon Arlington could not be there.

  That was what he was trying to tell her. The low rumbling phased into watery, understandable words.

  This ain’t real no more, Grace.…

  As if someone had thrown a switch, the image vanished. Detective Janson still stood before her. Grace panicked. How long had she been frozen, lost in the haze of possibilities? Had Janson grown suspicious at her silence? But his eyes still rested on the pendant at her throat. No more than a second or two had passed. Grace took a deep breath and gathered her will. Then she stepped beyond the fulcrum.

  Grace affected a pretty smile and performed her finest imitation of a North Carolina belle. “This old thing, Detective?” she said with a winning laugh and touched the necklace.

  A grin spread across his face. “Those symbols on it—they’re quite … unusual.” He bent toward her to take a closer look at the pendant.

  Grace did not hesitate. She thrust the paper cup toward Janson. Boiling coffee splashed across his face. A strangled scream escaped his throat as he lurched backward, eyes clenched, and stumbled into a filing cabinet. He clutched at his face with shaking hands and hissed in pain. The skin was already turning an angry red. Grace did not waste the moment. She stepped forward, grabbed the pistol from the holster slung over his shoulder, and leaped back. Janson groped for her, tried to grab her arm, but his fingers closed on empty space. He started to lunge for her, then froze at the click of a gun’s safety being switched off. Grace allowed herself a sharp smile and tightened her fingers around the smooth grip of the pistol. She was getting pretty damn handy with these things.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Janson squinted at her through swelling eyelids. “This is a goddamn police station!”

  “I know what you are,” she said through clenched teeth.

  For a moment Janson stood utterly still, then came a transformation so sudden and complete Grace nearly dropped the gun in shock. As if he had cast off a mask, the detective’s confused expression was traded for one of utter malevolence. Evil light shone in his beady eyes.

  “How?” Janson hissed. “How can you possibly know?”

  With one hand Grace reached into her pocket and pulled out the plastic compass. She tossed it at him, and he flinched as it landed on the floor at his feet. The needle spun in spastic circles. With a grunt of disgust, he stepped on the compass and ground it into plastic shards with the heel of his shoe.

  “You can’t escape us.” He spat the words like venom. “I don’t know who you are, or where you got that necklace, but I guarantee you my master will want it for his own. Once he hears about it, he won’t stop until he gets it, even if it means taking it from around your dead neck.”

  “Then maybe he’ll never hear about it,” Grace said.

  Janson let out a strangled snarl and tensed as if to spring at her. Grace leveled the gun at his head.

  “I know how to kill your kind,” she said without emotion. “I’ve done it once, and I can do it again. A bullet in your chest won’t stop you, but a few in your brain will do just fine.”

  Janson glared at her in hate. “I’m a detective, this is a police station. Kill me and you’ll rot in jail—if they don’t give you the chair first.”

  “I’m willing to risk that.”

  A sneer twisted his puffy face, but he did not move. “What are you going to do with me?”

  A glint of metal caught the corner of Grace’s eye. She reached behind her toward the desk, and her hand came back with a pair of handcuffs.

  “Take a guess.”

  Keeping the pistol trained on Janson’s head, Grace instructed him to sit and handcuff himself to the desk chair. She was surprised at the steel in her own voice. It was as if she were born to giving orders like this. Janson did as he was told. In moments he sat at the desk, wrists securely cuffed to the arms of the heavy chair.

  He shook with rage. “You’ll never get out of here.”

  “Care to place a bet?”

  Janson’s eyes were nearly swollen shut now, yet she still caught a glint of such inhuman fury in them that her breath caught in her lungs.

  His voice dropped to a whisper. “Run, Beckett. Run as fast as you can. It won’t make any difference. In the end, he’ll find you. I know.” A shudder surged through his body. “In the end, he finds everybody.”

  Dread trickled down Grace’s throat and filled her chest. She could not possibly imagine the evils this man had witnessed, or what temptation had compelled him to sacrifice his own living heart in trade. For a moment she almost felt pity for him. Almost. For whatever had once resided in him that might have been sad and pitiable, it had been cut out and replaced by a lump of iron. Detective Douglas L. Janson was already dead, and upon the dead, as Grace well knew, pity was a wasted thing.

  She held the gun with one hand and used the other to grab a handful of paper towels from a stack by the coffeepot. She crumpled them into a ball, then ordered Janson to open his mouth and rested the gun against his left temple for incentive. He complied. She shoved the wad of paper into his mouth. His muffled shout of protest verified the gag was functional. It was time.

  She bent forward to whisper in his ear. “Tell your precious master, whoever he is, that he had better think twice before he picks on me.”

  Grace moved to the door and slipped the hand with the gun into the deep pocket of her chinos. She opened the door and glanced in both directions. The hallway was empty. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her. Heart thumping, she started down the corridor. She walked quickly, but not so quickly as to arouse suspicion. If she was lucky, it would be several minutes before anyone discovered Janson, and Janson’s superior had approved her release. People would be expecting her to leave the station. She just had to stay calm.

  She rounded a corner and collided into a young woman officer. Grace stuttered an apology, certain the officer must have noticed the gun Grace gripped in her pocket. But the young woman only smiled, told her not to worry about it, and continued on. Grace passed several other officers, and she imagined that some of them looked at her with more than passing interest. A terrifying thought occurred to her. Perhaps Janson was not the only ironheart at the police station, perhaps there were others as well. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed unlikely he was the only one. She forced her face to remain expressionless and kept walking.

  The corridor opened onto the station’s main office. At first the noise and chaos startled Grace. A dozen harried officers sat at paper-clogged desks, where they took phone calls, talked with belligerent suspects, or tried to reassure frightened victims. Other officers milled about in an attempt to keep the flood of accused moving. After a moment Grace realized the confusion gave her the distraction she needed. She wended her way through the throng, and no one gave her so much as a second glance. She pushed through the police station’s front doors and stepped into the night. The bracing air cleared her head. She descended the steps and walked down the street. She was going to make it.

  An engine roared behind her. Grace turned in renewed alarm to see a car speed toward her. Tires squealed as it came to a halt scant feet away. It wasn’t a police car, but a sleek, black sedan. Before she could consider running, the driver’s door opened, and a man stepped out. In the moonlight she recognized the elegant form of Hadrian Farr. He gestured to the open door.

  “Get in, Dr. Beckett,” he said.

  She gaped in openmouthed astonishment, and once again Farr answered her unspoken question.

  “Detective Janson has been discovered. Even now he is informing his fellow officers of what you did, and that you have escaped. They’ll be pursuing you in moments.”

  Bewildered, she shook
her head. “But how do you know that he—?”

  Farr raised a hand. “Please, Dr. Beckett, there isn’t time.” His cultured voice was as polite as ever, but there was an edge of authority to it that shocked her and forced her to listen. “You must take my car. Drive it out of the city, it doesn’t matter where you go. They won’t be able to follow you.”

  “But what about Janson?” she said.

  A hard gleam touched his eyes. “Do not worry about Janson. I will take care of the detective myself.”

  With that, she found herself gently but forcefully helped into the driver’s seat of the sedan. The engine was still purring. Farr leaned through the open door.

  “Please take this.” He handed her a small, thin object. “Contact me as soon as you can.”

  With that he shut the door and sealed Grace inside the soft interior of the sedan. She looked down at the object Farr had pressed into her hand. It was a white business card. It read simply:

  The Seekers

  1-800-555-8294

  Grace stared at the card. Then Farr’s voice jerked her out of her stupor. “Drive, Dr. Beckett,” he said. “Now!”

  Instinct took over and she punched the accelerator. The car lunged forward with surprising speed and pressed her back into the leather seat. Grace tightened her grip on the steering wheel and gained control of the vehicle as it sped into the night. She glanced at the rearview mirror and tried to glimpse the world she was leaving behind. However, the sedan’s glass was too heavily tinted. All she could see was darkness and her own pale reflection staring back at her with haunted eyes.

  19.

  “Thank you, come again,” the dull-eyed clerk behind the counter mumbled. He handed Grace her change without looking at her, then turned to wipe the soda machine with a grimy rag.

  Not much worry of having my face recognized here, Grace thought with slightly manic mirth. Never again would she complain about apathetic service. She glanced around the fluorescent-lit convenience store where she had stopped to purchase gas for Farr’s sedan. A cryptic pictograph caught her eye. The women’s rest room, she assumed, and pushed through the stainless-steel door. She slipped her necklace beneath her blouse, then splashed water on her face and finger-combed her hair in an effort to make herself look somewhat less like a fugitive from the law. A thought occurred to her. She locked the rest room’s door, then pulled Janson’s pistol from her pocket and wiped it with a paper towel. She wrapped more towels around it and shoved it deep into a trash receptacle, then she unlocked the door, walked through the store, and out into the night. A glance through the plate-glass window confirmed her expectations. The clerk still wiped the soda machine with mindless diligence.

  Grace hurried back to the car and climbed in. She was still on the outskirts of Denver. It was time to put some distance between herself and the city. She turned the key and noticed a white shape on the dashboard. The business card Hadrian Farr had given her. She picked it up and glanced at it again. The Seekers. That must be the name of the organization to which he belonged. The society of scholars, as he had called them. But who were they really, and why would they go to such great lengths, and at such great risk, to help someone such as she? The only reason that made any sense was the one Farr himself had given her: that the Seekers were observers of the unusual, that to study strange happenings was their purpose, and that she had unwittingly found herself in the midst of one of their investigations.

  Grace slipped the business card into her pocket, then piloted the car out of the parking lot. As soon as she was someplace safe, someplace where the police could not find her, she resolved to call the telephone number on the business card. She wanted to thank the Seekers for helping her escape. However, there was more to her desire than merely gratitude. Certainly the Seekers possessed more knowledge of the men with the hearts of iron than Farr had revealed to her. Now that she was aware of their existence, Grace could not simply forget them and their evil. She wanted to learn more about them—where they came from, what they wanted, how the seemingly impossible organs of cold metal functioned to keep them alive. Perhaps she could even help the Seekers in their study of the ironhearts. After all, she was a doctor. She could perform dissections on any deceased specimens they might acquire, to examine their anatomy in hopes of discovering what it was that made them tick. A warm spark of excitement flared to life in her chest. Perhaps, in time, she might even become a Seeker herself.…

  The sedan sped down a deserted road and left the glowing lights of the city behind. A smile spread across Grace’s lips. Buoyed by a sudden exhilaration, she pressed the accelerator and sped deeper into the folds of night.

  Time slipped by, like the shadowed world outside the tinted windows of the car. Grace had not noticed when the hulking shapes first rose around her. Now they loomed in all directions, sharp against the star-strewn sky. The car’s headlights cut a swath through the dark as it wound its way up the twisting two-lane road. She had not decided to head into the mountains, yet it made sense to stay off the main interstate highways. Besides, once she did see them, the rugged silhouettes of the mountains beckoned to her and drew her deeper in.

  She wasn’t exactly certain where she was now. Not that it mattered anyway. It wasn’t important where she went, as long as it was somewhere far away from where she had been before. Like water in the wake of a ship, the night closed behind the car as it glided down the road.

  Grace nearly did not see it in time.

  She slammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to a violent stop. The seat belt locked, and that was all that kept her body from striking the steering wheel. She peered through the windshield. White light glinted off pointed antlers and silver-brown fur. A shadow darted across the road and vanished into the gloom of the night. Grace let out a breath of relief. That had been close. The last thing she needed to do now was hit a deer.

  She pressed the accelerator and drove on. A minute later it struck her. She had seen the antlers, but something about the shadow had been wrong. Then she had it. How many deer walked on two legs?

  She shook her head. Her eyes were playing tricks on her, that was all. Sleep-deprived interns in the ED were known to hallucinate.

  “You’re tired, Grace,” she said. “You’re way too tired. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  She glanced at the dashboard clock. Almost three in the morning. She was far away from Denver now. It would be safe enough for her to pull over to sleep, just for an hour or two. At least, she had to believe it was.

  Just ahead, in the dimness, she glimpsed an abandoned building next to the road. In front was a flat area. It would do. She slowed down, pulled off the highway, and brought the car to a halt before the blocky hulk. With a yawn she shut off the ignition and reached to flick the switch for the headlights.

  Something made her hesitate. She gazed through the window at the abandoned structure. It was impossible, but this place seemed familiar to her. She felt a tingling against her chest, lifted a hand, and touched the pendant through the fabric of her blouse. Compelled by a force she could not name, she opened the car door and stepped out.

  She shivered as the wind tangled cold, substanceless fingers through her hair. Silence ruled the night. Before her, half-revealed by the headlight beams, the old building glowered against the sky. A dozen empty windows stared out like hooded eyes. Of all the places where she might have driven that night, of all the roads she might have traveled, what trick of fate or long-submerged memory had led her here? She knew this place. This was where it had all begun. This was where she had first learned about the existence of evil.

  The Beckett-Strange Home for Children.

  Grace approached the ruin. It was difficult to believe she had spent ten years of her childhood here. But it was just miles from this place, on a mountainside, that she had been found as a child: no more than three years old, alone, abandoned. It was here she had been given her Christian name, Grace. It was from this place her legal name, Beckett, had come. And it was wit
hin these walls she had first learned to treat the wounds of others.

  Much of the Home’s roof had collapsed inward, and only a few shards of glass clung to the window frames to glint like broken teeth in the last of the moonlight. The board nailed over the entrance had fallen to one side, and through the gap, brooding in shadows, she glimpsed the front door. Its surface still bore the blistered scars of old fire. The building was just a husk now, like the cast-off skin of a snake—an empty reminder of the evil that had once dwelled within. Even after all these years, a burnt smell hung on the air. But the fire had come last of all, and long before the fire there had been the cries of owls, and the hands reaching out of the dark.

  A voice spoke behind her and jerked her back to the present.

  “Can I help you, child?”

  Grace gasped for breath, like a swimmer who had just surfaced after long submersion. She turned around and blinked against the glare of the car headlights. He stood before her, although she had not heard him approach, an unusually tall man clad in a shabby black suit that hung loosely on crooked scarecrow limbs. Eyes glinted like chips of obsidian in the cratered moonscape of his face.

  “Who are you?” she whispered, but even as she asked the halting question she thought she already had an inkling of the answer. For there was something about him—in his old-fashioned clothes and in his ancient, knowing gaze—that reminded her of the purple-eyed girl she had encountered in the park.

  With long fingers, the man in black touched the edge of his broad-brimmed pastor’s hat and affected a mock bow. “The name is Cy,” he drawled in a voice smooth and gritty as new-oiled rust. He reached out, as if to hand her a calling card. “That’s Brother Cy. Purveyor of faith, peddler of salvation, and prophet of the Apocalypse. At your service.”

  “I see,” she said breathlessly, for it was an introduction difficult to fathom in just one hearing. She glanced down and saw that instead of a calling card, her cupped hand held only a faint glow of starlight, and as she watched even this ran through her fingers and was gone. To conceal her startlement, she blurted out her own name. “I’m Grace. Grace Beckett.”