“Well,” he began, seeming to collect his thoughts together with a gathering gesture of the hands, “it began back at my birth, I’m sure. It’s nature and nurture, really. Some people are born to read the signs and some people are bred to. In my case, it’s probably a little of both.”
Joe gave Gina an infinitesimal shrug. Lucid or not, Owen wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. He was talking, though, and people had a funny way of actually saying more than they thought they were, if left to talk. Enough words and people’s defenses came down a bit at a time, and they often gave away enough to hang themselves. The trick was to keep Owen talking, however nonsensical it sounded; what Joe and Gina couldn’t parse into useful results, maybe the psychiatrist could.
“What do you mean, ‘read the signs’? What signs?”
Owen gave a sly smile, the first truly confident gesture they had seen him make since they’d arrested him. “I’ll get to that. See, I didn’t know about any of it – the signs, the words, the wisdom of millennia of knowledge. But I can tell from the looks on your faces that you want me to get on with it. So,” he sighed contentedly, “I’ll start with Jordan.”
The detectives exchanged glances. This was the first they’d heard of anyone named Jordan. Nothing in the profile or crime scenes suggested an accomplice.
Joe nodded. “That sounds like a good place to start. Who’s Jordan?”
Owen shrugged. “A dealer. A junkie, too, probably. We met at the hospital, the psych ward. He’s a nice enough guy, I guess. Anxious and a little paranoid, but nice enough. He deals out of the Pantheon Apartment Building, over on the corner of Cross and Amway. You know the place?”
Joe, who had busted down a few doors over various disturbances in that place, nodded.
Satisfied, Owen continued. “I guess you know I’m not much one for...prescribed pharmaceuticals. The grandmother says you found my pills when you raided the house.”
“You two had a deal – you were selling them to Jordan,” Gina guessed.
That sly smile found its way back to Owen’s mouth. “Supply and demand. I wasn’t using them, so I supplied them to Jordan. That’s how I discovered the Pantheon. And apartment 403, of course.”
“Is that the apartment number?” Joe asked as Gina took notes. “403? Where this writing is? Where you living there part time, something like that?”
“Yes, and no. I mean, no, I never lived there – no one lives there. That would be like living at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or the center of a volcano. But yes, that’s the apartment. You need to see it, detective. I think once you do, you’ll see – you’ll understand – that my actions were justified.”
“We may just do that,” Joe said noncommittally.
Owen nodded. “Jordan wanted some more pills, and I needed some money, so I met him at the Pantheon one night after the grandmother went to bed. And while he went to get the money, he parked me in 403, what he called an ‘empty’ apartment.” He chuckled. “Jordan was too strung out, really, to read the signs. He told me once it was all just gibberish. Can you believe that? Gibberish in an empty apartment. Yeah, right – an apartment that everyone, even the toughest criminals in that building, steer clear of. The poor fool. Looking back on it, I wonder if he was hoping the apartment would just...swallow me up. And then he wouldn’t have to pay me.”
Owen seemed to go someplace far away behind his eyes just then. Joe huffed impatiently after several seconds of unproductive silence, so Gina gently prodded him.
“What happened in 403? Owen, what happened to you?”
He flinched, wrapping his skinny arms around himself again as if suddenly cold. A look of savage resentment passed across his features as he looked at Gina, though it faded and he resumed his story.
“I read the walls. You can’t begin to imagine that first time, me standing there all by myself in the middle of this crossroads of multiple universes, reading, deciphering, understanding – and knowing these walls were touched by beings we have only imagined in dreams.”
“So...you’re telling us you believe a drug dealer left you in the Twilight Zone lounge of a crack house, and you were then exposed to...what, cosmic instructions to kill children?” Joe, whose impatience and disgust had been multiplying as the interrogation wore on, had never been particularly effective in the “good cop” role, but Gina could see he was having more trouble than usual in keeping his composure. Joe hated anyone doing harm to children, and he was a big guy with a quick temper besides. That Owen Offrey wasn’t already on the ground and bleeding was a testament to the strength of his self-control.
“Picture a crossroads. A rest stop, if you will, where intelligent beings from all different planets in several different universes stop on their way...elsewhere,” Owen explained. “Some leave their mark, a signature to show they have passed through. The graffiti of gods, in a sense. Maybe there are a lot of these types of places, but I doubt it. I think that apartment might be one of the only places on our planet – maybe even our particular universe – where the thoughts and ideas of the travelers has been set down in one place – everything from jokes and poetry to puzzles and rites to directions and tips...hell, there’s even an entire set of instructions for summoning travelers to the crossroads. There’s so much to read. And the words, the symbols...the ideas behind them, really – they get inside you. Make you want to know more, read more. That’s 403.”
He sat back with a sigh. “Of course, to read and interpret all of it can only lead to madness. We’re not like the travelers. We can’t physically or intellectually handle supreme understanding. But the drive is there, isn’t it, detectives? The quest for the truth. The need to flay and peel back the filthy layers of skin that cover this dismal city and expose its gleaming bones for what they really are. Still, it’s decades’ worth of undertaking. I’ve been at it for years and even I can only understand one wall. The one with No Songs for the Stars.”
The psychiatrist motioned to the detectives for permission to ask some questions, and Joe swept his hand toward Owen as if to say, “Be my guest.”
“What is the connection between room 403 and the children, Owen?” the psychiatrist asked.
The scrawny man across the table seemed to consider how best to answer, then said. “There was a guide on killing beasts. The words made sense to me one day. It gave a clear description of who to look for – I think you called it Molly – and told me what tools to use. Stabbing tools, in that case.”
Joe spoke through gritted teeth. “Molly Mitchell was a bit of overkill, don’t you think? She was only eight. You had had her bleeding from – “
“It,” Owen said with a small sigh. No smile.
“What did you say? You sick fuck, what did you say?”
The psychiatrist put a cautioning hand on Joe’s arm.
“I didn’t mean it in a demeaning way.” Owen looked up. “I mean that those kinds of beasts have no sex, so far as I can tell. These that came through, they chose little children – mostly girls, I think – because society believes them to be the most innocent, the most vulnerable. The most above suspicion.”
“How can you see children, little innocent human beings, as some kind of thing? If that’s what your god-wall told you, it was dead wrong.”
Owen stiffened a little. “Isn’t that how you see me? An alien thing? Something whose motives are completely beyond your understanding?” He leaned back. “Aren’t I, to the general masses, a monster with almost superhuman ability to carry out atrocities toward normal people? Normal human people? Wouldn’t you have taken me out seven months ago, if you’d known what you know about me now, about what I would do? Well, it isn’t that much different than what the walls told me about those things – which were not little human beings, by the way. The walls hold truths, viewed from every angle, above time and space.”
* * * * *
Owen Offrey was transferred to McNaulty’s care at Haversham State Hospital to await trial, and for Gina, that was a relief. She couldn’t get
rid of that creep fast enough, with his talk of walls full of words and cosmic crossroads telling him to mutilate, kill, and dismember little kids. He made her sick to her stomach and worse, he had gotten under her skin, a rare feat; she’d been ten years already in homicide and while plenty disgusted her, little scared her anymore.
Owen scared her.
She told both herself and Joe that it was only due diligence that they check out Owen’s crack-house apartment 403, but it was more than that. His talk about children bleeding and screaming, with lines of runes and symbols carved into them, made her afraid to go to sleep. Those images came back to haunt her in sleep as well as during every slow moment of the day – burning, glowing wounds fading to black as she sat in traffic, and open wound-words with deep-space vacuums that churned between the fragile bones, yanking child-bodies into terrible shapes as she tried to do paperwork. When she showered or tried to unwind on the couch in the evenings, a thousand words in alien tongues demanded sacrifices over the rush of the water or the canned laughter of the TV. Worst of all, as she lay in bed, eyes closed, and willed empty sleep to come, she saw twisted little forms in the shadows, flopping, dragging, and slithering toward her as she crouched, screaming and crying, in the corner of an empty apartment....
Joe agreed due diligence was necessary. After ten years, Gina could read him pretty well. Three-day beard stubble, a thickness in his voice, and twice as much coffee in his travel mug were not nearly as chilling a confirmation of his own nightmares as the haunted shadows in his eyes and the slight trembling in his hands. Four days and three unbearable nights was long enough.
They both needed to see apartment 403 of the Pantheon for themselves.
They arrived around 9 p.m. to shifty glances and skittering movement in the shadows. Joe and Gina were police, and so they were not welcome there by those who made their living or wasted their lives within and without the Pantheon.
The apartment building was a sad, sagging, sepia-toned place with grungy floor tiles and tacky 1970′s wallpaper. The front lobby smelled vaguely of stale air and sweat, and consisted of two chairs upholstered in a rough-looking stained tan fabric and a rickety table between, a fake potted plant, a staircase leading up to the apartments, and a front desk. A black-haired waif of a girl several shades too pale, with heavily shaded eyes and nails the color of her hair, slumped against the wall, asleep or stoned, on one of the steps.
Joe flashed his badge at the landlord/handyman, a fat and somewhat greasy man who slouched over the front desk, reading the sports section of the newspaper. The landlord looked more annoyed than alarmed, and audibly huffed when Joe asked to see room 403.
“No one in there,” he told them as he puffed up the stairs.
“So we’ve heard,” Gina said, side-stepping a pair of spindly young men muttering to each other in their own half-word language.
“You ain’t gonna find drugs in there, if that’s what you’re looking for. No girls, neither. Place is empty, like I said. It’s always empty.”
“We appreciate your cooperation nonetheless,” Gina offered tightly. The landlord took the hint and his end of the conversation wasted away to effortful grunts and heavy breathing. On the fourth floor, he unlocked the door.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he muttered, but when Gina turned to ask him what he meant, he was already shuffling down the hall, moving surprisingly fast for someone of his bulk.
Joe opened the door. “Oh my God.”
He stepped aside so Gina could see the interior of the room, and she gasped.
The floor plan was fairly open, with small alcoves carved out for a kitchen and a den. A bedroom and bathroom, Gina remembered, were located at the end of the hall. There was no fridge in the kitchen, and the appliances looked torn out. The tile back splash was chipped, the paint peeled in the corners, and overall, the room smelled musty and somewhat chemical.
None of these things, though, were nearly as shocking as the walls. The space was devoid of any furnishings whatsoever, but it was far from empty. Every single bit of space on all the walls, as well as the ceiling, was covered with methodical, deliberate marks, approximately an inch high and either drawn, painted, or carved into the sheet rock itself. Lines and slants and even columns of both simple and complex symbols, figures, and formulas ran the entire length and height of each wall, then picked up on the adjacent one once the floor molding was reached. Across the ceiling, the rows were more pictographic in appearance, but unlike any hieroglyphics Gina had ever seen. None of the specific characters so carefully set down onto the pale tan of the walls was familiar to her, though she prided herself in being somewhat familiar, as an avid fan of history, with the appearance of ancient languages. One thing she did notice, though, was that the quality of the characters changed – the pressure with which the tool had been applied to the wall, the size and thickness of the characters, their degree of slant. Sometimes one type of handwriting ran for lines on end, while other types contributed two or three words. Occasionally, the change from one to another happened mid-"word.” It was truly as if different hands had written or carved each their own mark, their contribution, over time. Gina couldn’t help but be reminded of Owen’s claim of travelers having their say and including their own piece of the great puzzle, their mystic knowledge from their far places in the universe.
It gave her a headache looking at all those curves and cuts and squiggles. In fact, she felt a passing wave of dizziness as the marks swam around her, engulfing and encompassing her. She blinked, breathing slowly in and out until the world righted itself once more, and noticed some of the characters looked a little like English letters....
“You okay?” Joe’s hand squeezed her shoulder.
She nodded. “So this is Owen’s great rest stop of the cosmos, huh?” She tried to make her voice sound light and failed. The line in front of her at eye level suggested to her mind a kind of greeting, which a quickly dashed-off diagonal of squiggles beneath seemed to be responding to. To the right, she felt fairly certain someone had jotted down some kind of recipe.
“Looks like the scribblings of drug addicts, maybe. Occult markings, random doodles, all that Timothy Leary bullshit about expanding the horizons of the mind.” Joe scoffed. “I’ll bet there’s a room or two like this up in Haversham with some crackpot scribbling out his plans for world domination.”
Gina heard what Joe was saying, but the longer he talked, the less she took in. Her headache felt more like waves of nausea washing down her body from her skull, and an odd buzzing clipped off any sharpness of sound, leaving it muted and meaningless.
Joe was still talking when she finally said, “I have to get out of here.”
Her partner fell silent, looping a strong arm around her just as the world went white and fuzzy. A moment later they had sunk to the floor in the hallway, Joe fanning Gina with his notepad. “You okay?”
She nodded, trying to even out her breathing. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just got a little light-headed in there. Must have something to do with that chemical smell.
“Chemical smell? I didn’t – “
A scream made them both jump. A blond guy, maybe in his mid-twenties, with only one hand and a needle hanging out of his arm, came careening around the top of the staircase banister, loped down the hall in a half-run, hit the far wall, and fell back onto the floor. He picked himself up and shouldered his way into 409.
“Let’s get out of here, huh?” Joe said, helping Gina up. She nodded. She’d seen enough of the Pantheon, she thought, to put Owen’s views into grim perspective. She shook off Joe’s help and made her own way to the staircase, noticing only in the periphery of her understanding that the door to room 403, which had been open when the junkie had passed it, was now closed.
* * * * *
The nightmares grew steadily worse over the course of the week. In them, there were no more tortured bodies of dead children to contend with. Once, there were ancient things beyond the edge of sight, things with eyes and teeth
and long snaking things that reached out in the darkness. Owen had been in that dream, telling her things without words, pleading, screaming without sound. That was the worst of the dreams, because Gina still managed to understand what Owen had been telling her – the depravity of the ideas, the horrific suggestion, woke her to cold sweats and the urge to vomit. She had believed there were no limits to human cruelty, but there were, and beyond where those limits lay was the dominion of the dream-Owen’s revelations.
Mostly, though, in the dreams there were only the ideas from the walls. These ideas held a kind of morbid fascination for her, a series of symbols substituted for elements and ideas, strings of numbers which formed a kind of code. For one thing, there was a pattern, a kind of fractal backbone, to everything in nature – shells, tree branches, crystals. There were patterns of symmetry, repetition, infinity. People had patterns, too, reliable enough to predict their actions and words, even to read their thoughts.
For another thing, the number eleven was everywhere, and in everything: The precinct was on the corner of 10th Street and 1st Avenue – number 110. Owen’s house was on 7th Avenue, and his killings a four-block radius from the house. There had been eleven victims, five boys and six girls. The first victim had been found in November, the eleventh month. The last had been found on the eleventh of September; nine plus one plus one equaled eleven.
More importantly, the apartment at the Pantheon had eleven different surfaces, given the configuration of the place, that had writing on it, including the ceiling. Room 403 was on the 4th floor. Four plus zero plus three plus four equaled eleven.
But the patterns and numbers just proved the logic, the order of the words on the apartment walls, the inter-connectivity of the universes and their parts. They set the baseline for belief in the wisdom of the words. And there was much wisdom. The patterns and numbers were only the beginning.
She’d only made out two or three scribbles that first time, and she had gained so much, in spite of the nightmares. She could only imagine what else could be learned from a simple translation of one corner of one wall.
Night Movies Page 4