Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  I push the front door open with my foot. I sweep the living room with the gun. It’s dark and empty. I step in to cover the dining room—

  I forced myself to act calmly, to move deliberately. I knew I was nervous about what was going on. If there were important pictures, I knew that I’d stash them somewhere.

  I knelt down, almost unconsciously, and pulled a plastic jug of developer out from under the table. Underneath it was a small drain. The grate came up easily. A layer of scummy water sat an inch under the grate. I stuck my fingers in, not quite sure what I was feeling for, but I knew it when I touched plastic.

  I pulled a slimy Ziplock bag out of the drain. It came out with a slurp. Inside was a plastic film canister. I had no idea what was inside it, but I peeled open the bag and removed the container. I opened the cap on one and saw what I’d expected to see: rolled-up negatives. I put the cap back on and pocketed it.

  I shoved the empty bag back in the drain, and replaced everything else as I’d found it.

  I was stalling. Eventually, I killed the light and headed upstairs.

  Halfway up the flight, I had to stop. The feeling of dread was like a weight holding me back. By the time I had reached the door to the kitchen, it seemed to take an hour just to reach up and turn the knob.

  I could smell it even before the door opened. It tore into me, ripping the shroud from a memory—

  “You should not pry into things which are not your business.” The voice on the end of the phone had been female, barely. The sound was harsh, violent. There were scratching noises in the background.

  I’m remembering the call as I sweep the living room with my revolver. My pants are still muddy. My camcorder is back at my car. The call had come on my cell phone as I’d driven madly away from Lakeview.

  The voice had said, “You are being punished. Then you will die. ” There were moans in the background, someone in pain, barely conscious.

  I am remembering the moans as I turn, covering the dining room. I am remembering the inhuman laugh that was on the other end of the phone—

  The door to the kitchen sticks on something, but I keep on pushing. The smell hits full force.

  I remember the noises, wet noises, as my eyes adjust to the gloom shrouding the dining room—

  The smell is of old blood.

  10

  I stepped into the kitchen, unable to separate memory from the scene before me.

  I stumble into the kitchen, breath ragged and dizzy from the scene in the dining room. I’m frozen at the chaos in here. The overturned dishwasher, the broken table, the dented stove—Everything ignited fragments of my weak memory. Blood is everywhere. Pooled on the stove, speckling the table, coating the sink. Stab marks—now dutifully circled by the forensics team—gouged holes in the walls, as if the house itself were being attacked, bleeding—central to it all now was the surreal contribution of the police, the strings leading to blood spots on the walls. Their attempt to map flying blood cast the kitchen in a giant spiderweb.

  “Kate,” I managed to croak out.

  I edged away from the kitchen, filled with a sour rage that was nearly as sickening as the carnage in front of me.

  I backed all the way into the dining room before I turned away from the scene. When I turned away, the rage burned itself out, blown out by the impact of the full memory, complete and ugly.

  Ever since she had left me, I had the dim hope of someday coming home to her. Childe had granted my wish.

  I barely escape that scene in Lakeview. I drive away from the scene of that carnage, numbed. Then the car phone rings. It beeps insistently. I don’t want to pick up the phone, but my hand reaches for it.

  “Kane,” says the ragged voice on the other end of the phone. I don’t know who it is—the voice is distorted beyond recognition—but I know what it is, what is represents.

  “You killed her,” I whisper.

  “Hardly,” the voice laughs at me. “You should not pry into things which are not your business.” The voice on the end of the phone is barely female itself. The sound is harsh, violent. I hear scratching noises in the background.

  “You aren’t going to get away with this:”

  Laughter, endless mocking laughter. Then the voice tells me, “You are being punished. Then you will die.”

  I hear moans in the background, someone in pain, barely conscious. I can almost recognize the voice.

  “Come home, Kane Tyler, someone is waiting for you.” She hangs up.

  I race the car into the dawn, in a near panic. I know what waits for me, but I keep some desperate hope that I can make it in time. As I drive, I call the police, then I call Sam.

  Something is wrong at my house.

  I arrive before the police do. I walk up on the porch. All the shades are drawn. The front door is ajar. With the shades drawn, none of the dawn light reaches inside the house.

  I draw my thirty-eight, and push the door open with my foot. I sweep the living room with my revolver.

  I remember the noises, wet noises, as my eyes adjust to the gloom shrouding the dining room.

  The strength goes out of my legs. My breath catches in my throat and I almost drop the revolver. Blood is everywhere. The air is so rank with the smell that my brain doesn’t want to identify it.

  “Kate,” I manage to croak out. Breathing in the blood-tainted air makes me sick. My stomach wants to rebel, but after what I’ve already seen tonight, all it can do is spasm quietly.

  They had crucified her on the dining room table. The violence was so bad that I could not be certain if she had been alive when they had tied her there.

  The memory dropped me to my knees. It was so vivid that I almost saw the body on the table there in front of me. Even though Kate had long ago been taken away.

  In the moonlight it was hard to make sense of the stains, the strings, the marks left behind by the policemen in their investigation.

  The stains formed a vaguely cruciform outline on the table. Markings by the police gave it a human shape. The table was scarred, knives perhaps, maybe even claws. I saw wires that could have bound legs and arms. Some of the strings led up to bloodstains on the ceiling.

  “No.” I whispered again, trying not to see it.

  The memory came, in incoherent, unwanted pieces. My gaze fixated on the head of the table, where a single beam of moonlight picked out a shape. I stared at it, trying to make sense of the tiny black knot in the black bloodstain. I edged around the table, irrationally drawn to it.

  When my back was to the window, I finally understood what it was. I stared at a finger-sized clump of my wife’s hair, glued to the table by her own blood.

  I had a memory from after the medics came, when they had finally moved the body out of the tacky blood. I had seen her head nod limply as that knot of hair was tugged from her skull. No one had seemed to notice.

  I had loved this woman, loved her past the end of our marriage. How could I grieve for her with my wounded memory? I finally began to cry.

  I still have a daughter, I thought.

  If anything, that made things worse. Gail had lost her mother because of me, and she was in the process of losing her father. Not only was my memory crippled, but there was blood on my hands. I was a murderer.

  A murderer, and maybe something else.

  I wanted to see her—desperately—but forcing me upon her after what had happened to me would be needlessly cruel. Better that she should bury me with her mother.

  I reached out to touch the table, gripped by a torrent of conflicting emotions—grief, anger, and a hollow sense of failure. My finger brushed a strand of long red hair.

  A murderer, and maybe something else.

  Why did I insist on maintaining that possibility? Was it some sick way to moderate the guilt of Tony’s death? Thinking that was sabotaging my own sanity. Insisting that I was infected by some supernatural entity was insane.

  But if it was insane, why did all my feverish symptoms, the delirium, the hunger, all vani
sh when I had killed Tony? I had physical symptoms. I had needed that blood. I had needed it when I was in that accident with Sam.

  I walked out of the dining room, swamped with fatigue. Behind the blinds in the living room I could see the sky lightening with the coming dawn. I had a reaction to the light, a visceral fear that I couldn’t damp by telling myself it was irrational.

  I forced myself to walk to the front windows, and separated the slats of the blinds with a shaking hand. Through the blind I stared at the sky, which had lightened from purple to a deep aqua.

  The fear flared into a barely controlled panic. My hand dropped from the window and I turned away. I faced the dining room and felt a different fear grip me. I had stopped breathing again, just as I had in the sewer. I had no idea when I had stopped. I had suffered too many shocks in the past few minutes for me to pick out one that could have knocked the breath from me.

  If that insane possibility were right, if I were somehow the walking dead, did I need to breathe?

  I ignored the panic, and kept holding my breath. I waited for my chest to tighten, for my body to protest the lack of oxygen. I waited for my vision to darken and for a feeling of giddiness.

  Nothing.

  I stood, and waited for five minutes, then ten, as the room around me began to lighten slightly with the approaching dawn. The light began to take a yellowish tint.

  Something had happened to me. Something that had driven me to tear the throat out of a man and drain his blood. Something that had removed the necessity for breathing.

  I had yet to see daylight, ever since I crawled out from underground. I turned to see the predawn glow shining from behind the blinds, and I felt the terror of having to.

  I needed to get away from that light.

  It was insane to think what I was thinking. But it was either that, or I had lost the ability to trust anything that happened. And, if I had completely lost touch with reality, what difference did it make what I thought? If I had lost touch with reality so completely, I could believe I was a leprechaun for all it mattered.

  Of course, no one made movies about leprechauns bursting into flames and crumbling to dust at the first touch of direct sunlight.

  I couldn’t leave this house. And there was only one place here I knew the rays of the sun wouldn’t reach. I ran through the remains of my dining room and kitchen and took the stairs to the basement two at a time. It was no longer hypothetical. I had stopped playing what-if with myself. I had stopped telling myself that the idea was an insanity.

  I dove into the black womb of my darkroom knowing what I had become. As the rush of fatigue crashed over me, I felt the card in my pocket and knew that I was going to talk to Gabriel.

  Somewhere in the not-quite-sleep that gripped me, I remembered things. Remembered them, or dreamed them. Maybe both.

  The guy I’m talking to is known as Switz. Not his real name. The name has something to do with his excessively Aryan appearance. That’s my guess at least. He’s blond, blue-eyed, and has a motto in German Gothic tattooed on his bicep. I suspect he’s a Nazi, but I don’t know and don’t ask.

  He’s not a friend, and I’m not talking to be social.

  We’re standing in a parking lot somewhere in Richmond Heights. Behind us is a vast expanse of snow-covered Mall, after hours, empty. We’re standing behind Switz’s car, a brand-new white Mercedes sedan that’s at odds with his military-surplus clothing. Switz has just pocketed a large sum of money.

  He pulls out the keys and opens the trunk. Inside is an aluminum briefcase covered in black vinyl, which he also opens—

  “There she is, Kane. Mother of all handguns, the biggest thing I got.”

  The gun is massive, a forty-five on steroids. I pick it up, heft it. It seems almost cartoonishly large in my hands. “Fifty-caliber? You have shells for this?”

  “Fifty-cal magnum.” Switz nods at the case, “I’ve enough shells.” He smiles. “What you planning to drop with that thing?”

  I clear it, check it, put it back in the case. “You don’t want to know, even if you’d believe me.”

  Switz snorts, “Whatever it is, you shoot it with that, it’ll drop.”

  “I hope so.” There’s a trembling note on my voice. “Is it clean?”

  “Clean? It hasn’t even been fired.”

  “Where’s it from?”

  “A collector gave himself a 12-gauge lobotomy. His estate got thinned a little. This was still in the packing crate when I got it.”

  I nod and close the briefcase and take it. “Wish me luck,” I whisper.

  “With that thing you don’t need luck.”

  Kate and I are having one of our uniquely formal lunches, something that has become a tradition with us since she left me. Dinner was too significant a meal, so it was always lunch at some inexpensive restaurant downtown.

  Today we’re in the Arcade downtown, sitting at a table next to the mezzanine railing. The light from the glass ceiling is too white with the snow collected up there.

  We’ve just finished discussing Gail’s tuition.

  Kate reaches out and touches my hand, as physically intimate as we’ve been for the past five years. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Tell me. Something’s been bothering you.”

  I drink some Styrofoam coffee to avoid answering. But there’s little coffee left, and it doesn’t last long. I stare into the empty cup. “My job,” I finally say in response.

  “What about your job?” I look up and see the concern in her eyes. I am uncomfortable with the idea that she might still worry about me. She had been the one to leave me. I should be free of her concern—

  Life is never that simple. “I called someone a rotten parent today.” I shake my head at the self-evident hypocrisy of the statement.

  “You deal with rotten parents all the time,” she says. “Mostly stealing their kids from each other.”

  “This is different.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s this gentleman—I use the term loosely—named Sebastian. I know him from my days in the force. Not as a colleague.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “He’s done well for himself. He was a two-bit punk we’d pick up every other month when I knew him. Since then he’s done five years, made some connections inside, and come out a businessman. Now I’m pretty sure he’s got a finger in every drug-laced pie in this town.”

  I crave a cigarette, even though I haven’t smoked since I left the police-or, more accurately, since I took a bullet in the lung.

  “And he’s the rotten parent?”

  I nod, “He’s got a family now. And a daughter about two years younger than Gail.”

  “And she’s missing.”

  “Bingo.” I crumble the cup in my hand. “He’s not a man people say no to. But I said I didn’t want to touch his money. When he got insistent, I told him that a man who did what he did wasn’t fit to be a father—” My voice chokes off.

  “You were angry—”

  “I saw his eyes. I think I’m the first person to have hurt him, really hurt him, in years. I’m surprised he didn’t have one of his bodyguards shoot me there.”

  Kate looks at me and I can see her read me. It’s something she is still too damn good at. “You’re nothing like him.”

  “Then why aren’t we still married?” I whisper.

  “One of the reasons is you have a tendency to compare yourself to your clients.”

  “He’s not a client.”

  “Isn’t he?”

  After five years, she still reads me too well. I find missing kids for a living. Doing that compensates for a lot of moral ambiguity.

  “Twenty-five hundred retainer, nonrefundable. Five hundred a day, plus expenses. ”

  The man on the other side of the wide antique desk smiles weakly. “Somewhat mercenary, aren’t you?”

  “I always quote the price first, Mr. Sebastian. ” I sit in one of the leather chairs facing the des
k. The whole office seems lifted out of the last century, which makes the off-white PC with the rounded corners all the more incongruous. “Too many times the parents know exactly where their kid is, they just don’t want to deal with cops or lawyers.”

  “The money’s not a concern. I am somewhat surprised at your change of heart. ”

  “I have a daughter myself, Mr. Sebastian.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I find missing kids. That’s who I do this for. I deal with a lot of parents I don’t approve of. I let our prior relationship get in the way of my job.”

  Sebastian nods. “I understand.” He turns around one of the pictures on his desk and says, “You will find my daughter. ”

  PART TWO

  DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM

  Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

  In a strange city lying alone

  Far down within the dim West,

  Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

  Have gone to their eternal rest.

  There shrines and palaces and towers

  (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

  Resemble nothing that is ours.

  Around, by lifting winds forgot,

  Resignedly beneath the sky

  The melancholy waters lie.

  —“The City in the Sea”

  11

  I never completely lost consciousness. Even as I was kept company by returning memories, I never lost awareness of the concrete floor I lay upon, or the faint chemical smell of developer. Hours passed, and I never lost those two sensations.

  I rested—but I never slept, and I never truly dreamed.

  Somehow I knew when I was supposed to rise. It was as if the unseen sun were a weight on my body, a weight that lifted when the sun left the sky.

  When I stood, I knew who Kane Tyler was. I had built a mosaic of myself and I could see the broad outlines of the man I used to be. I had been driven, obsessive. Kate had married me, but she had married me when my obsessions had an external focus. I quit the force to save our marriage, and in doing so I had destroyed it.