Carlo did as instructed, turning the darkened Lincoln through a doorway already open to accommodate a large panel truck. Carlo pulled the Lincoln up next to the truck. The way into the vast darkened space was blocked by a concrete dock that rose to the level of the Lincoln’s hood ornament. Carlo noticed that there weren’t any men by the truck.
“Keep the engine running,” his passenger said. “Be ready to pull out of here.”
Carlo nodded. He knew his job. He wished it was all he knew.
As his passenger slipped out of the car, Carlo wondered if they would take the body or leave it here. He hoped they’d leave it here. He hated it when his passengers would ask him to help lug a newly dead corpse. Carlo wasn’t particularly squeamish, but the idea of chauffeuring a dead man made him uneasy.
From the looks of things, it wouldn’t come to that. The man with the shotgun would do his job and run. There would be other people here, and they wouldn’t have the time to remove Dietrich.
Papa would be appalled at the thought, but Carlo hoped that whatever bodyguards Dietrich had would finish off his passenger as he shotgunned his target. It would make Carlo’s job easier, give him a chance to stop for a drink on the way back.
Carlo’s passenger was now just a shape slipping over the loading dock into the darkness. As Carlo’s eyes adjusted he could see that the warehouse beyond wasn’t completely dark. None of the lights inside the giant space were lit, but blue arcs from outside filtered through the fog and dirty windows to cast dim illumination across the floor in front of the loading area.
Carlo watched his passenger melt into the blackness edging the one irregular aisle of light. Then there was no sign of him anymore, his shadow inseparable from the vague mass of crates filling the void beyond Carlo’s vision.
Carlo swallowed. His throat was dry, his palms slick against the steering wheel. The vibration from the Lincoln’s idle didn’t quite mask the fact that he was shaking. He felt his breath catch as if his throat were filled with broken glass.
Christ almighty, what’s there to be scared of?
The terror made him want to cut out of there, cut out and keep driving until he’d put at least one state line between himself and this place. His hand even moved to shift the Lincoln into reverse.
Wherever the impulse came from, it came too late. Carlo saw something move in the aisle, and the sight transfixed him. The figure was a man, blond hair and pale skin cutting a shape in the darkness. When Carlo saw the figure walking in the dim blue light, he knew that he was looking at the source of his fear. There was nothing inherent in the sight of the blond man that should terrify Carlo, but Carlo froze, as if any movement at all would draw attention toward him.
Carlo was so focused on the figure of the man that when the shotgun went off, it caught him completely by surprise. A flash briefly tore through the darkness, silhouetting the blond man. The sound echoed through the empty space reverberating around the towering stacks of briefly-illuminated boxes.
On the boxes so briefly lit, Carlo thought he saw lettering in German gothic.
As the pale man collapsed, Carlo could move again. He began shifting, preparing to back out as soon as his passenger made it to the car. Carlo could see him running past the corpse, no tries at stealth now. The assassin’s trenchcoat billowed behind him like a cape, and he held the shotgun before him as if warning the darkness out of his way.
Carlo revved the engine. He wanted out of here now.
The gunman made it nearly all the way back to the loading dock. Then, in response to something Carlo couldn’t see, he turned around, raising his shotgun to bear on something behind him. There was no flash this time, but Carlo heard something snap as the shotgun flew away, thrown tumbling and broken into the darkness.
Carlo slammed the gas, backing the Lincoln out of there as fast as it could accelerate. Before he had made it halfway out of the loading bay, the gunman’s back slammed into the windshield. Glass blew into the car, slicing at Carlo’s face. The gunman fell all the way into the Lincoln, his head landing in Carlo’s lap, bouncing on a neck too loose to be in one piece.
Carlo screamed obscenities at the dead gunman’s face as he tried to keep the Lincoln from swerving out of control.
He looked up and saw, standing on the edge of the loading dock in front of the Lincoln, the pale man, Dietrich, the man who was supposed to be hit tonight. He stood impassively, arms extended in a Christlike gesture. Carlo could still see the ragged edges of the exit wound through the hole torn in his shirt. Carlo thought he could see the flesh moving.
In trying to maneuver the car back out on the street, the front fender clipped something as he attempted to turn. His hand slipped while trying to shift across the gunman’s body, and he couldn’t straighten out on the road. The back of the Lincoln slammed into the rear of a parked truck. The impact threw Carlo against the steering wheel, stunning him.
Carlo pushed himself away from the wheel and glanced behind him to see the damage. The Lincoln wasn’t going to move again. The rear corner of the truck had crushed the back of the car past the rear axle. The back seat had buckled, and the metal of the truck had twisted to obscure his view out the rear. The inside of the car was filling with the smell of gas.
He pushed the body off of him and began forcing the driver’s door open. He could only move it a few inches against the twisted frame, but it was enough for him to scramble out of the car. He fell on damp pavement, the spreading gas stinging the cuts in his hands. He forced himself up, fighting a throbbing dizziness that made him unsteady on his feet.
He stumbled away from the wreck in a direction that he hoped was away from the warehouse. Between the fog and the stinging in his eyes, he couldn’t see where he was going. He tried to wipe the blood off of his face, but it only made things worse.
He almost stumbled into the pale man before he saw him. Carlo stopped when he could see the figure a few feet away, facing him. Carlo’s throat was clogged by fear. He tried to reach out to steady himself, and his hand found nothing. He collapsed onto one knee in front of the man.
He felt his pulse in his neck, and in his temples. His breath was shallow and ragged, sounds muted under the rushing of his own heart. Before him, Dietrich stood, arms extended.
Carlo could see clearly now where the shotgun blast had torn away Dietrich’s clothes. Underneath, Carlo could see the torn flesh in his chest and side. The edges of the massive wound seemed to knit together as he watched.
Carlo wanted to move, to run. He wanted to die, if that was the only escape offered him. He looked up and couldn’t tear his gaze away from Dietrich’s eyes.
“The lords of this city will acknowledge me,” Dietrich said. The voice was like a solid lump of ice lodged in Carlo’s heart. “You shall become a vassal of my blood.”
Carlo couldn’t move, couldn’t nod or shake his head. Speech was lost to him. Even if his throat could have formed words, language seemed stripped from him. The only words he could understand were those Dietrich spoke. The only meaning was in those words.
Dietrich’s pale form was suddenly illuminated by a flickering orange light. A warm acrid wind blew by them, but Carlo was too far away from himself and the Lincoln to notice. His attention was focused in front of him.
Dietrich lowered his gaze, and Carlo’s gaze followed as if he was looking with the same set of eyes.
Dietrich had begun to bleed. Until then, no blood had spread to stain his tattered clothes. But now a violent red began to seep from the closing lips of the wound. It almost seemed to glow in the flickering light, holding a warmth beyond anything that Carlo had ever experienced.
Even though Dietrich no longer spoke words, Carlo could feel his voice in his head. Take of my blood. Take of my flesh. It ran through his head, an obscene parody of the sacrament.
You’ve never held any power, Carlo. You’ve always lived in fear of those around you. You’ve always been an instrument of someone else’s will. Take of me, and you will see those who have
owned you bound to you in servitude. Or dead.
Carlo shuddered. Panic still raged in his body, but now other emotions raged alongside it. Anger led them. Carlo felt a burning rage at a family that thought so little of him that all they could see him as was a chauffeur for their hired assassins. Assassins they treated better than their own flesh and blood. The only respect he had belonged to Papa, and Papa had none for him. Carlo hadn’t seen it until now, but all the talk of sending him away to college was simply an excuse to get rid of him.
With the anger came another emotion. A feeling even hotter against the growing coldness in his chest.
Grant me your fealty, bind yourself to me, and you will feast within my kingdom.
The feeling was hunger.
Carlo reached for the pale man, and the long arms embraced him as Carlo buried his face in the still-bleeding wound.
In the Cleveland Press the next day, the burned out Lincoln was mentioned alongside two other traffic fatalities. No one paid much attention to the accident, everyone knew how dangerous Cleveland traffic was. The only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the supposed driver was the only fatality.
10
Monday, October 14
Doctor McCutcheon led Stefan through a file room at St. Vincent’s Charity. All the while the doctor shook his head and kept saying, “I don’t know what to tell you, Detective Ryzard. The man was dead.”
Each time, Stefan would nod and remain quiet. As far as he was concerned, he had seen Samson Fairfax alive and well, and he only had this doctor’s word that he had ever been anywhere near death. He followed the doctor through narrow aisles of wood and paper. The single low-wattage bulb cast a yellow pall on the file room, drawing the brown rust stains on the walls, and some of the cabinets, into relief. The place smelled of steam heat and old paper.
“Here we are,” said the doctor, stopping in front of a cabinet and smoothing his Errol Flynn mustache. He drew open a file drawer, which came free with a squeak of pained wood. The doctor began rummaging in the files.
“He claimed to have ‘spells’ that someone might take for death.”
Doctor McCutcheon snorted. “A layman maybe. Sure, there are conditions that could produce a temporary comatose state. But the John Doe you brought me wasn’t suffering a fit, a trance, a fugue, a coma, or anything else—here we are.” He drew out a slim folder that was labeled, “John Doe, September 23, 1935.”
The doctor opened it. “Here are my notes. Respiration stopped at 2:30 AM. Despite efforts to revive him, we lost his pulse for ten minutes later. He never started breathing again. By 3:00 AM I declared him dead. It’s all here if you want it—down to the names of the attending nurses.”
Stefan took the folder and glanced at Doctor McCutcheon’s notes. They told the story the doctor said they did. Stefan shook his head. “I’m sorry to lean on you, Doctor. I’m just trying to understand how I could see this man again, alive and well, weeks after you declared him dead.”
The doctor shook his head, “You couldn’t have. There’s no way it could be the same man, no matter what he said.”
Stefan sighed. “You don’t think there might just be a possibility—”
The doctor slammed the file cabinet shut. “The man I tended died. Period. You have the file right in front of you.”
“If it weren’t for the missing body—”
The doctor shook his head. “Talk to the guard who lost the damn body. All I can tell you is that if the man you saw was Samson Fairfax, the John Doe I treated was not.”
Stefan learned from the hospital administration that Edward Mullen had been let go because of the incident. From the sound of it, he had maintained throughout that someone from the coroner’s office had picked up the body, despite the denials of Coroner Pearse and the absence of any paperwork. It also sounded as if Mullen had been sacked less for losing a body than for insisting on his own innocence.
Mullen lived above a bar northeast of the intersection of Euclid and East Fifty-Fifth. The building looked as if it were a refugee from the other side of that intersection, a refugee from its poverty-stricken and ill-kept peers in the Third. It squatted on the corner of two unremarkable streets, seeming to shrink from the working-class homes surrounding it.
Evening was coming as Stefan pulled up in front of Mullen’s building. The bar was open and getting a start on the after-work crowd. The sky was a darkening pall above him, and the folks on the street had to hunch themselves against the wind.
Stefan checked the address twice before he got out of his car. The only lights were from the bar, the small curtained windows glowing out into the dusk, a small globe of light carving out the doorway of the establishment, another lamp picking out the name “Armand’s” above the door.
The windows above the bar were dark. Half-height wrought-iron fences tied themselves to the brick in front of the darkened windows, forming a faux balcony barely a foot wide beyond the sills of the windows. The one to the right had a window box that had bloomed once, sprouting flowering vines to wrap the iron rail. The plants’ season was long gone, and the vines gripping the iron were brown and dead.
Stefan found the door to the upstairs hidden in the darkness along one of the side walls. The stairs and the hallway were lit only by two incandescent bulbs, and Stefan had to pick his way carefully up the stairs, half-wrapped in gloom.
Upstairs, from the sound, he might have been inside the bar itself. The sounds of clinking glasses, music, and loud conversation filtered through the black-and-white-checked linoleum. The sound carried so well that Stefan was worried about the strength of a floor that was thin enough to transmit sound so freely.
As if designed to capitalize on the fear, the floor of the hallway sagged in the center, a dip that followed the hallway along its short length across the building.
There were four apartments. Two doors on the right, toward the front of the building. Two on the left, toward the rear. Mullen lived in number four, the second door on the left.
Stefan walked up the hallway, away from the lights. The only thing that prevented Mullen’s end of the hallway from being completely dark was the dim light filtering through the window here.
Stefan snorted. It smelled up here, of alcohol, urine, and food gone bad. He could hear flies tapping on the inside of the window, and on the sill was a strip of fly-paper that had fallen from the ceiling. The amber cellophane was almost completely covered by black insect corpses.
He pounded on the door. He heard nothing except the sounds of the bar below him, and renewed activity from the flies. The sluggish buzzing was just loud and close enough for him to hear above the noise downstairs.
Mullen, if he was home, didn’t respond.
“Mullen, Edward Mullen! This is Detective Ryzard from the Cleveland Police Department. I want to talk to you!”
As he called out, a fly landed on the back of his hand. He had to shake his hand twice to get it off. He pounded the door again, and as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was beginning to see that a host of flies had settled on Edward Mullen’s door. They were sluggish in the cold, and didn’t fly away when he pounded on the door.
No one answered.
Stefan tried the door. It wasn’t locked. He pushed it gently into an apartment that was shrouded in even deeper gloom than the hallway. The smell became much worse, the smell of something rotting. He gritted his teeth while pushing the door open with his foot.
He felt flies batter against his face and his arms, causing his skin to twitch.
It was still dark beyond. He couldn’t see a foot beyond the doorway. All the shades in Mullen’s apartment were drawn against the windows. The only light was what managed to leak past Stefan.
He already knew what he would see. He hoped differently. He prayed to God that he was wrong. But he knew he wasn’t wrong. He reached inside the apartment, next to the door, fumbling for a light. When he found a switch, he hesitated for a few long moments.
For a little while he fa
ntasized that he could just walk away.
He stood in the door, sensing—half imagining—that it was too warm. The smell of decay was a humid smell, making the air too fetid to breathe through his nose. Between the warmth, the dark, and the smell, he felt as if he’d been buried in a gangrenous wound.
Stefan turned on the lights.
It was as bad as he had feared. Flies were everywhere, dotting the walls, the ceiling, the couch against the wall.
Mostly, the flies covered Edward Mullen.
He was seated at a desk directly across from the door to the apartment. His back was to Stefan. He had collapsed across the desk, his head face-down on a stained blotter that was writhing with insect life. His right hand lay on the desk next to his head. It clutched a large revolver.
Automatically, Stefan’s gaze followed the path of the phantom shot, to the wall left of the desk. The wall was alive with flies, almost a solid sheet covering the area where the contents of Mullen’s skull had sprayed the wall.
Stefan’s stomach tightened as he walked into the apartment, but he didn’t let his mind dwell on it. He stepped up next to the corpse. Mullen had to have been dead, rotting up here, since he’d been fired from St. Vincent’s. Stefan did as thorough an examination as he could without touching anything.
Mullen had written a note and weighted it down with the penholder in front of him. Gore had spotted the page, and old blood had spread beneath it, sticking the page to the desk, but Stefan could read what it said.
I cannot lie for the Devil, the only explanation that Mullen gave for taking his own life. Stefan looked up from the page, and noticed the crucifix hanging on the wall above the desk. The figure of Christ seemed to be looking down at Mullen with a grieving expression. The blood on the cross wasn’t from the Savior.
Stefan left the apartment to call the scene in to the Central Station.
“What am I going to do with you, Stefan?” Inspector Cody asked. He had come, with a few more cops and the coroner’s wagon, in response to Stefan’s call. He stood next to Stefan’s car, shaking his head at the spectacle of the body’s removal. “What was it you were doing here?”
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