by Lamb, Robert
Only the wall calendar had been truly spared. Its grid of days was scrawled up with names, locations, and publication dates.
“How’d you make the connection?” Quinn asked.
“The more I looked at JD5, the more I remembered this one social worker I spoke to on some assaults a couple of years back. I had her card in my rolodex: Catherine Alexander, part of this inner-city support and outreach program for women at risk. Nothing weird about her, just one of those militant change-the-world types. I imagine she did a lot of good work out there -- before, that is."
“Fuck, you just busted in?”
“It was unlocked,” he said. “Murderer on the prowl out there… lady who worked with the victims nowhere to be found... I dunno. I did what I needed to do.”
Quinn looked over the dark, blurry images on the walls: black ink-jet blood and pale, direct-flash thighs. The camera work had apparently been the social worker’s own. The handiwork on the bodies was undeniable.
Quinn touched the wall. “Jane Does two through four…”
“If you keep looking, you see others too -- ones we never found,” Abrams said. “The color digitals are all on the computer in the bedroom. She didn’t even own a camera before the murders started popping up -- then she went out and put a fucking Cannon 30D on her credit card.”
Quinn eyed the rest of the room – a few dirty dishes had dried to crust in the sink, the takeout boxes in the garbage can reeked of spoiled meat and curry. The place was steeped in the sudden onset of obsession and neglect.
“At first I thought I’d found the killer,” Abrams said, “then I realized she was just following his footsteps too, figuring out who was missing before anyone raised an eyebrow, finding the body and photographing the hell out of it before we even caught wind of it, while it was fresh.”
At least photographing, he thought.
Quinn moved towards the bedroom. “And somehow they eventually found each other.”
“I’ve been trying to come up with a rational theory,” Abrams said, dropping into a kitchen chair. He buried his face in his hands.
“Fuck, I keep coming back here, like if I think about it enough in a place this… this drenched in the mess, something will sink in… something will stick out and suddenly it will all make sense.”
Quinn stepped into the tiny bedroom. It was just enough space for a double, unmade bed, an end table and a computer desk. He approached the dormant, humming desktop and stirred the mouse. The black screen came alive in shifting shades of garish red and gleaming pallor.
“Fuck,” Abrams said from the next room. “I never thought I’d say it, but I think this case is getting to me. It’s all I think about…”
A few quick key strokes confirmed that she had dumped thousands of the images onto the hard drive.
“Between JD1 and the last disappearance, that’s what … barely a month?”
“Yeah,” Abrams said.
Quinn studied the rest of the room: more photos stuck to the walls, the remains of clipped newspapers abandoned in the corners, all cast in a sickly crimson by the monitor’s glow.
She’d been in contact with the girls, knew which ones the work had touched -- which were likely to be pulled in next. The first to see a body here, someone she told about it there. But how did she know where? Did she just follow them? Trail them until they wandered, dreamlike, to their fate?
Quinn turned and walked back into the kitchenette. “I need to get back.”
“You go on ahead,” Abrams said, staring up emptily at the walls, eyes moist and gleaming. “I’ll call a cab. I’m gonna stick around here a little longer, see if I can’t work some sense out of it…”
Quinn looked down at the slumped-over detective, the drained weariness in his face. He'd seen that look on junkies before, patterns in the meat, all of it wired to sapped and addled brains.
How long had it taken with Abrams? A week? Two?
There's no hope, something in him whispered. Not for any of what came before.
This was the beginning. A pattern was emerging. A fundamental change.
"You're sure?" Quinn asked.
"I'm not sure of anything."
Abrams didn't even glance up as Quinn walked past him and out the door. He hurried to his car, made for Jill's apartment as fast as he could.
He had nine messages from her on his cell phone, all of them the same: "What do you feel?"
***
Her taillights bled in the veined trace of raindrops across his windshield, but he kept her in sight.
It had been a long time since Quinn had tailed anyone. If Gwen had been on her guard, she'd have surely noticed him. But her mind was no longer attuned to the details of the world.
She was further down this new path -- already lost to the same energies that had forced Morgan to set out alone and seek his killer in a foreign city. If she'd seen the things Quinn had seen in his time, or if she'd worn out as many pathways to sensation, maybe it would have worked slower on her. If what was happening truly followed any rules.
He imagined the hunched-over form at work in the dark. The Rearranger.
What were words in comparison to the enormity of what was happening? What was language but strings of symbols meant to enforce an ordered understanding of a chaotic universe?
Every detail of its bloody handiwork shifted the paradigm, rendered a thousand tongues useless to speak its meaning.
He followed Gwen through smatterings of urban renewal and decay, past the rolling lights of marked police cars and midnight construction. Her path seemed random at times, even doubling back on her own path. But after nearly two hours, he watched her pull into a place he knew had no other exit: the old Davis housing project.
He'd worked a case there a year or so back - a homeless decomp, half-submerged in the mud of its own rotting. He'd been there long enough to get a basic lay of the land. It was all fenced in now. There were plenty of gaps, but only the one gate for a vehicle. Tonight, it was open.
She pulled in and he kept on driving a little further down the road. He pulled over behind the cover of an equally abandoned, bar-windowed grocery. He killed the engine, popped another speed pill and washed it down with a quick swig from the flask.
He briefly considered his service weapon, but left it stowed it under the seat with his bag.
As he walked back towards the gate, he listened to the sounds of the nearby interstate: a river of glass, steel and noise that bisected the city. Beyond it, a smattering of skyscrapers burned in the night. It was one of the few sights in the city that made you feel like you lived somewhere cinematic -- if only for a short while.
The abandoned housing complex existed in a desolate triangle, cut off from those glowing towers to one side by the interstate and a new exit road on the other, leaving only a stretch of dead businesses between here and the nearest habitable area.
Quinn's eyes adjusted to the moonlit dark as he strolled in through the gates. Gravel and bits of glass crunched underfoot. All the windows and doors were boarded and posted with trespassing signs. Weeds choked everything.
He made out traces of gang tags and graffiti: scrawled slang, death iconography and swooping bands of color.
He recalled bits of a quote he'd heard once: "Where language fails us, the limit of our world begins."
He strode over to stand before a swath of moonlight against a concrete wall. He read the un-language of vandalism: DROPP, G-CRUSSH, STO, a crown and something that might have been a pale face. Underlying all of it, he made out the faint remnants of a swastika, this one spiraling to the right.
What pattern had these authors hoped to impress on the world?
He turned his head at a sound from across the barren courtyard: rusting hinges screeching in the night.
He passed her parked car and wondered if this would be the first victim found near a vehicle. But this had already moved past the world of Jane and John Does. They had ID'd Morgan. They'd ID'd Gwen. It didn't need secrets anymore to sust
ain its momentum.
He followed the sound and found a cracked door. The sheet of plywood that had covered it lay in the bushes. He stepped inside, gauging each step carefully.
Ahead, he saw something pale gleam in the dark, before disappearing around a corner.
His thoughts turned back to the fragment of paper he'd discovered in his coat pocket -- something he'd snatched from the autopsy room and forgotten about. The note was blood stained and crumpled, evidently something he'd grabbed from the autopsy room and forgotten about.
"We can only understand the divine by contemplating its opposite," the handwriting had read. "We can only see the form by the shadow, the chaos matrix in the fabric of all things.”
Quinn rounded the corner, only to see her vanish beyond another at the end of a hallway. He made that one only to see her bare feet vanish through a water-rotted hole in the wall. He followed though a narrow, lightless alleyway between the rear of the building and a kudzu-choked fence. When he reached the dead end, he panicked -- and then saw the parted vegetation around a hole in the fence. He crept through, pushed past clawing limbs and crawled through a window into another ruined interior. A hint of moonlight shone through the slits in a boarded-up window. Behind a turned-over desk, stacks of soggy carpet samples rotted in the corner.
Quinn found himself trembling as he approached the room's one doorway. He heard her footsteps just beyond it, felt as if his very heart was stitched to the sound.
He crossed the threshold.
The space was enormous. Its manufacturing days were decades past, attested to now only by three heaps of rusting industrial machinery -- burial mounds of industry. Their shadows fell across the space like the broken pillars of some forgotten, caliginous palace.
The reporter knelt on the floor just a few yards away from him, as if awaiting something in the greater emptiness of the room. Her long crimson hair cascaded down her naked back. Her piebald skin seemed to glow in the meager moonlight.
He didn't call out to her, didn't move any further. She didn't even tremble.
Silence. A Breath. The beating of his own heart.
And then something moved.
His skin crawled.
A form stepped impossibly from the trio of Golgothan shadows, as if their darkness dipped into hidden gulfs.
The wide brim of a hat obscured its face, though it clearly looked down at the nude reporter. It was dressed in a great dark raincoat, which fluttered to the side like rustling, membranous wings as its arms unfolded with a mesmerizing grace.
It took two delicate steps and came to stand before its kneeling initiate.
Something gleamed in each hand. Then it set to work on bended knee.
Gwen gasped.
The rearranger's arms blurred with motion. Initially, the only sounds were those of speed and incisions, but the reporter's gasps soon turned to moans. Her song coursed through all the movements he had ushered her through in their drug-laced trysts, stirring to mind details he'd forgotten from their hours in the autopsy room.
Then her cries became something different, her sensual writhing something even more animalistic. She escalated towards peaks of sensation he could never have hoped to pry from her -- wave after wave of orgasm spiraling into death.
Somewhere deep, where primitive masculinity still lined the framework of his being, Quinn felt the tinge of cuckoldry, at once ridicules and biting.
Yet those feelings felt distant compared to the blood-gorged throbbing of his phallus.
The redhead quivered and shook -- an ejaculatory spray splashing black across the floor underneath her. The resulting spasm grew more severe, until she doubled over backwards, legs still bent. Her hair splayed on the filthy floor.
Quinn stared wide-eyed as the rearranger bent over her to continue its work. The arms blurred into multiples, like the some Hindu god of vivisection.
He took a step forward.
The hat still obscured the being’s face. A steady mist of aspirated blood seemed to hang in the air. The sound of slicing and frenzied panting filled the air.
Quinn took another step.
A red pool continued to expand, but he still couldn't see the wounds -- not from this angle, not in this light.
Just a few feet away from them, a piece of glass crunched under the detective's foot. He froze.
The rearranger lifted its head from the still-quivering victim, from the luscious breasts and erect nipples dabbed with blood. As it moved, the hat brim revealed what might be a chin, what might be…
A million incisions becoming eyes, the spear wound of Christ through a kaleidoscope, a vortex of vaginal wounds yearning to receive him…
And enough blood… enough blood…
"My god…" Quinn moaned.
To drown in.
The wound-faced being rose from its handiwork, scalpels in each black-gloved hand drizzling blood like a faucet
"My god…"
Quinn's hands trembled as he shed his coat. Buttons cascaded to the floor as he ripped open his shirt. He bared his chest and fell to his knees in the warm blood. He closed his eyes and bowed low enough to wet his forehead in the slick.
"Take me too," he spoke into the blood.
But there was no reply, only the sound of his own furious breathing and the soft panting of the dying woman that lay between himself and unfathomable.
"Please…"
Weeping, he looked up again at the rearranger, but there was no translatable expression to in its countenance.
"I beg you…"
It cocked its mutilated head, as if studying him -- went so far as to lift a still-dripping scalpel. As if some notion had occurred to it.
Then it lowered the instrument.
It shook its head, slow and deliberate as if its movements animated granite. Then it took a single step backwards into a column of ruin-cast shadow.
And once more, Quinn was all alone.
***
He stayed with Gwen through her final moments. She mostly panted, but a few uttered words seeped through the veil. Something about castles of ivory and iron, something about the order of the stars.
He wept when she died, cursed the numbness in his soul -- the emptiness that had prevented him from joining her in ecstasy on that cold, abandoned floor.
He made love to the rearranger's handiwork after that, cradling the masterpiece close and burying himself in its still-warm secrets, nursing him on its wounds until dawn finally crept in through the cracks.
Then he dressed in his bloody clothes and smeared much of the caked gore from his skin with puddle water. He left her there -- not because he really wanted to abandon the body, but because the others needed to find her. It had to spread.
He wandered the streets for a few days and watched the city begin to follow the wound-faced god down its piper's path. Work only tried to contact him once and the headlines ran with Gwen's death, then the deaths of Abrams and Singh. More followed.
Within a week, all the city papers were running full-color wound photos on the front page. The local TV channels followed suit with non-stop coverage of glistening gore. There was no commentary, just voiceovers of new victim names. The location of the latest murder scenes. All of it set against an unceasing tide of images. The national networks made the pilgrimage as well.
Quinn stood in the shadow of the city's few skyscrapers. Gaunt and unshaven, he looked like some addled street prophet come to convert the hungry. Swaths of brown, dried blood marked him like a butcher's camouflage. The latest newspaper poked out from under his arm -- nothing but crime scene photos and a few rambling, incoherent articles. A gaping laceration marked the cover.
He gazed bleakly at the ashen sky. An engine revved in the distance and he glanced down the disserted street. The silhouettes of a three copycat murders swung stiffly from a light pole -- probably lynched in the night for their blasphemies.
A new world.
Repeatedly, he relived hollow terror and shame of his denunciation. He knew now
that he stood beyond its reach. He wondered how alone he was, a numbed witness to the day God's shadow fell across the world.
He looked up through the reeling emptiness above and glimpsed a slight break in the gray canopy overhead. A ragged slit.
He watched it close.
Murk
Despite the pain, a pain that seemed to form the outer boundaries of an ever-growing numbness, Nathan Griggs continued his slow, shambling decent into the subway system. Relying heavily on the handrail, bracing himself for balance with each labored step, he shuffled his increasingly unmanageable girth down the stairs.
One after the other, he told himself. The left, then the right...
The weight made it difficult. Movements which had come second nature to him all his life now took concentration, strained effort to accomplish. He’d only had a few days to adjust to it.
He took another step, slid his oily hands down the railing.
There was a thunder of footfalls behind him, giving him just a moment’s warning before three teenagers stampeded past him, taking two steps at a time in their high-end sneakers as they rushed down to the terminal.
One of their shoulders caught him in the side and he swayed, desperately tightening his grip on the rail. His knees buckled, but he managed to keep his balance long enough to pull himself into the wall.
The kids cackled as they vanished around the corner of the next landing. Griggs was sure he heard “fat fuck” somewhere in the mix of slang and laughter, but they were already just an echo.
A final tremble of vertigo shivered through him before equilibrium returned. His cheek pressed flat against the wall, he exhaled his relief in a fog of moisture across the grimy yellow tiles.
He used to wonder if this place had ever really been clean. As a younger, healthier man, he’d gazed into the grime and envisioned the cement floors having been poured from the belly of some tainted mine, each tile set in mortar scooped from the lungs of cancer-ridden behemoths. Every surface felt chillingly alive with microscopic activity -- occasionally sticky with an unknowable, infectious glaze.