Hard rain struck his face even more fiercely than before as he emerged from under the bridge. A figure looked down from the edge. She wore a yellow dress.
Jo, is that you?
Gavin shook the raindrops from his eyes for a better look. “You’re not my Jo,” he mumbled in confusion.
The scent of lavender filled his nostrils. The woman held something above her head the size of a small suitcase, something shiny. He couldn’t make out the unclear shape.
Then, with a voice that boomed like thunder, she said, “I’m coming through, and you’re going to help me.” She threw the object, hitting Gavin squarely on the head, and then everything went dark.
Gavin awoke to the sound of his own screaming.
Even after the initial shock of coming out of a sound sleep lifted, he continued to breathe heavily. The details of the dream faded like fog subjected to the heat of a new day.
He took a moment to acclimate to his surroundings. The bedclothes were a damp, tangled mess, and he was drenched in sweat. On the far side of the room, an elongated shard of morning sunlight escaped through the suite’s drapes onto the floor.
Gavin’s mouth tasted like a burned tire. He grunted, “Coffee,” and shambled in his plaid boxers across the plush carpet to the small percolator. Moments later, the single-cup maker was dutifully brewing a small foil packet labeled House Blend as he headed to the bathroom.
Returning to the main area of the suite, he promised himself to never again get as drunk as he’d been the previous night. He didn’t even remember how he’d made it back to his room. Cup in hand, Gavin took long, measured sips of the steamy liquid. Not even a river of coffee could wash this headache away. He remembered how Josephine would have a fresh pot of his favorite blend waiting for him each morning. She joked that the aroma warded off the evil fairies that caused writer’s block.
If only that were true. Gavin hadn’t written anything new in over a year and a half, not since the divorce. The book tour he was on was for a manuscript that he had completed while he was still with Jo. Except for an essay written for TIME Magazine comparing vampirism to a distorted version of the Eucharist, he hadn’t done anything of note for over nineteen months, fairies or not.
He opened another single-serving packet and set another cup to brew. Across the room, something caught his attention. At first, he thought that one of the white curtains was off the rod and on the floor, but that wasn’t it.
Across the suite, a long, beige sheet of paper curled out of the typewriter and onto the floor like a thousand-year-old ribbon. It reminded Gavin of the classic images of St. Nicholas holding a spiraling parchment with the names of every child in the world. He moved cautiously toward it, hoping that he hadn’t damaged the device during his bender from the night before.
To his astonishment, the winding scroll was covered in typewriter text. Expecting clumps of nonsensical type on the paper, he was shocked to find coherent sentences. Of course, each paragraph contained random occurrences of words with wrong characters, but that was the fault of the machine’s peculiar keypad.
It smelled like the pages of an old book. He held the midsection of the roll of paper to his nose and took in the aroma. Closing his eyes for a few seconds, he imagined himself in a cramped cottage bookstore, holding a first-edition Faulkner or some other classic work. The scent eased a fraction of the pounding that was his head.
With exuberance, he traced the scroll back around to where it started on the floor, back at the beginning. The story began with the abduction of an erotic dancer of Asian descent on her way to work at a men’s club. Written from the perspective of the killer, the opening chapters showed his blasé attitude in selecting a victim as if he were choosing a ripe tomato from a fruit vendor’s cart.
Gavin’s eyes raced across the sheet with unmitigated delight. He remembered the classic Hemmingway quote: “Write drunk; edit sober.” Maybe the old codger had been onto something after all.
He continued as the text masterfully described the character forcing the girl under the boardwalk and tying her to a support beam with an extension cord. As the killer applied another layer of duct tape to the victim’s mouth, he told her that when the tide came in that night, she wouldn’t drown through her mouth, but her nose. He kissed her on the forehead while tearing one of the dolphin-shaped hoop earrings through her left lobe. The killer examined it like a trinket that washed up on the shore of some lonesome beach.
The last thing the perp said to the crying girl was the single word, “Souvenir.”
Then the story unfolded with the typical aftermath of the detective genre—an early morning fisherman spotted the body, there were descriptions of the goings-on at a crime scene, and a crotchety old detective worked the manhunt with a newbie partner. Even though these segments were not nearly as intense as the crime, they were still first-rate. The best part of it was the absence of the Damien Marksman character.
As he prepared to remove the paper from the typewriter, something on the page caught his eye, or rather something not on the page. The pangrams he’d typed the afternoon before while on the phone with Beverly and Billy were gone, except for one—the one that had left out the letter K. He shuddered when he looked at it.
Q: JUST WHAT UNEXPECTED HORRORS BEFALL A VERY CRAZY MR.GAVIN CURTIS?
But those words hadn’t been the last ones he’d typed before heading off to the bar. Those had been “Reichenbach Falls.” Was he losing his mind? Everything he’d typed before and after that sentence was gone, yet the blank space was still there on the page where those words had been. He ran his finger across the coarse paper stock and was slightly relieved to feel indentations in the blank areas on the paper. But why did all of the other phrases fade or disappear and the text about him remain? Even more alarming was the possibility of the story of the murdered Asian dancer dissolving into nothingness. Using the camera feature of his cell phone, he took snapshots of the writing, thirteen pics in all.
Gavin delicately tore the paper roll from the top of the machine and grabbed his pen for markups. He re-read the story as the long scroll trailed behind him on his way to the edge of the bed. The writing was sublime. It was perfect, superb in the classic Gavin Curtis style. It was chock full of what a leading horror critic from long ago had classified as “Curtis’s poetic flourishes of gore.”
Gavin placed the pen on the bed beside him. He didn’t need it. Other than the mistype errors caused by the quirky machine, there was nothing to change. It was a flawless piece. He marveled at the notion that he’d written a first draft that required no revision—and written it stone-drunk, no less. Usually, Billy Cavanaugh only looked at his stories after the third or even sometimes fourth draft, but here was something that Gavin could proudly send to press without any editing.
Giddy with excitement, he made a fist pump in the air. “I’m back! Oh, God, this is gonna be so huge. I’m so back.” It felt like he was twenty-five again, despite the awful hangover pounding at his head. The aches brought on from the night before would pass, but this thing was his emancipation from the rut he’d been trapped in. The disappearance of the pangrams didn’t matter.
He shot a glance at the alarm clock display. It read 10:38 a.m. in dark red characters. Gavin fumbled for pillows to prop himself up for his third self-indulgent reading and clicked the television remote. The Dodgers and the Reds had been tied 1-1 at the end of the fourth inning last night when he was in the bar. At least that was what he last remembered of the game. Cycling through the channels to get the final score, he came across an overly chipper morning show. He decided he could endure them for the sake of the scores. The hosts cackled away for a few minutes about the latest celebrity mishaps and gossip.
Finally, they broke to the scheduled local news segment. There was an aerial shot of half a dozen police cars and emergency response vehicles parked along a fishing pier. The crawl at the bottom of the screen relayed the grim message: “Local resident, Misa Kawaguchi, abducted near Pier 719, bound to s
upport column until drowned. Police Chief Taylor: ‘The most inhuman thing that I’ve ever witnessed.’”
Gavin rose slowly from the bed and stood, remote in hand, feeling his mind turn inside out. His blood ran cold while a distraught-looking man in uniform, who Gavin guessed was the police chief, concluded his final comments about the murder. A high-school yearbook photo of a smiling young girl replaced the image of the man. It must’ve been the most recent photo the media could get by airtime, the graduation date being from four years before. The text under the picture read, “Victim—Misa Kawaguchi.” Gavin gasped, noting the girl’s Asian features.
The floor beneath him felt as if it had fallen away. He slumped to the floor with his back against the bed, crumpling part of the paper roll in the process. What’s going on here?
He chewed his lip as the report continued. The newscaster bore a solemn expression as he encouraged viewers with any information regarding the case to call the station’s tip line. Gavin sprang into action, nervously jotting the number down in the margin of his story.
As the program shifted to a brief recap of weather and sports, Gavin stared at the widescreen in frozen silence. The Dodgers had beaten Cincinnati 4-1, but he barely registered it. Internally, there was a firestorm swirling in his mind as he struggled to force the pieces of the murder together.
How could this be? Was this for real?
The channel returned to the annoying clamor of the morning show, prodding Gavin from his trancelike state. He turned the television volume low.
Think, Gav! Think about it. What’s happening here? Concentrate. Just work through it like a puzzle.
As crazy as it seemed, there had to be a logical explanation.
He paced even before being aware of doing so. When he passed in front of the full-length mirror, he caught sight of his hair spiraling in all directions.
“Where did the story come from?” he asked, patting his hair down. A few wild strands defiantly stood back up. One thing he knew was that he couldn’t take this horrible thing that happened to the girl and market it as fiction—not without altering some of the details, at least.
He looked down at the phone number scribbled on the parchment. Of course he didn’t have a Crime Solvers tip. How could he? But maybe he could get some information about the case.
Gavin grabbed his cell phone from the nightstand only to discover that the battery was dead. It’d been a stroke of luck that there’d been enough of a charge to snap pics of the story. He set it to charge and picked up the hotel phone.
Then he lowered the phone to its cradle as if placing a sleeping rattlesnake back in its terrarium.
How could he be so stupid? He wrote detective and spy novels! It’d be child’s play to send a trace back to where he was.
He stared at the cord, taut between his twitching fingers. Until he had all the facts, and most importantly, until he was able to prove his own innocence, he couldn’t tell the cops what he knew. He couldn’t tell anyone.
But what if the police already knew about him? The notion made him feel like he’d been kicked in the chest. It was undeniable that someone out there knew what was happening.
What if the police concluded that he was involved? What then? How could he prove he wasn’t? What if someone accused him?
Gavin rushed to the window, half expecting to see squad car lights. There were no patrol cars, only the parking lot and the blocked-off bridge in the distance. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” he chided himself. Of course there were no police. This thinking was merely the result of an overactive imagination, right?
Be cool, Gav. Be cool. Gotta get control of this before it goes off the tracks.
Frustrated, he repeatedly slammed his palm against the wall next to the curtain. “This is ridiculous. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
He glanced down at his stinging hand. “It’s impossible! I couldn’t have done what’s on the page.”
He turned from the window to face the antique typewriter on the desk. Gavin swallowed hard and approached the device.
But could he have done the things on the page, things that he’d written about?
The news reported that the murder scene was only a couple of miles from the resort. Gavin massaged his temples. This was the mother of all hangovers. Could he have been drunk enough to have been there and not remember it?
Even if he had walked two miles stone-drunk—murder? Why would he kill anyone? It was impossible. He just needed time to sort it all out. Equal measures of confusion and panic flooded in like a tsunami, making it difficult to breathe. He began to hyperventilate. He thought of the suffocating frog from his childhood. If he didn’t settle down, he was going to pass out, or worse, have a heart attack.
He stopped at the edge of the desk, transfixed on the machine as if he were waiting for it to move. Had it moved? He was certain that it’d been in the center of the desk when he tore the story from it. Now it was slightly over to the left.
He reached ever so slowly to touch it. Before his fingers made contact with the keys, a knock from the door startled him. Gavin jumped back from the desk as if a cannon had been fired in the room.
Cops!
Without thinking, Gavin rushed to unlatch the sliding door to the balcony opposite the entry. The glass was a quarter of the way open before logic kicked in and he recognized the obvious flaw in going that way. There was no escape, and he couldn’t very well hide from the police out there.
More knocking at the door rang out across the vast suite, this time more forceful.
He faced the paper roll with the story opening—evidence! The chapters might as well be his confession. He scrambled to wad up the scroll and shove it between the mattress and box spring. A few seconds later, the dreadful click of a key card disengaging the door lock made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. They were coming in.
The metal swing-bar latch prevented the door from opening all the way.
The unexpected voice of a woman announced, “Housekeeping?” with an inflection that sounded more like a question.
Was it a trick? Were the police behind her, waiting to pounce on him?
“Uh, just a minute,” Gavin managed to blurt out. “Uh, I’ll be right there.”
He bounded for the door and shoved it closed. Looking through the peephole didn’t reveal as much as he’d hoped. There was the fisheye distortion of a tired, thirty-something-year-old woman waiting to come in. She tapped on the door. “You want me to come back?”
She leaned forward until an almond-colored eye filled the peephole. “I’ve got other rooms. I can come back in a half hour.”
“No,” Gavin answered abruptly through the door. He had to be cool. If the cops were out there beyond his view, he needed to appear normal, and the normal thing would be to let her in to clean. And why not? He hadn’t done anything wrong. “Gimme a sec to get my robe on.”
“All right.” She pulled away from the peephole and adjusted the cleaning bottles on the cart behind her.
He grabbed a plush robe from the bathroom along with a couple of oversized towels. After draping the towels over the typewriter on the desk, he checked the bed to ensure that none of the scroll peeked out from under the mattress.
He tried to calm his breathing. Be cool, Gav. Be cool.
With trembling fingers, he unlatched the door. “Sorry for the wait.”
The woman pushed the cleaning cart past him without a word.
Gavin peered down the hallway for any trace of an ambush. It was empty for the moment.
Already in the bathroom, the housekeeper began her duties. When she saw Gavin watching her in the mirror, she turned to face him. “Are you feeling okay? You seem a little out of breath. I could radio someone if you need a nurse.”
“No, I… when you knocked… well, I was… running in place.” He knew this was a weak explanation, but now he had to go with it. “For exercise. You know, jogging in place? Yeah, here in the room.”
“You know that we have a gym o
n the third floor, right? And you can schedule a time with a trainer.”
“Yeah, but I like self-led exercises.” The lie’s credibility was crumbling faster than he could spin it. “I don’t like using equipment that people have sweated on.” Gavin felt like an idiot, but he had to keep it going. “It’s working pretty good for me, in fact—five pounds in two weeks.”
It was obvious the woman saw through the lie, as demonstrated by her new interest in cleaning the toilet rather than speaking with Gavin.
He studied her. He wanted to ask if she knew anything. Were there any police in the lobby? Was anything out of the ordinary happening?
Looking over her shoulder at him, she asked, “Do you need to use the commode? Because I can make the bed if—”
“Huh? Oh, no, it’s fine. I just wanted to ask you something.”
She turned back to the toilet and scrubbed at it more vigorously. “What?”
“I wanted to ask if you’d heard anything.”
“About what?”
“The murder.”
She stood up and flushed the toilet. “What murder?”
Was she bluffing? Was it a trick to get him to let his guard down before the cops burst in?
“There was a murder—a drowning—a couple of miles from here. A young woman.”
The woman peeled the rubber gloves from her hands and tossed them into her plastic bucket. “Nope. I ‘ve been making my rounds.” She offered a polite “Excuse me” as she passed by him into the main area of the suite. Pointing at the mound of towels on the desk, she asked, “Do you need me to replace those?”
Gavin quickly skirted by her and placed a hand atop the concealed device. “No, they’re fine. They’re not wet or anything. I wouldn’t put wet towels on wood.” As absurd as it was, he felt like his mother had found a stack of Playboys in his dorm room.
“There’s not an animal in a cage or something under there, right? One time, a fella tried to keep an injured bird that he—”
Cruel Devices Page 9