The Knowing: A thrilling horror fantasy

by David Graham

  “You what?” the chief spluttered.

  “It’s what my ‘knowing’ is all about, Chief. Meaning that events in the future are fed back to me in the present.” Dale held up his hands to pacify his colleagues. They’d probably already started speed-dialling for the men in white coats and a straitjacket. “Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds screwy, but that’s God’s honest truth.” He’d made the sign of the cross without knowing why. Shit! Is that to protect me from myself ?

  The chief scratched his head. “Christ, Dale, I don’t wanna say that’s a load of baloney, but ...” He looked around for support, but all he received were shrugs. “Okay, okay, so how do I explain all this to the judge when I ask for the search warrant?”

  Tomasz Zbigniew didn’t have a criminal record, but he did drive a 1967 V8 Chevy Impala renowned for its generous-sized trunk. They’d discovered that snippet of information from an overly talkative clerk at the Kansas Division of Vehicles whose troublesome ex also drove a Chevy, although of a lesser vintage. A rather more functional Social Security check revealed that he’d bought a condo just a few blocks from Dale’s apartment. Downtown KC was clearly on the up and the down.

  Presiding Municipal Judge O’Connor had raised a bushy eyebrow when the search warrant was requested, but he was no stranger to dealing with misconduct in public office. To his eyes, incriminating material was incriminating material, no matter the source of the intelligence. The notion of the Law being bamboozled by a suspected felon with a law degree merely added grist to his mill. A warrant for the arrest of the assistant prosecuting attorney had been the icing on the cake, and he’d have willingly gone along for the ride. But a four-course lunch, with a bottle of fine Burgundy, beckoned instead.

  Dale had been given the task of identifying the location of Tomasz Zbigniew that crisp fall morning. His colleagues were far from unanimous on the appeal of marching into the City Prosecutor’s Office with warrants and handcuffs. On the side of positive thinking, it was hoped the attorney would fulfil his civic duty, come quietly, and say, “It’s a good collar, you’ve got me dead to rights, Officer.” On the negative side, an egg/face scenario would be deeply embarrassing for the department.

  Dale discovered with some relief that Mr Zbigniew, J.D. was on compassionate leave from the City Prosecutor’s Office following two unexpected deaths in the family. That was when Dale realised how he knew the man’s name and face: he’d featured in KCTV5’s account of two Holocaust survivors who’d been found brutally murdered with their fingernails removed ante-mortem. Mr Zbigniew had given a touching eulogy at his relatives’ funeral, although there’d been something distinctly creepy about holding the service in a crematorium. Christ, what a sick bastard! Dale thought bitterly. Matching DNA on the trainers would be a pain in the butt if the CSI team hadn’t kept any specimens. So, it would be guns cocked and loaded and a lunchtime raid on his condo. Dale had arranged a takeout from Joe’s Diner for when they got back and the chief had even offered to pick up the tab. Things were looking up.

  “So, where’s the Chevy?” Chief Scanlon asked as they checked the immediate surroundings of the brownstone building.

  “Dunno,” Dale said. “Perhaps he keeps it in a lockup. It’s a collector’s item, after all.”

  The chief nodded without comment. His home was a shrine to baseball memorabilia and collecting was in his blood.

  A janitor was on hand with the passkeys. Dale and the rest of the posse stood back with guns raised. Chief Scanlon knocked on the door. The noise echoed along the length of the corridor, reverberating in the still, musty air. No one responded from inside the condo. The chief rapped again, louder. They heard the sound of door bolts being pulled back. “Brace yourselves,” the chief said. “If he’s armed, take him down. I don’t want no casualties.”

  A head full of curlers emerged tentatively from the apartment to the left. The woman stared wide-eyed and a gasp escaped her mouth as half-a-dozen, stateof-the-art firearms swivelled smoothly in her direction. She raised shaking hands above her head. “Please don’t shoot me,” she whimpered.

  The chief raised a mollifying palm. “It’s all right, lady. You’d best be going back inside.”

  The neighbour lowered her hands and patted her rollers. “He’s in there, you know. I heard him close the door about – ” she looked at the watch on her scrawny wrist, “ – an hour ago. He must be making lunch. He’s got something cooking on the stove. Smells good, too.” She reached into her robe and put on over-sized spectacles. “My, there are a lot of you. Has he been a bad boy, then?”

  “Something like that,” Chief Scanlon grumbled. He pointed an index finger at the neighbour. “Inside. Now. If you don’t mind, ma’am.”

  “Well,” she said. “I was only trying to help.”

  As the door closed behind the woman, the chief motioned the janitor to step forward with the passkeys. All eyes were on the door as he turned the keys in the lock. “One ... two ...” Chief Scanlon flicked his eyes over his troops for a fraction of a beat, “three ...”

  Half-a-dozen police officers lurched into the apartment like the creature from the black lagoon. Massed eyes out on stalks scanned for anything approximating to the human form. The owner had furnished the living room straight out of a cheap catalogue. There was a galley kitchen to one side and something was definitely roasting, but the cook wasn’t to be seen. The Maillard reaction was developing nicely. The aroma was so rich and meaty that a cow would have turned carnivorous. Dale reached for his radio.

  “Any movement down there, Mike?” he asked the officer stationed at the bottom of the fire escape.

  “Nothing human,” came the tinny reply, “although the south-westerly wind is gusting up to 30 miles an hour. The pressure is falling, too, so there could be a storm brewing.” The officer had aspirations to be a weather anchor and he’d recently purchased a wind meter app for his iPhone.

  Chief Scanlon raised an eyebrow. “Dale, you and Franco take the bedroom. We’ll check the rest. There’s something not right about this.”

  That was the understatement of the year. Chefs didn’t usually leave their steaks sizzling. Dale’s testicles had started aching, too, so there had to be something in the air apart from the meaty smell. And Officer Franco was smirking, which was just as bad a sign.

  “Fancy a quick romp?” Franco asked, his eyebrows arched.

  “Dumbass,” Dale said, checking the rounds in his Glock.

  “Is that a pistol in your pocket or – ”

  “Christ! Give me strength!” Dale muttered. He’d have a word with him later about his unprofessional behaviour.

  “Right, I’ll go in first. You cover me,” Dale said as they approached a door on the left. He snapped on latex gloves.

  “How do you know it’s the bedroom?” Franco asked. His lascivious grin had morphed into puzzlement.

  “I know. Trust me.” As usual, Dale’s cojones had had a say in the matter.

  Franco shrugged and adopted a firing position as Dale put his hand around the doorknob. Their entry was executed as smooth as silk. It was too easy. The bedroom was a whole lot tidier than Dale’s. He sniffed. There was a remnant of some fragrance in the air. It was sweet and clashed with the roasting aroma that had spread throughout the apartment.

  Dale and Franco swung open the doors to the closet with a co-ordinated yank. Clothes had been arranged in separate sections with neat gradations in colour. Luggage was stored on shelves at the top. If anyone had left the premises, it couldn’t have been with much more than an overnighter. Dale parted the white shirts and found a barely noticeable crack in the back panel. He pressed the wood and a rectangular section swung back, revealing a cavity cut into the wall behind the closet. Dale reached in and gingerly withdrew a pair of Nike trainers.

  Franco stared disbelievingly at the well-hidden evidence. “Jesus! How the fuck did you know where to look?”

  Dale tapped the side of his nose. “Intuition, my friend. You ought to try it sometime.”


  Franco shook his head. “You’re weird, man. I just don’t – ” He was interrupted by a dull thud from somewhere else in the apartment. “I’d better go see what’s happening.” He left the room with his firearm raised for action.

  Dale inspected the trainers. They were exactly as he’d seen inside his head back in the department. The soles looked unworn, but the grey uppers had been liberally sprayed with dark dots. The shoes had a musty, metallic odour that was due to more than just sweaty feet. Dale checked the inside. Something had been pushed into the end of one of the shoes. The paper had been folded, origami-like, to resemble a bird. Dale almost dropped the trainers when he saw his name written on one of the wings. His heart thumping, he carefully unfolded the paper. The handwriting was small and neat: ‘IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE’, he read. Christ! What the fuck is going on? He quickly pocketed the slip.

  “Chief Scanlon needs you,” Franco said, putting his head around the door. His swarthy, Mediterranean complexion had turned unwholesomely ashen.

  Dale deposited the trainers on the bed and followed his colleague along the short corridor. Another officer pushed past. “I’ll direct the paramedics,” he yelled. Everyone else had gathered in the bathroom. The door had been forced open and the jamb was splintered. Chief Scanlon bent over a man lying prone on the vinyl floor. The checkerboard pattern contrasted neatly with the dark suit and white shirt on the body. Mr Zbigniew had put on a black tie for the occasion. Some unusual accessorising with black leather gloves suggested he’d chosen his funeral attire. The chief perspired heavily from his exertion.

  “For fuck’s sake, Dale, where’ve you been?” he gasped. “You take over. At least you’ve done basic life support.” He glared at the other officers who shuffled uncomfortably.

  Dale and the chief exchanged places. Dale looked down at the body. The chief hadn’t opened the man’s shirt and had been crushing his abdominal organs. Dale tried to avoid looking at the face as he felt for a pulse in the neck. Mr Zbigniew’s complexion was deathly white, as if covered by a layer of chalk. “So, what happened?” Dale asked, as he commenced compressions.

  Chief Scanlon stood half bent over, his meaty hands on his thighs, huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf in a very bad mood. “Fuck,” he panted. “Someone get me some fucking water.”

  One of the other officers filled in the story while the chief’s liquid refreshment was located. “We had to break the door ’coz the janitor didn’t have a key. Looks like the perp hanged himself with a belt – ” he pointed at a fixture that had come away from the wall, “ – so we cut him down. There was blood in the tub, but we – ”

  The raucous sound of what could only have been the stove’s buzzer interrupted the officer’s account. Dale realised he was salivating. His mom had a habit of banging on the pan when she was about to serve the Sunday pot roast. Still, he had to admit, the contents of the oven smelled pretty darn good. A bit of moderately strenuous CPR sure gave one an appetite.

  “Go check what the fuck that is, Officer!” Chief Scanlon said, after swallowing the contents of a glass in a single gulp.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” the officer said in his best English butler’s voice. “I do believe luncheon is almost ready.” He went off to attend to the noise.

  “Jeez,” the chief said with a snarl. “What have I done to deserve this crap?”

  The tension in the air was thick enough to cut and serve in a sub. Dale didn’t appreciate Chief Scanlon’s intense scrutiny when he was just doing his job.

  “Shouldn’t you be giving him some air?” the chief asked pointedly, waggling a sausage-sized finger at Mr Zbigniew’s mouth.

  “Mouth ... to ... mouth ... is dead,” Dale said, trying to keep up the rhythm of 100 compressions a minute.

  “Who said?”

  “The ... American ... Heart ... Association ... in 2010.”

  “Oh.”

  Three police officers rushed through the door, bringing a halt to all further discussion about the latest CPR guidelines. They clutched their stomachs. “Shit! Fuck! Christ!” they gasped as they hurled themselves at the toilet.

  The officer with pretensions to servitude made his entrance a moment later. He held an ominously smoking tray. “Ta-da!” he announced. “Luncheon is served.”

  Dale immediately knew why the man had put on gloves before hanging himself – and the source of the blood in the tub. “I’d ... say ... he’s ... giving ...us ... the ... finger.”

  Chief Scanlon looked blank ... and then looked at the tray. He put his hand to his mouth. “Jesus Christ! What a sick motherfucker!”

  Like yawning, vomiting could be just as contagious given the right conditions – all of which had been met in the condo’s checkerboard bathroom. As Dale puked his guts out for the second time that morning, it occurred to him that he’d forgotten to take his gloves off when he discovered the trainers. Perhaps that had never been on the cards, though. If he’d removed his gloves when he hadn’t been meant to, a paradox might have rippled its way through time and obliterated God knows what. There again, if he’d taken no notice of what he saw inside his head, and had left the trainers where they were, perhaps fate would have got its own back and allowed Donald Trump to win the race to the White House. It was like being a plaything for some Mr Big who got his kicks out of waggling monumental carrots. But at least he could do CPR – not that that had made any difference to Mr Big ... Zbigniew ... Christ, my head hurts!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Five minutes in, and Steve Abrams’s second visit to the Two Rivers psych facility was already going a whole lot better than the first. The woman on intercom duty seemed imbued with the milk of human kindness, although the increasingly husky tone in her voice hinted at something more down to earth. She’d even requested his cell phone number, in case of ‘administrative issues’. Steve then noticed that the sticky tape over the camera lens had been uncovered, so she could see him, although not vice versa. He’d smiled winsomely and the woman buzzed him in with a demurring sigh that probably still lingered on the line.

  Inside, the unit seemed quieter than before. Steve guessed the zombie teens must have been in medicated lockdown. A patient even offered to direct him to the nursing office. It was fortuitous he’d felt the back pocket of his pants before the door closed. ‘Where there’s a will there’s a pickpocket,’ was the saying back home, but he wouldn’t be pressing charges.

  “To be honest, Officer Abrams, we didn’t expect you back,” Nurse Elliott said, after soundly scolding the miscreant. “Most who come to visit don’t do repeats unless they’re attorneys or relatives. I think you made quite an impression on young Joseph.”

  “Yeah?” Steve had heard that before and it tended not to mean undying admiration. ‘Foot-in-mouth disease’ was the way his mom put it. And he had size 14 feet. His psychology professor would have sewn his mouth up if he could.

  The nurse nodded. “As I said on the phone, he has something to show you.”

  “Yeah, that’s got me intrigued,” Steve said. He wondered whether the kid had progressed to pecans and walnuts. “So, how’s he doing?”

  The nurse nodded encouragingly. “He’s doing okay. The meds have made a difference. Joseph isn’t out of the woods, but he’s getting there. We’re switching him to a day care program next week.”

  “You mean, basket weaving for boys and how to bake a perfect Victoria sponge,” Steve said with a twinkle.

  “I’ll have you know, Officer, their sponge has won awards at the county fair,” Nurse Elliott said. “Not to mention basket weaving being excellent for attention and concentration.” He grinned. “To be honest, I wish they did do that kinda thing. It’s all group this and group that. In my experience, teenagers just don’t wanna talk unless someone’s paying them to do it.”

  Steve was the exception to that rule. He’d even started a debating team in high school. “Actually, I’m thinking of going to psychology grad school and Joseph is a case I’d like to write up. You know, brain le
sions and art.”

  The nurse cocked an eyebrow. “Well, you’ll find even more to write up now. He’s taken over the art room.”

  As soon as Steve entered the art room, he could see Nurse Elliott hadn’t been kidding. The room was awash with light, and row after row of canvases had been stacked against the walls. Joseph currently stood halfway up a ladder, recreating a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno. He’d located purgatory in the bottom left and paradise in the top right. Steve could imagine it as a road map for someone’s righteous path. It also bore uncanny similarities to Dai Williams’s description of the inside of Lady Leanne’s brain. The only thing missing was Bugs Bunny sprawled on a chaise longue, chewing a carrot and saying, “Eh, what’s up, Doc?”

  “Whaddya think, then? It sure beats drawing peanuts,” Joseph said, swivelling around on the ladder rung to check out his visitor.

  Steve walked up to the painting and pointed at what appeared to be golden sex toys hovering over the lavastrewn landscape. “I bet they didn’t have those in the 14th century.”

  “Oh, you mean the winged phalluses?” He grinned. “Wouldn’t it be cool to pluck a BJ straight out of thin air?”

  There was a park near Dale’s apartment where getting frisky alfresco happened most evenings, but Steve wasn’t about to give the impressionable Joseph the heads-up on that. He hemmed and hawed, and examined the painting some more. It definitely wasn’t portraying thin air. In fact, the fiery sky was so thick with activity that even air traffic control wouldn’t have coped. Naked angels were engaged in lewd behaviour that would have made every one of the Promised Land’s 72 virgins blush. Joseph still had sex on the brain, which wasn’t an encouraging sign. Still, there was something to be said for getting one’s fantasies out into the open, and his artwork would be good for some healthy discussion in the day care group.

  “What’s the painting called, then?” Steve asked. “The Nine Circles of Hell?”

  “Oh, no.” Joseph looked puzzled. “It’s Coming Out the Other Side.”