by Hopkin, Ben
In that more welcoming light, Trey noticed that Darc had outpaced him. That man was an effing workhorse. “Man, you walk fast. You’d think with what we’re looking for…” Trey stopped talking in order to have enough breath to catch up to his partner.
And then they settled into something just below a breakneck pace. At least, that’s what it felt like to Trey. Enough to keep his legs and lungs burning, not so fast that he would pass out. It certainly left him no space for idle chitchat. Trey began to suspect that maybe Darc had done that on purpose.
The forest was a presence around them. Movements of small animals slipping through the brush set Trey’s nerves on edge. The shadows from the ever-brighter flicker ahead danced crazily around them, making it feel like a whole posse of insane, cannibalistic clowns was about to attack them from behind a bush. Not that the shadows looked particularly clownish. It was just the scariest image Trey could come up with at the moment.
They crested the hill, and there in front of them was a campfire, burning merrily away. Hung on a metal framework above the flame was an enormous cast-iron pot. Okay, Trey was kinda pissed. After pulling the snakes out of the freakin’ background, now the killer was giving them this straight-up copy of the painting? Where was the out-of-the-box killer Trey had grown to despise and loathe? It’s like he wasn’t even trying anymore.
“Dude. This guy is literal.”
Shifting around so that they were approaching the cauldron from opposite sides, Trey and Darc moved closer and closer to the bright and cheery center of what looked like nothing so much as a Boy Scout camping trip.
Okay, the big black cast-iron pot was a little creepy, but even that just looked like some awesome Dutch-oven cooking was on its way. From the metal container, Trey could hear the sounds of boiling liquid burbling away inside. He had to stop himself from chanting, “Double, double, toil and trouble.” A giddy giggle also seemed to want to erupt, his body’s way of venting the sheer panic that threatened.
Tiny wisps of steam issued out from under the massive lid covering the pot. Trey had no desire to open it up. That’s how he knew it was what he needed to do.
Trey grabbed a stick to help pull the lid off. He looked up at the huge cast-iron crock and then at the thin switch of wood in his hand. Lifting his eyes up to meet his partner, Trey grimaced as Darc gave a sharp shake of his head. Yeah. There was no way that twig was going to budge something as heavy as the manhole-cover-of-a-lid that topped this sucker. Trey sighed and tossed it away.
Back into the jungle he had to go. He took a deep breath, crossed himself, and plunged into the undergrowth surrounding the clearing.
After thrashing around for a moment, he came back out with twigs in his hair, a new bruise on his hip, and more scratches than he had gotten once when he fell into a rosebush while trying to pick a flower for his girlfriend back in high school. At least he’d obtained what he’d gone out there for. He was clutching a large branch that had fallen to the ground off the huge and obviously ancient maple behind him. Hefting the cudgel and squaring his shoulders, Trey advanced on the fire once more.
“Ready?” Trey asked, lifting up the branch.
Darc nodded, but Trey let the point of his bough tip back down to the ground.
“Sorry, I’m not,” Trey said, trying not to hyperventilate. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what was in that pot. No, scratch that. He was positive he did not want to know what was in that pot. His partner directed a look at him that could have frozen lava. “Okay, okay. Jeez.” Sometimes Darc could be such a little priss.
Edging his way forward with extreme caution—hey, the graves had exploded, right?—Trey eased the point of his lever forward in one hand, trying to keep it from shaking too much. That was just because of how long and big the stick was. It had nothing whatsoever to do with fear. His other hand, he kept firmly on his gun. He knew there couldn’t be anything alive inside the pot, but somehow, having his hand touch metal was a tiny bit comforting.
Sliding the tip of the wood through the ring on the top, he started to lift up, but the circle of metal slipped off the end of his branch. Trey overbalanced and almost went face-forward into the fire. That would not have been a pleasant ending to this little field trip.
“Crap.” Trey could feel Darc’s disapproval all the way from the other side of the campfire.
Setting the branch completely down for a second, Trey shook his arms out, rolled his shoulders around, and cracked his neck. This time, he gripped the branch firmly with both hands and managed to ease the cover up enough to see that the liquid within looked to be blood. Floating in the viscous sludge was the back a human head.
“Ah,” Trey gagged. “That’s just—”
And then the head rolled over. It was the black guard at the hospital.
“What the…? No, no, no, no, no…”
The metal lid fell with a loud clang as Trey backed away from the cauldron, trying desperately to rid his vision of what he had just seen. As the branch fell and bumped against the pot, the contents sloshed around inside, causing more heads to bob to the surface.
There wasn’t even a flicker of acknowledgment from Darc. It was like his partner was a stone. But then, with no change in posture or even a shifting of his countenance, Darc let five words fall from his mouth.
“He was protecting the girl.”
Trey’s mind exploded into a million gibbering fragments. “Oh dear…No. No. No.” He picked up the twig he had abandoned earlier and ran back over to the pot. Swiping the stick through the gory stew, he managed to turn another head around. Father John.
“Oh, no. Please, God. I’ll repent. I’ll do anything. Just no.” Trey babbled incoherently as he continued moving around the horrific contents of the iron pot.
Darc had not moved or made a sound.
A third face rotated up to turn its blank eyes toward the black heavens. Mala.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
It was too much for him. God would understand.
“Shit, no. No. Mary, mother of god.”
Darc stood motionless above the bubbling metal vessel, his face uplit by the flickering flames. His spine was rigid, his face without expression. Trey hit him on the arm. Hard.
“Don’t you care, man? Don’t you effing care?”
Darc didn’t even deign to answer the question. He just looked him right in the eye and asked one simple question.
“What about the girl?”
That was more than enough to send Trey back to the pot.
Trey’s movements were growing more and more frantic as he fished inside the cauldron for a catch that he did not want to make. Blood sloshed and spilled over the side, sizzling down the red-hot metal, splashing down to hiss in the depths of the crackling fire.
“No, no. God, no. Please, oh God, no.”
Dropping the stick and stumbling back, Trey retched and heaved with equal portions of disgust and relief. He wiped his sweaty hair back from his forehead and sobbed.
“She’s not in there. She’s not in there.”
Turning to his still-rigid partner, Trey hit him again, calling out to him, trying to penetrate the armor of stillness Darc had wrapped around himself.
“Did you hear me? She’s not in there.” Nothing. No response. Trey raised his voice even further. “Darc!”
Once last time, Darc made a pronouncement of lifeless words. “Then he’s got her.”
The words did not want to enter into Trey’s brain. They were clear enough, their meaning straightforward, but he couldn’t bear them. “No. No. Just no.” Trey fell back to the ground, not even feeling the impact. He looked up, wanting for once to see something in Darc’s eyes. Hope. Comfort. Even an indication of pain. There was nothing. His face was a black hole, sucking in Trey’s torment and giving back nothing.
And then a glimmer of hope burst into life inside Trey’s head. “But wait! You baptized her. That will protect her, right?”
From his partner issued
forth a groan. It was filled with all the torture that Trey had been looking for on Darc’s face. It spoke of all the chaos that must be unleashed within his partner’s soul. It also gave Trey the answer that he didn’t want to hear.
“But how would he know that?” Trey muttered, mirroring the agony of Darc’s exclamation. “Would Janey know to tell him?” And then another step down the pathway to hell opened up before him. “No. Oh, no. What will he do once he finds out? What will he…? No.” Trey grabbed his hair in both fists, pulling and tearing at his own scalp. He took deep breaths, trying to calm himself. “All right. Don’t freak out, Keane. We can figure this out.” Trey stopped, then glanced over at his statue of a partner. “Well, Darc can figure this out.”
Trey walked over and planted himself in front of Darc, reaching out and placing a hand on each of his partner’s shoulders. “Come on, man. Hit me with some genius. Where would he take her? What do we do?”
There was no visible response to his questions. He might as well be talking to the trees around them. “Darc! Don’t you dare retreat into mute-ville.” Trey shook his partner over and over, each time with more energy. “Get your ass back to reality, dude.”
After several long moments, his hands dropped down to his sides and Trey released a long breath. It was no use. Darc was gone. Trey started pacing back and forth in front of the fire, tugging at his hair.
“This is not okay. What the hell am I supposed to do?” He paused in his ranting for a second, peering over at the tall figure that almost appeared to be one of the statues of the cemetery. “Better question. What would you do? What’s the last thing you were working on?”
And then he knew. He had it. Snapping his fingers, he started tugging on Darc’s sleeve.
“Come on, dude. Come on.”
They had some drawings to find.
* * *
It was so dark here. And so, so scary.
She had never seen anything like it, ever. So scary that it made her want to be asleep again, like when the man had put the smelly cloth over her mouth. That had been scary, too, but not as scary as this. The only thing that made her stay awake was that she had to pay attention. Like in class, but even more important than learning how to spell and stuff.
She knew she was supposed to be brave, but sometimes it was so hard. And the man, the bad man, the sneaky-meanie man, had taken Popeye away from her. She didn’t know where he was.
Popeye would probably be mad at her because she hadn’t yelled when the man took her. That was what she was supposed to do. Stranger danger. But even with Popeye angry, she’d still rather have him with her. She didn’t have anyone to talk to. At least, not anyone nice.
“Don’t worry, little one.” It was the man again. “It won’t be too long now. Not so very long before you see your parents again. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She knew what that meant. He was talking in a grown-up voice that meant that he thought she was stupid. She wasn’t stupid. She was very, very smart. Her mommy and daddy and all her teachers said so. She wanted to kick out at the bad man’s leg, but that maybe wasn’t a good idea. Besides, he had tied her down, so she couldn’t anyway.
She nodded instead.
Her mommy and daddy were dead. That meant the meanie man wanted her to be dead, too. She thought about that for a while. Maybe she would’ve liked that before. To be dead with her parents. Like, right after all the really bad stuff happened. But now she wasn’t sure. She missed her parents, but the tall man was there to protect her. He was so nice. Even though he didn’t smile at her, his eyes made it feel like he was.
He was going to come. She knew he was going to come. Nobody was smarter, braver, or handsomer than him, except maybe her daddy. Thinking of Daddy and Mommy made her sad, but thinking of the tall man made her feel like she was taller or something. Braver.
That was a good thing, ‘cause the bad man was putting things on her. And talking.
“You must stay calm, little one. Calm. Breathe slowly. Breathe deeply. We don’t want things happening too quickly, now do we?”
She didn’t know what he meant, but it didn’t sound good. It turned her stomach all gooey-stretchy inside. Not as bad as throw-up, but almost.
Things were bad right now. Really bad. It was like what Mommy used to say. “Things seem bad sometimes, but they get better. Sometimes it takes a little while, but they get better.”
She just had to wait.
And then he would come.
* * *
Flashes. Bursts of light. Incoherent swirlings of what he had once thought of as his muse.
He was anchorless. Formless. A floating mass of neurons firing at random in the darkness of the night. Dark.
Darc.
But that was someone else. Someone capable of ordering the chaos to suit his needs. Someone with the power to wrest the anarchy out of itself and from the broken tiles of bedlam create patterns.
There were no patterns here. Nothing but bombshells of fading glory, shards of broken logic, shreds of glimmering pathways.
His consciousness shrank and grew, as random in its variations as the supposed light of logic. Glimpses of trees, gravestones, statues. Flashes of the Rover, the blur of the passing city, the continued murmur of his onetime partner. His partner, who never knew how to shut his mouth. Even now, still talking.
This incarnation of self had known no partner. That was a past that was fading into the background of disconnected picture memories. It was minutes ago. It was an eternity ago.
The girl had counted on him. Trusted in him. And now her head floated in the bubbling reduction of her own life’s vitality.
She had counted on him. Sat within the circle of his protective badge. And now she was captured, possibly already dead.
The lives floated on the surface of the flotsam and jetsam of his shattered awareness. No more nor any less significant than the images that seeped in from outside. A streetlight, its light burning a streak of blue into his retinas. The circular port of the hospital’s emergency room. The pinched face of a nurse, staring at him as he was pulled past her toward some indeterminate goal.
They meant nothing. How could they mean anything? Nothing had meaning. Nothing had purpose. Nothing.
Nothing at all.
The wisps of light floated about, calling out to him with their siren song. They enticed him to dance with them once more. But he could no longer dance.
He had forgotten all of the steps.
* * *
The trip through the hospital to Janey’s room was an effing train wreck. Trey had never realized just how much he used Darc as a battering ram. Something about his partner made the crowds magically dissipate the second Darc wanted to walk through. Now that Trey was the one leading his semi-aware partner along, it was pretty clear that Trey had no such talent.
It didn’t make it any better that he was pulling along a six-foot-two, vacant-eyed bald man in his wake. Trey just wasn’t used to this much attention. Okay, maybe he used Darc as an attention-battering ram, too. People tend to overlook the shorter, quirkier detective. You crack a few jokes, make a few people chuckle, don’t draw too much attention to yourself. Let your brilliant partner drift unawares through the sea of admiration and/or irritation. Worked for Trey, He supposed. Most of the time.
After a flurry of bumps and bruises, they managed to make it through to the peds area, only to walk into a beehive of activity. The hallway outside Janey’s room was swarming with cops and crime scene investigators. Bags of evidence whipped back and forth in the hands of serious people doing serious things in a serious way. Photos were snapped, orders were barked, careers were made and broken in moments.
And into the maelstrom drifted Trey, dragging his comatose partner along behind. When the frenetic press of people finally got to be too great, Trey cut Darc loose, leaving him to fend for himself. Who knew? Maybe if someone jostled him hard enough, he’d wake up and bitch-slap ‘em.
Trey rushed toward the cordoned-off
area where curtains had been pulled shut in front of Janey’s room. Two steps away from getting inside, he felt a solid hand thunk down on his shoulder. It was the meaty fist of the captain. Here. Again.
“Whoa, Keane. It’s not pretty in—”
“I know. Just let me through.”
Captain Merle held on, though, and turned Trey around to face him. “There’s so many body parts in there, we’re not sure who is who.”
“But no heads, I know.”
“We’re not sure if it’s the little girl or—”
Trey cut him off. “It’s not Janey.”
“How could you know that for—?”
“I just do, okay?” Trey snapped, then pulled himself together, speaking more forcefully than…well, ever. “Now let me in.”
The captain moved out of Trey’s path, a look that almost could have been respect crossing his face. Weird. Trey opened up the curtain and passed into the room, feeling something underneath his left foot as he stepped inside. It was Father John’s collar, the white square turned to a dark red.
Seriously, what kind of a sicko goes after a man of the cloth? That was the problem with this serial killer. No sense of boundaries.
Compared with the white sterility of the hall outside, the room was a blood-soaked scene out of the worst that nightmares had to offer. It was like that scene from The Shining, times ten. Trey barely glanced at any of it. Not like he hadn’t seen it all before. Blood and guts? Ho hum. Nothing new here. He moved about the room, overturning chairs, looking under the bed, moving equipment doused in red. The captain entered, his jaw agape, apparently from Trey’s cavalier tossing of the room.
“What the—”
Trey ignored his boss’s shock, focused on his frantic search. “Have you seen any papers? Drawings? Little kid’s drawings?”
“No, but I don’t see—”
Knocking the medication cart over with a crash, Trey sent pills and vials scattering all over the floor of the room. Oops. Nothing. He had to find them. Captain Merle barked at him, his deep voice harsh with criticism.