“Oh, yes, bravo,” hissed The Rat, “but how long do you think you can keep me trapped? Soon, you will burn out, like all mortals. You have granted yourself a brief reprieve, nothing more.”
Marie knelt down beside me and closed the pentagram with magnesium powder. Then she helped me to stand. I looked at The Rat, taking in its smug confidence. Understanding every way in which it was right. This was only a brief reprieve. According to the rules that the game was played by, it still had me. I could do nothing to hurt it. Hell, I didn’t even know how any of this worked, much less believe in it strongly enough to make any bit of it work for me.
The Rat’s smile grew into a wheezing chuckle in the back of its throat. I had heard enough of this bastard’s laughter.
“You’re right,” I said, “I can’t hold you. And I can’t hurt you. But I know someone who can.”
I stepped aside and let it see Vlade who was standing behind me. The Rat stopped laughing. The black of the snake tattoo on Vlade’s neck and shaven head gleamed like oil on the surface of calm water by moonlight. Through his thick accent Vlade said, “Leave me with the Vermin.”
* * * * *
Chapter 23
Marie helped me inside the empty club. I slumped at the bar and watched her pour herself a drink. Her hands shook as she did it. She showed me and smiled awkwardly. I just felt weary. As weary and as old as time itself.
On the bar was a pack of cigarettes. I lit one and felt the warmth spread through my chest. For a moment it was just Marie and I. Me with my cigarette. Her with her drink and her skin and her cotton dress, dirty and torn, her hair headed in a thousand curly, contradictory directions and damn, didn’t she make me want to be alive.
She sipped her drink, shifted her weight and gave voice to my question, “What now?”
From outside, I heard screaming. Then the smell of an electrical fire filled the air. The silence that accompanied the smell was fraught with portent.
We looked from the door and back to each other. “I don’t know what comes now,” I said. Then we were silent long enough for me to finish the coffin nail.
The door to the back of the club opened and a very contented Vlade walked in. His face and body were marred by marks that looked like they had been made by claws. Blood splattered him from head to toe and his face was almost completely covered. But whose blood was it?
Vlade was unconcerned by his appearance. He picked up a napkin, and rather than wiping the copious blood off his face, or tending to any of his fresh, ragged wounds, he daintily wiped the corners of his mouth.
Without looking at us, he walked to the bar. When he got to the end, he fixed me in his gaze. The whites of his eyes stood out in sharp contrast against the blood that was drying and darkening on his face.
“It is done.”
“What is done?” I asked.
“The rat will trouble you no more.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing is ever created or destroyed. There is only a change of form. So, he has changed form.”
“But what happens to me?”
Vlade shrugged. “Why should I care?”
“But am I stuck like this? I mean, after all this? I’m stuck like this? Falling apart, little by little? Never able to eat a meal, make love to a woman, take a nap in the afternoon? Until one day, there’s just some speck of me lying in the corner -- maybe an eyeball, still aware -- still aware but bored to death of looking at people’s shoes and wishing one would step on me and end it all!”
Vlade looked at me for a long moment. “This life, I think, is not for you,” he said with that fatalistic, yet non-committal shrug that only Eastern Europeans seem to be able to pull off when talking about profound matters.
“What life is this?”
“You see? Not for you.” He stood up and encompassed both Marie and I in his gesture, “Come, is time for you to go.”
He walked us out the front door onto the sidewalk. It must have been 4 in the morning. Not a soul on the street. A cab drove by like a strangely luminous yellow fish, plumbing the depths of a dark city night. Marie shivered a little in the night air. As always, I felt not the cold or warmth of life. I was just will encased in dust. Now that the danger had passed, how stale, flat and unprofitable it all felt now. What point was there? Now that I could finally see something of the beauty of the world, participation in it was denied to me.
Vlade turned to me and asked, “Do you want to be as other men again?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to be mortal again? To go back to your old life? To life like all the other warm-blooded animals in this city?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.”
“To have the same shitty little life?” Vlade asked as if he did not believe me.
“It was a life,” I said, “The only real problem with it was the shitty little guy living in it. What are you talking about? Can you fix this?”
“I don’t see anything broken,” he said with a strange smile.
“Do you have a way bring me back to life?”
“Well,” he said with that fatalistic shrug, “there are no easy ways.” Then he stabbed me in the heart.
I said, “You stabbed me again? Why did you stab me again?” And then I felt it. A cool feeling. A wet feeling seeping through my insides. I looked at my chest and saw that an icicle protruded from below my sternum. Then pain.
“Breathe,” said Vlade.
Marie shrieked, “What have you done to him?”
Vlade ignored her and dialed his cellphone. I collapsed to the sidewalk. I realized that I could feel everything. The cold of the night, the concrete grinding against my knee. The warmth of Marie’s hands as she held me.
Vlade said the word “Paramedic” into his phone and then looked down on me. From the back of his throat he sang a little chant in an Eastern language.
“Is that a prayer?” I asked.
Vlade smiled, “No. It’s the other kind. Now, we are even. Do not trouble me again, or I will eat your soul.”
As the blackness closed in around me, I asked, “Why?”
Vlade said, “You are a man with a destiny. And I will not be destroyed by it.”
* * * * *
Chapter 24
When I awoke I was in a hospital. It was bright and loud and everything hurt. A nurse came in to draw blood and told me where the self-administered morphine button was. I grabbed it pressed it until I blacked out.
That’s how it went for a while. The pain and bright lights would come back and I would press the button until it went away. How long, I couldn’t tell you. Could have been days. Could have been weeks. Sometimes the lights were on when they came in to take blood, sometimes the lights were off. Sometimes there was something on TV. Sometimes there wasn’t. It was all an endless cycle. Groundhog Day in hell.
At some point, they dialed back the morphine. I started having longer and longer periods of consciousness. I discovered that my right leg was a mess. It had been elevated and immobilized within a metal cage that held the wreckage of my skeleton in place. When I tried to turn my head, I discovered I had an elaborate cast holding my left shoulder in place. The nurse said my collarbone had been broken.
She also told me that they had never seen someone so dehydrated. Or so lucky. That if there had been anybody else for the ICU that night, they would have triaged me out. I was dead on arrival. A hopeless case. But it had been a slow night and I had lived. Then she started asking me questions.
I almost said, “When somebody goes through what I’ve been through, what makes you think they give you any answers at the end?” Instead, I just kept lying. I said I didn’t remember. I should explain things to her? You tell me, how could it be done? How could I tell her that I had died and come back from the dead?
Would she have believed it? Probably not. And if she did believe me, would that be better? That’s how religions got started, you know. And that’s all I needed. The adulation and worship of countl
ess people who would never be able to hear what I really had to say. It’s not the answers that they give you that matter. It’s the questions you answer for yourself.
What happened? I happened. Me, a unit, an unbroken, unbreakable whole. The story of my mistakes written in my flesh for all to read, but my soul? My soul discovered – I suppose. I had learned something of what it meant to be me. That knowledge was a true possession that could not be taken from me by thief or trickster; by the disaster of the moment or the relentless, incremental destruction of the passing moments of mortal life.
Compared to that, what else mattered? The rest of it was just details.
One day the nurse said, “Your girlfriend is here.” I looked up to see Marie sitting by my bedside. Even as messed up and out of it as I was, my heart still leapt at the mention of the word -- girlfriend. She smiled at me. A sad smile, but all the same, it was, I think, the most beautiful thing I have seen in my whole life. Well, my second one to be sure.
“How are you?” I asked.
She nodded and looked off to the side, “I’m okay.”
“How is your stepfather?”
“He’s gone, gone. The Rat won in the end. When I got home he was lying on the floor, already dying. He looked up at me and said, ‘My name is Josue.’ Then he smiled at me. Then he died.”
Neither of us said anything. We just sat there in the hospital room, listening to the machine that was dutifully pumping saline and glucose into my veins.
Finally I said, “I don’t think The Rat won.”
Marie said, “I lost.” I couldn’t argue with that. “Vlade’s gone,” she said. The club burned down that night. There was a package for you at my shop. She pointed to the nightstand. On it was a brightly painted red doll. It was the Russian kind that held a smaller doll with a smaller doll inside it and smaller doll inside that one.
“A very strange man,” I said.
“If he’s a man at all,” said Marie.
“Yeah,”
“There was a note,” she said as she held up a piece of paper that had, “Something I didn’t have room for in my luggage,” scrawled on it in strange block printing.
I looked to Marie and started to give voice to my secret hope, “So, what are you doing?” It sounded impossibly awkward and stupid, but it was out there, so…
She said, “I am leaving. I can’t live in this city anymore. Too much power. Too much evil. Too many memories,” and the she trailed off, tracing a shape on her leg, over and over again.
“But,” I said. Marie came to the bedside. She leaned over and brought her face close to mine. I felt her breath move the tiny hairs of my eyebrows. She kissed me on the forehead. Then on each eye. Then on the lips, full and lingering. She placed her hand on my stomach and said, “Sleep.”
When I woke up, she was gone.
Days later, when I was feeling better and moving around a little, I turned my attention back to that nesting doll. One of the endless parade of vampire nurses – of course they were vampires, there only reason for existence seemed to be to visit me in the dead of night, when I was weak and disoriented and suck my blood – told me that the doll was called a ‘Matryoshka.’
I had always thought they were a pretty stupid kind of toy. You open one and instead of finding a piece of candy or $20 bucks or something you really wanted, inside is another doll for you to open. And inside that one, another doll. It was like a joke that didn’t have a punch line – a toy designed by a committee to provide small amusement to a bored person. Which is what I was, so I opened it.
Whattya know, inside the first doll was another doll. And inside that doll was another doll. And inside that doll was it ANOTHER doll?
No. This time it was different. Inside that doll was a police detective.
How do I explain it? How do I explain any of it? I opened the doll and a black cloud poured out. And then Detective Douglas Marsten poured out of the black cloud and onto the floor. He tried to scramble to his feet, limbs flailing wildly, knocking furniture around, collapsing into a corner with eyes as wide and frightened as any trapped animal. In his right hand was a gun, and it was pointing at me.
“Yu, yuh, yuh, you’re dead!” said Marsten.
“Yeah,” I admitted, “I was.”
Marsten just stood there, flicking his eyes around the room, and trying to put it all together. I had no idea what Vlade had done to him, and it was pretty clear that neither did he. But still, he was pointing a gun at me.
“Y’know, if you shoot me, I don’t think you’re going to be able to claim that I was fleeing the scene.”
The joke didn’t seem to register. He looked at the gun as if he was becoming aware of it for the first time. He gave me a little shrug and put the weapon back into his shoulder holster.
He sat down in the chair next to the bed and hung his head in his hands. He ran both hands through the ragged mop of his hair and let out a deep breath. Then nodded to himself and sat up.
Having gotten some kind of grip, he asked the obvious question, “How did I get here?”
I said, “You were in this doll.” I handed him the rest of the unopened Matryoshka. I damn sure didn’t want to open them. Who knew what else was in there? Marsten set the doll on the table and said one word, “Vlade.”
“Yes, Vlade,” I agreed
“What day is it?”
I just laughed, “Man, I got no idea. I was in a coma when they brought me in here.”
Then he said, “I have to go.”
Marsten came to visit me many times after that. I told him my story. He told me his. As a homicide detective, he had been investigating our mutual friend Vlade. Seems that bodies had a habit of turning up around him. He threatened to admit me as evidence. I laughed. Maybe the first good laugh of my newborn life.
We tried to make sense of all of it. I’m not sure we made any headway, but we each found comfort in being listened to.
Right after I had walked out of the morgue, he had tried to arrest Vlade. Something to do with narcotics, maybe not even a charge that would stick, but Marsten wanted him off the streets for a little while. Vlade and his men did not come quietly. There had been a lot of shooting.
Marsten had chased him several blocks and caught him. Had him dead to rights, ready to take him in, when something had happened. That’s really how he said it. Something.
He said that Vlade had mumbled something in Russian and waved his hand. Then there was rushing of black, like someone had thrown a curtain over him. “Russian,” I said, “Is English the only language you can’t cast a spell in?” We both laughed, even though Marsten didn’t really believe in spells. Even after all the shit he had been through.
After that, Marsten’s next memory was of my hospital room. We worked out that he had been in the doll a little bit more than two weeks He had fed his captain some story, real thin, but it was enough for appearances. Really, weren’t appearances were enough for people? If you were up and moving around, then you had to be alive. Didn’t you? Only a rare few people ever come to know differently.
The weeks went by. Time sped up when I started physical therapy. They told me that I would never regain full use of my leg. My hip had been crushed by that car, and it just wasn’t going to work right. The best I could manage without a cane was a zombie-like shamble. But I was okay with it. Better to look like the walking dead than to be the walking dead. Maybe I had learned something after all.
The next time Marsten came to visit, I could tell that something was wrong. He seemed preoccupied. Not his usual, smiling, big Mick self. I didn’t say anything. Somewhere along the way I had learned how to be quiet. Finally he said, “They fired me. I’m off the force.”
“Because of what happened?”
“That’s part of it. Not showing up to work for two weeks tends to piss off your Captain, but that’s not what tore it. It’s this new case. The Captain and I didn’t see eye to eye. Well, to be fair, the Captain wanted to see it my way, but the Chief -- well, he was playi
ng politics.”
“What happened?”
“There’s somebody running around the streets killing women. Sick bastard, carves them up in intricate patterns with scalpels. Leaves the bodies where they can be found, like he wants to scare people. Precise cuts, like he’s a surgeon.”
I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“There’s a pattern. Five women are dead. He’s not going to stop. We’ve got a serial killer, but the Chief wants to keep a lid on it. Doesn’t want bad press. See, if it’s just murder statistics, it looks better for his career. If he can keep a lid on it long enough, he can pass the buck to the next guy. And then he moves up to whatever position it is that assholes get promoted to when they accumulate enough slime points. Meanwhile, women are dying, and they’re going to keep dying.”
I thought about it for a long time before I told him. But really, how could it be any crazier than the things we had already told each other about? “I think I know who’s doing it.” Then I told him about the séance and my talk with Auld Jack on the cobblestones streets.
“Cobblestone streets? There’s only three cobblestone streets in the whole city. It was Mercer Street! Were you there when the Unwin girl got murdered?”
I nodded. “He asked me to kill her.”
“You killed her?” he said, rising out of his seat. He was really upset, clearly not the kind of guy who could leave his work at the office. But then, I guess Detective isn’t the kind of job you can hang on a hook at the end of the day.
“No, I ran away.”
“You didn’t do anything?” Marsten was very upset.
“No, I didn’t do anything. There was fog. I was dead at the time. Man, I had problems enough of my own.” Even as I said the words they sounded like a crappy defense to me.
Marsten gave me a look, the likes of which I hope to never see again. It was a look that showed me that beyond anger and hate lies contempt. He mumbled, “I gotta go,” and walked from the room.
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