He rose up tighter in his chair. `I've told you once, and I'll you again, and again, that I do not know who she is, nor have I ever seen her.'
Or maybe he'd known her? In a dream perhaps, or in some other existence, one too strange and unlike the one he was now living. Bygone, he thought, I know her, yet I do not know when, why or how.
`I was sitting down, watching The View. I remember seeing two girls going at on the war in Iraq. One was saying how Bush should get the troops out, that six hundred thousand people dead was a tragedy of great proportions; the other, how the Iraqis are terrorists. Then a fistfight ensued between the two hosts.' He paused. `Then suddenly I blacked out.'
Two hours before a nineteen-year-old college student was found brutally murdered in Central Park. An elderly woman claimed she'd seen a suspect matching the way Mike looked enter the apartment building several hours before the murder and claimed to have heard arguing going on.
`But a woman claims - she swears - that she saw you enter the apartment several hours before the murder.'
Mike took a deep breath. `An old woman,' he said in a low voice. He gaze shifted to the floor in front of him. `I don't know how old or senile your woman is, but a lot of elderly people get their facts wrong.' Which is true, he thought. He remembered his 83-year-old grandmother in 1999 still believing that Ronald Reagan was still president.
`Not exactly senile,' countered the officer. `She teaches at New York University. For ninety-three, she looks and acts damn normal to us.'
Suddenly he noticed a stench. At first it wasn't so bad, and then it became unbearable. He was about to ask what the stench was when the officer said, `So why don't you tell me the truth and maybe things won't be as bad for you.’
Except . . . he'd known her in another reality. Strange but true. In his dreams he'd seen her before. When? He was unsure.
He didn't believe in killing. Not even so much as a cockroach or even a bug. Life, in his view, was precious and there was no greater importance to the life of a man than that of an insect. Faced with impending death in the face of a potential murderer, he'd rather flee than fight, and this philosophy is one he'd always had for as long as he's lived.
For a second time his eyes landed on the young woman's photo. He reached out his hand and grabbed it. He held it in both hands. He didn't want to let the officer know of his thoughts for obvious reasons. He was already as big a suspect as he was.
He placed the photo back on the table.
`Yes?' said the officer.
`I'm sorry?' He looked at her and noticed she was staring at him eye-to-eye for the first time.
`You seem as if you really recognise her.' This time the officer's voice was sullen and dull. Sadness crossed her face. He looked at the window and noticed the frost on it. It was cold outside, but more than anything else it reminded him that Christmas was right around the corner--in three days, to be exact. If things didn't work out he might end up spending his first holiday ever away from his family, in a prison.
`I'll tell you again. I don't know who she is. Never met her in my life.' Not in this life, added to himself.
Mark sat motionless on the chair. He took a deep breath.
In front of him stood Susan Watcher, detective at the 44th Precinct.
`So you said you were where on the night of her disappearance?' She wrote notes in her pad, not bothering ever once to look him in the eye ever since their interview began five minutes ago.
`I've told you once, and I'll tell you again. I was at home at the time.' The suspect paused. He felt a pang of guilt overcome him. In all of his thirty-two years he'd never felt so awful, rotten. Here there was a murdered woman and he the main suspect. He didn't do it. That much he knew. So why had they arrested him?
He looked at the woman's photo. She was young, perhaps twenty-five but certainly no more than thirty. Her blue eyes radiated in the picture, and her smile reminded him of that of Mona Lisa. She was dressed in a Greenpeace hat and a T-shirt that said `Vote for Green'. He had never seen her in his life.
The evidence was all word-of-mouth. An old lady who lived in the same building as he had been interviewed two days after she'd been reported missing by her family. According to her testimony, she'd see her leaving the apartment complex on the night of her purported disappearance.
The fact is he wasn't guilty of anything. He truly didn't know who the lady was, nor had he ever met her.
`What do you plan to do to me?' he asked. `Just an old woman. Perhaps it was someone else she saw.'
`We're not saying that you're guilty,' replied the officer. `All that we're saying is that you're a suspect.'
This was a strange office. Didn't look like one in a police precinct station. Diplomas lay on the wall to the right. To the left was a painting of a woman dressed in purple. The floor was carpeted.
At first glance the interrogator didn't look like a cop. Bespectacled, with a beard, he had blue eyes that seemed to gleam even in the relative darkness of the room. He wore a green t-shirt and blue jeans. He seemed more like a professor than anything else.
Nevertheless, there was something even stranger than this office, though he couldn't quite pinpoint what it was just yet.
`Don't make this any worse than it already is.' The officer's tone was its loudest yet. `If you tell us where the body is the prosecutor's office most likely will elect for life locked up as opposed to the death penalty.'
`So do you have anything to say?'
`Let me tell you a story.'
He said nothing.
`I've been a cop for twenty-five years. That's almost as old as you are,' the cop said proudly. His eyebrows rose. `And I've seen just about everything. I've seen people get shot in front of my face - -that, of course, doesn't include those whom I had to shot out of necessity.' He paused, appearing to try to regain his thoughts. `And there's nothing at all that would strike me as bizarre. You remember Jeffrey Dahmer?'
He nodded though remained silent. He wondered what the cop was trying to get at.
`Here you have a guy - looks like your average normal guy. What happened with him is he'd pick up guys at bars, take them home, then rape them before killing and eating them.'
`And what does that have to do with me, sir?'
`Well, who knows what kind of person you are. I don't know you.' He slapped the pen down on the table. Then the cop leaned forward in his chair, and in a slow, deliberate manner added, `You'll have to answer my questions to your satisfaction, and only after the police department is convinced that you're not the murderer will we free you.' He paused. `Agree?'
`Agreed,' he muttered.
He looked up and as soon as he did he noticed a cloud to his right. It moved slowly. Seconds later it covered the interrogator.
`Are you sure you never killed anyone?'
`Positive.'
`So, again, you don't know the woman?'
`No,' Mike said flatly. That was a lie, of course, and he knew it. Yet he realised the gravity of any utterance of a prior knowledge of the woman, for it would do nothing but hurt him. In these circumstances, no, no, no would be the response. Even if they tied him up to a chair and beat him or sent electrical waves through him like they do in some Third World countries, he still would not confess--no, not in a million years. And the reason was simple: he didn't know her and would be willing to die with the truth if that's what it took.
What the hell?
For those moments in which the cloud lay between both of them he’d had a hard time breathing. His throat also hurt, as though he'd swallowed the skin of a pineapple. And then . . .
The cloud instantly disappeared and in its place stood . . .
Another man?
This one looked similar to the first one, only this one was more rough and had a tattoo on his arm that said, `Let me be your granddaddy.'
`Hello,' said the stranger.
`Hello,' he replied in a low tone.
The puffed-up version of the first man said, `It's nice to see you her
e.'
`Me too.' A lie.
`I heard you were put through quite interrogation,' continued the man. `Seems as though you did something bad in a past life.'
He'd actually planned her murder during this period--how he was going to do it, when, and where. From the day she'd left him until about two weeks were the most difficult. In despair he'd clung to the idea, however minute, that she'd return, telling him how much she was sorry and how she'd never do that again and how they'd remain together until the end of the world. She didn't, and then that was when he started thinking seriously about his plans to get rid of her.
He thought he'd do it in the park. That was the place she'd walk through every day on the way home from work. Maybe, just maybe, he'd thought, she hadn't yet gone to Paris and was still employed at the same company (he'd called several times after she'd left him to ask if she was still there - every time they'd tell him no). He'd make it seem as if she'd been robbed. It would take a knife, gloves, and lots of guts.
The knife and gloves he had--those he'd purchased several days before he'd eventually decided to drop the plan. You see, he didn't want to end up in jail, for what good would that do (to him that is)? So the guts part he didn't have.
At one point, two days after dropping the park plan, he planned it to occur at their home.
He remembers the day still. That evening he'd been in the living room, holding a picture of them two in his hands, staring at it for what seemed to be a hundred years. Tears fell down his face as he thought of what was, and what might've been.
In his pocket, hidden inside a leather pouch, was the knife that he'd use for the purposes of murder.
He went to the sofa and sat down, the picture still in his hand. Suddenly, his chest tightened. He placed the free hand on his chest and began to take deep breaths because that is what Dr. Adams had told him to do whenever he felt tightness there. That, he'd said, would help rid the pain. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Then, however, it hadn't. With every breath he took he would invariably feel the tightness get worse. The pills hadn't helped much. He'd taken them for three months. During the first two they'd worked but then their ill effects had begun. Sometimes Scotch would help, especially if he'd had a shot or two just before breakfast, but it never helped enough. He'd frequently have pain, a thirty-six-year-old in an eighty-year-old body.
He looked again at a framed picture of him and his wife on the bureau near the TV, and again he was overcome with deep nostalgia.
Then his thoughts returned to the man. Maybe he should get rid of him and not her.
He'd never thought that he'd be two steps from being a murderer, but you've heard of the expression: There's a first time pretty much for everything. Luckily for him (and for Karen and her lover), that didn't happen.
So, two days after buying the gloves and knife . . . he discarded them in a dumpster behind his place of employment.
He was glad he did, too, because who knows what horror there might have been had he decided on going through with the plan?
He was a nice guy, but you certainly wouldn't want to push his bad button.
Some mornings when he looks out the window of his downtown apartment and see the sun rise, he'd think of that fateful day when he dumped the knife and gloves, and a gentle smile forms across his face. Life is sure hard, but it's certainly good to be free as well.
He screamed; a scream that caused his ears to ring. The temperature around him was beginning to get cool. He hated cold weather and hoped that it would warm down soon.
`Your soul will soon be mine.'
And then suddenly a face appeared.
The face of the woman.
`To be honest with you, I really don't know what the hell I'm here for - or if this is all real, for that matter.' He paused, trying to regain his thoughts, which had been clouded by anger and impatience. `I want to go home - if that's not too much of a request.' This was just like in a bad movie; you ended up somewhere totally unfamiliar and then have trouble leaving.
`Actually, it isn't,' replied the stranger. `Although first certain conditions must be met.' He stood up and walked out of the room, just like the first one, though this one didn't slam the door.
And so he was left there all by himself. He tried to hum. This was just another way he could convince himself that this was all a dream. The hum hummed. And then he pinched himself. And it hurt. So this couldn't be a dream. But if it wasn't, then what the hell was it?
He didn't believe in life after death, either. He was a strong believer in the ``show me the proof'' theory. You see, unless you got proof, it couldn't be proven that it was real. What did he think happened when you die? Well, you just ceased to exist that's all. So the purpose to life, what would it be? That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question, one that has baffled scientists and the layman for thousands if not millions of years, and one that would most likely never be answered.
And the where-did-we-come-from theory? Well, that was a hard question, too, although there was one idea which his colleague once told him which made some sort of science. It had to do with the idea that we all--that includes all animals, not just humans - have one common ancestor, which explains why all living things are similar physically, and that that one ancestor was just one cell. This explains the ex-nihilo theory, which means that everything came out of nothing. A cell isn't exactly `nothing', so it's as good a theory as scientists have been able to come up with so far. It made a lot of sense, too, when you thought about it. He'd thought about it often then, and still thought about it now, and he was convinced that this was so far the best explanation you had of where all living things come from.
He returned several minutes later. Like the first man he had a stack of paper, this one thicker by about two than the first one.
`Are you going to tell me the same thing the other man told me?' he asked.
`I'm afraid so.' The interrogator shook his head. He wrote down something else in his pad.
He considered standing up and running though didn't think he'd have much of a chance, not here in Hell.
`We have a file here of all of your victims,' began the man, `and you must be held accountable for each and every one. You must give us a good-enough reason for your killing them. Only then will we consider your release.'
Another cloud.
Shit, not again, he thought.
But how in the world did the dream turn into reality?
`Am I in . . . in Hell?'
The interrogator chuckled. `Well, not quite.'
He'd long thought of Hell as a place where you burned forever and suffered. Of course, there was no logic to it, that you would burn and not turn into ashes, because pretty much everything that burned eventually turned into ashes, and when he'd as a kid asked religious authorities what happened to the body after a certain amount of time, their response had always been the same: `It just is, son.'
Here, though, there was no fire.
`I thought Hell . . .'
`With balls of fire . . .' The interrogator chuckled. `No, it isn't like the way you think. Actually, it's much more of a process.'
He waited for a more elaborate explanation, but before he could get one the interrogator rose in his chair and said, `I'll be back.' He went out the door and slammed it shut, and the sound was louder than any he'd ever heard.
The interrogator came back several minutes later with a file about a foot thick.
`Well, let's get started. These are people that are all dead.'
`This isn't the only stack,' announced the interrogator. `There are many, many more.'
He regarded as the officer opened the file to the first page. The file seemed to have been at least three inches thick and reminded him of an encyclopaedia. He wasn't sure if the whole book was devoted to him or if his sins were only part of the entire tome yet a shudder overcome him.
`And now to begin.' The man cleared his throat. `Do you believe in God?'
`As in someone sitting in a throne somewhere
up there with all of his angels watching our each and every move?'
The man nodded. `Someone who created us?'
He didn't believe in religion, much less such superstitions as karma. He'd had a grandmother who did, however. He didn't believe you lived any less if the lifeline in your hand was shorter. Nevertheless, he believed in dreams and their power to foretell the future. Once he'd dreamed that he would win a raffle at school and the next day he did. He also knew the final score in the Mets-Red Sox game two years ago because he'd dreamed it the night before. Nevertheless, he thought of the man's question for a long moment, and then finally answered: `I do. Although it's hard to define him.'
He awoke.
The room was pitch black. An ocean of darkness.
The hallway was the longest he'd ever seen.
The white light at the end - actually a bright ball - seemed as bright as the sun if you were to look at it on a cloudless day. He was sure it was damn hot, too, for the further along he walked the warmer his body felt.
But why was he heading in the direction of the bright light, if he knew it would eventually burn him up if he continued walking towards it? Was he in a dream?
Or was this reality?
Reality he was sure it wasn't; a lot of things now didn't make any sense. Take for instance the large ball of light at the end of the hallway. What was it--the threshold between life and death, the moment when you ceased to live in this world and prepared yourself for the next?
Then there was the sudden change of scenery.
How in the world did he end up here? One moment he was up on his bed after a night of bad dreams, thinking the worst was over, when . . .
He resisted the urge to bellow out a laugh. The situation seemed ridiculous. It was just like in the movies; you often awoke soon after such instances. Most likely he'd awaken to the sound of his breath panting, the darkness there to greet him.
And to laugh at him - letting him know that all these nightmares had been created to punish him for refusing to believe.
In a bet at school several years ago he'd told his friends he didn't think the bogeyman existed. His classmate Jerry had mentioned he'd seen the bogeyman the previous day in the closet of the home his parents had moved into recently. `The bogeyman exists,' his friend had told him.
Horror Express Volume Two Page 14