by Lucas Alpay
Carefully, he stood up and went to the kitchen to prepare two cups of coffee. He didn’t know why, but he was suddenly inclined to prepare a proper breakfast. There was a strong part in him that didn’t like this. But even so, even how that part was dominant, he searched happily in the cabinets for something to serve, something to give impression that he was a really nice guy. There were eggs (he liked eggs, he wished Natasha too), there were tomatoes at the small refrigerator, and various sandwich spreads. What he found in the cabinets on the other hand were slices of bread, so it was a no-brainer; he would create egg sandwiches with mayonnaise, heated in a microwave oven preferably.
As he prepared, he couldn’t help but to stare at Natasha on his bed. He had been with many people, both men and women, but he hadn’t never looked at them the way he was looking at her now. Maybe it was her talent, maybe it was the illusion of her face, her splendor. Fritz believed more than anyone that humans and also sandmen were superficial beings, slave to beauty even though they know that beauty isn’t the truth of a person’s soul. A beautiful face alone is an ugly lie, another sandmen had once told him that, and somehow he agreed with it, because it was true; you couldn’t trust a face in just one glance, you should know first what is behind that face. Yet he couldn’t help but to oppose that young saying… He suddenly began to wonder if her fart sounded like an ode too. Fritz laughed at the idea.
When he was finished preparing breakfast, he placed it methodically on the table and waited for her to wake up. If she didn’t, he would force her eyes to do so after five minutes. He didn’t want the food to get cold, and he had worked on this, these plates were two of a kind because he rarely prepared breakfast for himself. He now coined a call on what was happening to him: the Natasha fucking effect.
When it was only two minutes before Fritz could wake up Natasha, someone knocked on the door and whispered his name. “Hello,” it said, its voice small and serene. It knocked again.
Fritz’s heart pounded. He moved towards his bedside cabinet and pulled out a gun. He imagined a little girl wearing white standing in front of his door, her face covered in black, long hair, a knife on her neck with black blood flowing to the floor.
“Hello, sir, this is Cynthia. There’s a package waiting for you downstairs.”
Fritz breathed out and relaxed his shoulders. He put the gun back and slowly got out of the room so Natasha wouldn’t wake. When they were downstairs, they walked towards the welcoming area of the mansion. In there Fritz saw a white cardboard box that could contain a basketball (or something in the same size). It was in a perfect square that had this card saying “I hope you’ll be surprised” in gorgeous cursive.
He looked at the box and speculated who it was from. There was no return address on it, so it could be that someone had dropped it off personally. His heart suddenly notched a bit as he undid its strings; he was thinking of a bomb, anything that could level this place, but before his mind could order him to stop, he already opened it fully. What he found was only a birthday cake that had his name written on it.
But something was not right. The cake had an odd smell, a smell of wood moistened for weeks, the smell of rot.
Chapter 21
Fritz brought the cake into the kitchen to take a closer examination on what it really was. He put it on the islet and took a whiff of it; it smelled sugar, of cream, but there was another faint smell. It would be almost unnoticeable, but when its scent entered your nose, you would also think of something most certainly odd.
“What do you think it is?” Jack asked, he was standing behind him, Cynthia too, their hands on their weapons.
“I don’t know—”
His phone suddenly rang. When he removed it from his pocket he saw Mark’s number. He pressed answer and—
“Fritz,” it wasn’t Mark.
“Wilder? Wilder, is that you?” he didn’t answer. “Where’s Mark?”
“I’m sorry, Fritz, there has been an attack, although this time it was different. When I found out, I immediately boarded the next plane…” he drifted off.
He moved to the hall because there was a tone in Wilder’s voice that demanded privacy. “Stay there,” he said to Cynthia and Jack.
“How do you mean?” he asked Wilder.
“There was no all-out attack in the office, or any other in the city… there’s just this incident,” he stopped, there was a voice on the background, talking to him, Wilder said yes. “Anyway, it’s a headless body… The penis has been also cut off clean… I’m sorry, Fritz. I’m so sorry…”
He could hear the pulse beating from his ears. With wide eyes and sweat covering his neck, he turned and looked back at the cake. “Sir,” Cynthia called him, there was icing on her fingers and there was now a hole where the white icing had originally been placed. Fritz moved closer, dismissing Wilder’s call on the phone… “Fritz? Fritz, are you still there? Have you heard me? The body is from Mark… we’re looking for the rest of him… Fritz?”
And in that hole in the cake, he found an eye staring at him. It was all red with the exception of a darkened iris. He could now identify clearly what that smell was; it was metal that had a hint of fishiness, the smell of blood in the first stage of decomposition.
His throat closed up. “I think I have him…” he said over the phone weakly and dropped it on the floor.
It suddenly became a part of their training. The sandmen of both sex that remained at the Mansion were given a head-cake to examine, to review, to be autopsied in full account. It was Fritz who ordered them this. He couldn’t do it himself. He had the competency if it came from a person he didn’t know, but this was different because he had seen that head alive, talking and cursing… he had seen that head for many years.
They examined Mark in an unused garage, to see if it was really him. And as the only one who could identify and deliver, Fritz grudgingly declined when the sandmen asked him to do so, instead he gave them his cell phone with Mark’s picture. And so the inevitable was announced. They said it was really him, and there was a dick attached on the bone of his neck that should be really attached on his spine. It took them almost half an hour in identifying him; they said that if not for the severe bruises and gashes on the skin then they could have done it in five minutes.
Fritz wanted to vomit as he stood outside the garage, the autopsy already finished. The sandmen asked him what they would do next, their faces still unafraid on what they had just done—this collective reaction, as Fritz saw it, was innocence, they just knew what was happening but they weren’t completely aware. Even the idea of death they were yet to completely discover.
He told them to put it in a plastic and box and then send it to San Francisco office. He’d written the address on a piece of tissue he had found in his pocket and gave it to the first newborn sandman he could boss around. After a few minutes, he watched them move this brown box out of the garage. Fritz stayed there, frozen and depressed. He didn’t want to do anything now, he just wanted to stand there and watch the light of the sun crawl on the ground of concrete and grass until the next attack. In a little while he prayed, he prayed that if that time came he’d be dead too, that would mean he would just stop being, he would be nothing, a preferable nonexistence than this shit hole he was at.
“Fuck you, Mark, you asshole for dying on me—fuck you,” he said, his eyes staring at the patch of green growing at the crack of the paved ground.
He didn’t know how many hours he stood there, and he didn’t know how many more time he would waste, but when a voice called him, he looked up and found a bit of hope.
“Fritz? Hey,” it was Natasha, walking through orange sunlight. Could it be that it was already past six?
He just smiled at her, short and not sweet. “Sup?”
“We’ve checked the public records,” she said, careful in her every word, “Jack and Cynthia helped me get by, and you’re right, we found Rowan Wood in the city hall. The records say he’s a nurse in a hospital downtown. We can go get
him now if you want…”
Fritz had no clue what to think, honestly he just wanted to stand there until the end of time or until his knees began to fail.
“Don’t you want to know why he is doing this?” she asked sweetly, making Fritz afraid to look at her because he might be put under her spell if he did. “Aren’t you curious?”
That word… he thought: Curious. If there was something that would pull him through this happening, it would be that word. And then he thought as he finally looked at Natasha about why Rowan Wood specifically killed Mark alone: Why the attacks are now directed and not in quantity unlike the first days?
Weakly, Fritz nodded to her and said, “It would be dark soon. It can wait. Tomorrow. Tomorrow so we could prepare.”
“Tomorrow,” Natasha echoed, and they walked side by side towards the mansion.
He found himself looking at a new tenant in the place. She was a girl, could be a teenager, but she had this face that looked so young but at the same moment made him question his judgment because of her aura. It was an aura he had seen few times. An aura that defied the logic of age.
Erik was sitting next to her on the sofa, his face hard when they saw them walk by.
“Natasha, Fritz, this is Melissa, the next California Elect,” he said, and then an unexpected thing happened; Melissa stood up and offered her hand. It was an unusual move for a candidate. It seemed she still had her humility (a trait that would eventually fade away after she’d been rightfully seated as an elect).
Fritz stared at her flawless fingers first before taking it, and then Melissa moved to Natasha. “Nice to meet you two. Erik said you are the ones investigating this man.”
Due to his current emotional condition, Fritz thought it would be best that Natasha would speak for both of them, but when no one answered Melissa for a good five seconds, Fritz was the one who said yes they were.
“Yes. Erik said you have questions for me?” she looked at Fritz.
“Um… I do,” he looked at Erik, his gaze like steel, “But I think it can wait… you should rest first, you had a long trip I presume.”
“Not at all. I’m actually excited that I finally got out of that place for a while. Unlike here, there’s always restrain in time at the institution.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Very well, if you say so, we will ask you a few questions about his methods and—” he looked at Natasha, still expecting her to save him with this, but when he saw her, she was almost a statue, her eyes were wide and her lips were slightly parted as if she were taken aback. “Natasha,” he called, and that snapped her out.
“Uh… yes, we will have a few… more if you want,” she said seriously and then smiled.
With a short scowl, Fritz turned to Melissa and asked her where she wanted the interview to happen.
“Is it fine here?” she asked, her eyes soulful and, in a subtle way, euphoric—and blue, they were bright blue. “Oh I almost forgot,” she said and pointed at the path where they could see the passage towards the garden, “See there?” They saw a ghastly woman in crimson robes, standing there like a blood flower in the night. “That’s my prime dream, Tora.”
In all of Fritz’s years, this was one of the very few times he heard that name: Prime Dream. Curious, he thought. Very curious.
Chapter 22
Fritz asked her the things he already knew, and he played his part very well. He questioned her and made her think everything she was saying was valuable to the investigation; could be valuable in a different time, but not now. Besides, he was now finding a murderer and not how this murderer conducted his attacks. But in the middle of the questioning, when Melissa was saying how it was hard to dream up the things Rowan Wood had been dreaming for the uninitiated, he suddenly got interested.
“Dreaming, basically takes time,” Melissa started. “But not as long as you think. In the institution, we were trained to think before we dream. They said to us that it would be easier when we enter the Sleeping to transfer that dream to the Waking.”
“So how long do you think this man has been dreaming his dreams, his army for example? Two days, three?”
She gave him these thinking eyes and a small curve of the lips. “How was the quality of the dreams?”
“How do you mean?”
“If dreaming an army, we would rely on our subconscious during our lucid dreaming. If I were this man, that is what I would do.
—We would have this pattern before the actual sleep, the structure of a particular soldier with no face, just its characteristics. This is called the ‘quantity dreaming’, the only quality in there is how we like for the soldiers to appear. Are you getting me?”
Fritz wanted to laugh on her last question. It sounded like it came from an impatient, workaholic person that didn’t want to repeat what she had just said. He could already see her future. “Yes—it’s all going up here,” he pointed at his head, “So, how long would it take?”
“One whole night, a few hours if this elect is talented enough. It takes time, but it isn’t hard. I can make an army if you want me to… umm, but it also depends on the age and experience of the elect, it’s not just because of talent alone.”
In the whole interview, Natasha was no help at all, she just sat there next to them, having these episodes of staring contests with the wall. Fritz guessed why she was reacting like this; maybe it was because the idea of replacing Erik. It wasn’t uncommon for any dream to watch their creator get old and die while they stay ageless, unchanging. Fritz wanted to give her a pat on the back and look at her with a minuscule frown to express his sympathy. Yet on the side of empathy, sad to say that such thing in this certain subject was well forgotten due to incredible time and circumstances.
When Melissa was telling Fritz more about how the inception of a particular dream happened, Natasha finally joined them—
“Can you tell us about prime dreams?” she said, her eyes not meeting Melissa’s.
Melissa gave them an ample amount of silence. She then looked at Natasha with an undetermined and mysterious emotion, which immediately shifted to nonchalance when she looked at Fritz. Fritz on the other hand suddenly forgot about everything Melissa had said, his interest was suddenly shifted on knowing more about Natasha’s query. The word curious burned in his mind, but with it the remembering of Mark’s head covered in icing too.
“It is a dream of pure quality,” Melissa said. “It is a type of dreaming where an elect concentrates her efforts in creating a more detailed dream. For instance, my prime, Tora, I’ve created her when I was seven years old, when our teachers taught us quality dreaming. It wasn’t really an exercise, and that time, creating a prime was due the following semester if my memory serves me right. But I created her anyway, immediately after they announced it to us. The first version of Tora wasn’t as complex as she is today, she was just this skinny woman wearing a red dress—she was there just to be beautiful, but there was something I didn’t expect when she came about… she was… blind. I fixed her, but in a couple of years she told me to make her blind again… I really don’t know why she wanted it even though she—”
“Can I cut your right there? I just want to know something,” Fritz said.
“Shoot.”
“You can change Tora whatever and whenever you want?” his tone was peppered with incredulity.
“Yes, that’s how primes work. We can modify them if we want to, but only with a chosen dream and not anybody else, well… unless the first prime died, then the dreamer can create another.”
This was the very first time Fritz understood the complete concept of a Prime Dream. And this made him think about Erik’s. At first, in his short history in this mansion, he thought it was the Giant Man (because that would make more sense, considering you wanted protection and intimidation towards your enemies), but he was so wrong… it was none other but Natasha. The girl who had been given talents.
The next morning was eventful enough for everybody to be up on their toes. Erik had j
ust ordered to prepare a stealth operation for the capture of Rowan Wood this evening. The other sandmen that had been tasked in finding out his schedule had told them that he was on night shift in the hospital for the whole month. Fritz thought this would be like hunting an unlicensed dream, but killing? There would be no killing as Fritz understood it—Rowan Wood would be put into trial as decided by the Circle of Elects on the West Coast. That’s human clubs for you, Fritz thought, and the reason why this notion came about was because every time a talented threat surfaced, almost every organization tried to pacify that threat and recruit it as their own. And the reason: it would be a waste if they kill a talented someone.
Fritz also pondered if Erik had said to this Circle of Elects about the dreams that had souls. But then he decided that Erik had kept it secret, because if he didn’t, then there would be a couple of representatives of the Circle to study how Rowan created such dreams, such precarious things. Hell, there could be representatives coming from different continents if the news broke out. This was of course unprecedented, and could be the only one in their history if Wilder and Gordon hadn’t seen anything in the Chicago files that was.
In the afternoon, Fritz remained undisturbed on his balcony while he listened to every recording he had collected. He had already found out who was this terrorist, in other words his job here was done. But something was telling him that it wasn’t, something was telling him that this wasn’t over even if Rowan was captured and jailed. Something he missed. Because it felt easy; them seeing Rowan Wood now seemed to be staged. It was as if Rowan wanted for them to see his face.
And to make it more interesting, there was the fact that Rowan Wood particularly assassinated Mark. Was there something Mark did? Fritz still trusted his memory of this century, and it seemed that he couldn’t remember any boy that had that perfect face being offended by their tandem. No one could forget that face. Maybe that was why their office had been attacked in the first place, because of Mark… and possibly because of him too. But what was the reason of Rowan to do this to them? What would he gain in killing Mark?