Sandmen

by Lucas Alpay

  “Hello? Hello? Hello, sir…” a little girl said, her palms towards William. “Alms, do you have alms, good sir? I haven’t eaten since yesterday, I’m afraid I might pass out. Alms, sir, alms…”

  Coming out from a deep thought, William faced her and told her he had none, scram, little girl. And the girl bumped him hard. She thought he wouldn’t feel it, but he did. He felt that little hand slide in his pocket and was efficiently pulled out. He patted and checked for his billfold and found nothing there. William then held his cane on its middle and ran to the little thief, and when he got her, he lifted her kicking and screaming and scratching with her dirty fingernails.

  She smelled like dead fish fresh from the market. “I won’t be a gentleman to you, you burglar! I’m going to send you to the authorities, what do you think of that, eh? Ask for alms there.” And then he felt her ribs, hard and elastic on her side. He looked at the girl and found her crying. “Where are your parents, little thief?”

  He placed her on the ground, but instead of finding a little girl, he found a body soaked in blood. He found himself in darkness, a light shining at the edge of the hall. There was a knife in his hold and he felt the astonishment creeping towards his heart. Blood was suddenly everywhere. What have I done? I’m sorry, forgive me!

  “Fritz…” someone called, the darkness suddenly faded out, he couldn’t move. “Fritz…” the voice seemed to come underwater, garbled and indistinct, yet he was finding it easy to understand.

  “Fritz, wake up… You’re dreaming,” Natasha said, finally seeing him open his eyes.

  He found her palm on the side of his neck, and when he reached for it, he felt that he was soaking in sweat. There were tears on his cheeks.

  “Olivia?” she asked, her eyes big and worried.

  Fritz nodded and stared at her still naked body. “What time is it?” he found the window and saw that it was still dark.

  “It’s just five fifteen… we still have time…”

  Chapter 27

  It was the morning after the arrest, but when Fritz and Natasha and their protectors finally got back to the mansion, it felt like the arrest didn’t happen. There was no congratulatory address, no celebration on what they had prevented. Once they saw the front of the building, everybody was just in their own place, standing and chatting with each other in whispers and, if Fritz heard right, a tone of incredulity. But most of all, there was the aura of gloom in the air. No one spoke to them, the occupants of the mansion just moved their eyes and heads as they passed.

  They got to the welcoming area and found Melissa crying. Next to her was her prime, Tora, soothing her, having her hand on Melissa’s back and whispering reassuring things—and her dress, as Fritz noticed, was redder than usual. There were other people inside, sandmen from the offices in LA. Fritz could see Bruce on the balcony of the second floor. He was discussing something with a subordinate with a deep scowl and a wrinkled frown.

  Sitting beside Melissa and Tora, “What happened?” asked Natasha.

  “Erik is dead…” Tora said.

  Natasha stopped and asked once more, “What… what happened?”

  Melissa wailed, “Someone killed Erik!” and she threw herself towards Natasha, her head snugly placed on her belly, and there she continued her grief.

  Fritz on one side somehow knew that this kind of thing would happen to Erik. Rowan wasn’t someone who could be stopped, he was something more, like a hurricane—all you can do is stay away and wait for it to settle.

  “I’ll be back—you two,” he looked at Cynthia and Jack, “Stay here and help the others,” he said and went upstairs to have some more details on what had occurred, he was gearing towards Bruce.

  “Where’s the Rowan you captured?” he asked, his breathing suddenly fast.

  Bruce raised an eyebrow for a second, “Rowan we captured? What do you—”

  “Who is the only suspect here, Bruce?”

  Silence for a moment, his eyes gone down and then looked at him, “He’s in the basement.”

  “Fuck…” he stomped his foot on the floor and, with his fist, hit the baluster. “Have you cleaned up Erik’s body?”

  “He’s still there in his room, we just got the call thirty minutes ago.”

  Fritz started walking towards Erik’s room. Bruce followed.

  “Who found him?”

  “Melissa.”

  He rubbed his hands on his face. “What time?”

  “We still haven’t asked her, but we think it’s not more than an hour. Got the call immediately.”

  They took a left and finally reached the room. It was open but you would first go through a small passage before you could actually see the whole area. When they entered it, there were sandmen dusting everything for prints, some of them were taking pictures and jutting the things they had seen. They all looked as if they had done this before.

  But Fritz couldn’t think of a reason why this was needed; they knew who had done the crime, and they should be already preparing the judge and the jury. NO, he thought, they didn’t know that the Rowan Wood they had captured was another dream, could be another dream. He was still out there.

  And then he saw Erik. It was somehow the way he should go out of this world, having sex with a girl, just the way he had lived. The woman, who could probably be one of his dreams, was on top of him, there were multiple wounds on her body, but the most severe were the wounds at the back of her head; all the inflictions were the same in characteristic, the blood already dried up down her pale skin. Underneath her was her maker, Erik. His neck was chopped up, and Fritz could see that a cheek was sliced off, making way for the white of the jawbone. There was also a bad bruise on his eye, and Fritz immediately knew the strength of the impact because Erik’s eye had been dismantled from its socket. It seemed that whoever did this loved doing it.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Bruce said behind him, “This is only for the records… we know it was Rowan. But you know what the odd thing is with all of this?—”

  He remembered Natasha and what Erik had done to her. “There’s no odd about this, the girl is on top and that fuck in the bottom. He was fucking old for this crap and he was still doing it.”

  “It’s not that, Fritz… we still haven’t dusted a print, even theirs…” he gave a nod towards the horny one-night stand lovers.

  Fritz looked at him and admitted to himself he was right.

  He told Bruce that he would give a hand in examining the scene. So they searched everything people would commonly hold and dusted some more prints: the doorknobs, the perfumes, the handles of the drawers, the remote… everything, even shoeprints. And they eventually found some. They were in the bathroom mostly, and at the balcony outside. But in the main bedroom, everything was clean, as if the culprit who had done this was a ghost.

  “Have you found the weapon that killed them?”

  “We’re still searching.”

  Fritz propped down and looked at the blood splatter on the floor. They were minimal, just a few drops here and a pool of red over there. Whoever had committed this had taken his time, valued every second that had gone by—and so, Fritz imagined how they had ended up like this to get a better picture, he assumed how the killer had savored said time. The only explanation he could think of was that probably the killer had been intoxicated in a euphoric state doing this, that he had slowly carved up Erik’s face and almost chopped off his neck with an angry, maniacal grin that absorbed the sight of the blade slicing through skin. The first strikes would be definitely fast to ensure that the victims were dead, or at least close to dead. If Fritz would kill somebody he despised, he would do it the same way.

  “Tell me when you find the weapon.”

  Fritz went back to his room to have a drink. He sat there at his balcony and looked at the nightmare of trees. He wanted to think, to identify who was the real killer. So did that mean he thought Rowan was innocent? It was hard to believe, but there was a big chance. Why would a dream dust off hi
s own fingerprints? Oh yes, they had fingerprints, an unintentional byproduct of the dreamer’s mind. (Every sandmen in the world during 1997 had been ordered to scan their prints for this database the Circle of Elects had created. They had said that it was a matter of organization and identification of every non-human member of the society—this was the closest they had in being as what people say nowadays ‘in the system’). But if Rowan had created a new dream, an assassin dream, then such fingerprints would be unknown to their system—as a matter of fact, every dream Rowan conjured wasn’t in their system, the killer wouldn’t benefit in taking his extra minutes to clean everything.

  As he finished his drink, he decided that Rowan was innocent for this one. Even though he had all the reasons to kill Erik, this wasn’t him. Or maybe, he was just messing with him, that somewhere in Rowan’s mind he thought that he would overthink this, would overthink the absence of fingerprints in the crime scene.

  He fixed himself another glass, emptied it in a few gulps, and then made an agreement to himself that he would go to the basement to meet with this duplicate of Rowan Wood. Because this thing for him somehow couldn’t wait, he needed the answers now even though they weren’t the answers that would ultimately finish this case. A duplicate isn’t the real thing. Yet somehow deep in his heart he was thankful that this Rowan Wood that was stuck in the basement had the possibility of being a copy, because he could have the satisfaction of destroying that perfect face while being handed out answers of where the location of the true Rowan Wood. Heck, he could even kill him in the process; the Circle of Elects hadn’t said anything in not killing any clone.

  And then he had the thought, a thought that would make this easier, primarily it was the fantasia, an artifact that could locate the dreamer through the dream. But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t destroy his face anymore just because he only needed the duplicate’s blood. He would still do what he intended to do.

  He stood up on his seat and checked if he had the phone. He reckoned that he would still need the recorder application to put what he was about to do in his phone indefinitely, something that could be played over and over if he were lonely.

  He went downstairs to find Natasha and ask her about the fantasia. He had places in mind on where to find her, but when he arrived at the welcoming area, Natasha didn’t move from where she had been since Fritz had left her. Fritz eliminated the wrath on his expression and approached her. Instead of Melissa’s prime dream, Natasha was now the one who was comforting Melissa, Tora now was only floating around the background, watching with her eyes in gray, and her face unreadable.

  “Natasha, where did you put the fantasia?” Fritz asked.

  She faced him, her eyes all red and her lips pale, as pale as the first time they had been solving the crime. “It’s in my room, in the drawer of my bedside table… If you don’t find it there it should be under my pillow.” She went back to her weeping, she went back to Melissa, and she went back to their shared silence.

  He went to her room and searched as instructed. It was under the pillow. He removed it from its sheath and suddenly had the thoughts of killing someone. That same thoughts brought him straight to the basement.

  “Where is that fucking bastard?” he asked when the only prisoner he saw was Penny. Everyone seemed to step back when they saw him holding the fantasia like a fiend in a killing spree.

  One of the sandmen pointed at the door at the edge of the room. Fritz went straight to it and banged the door open. Inside he found Rowan Wood, sitting comfortably on a chair, his hands shackled on the table. This room looked, more or less, like an interrogation facility, but less of the pleasantries of a one-way mirror and a camera that would record his every move. This looked like more of a torture chamber. And torture in Fritz’s mind was playing around.

  He held the fantasia tighter. “Hello, Rowan, if that’s really you…” He grabbed the chair close to the door, put it in front of him, and sat.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, I know you’re just another dream, another clone the real thing imagined just to carry out his plans, so he could mess with us.” He put the fantasia on the table. “I’m just going to make this short, because I don’t have a lot of time. See this dagger? Do you know what it is?”

  The fake Rowan Wood nodded, and he did it well. His eyes moistened, and Fritz could easily see fear and desperation in every small movement he was doing. Now he was turning red, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead, and veins starting to bulge on his neck.

  “Please don’t hurt me!” He shouted, “Please, whoever you are, I’m begging you please don’t hurt me!”

  Chapter 28

  If he could position his hands in prayer he would, but he couldn’t, so he decided to cry, hoping that his tears would create sympathy in Fritz. But Fritz wasn’t in the mood for it. The more Rowan cried the more he would hate. He grabbed the fantasia, stood up and went behind this version of Rowan. Fritz was now debating within himself if he would carve up a nice line on his neck or he would just prick a little blood because that was the only thing fantasia required. And in his act of choosing, he just stared at the back of Rowan’s head and to his shaking shoulders. Rowan now pleaded for his life, he called all the saints the Catholic Church has to help him, to give Fritz’s mind clarity on what he was about to do.

  Fritz stabbed his arm a little, moved to the door and got out of the room. It wasn’t his prayers that saved him, he said to himself, no higher being had given him clarity. He didn’t kill him just because he couldn’t. As he had stared at the back of his head, that mess of a hair, he had thought that he wasn’t worth it. He had no energy to kill, to even think of killing; something that absolutely contradicted his rage minutes ago. The man he loved to kill was already dead. That was none other than Erik. Currently he was free from any responsibility other than his responsibility in the office back in San Francisco. But most of all he was tired of playing Rowan’s games—he could fuck up the city whenever he wanted, as long as he was out.

  He sheathed the fantasia back and dropped it on the table at the receiving area. He now found no Natasha and Melissa there, only the other sandmen from the offices near this mansion. He asked if they knew where they went and they told him they saw them go upstairs. The first thing that entered his mind was Natasha’s room, so he went there but only found Melissa and Tora—Melissa was calmer now and was only sobbing when he saw her. Near them there was a bag with clothes messily stacked around it.

  Fritz knocked on the door and asked permission to enter.

  “Did Natasha tell you where she would be going?” he asked.

  “Are you helping us to solve this case, this murder?” She asked back. “You will help us again, won’t you?”

  Fritz started with an Um, and then he brushed his hair and looked slightly down. He looked like a schoolboy caught smoking. “Yeah, I will do my best…” It was a lie, “have you seen Natasha? I need to talk to her.”

  She cried again, this time it wasn’t of sadness but of terror. She looked at him, her face pink and in a grimace. “She told us that she would check on the room.” Melissa said the last two words as if they were the most horrible words in the English language. The room.

  He thanked her and immediately moved to the crime scene. When he arrived, he saw Natasha sitting on the floor on her heels. There were sandmen near her, one of them holding her shoulder, the other was just looking at her, maybe he had spoken to her, told her she shouldn’t be there, that they were doing their jobs and they understood what she was going through. Fritz was pretty sure that was the sequence on how Natasha ended up on that floor with her eyes looking at nowhere.

  He moved to her and announced to the sandmen that he had this.

  “Let’s go, Natasha…” He helped her stand, and they walked out of the hall. They went downstairs into the receiving area where Fritz had left the fantasia. He held her arm, “Do you want some water?”

  She nodded, and Fr
itz told her to stay there. He went to the kitchen and produced a glass of water and a bottle of it in case that she needed more. When he got back, he was thanked, and she held him close. She said: “Stay…”

  They held each other for a while, and when Fritz thought that time was right, he asked, “Are you going somewhere? I saw your bag in your room… Clothes…”

  She pushed him away and drank water some more.

  “I guess no one is now holding you back from here,” Fritz continued. “You’re free, Natasha, you can live your life the way you want it to be.”

  “What if that decision isn’t still up to me?” she said and looked at him. “You haven’t asked me what happened to my child, to our child.”

  Fritz simply didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know that she had something with that old man, that their illusion of love created something that would make her remember a dark connection that should be severed ten times.

  He sighed, the anger returning. “What happened to your child?”

  She drank some more. “Fritz, she’s the next elect…”

  In the small interrogation room, Rowan Wood was being beaten to a pulp by a big sandman. There had been no questions asked to him, they just wanted to hurt him. And each punch they inflicted, the other sandmen in the room told him the names that died in the past days. They also told him their ages, as if they would matter to him. He always told them that he didn’t know anything they were saying. He told them that he was a nurse, he even revealed to them where he lived—maybe this was all just a big misunderstanding. But they continued to punch and punch until he spat blood. And he wondered, with the big sandman’s fists, if he could already have an internal bleeding somewhere in his cavity.

  When he moved, he could now fill some broken ribs in a form of stabbing, excruciating pain. So he begged some more, told them that he might die if they continued. And to respond in his request, they shifted to his face. In five punches they broke his nose, ruptured his lip and made his left eye blind. After all of that they opened the door and told him they would come back, informed him that even if he was wanted alive, they could still hurt him because there was no order not to do so.