Unhallowed Shadows

by Stefanos Kottas

  “My turn to bid you a very good morning. I see you’ve already met my partner. See, under the best of circumstances, patience is not his greatest virtue… I’m afraid that now he’s even less inclined to restrain himself, you know, since you and your buddies have murdered all these women. My name is Marcos and, don’t you worry, I’m much more reasonable than John!” he announced to the detainee, happily.

  He went and stood next to John; he was head and shoulders taller than him and several pounds heavier. The differences did not stop there; John’s hairline had been receding for some time now, despite him being young, while Marcos had thick black hair, though he wore it very short. The two men realized that the detainee was observing both of them, so Marcos joked:

  “I know, I know, everyone’s telling us that we look alike, like brothers! It’s just that I got those pretty blue eyes! Now, tell me, what where you discussing before I arrived?” he asked, maintaining the same light-hearted tone as before.

  Seeing that he wasn’t getting any answer, he continued:

  “What? You hadn’t said a single thing? Oh, come now, we must remedy that! I’m off to get us some coffee!”

  With those words, he nodded to John and exited the interrogation room.

  He took a good ten minutes to return with the coffee and, when he walked again into the room, the detainee was over by the corner, while the bruises on his face had multiplied. Marcos placed a couple of mugs of coffee on the table, pushed one towards John and took a sip from the other.

  “Coffee! God’s gift to humanity!” he exclaimed joyfully and immediately afterwards he became serious. “By the way”, he told the detainee, “I seem to have forgotten yours. Mind if I bring you some later on? Unless you want me to leave you again alone with John”, he added, nodding towards his colleague, allowing the threat to hang in the air.

  The man looked at him and burst into laughter, as if he was amused by some private joke. This infuriated John, who lunged at him, landing another blow on the detainee’s face.

  “What are you laughing about, you fucker?” he shouted, beating him again and again.

  This time Marcos did step in and gestured to John to exit the room. His colleague stared at him, as if he was about to refuse, but the message was clear in Marcos’ eyes:

  “You’ve had your chance, now let me have a go at him”.

  Annoyed, John kicked the table and then left.

  “If memory serves, you weren’t this calm a few hours ago”, said Marcos and sat on the chair opposite the detainee. “Basically, I remember you whimpering, holding that toy knife and begging me not to arrest you. Pray tell, what’s changed in the meantime? Did you find your courage lying about?”

  With a sneer, the man replied:

  “I was absent at the time. Now, you’re dealing with the real me”.

  Marcos did not reply, he was trying to understand the man’s psychology, put himself in his shoes. He wondered how he would have reacted, if he was accused of being a serial killer, responsible for a number of ritual killings. Pleading insanity, pretending to be a schizophrenic may have worked in another European country, but the man had been arrested in Greece. Even if the authorities did believe him, at best they would electroshock the shit out of him, pump him full of meds and lock him away in some high security prison. The chances the man didn’t know that were slim to none. Marcos had read his file: educated, no family ties, well-off. No prior offences, if one was willing to overlook the fact that some twenty four hours ago witnesses saw him run away in bloodied clothes from an abandoned building, the very place where later on the seventh victim of the cult was found. “The seventh!” thought Marcos angrily. Seven women, all stabbed on the heart with a bone knife, with their eyes seared and their entire body covered in runes; their bodies left lying like a pile of human rags, their blood pooling around them. The authorities still hadn’t deciphered the meaning of the runes, while the autopsies had revealed no indications of sexual abuse.

  “Why did you kill them?” Marcos decided to ask the man, after a prolonged pause.

  “You’re a veritable genius, aren’t you? For the ritual, of course!” answered the man, laughing sarcastically.

  “So, you confess?”

  “Your intelligence is truly astounding. You shall go far!” came the next answer, equally ironic with the previous one.

  Marcos decided to ignore the insults and continue with the questioning. If the man felt like spilling the beans, he had no intention of stopping him.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Five”.

  “Who are the others?”

  “Eeny, Meeny, Mini, Mo… Stop asking these idiotic questions, you’re beginning to bore me”.

  “Why are you always targeting young women?”

  “Always? It’s easier, that’s all! I don’t know about you, but for a ritual sacrifice, I simply go for the drunk broad in heels who can’t run for more than a couple of yards… But, worry not, if it bothers you, I could off a man. Just for you, buddy, remember that, because you went ahead and asked a third idiotic question”.

  The man’s attitude was beginning to annoy Marcos, but he reminded himself that the scumbag sitting opposite him was shackled. He wasn’t going anywhere, for a long, long time. However, he decided to change tack:

  “What were you aiming to achieve through those rituals?”

  “Aha, now there’s a question! You need a person to form a sun and another eight for its points, so that you end up with the star of Astarte, a princess of hell, and then you may invoke her”.

  “So, you’re missing another two people?”

  “Such a daft question; we’re missing one”.

  Marcos’ mind refused for a few seconds to process that information, refused to accept that yet another young woman was dead. His anger, for the first time in a while, boiled over, clouding his thoughts. He threw his arm, grabbed the man by the neck and pulled him forward, over the table.

  “Where’s the girl? Tell me!”

  “Shouldn’t… you… be… concerned about… the ninth victim?” asked the man in a choking voice, having difficulty to draw breath.

  “Tell me!” screamed Marcos.

  “In ‘Asteras’, the old cinema, downtown”, said the man, breathlessly.

  Marcos let him go and the man fell on the back of his chair.

  As Marcos was rushing out of the interrogation room, the man took a couple of deep breaths and resumed his laughter.

  Travis finished with drawing the sign of the Chinese mafia on a priceless painting decorating the entrance to the mansion and immediately run towards the basement, where he found Erica. Such was his stress that he almost stumbled on the corpses of the guards and the servants, killed by Erica a little earlier. Most of them had died instantly, their necks broken before they had the chance to realize what was happening. The few who had managed to lay eyes on the young vampire before she attacked them had died with expressions of sheer terror twisting their faces.

  Travis found the stairs that lead to the basement and descended them two at a time, ignoring completely the guard who lay heaped before an opened steel door which had been secured with an electronic lock. The man was still alive but quite unable to pose any threat. Erica had used her powers in order to force him to open the door. The guard would never be the same again, his brain had overloaded and his mental health had been permanently shaken by the strength of her projected will.

  He found Erica as she was filling a large sack with weapons. She had taken off the clothes she had been wearing and now was dressed in something he had taken off a maid. The blouse was stained with the blood of its previous owner. Travis realized that he didn’t particularly care about any of this. He grabbed one of the empty sacks and began filling it with weapons.

  “Did you paint that mark I asked you?” said Erica, carrying on with her task and when he nodded, she closed the sack before her and lifted it on her shoulder as if it was weightless. ‘Let’s split. The police will b
e arriving soon and they must not find us here”.

  Travis hesitated for a moment, gathered his courage and asked what had been on his mind for some time now:

  “You do know I still have no idea what you’re trying to do, right? First, you’re offing an Arian and then send the corpse to his people, expecting them to believe it was the Chinese who did it. Then you kill a few Russians and you’re still expecting their gang to think that the Chinese were behind the attack? Why would they think that? But, let’s just say they take the bait, hook and sink; care to explain how that helps us with our little vampire problem?” he asked her, as they were walking towards the exit.

  “Sounds like a shitty plan, heh?” Erica replied, sneering.

  “Well…”

  “You kindly informed me that this city is controlled by two rival factions. Lucas belongs to one of these factions and I need his help. We could attack the opponents of his faction, but then we’d risk them thinking he’s on our side. After all, you were under his charge. So, instead of messing about in this city, we’re letting them think we’re up to something, while we’re simply heading elsewhere, where we shall enjoy once more the element of surprise”.

  “… and this time, we have guns”, added Travis.

  “Precisely, and in fact many more than the two of us would need”.

  Travis remained silent; after all, he had realized what was coming next.

  This time, everything had been covered in blood. Inside the dusty cinema of “Asteras”, in downtown Athens, the young woman had met a tragic end. Unlike the other victims this cult had sacrificed, this one had suffered much more before dying. While the technicians of the forensic department, dressed in white overalls, examined the scene for evidence left behind by the perpetrators of this crime, Marcos was standing frozen by the door, inspecting from there the scene. The face of the young woman bore a number of deep cuts, her eyes had been seared and her hair torn out. Her legs had been broken, as well as her arms, but the horror did not stop there. Scattered around her body were most of her teeth, along with almost all of her fingers. Her half-naked body had deep wounds on almost all vital organs and the ritual dagger that had been used in all this was still wedged in her heart. What made her look like the rest of the victims were the dozens of runes that had been carved into her entire body.

  Most of his colleagues had departed and Marcos knew that, at that very moment, the media would be taking turns in crucifying his chief, since the eighth victim had been engaged to one of the king’s advisors. The problem lay neither in the treatment of the police chief, nor in the vilification of the Greek police for the umpteenth time, but in the fact that a large number of his colleagues would be assigned to the protection of people deemed important to “national interests”, instead of hitting the streets to look for clues. Marcos considered that possibility for a moment, getting pulled off the case in order to have him sit outside some mansion. The second they did that he knew he’d be tendering his resignation in order to continue the investigation on his own. He pushed aside such pointless thoughts and continued with the observation of the young woman’s body. The words spoken by the man he had been interrogating a little earlier came to his mind and Marcos carefully approached the body to look for the symbol the man had described. Due to the loss of blood sustained by the victim, the runes were showing clearly on her skin, so he didn’t have to wait for the autopsy report. Soon, he had located what he had been looking for. Low on her stomach, they had carved a star with eight points, resembling a sun.

  Marcos was tense. He could not take his eyes off the scene of the crime, as he was observing again and again the terrible wounds on the woman’s body, each rune in turn; unable to cast aside the thought that all this had happened because some sickos thought they could invoke the devil or some such demon. Eventually, a sharp pain on his side, where he had been struck by the bullet, combined with the headache which had begun creeping in as he was observing the body of the victim, convinced him to return to his apartment and try to get some rest. Before that, though, he spoke to one of his colleagues present at the scene and asked him to forward to his email any photographs they took from the scene, so he could continue working on the case from home. As he was walking out, he took the cell phone from his pocket and called John. He knew his partner would be fuming and he was proven right.

  “Yes! Let’s hear it!” his colleague almost shouted at him, the moment he picked up.

  “Still at the station, huh?” asked Marcos, grimacing as he realized that maybe he was indeed asking stupid questions every now and then.

  “Nope, lounging in Hawaii, nursing a cool pina colada!” continued his partner, annoyed.

  Marcos did not speak this time, allowed him some space to cool off; after all, he knew him too well.

  Indeed, after a few seconds, John asked him, “… what did you want to ask me?”

  “What’s your assignment now?”

  “A full review of the cases so far, so that the chief is fully briefed when he faces those journalists tomorrow. Because, well, that’s what’s really important right now; every bumpkin has the right to know how old the first victim was!”

  “Need some help?” offered Marcos reluctantly, hoping his partner would refuse.

  “Let me be and get back home. If there’s any news, I’ll give you a call”.

  “Got it. I’ll be over first thing. When you’ve had enough, drop it and I’ll pick up from where you left tomorrow”, said Marcos, but John had already hang up, without waiting for his response.

  He was now outside the old cinema, walking towards the main street, as he was hoping for some passing cab. He had arrived on the scene in a patrol car, accompanying by some uniformed colleagues; his car was back at his place, since John was adamant that his wounded friend shouldn’t drive. Under normal circumstances, he would have waited for a bus, since he had no problem commuting, but at that moment he felt exhausted.

  A couple of minutes later a cab appeared, Marcos hailed it and got in, hoping that the cabby wouldn’t feel like talking. His wish was granted; the driver was an elderly man who looked like he was counting the minutes until the end of his shift, so they did not exchange a single word all through the ride.

  The route, however, despite his exhaustion, was something that never bored him, no matter how often he followed it. Despite the major blow suffered by his country, following the defeat in the Fifty-Years War and the ensuing collapse of the Byzantine Empire, which broke into several successor states, one of which was Greece, the capital had retained its charm. Several imposing buildings dominated the city center, which managed to preserve their status, despite the dire financial situation: palaces, Grecian temples which now housed universities, impressive churches and, the crown jewel of the city, the Acropolis, which stood proud and intact since antiquity and now served as command center and the king’s residence. Of course, the more the taxi moved away from the center, the more Athens’ beauty faded. The slums, following the war, had multiplied. Drugs, especially new and cheaper variants, were sold at each corner and beggars were gathered at many traffic lights, on the brink of collapse. Many children dropped out of school early and opted to join the Academy, in an effort to earn some money as soon as they could and financially help their families, no matter how little that money was while training. Marcos had been one of those children; he entered the academy at the age of fifteen and opted to become a policeman. The pay was less than if he had joined the army, but there were some advantages; as a policeman, he would have the option to take a variety of courses, other than combat training.

  The taxi dropped him off right in front of the building where he was living, which was located in a relatively good neighborhood. He walked into his apartment, locked the door behind him and tossed the keys in the decorative basket with the colored pebbles he kept on a small table next to the entrance. He was living in a small flatlet, which comprised a single bedroom, an even tinier bathroom and an area that served as both sitting room a
nd kitchenette. In that area he had managed to squeeze in his desk, where his computer sat, along with a small bookcase containing all his favorite books; a small couch for the rare occasions he had guests and a television, one of the latest models, which was mounted on the wall and was one of the very few extravagances he allowed himself to have, along with an espresso machine. Theoretically, his wages could support a larger house; the kingdom paid well its police force and military, but Marcos felt it would be pointless living in a huge house on his own. After all, empty places depressed him.

  He glanced at his computer and then towards his bedroom, thought about how tired he felt and then, with a sigh, turned on the computer and went to change his clothes. Five minutes later he was sitting in front of the screen, chewing absent-mindedly on some cold leftovers from the previous day. He was searching for information on Astarte. Perhaps, if he managed to learn more about these things, he’d be able to draw more details from the man they had arrested. The first results returned by Google informed him that Astarte was the name given by the ancient Greeks to a Mesopotamian deity which went by the name of Ishtar. This particular deity was related to fertility, sexuality and war. Its symbol was indeed the one he had seen on the corpse of the young woman. Various myths surrounded Astarte’s name, such as that she was the daughter of a god who sent her to seduce his brother. Possibly, Astarte was the deity which the Greeks later renamed Aphrodite. Marcos searched some more and managed to find some less frequent passages, detailing the story about Astarte falling victim to one of the higher demons of hell who, using his powers, corrupted her and then unleashed her upon humanity, so she in turn could corrupt as many men as possible. In her human form, Astarte met a tragic end at the hands of the inhabitants of a small town, close to ancient Babylon. Several local legends claimed that her spirit had stayed on Earth, to spend an eternity looking for a way to take revenge from the men who had slain her, refusing to return to hell until she succeeded.