Death Trance

by R. D. Zimmerman

Tyler's old Duster was as easy to keep in sight as an American in Moscow. Of course, he probably didn't suspect that he was being followed, but I did nothing to announce it, either. Careful to remain far behind, I didn't pull out of our parking place until Tyler was down the block and hanging a right.

  “He's heading north,” I said, “which would put him in the direction of Liz's.”

  I punched the gas, and the Honda bolted forward. Harriet Avenue ran north and south—all avenues, for that matter, in Minneapolis ran north and south, all streets east and west; such was life on a grid in the plains —and, careful to keep my distance, I followed Tyler as he headed west on Twenty-fifth Street. Liz's place was actually only a couple more blocks over and one farther south, and I thought, could this guy really have the gall to return there?

  But he didn't. He kept going west until he reached Lyndale and then he turned north. Where was he going, to the grocery store? Was that where this great mission would lead? No. That was what I feared, but I knew it wouldn't. Deep in my soul I knew that following Tyler would lead to a heart, a core, a kernel of truth. This was a dangerous path, I sensed, but an important one that would lead us to an intimate, even hidden part of Rob Tyler.

  “Where the hell's he going?” asked Toni.

  “Who knows,” I answered, my curiosity sharpening, pulse thumping, aware that something of concern lay in the immediate future.

  I stayed a couple of cars behind him, flowing with the midafternoon traffic down the broad avenue, which was dotted here and there with original elms now struggling to come into leaf. Tyler continued past the rude tangle of roads above and around Highway 94, past the Walker Art Center and the Guthrie Theater, the Sculpture Garden, too. Then straight past the Basilica, a huge copper-roofed structure of stone that looked as if it could belong in Europe except for the freeway that nearly ran in its back door. On Tyler went, not speeding or racing, just continuing toward the Farmers’ Market. I lingered a bit in this broad stretch of road, let him gain some distance, and soon he was turning right. Way up ahead. Yes, turning right toward downtown and its sprouting towers of concrete. This was interesting. All roads in Minneapolis, I always said, led to Dayton's, the mammoth department store that anchored the city in both fashion and urbanity, and so I couldn't help wonder if this was where he was going. To get a Mother's Day gift? Somehow I doubted it, and then to prove me correct, he veered left, avoiding the downtown jumble of modern buildings, and going toward the collection of shorter, squarer buildings on the fringe.

  “There, he's turning.” Toni motioned with her hand.

  “I get it. He's going into the Warehouse District.” My mind whirled, settled on a logical possibility. “Maybe he has a studio. Or a friend who has a studio here.”

  The area was filled with a collection of dark brick buildings, many of which had housed machinery and equipment that had serviced the flour mills along the river and the almost endless expanse of farmland surrounding the Twin Cities. Endless numbers of farmers with endless supplies of hard winter wheat that they had brought to Minneapolis to be processed in the huge mills along the Mississippi. And these enormous buildings with high ceilings and huge beams and broad windows had been abuzz with activity until the waterfall that powered them all was no longer needed; gas-powered mills took over. So now these turn-of-the-century warehouses were struggling to find new life. And they had. The first to come were the artists, turning the vast spaces into studios and lofts. The second to come along were the trendy entrepreneurs, converting the atmosphere-rich environments into packed bars where hormones raged.

  These warehouses, however, the farthest from downtown—past the Timberwolves arena, past the New French Bar, past the new parking ramps, and across a set of train tracks—had yet to have much new life. Some were just short of derelict, several totally so. Rob Tyler drove to the one that looked the most abandoned. When I saw him turning into an alley, I steered down another street.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling over and having no trouble parking in the nearly empty area. “Let's walk.”

  Toni was the first one out. I hurried alongside her, and we rounded the corner, came to a brick alley that was lined with wobbly-looking train tracks where freight cars had once lumbered. There were large puddles of blackish water, weeds sprouting around them. And Rob Tyler's rusty Duster. The car was empty.

  Toni didn't hesitate. She sensed it, too. This truth that lay ahead. I knew there wasn't going to be a studio back here. It was too dark, too musty, too dead. You couldn't create art in a place like this. It wasn't a positive enough environment. Reaching the back of the warehouse, we climbed up a broad set of rotting wooden steps, crossed a loading platform, came to a huge sliding metal door that was cracked open. Toni looked at me, raised her brows. I agreed. We had to go in and we had to be quiet about it.

  We stepped out of the near-perfect spring day and into darkness that swirled around us in great cool clouds. There was a staircase that didn't go up, only descended into a black hole. Another door straight ahead. Wanting to avoid the steps and some pit below us, I first pulled on the door handle, but it budged only a couple of inches before a chain and padlock on the other side caught it. Locked from the inside. Shit, I thought. That meant Tyler had in fact submerged beneath the building.

  “You want to?” I whispered to Toni as I pointed down the black staircase.

  “Sure.”

  I started down, Toni right behind me. The banister was cool, wet, rusty, the cement stairs gritty. It seemed as if we were making an immense amount of noise, the soles of our shoes scraping over the sandpaper-like steps. I could hear every movement of ours bouncing off every wall. The light faded with each step, gray to near blackness, as we descended down a half-flight, doubled back, and then sank deeper. What were we crawling into? Digging into? Could it be something as innocuous as a rock band's rehearsal space? I'd heard of a lot of bands practicing in the subterranean guts of the Warehouse District. So was our Rob a musician as well? A drummer seeking privacy to beat his brains out? Of course not. Our Rob couldn't be so talented, so diverse.

  The stairs stopped and we came to another door. I was ready to reach for it when I heard steps above. I raised my head. Someone else was coming down.

  Toni pulled on my elbow. Pulled as she backed into utter blackness. The two of us slithered over a small pile of wood and beneath the staircase, hid like two rats from the humans who were clumsily moving down. There were two of them as well. Toni clutched my arm and I reached over and grabbed her arm. Yes, clearly, two of them. They weren't speaking, whoever they were, but the strangers’ steps were quite distinct as they walked down upon us. When they were on the last flight, I reached out with my other hand, felt for Toni, grabbed her. Then they were there, only feet away. I hadn't realized there was actually any light, but there was because I could see two black shapes. Massive ones, broad and heavy. Men.

  Toni and I were barely breathing as we watched, sensed, the two of them open the heavy door and melt into the oblivion that lay beyond. Some unseen hinge or spring pulled the door shut and then we flinched, moved for the first time. I stepped over the pile of wood, moved out, Toni and I still holding hands, clutching for something warm and known in this cold, odd place. We should have turned around, ascended into light and safety. But my hand went right for the handle. Follow them. Pursue this truth. This was connected to Liz, tied to her fate. We both knew that, Toni and I.

  I pulled that heavy door open just wide enough for the two of us to slither in, felt a breeze of coolness, a great cloud of it, and as we entered I sensed that this was a much larger space. A huge one. From another doorway straight ahead I saw a hint of yellowish light. We moved to the side and then forward, not straight across that big barren space, but along a wall. I reached out with one hand, felt rough brick, took one careful step at a time. I kept my other hand back, wrapped around Toni's soft doctorly hand. She was just as scared as I was; her sweaty palm gave evidence of that. Just as determined as well. Perhaps more so, fo
r I was only curious, Toni adamant. Liz had been her sister, a very loved one.

  My hand felt nothing. I groped, realized this was a doorway. A room off to the right. One more step, and I felt the wall again. Now the light ahead of us was brighter, and dancing, swaying, and pulsing. Candlelight. No electricity down here. There were voices, too, rhythmic and pulsing. Chanting, that was it. Deep, hard voices grunting and pushing sounds that didn't make any sense. Throbbing, just like my own heart. So was this some sort of men's group, a ritualistic gathering to explore the male psyche? No, I sensed it wasn't anything so benign. Dr. Dawson had said Rob was involved with a group or gang, and this was it. A cult. Of course it was. I could sense that alone by my growing fear. A cult that might have been responsible for Liz's death? Quite possibly. Suddenly I knew in the pit of my sensibilities that Liz hadn't committed suicide. Not at all. Quite probably she had stumbled upon this group—perhaps Rob Tyler had even brought her down here—but she hadn't liked it. She'd hated it, in fact. Or maybe she'd just been amazed and supremely interested in it all. So interested that she knew this was the journalistic break she'd been craving. But then this cult had found out about her plans to make their secret group quite public, so they'd hurled her off the Hennepin Avenue Bridge and into the dark, swirling waters of the Mississippi.

  Yes, that was what had happened, how Liz had gone down into death, and my heart was racing as fast as my mind. I knew we had to get out of there lest we fall into the same murky Mississippi waters. This was no place for Toni and me.

  My outstretched hand hit nothing again—a doorway into another side room—and the warning bells were tolling, heart banging against my ribs. Far enough. Time to retreat, turn this matter over to the police and Detective Jenkins before Toni and I became fish bait as well. I turned, stopped Toni, leaned forward to whisper we should retreat. But the door behind us creaked and shrieked.

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

  Someone else was coming down, passing through this room. Who now? What next? We'd be spotted here, huddled against the wall, so I ducked into the side room, pulling on Toni's hand, and the two of us stepped into a dungeon of a hiding place. I pressed myself up against the inside wall as I peered back into the large main chamber, and Toni pulled away, let go of my hand. Another guy. I couldn't see his face, but he had long hair that hung all scraggly. Kind of fat, too, and tall. What was this? What were this guy and all these other men doing down here?

  I turned around in the blackness, groped for Toni but couldn't find her, feel her. There was nothing to greet my touch, only emptiness. My heart flipped. Toni? Toni! Inside me I screamed: Toni, we've got to get the hell out of here but I can't see you, so where the hell are you?

  In a far corner I saw a small button of light, noticed a shape right in front of it. Toni? I started toward the shape, thinking that if it wasn't her, we were in deeper shit than I'd ever been in my life. I walked carefully, trying not to trip over anything and lifting my feet high, almost prancing, and holding my hands out, groping, pushing at the emptiness in front of me to make sure it was just that, empty space. Then I saw a bunch of hair sweep down over that bit of light. So it was Toni, peering through, looking into another chamber. Spying. That's what she was doing. Eyeing the group of men, this cult on the other side of the wall.

  I slowly moved close by, just behind her, and she grabbed my arm, pulled me forward, pulled me down to the hole of light. Bending over, I peered through, looked from our black chamber into the next one, where all those guys were gathered. A whole bunch of them circled around a table, a dais of some sort with silvery stars and moons dangling from it and on top of which something was lying. All of the men were shirtless, all of them wearing black masks that covered their eyes and rode down over their cheeks. They looked like a bunch of bikers, mostly chunky bodies, hairy ones, all sweaty. Dear Lord, oh Jesus, we gotta get outta here or we're dead meat.

  But I kept staring, couldn't pry myself away because I was looking, checking to see if Rob Tyler was actually in there. I leaned to one side, looked into a far corner of the murky room, saw a shaved head behind one of those masks. The guy was lanky, wearing jeans and no shirt, and I saw the tattoo right there on the arm. Dragon roaring, tail drooping and curling down and around. The same tattoo I'd seen on the assailant back at Liz's apartment last night. So it had been Tyler back there. Tyler who'd attacked me. Proof positive.

  Then, however, another lanky figure moved across the room, a masked, shirtless guy who looked like he, in fact, might be the real Tyler. From what I could discern, his head was shaven and he wore black jeans, too. I saw his arm, studied it because I didn't quite get it. It was the same tattoo. The dragon. My eyes started darting from right shoulder to right shoulder, all of them. They all had it. The identical dragon. Obviously it was their code, their brand, which meant that whoever had been in Liz's apartment could have been Rob Tyler, who had to be one of those two lanky guys, or it might have been someone else in this group. Maybe Liz had become involved here. Or maybe she had dumped Tyler and gone off with another of these masked wonders, for which Tyler had extracted the ultimate price, her life. Or maybe someone had snuffed Liz because… because… ?

  Toni and I stood there, taking all this in, trying to believe it, comprehend it. We were too shock-struck to move. It was then that I saw what was lying on that dais in the middle of the room, the platform around which they were all moving. An animal of some sort. Oh Lord. It was a goat, quite dead, and quite split open, cut right up its gut. Something was pouring out of it. A mound of guts? No, nothing so fluid and messy. Right, there was no blood. One of the men moved aside, and I could clearly see the mass. What was tumbling out of the dead goat was big mounds of cooked rice.

  A wave of disgust rolled from my stomach and snaked and tickled up the back of my throat, into my mouth, around my tongue. I would have cried out if I could. Instead I started to sweat, felt chilling drops of perspiration roll down my sides. I grabbed Toni by the arm, clenched her as tight as I could. She saw it then, didn't say anything, only clapped one hand over her mouth. A split-open dead goat stuffed with rice. Devil worship. Satan's followers. That's what they were, weren't they, what they had to be, this group? Was Liz the victim of this group's bizarre activities? Oh Lord, could they have cut her open, too, then drowned her? Oh my God, oh my God, that poor girl…

  From somewhere in a back room came a rhythmic banging, and Toni and I leaned to one side, saw a man come out of a back room. He wore a mask, of course, was naked from the waist up, his chest covered with thick gray hair. The same dragon tattoo on his arm. The whole works. Only he wore some feathers, red and yellow ones poked in his mask, and he carried a staff topped with a large full moon. Of medium height, he appeared not as young as the others. One of their top guys? Yes, someone high up. He came into the room, banged his staff twice. All of the others backed into a corner, and I understood. This was it. The ritual for which they had gathered was about to begin. Toni and I couldn't leave because we had to see just what they were up to, how far they would go, how awful they were.

  The guy with the staff banged two more times, and a man in a long black cape decorated with stars and moons entered the room. The obvious leader. All the others focused on him, watched his moves, and behind him came a figure, bouncing and swaying. A human being led into the room by two other men. My heart nearly exploded. It was a woman, pale and white, blond hair, figure full and bound in a plain white sheet, and she was twisting and kicking, trying to get away. Eyes huge, screaming fright, a gag drawn and tied tightly across her mouth. Oh, God, I didn't want to see anyone killed. I didn't want to see this woman sliced open like the goat. They wouldn't, would they? Could they? Yes, absolutely, because just then one of them stepped forward with a long knife and pressed it against her chin. Dark, rich blood immediately emerged from the woman's skin, then began quickly dripping down on the pure white sheet wrapped around her virginal body. There was a deep, guttural groan of approval from the crowd of men, and I understoo
d that they meant to shove aside the rice-stuffed goat, draw the woman up on the dais, perhaps gang rape her, and then maybe quarter her, either leaving bits of her down here in this abandoned building or throwing her into the great Mississippi.

  There was nothing Toni and I could do, not alone, not so outnumbered. We had to get help. We had to slip out of there, get to the car, to a phone, call 911. If we acted quickly we could stop all this, save this blond woman.

  I leaned forward, whispered as lightly and faintly as I could, my breath not much more than a wisp of air, “We have to get help—now!”

  She nodded quickly, and we pushed ourselves away from the wall, back toward the door and that big room. If only we could get out, escape this pit of darkness. I moved fast, too fast, for sure. I could have stumbled over a board, alerted the whole room of devil worshipers. But all I could think of was getting out of there, running back up those stairs, charging back into light and safety, finding a phone, notifying the authorities.

  We made it to the door of the large chamber. I glanced to the right, toward the doorway that led into the ritual room. Only glowing light. No person standing guard. Toni and I pushed on, hand clutching hand. They were chanting back there behind us, loudly now. Grunts and groans rising and beating in rhythm, beckoning the forces of blackness. We were about halfway across the large chamber and to the stairs up. Almost there. I could see the faint outline of the door to safety. That was when they did it, tore off that woman's gag. Or maybe she chewed through it in desperation. Whatever—we heard it, were stabbed by it, a piercing, knife-sharp scream.

  “No!” the woman shrieked and begged. “Please, no!”

  Toni stopped. What was wrong with her? We should have been flying out of there by then, soaring to the surface for help. But instead she froze. Were images of her sister grabbing her, holding her? Was Toni certain that Liz had perished thus and was determined now to stop this blond woman's death? Perhaps that was what gripped Toni and held her, what caused her to scream out herself, shout back at that room where they were about to do God knows what to an innocent person. She did it without even thinking, acting quickly, like a doctor trying something, anything, to save someone's life, pull them back from the brink of death.