Revels Ending

by Vic Kerry

  “Can’t you wait a few minutes before drinking that stuff?” she asked. “You’ve got the place stinking like scalded coffee.”

  “Sorry. I need my jolt first thing in the morning. I have to get my hair on my head.”

  She took the pancakes off the griddle. “Looks like it did that itself.”

  He laughed sarcastically. With his hair standing out everywhere, Cybil thought he looked cute, like a little boy. His face bore some stubble as well. She liked the way he looked in the morning. Making breakfast for him might be something fun to do in the future as well. He pointed his coffee mug at the TV.

  “What’s on?” he asked.

  “Local news. I wanted to catch the weather for the rest of week. You might get a vacation, but I’ve got to go to class and work.”

  He pointed again. “That’s Detective Semmes.”

  She looked at the screen. A picture of Semmes levitated in a box above the newscaster’s shoulder. It was a younger photo and looked like something that the police department might have in his personnel file. His name was written underneath the box. She turned up the volume.

  “The body of Mobile Police Detective Alexander Semmes was found at the entrance to the Outlaw Convention Center’s parking deck this morning. A guard walking the perimeter stumbled upon the body wrapped in a tarp at about five a.m. There is no official cause of death, but the police suspect foul play,” the newscaster said.

  “That can’t be right,” Ashe said.

  Cybil heard the strain in his voice. He must have been working hard to keep from sounding overwhelmed. She looked at him. His mouth stayed gaped open. Cybil put some eggs, bacon and a couple of pancakes on a plate. She handed it to Ashe.

  “Let’s eat,” she said.

  “How can I do that? He’s dead.”

  “You’ve got to eat,” she said. “I know it’s tough, but I’ve got a feeling that this isn’t the last we’ll be dealing with this.”

  All they needed was for Ashe to get arrested again. Semmes helped him out last time, or so Ashe had said. Cybil didn’t like nor dislike the police officer. He’d helped out at her apartment break-in, but seemed obsessive and intense.

  “That voice message is coming true,” Ashe said.

  Cybil had thought about that no sooner than the newscaster had announced the death. She started to worry about herself. If someone could get to Semmes, who was a hard-boiled egg, how easily could they get to her? She thought about her parents’ place in Florence up in Lauderdale County. Breaking her vow to never return would make her mother the winner, but being so stubborn that it might get her killed accomplished nothing as well.

  “Maybe I should think about visiting my folks for a while. You could go with me,” she said.

  “I’m not sure Daddy and Mommy would like me too much, and anyway if this person is trying to get to me, he might follow me there and do things to your family. I won’t risk it.”

  “We have to do something. I feel like a sitting duck.” She tried hard not to yell or carry on.

  “I do too, but I don’t know why they picked me of all people to come after.”

  “Let’s eat and try to come up with something.”

  Ashe sat at the computer in his office at the university. He didn’t spend his time working on critiques of student theses. Instead, he stared at pictures of grisly murders. Someone out there wanted to kill him for some unknown reason.

  Someone knocked on the door. He looked up to see Rogers standing there. The psychologist’s usual demeanor was jovial. Today he looked stoic at best, deeply saddened at worst.

  “You look like you lost your best friend,” Ashe said.

  “No, but I’ve got more bad news for you,” he said.

  “Am I being arrested again for something? Because I have a watertight alibi for where I was last night during that time.”

  “Janie Hack is dead.”

  “The one who’s been working with you on emotion research?” Ashe asked.

  “The same one. She died of unknown causes,” Rogers said. “It’s a shame because I was training her up to be my shadow when I left the university.”

  “Detective Semmes is dead too. They found him out near the bay,” Ashe said.

  “That’s the cop who was helping you try and find out what happened to Marianne?”

  “Right. Now he’s dead, and I’ve been getting threatening voice messages about how everyone around me is in danger,” Ashe said.

  “Things are getting tougher. I’m going to call Peter to come over and talk with you some more,” he said.

  “I’ve talked to Father Smalls enough. I don’t know if he can help me; maybe he can help you. I mean your protégée just died.”

  “Nonsense. I don’t want you committing suicide and the amount of stress you’ve been under makes you a prime candidate for that. I know how to handle this kind of thing.”

  Ashe shook his head. “I’ve got someone out there trying to kill me. I don’t think I need to help him along.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Peter about this paranoia,” Rogers said.

  “It’s not paranoid if it’s true.” Ashe turned a yellow legal pad around for Rogers to look.

  He’d written out the names of all the people who he knew had died of mysterious reasons recently. He even included Carol Heinz from Birmingham and Harold Conner from Natchez. He circled the names of the people directly connected to him in red, and the ones only vaguely so in green. The stolen engram recorder was listed in blue on the bottom corner of the page. Rogers looked down at it.

  “A little late for a Christmas list, isn’t it?” Rogers asked.

  “The ones circled in red are the mysterious deaths I have a closer connection with. The green circles are people who I have no connection with but that I’ve interacted with. All of them are dead or presumed dead.” He looked at Rogers. “Strange how I’m a central figure, don’t you think.”

  Rogers took a blue pen from his pocket. He circled several of the names. Then he took a pencil off of Ashe’s desk and circled a few more names.

  “Same dead people,” Rogers said. “I’ve circled the ones directly connected to me in blue and the ones vaguely connected with pencil.” He wrote Janie Hack’s name down and circled it with blue ink. “I’m just as much a target according to your logic.”

  “You haven’t run into two supposedly dead people at Mardi Gras parades either,” Ashe said.

  “Have you?”

  He pointed at Conner’s name and then Heinz’s. “I met him at a bar. Smalls was with me. Cybil and I met her downtown.”

  “Harold Conner is dead?”

  “Probably. He’s a missing person from Mississippi.”

  “Cybil knows what that woman looked like. You’ve shown her a picture of the woman on the video walking out of the Birmingham morgue?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “How do you know that you’re not mistaken? Eyewitness testimony is very unreliable, although people don’t seem to think so, and a missing person isn’t necessarily dead.”

  “You think I’ve made it all up?”

  “No, of course not, people have died. Supposedly dead people have walked out of the morgues, but I don’t think you’ve met Carol Heinz or Harold Conner at Mardi Gras. Think about it, Ashe. What I’ve said is rational.”

  Ashe thought for a minute. Anger stirred in his belly. The woman from downtown was Carol Heinz. He could remember everything about her face when he’d seen it in Birmingham. Smalls had been with him when they met Conner, but that man called himself San Roman. Could the priest be wrong? Was he just making things up in his mind? Rogers waited with his cool, poker-face eyes.

  “Maybe you’re right. It just seems like a lot of people around me have died lately,” he said. “I guess I want to make them fit together.”

  “That is what hu
mans do. We strive for a gestalt view of things. If you don’t believe me ask Peter, he’ll tell you the same thing. Half of what his research is on deals with people dreaming up phenomena.”

  Rogers stood up. He pulled the small emotion-recording device from one pocket and the cranial electrode pads from another. Ashe still felt angry but now it wasn’t for having his own irrationality pointed out to him. He was angry because he’d been so irrational. Scientists were supposed to have better grips on reality than that.

  “Mind if I get a recording off of you?” Rogers asked. “I haven’t gotten a sample of non-clinically-induced confusion and self-doubt.”

  “Always the scientist.” Ashe lifted his bangs up off of his forehead. “Go ahead.”

  Rogers leaned across the desk. He pressed three of the pads to Ashe’s head. One toward the right temple, another in the middle of his forehead, and a third at his left temple. He felt a little tingle as Rogers turned the machine on. The tingling stopped. Rogers took off the pads, pulling a little bit of hair with the one positioned at the left temple. Ashe rubbed where the hair was torn from.

  “Think that’ll do it?” he asked.

  Rogers shrugged. “I’ll look at the pattern compared to induced guilt, but I have nothing on self-doubt at all. I’m anxious to run this and see what I get.”

  “Not a very large sample size,” Ashe said.

  “When dealing with something like self-doubt, a case study might be in order.”

  “I’m not going to be your personal guinea pig, Dr. Rogers. I don’t like wallowing in self-pity.”

  Rogers smiled. “I hope that’s not what you’ve recorded on this thing. I have more of that than I know what to do with. I recorded the entire Auburn University football team the day after they lost homecoming to UAB. Self-pity off the charts.”

  “I might get that joke if I followed football,” Ashe said.

  “You ought to. It’s a great game, and your alma mater has had a pretty good team the last few seasons. Mine hasn’t.”

  “Remind me again of where you went to school?” Ashe asked.

  “Duke University. I’m a Blue Devil through and through.”

  “Oh yeah.” Ashe had known Roger’s alma mater all along. “I guess you need to switch to basketball. I hear they’re pretty good at that.”

  “Ha, ha.” Rogers pocketed his machine. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  Ashe turned back to his computer search. One of the pictures from Jack the Ripper’s murders looked back at him. The prostitute’s neck had been sliced open. According to what he read, the attack was so violent that her head was almost cut off. The face of the victim changed to that of Marianne. He saw her body in that photo. Then it morphed to Cybil.

  He typed a new address into the web browser. A search engine pulled up. He searched for the lecture he’d assigned his graduate students before he had gone to Birmingham. Two sites pulled up first. He clicked the link that took him directly to that professor’s website. When he tried to download the MP3, he received an error message about the file being temporarily unavailable. Clicking back, he went to the other hit. It brought up a friend-share site, but the MP3 loaded from there with no problem.

  The file began to play. Ashe leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The professor’s voice droned out of the computer speakers. He couldn’t believe how boring this was. From all the talk he’d heard about this guy, he’d expected a lot better. No wonder his students had complained in previous classes about this lecture. Marianne had volunteered to listen to it this semester because she knew that he was a bit overwhelmed with a new introductory class he was building for the next semester.

  The recording hiccupped. Ashe opened his eyes and looked at his computer. The line that pulsed up and down with the voice moved with the rhythm of the speech. Another hiccup and the recording stalled. He clicked on the play button, but nothing happened. Then the cursor changed from a pointing finger to a twirling hourglass. Ashe moved it along, trying to get the computer to do something else. The screen went blank.

  “Great,” he said. “Just what I need.”

  He banged on the side of the monitor with his hand. As if this were the magic touch, the screen flashed back on and the line of the media player started to move again. Instead of the lecture, harsh electronic chords came through the speakers. Then a manic drumbeat followed by the thumping of bass. Lastly, a bad guitar riff started. Ashe dragged the cursor over the media player. A white box popped up. Inside were the words Goth Sox: Pink-Striped Hair scrolling across in black letters. Now he noticed that another version of the song was playing beneath the first. He hit the stop button, and the music ceased.

  Ashe switched back to the lecture and tried to get it play again. As soon as he hit the play button, the Goth Sox song started playing back at the same point he cut it off at. He hit the stop button again, and pushed away from his computer desk. He snatched up his telephone and hit the speed dial for Rogers’ office. When the psychology professor answered, Ashe asked him to go ahead and call Smalls. Apparently, he needed the priest after all.

  Security Camera: Beauregard Hall, ATU, 3:23 p.m. CST

  A few students stand near a metal railing that has several bicycles attached to it. They smoke. The wisps of smoke disappear quickly in the gray nothingness of the grass. A tall, broad-shouldered man approaches them. They do not seem to give him a second thought.

  He taps one on the shoulder. When that student ignores him, he twists the student around. Hands fly up as if the student is surrendering. The cigarette falls to the ground. A thin twist of smoke escapes from it during the plummet. Now the student gestures toward the building with his whole hand. The broad-shouldered man points to the building with a single finger. The student nods.

  The large man asks a question. The student answers and for extra emphasis holds up all the fingers on one hand as if talking to a little kid. The man pats the student on the shoulder, turns and stiffly walks up the sidewalk toward the entrance to Beauregard Hall.

  The student snatches a cigarette from the lips of one of his compatriots. He takes a drag off it, and then puffs, blowing smoke like an old steam locomotive.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cybil hurried down the fifth floor hallway. Her backpack was slung over her shoulders, and her arms were burdened with several reams of paper. One of her other bosses had sent her to the campus bookstore to pick up several printouts of the manuscript he was working on. The bookstore usually boxed up those kinds of things, but not this time. Her luck had doomed her to rushing around with loose papers stacked in the right order. The copy people hadn’t even stapled the stupid things together.

  She turned the corner that led to the south hallway. Her shoes, slick from walking over a mopped floor near the elevator, nearly slid out from under her. This hall always made her a little bit nervous without having the extra burden of a few manuscripts. The baseboards and moldings in this hall were scrolled with strange-looking creatures that resembled goat men. Supposedly when the school had been a military academy well before the Civil War, this floor was devoted to the humanities and especially ancient languages and history. She’d been told the goat men were satyrs from Greek mythology, little gods of mirth. They made her feel creepy not jovial.

  Dr. Milton’s office came up on the left. Cybil kept her balance and skidded to a halt just inside his door. The old professor looked up at her and pointed for her to put the stacks of paper on his desk. She did so without being told twice. The muscles in her forearms jumped and quivered now that they were free from the burden.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “No, thank you. I hope these aren’t stapled,” Milton said.

  “No sir they’re not, and every page should still be in the right order.”

  “Good, good. You can go.”

  Cybil wasted no time. Dr. Milton’s office smelled like old man, an
d it bothered her just a little bit. She wondered what Ashe was up to and if he might want to grab a coffee or something. For some reason, the professors ran her ragged today. She started down the hallway toward the side staircase. The route took her past Rogers’ office, which she would have rather avoided, but the spiral side staircase was closer than walking to the other side of the building for the other set of stairs or elevators. As she passed his office, she saw that the door stood slightly ajar. Even though an encounter with the psychology professor was the last thing she wanted, Cybil stopped by the door. Rogers never left his door closed when he was in his office, but he never left it ajar if he was gone.

  She stopped and listened. No sounds came out of the office, but then there was clatter, a huff, and some under the breath cursing. She almost pushed the door open to make sure there were no burglars, but then she thought about her own apartment and what might have happened to her if she’d made it home earlier. Instead she listened closer. Rogers spoke, and someone answered. She didn’t recognize the voice, which wasn’t a big shock because there were lots of students at the college. However, this voice sounded too deep and old to be a traditional student.

  “How stupid do you have to be coming here?” Rogers asked.

  “I had no choice in the matter; I received orders to fetch you. Things require your attention,” the other voice said, sounding clipped and forced.

  “I’m busy,” Rogers said. “Tell him that I have other important business to attend to, and that he’ll have to wait.”

  “Why should I?” a third voice said.

  The third man spoke in a raspy voice that demanded respect. Something about the accent set Cybil’s teeth on edge and made her stomach flop. It didn’t sound artificial like the other, but sinister.

  “It’s your business I’m trying to get organized,” Rogers said.

  “My business is your business as well,” the foreigner said.

  “What is it?” Rogers asked.

  “We need more emotional recordings. We lost one the other night when John Balby died,” the man with the forced speech said.