Revels Ending

by Vic Kerry

  “I guess that’s nice of them. It would be stressful to have to go to school with that going on.” Ashe opened his toolbox and looked inside. Everything seemed to be in its place. “What have you done to the recorder this time?”

  “I’m not sure. It does not want to download the data into the computer. When I put it into the USB port, it tells me that it cannot read the device.”

  Ashe closed the top of the toolbox. “That might be a software issue instead of a hardware one. Have you consulted the programmer?”

  “It’s not that. I have the software on several computers. None of them will recognize the thing. It’s down in my office. Come on and I’ll show you.”

  He and Rogers headed downstairs to the psychologist’s office. A fan blew the air in the room around. Papers on Roger’s desk fluttered. It looked like the psychologist had been working all night for several days. Beside the untidy stacks of papers on his desk, empty potato chips bags littered the floor and empty soda bottles sat here and there. Looking at him a bit closer, Ashe thought Rogers appeared tired, although he didn’t show typical signs like dark bags under his eyes.

  “Been burning the midnight oil?” Ashe asked, setting his toolbox down on a Zapp’s Crawtators bag.

  “I’m working on a deadline, a very important deadline.”

  “Working on a grant?” Ashe asked.

  The door to Rogers’ lab opened. A man with black hair swooped into a pompadour walked inside the office. A scar ran from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his mouth. He smiled and revealed small white teeth.

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” he said with a strong accent.

  Ashe looked from the man to Rogers and back to the man. He felt butterflies in his stomach again. Cybil talked about a man with an accent threatening Rogers. He only half believed that Rogers might have been conferencing with a strange fellow. Even when she said that Rogers had told her that people needed her to mind her business, he thought it was just Rogers being a douche bag. The man walking toward him with the less than friendly smile didn’t look like any professor Ashe had ever met.

  “You have no reason to be afraid of me, Dr. Shrove. I won’t hurt you.” He held out his hand to Ashe.

  “I’m not afraid,” Ashe said, taking the man’s hand. It felt very soft like it belonged to a person who had always kept it in a glove full of lotion. “You just startled me; that’s all.”

  “My name is Mikal Czernobog. I am a business associate of Dr. Rogers’.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call us that,” Rogers said.

  The increasingly unnerving smile turned to the psychologist. “I don’t know. We have a deal. I did some chores for you and now you have to do some chores for me.”

  “Listen, just give me the engram recorder, and I’ll get it fixed,” Ashe said. “I don’t want to have any more involvement in your agreement than that.”

  “Dr. Shrove, I was hoping that I could convince you to lend me your services as well. It seems that our dear friend Dr. Rogers is very clumsy with your device. He seems to break it frequently. I need better and quicker results. You show much technical genius. How quickly could you make five more of those devices?”

  “The full contraption? About three years,” Ashe said. Although Czernobog made him very uncomfortable, he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “The engram recorder isn’t something that I’m set up to mass produce. It is a delicate instrument.”

  “But if I could provide a facility and ability to mass produce it, how long?” Czernobog asked.

  “That’s not possible,” Ashe said. “It’s far too sensitive for that kind of work. Each one has to be handmade.”

  “I can provide the hands,” the other man said. “How long?”

  “Can you provide the expertise in engineering as well?”

  “You do not understand, Dr. Shrove. I have unlimited resources at my disposal.”

  “Almost unlimited,” Rogers said.

  Czernobog cut his eyes toward the psychologist. The smile disappeared, replaced by a look that Ashe couldn’t describe if he had to. The air in the room almost became electric. Ashe took the chance to snatch the engram recorder that lay on the desk. He dug into his toolbox and got the tool he needed to fix it. As the other two stared at each other like gunfighters in some Old West movie, Ashe finessed the mechanism. It looked like the other one had. Rogers or this guy had been using the recorder to broadcast emotions out. He closed the mechanism back into its plastic shell and replaced it on the desk.

  “I’m done,” he said. “I suggest that you use the recorder for what it is designed to do, which is record and download onto a specific program, not playback on something else.”

  Czernobog turned back to Ashe. “Is there nothing I can do to convince you to work with me? I really need more of those recorders as quickly as possible.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ashe said, “but I’ve got enough trouble right now without dealing with the KGB.”

  “KGB, indeed,” the Russian said and laughed. “I have nothing to do with that organization, but I am sure you will come to see things my way, Dr. Shrove.” He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and brought out a black business card with silver lettering. “Take this and call me. You can ask any price.”

  Ashe looked at Rogers, but the other professor made no eye contact. He took the card and stuffed it into his toolbox. Without saying another word, he left. As Ashe walked down the hallway, he heard Czernobog.

  “Do that again, ever, and you will experience wrath like you cannot imagine.”

  He tucked the toolbox under his arm and wasted little time getting to the stairwell and out of the building.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Noodles bobbed up and down in the boiling water. Cybil flipped the ground beef over in the pan as it sizzled. Every time she turned the meat, it broke into smaller and smaller pieces. Father Smalls read in the spare bedroom. He’d gone in there almost as soon as Ashe had left to go back to the college. Cybil had been a little bit worried that if the priest was some kind of killer he might come after her during that time, but he hadn’t done anything since then. She popped her head in to see if he wanted anything for supper. He had said it didn’t matter much, that anything was better than the food in jail. She decided to make spaghetti, one of the only things she knew that she made well enough to serve to other people.

  Some of the grease from the meat popped on her arm. She hated when that happened and let the meat simmer in its own fat. The jar of marinara sauce sat on the counter beside the stove. She grabbed it and tried to open it. Her hands slipped around the slick metal lid. She tried again using the tail of her shirt to cover her hand but had the same result.

  “Father Smalls,” she yelled as she took the jar and headed toward the spare bedroom. “I need your help opening this jar. My hands are too slick.”

  Cybil rounded the corner from the dining room into the living room. As she did, the jar slipped from her hand and hit the floor. It bounced on the carpet and rolled under the couch. A scream caught in her throat. Three large men stood in the living room. The front door hung open, and the cool February air came in. The largest of the men moved toward her. His movements were stiff like something automated instead of alive. The scream finally escaped.

  The door to the spare bedroom flew open. Father Smalls rushed out. He stopped short almost toppling over his own feet as the smallest of the three men turned on him.

  “What’s going on?” Smalls asked.

  Cybil couldn’t answer. She turned and ran back into the kitchen. It sounded like Smalls threw something. Then she heard a meaty thump, and somehow knew he’d either been killed or knocked unconscious. She ripped open the silverware drawer looking for a knife as the largest man lumbered into the kitchen.

  “You are to come with me, Cybil Fairchild,” he said with a voice as artificial as his walk w
as.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She pulled a paring knife from the drawer and swiped at the man. He knocked her hand away, and the knife clattered to the floor. His hand closed around her wrist. Cybil reached out and grabbed the frying pan of sizzling meat. She flung it at the man. The half-cooked ground beef flew through the air. It splattered on the man’s face and slid down. Although his skin blistered, it didn’t seem to faze him.

  Terror locked down everything inside of Cybil. Never had she been this scared before. It all seemed unreal. She fumbled with all her effort to grab the pan of boiling noodles. The man jerked hard on her arm. Her hand fell on the hot eye that the frying pan had been cooking on. She squealed as her skin burned.

  “We have to go. No more of this.”

  As she drew her stinging hand to her stomach, he pulled a cloth sack from his pocket. He tugged it down over Cybil’s head. Everything went dark, and she smelled a tangy smell like alcohol mixed with some kind of strange fruit. Her head swam. Vertigo overwhelmed her and then nothing.

  Something wasn’t right. Ashe knew it deep down inside of himself. It wasn’t just nerves from the meeting in Rogers’ office. There was something seriously out of whack. The traffic on Azalea Road moved along faster than it usually did for that time of the day. He usually avoided using that street except late at night or early in the morning, but it was the shortest route back home. Ashe wanted to get there without the usual twisting and turning through Mobile’s side streets. As he got closer to his neighborhood, a plume of dark black smoke billowed up over the pines and green leaves of the live oaks. It looked like a storm cloud descending from the blue sky. The next block, a stretch that included a gas station Ashe frequented because they had cheap coffee, brought him closer to the smoke.

  The feeling of dread and anxiety overpowered him. He ran the red light at the intersection where he turned onto his street. The smoke was definitely from his block. The tires squealed as he turned onto Boleyn Court. The street was clogged with fire trucks and police cars. The red and blue lights flickered and strobed on the neighborhood houses. Ashe stopped his car so hard that he hit the steering wheel. He didn’t turn it off as he jumped out and ran toward his house or what was left of it. The smoke billowed up from the little square of property that he’d bought when he started at Alabama Tech. Flames lapped the sky at the rear, which would have been somewhere around the kitchen. The firefighters sprayed water over the front of the house. He stopped when a police officer stepped in his path.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t go any farther,” the officer said.

  “This is my house,” he said. “I live here.”

  “Detective,” the cop yelled. “Here’s the owner.”

  Cooper, wearing a long raincoat, hurried over from a group of police officers. She pushed past the cop that had stopped Ashe and stuck her hand out to him.

  “We meet again,” she said.

  He took her hand and shook. It seemed strange to shake hands at an event like this, but he didn’t know what else to do.

  “Yes. This is my house.”

  “I understand. When I heard this fire come over the radio, I hurried over. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “I would like to ask a few too.” He pushed past her and closer to the house. “Like where are Cybil and Father Smalls?”

  Cooper followed him. She put her hand on his shoulder with force to slow him down. “There wasn’t anyone inside, as far as the firefighters could tell. A neighbor called the fire in not long after it apparently started, but it burned really fast.”

  “My friends, Cybil Fairchild and Father Smalls, were there when I left.” He looked toward his small garage that he didn’t use, but that Cybil’s Vespa had been parked in front of. The scooter was not there. “Her Vespa’s gone. Maybe they left to go somewhere.”

  “Actually, they moved the scooter away from the house in case the fire jumped to the garage. They didn’t want it exploding and causing more problems. The same neighbor that called in the fire told the first officers on the scene that something like a moving van came up before the fire.”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything to be delivered.” Ashe stopped. “Father Smalls said that Archbishop Harrington was supposed to bring by some books he had confiscated.”

  “Do you mean the head of Mobile archdiocese?” Cooper asked.

  “I guess. Is there more than one archbishop in Mobile?” Ashe asked. “I have no idea. I’m not Catholic.”

  “I think we might need to go sit in my car and talk,” Cooper said.

  “Why? My house is burning down, and you want to talk.” Ashe almost started to cry.

  “Please, I think this might be just part of the worries you need to have right now.”

  He looked at the detective. Her eyes were serious but concerned. Something weighed on her mind. He nodded and followed her to a white Ford Escort. She motioned for him to get in on the passenger side. Ashe walked around and sat in the car. Cooper slid under the steering wheel. She turned the car over and fastened her seat belt.

  “Where are we going?” Ashe asked.

  “Away from here,” she said. “I think you’re in a lot of danger.”

  Ashe wanted to roll his eyes. Everyone kept telling him that, but not until he saw everything he owned and still loved eaten by fire had that idea hit home.

  “Really?”

  The car maneuvered past a few police cars and was free to accelerate the rest of the way down Boleyn Court until it made a U-bend and turned into Seymour Place. Cooper kept her eyes on the street. Ashe kept his on her.

  “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

  “No, but I need to keep you close to me for your own protection.”

  “Sounds like protective custody to me,” he said.

  “You watch too many cop shows. The description of the van your neighbor gave matched the one on the surveillance video at the Outlaw Center.”

  “What are talking about?”

  “It was the same van that Semmes’ killers used to dump his body. Now you’re telling me that the only thing that you expected to be delivered was from the head of the Archdiocese of Mobile.”

  “Do you think that whoever came in that van, took Cybil and Father Smalls?”

  “I think they took Cybil, but I think your priest friend was in on it.” Cooper turned onto Azalea Road. “Remember I am investigating the murder of Amanda ‘Hortense’ Moore. I was never convinced that Smalls didn’t kill her. By the way, clever how you got that lawyer to say that you were his associate.”

  “That was his idea, not mine.”

  Ashe felt guilty. He hadn’t trusted Smalls enough to leave Cybil alone with him, but he had. Now, she was gone and might end up like Hortense and Marianne. Smalls was some kind of sociopath to use his position as a priest to do such things.

  “I’m going to take you up to a safe house in Saraland. We use it to keep suspects protected. You have to do a few things for me though. Don’t answer your cell phone unless you get a text from me telling you to.”

  “They can’t trace a cell phone to a location,” Ashe said. He knew it was possible but didn’t figure that Smalls had that kind of technology or savvy. “What about my job and clothes? What about Cybil? Are you going to try and find her?”

  “We’ll use whatever leads we can. Right now the only thing we have to go on is a dead end that Semmes was looking at.”

  Ashe wrung his hands. “What is that?”

  “A parading society called the Mystics of Mayhem. Apparently, he thought they had something to do with your fiancée’s disappearance from the morgue. He found the location where they were building parade floats, but never found any kind of evidence. We’ll get a warrant and search the place.”

  “How long will that take?” he asked.

  “Not long, when we have a possible kidnapping w
ith all these strange murders and other strange things going on.”

  He hoped that would be the case. As soon as they found Cybil, he planned to get her and get out of the area. His cousin lived in Memphis. That wouldn’t be too far to get in a quick amount of time, until he could figure something else out. He settled back into the seat and looked out the window as the detective drove onto the interstate. The afternoon light started to fade more and more. The sky across the bay began to turn an indigo color. He hoped they’d get to Cybil before nightfall. Bad things happened at night. He’d known that since he was a kid and listened to campfire stories and ghost tales. Now it seemed he was involved in his own horror movie.

  Everything was dark, but Smalls was awake and aware. He and his kidnappers had been driving a long time. They had stopped at one point not long after he regained consciousness and unloaded Cybil. Then they moved on. After the stop and go traffic of the city, the vehicle drove a long while without much stopping or slowing down.

  Smalls assumed he was being driven into the countryside. He didn’t think that the kidnappers had taken the interstate because the road noise hadn’t sounded like that. This made him happy because he wasn’t being dropped off in the delta north of the city to be left to the mercy of the alligators, who would still be moving about even in the winter.

  The vehicle began to slow. It stopped. He heard the door slide open, and a hard breeze gusted into the van bringing cool air. A pair of strong hands grasped him under the arms. He felt the helpless sense of being heaved up and out. The sack over his head jerked off as he flew a few feet and crashed onto hard-packed sand. Smalls looked up in time to see the door to a white van being pulled closed. The van turned and sped away tossing sand into the air. Bits of the stuff landed on him. A few grains entered his eyes. He tried to reach around and wipe them, but his hands were secured behind his back by what felt like duct tape. Smalls blinked hard and tears welled up, making everything a blur.

  As he waited for his vision to clear, Smalls sat up and took in the things around him using his other senses. The wind felt not only cold but damp. The smell borne on it was musky with brine. The scent smelled stronger than the breezes that blew in off the bay on his walks around downtown. The air even tasted salty. Not that far away he heard the ocean washing up on the shore. The bay didn’t have waves like that and the delta or a bayou wouldn’t have waves at all. Finally the sand exited his eye, and the tears started to clear out. Although the sun had almost slipped down the horizon, he could see enough to know where he was at.