Lake of Darkness

by Scott Kenemore

  “A regular, then?” asked Flip.

  “Drops by every time he’s in town,” Sally replied with a nod.

  Graf ’s driver lifted his head from his newspaper and looked up the street. The marching reformers had grown closer. (They had become hoarse from the effort of singing now, and transmitted only soundless expressions of disapproval. They seemed to dare any of the men on the street to spit at them, throw bottles, or take a swing. Their temerity was not surprising. They were emboldened by a string of recent successes. These were men and women who felt sure that history was on their side, not to mention holy providence. There had to be a hundred of them. To Flip, it gradually seemed less a parade, and more an invading gang.)

  “I thought it would be enough for these people when they got the Levee District shut up,” said Sally. “But it looks like they were just getting started. Now they want more. I never thought they would make it to my part of town. But here they are.”

  Flip rubbed his chin philosophically.

  “Folks say temperance is going to solve everything,” he said. “They say that if men won’t drink, then they won’t beat their wives. And they won’t be greedy or lustful or gluttonous neither. They won’t want to commit any crime at all. You combine that with this war we got going now—people calling it ‘The War to End War’—it sounds like pretty soon there won’t be any problems at all. No vice. No war. None of it. This new world is just a few months away, if you believe these people. And look at their faces. They do believe it.”

  Sally gazed down into the sea of reformers.

  “You and I will be out of a job,” she offered with a smirk.

  Flip shook his head.

  “But see. . . something tells me—something deep in the back of my head tells me—my job is completely damn safe,” he said. “Yours too. Something tells me ain’t a damn thing gonna change. That there’s still gonna be war and drink and gambling and sporting girls. That you can move the pieces around, but you can’t take ‘em off the chessboard.”

  Sally smiled a very beautiful smile. The reformers drew nearer, their lanterns burning bright in the warm Chicago night. A few directed their gazes up to look at the Negro man and woman on the raised, railed porch of the brothel.

  Flip and Sally looked right back.

  “You want to come inside the parlor and wait?” Sally asked after the reformers had passed.

  “All right,” Flip said.

  “Can I take your fireplace poker?” the madam asked.

  Flip smiled as he shook his head no.

  For nearly an hour, Flip sat in the gilded lobby of the Palmerton. Sally Battle’s favorite color was green, and everything inside seemed to be trimmed in either glittering gold or deep emerald. Green tapestries hung from the walls. There was gold-plated piano in the lobby’s center, with green ferns upon it. Gold spittoons had been placed in the corners. Flip sat on a couch hidden partially by an Oriental screen, all green and gold.

  Sporting girls walked by from time to time. They were some of the most beautiful women Flip had ever seen. He smiled at them perfunctorily, but his eyes looked through them like ghosts. He understood acutely that he would not rise further in the world by flirting with any of them. And that going upstairs with any of these women —which, due to his long friendship with Sally, would have almost certainly been on the house—would only give them power over him. It would mean that he had a weakness; that they had something he wanted. And wanting—Flip understood—was the only real weakness in the world.

  Flip smiled politely, sat alone, and accepted nothing more than a glass of water.

  In addition to girls, Flip also watched men pass through. Some of the most powerful Negro men in the city—and a couple of whites, too—made their way inside. These were movers and shakers known not just along South State Street, but throughout Chicago. Most assumed that Flip was employed by the brothel as additional security. One very senior gentleman in a red suit wandered awestruck through the door, gazed in wonderment at the finery around him—then looked to Flip and asked “Where do I go?” Flip smiled and nodded to the lounge adjacent.

  When an hour was close to up, Sally reemerged.

  “Your conjure woman due to materialize soon,” she said, gazing at a grandfather clock with clover hands that stood beside the door.

  “I expect you’re right,” Flip responded, rising to his feet and snatching up the poker.

  Wordlessly, he reached inside of his coat, felt around for an envelope, and came out with five hundred dollar bills. Sally’s mouth opened as Flip pressed them into her palm.

  Her expression of surprise was complete. Had the policeman finally, after all these years, decided on purchasing services for himself?

  She vanished the bills into her décolletage with a quickness that would have impressed Drextel Tark.

  “What-”

  “You just keep an eye out,” Flip said.

  “For. . .?”

  “For anything I might want to know about,” Flip said to her. “You done me right for a while now, Sally. That there’s long overdue.”

  As Flip began to exit the brothel, Sally cocked her head to the side.

  “Flip. . .” she called, still confused. “Is everything all right?”

  Flip saluted her silently with the fireplace poker, and closed the door behind him.

  Back behind the Palmerton, Flip made his way down the crumbling staircase, reached the basement door, and pounded on it hard.

  This time, a voice came from within. A dead voice like a tear in space and time.

  “Whoever knocks, open up. . . it’s unlocked!”

  Flip peeled back the door and ducked inside.

  The shadowy, low room beyond looked and felt like an abandoned machine shop. It was a large space with no dividers, crowded-full of broken furniture—half of it covered with sackcloth, as though it would soon be moved or stored. The room had no windows, and the walls beyond the sackcloth shapes showed a perfect, utter darkness. A surreal aisle of light ran down the center; tiny lanterns with single taper candles had been carefully placed to either side of a long Armenian rug. Fifteen paces along this illuminated aisle was a wooden table. Resting upon the table was a shape about the size of a human head, covered with a thick, velvety cloth, utterly black. To one side of the table was a bare, backless wooden stool, and to the other, a very old rocking chair.

  In the rocking chair sat Ursula Green.

  Ursula was sexless. Genderless. Raceless. Ancient almost beyond life itself. Flip didn’t like to look at her, not directly. He had to force himself whenever it came time to meet her cataract-clouded eyes. Looking at her was one thing, but hearing her talk? Up close? That was what he truly found near-to-unbearable. That was what physically hurt. Hurt his mind. Hurt his soul. Hurt something in his very sense of decency.

  Flip made his way down the aisle. The rug crunched softly beneath his feet. Ursula said nothing and did not move as he approached. She looked dead. Another man might have felt himself practically alone. Yet Flip knew he was being carefully watched.

  Flip had difficulty telling exactly how high the basement ceiling was (he had never been able to see it), and so he always ducked a little as he walked. When he reached the table, he sat carefully on the wooden stool, keeping himself hunched. At the same moment, the black cloth was pulled away. A gibbous crystal sphere was revealed underneath. Reflected tips of lantern-light swam inside it like shimmering goldfish, exploring its irregular angles.

  Ursula Green seemed too inert and lifeless to have possibly moved the cloth. If Flip had not seen it happen before, he would have looked for a tripwire, a contraption, something—anything—to take the credit. But it was now the withered claw of the old woman that held the cloth, like a gnarled tree branch that had grown around it for decades.

  Flip got himself situated.

  The witch was very still; her breath detectable only insomuch as it disturbed her beard. When she did move or speak, however slightly, it felt to Flip, again—as
with the movement of the cloth—as though the source must have come—could only have come—from somewhere else in the room. That a separate creature hiding behind one of the shadowy sackcloth shapes had jolted her. That a master puppeteer moved her. That electricity had shocked the corpse into a momentary simulacra of life. For it could not have been her own will or energy.

  Could not have been.

  And yet he knew, hideously, that it was.

  Flip placed the heavy fireplace poker on the table in front of Ursula, directly beside the crystal ball with its swimming light-fish. Then he reached into his pocket and retrieved the long, thin splinter covered in the blood of the Whitcomb boys. He took out the few inches of evergreen shrub from the alley where the Washington twins had been found. These, too, he placed before the silent, ancient being. Then he fished out the shoe polish tin containing the oily dirt from where the Horner twins had been decapitated. He placed this tin on the table as well, leaving it unopened.

  But he was not quite finished.

  Flip dipped into his coat with a thumb and a single finger. He fiddled within the envelope until he’d counted ten hundred-dollar bills. These he withdrew and carefully set on the table before Ursula.

  “There is more than usual tonight,” Flip said to the witch. “This is not one case; it is four. Or rather, four cases that are connected, I believe. You’re going to need a bigger table, with everything I’ve brought.”

  The crone’s clouded eyes moved to the objects set before her with the jerky tic-tic-tic of an automaton.

  “That much money, I expect I can afford a new table,” she finally pronounced, her voice like a claw down a chalkboard.

  Flip looked and saw that the stack of bills had already disappeared.

  Ancient and essentially dead, Ursula had still secreted them away with the same speed of Drextel Tark or Sally Battle.

  Somehow.

  And now the ritual began, and the old woman began to run her timeworn hands over the objects set before her. To Flip, it was like watching a department store window-dresser positioning a mannequin. The arms were stiff and did not flex as they should. The fingers did not bend. They seemed not really to feel. Ursula was rigid as though she were made of wood.

  Flip watched carefully. Did the woman linger on one item longer than any other?

  “These are new. . .to you,” she finally pronounced, each word like a cutting dagger. “You only come here when your trail is cold, Joe Flippity. You only visit me when you’ve tried everything else. But you just picked up this scent. Therefore, you are in haste.”

  “I have a week to make progress on the case,” Flip told her. “I need all the help I can get.”

  Flip took the envelope with the photos of the crime scenes out of his pocket. He knew they would be nearly impossible for anyone—much less Ursula—to see in this gloom, but it still felt important to make the presentation. Flip had never understood precisely how Ursula Green’s gift worked, only that it did. He did not know what was necessary to show her or to tell her during these visits, so he erred on the side of everything.

  The old woman never grasped a totem and spouted the name of the murderer, rapist, or thief—true—but her answers, however oblique, had an uncanny way of helping Flip to think about things he’d not yet considered. Always, it seemed, her words ultimately led him to the resolution he sought. (Would he have thought of these same case-breaking connections eventually, on his own, and without her? That was a question which haunted him, and upon which he never could make up his mind.)

  Flip had been coming to see Ursula for nearly ten years. During that decade, Ursula had seemed never to age. Sally Battle said that Ursula was now 105. This would make her old enough to have known Jefferson and Adams—if not quite George Washington himself. Sometimes 105 looked about right to Flip. Other times, it seemed she could simply be a rough 80. The perspective, the amount of light in the room, it all changed his opinion from moment to moment.

  Flip carefully held up the photographs and told Ursula about each one. He left out no detail. Because he did not know which notes charmed the snake, he played them all.

  When he was finished, he returned the photographs to his coat and waited. Before long, an answer came.

  “You don’t know any twins,” Ursula said. “You have no skin in this game, Joe Flippity. You have no skin at all.”

  Flip smiled. He was unfamiliar with the expression, but understood immediately what it meant.

  “To the contrary, my skin is the reason I have the assignment,” he told her. “This is a killer who kills Negro twins. Child Negro twins, Ursula. Think about that.”

  “A white man could stop that killer, same as you,” Ursula said.

  “But I stop this killer. . .”

  Suddenly, just as the she had begun to seem—from her speech, at least—human for a moment, she fell away into the unearthly. The distorted cackles that spewed forth to interrupt the policeman were not normal human laughter, or even like a machine built to imitate human laughter. They were closer to the wild HONK HONK HONK of some giant, marine animal, whose nauseating utterances are only called “the laughter of the sea” because no other words in a terrified mariner’s vocabulary exist to characterize such awful cries.

  When her paroxysm had finished, Ursula drew breath like a broken bellows pulling through a wax-clogged nozzle.

  “Do you really think you will change things for anyone in this city? Whose word do you have on that? The word of a man who always lies?”

  “I. . .I. . .” Flip managed.

  That was how Crespo had described the mayor, but as much could be said of any politician.

  “You think you can guess what is happening here,” Ursula asserted, waving a rigid stick-arm at the items on her table. “You have no idea what is happening here. You have no idea what any of this means.”

  Flip said nothing. He squinted unnecessarily in the darkness, trying to guess what the witch wanted him to understand—trying to guess what might bring her closer to pulling some useful clue out of the ether.

  “What is a twin?” the old woman asked through a hiss and cackle.

  Flip smiled from the corner of his mouth, but stayed silent.

  “Buy heck it!!!” the crone cried so loudly that Flip started and the stool beneath him shook. (This phrase was one of Ursula’s favorite expletives; Flip understood only that it indicated frustration—generally with him.) “Tell me what a twin is! Tell me!”

  Flip sat straight.

  “A twin is a child born at the same time as another, from the same womb,” he said. “And identical twins—which most of these are—are ones who’re born looking exactly like the other.”

  “And are they the same?” Ursula pressed.

  “Not inside,” Flip said after a pause. “They have their own characters. Personalities. Inside themselves, they’re different people.”

  “But their bodies . . . are they the same?” pressed Ursula.

  “It sure looks that way,” Flip conceded.

  The witch shifted slightly in her rocking chair.

  “You have no twin, Joe Flippity.”

  Flip relaxed a bit.

  “I mean, not that I know,” he agreed. “Not that my mamma ever told me.”

  “But there are worlds where a man with your skin walks and lives,” the witch insisted, raising a brittle, paralyzed finger to make her point. “There are other worlds all around you. When you saw Sally’s girl tonight . . . the one with the patch. . . some part of you thought to ask if it was disease from a man’s prick that had rotted the eye out of her head, or a fist that had beat it out. You nearly said something . . . but you did not. And yet, in another world, there is a man—a you—that did. Do you understand?”

  “But I didn’t say something,” Flip maintained. “And how do you know about that?”

  “There are other worlds where you have other souls, Joe Flippity.”

  “There. . .” Flip trailed off. “Can I meet one of these other me’s? Woul
d I like him?”

  “A man may meet his physical twin,” Ursula hissed. “Does it not then come that he may meet his other soul?”

  Flip took a deep breath and let his eyes scan the endless ceiling of the dark, dingy basement.

  Redirecting the conversation with Ursula could be something of a challenge.

  Flip slumped his shoulders forward and stared at the crystal ball in the center of the table.

  For a long time, he said nothing.

  “Ursula, do these items tell you anything about my case?” he asked after a pause. “Is there anything I should know? Or are you just gonna talk about ‘the other me’ wondering if an eye was lost to violence or syphilis? If you can’t see anything right now, that’s all right. I don’t blame you for having a bad night. Everybody does.”

  For a few moments, nothing more. The elderly woman was still.

  “Your answer is right here,” she said.

  “Here, in the items on this table?” Flip asked.

  The witch’s eyes moved, tic-tic-tic.

  “Right here,” she hissed. “The one you seek. . .it is right here, in this very place.”

  Ursula leaned back in her chair and turned away.

  After a time, Flip knew she would say nothing more.

  SIX

  He took the fireplace poker but left the other totems on the table in front of Ursula.

  Back around the front of the Palmerton, Flip saw that the beer baron’s touring car had departed. Up on the balcony, three sporting girls were relaxing and smoking, but they were none that he knew. One gave him a polite, collegial wink. Flip waved back with the poker.

  Flip stepped out into the street and headed due southwest, to the top floor of the three-flat where he lived. As he walked, he asked himself the “who” questions in his head.

  Who would want to kill twins in general? Who would want to kill young black twins in Chicago specifically? Who would gain from it?

  Then he had a thought: Maybe it wasn’t just in Chicago.

  There were newsagents in the Loop where you could buy newspapers from New York, San Francisco, and everywhere in between. Maybe there were other beheadings in other cities that had not been kept out of the papers.