Lake of Darkness

by Scott Kenemore

  Lightning and thunder struck Joe Flippity. He saw no flash and heard no report, but the effect was nearly the same. He looked up into the night sky, crowded with the reflected glow of the streetlights, to see if there were indeed thunderclouds above. All that came back out of the ether were Ursula Green’s words. One is two. Two is one.

  The thought inside his brain seemed so terrible that he feared if he spoke it loudly the universe might simply strike him dead—with real lightning, this time. Something in Flip’s soul told him to keep it clamped shut in an iron-tight lockbox.

  Tark and Sally looked on in concern.

  “Flip, what is it?” whispered Sally. “Do you think it’s Ed Nash instead of Rotney Nash?”

  “Yes,” Flip said slowly. “Yes and no.”

  “I don’t follow,” said Tark.

  The policeman took his eyes back down from the skies above Chicago. He spoke carefully and soberly, like a physician explaining a complicated condition to a patient.

  “In your act, Tark, you and your brother pretend to be one man. That’s how you appear across the circus tent. You let on like there’s just one Tark brother, but in actuality there are two. The trick works because no one in the audience is even thinking you might be a twin.”

  The magician nodded.

  “If I’m right, we have the reverse,” Flip continued in deadly serious tones. “Everyone acts like there are two Nash brothers—Ed and Rotney—but what if, really, there’s just one?”

  Now Tark looked confused.

  “Just which one?” Tark asked. “Cause we’ve met Ed, and we’ve seen a newspaper picture of Rotney.”

  “I don’t know the details yet,” Flip said. “But I can imagine a man who runs a respectable insurance brokerage during the week, but on the weekends likes to do things that would keep anybody from wanting to trust him with a policy on their life. So he decides to become two people. He’s Rotney Nash when he’s carousing at the Bucket, and he’s Ed Nash the rest of the time.”

  Tark looked halfway convinced. Sally, less so.

  “Wait. . .” Sally said. “That still doesn’t explain what Janice Collins saw. Or thought she saw.”

  “I’m thinking about that right this moment,” Flip told Sally, inclining his head like a man listening for a sound in the far distance. “In my experience, people with something to hide will spin a lie so that it can work both ways. So that it can work ‘just in case.’ I can imagine a night ten or so years ago. . . Ed Nash came home drunk as a skunk, after being out as Rotney. Maybe he was careless. Maybe he stumbled around the back of his house where that pretty young newspaper girl worked—tried to look into her window, even. And maybe the next morning he thought she might have seen him without his hairpiece on, so he made up a story. When he saw her again, he told her that a man with a divot in his head had attacked him. That it was a mugger. I’m still not sure, but it’s got to be something like that.”

  “This is all very strange,” Sally said.

  “Maybe so,” said Flip. “But I get the feeling it means we need to find Nash, and we need to find him right away. Mr. Hyde only comes out on the weekends, so I think we got to go arrest Dr. Jekyll.”

  When they reached the south end of the Levee District where you could still catch a cab, Flip used his policeman’s star to hail one and they piled inside. Flip pushed money into the cabbie’s hands and gave the address of Ed Nash’s neighborhood in the stinking shadow of the stockyards. The neighborhood only. Flip told the diver to stop at its edge.

  Flip said nothing more. He was distant, lost in thought. He was still turning over the strangeness in his head.

  “Why we ain’t go directly to his house?” the magician whispered after they had gone a few blocks.

  “Because that’s not how I choose to handle it,” Flip said, looking up at the stars above the city—smelling the lake and the hogs on the summer breeze. “Ed Nash is already under arrest. He was under arrest the moment I thought to arrest him. The only question is what makes him more liable to talk. More liable to tell us the truth about what he did. I could go to the station right now, come back with enough policemen to surround his house. Then we’d take him downtown and put the screws on.”

  Flip inhaled a bug or piece of pig mummified pigshit floating in the air. He paused to spit it out the side of the cab.

  “But that doesn’t always work,” he continued. “I’m thinking it might not work at all on a man like him. He’d just clam up. And I feel like what the mayor wants, really, is answers. That’s what I’d want, if I were mayor. If we’re not bringing in Durkin—which I don’t think we are—I got to be able to say why. So I want to make Mr. Nash explain himself to me.”

  The cab paused at the edge of the neighborhood. Flip directed the cabbie to press just a little further inside. The pig smell was strong now. The scent did not ease up overnight. Perhaps it never eased up. Maybe in winter, Flip mused. Maybe then.

  The surrounding homes were dark and quiet. Nobody was out on the street. Flip told the cabbie to stop at the end of Nash’s block, and then to turn around and leave the way he had come.

  On foot, Flip led the trio into a row of trees that grew parallel with the street and wound through different yards and properties. Flip seemed uncannily able to pass into shadow and become one with it. Despite being a tall man, he concealed himself so completely that Tark and Sally Battle found this ability to disappear positively disturbing. Tark was on the point of commenting upon it when Sally hissed: “Someone is liable to think we’re burglars and shoot us, creeping around like this.”

  “Then I’ll shoot back,” Flip said. “Now stay quiet. We’re almost there.”

  They were.

  The trees led to the edge of Nash’s yard. His house was visible only by the light of the moon; there were no streetlights close by. Flip remembered that a young woman rented the upstairs flat. He hoped she would not become involved tonight. With luck, she would prove a very sound sleeper.

  “There’s a back door to his place,” Flip whispered. “I mean on the first floor. I saw it when we were inside. If he’s going to run, that’s how he’ll do it. I think he’s too wide to fit through any of the windows. None of you saw other exits, did you?”

  Tark and Sally shook their heads.

  “Me either,” said Flip. “I’m going to knock on his front door and get in under a pretense. Sally, I’ll ask you to come with me. I think he’s liable to believe I have softer intentions if he sees a woman along.”

  It was too dark to view Sally’s reaction to this idea.

  “Tark, I want you to go around back and hold the rear door shut. It opens out. Place your foot against it. If he tries to run, you only need to buy me enough time to get back there. Understand?”

  Tark said that he did.

  They stepped out of the trees and into the darkened yard. Flip and Sally headed up toward the front door. Tark split off and picked his way around to the back of the house. Flip thought again of the young woman sleeping up on the second floor. His eyes traced the dark window panes above them. He looked hard but saw nothing, only blackness and reflected glass.

  Because his eyes were adjusted up, he and Sally were fairly close to the house before Flip chanced to peer into the darkened first floor windows. And he saw it immediately. A visage so close and clear that it seemed for an instant to be his own reflection. Ed Nash. Or Rotney Nash. Wearing trousers and a sleeveless white undershirt. Staring back out at him from the other side. Stone bald headed, and with a piece of his forehead missing.

  And he had been watching them, maybe the entire time.

  Flip opened his mouth to say something, but Nash was too fast. He disappeared like a ghost into the darkness. Flip heard his footsteps padding fast to the back of the house. Flip changed his course and broke into a run.

  “Tark, he’s coming your way!” Flip shouted.

  Flip raced around the side of the house. Sally trailed after him. They heard a crash and the sound of glass shattering. Flip r
eached inside his coat and produced his 1911. They turned the corner, and Flip swung his gun left and right, looking for a target. He saw nothing, not even Tark. Then he noticed the crumpled pile on the flagstones behind Nash’s back door. Glass was all around, and the door was ajar.

  Flip ran over.

  Tark sat up out of the pile. He was the pile. One hand still held the neck of the broken gin bottle. The other held his head.

  “You all right?” Flip asked, training his gun into the trees.

  A neighbor had heard the commotion and was turning on lights.

  “He came before I could get my foot on the door,” Tark said apologetically. “I was just having a nip for courage. Then the door slammed into my head and knocked me over.”

  “Where!” Flip cried, squinting into the darkened yard. “Where did he go?”

  Tark pointed into the trees, due east.

  “There, I think.”

  Sally approached. She placed her hands on her hips and clucked disapprovingly, then bent to help Tark right himself.

  Flip went immediately after his prey. He lunged into a sprint and disappeared in the darkness. His footfalls fell away and soon Tark and Sally heard and saw nothing more. Flip was like an eagle launching himself into the night sky. It chose not to silhouette itself against the moon. It chose not to show itself, period.

  Sally inspected Tark’s wounds. He had a small gash on brow where the door had connected with his face, but it was not deep. Other than that, he might only have some bruises.

  “Come on,” Sally whispered. “Stand up. You just got the wind knocked out a little.”

  Tark dropped the jagged neck of the gin bottle and rose.

  Moments later, they heard Flip’s quick, sharp breath and he came padding back out of the trees. He held his 1911 low, with two hands. There was nobody with him.

  Flip shook his head, answering no, he had not found Nash. He stared at Sally intently.

  “He didn’t come back here either,” she whispered.

  Flip suddenly became interested in the back door, creaking on its hinges.

  “Tark, you’re sure he brushed past you?” Flip said urgently, taking the magician by the shoulder. “He didn’t just bump you and run back into the house?”

  “No,” Tark insisted. “I saw him run that way.”

  Flip sighed in frustration and put his gun back into his coat. He opened the door with his foot and looked doubtfully into the dark house. There was no movement or sound. Flip saw no trace of Nash.

  “What do we do?” Sally asked.

  “Is Tark all right?” Flip asked, leaning in to have his own cursory look at the magician’s brow.

  “He’s fine,” Sally said. “Cut like that can be stitched right up.”

  “Come on then,” Flip told them, heading back into the yard.

  “To where?” asked Sally.

  “There’s a thousand places he might go,” Flip said. “But I know men like this. Men with double lives. In this situation? There’s one place I know he’ll go.”

  Flip took off into the night.

  Tark and Sally Battle looked at one another, then followed after.

  Flip walked quickly but did not quite run. He knew that Sally’s shoes and skirt were making it difficult for her. He also knew that nothing could be done. The woman would have to soak her feet after this, surely, but she could afford the Epsom salts.

  The stockyards were near now. The trio could hear low bayings in the distance. A night ocean of animals awaited.

  “Why don’t we find another cab to take?” asked Tark.

  “I don’t want to beat him there,” Flip said. “He sees that, he goes someplace else. We never catch him. I want to chase him into his hole. I want to be right on his heels. And I think that’s where we are.”

  They made their way deeper into the yards. The horrid smell increased.

  Flip had not made up his mind as to whether or not a cornered Nash would be dangerous. Many predators could be positively meek when you first met them, but then the claws would come out when things got underway. Many predators, but not all. . . Flip had not seen any real claws from Ed Nash. That he had fled was a good sign. His knocking over Tark had probably been an accident.

  They turned a corner and the walls of the stockyards rose before them. And there, in the distance ahead, at the center of it all, amongst bunkers and outbuildings just like it, was the garage of Rotney Nash.

  The air around them seemed to crackle. Not with electricity, but not with airborne pigshit either. The wind blew in hard off the lake, the way it should not. The strangeness might have come directly from the great body of water itself, or from another place entirely. Flip had the sudden sense that something else was present in the atmosphere above.

  Flip slowed his pace enough for Tark to ask, “Hey, what’re we gonna do when we get there?”

  “When we get there, I want you to look in,” Flip said. “And Sally, I want you to look out. That is to say, Sally, you keep an eye on the pens and the walls around us. You see guards, you go up to one of them. They’ll be less alarmed to see a woman. You go up to them and tell them to fetch the police. Tark, you watch the garage. You see Nash come out of there—out through a place where I’m not—you shout to me. You raise an alarm loud as you can.”

  Sally and Tark both nodded.

  “Otherwise, you both stay away,” Flip told them. “The rest of this is up to me.”

  “But what if he’s not in there?” said Tark. “He could be in any one of these buildings; there are hiding places all around us.”

  Flip said nothing. He lowered his stare. For a moment Tark believed the policeman was angry with him for having brought up the possibility. Then Tark realized why Flip was looking down.

  Just visible in the pig dust was a single set of footprints, hard to see in the moonlight, but not impossible. And they headed straight to the garage of Rotney Nash.

  Once again, Flip produced his 1911.

  “Just keep an eye on that garage,” Flip said. “You see him come out—and I ain’t directly on his heels—you start shouting.”

  Tark nodded and Flip moved off, stalking deeper into the pigyards.

  FOURTEEN

  Who was Nash?

  Who was he really, and where had he come from?

  Flip had to remind himself that most cities in America weren’t like this. Weren’t like Chicago. People in most towns—or in the Negro parts of those towns—weren’t all from elsewhere. You knew people’s mommas. Families went back generations and had reputations. Folks had roots.

  But Chicago was different. Migrating to Chicago was something anyone could do, and nobody questioned why you would do it. In many quarters, the only question was why you wouldn’t. What would have to be wrong with you to keep you planted where you were?

  Flip considered for the thousandth time that he might as well have been a sheriff in a frontier settlement out west, or a constable in a gold rush camp in Alaska. These men and women in Chicago . . . you had only their word on who they were and where they had come from. If you were lucky, you also had the word of a friend who had come up with them. But that was all you had. Chicago was a place where people began again. Where you could make or remake yourself as you saw fit. Anyone could.

  Including killers.

  Flip knew that if he shot Nash dead tonight he would never know who the man really was. That or anything else about him. If he killed him, then there would be no bargaining. No true reckoning of the facts in exchange for a lighter sentence.

  Flip’s goal was not simply to swat the bug. No. He wanted to capture this strange insect, put it under glass and study it. That, and only that, would kill the horrible mystery of why this thing was happening. To catch something like Nash and simply grind it into the pig dust underfoot? That would ensure only that the mystery lived forever. And Flip knew the wondering of it would probably give him nightmares for the rest of his days.

  Flip reached the door of the filthy garage and pressed h
imself flush against the edge. There were no windows into which he might peer, and no sure way to scale the side of it. The only thing to be done was open the door—either all at once or gradually. If Nash were indeed within, Flip could imagine no way that he could easily escape.

  Flip kicked the door hard and shouted.

  “Mister Nash, you need to come on out! Chicago Police! Come out, and no harm will come to you! When the other officers arrive, I can’t promise you’ll get the same deal.”

  At first, there was no response. Flip heard only the nearby hogs in their pens. Then a very singular sound arose. It started as a kind of mechanical ‘pop,’ then built into an omnipresent hum. Soon it became lower and quieter, until it almost could not be heard at all.

  Something inside the garage had just been turned on, Flip realized. Some kind of machine.

  Flip’s initial concern was that the metal door to the garage had been electrified. Yet that did not feel right. A standoff hardly seemed like Nash’s plan.

  Flip kicked the door again, and no electric shock coursed through him. He risked a pound with his fist and got the same result.

  The deep, quiet hum continued.

  Concealing himself partly at the side of the garage, Flip gripped the base of the metal door tightly with his free hand. He lifted it slowly at first. Then, as the door gained momentum, he threw it upwards all in a rush.

  In Flip’s experience, there were good cops who went in fast, and bad cops who went in fast, but no good cops who went in slow. Either you knew what you were doing (or acted like you did) and you went and did it . . . or else you lingered and the bad guy got away.

  Accordingly, Flip would allow himself only the quickest glance around the corner of the garage before bounding inside. In that glance, he saw the darkened, filthy garage interior, looking much as it had earlier in the day. He saw an empty couch, an empty mattress on the floor, a pile of papers, and a mound of empty glass bottles. Yet he saw no person or persons; no telltale glint of eyes in the darkness.