Chalk Man

by Tony Faggioli

  At last, Napoleon spoke. God bless the little children, he said, his voice quaking with emotion.

  Chapter 26

  Parker awoke the next morning to the ringing of his cell phone. It was the station house. He normally didn’t work Saturdays, but every day was a workday until the Henson case was solved. He noticed that he was alone in bed; Trudy had probably gone to the gym after checking the beer count in the fridge, which she would’ve been pleased to see remained at four.

  “This is Parker,” he answered, in a voice hoarse with sleep.

  Murillo’s voice came over the line. “Hey, man. It’s me.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We got a problem over at Ava Thomas’ house.”

  Parker immediately sat up. “What’s going on?”

  “Neighbors called it in. They say she’s wigged out. Spent almost the whole night screaming and yelling. One went over to check on her this morning, said she’s covered in blood.”

  “What the—”

  “I know. Klink’s already on his way. Can you join him?”

  “Shit. Of course,” Parker said, jumping out of bed and heading to the closet.

  “Cool. I’ll let him know.”

  Then, remembering the girl in the hallway at The Hotel Clarke, Parker said, “And Murillo?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You tell him, flat out, not to go into that apartment without me, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  Twenty minutes later, Parker pulled his Camaro into the parking lot of Ava Thomas’ complex and parked it between two police cruisers. His clothes were clean, but he hadn’t showered and his mouth felt funky because he hadn’t even taken the time to brush his teeth.

  Klink was waiting twenty feet away, both of his hands on his hips as he spoke to a lady in her mid-forties, who had long gray hair and a face full of worry. Evidently, it was one of the neighbors.

  “Hey,” Parker said as he walked up.

  Klink nodded his way. “Hey.” He immediately jerked his head toward Ava’s apartment door. “We need to get in there.”

  Leaving the older lady behind, they walked side by side to the door.

  “Do we know what the hell is going on?” Parker asked under his breath.

  “Not in the least bit,” Klink answered.

  Once they were at Ava’s apartment door, they each took a position on either side of it and Parker knocked. The door was slightly ajar and opened a little all by itself. “Ava?” he shouted. “It’s Detectives Parker and Klink. With the LAPD. We spoke with you about Charlie Henson earlier. Can we come in?”

  No answer.

  “Ava?” Klink yelled louder this time.

  Still, nothing.

  Parker bobbed his chin at Klink. Just in case she had a weapon, they both drew their guns. Then, they pushed open the door and went in.

  The inside of the apartment was alarmingly dark, with only the early morning light to work with as it was filtered through the living room blinds. It took a few seconds for their eyes to adjust. Shapes began to be defined: the couch, a chair on its side, the coffee table broken down the middle. But no Ava. He scanned the room again and this time he was able to pick out a blanket, a water bottle and . . . when Parker finally saw her, he wished he hadn’t.

  Ava was balled up in the corner of the living room, silently rocking back and forth, wearing nothing but her underwear and the Adidas hoodie she’d been wearing the night before. But it was her legs that Parker noticed most.

  Evidently Klink did, too. “Dear God . . .”

  Starting at her ankles, moving up her calves and across her thighs, her legs were cut up with what looked like words and letters. As they crept closer, they could make them out: DARk. HarmONy. LONEly. LieS. WanT. NEED. The words were the dark red of dried, clotted blood.

  The same dark red stain was on both of her hands, one of which was folded up beneath her chin, the other lying limply on the floor, the fingers open and cradling a bloody box cutter.

  So. She’d evidently done this to herself.

  Her eyes were open but locked in a vacant stare.

  Parker cleared his throat as they moved even closer. “Ava?”

  She began whispering something, over and over. Four words. But he couldn’t make them out.

  “Ava? What are you trying to say?”

  Her eyes darted at him and then away again, like a wounded bird. More whispers, of varying incoherency, until she managed: “Not a good time, not a good time.” She looked around the entire apartment with a panicked gaze, as if she were expecting something to come out of nowhere, before she locked eyes with Parker and repeated the words in a deliberate, forceful cadence. “Not. A. Good. Time.”

  “It’s okay, Ava. We’re here now. You’re safe.”

  “No!” she screamed. “He’s going to come back. He will.”

  “No one’s going to come back, Ava,” Parker said, as he carefully holstered his gun.

  In all that Parker had seen in his life—in war, in the Fasano case, with Güero Martinez—nothing, absolutely nothing, frightened him as much as the sick and haunting smile that Ava Thomas gave him upon hearing his words and the look she gave them that followed it.

  “Her eyes,” Klink whispered.

  Parker nodded. They were filled with madness. One thing Parker knew for sure: everyone had an inner cliff to their own sanity. And it was obvious that Ava hadn’t just gone over hers; she’d taken a triple-flip, Olympic-sized dive off it. As he grew closer, he looked at more of the words she’d carved into herself. LiAr. BeLIEve. L/Hate. Love Too Late. Surrounding them all were a string of profanities, written in all different sizes.

  Then, as if the threat had suddenly passed and it was time to talk about the weather, she added serenely. “You know, he says I can never have children now.”

  Flat words. Empty of emotion. Still, somehow, weighted with despair.

  He did not know why, but her words hit Parker like gut punch. He could only manage one word. “What?”

  She smiled with a face so full of resignation that it almost colored her teeth. “What? You need it be any clearer? He said it to me. He did! Then? He made me hurt inside, real bad. And now I don’t think I can ever have babies.” She pushed her cheek against the wall as tears welled in her eyes. “Isn’t that great?”

  Something in Parker shifted. He had seen and heard a lot of horrifying things in his days, but this was pushing into new ground. It left him not only speechless but also scrambling in his mind to reconcile what he was feeling. He wanted to gather Ava into his arms and tell her that everything was going to be okay. But that would not only be unprofessional but also a lie. Because he knew no such thing and he could make no such guarantees.

  “Who did this to you, Ms. Thomas?” Klink asked firmly.

  She rolled her eyes. “You know who, silly.”

  “No, Ms. Thomas,” Klink said. “We don’t. Who?”

  She looked at them both and gave another tormented smile. “Chalk Man, silly boys,” and her chest heaved at the words.

  Klink looked at Parker with stunned disbelief on his face. Parker was afraid that he’d failed to reflect the same look to Klink. Because, well, he wasn’t surprised at all.

  “Can you believe it?” Ava said. She dropped the box cutter and held her cut hands out in front of her. “I’ll never get to hold a baby?”

  Again, Ava’s words hit Parker hard. He wanted to scream at her to shut up. To tell her it was a lie, told to her by an agent of lies, who worked for the Prince of Lies. But he couldn’t. Because her eyes and face, her whole bloody body and even the entire apartment were drenched in evil. He could feel it. The bastard had come here and engulfed the place in it and taken his rage out on a girl that was barely a woman.

  He was seething. And the seams in his mind, sewn there after months of therapy to hold the rage and his own inner madness in place, began to tear. No, he told himself. Not here. Not now. Sometimes, it was okay to compartmentalize. Do so now. Box it up. Open it l
ater.

  She pointed at the box cutter on the floor and stared at the blade. “He’s the one that did this to me, you know. He kept saying the words and then making me write them.”

  Box it up. Open it later.

  “I always wanted to have kids, ya know. Get married.”

  Box it up.

  Her lower lip trembled violently. “And now what?”

  Open it later.

  Klink quietly kicked the box cutter out of Ava’s reach.

  “Ava,” Parker said, his voice calm and even. “It’s going to be okay. Calm down.”

  She began to cry. “I told him I could grab a piece of paper, ya know. That I could draw the words for him instead, if he wanted. But no.” Her elbow was planted on the floor and her hand began to dance like a swan with a deadly sharp beak. “He said that no red was better than blood and that this way the words would be permanent. That it was my punishment for not doing the drawings.”

  Klink’s voice sounded like he’d had enough. “What are we gonna do?” he whispered harshly to Parker.

  Again, shaking his head, Parker tried to hold him at bay. “What drawings, Ava?”

  Whimpering, she turned away from them, took the hand that was under her chin and slowly, almost like a sloth, began writing something on the wall using her fingers, which Parker noticed were now ground to the nub, covered with chalk and blood. Just like Ms. Herrera had described her son’s hand. How? Parker glanced around, looking for another chalkboard. There wasn’t one.

  Taking a deep breath and looking quickly away from Ava’s hand, Parker forced himself to assemble the scene. The wounds on Ava’s legs were almost completely clotted. It had been about twenty-four hours since they’d last seen her and he was willing to guess that she’d done this to herself not long after they’d left. But the blood on her fingers was fresh. When he looked back to the wall, she’d finished writing. She’d written two words: OF HER.

  “Her? Who are you talking about, Ava?” Parker asked.

  She began to sob.

  “It’s going to be okay, Ms. Thomas,” Klink said a little too soothingly. “We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?”

  Ava Thomas didn’t look very sure of that as she suddenly glanced at the bedroom door.

  Eyes could point as well as fingers.

  There was a trail of blood droplets on the carpet from where she lay now and the bedroom.

  Parker drew his weapon again and aimed at the bedroom door. Klink, completely startled, did the same.

  “What the hell, Parker!” he mumbled. “Did you see something in there?”

  “No. But she looked that way and I didn’t like the look. Cover me.”

  “Wha? Shit! Hold on . . .”

  But Parker was all about clearing a room as quickly as possible. He’d learned the hard way, lost more than a few good men who hadn’t done so, and he was livid with himself for getting so enthralled with Ava that he’d failed to move quicker. He wasn’t going to lie; he’d had the corner of his eye on the mostly closed bedroom door the short time that they’d been there. But now, it was time to make sure.

  He took two steps when Ava suddenly said, “He wanted me to draw someone named Sacniete.”

  Parker paused in stunned disbelief.

  “He said they used to be in love,” Ava continued, her eyes going to and from some far-off place. “That’s a pretty name. Sacniete. I looked it up. It means ‘white flower.’ He wanted me to draw her. He said it would help him get to her. But I said no.”

  “Parker? What the hell is she talking about?” Klink asked.

  But Parker ignored him. His attention was back on Ava. “Why?” Parker said, quickly glancing her way with his gun still pointed at the bedroom door.

  She giggled for no reason, then grew serious again. “Because with a name that means white flower? I think that’s the name of a nice person. And he was a mean person. I could tell. Mean to the core. So, I told him I wouldn’t do it because I didn’t believe that she loved him. And that’s when he did this to me.”

  Klink crept up next to Parker, then they each took a step opposite the bedroom door.

  Ava Thomas caught her breath between a few sobs. “Can I ask you a question, Detective Parker?”

  Parker put his right hand out to motion for Klink to hold his position. “Sure, Ava. What is it?”

  “Do you believe him? Do you believe that I can’t have babies?”

  Box it up.

  He couldn’t.

  It was the way she said it that did it to him again; that brought out in him some paternal instinct that he did not know he had. There was something so special about this girl. So jaded and yet so . . . innocent somehow. So overwhelmed by the world and yet so unknowingly, unwittingly equipped to completely conquer it. Parker wanted to protect her, and yet even more than that, he wanted to be front and center when she discovered that she needed no protecting. That she was a force completely unto herself. He was bewildered by his feelings and at the same time desperate to give her an answer right now, some level of assurance.

  His mouth was dry and he was about to try and answer her when Ava’s face twisted up and she began to seize. The tremor began in her left arm and then whipsawed into a full, grand mal seizure right before their eyes. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her tongue began lolling about. Parker thought of trying to jump down and reach a finger in, to keep her from swallowing it, but the way her jaw was clenching open and closed he was afraid her teeth would come down and bite his finger off.

  Klink began screaming for the medics, which was premature, as they hadn’t cleared the apartment yet. “We gotta move, Parker!” he said, and as if to affirm this fact, he motioned his head firmly to the bedroom door.

  The footfalls of the paramedics were approaching as they charged the bedroom. Klink led high, with his right shoulder, and Parker followed low, just behind him.

  The bedroom was square, with a mattress on the floor with two pillows twisted up in a sheet and comforter. A low nightstand was to the left of the bed and had a dome lamp on it, which was lit. There was also a taller corner lamp, which was also lit. Both added to the natural light coming in from the window over Ava’s bed.

  Parker’s eyes registered two things that were odd right away. Painters paper was all over the floor, with dozens of chalk sticks, some fat, some skinny . . . and all the walls were covered in . . . art.

  Chalk art.

  The world went sideways on him. How?

  And that’s when Parker noticed that all the walls of Ava’s bedroom were covered with chalkboard paint.

  At first, it didn’t register. Something about all of this was insane, and yet something about it made perfect sense.

  His mind began to connect the dots. When they’d first come to visit Ava? There’d been an art textbook out on the table. And a notebook. No. He realized now that the dimensions were off. Not a notebook. He should’ve recognized it for what it was: a sketchbook. He’d surmised she was a student, but now, looking at her bedroom, it was obvious that she was an art student. They hadn’t seen into her bedroom before, so they never could’ve never known. Looking at the walls now, he could see the overlapping work of various murals that was probably her work: a misty Chinese landscape; a nearly 3D image of a pond covered with lilies; and a beautiful woman with a back tattooed with a cherry blossom tree, partially turned and looking over her shoulder at the viewer.

  Around, and sometimes even over, some of these images, were nightmarish scribblings of ghastly creatures, hellish hillsides, and letters and words in what appeared to be dozens of different languages. Everywhere the eye looked there was something, with hardly a bare patch of wall that was not covered with them. And in some places, there were the blood streaks from Ava’s fingertips. In one, just inside the door and next to Parker’s head, he could see that she’d drawn so frantically that she’d broken a nail off. It was stuck like a bug in the bloody chalk smear.

  But one wall was different. It had been sloppily wiped cl
ear, the original image below distorted in frantic smears, and was now covered by a series of six squares filled with Mayan drawings and outlined in red chalk.

  Klink could barely speak. “Shit,” he whispered.

  The room had knocked them both completely speechless.

  As the paramedics reached the entry of the front door, one of them called out. “Clear?”

  Parker tried to speak but his voice jammed. He tried again. “Clear!”

  As the mad scramble of medical help took place out in the living room, Parker and Klink walked the walls of the bedroom in opposite directions.

  “Parker . . .” Klink said. “What’s all this about, man?”

  Parker shrugged and was about to reply that he had no damned idea when something on the floor caught his eye.

  He knelt and picked up a small pamphlet that had a credit card receipt stapled to it. On the receipt was printed: SPACE 147.

  When he read the pamphlet, his heart sank as it all came together.

  Parker spoke the words softly but firmly. “I think I know where we have to go next.”

  “Where?” Klink said. As he walked over, Parker turned to him and held up the pamphlet.

  It was for the annual Pasadena Chalk Festival.

  Chapter 27

  They were in the car, with Parker driving, and heading to the 5 Freeway when Klink spoke up. “Why are you so sure that we need to go to this sidewalk chalk festival?”

  Parker was stuck in a bad place. He wanted to say, “Well, Klink . . . where the hell else do you think a demon that goes by the name of Chalk Man would find a better place to wreak havoc than a chalk festival?” But he couldn’t, obviously. So, he hoped he could sell a little feigned self-doubt and said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this but . . . I’ve just got a hunch.”

  “A hunch?” Klink replied flatly. He wasn’t buying.

  Parker pulled onto the 5 Freeway North and merged into traffic. He could only muster a “Yeah.”

  “Did that hunch have anything to do with how you reacted in that hospital room with Joey and his mom?”

  Again, Parker, be careful. Napoleon was back, leaning over from the backseat off the car, his chin on his forearms like a kid.