Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  As they climbed the stairs out of the basement back onto the street, everything felt a little new and different. It took Lia a few seconds to realise where the feeling was coming from. She had stepped over another threshold. She knew what using a gun was like and that theoretically anyone she met could be carrying a weapon.

  Lia’s initiation into a group of people previously foreign to her had begun.

  There were people who could draw a gun and shoot it. There were people who could take another person’s life.

  27.

  ‘Crazy,’ Theo said.

  He said it as carefully as he could, pronouncing the English as precisely as he knew how. C-r-a-z-y.

  No answer came. But just now Theo Durand didn’t feel like he had much to lose. He had to say it out loud.

  Crazy. The man who had brought him here was stark raving mad. He didn’t look mentally disturbed in the beginning, but there was no doubt now.

  Maybe Theo had noticed something in the man’s eyes, a flash of some frightening otherness, because at first he had hesitated to go with him. Then that otherness had come out later, in his eyes.

  Theo was thirsty. The heat made him sweat. He could feel how his entire body was struggling to retain moisture, but the penetrating heat was winning. He perspired constantly, even when he was lying on the floor motionless.

  This constant, terrible thirst. The man had given Theo water once. Theo wasn’t sure how much time had passed. He had slept a couple of hours, maybe three, but a day might have already passed since the man brought him here.

  Theo had inspected his cell. At first he didn’t even dare move around, but as time passed and no one came, he began roaming the cell. He tried the bars, attempting to bend them, but they didn’t budge.

  The worst was the silence. And the darkness. No sound came from anywhere, which meant that the walls of the building were thick, and the only light shone dimly from somewhere behind the bars.

  And then there was the camera flashing high on the wall. Theo looked at the camera. With his lips he mouthed the silent word at it.

  ‘Crazy.’

  The man had to be there, on the other side of the camera. If not constantly, then some of the time. He had to see. He had to be there watching, because the only thing Theo could imagine to explain all this was that it aroused the man.

  He had taken almost all of Theo’s clothing at gunpoint, along with his shoulder bag, phone, everything. All he had left was his underwear.

  Theo’s chest glistened with sweat. He could just barely see in the dark room. The man had to be there somewhere looking at his half-naked body through the camera.

  Because if the man wasn’t there watching, what did he want?

  That was too frightening to contemplate.

  What did he want? Thinking about that made his gut clench.

  Theo hadn’t recognised the danger immediately, not after that first flash in his eyes. The man had behaved so calmly. Spoken so easily. Chatted like anyone might. What brought Theo here? the man had asked. Where was he from? Just think, the man knew the 17th Arrondissement of Paris, had walked the streets where Theo lived. What was Theo looking for here? Maybe a specific building, one of the town’s many attractions?

  They had smiled together at the situation. Theo at his confession, knowing he seemed simpler than he was, part of the stream of tourists that poured through this place every day. But the man had said he came here for the same reason, to go to the same place.

  Theo had still been smiling when the man brought him to this dreary building and urged him to step inside. What a squalid place. Could this be where everyone talked about? Theo had thought in confusion. And Theo had smiled, because he knew the man had also brought him here to offer sex. He didn’t intend to agree, not so easily. Theo didn’t do that – but it was exciting if someone suggested it.

  The proposition never came. The man took out a gun. Theo hadn’t smiled now in more than a day.

  Theo jumped at a noise. Someone was close. Had he fallen asleep again? Who was it?

  He saw the man behind the bars. In his hands he carried nothing. Thank God he didn’t have a gun.

  What did he want? Did he want sex now, after subjugating him, after wanting him, after holding him prisoner? Was this what turned him on? What did he want?

  From the darkness a small paper bag appeared. Theo heard a soft rustling as the man opened the mouth of the bag and set it on the floor where Theo could reach it through the bars.

  ‘What’s in it?’ Theo asked.

  He had to get the man talking. You had to get crazy people like this communicating with you. Otherwise things could go badly.

  ‘Eat,’ said the man.

  Swallowing, Theo stepped closer to the bag. In the darkness he tried to see what was in it.

  Something powdered, like slightly damp sand. A little lumpy.

  A syrupy smell came from the bag, and a sound escaped Theo’s mouth. It wasn’t a word, it was a release. Theo let out a yelp, evidence to both of them that he was completely at the man’s mercy.

  ‘Crazy,’ Theo said, moving away from the bag, as far away as he could get from the man.

  ‘Eat,’ the man said. ‘You aren’t getting anything else.’

  ‘What’s in it?’ Theo asked.

  The man looked at him. Dear God what eyes.

  ‘Eat,’ the man said.

  Theo pulled back against the wall, pressing against its filthy surface. His legs started giving way. The man was a lunatic, keeping him here as a prisoner, only giving him some powder for food.

  Then the man left. Theo heard quick steps, and then somewhere a door opened.

  Theo screamed. No words came out, but sound did. He screamed his horror out.

  The door closed, and he was alone again. Crazy.

  28.

  Everything had changed in Mari’s flat.

  When Lia stepped into the hall, she saw immediately that the lady of the house was on her feet and had been for some time. The lights were on in every room, and the bedroom door was open. Music echoed from somewhere. Hard rock, familiar sounding.

  Suddenly it was switched off. Mari had noticed her arrival.

  ‘Hi.’

  Mari looked different as she entered the hall. Not completely different from before, but something had happened. Mari’s gaze moved quickly, and she avoided looking directly at Lia.

  ‘Good to see you up and around,’ Lia said.

  ‘I’m halfway better,’ Mari said.

  Nothing more needed to be said. Lia understood the rest.

  Leaving her jacket in the hall, she followed Mari into the living room. Everywhere were stacks of books, printed papers, opened newspapers and magazines. Mari was researching something.

  Mari sat on one of the wide windowsills. It was like a long bench, with space for Lia too.

  Lia pulled her legs up under herself Indian style and looked at Mari, who had a pen and notebook next to her. Mari had been listing words, with lines drawn in between.

  ‘Paddy taught me to shoot,’ Lia said.

  ‘Good.’

  Lia had expected a little more, a more interested reaction. Nothing came.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

  A moment passed before Mari replied.

  ‘Mark Chapman.’

  Mark Chapman. The man who killed John Lennon.

  ‘The day Chapman shot Lennon, he had been waiting for him a long time,’ Mari said.

  She continued talking for a long time, and as she did, Lia’s blood went cold. Mari spoke of strange, frightening things. Things it was hard to understand existed and about which she didn’t really want to hear.

  In 1980 Mark Chapman was twenty-five years old, a kid from Texas who had set out to see the world, an insecure drop-out and part-timer with mental health issues. He had attempted suicide. Since he was a boy he had entertained all sorts of fantasies, including talking to imaginary people. For years he had been obsessing over things, for example Dorothy
from the film The Wizard of Oz, The Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon.

  On 8th December 1980, Chapman spent hours waiting outside Lennon’s New York City flat. For some time he had been hinting to acquaintances that he felt like his life was out of balance and he might do something alarming. He was bitter at Lennon, whom he idolised, for what he saw as hypocrisy: in public the star talked about the poor and unfortunate of the world but he lived in the lap of luxury himself.

  Chapman shot Lennon four times in the back on the street. After the murder, Chapman gave several interviews. In them he repeated thinking he was the protagonist from The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, who hated hypocrisy. One passage in particular from the book touched Chapman: Caulfield imagines himself as a saviour who has to catch children to protect them – to save their innocent souls from the hypocritical future of the world.

  ‘People have always wanted to believe Chapman,’ Mari said.

  People wanted to believe the murderer’s explanation for killing Lennon, that Chapman was mentally disturbed and thought he was someone else.

  But the facts said something else, Mari said. Chapman had thought about killing several other celebrities. He had visited New York earlier the same fall, intending to kill Lennon then too. He told a lady friend about his dark fantasy before he acted it out, although he claimed he was giving it up. On the day before the killing, he assaulted another famous musician, James Taylor, and talked to him about Lennon.

  In addition to a pistol, Chapman prepared for the murder and set the stage for it by purchasing a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. After the murder he remained at the crime scene reading the book, which he also quoted to the police.

  ‘He wasn’t a madman with no idea what he was doing,’ Mari said.

  Chapman was an extremely distressed person who wanted to do something big to alleviate his distress and get famous. He used Lennon and The Catcher in the Rye to do that, forevermore linking himself to their fame.

  ‘Actually Chapman’s goal wasn’t just to kill Lennon. He reported thinking that day outside Lennon’s building that what he was doing was wrong and wanting to leave. Killing Lennon was just a tool for him to destroy something big, to make himself great.’

  ‘Why have you been researching John Lennon’s killer?’ Lia asked.

  ‘Because this guy is doing something similar,’ Mari said. ‘He’s just doing it on a larger scale. Those ten black videos – I realised yesterday that we’ve overlooked a crucial fact.’

  The killer had gone to great pains planning his actions. The black videos, the places he snatched his victims, the taping of the killings, the precise editing of the videos. Everything had been done with planning and precision.

  ‘For people like that, every detail matters. And not just the things we notice. He probably has reasons for all sorts of things we don’t even realise we’re seeing.’

  The killer started by posting ten videos online with no sound or picture. This wasn’t just a scare tactic or a practice for breaking into people’s accounts. For this man, they meant something.

  ‘He’s so careful about details that he must have thought out everything about these videos. That there are ten of them. And how long they are.’

  That was why Mari had rung Rico and asked him to research whether the videos’ lengths matched any other videos on the Internet. Rico had made a program that crawled the major music and video sites to find clips that were the same length down to the second.

  ‘We found a lot of them. Hundreds of thousands.’

  Checking each result one by one would have taken weeks. But Mari asked Rico to further crosscheck the results for any single common factor.

  ‘We found something. This is a top ten list. The videos are songs. They’re part of a ritual, a fetish. He’s a fan. Not a fan in the sense people usually are though, a fan in the sense of a fanatic. For him liking an artist means creating an entire world, a twisted religion only he follows.’

  Lia shook her head. Keeping up with all of this was a challenge.

  ‘There isn’t anything in it that will make sense to us,’ Mari said. ‘He lives in his own world. To us things look one way and to him a completely different way. He can operate in our world as effectively as anyone, but everything he does is driven by a kind of religious fanaticism. To him his victims aren’t even people. To him they’re just… pieces to manipulate. Hateful things he can use to his ends. Like Chapman used Lennon.’

  This man, the person who killed Berg and four others, had his own The Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon, Mari said.

  ‘Who is he?’ Lia asked.

  ‘Queen. The band. And Freddie Mercury.’

  The phenomenon even had its own word, Mari said. Celebrity obsession syndrome.

  ‘Chapman was an extreme case,’ Mari admitted. ‘And so is this man. But they have several different overlapping obsessions.’

  Admiration had its dark side too. Idols aroused strong feelings in their fans. Some of them, the unbalanced ones, developed fantasies around their idols that could lead in dangerous directions.

  ‘But the idol is never the underlying reason for the admirer’s actions.’

  All ten black videos matched the length of a Queen song. That was the connecting factor that Rico’s program had found.

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ Mari said.

  ‘That’s… crazy,’ Lia said.

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Why Queen?’

  Even as she said it, Lia realised how obvious the answer was. Freddie Mercury, the lead vocalist of Queen, was one of the most famous gay men in the world and one of the most famous victims of AIDS. Their murderer was killing people he grabbed from gay bars.

  ‘I think Queen and Mercury and gay people are just parts of a larger picture here. They don’t completely explain what he’s doing,’ Mari said. ‘But we can use them to try to figure out who the killer is.’ They sat and talked for a long time.

  Mari poured them some white wine, and even though what they were talking about was strange and dark, there were moments when Lia felt as though Mari was recovering. Some things in their lives were returning to normal.

  This killer didn’t have anything in common with normal people who admired celebrities, Mari said. You had to separate what most people experienced from morbid obsessions.

  ‘For us it’s no big deal if someone likes a musician. Everyone’s a fan of something. It’s a good thing. But for people like this man, it becomes an alternate reality into which they channel all of their bad feelings and aggression.’

  Mari grabbed her laptop and started looking for something. After a moment, music started playing from speakers hidden around the room. Lia recognised Queen instantly even though she had only ever listened to a couple of their albums.

  ‘I’d know that sound anywhere,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ Mari said.

  It sounded at once beautiful and bombastic, Mari thought. A rock band who named themselves Queen were instantly flaunting any number of things: irony, arrogance, daring.

  Mari took a large sip of wine.

  ‘I have to show you something that’s going to make this even more repulsive,’ she said.

  Lia blanched. What could make this any worse?

  Mari turned off the music and searched for something else on her computer. Then she turned the display towards Lia so she could see.

  Lia recognised the video immediately. It was the first kicking video, the one she had seen more than a week before at Level with her colleagues.

  But now music played to its rhythm. Queen’s old hit ‘We Will Rock You’. Lia knew it well since it was a staple of sports stadiums around the world.

  The killer had edited the video to make the pictures flow to the music. Lia watched until she had to look away. Mari stopped the video, and a perfect hush fell over them.

  ‘How did you notice that?’ Lia asked.

  ‘It was pretty obvious as soon as I realised that the videos were the same leng
th as specific songs,’ Mari said.

  Combining the music with the video only took Rico a few seconds, after which he hadn’t been able to watch the video at all any more.

  Lia grimaced. She knew exactly how Rico must feel.

  Mari showed her what songs the killer had used so far. ‘We Will Rock You,’ ‘Now I’m Here,’ ‘We Are the Champions,’ ‘Another One Bites the Dust.’

  The songs weren’t from the same record originally, Mari pointed out.

  ‘I think he’s making his own greatest hits album,’ she added. ‘These are his ten favourite songs.’

  The Internet was full of homemade video clips set to people’s favourite songs: they danced; they lip-synced; they taped their pets moving to the music. Some could be quite complex video compositions.

  ‘If that’s true, these are the sickest fan videos ever,’ Lia said.

  Mari nodded.

  ‘He’s combining snuff films and music videos. The purpose is to reach as broad an audience as possible. And change people’s experience of what they watch online.’

  Why didn’t he publish the videos with the music from the start? Lia wondered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mari said thoughtfully. ‘It probably has some significance. Maybe it’s his way of showing defiance. Figure out what’s going on and you’ll find me.’

  ‘He wants to be found?’

  ‘He knows he’ll get caught. But he wants recognition for the greatness of his actions.’

  It was starting to get late, already after ten o’clock.

  As she realised how much time had passed, Lia immediately thought of Gro. Then she remembered that the dog was in good hands with Mr Vong, who had promised that she could stay the night if necessary.

  How could they pass on Mari’s information to the police? Lia asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mari said.

  The videos were still running on the screen, one after another. Lia could see how the rhythm of each synced perfectly with the music playing in the room.

  The combined effect was terrifying. Lia had never been a particular fan of Queen – the band had seen its heyday so long ago – but with the videos their music started feeling almost revolting.