Sins of the Flash

by David Niall Wilson

  That was a fallacy, Tommy knew. It was something he'd learned to live with, to use to his advantage. There was always a reason to fear. There was always a psycho, just around the corner, and there was no way, absolutely no – fucking – way to tell who it might be. Wherever he went, he watched. Whoever he was with, he wondered what they were thinking, what really made them tick.

  The psychos were old, young, successful, bums and they were everywhere. He'd been close to cracking enough times to recognize that the potential in others. He'd felt himself inside their minds, and had felt them inside his own, and he knew them only too well.

  God had fucked up making Man, if perfection was what he was after. What man had turned out to be was a time bomb, a living, walking breathing death trap, insecure, cruel, and ready to deal death to his brother at a moment's notice.

  This newest nut case was different, worse, in some ways. He was a freak of the first order, sexual abuse, murder, fetishes, and yet there was stability to what he did. He didn't go off half-cocked, grabbing the first victim he could get his hands on and throwing it to the cops, hoping to be caught. He seemed intent on some goal, or on some warped ideal.

  It didn't seem that killing was important to him. Not in any real sense. Tommy couldn't picture the man who'd done that makeup; the man who'd taken those photos, obsessing with something as simple as the death of another human being. He wasn't a serial killer in the normal sense. He was something worse.

  There was no emotion involved, not for the victims. Not for anyone, really. All there was were the photos, the creation of warped images. The death was incidental, and that was what was truly frightening.

  There were dead people lining up behind this guy like the washed off debris of some rising storm, dead people Tommy had sworn an oath to protect. They weren't the highbrow, rich citizens that paid the taxes that paid his salary, nor were they the solid working folk whose backs shouldered the load bulk? of the city's workload. They were on the fringe, beyond the line where they became the enemy.

  That was a trap Tommy wasn't prepared to fall into, though. He wouldn't presume to judge any of them, not even Gates. They did what they did and he did what he did. All of them had their place in the world. No matter what they did, no matter how fucked up their lives might be, they didn't deserve to die.

  No matter what they might have done in their lives that would turn the stomachs of everyday people, those girls hadn't deserved to be killed, or to be raped, and they certainly didn't deserve to be remembered last in those humanity stealing pictures, those demented reminders of Tommy’s personal enemy of the moment. They didn't deserve to be the possessions of a freak that didn't even care.

  That was it, he suddenly realized, and he glanced over at Mac as they turned down the last street, heading for the front of the building that housed the freak's studio. It wasn't the killings; it wasn't even the way the girls had been abused, made-up like porcelain china-dolls and filled with the freaks diseased semen. It was the photographs.

  He couldn't get them out of his mind. He couldn't correlate the dead girls he'd seen and those prints, couldn't bond them in his mind. It was as if the images had been stolen, the moments in time frozen, transferred to photo paper, and taken away. It left the corpses violated in a way he'd never imagined, left them emptier, even, than if the guy had just raped and killed them.

  Christ. And the pictures were beautiful. If he'd just seen them somewhere, not having a clue what they were, where they came from, he might have been tempted to buy one or two for his walls. For his wallet. Hell, he might have kept the fuckers by his bed. He would have sensed something, would have seen the darkness in the depths of their beauty, he knew, but his mind would have warped it.

  One thing Tommy knew from years of experience with things that should not be. If it shouldn't be, the mind would find another explanation, and that was the one that would stick. No matter that the facts stared you in the face, no matter that nothing you could do would change one iota of what already was, the mind would gloss it over.

  He would have seen the death in those photos, would have felt the control the man had felt when he snapped them, the utter potency of life and death authority, but his mind would have registered lust. It was simple survival.

  Tommy pulled to a stop, dimmed his lights, and they stared at the front of the building. There was light inside, but it was dim – a back room? There was no evidence that anyone was inside, or that anyone had been inside.

  "How about the back?" Mac asked, pointing at the alley running along the side of the building. Tommy followed his partner's finger, nodding quickly.

  They both slipped from the car, moving silently and swiftly, guns drawn. There was little traffic on the streets, not like the downtown area they were more used to. The streets were empty and desolate, like those of a concrete ghost town. Their steps rang hollowly, loudly, though they moved with all the stealth they could muster.

  "You try here," Tommy gestured at the front of the building, "I'll check the back. If you get in, make some noise, something to let me know. I'll do the same. We don't want him slipping out the other side this time. The freak has got to go down."

  Mac nodded and headed for the front door. Tommy slipped off along the side of the building and melted into the shadows of the alley, moving swiftly. He rounded the corner, swung his gun up to chest height, swept down, then up, scanned the alley and tracked the barrel with his eyes.

  There was nothing. He was alone. He moved toward the back door slowly, inching along the wall and ducked under a window to get to the door itself. No way to know if he was being watched, if the freak even knew they were there. Christ.

  The door was locked. He turned the knob gently, felt the resistance, and cursed. It figured.

  The lights inside were brighter from where he stood. Shadows played over the walls and moved across the ceiling. He heard a clatter, as if something had fallen, then silence. It seemed they hadn't been given away yet. The guy was doing something and was not paying attention.

  "Fuck," he grated. He hauled back with one booted foot, letting it slam forward and into the door, just below the lock. There was a splintering sound, but the lock didn't quite give. He curse, drew back, and kicked out again.

  The wood cracked and the deadbolt flew into the interior of the studio, but the door did not swing inward. He pressed his shoulder against it, but it wouldn’t budge. Grabbing the light from his belt, Tommy swung the beam up to the crack he'd opened, and he cursed again.

  There was a small worktable barring his path, and it had managed to jam itself at an angle under the door when he kicked it inward. The freak had done it by accident, but the door was not going to open easily.

  Tommy knelt with sweat pouring from his hair to soak his shirt and burn in his eyes. Where was the guy? What was he doing? Did he have a gun? He glanced into the crack he'd opened, spun back to the wall and waited. Nothing. There was no change in the sounds from inside, except that they had possibly grown more frantic. The shadows danced more quickly across the ceiling.

  He grabbed the leg of the desk and heaved. It was wedged good, but he was able to wiggle it just a bit. It started to come loose. Across the building from him, he heard a roar. Mac had fired.

  Christ! Was the psycho trying to bolt? Was Mac okay? Shit! Tommy wrenched the table aside and rolled into the room, playing his light and gun over the walls in a quick arc, holding them together so that the beam traced the barrel's path. Time to rock and roll!

  * * *

  Christian was just putting on the finishing touches, lining the eyes, dabbing in the final colors, when he heard the steps out back. He ignored them, hurried his fingers at their tasks, absorbed in the image he faced in the mirror.

  His time was almost up, but he would make it. There was nothing that could stop him now. Nothing. He smiled, and the image smiled back, and it sent a chill up his spine. So perfect.

  He laid his utensils down, moved to where the camera sat perched on its tripod.
It was already focused carefully, aperture and shutter speed set. The flash was attached and primed. Everything was ready for the shot, the ultimate roll of film. He smiled, but only slightly. He twisted one last setting to the right and released the button.

  Walking quickly across the room, he slid onto the divan, felt the softness of the green silk against his skin, let his limbs slip into a comfortable position, and then carefully pulled them into place. He arranged them so that the light would catch just right, so that nothing would be left to chance. He glanced above his head.

  He'd seen this position so many times, had been forced to watch, to see fingers trace its curves, to trace them himself. He knew it as well as his own face and had made it his own form.

  The scotch glass was right where he'd left it. The liquid contents glistened, capturing glimmers of light from the spots and reflecting them back at him, at the room. He saw a surreal, elongated image of his face in the side of the glass, and he had a momentary pang of remorse, another lost image. Lost for so long, and found only to be his last memory.

  There was a crash from the back door, but he ignored it. He reached up and grabbed the glass. The timer on the camera whirred and grew louder as it neared the short beep that would launch him into the annals of history. Christian Greve, artist. Immortal.

  He knew now what he'd missed before. It was so simple, so implicit to the process he'd been developing that he had bypassed it completely. He'd focused so intently on the models. It had been their fault he was a failure, their shortcomings that had ruined the images. Just as it had been his own shortcomings that his mother had blamed her failing beauty on, her inability to reach for her dreams and grasp them.

  True. It was the models that had been the problem, but the source of the problem was his vision. He'd strayed from his true path, strayed from the art. He'd allowed the desire of his flesh to taint his vision, dragging him into that whirlpool of lust and depravity that had brought him so close to the brink of success, so close to his dreams, and dashed him time and time again against the rocky wall of failure.

  He was the image. The only true vision he could ever produce, the only untainted image he could ever save for posterity, was his own - hers. His self, his soul. Her soul. He saw that now that the process was not flawed, only his choice of subject matter was to blame. He should have known that it had chosen him.

  He could know the women intimately, might even have breached the walls with Madeline, given the time, but he could never become them. He could never truly experience what they experienced in the moment of the flash, the instant of captured reality. Their flesh was not his flesh. Their souls were their own, even in death.

  Christian’s images, the one's he'd stolen from so many faces, so many personalities and situations, were never what they'd seemed. They were pale reflections, clues to the path he should be treading. They were the guideposts that had brought him to where he lay, and when the timer went off, it's tiny Beep! Beep! ringing loudly in the silence, he lifted the glass, and he drank to success.

  As the camera flashed, the film advanced one image at a time, and Christian heard the deafening thunder of gunfire. He heard the wrench of the furniture in the back being tossed aside, the soft thud of a body coming in. It didn't matter.

  His mind was fading. He felt his stomach heave back up what he'd offered it, and he clamped down the muscles in his throat and tightened his lips. He tried to roll his tongue back and fill the gap. Nothing could be allowed to mar the image or to ruin the perfection.

  He felt heat flow through him, then numbness, and finally, as the room erupted in flash after flash, removing his sight, removing the room and the world beyond that glowing, glittering sun of brilliance across the room, he drifted away. His back arched, his heart gave a lurch, and he was unable to stop his hand, in the end, from leaping to his throat, trying to force the poison up and out, and failing.

  In the darkness he saw her reach out to him across the void to pull him close. He tasted the salt of her tears, breathed the scent of her perfume, of her sex. Her eyes called out to his, and they blended, his gift to her. Her beauty, preserved. Her image, his own. One for eternity.

  He gasped a final word, but none heard it, none in this world. "Mother..."

  * * *

  Tommy whipped his gun back and forth and scanned the shadows, but there was no one in sight. He slipped through the door to the lobby and saw that Mac was wrestling with a pile of furniture in front of the door. The lock, or what had been the lock, was blown free of the wooden frame completely, lying in splinters on the floor. Tommy wondered fleetingly what had become of the fucking Swiss army knife method, but he had no time to dwell on it.

  There was one more doorway leading to the back room of the building, and he moved toward it. If he turned to help his partner, there was no telling what the freak might pull, or where he might run. The motherfucker wasn't getting away this time. End of the line.

  Even years of training couldn't prepare a man for a moment like the one he was living. The scent of death filled the air, familiar and heavy. The only question that remained was – whose death? How many psychos does it take to get to the center, Owl? He breathed, trying not to break into hysterical laughter at the image of the commercial that was flashing through his brain. "One? Two? Thureeuh..."

  He grabbed the knob of the studio door. Beneath it flashes of light strobed, one after the other. There was a mechanical whirring sound accompanying the lights, and he realized with a shock that it was a camera. The fucking freak was taking pictures.

  Bleak images flitted through Tommy’s mind. He pictured a camera, focused on the door, ready to frame his face as the psycho planted a bullet between his eyes, or whipped out a straight razor from beside the door to open his grin a little wider. He erased them, erased all thought and concentrated on that doorknob.

  Twisting it slowly, he pushed on the door and felt it give instantly. Not locked. Tommy pulled back to one side, and with a scream, he kicked it open and backed around the wall, pressing against it with all his strength and watching the doorway for motion.

  All that met his gaze was the flashing of the bulb, monotonous, and bizarre. Mac materialized next to him, and he saw his partner's face, then not, then he could see it again as the lights played with their senses.

  Finally the camera stopped. There was a loud click, a final whirr, and silence. Tommy waited for another few seconds for the freak to make a move, and then he dove through the doorway, taking the fall in a roll and coming up with his gun at eye level, sweeping the room left-to-right, high, and then low. Mac was on the other side, emulating his movements. Their eyes met in the center, and they froze.

  They knelt like statues, guns aimed and useless in grips gone numb. There were lights planted all over the room at odd angles. Each shone on a small divan across the room, highlighting a separate portion of the sight that burned itself into their brains.

  Christian Greve was sprawled across the seat, perched atop a green silk backdrop cloth. He wore no clothing at all, and his skin was an unearthly pale white, the skin of a man who'd never really known the sun.

  His face was made up exquisitely. He did not look like a man at all, in fact, but like a woman, an aged, but very beautiful woman. The makeup enhanced his features, strengthened them. The man's eyes were dead and haughty and arrogant. They stared straight through the intruders, as though they were insignificant.

  The man had one hand wrapped around his penis, which was half-erect in death. The other lay lightly against his throat, but it didn't look out of place. Somehow it was the perfect offset for the bizarre scenario, the perfect accent to the image.

  Beside him a glass had fallen away, a few stray drops of liquid rolling from the rim to stain the cloth beneath it. A second small dribble ran down the left corner of his mouth, but from where they stood, and no doubt from where the camera stood, it appeared to be a harsh wrinkle or an age line.

  "Holy shit," Tommy breathed, lowering his gun stupidly an
d falling to both knees as his tension slipped away. His limbs felt like they were held together with rubber and his mind was numb.

  "The son of a bitch killed himself," Mac said matter-of-factly. "He fucking killed himself, and he got away. He took fucking pictures Tommy. What kind of a man takes pictures of his own dead body?"

  Tommy spun his head to look at his partner, ripping his eyes from the grisly image before them, hearing the sirens rise behind them and feeling relief and resignation warring in his mind. "A fucking psycho, Mac, just a fucking psycho. Don't you ever forget man," he added, as he staggered to his feet, holding out one hand to help his partner up, "they're everywhere."

  The two turned away together and walked through the front of the building and out onto the street. Two squad cars were already pulled to the curb and a third screamed down the street toward them.

  "He's all yours," Tommy told the first officer he saw. "We'll see you back at the station."

  "But..." the words died on the young officer's lips. He caught a glimpse of the look in Tommy's eyes, saw it mirrored in Mac's, and he didn't say another word. With a short nod and a spin that was as much to escape Tommy's eyes as to get back to work, he was headed for the studio door.

  "Let's get the fuck out of here, Mac," Tommy said, trudging wearily across the street toward their car, "let's just get the fuck out."

  The darkness swallowed them, and he could see no end.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Niall Wilson has been writing professionally since the mid 1980s. An ex US Navy Electronics Technician, former President of the Horror Writer's Association, and multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, he has more than 17 novels published, 5 collections, and nearly 200 short stories in various magazines and anthologies. His novels include This is My Blood, Deep Blue, Ancient Eyes, The Orffyreus Wheel, On the Third Day, and various licensed works including novels for Star Trek, Stargate Atlantis, and White Wolf.