Project Pandora

by Aden Polydoros

  He cut across lawns and scaled fences. The moonlight was an inadequate light source, and by the time he reached his car, he was covered in scrapes and bruises. With each step, needles of pain shot through the soles of his feet and deep into his calves.

  He didn’t think he was being followed. Still, he didn’t pause to catch his breath until he was safe in his car, driving down the main road.

  After tearing a helter-skelter path through unfamiliar neighborhoods, he eventually stopped in front of a convenience store many miles from the scene.

  He took the silenced pistol and its detached magazine from the glove box. The magazine had a ten-round capacity, and there were ten bullets still inside it, gleaming through the holes drilled into the side of the box. After reattaching the magazine and unscrewing the silencer, he slipped the pistol into the shoulder holster under his jacket.

  There was no way to determine how the assassin had found him, but Tyler wasn’t about to dismiss it as an uncanny coincidence. While he loathed having to abandon his car, an electronic tracker might be hidden in the upholstered seats, the undercarriage, or another clever spot. Another possibility was that his smartphone had been used to find his coordinates.

  As he retrieved his smartphone from his pocket, a revelation struck him as hard as a sledgehammer blow.

  The black flip phone he had destroyed was identical to the one Shannon had found in her purse, the one she suspected belonged to the dark-haired boy on the metro. Was it possible that the boy could somehow be involved in this nightmare, another killer like himself?

  If that was true, and if the boy suspected Shannon now possessed his phone, then she was in danger. Just going on a date with her might have put a target on her head.

  He dialed her number, then spat out expletives when it went straight to voicemail. Dead, after all. He hung up and called Alan next, who answered after the first five rings with a slurred greeting.

  “Alan, it’s me,” Tyler said, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “Listen, you know that girl who came to your house last week with Victoria?”

  “Uh, no, not really. Just that she’s Victoria’s friend. Why?”

  “Shannon. Her name’s Shannon Evans.”

  “Oh, right. Shannon.”

  “Do you know her address?” Tyler asked, staring out the window in search of pursuers.

  “Why would I know her address?” Alan asked.

  “Okay, look, what’s Victoria’s phone number?”

  “Uh…”

  “I know you’re high,” Tyler said, “but this is really important. Think very carefully and tell me Victoria’s number.”

  “Dude, just give me a minute. I have it in my contacts. I’ll text it to you, okay?”

  “You’d better,” he snapped and hung up.

  In the thirty seconds it took for Alan to text him, Tyler felt his anxiety blossom into panic. He couldn’t get that boy’s—his name is Hades—face out of his head, and he was certain he had met the boy somewhere before the Woodley Park Station encounter. Perhaps during another murder.

  As soon as his phone pinged with a new text message, he dialed the number Alan had provided. Victoria was surprisingly prompt and picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Who is this?” Victoria asked. In the background, he heard music and laughter.

  “Tyler Bennett from school.”

  “You mean Shannon’s boyfriend?”

  Tyler found himself at a loss of words.

  “Just kidding,” Victoria said, chuckling. “I know you two aren’t going out yet, but she told me all about your date. Don’t worry, she had nothing bad to say.”

  “Victoria, what’s Shannon’s address?”

  “Oh, it’s— Wait, why do you want to know her address?”

  “I need to talk to her about something really important, and her phone’s dead.”

  Victoria sighed. “Seriously? How do I know you’re not going to, like, kidnap her.”

  “Victoria, please, there’s no time to explain. Just tell me her goddamned address.”

  “All right, all right. Do you have a pen ready?”

  Tyler scrounged through the glove box for a writing utensil. When he found a pen, he spread the roadmap on his knee and wrote the address she gave him on the map’s margins.

  “If you’re sending her chocolates, she hates coconut,” Victoria said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said and hung up the phone. He retrieved his backpack from the backseat and put the map inside the main compartment.

  He slung his backpack over his shoulder, stuck his smartphone in his pocket, and got out of the car. He left the keys in the ignition and the door ajar, hoping that an opportune thief would assume he had run inside the store for a speedy errand.

  On his way to the sidewalk, he passed an idling pickup truck and paused briefly beside it. The owner, a stocky man in a flannel shirt, was so fixated on examining his phone, he didn’t even notice Tyler. Within seconds, he was on the move again.

  Eager to put some distance between himself and the gas station, he walked down the street at a swift but calm walk. He kept his movements natural, making an effort not to show his panic. That would only draw attention to himself.

  As he walked, he pulled his jacket hood over his head. Soon, he would need to change his appearance. He was a fugitive now.

  A fugitive. The concept didn’t frighten him as much as it should have. There were greater concerns to worry about, like making sure that Shannon didn’t get caught up in this whole mess. Besides, being hunted was better than being an unconscious hunter. At least he was in control of his own actions.

  He would never allow himself to be manipulated again.

  He took a bus to the nearest station, paying in cash though he had a fare card. Although the chance was remote, he feared that using his card would be another way for Zeus to track him.

  Tyler sat tensely through the ride, curling his fingers around the underside of the plastic seat to keep himself from reaching for the gun under his jacket. He kept his head down and his hood up, avoiding eye contact with the other passengers.

  When he glanced out the window as they traveled through an underpass, the darkness transformed the glass pane into a mirror. His reflection disturbed him. In a matter of a single afternoon, his face had changed in some indescribable but integral way. It no longer belonged to him.

  After getting off the bus, he rode the Red Line to the Dupont Circle Metro Station. As he took the escalator up to street level, he looked over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. He found himself so fixated by the words carved on the wall above him that he turned his body to read them:

  Thus in silence, in dreams’ projections, returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals; the hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young; some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad . . . Walt Whitman

  Although Tyler had visited Dupont Circle before, he had always exited the station via the southern entrance. This was his first time using the north exit escalator, and as a result, his first time seeing the engraved poem.

  Staring at those grim words, he began trembling. Gripped in the jaws of a terrible intuition, he knew in that moment that if he did not hurry, Shannon would be killed. He swiveled around again, rushed up the escalator stairs, and emerged into the night.

  Cars honked as he hurried across the street, down a road lined with old attractive buildings. His footsteps echoed hollowly on the sidewalk. Minutes passed, but his panic did not. He read the address numbers as he passed them, until he finally stopped in front of a narrow brick row house.

  Tyler took a moment to compose himself then walked up to the front door. He rang the bell. As he waited for someone to answer, he glanced around at the row houses on either side of him, then behind him. A vaporous silhouette drifted past the bay window of the home across from him, obscured by filmy drapes.

  He
turned around again as the door opened a crack and found himself in the presence of a sleepy-eyed man whose thinning brown hair was brushed in a comb-over on his shiny scalp.

  “Are you Shannon’s dad?” Tyler asked.

  “More or less,” the man said, but made no attempt to disengage the security chain.

  “My name’s Tyler. I’m one of Shannon’s friends. Is she here right now?”

  “Tyler, you say?” The man’s eyes narrowed. “She’s never mentioned you.”

  “Please, it’s really important that I talk to her.”

  “She’s staying overnight at a friend’s house.”

  “Victoria?” Tyler asked.

  “No, a different friend.”

  “Her cell phone’s off. I think it’s dead.”

  “She left it here,” the man said, sounding almost guarded. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come back another time.”

  “Whose house is she staying at?” Tyler asked, hearing his own voice grow tight and jagged with fear. “Please, you need to tell me.”

  “You need to leave, son,” the man said and began to shut the door.

  “Wait.” Tyler wedged his foot inside the doorframe before the door could close completely. “Please, can you at least check her room to see if she has a plain black cell phone, one of those old flip phones? It doesn’t belong to her. I let her borrow it and—”

  The man’s face drained of color, and without another word, he tried forcing the door shut. Tyler had barely enough time to remove his shoe from the opening before the door crashed against the frame. Even from the outside, he heard the click of a deadbolt being engaged.

  Mystified, he backed off the stoop and stared up at the dark narrow windows that punctured the brick facade. Left with no choice, he turned back onto the street and began walking again, without a destination.

  Case Notes 21:

  Persephone

  Elizabeth awoke in an ambulance, with two paramedics hovering around her.

  One of the men leaned over her. His eyes were irritated, and his cheeks and neckline were blued with a five o’clock shadow. Even in his exhaustion, he smiled—a thin, stressed line. “Everything’s going to be okay, hon. Are you in any pain?”

  “No,” she croaked. Her throat felt like it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. Her saliva was thick and sour, making it difficult to speak. The glow of streetlamps spilled through the tall windows on the double doors, and a lamp overhead cast its pale radiance, but she had difficulty seeing. Everything was soft around the edges. Facial features, while distinguishable, appeared eerily warped in some vague, fundamental way.

  “Can you tell me your name?” the man asked.

  For a moment, she could not remember what her own name was. Then it came to her. “Elizabeth Marina Hawthorne.”

  “Where do you live?”

  She recited her address dutifully.

  “How old are you?” the man asked.

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Did you take anything while you were at the dance? Any drugs or alcohol? Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, but it’s important that we know everything.”

  “No, I just had a soda.” She tried to straighten up. Bad idea. As soon as she moved, her vision blurred into a stream of colors, and the world tilted like a fun-house ride. The taste of bile flooded her throat. She groaned and sagged against the firm cushion.

  The ambulance lurched forward, and she felt her stomach lurch with it. Nausea kept her grounded as effectively as any restraint.

  “Has something like this ever happened to you before, Elizabeth?” the other paramedic asked.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. The motion caused another wave of nausea, but it was weaker than the first. She no longer felt in danger of puking.

  The paramedics continued to speak to her. She followed their requests to take a deep breath, open her mouth, and look up as the first man pointed a penlight in her eyes, but she faded. She wasn’t all there anymore. Even as the paramedics wheeled her into the cold hall of the hospital and the acoustic-tiled ceiling above blurred into a seamless white stretch, a part of her was elsewhere. Somewhere warm and dark, floating.

  Her mother and father arrived just before the MRI scan.

  “What did you do, Elizabeth?” her father snapped, chasing down her gurney with the stubborn tenacity of a hellhound pursuing the damned. “I just got a call from the DA about some sort of fight—”

  Her mother put a hand on her father’s shoulder. “Larry, now is not the time for a lecture.” She turned to Elizabeth. “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. I’m sure it was nothing, just a panic attack or something. I’ve called Dr. Kosta. He should be here shortly. Don’t worry.”

  The technician was a dour-faced brunette who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in finding her vein. She had to jab Elizabeth several times before the needle went home.

  As the dye flooded her bloodstream, she felt heat radiate through her body. A taste like old pennies filled her mouth, reminding her of blood, which in turn brought back a hazy recollection of a large room filled with people and a boy in the center, hugging a pole.

  A nightmare from long ago.

  The machine whirred quietly. She stared up at the white underside of the rotor, then closed her eyes as the red lasers flicked across her face. She tried not to think about what had happened at the dance, but it lingered in her memory.

  She couldn’t get the sound of Hades’s laughter out of her head. How could he do something like that? Did he really take pleasure in the pain of others?

  It was impossible to reconcile her ideal vision of him with the way he had behaved tonight. It was like he had become a completely different person.

  Maybe he has split personalities, she thought, but she couldn’t convince herself of it. That was too convenient. The hard truth was there was no difference between the young man who had kissed her so passionately and the one who had kicked in the teeth of a downed opponent. No difference except that she had been on the opposite end of his violence.

  Keeping her eyes closed, she detected a trace fragrance under the odor of antiseptic solution. The aroma of forget-me-nots.

  “Vergissmeinnicht,” Elizabeth whispered, remembering the name that Hades had used for them. The word had sounded exotic in his low, melodic voice, but now it seemed so familiar, as if she had heard it many times before.

  Vergissmeinnicht.

  Forget me not.

  Lulled to sleep by the monotonous rumbling of the MRI machine, she envisioned a field of wildflowers bordered on one side by a tall overgrown fence topped with barbed wire and on the other three sides by dense forest. It was the same scenery she thought about whenever she felt stressed, a fairy-tale place conjured by her imagination. It was always dusk there, when the comingled fragrance of the evening primrose and alpine forget-me-not was at its peak.

  Normally, she was alone in that special place. Now, a boy sat in the grass, teasing flower stems between his slender fingers. He wore all black, and his clothes were of the coarse, shapeless type expected of a uniform. His dark hair was shorn in a crew cut as if he were going into the army, but he looked far too young for that, just fifteen or so.

  As the boy turned to face her, she was struck by the familiarity of his features. That milky skin. Those sooty-lashed eyes, violet in the fading light. His jaw and cheekbones were softer, with only a hint of the lupine sharpness she had grown so used to, but it was unmistakably him. Hades.

  “We should be getting back soon,” she heard herself said. “They’re going to call roll.”

  The setting sun caressed his face as he glanced upward. Though his deep-set eyes were cast in shadows, the darkness surrounding them was a product of the sun’s angle, not from insomnia induced by nightmares. In his features was a warm innocence whose absence she hadn’t been aware of until this very moment.

  “Just a few more minutes,” Hades said and turned his attention back to the flowers in his hands. He wasn’t just playing w
ith the forget-me-nots but knotting them, weaving the flowers into a circlet. His agile fingers, those fingers that had gently stroked her cheek once, now tied the stems so deftly he didn’t lose a single petal.

  “Are you really leaving tomorrow?” he asked, looking back at her. “Like, for sure?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry, I’ll visit.”

  His lips rose in a cold smile. In his features, she saw a ghost of the boy who had laughed at the sight of fresh blood and broken teeth. The boy he would become.

  “No, you won’t,” he said, fastening the last forget-me-not into place.

  “I will,” she insisted as he placed the flower crown on her head. The blossoms’ intense aroma was overshadowed by the scent that the warm sun had coaxed from his pores, a smoky, autumn fragrance out of season against the summer’s verdant overgrowth.

  “I’ll come back for you, I promise,” she said, leaning into him.

  “You won’t,” he repeated, and his lips brushed gently against her own. His sweet, warm breath fanned across her skin as he pulled away, and she was dismayed to see his violet-blue eyes overflowing with tears. “They never do.”

  She awoke to a nurse saying her name, her cheeks damp with tears of her own.

  “Five more minutes, dear,” the nurse said. “It’s almost over.”

  Blinking moisture from her eyes, Elizabeth tried to drift off again, but now the noise of the MRI machine distracted her. So did the memory of her dream. It hadn’t felt like a dream, not one bit. It had felt like a memory.

  Though patients on gurneys waited in the halls for rooms to open up, there was always space for a senator’s daughter. After the MRI, she was taken to a private room, where her parents and her psychiatrist, Dr. Dimitri Kosta, were already waiting for her.

  Dr. Kosta turned away from the window as she was wheeled inside. He gave her a reassuring smile. He was a tall man whose salt-and-pepper hair was brushed into a neat comb-over. A sizable mole marked his chin, and whenever he was deep in thought during their therapy sessions, he had a tendency to stroke it.