Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

Appropriate that Billy would relocate near the scene of Gina’s death to plot his revenge. His sentimentality gives me another chance to find him, but I’m not sure what I’d do with him if I did. He deserves harsh punishment for burning Olya, never mind the lives being shredded by his Unmasking. That said, I don’t want to be party to a summary execution if I deliver him to Blake and Mondano. At this point, Blythe is probably his only friend, and that’s not saying much.

  But at least I can rely on her to deal with Billy rationally.

  I whiz through the area in Google Maps’ Street View until I see the statue from the area I’m targeting. The green space facing Billy’s window is too indistinct in the webcam shot to figure out exactly where it is. I find three candidates and select the one whose windows best match the inside framing of Billy’s place.

  I print out a map and jog downstairs to hail a cab.

  The neighborhood around 120 Ferris Street is deserted. Wanting to approach undetected, I tell the cab driver to let me off a block early. Billy’s place is three tall stories of corroding brick with an assortment of boarded-up arches for windows. Bits of wire and the crazily sloping remnants of a fire escape decorate its skin, which shows scars where gutters have been stripped off for scrap.

  The back of the building, away from the street, will be my safest bet. There’s a line of large but sickly trees along the alleyway between the building and the vacant lot next door. One of them has a thick branch leading up to a window whose boards have mostly rotted away. I scramble up the tree, make a hole in the glass with a diamond-tipped cutter, and insert a stiff wire to flip the window’s antique lock. I have to climb down a set of empty cable brackets attached to the back of a huge open-air atrium that runs from a deep basement up to the roof.

  The interior of the old building is a wreck. The walls down in the basement sprout disused pipe connections and mounting hardware testifying to machinery ripped out when its former occupant was liquidated by creditors. The kind of place that drives architects to suggest “accidental fire” as the best motif for a redesign.

  At the far end of the basement is a wide spiral of cast iron stairs, which I follow up to the ground floor. Billy’s living room consists of a green velvet couch and a shattered seventy-two-inch LED television. A bachelor kitchen, which appears never to have been used, opens off to the right.

  I’ve been exploring the place in sepulchral silence, but now I become aware of a sound floating just at the limits of my perception. It’s a single, unvarying, high-pitched tone, obviously made by an electronic device, but it doesn’t have the alternating quality of an alarm.

  Another steep spiral staircase leads up to a studio area. As I climb the stairs, the sound gets louder. It confirms my impression that no one is here, since I doubt if any normal human could tolerate the incessant ring.

  On gaining the third floor, I see four large workbenches on the left side of the room, each littered with tools, materials, mechanisms, and scraps of clothing. There are three ripped-open workstations and a crushed laptop strewn around. The place looks like a Tokyo gadget market after Godzilla waltzes through.

  One of the tables holds what I take to be a severed limb until I see the titanium ball joint projecting from its humerus. Nearby on the floor lies the former owner of that arm, an exceedingly lifelike rendering of a small boy that’s been hacked apart. “Drawn and quartered” would be more accurate. Blood from internal bladders, still an artificially bright red, has pooled on the floor around him. I assume this gross display represents a beta version of a prop intended for when Billy reaches the limit of what he can hire body modders to do to themselves. There’s a tag on his ankle that reads SAPROPHYTE STUDIOS, which is a Pittsburgh FX operation best known for making fake snuff films so realistic that a Kentucky man spent almost two weeks in jail after police found a copy of one in his apartment.

  Toward the back of the room, two more of these mechanized grotesques hang from the wall. One is another little boy, the name “Giton” scrawled in black marker beside him. The other’s skin dangles in shreds, as if someone compulsively slashed the latex with a box-cutter. The name beside it, though mostly obscured with blood, seems to be “Augustine.”

  On either side of the stairwell are small rooms made of pristine dry-wall. The tone is emanating from the one on my left. I step up to the door and turn the knob. The door catches on its frame at first, and I have to bear down with my shoulder until it pops open with a suffering creak.

  Terror starts boiling inside me before I can make sense of what I’m looking at.

  It’s the smell: once again, brimstone.

  Instinct makes me fling myself out of the room. I almost tumble back down the stairs, but my shoulder bangs into the curving iron banister. As I scramble back to my feet, my mind has a moment to process what I’m seeing.

  A bank of monitors surrounds an unmoving human shape seated on a large, high-backed wooden chair. Several plastic blocks rest at his feet. I take a deep breath.

  It’s just another one of his stupid gore puppets.

  I try to get ahold of myself and flip on the light switch by the door. The scene gets worse.

  It’s a re-creation of the suicide video Billy sent to Blake. But taken to a new level of repulsiveness. The body slumped in the electric chair looks as though his skeleton has been reduced to fragments, held up only by the rusty iron band at his head. Around this are deep lacerations, blackened by the intense current. Below the cuts, one eye has popped out of its socket and dangles to the side of his nose. The other eye is just a red void, the border decorated with a clear jelly. A long, dark stain issues from his mouth, which is shut tight. I refrain from thinking about the state of his tongue.

  Finally, there are discolored pockmarks all over his chest and arms, which I can’t figure out at first. Then I glance down at the row of car batteries at his feet. Many of them are distended, and a few show cracks in their cases. I guess that would account both for the damage to the body and the smell of brimstone in the air. Many car batteries use lead and sulfuric acid to hold a charge. If one shorts them too quickly, they become very hot and explosive gases can build. Sometimes they rupture, spraying acid everywhere. The last thing I notice is the screen above the body’s head. It’s a heart monitor, with an unbroken horizontal line traversing its center. The source of the tone I’ve been hearing.

  I don’t know what makes me realize it; maybe the barely detectable stench of burnt hair and early decomposition, but suddenly I’m certain: this isn’t one of Billy’s atrocious mannequins.

  This is Billy himself. In the flesh.

  72

  Back at my apartment, I peer down the neck of a half-empty bottle of Hancock’s President’s Reserve—a rare treasure I looted from his otherwise indifferent liquor cabinet—and ruminate on William Bennett Randall and his (now vindicated) paranoia. The question that has me slugging it down at three AM:

  Do I believe him?

  That he was killed in his struggle against his older brother, I have no doubt. His death is obviously rigged for a suicide determination. A verbatim reenactment of his Jacking Out video, both continuing the unfortunate Jackanapes suicide rash and making him another victim of his family’s yearning for oblivion. I can just see Blake looking despondent, saying to an officer, “We were so worried.” True, in its way.

  But the Billy I’d come to know this past month was a fighter. He had plans for retaliation, and there’s no way he’d fall on his sword without taking another whack at Blake.

  My conclusion: Mondano and his goons somehow found him and did this to shut him up forever. I’ll bet the batteries were well drained before the lethal jolt from inquiries about how to shit-can his porn worm. Given what he said at the Cloisters, that would have been a bleak exercise. At least whoever planned it came up with a more creative package than a twelve-gauge in broad daylight.

  They meant to suppress the climactic reveal in Billy’s arcane tour de force: that his brother and Olya murdered Gina Delaney to get
control of her invention. I’d love to roll my eyes at his allegations and chalk them up to his deranged game narrative, but he’s denied me the easy escape of willful disbelief.

  Billy left evidence.

  My bourbon bottle now sits next to the lone intact electronics left in the place. And it wasn’t easy to find.

  From searching the wreckage of all the computers in Billy’s studio, I found that each of their hard drives had been meticulously wiped, presumably by whoever had meticulously wiped Billy. They’d even done a careful job destroying the processor boards and flash memory residing in his robotic voodoo dolls. I assume they intended this action to simulate the artist burning his life’s work before joining it on the pyre. But after all that, they still missed something. Something only I could see, having been subject to Billy’s codes and symbols for the last month.

  I’d already completed one round of searching the place. Retossing each room. Pulling open tools. Checking the innards of his electronics. Anywhere he might hide some final communication. I was walking by his animatrons on my way to make a more thorough inspection of the room in which his corpse reposed, something I’d been avoiding for the past couple hours, when the shredded remains of Augustine grabbed my attention. Her silicone body molding had been mostly torn away, but still attached to a small chunk at her left arm socket was a ragged scrap of purple fabric hanging loosely over the shoulder. Something about that particular rich hue, and the way the fabric bunched, brought forth a memory.

  That remnant was the same color as the purple toga worn by Gina’s av Ines_Idoru.

  Despite the thorough dissection, I could tell right away that they’d missed her vital organ. The large gear casing sitting right between the aluminum tubes of her legs. The place at her center of gravity: her womb.

  I picked up a screwdriver.

  It took quite a bit more surgery to take apart the gearbox. But as I suspected, at its center were the guts of a compact smartphone with a live connection to Verizon’s wireless network. I plugged it into my netbook and saw that Billy had a custom script in the scheduler. If he fails to check in for more than 48 hours, it sends a video to a long list of email addresses, including the NYPD, the FBI, and several national news outlets.

  This was Billy’s version of letting his demons out into the world. As such, the video’s a masterpiece.

  We begin with Billy’s argument for the prosecution in the case of Gina Delaney’s murder. It’s pithy, well produced, and certain to captivate his audience. Especially when you have the freshly mutilated corpse of the author to add sanguinary interest.

  Documentary in style, it starts with a reprise of IT’s progress, complete with stills of early versions of the Dancers. He identifies Gina as the real inventor of our system, gives a little background information on her, and then there’s a cut to black.

  Billy’s voice narrates mournfully:

  The New York City medical examiner’s office ruled Gina Delaney’s death a suicide two days after she was found. The primary basis for this determination was a videotape taken of her death, discovered by the responding officers at the scene. Here is the video.

  And again I watch Gina’s harrowing final minutes. But this time, framed by his forensic inquiry, I’m watching through Billy’s eyes. The video takes on the cast of subliminal witchery one finds in the ice cubes of liquor ads.

  At the end, we freeze on the shot of Gina’s hideous demise, and Billy says, “If you look closely, this video proves beyond a doubt that she was murdered.”

  Then he starts his assault. His leading elements are reminiscent of those late-seventies Zapruder reconstruction “documentaries,” trying to establish that JFK was assassinated by time-traveling Martians. Gina couldn’t possibly have lifted the meteorite ballast. The light patterns on her face indicate fire traveling toward her. The ME’s photos show conclusively that her wrists were recently bound. Some nonsense about the blood spatter being the wrong shape.

  The case is meretricious: Gina had plenty of mech-E from MIT and could figure out how to lift anything; there were any number of reflective surfaces in the apartment; her wrists already looked like uncooked funnel cake; and the right combination of model parameters could get Billy’s “expected” blood spatter to form a portrait of Mao.

  But like a true showman, Billy saves his best for last. And here’s where he makes me sit up and take notice. Now he just looks closely at the video itself. A part of it I’ve seen but never really scrutinized, since it occurs well after Gina is clearly dead.

  About three minutes after she dies, her body shifts slightly. Maybe from the drill’s vibration. Maybe her muscles relaxing in death. The movement causes her head to tilt slightly to her right. Billy freezes there on a single frame. The video is high def, so he’s able to zoom extremely close on Gina’s left eye. So close that I can just distinguish the reflections on its glassy surface.

  And for me those tiny glimmers have the power of a collapsing star.

  There’s an old legend that says the eyes of a murder victim will capture the face of his killer. This belief was held widely enough in the early twentieth century that forensic photographers devoted a whole branch of their nascent art to the detailed recording of a corpse’s eyeballs, and in some cases even attempted to “develop” images off the deceased’s retinas through some rather gruesome means. The idea is lunacy of course, but exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to an artist like Billy. Maybe the concept sprang to mind when he was confronted with Gina’s agonized eyes at the time of her death. I can just see him examining them minutely, since that image was the last remaining evidence of the now impassable pathway to her soul and its tragic mysteries. At some point he must have noticed the subtlest motion. Then he realized that in combining a high-res camera with the half-mirror of her eyes, he had a situation where the superstition actually proved true.

  They’re tiny, picked out in pixels of lightness against the deep black of her pupils. The outline of two figures standing side by side. Her head must have come to rest at just the right angle of reflection from some light in the room. There’s not enough detail to get a very clear picture, but one attribute stands out: they both have blond hair. Almost white.

  Billy slaps up a frame counter and lets twenty seconds tick by. During this, you can see the couple’s heads turn toward each other. The man steps forward until he’s directly in front of the body, perhaps touching it. Then he moves back, and they both walk off to the right until they disappear at the margin of her pupil.

  Billy can run all the hypotheticals he wants, and I’m unlikely to pay much heed. Lawyers consistently show that, much like statistics (or people), you can torture models into saying anything. But now he’s showing me something I can see with my own eyes. An image recorded on video. And what it means:

  Gina wasn’t alone when she died.

  Not content to rest his case there, Billy wraps up with a seductive reconstruction of his theory of events. There were two people with Gina that night. They drugged her, bound her hands, placed her in the chair, set up the lighter fluid, put a lighter by her hand. She revived slightly and spoke her last words. Not addressing the camera; addressing them. They stood just behind the meteorite and lit the cardboard tube on fire.

  When certain she was dead, they unbound her hands and left the room.

  As stand-ins for the murderers, he uses these indistinct wisps from Gina’s eyes. Then he focuses on them for yet another unmasking.

  Gradually, the foggy pixels begin to coalesce into more specific visages. Of course, he chooses his blond bêtes noires. Olya Zhavinskaya stands there directing half-closed bedroom eyes at her accomplice, Blake Randall.

  He asks, “And what was their motive for this crime? Why not hear it in their own words?”

  An audio loop begins. The sound is slightly muffled, but I can understand the words pretty clearly. Blake must be closer to the mic, since his voice is loud and instantly recognizable.

  He says, “. . . why she still
feels that way. It’s unfortunate. Do you think you’ll be able to bring her around?”

  Olya’s voice is less clear but identifiable from her accent. “She can refuse me nothing. I make things very unpleasant.”

  “Ah . . . ‘The way to a woman’s heart is the path of torment. I know of no other.’”

  Olya says, “Eh? I don’t know. G is very difficult. I think maybe the right path is through her rib cage.”

  “A bit unsubtle, darling, don’t you think?”

  “Mmm, but I’m tired of petting her always.”

  “Well, be patient. I’m sure you’ll be irresistible in the end.”

  Blake’s intonation on his line about “a woman’s heart” suggests that he’s borrowing the words. I guess their source even before searching for it.

  So was this conversation what stimulated Billy’s whole jihad against his brother? Blake glibly quoting Sade’s dating tips?

  It explains Billy’s use of the marquis’s words in his electrocution speech. When did he record this? An early jewel from his surveillance at GAME? Or he could have been listening through the mic on Blake’s compromised laptop. Regardless, in the context of all his other evidence, the dialogue plays like a confession.

  We fade back in on a shot of Billy himself addressing the camera. He’s sitting a few feet away from where I found the video. His face bears a glazed, sorrowful expression. He’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday.

  Your viewing this video means that I am dead. Murdered. I’ve never been one to apologize for my art, but I’m afraid this fact may be cast into doubt by my recent endeavors. My death will be seen in the context of suicides both in my family and among my colleagues at GAME. My communications with my brother will be used as evidence to support these lies. I regret that I’ve given them the weapon. But that cannot be helped now. Here is the truth, for those willing to listen.