Walk Hand IN Hand Into Extinction : Stories Inspired By True Detective

by Christoph Paul

  Carmelita is meeting me out here tonight. She doesn’t know He is with me.

  The first body was found toward the end of May, not even three weeks ago. Naked, middle-aged Caucasian male, clothes scattered about in a twenty-foot radius, bones exposed in places where scavenging animals had torn away the flesh, eyes and genitals eaten away, flies and yellow maggots crawling in the wounds. Ugly and grim, but little I hadn’t seen before in four decades of law enforcement. No obvious cause of death, but in the corpse’s mouth was a playing card, the King of Clubs, on the back of which were two lines neatly typed:

  * * *

  When the gibbous moon and black stars rise,

  The Pallid One has a thousand eyes.

  * * *

  For the first time in over fifty years I remembered Moses in Vicksburg. I ran the capitalized phrase through every search engine and database on the Internet, but found nothing useful—only brief, dated references as vague as the message on the card. Forensic analysis indicated that the note was typed on a Smith Corona manual typewriter, and yielded no usable fingerprints.

  For kicks, I searched for records of men named Moses living in Vicksburg during the late fifties and found only a bare-bones 1959 obituary for a Moses Wells, aged seventy-eight; a taxidermist, no family, never married. No photograph.

  Expired driver’s license in the corpse’s discarded shorts identified it as Murray Browne, a local junkie who hadn’t been seen for about two weeks and had probably only been missed by his dealer. Next of kin was a cousin two states away who claimed not to have spoken to Browne in almost fifteen years and wanted nothing to do with him now.

  Autopsy revealed a small puncture wound in Browne’s neck, and that the cause of death was a probable morphine overdose. It also revealed that, though all of the bite wounds were inflicted post-mortem, the oldest teeth marks appeared to be human.

  A search of Browne’s home—a rundown three-room trailer with dim furniture and lighting—yielded the typewriter: a pale blue model from the seventies. And next to the machine, a full deck of playing cards, minus the kings. There was a small radio and several books, but no television, computer, or phone—though there was no sign of a struggle and little indication that such items had ever been there. I doubted a robbery. There were also various pieces of drug paraphernalia (including syringes and needles, but none that matched the puncture wound), a small bag of heroin, a loaded Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver, and scattered sheets of paper containing mediocre poetry occasionally referring to a “Maria” and, more often, a “Carmelita” (presumably written by Browne), but no morphine and no further references to “The Pallid One.” Only prints in the place were Browne’s.

  “Carmelita” was the popular moniker of Carmen Jimenez, a stripper at The Dragon’s Lair near the edge of town. I’d seen her there more than a few times myself; petite Latina in her early thirties, very pretty face, black hair trimmed short like a little boy’s and gelled into spikes up front. The few locals who recalled seeing Browne two weeks prior said he’d been at the Lair, so when I went there to ask around I figured Jimenez was a good place to start. She said he’d been there often in the past few months, and that she was his favorite for lap dances, when he could afford them. I asked her if they had any relationship outside the Lair, and she said not to tell anybody but she didn’t swing that way if I knew what she meant. I did.

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Browne?”

  “Must be a little over two weeks ago. He came in like normal, had a few drinks, bought a dance from me and tried to flirt, como siempre. Poor Murray.”

  “Did he talk about anything unusual? Any special problems he was having? Strange people he’d met?”

  “No, just flirted.” She giggled sadly. “Joked about pawning his TV so he could keep seeing me.”

  “Anything else happen?”

  “No, he left right after the dance.”

  “Was he alone?”

  Jimenez nodded. “Yes. He was always solo.”

  “Okay. Do you know anyone named Maria? The name came up in some—uh—papers we found at Mr. Browne’s home.”

  She looked surprised. “Only two: Maria Peraza and Maria Vasquez. Peraza works here, but I don’t think Murray ever bought a dance from her. She didn’t like him, anyway.”

  “Is she here tonight?”

  “No, she’s off tonight. But she’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “What about Vasquez?”

  “She’s a nurse at Borderland. Took care of my mama last year before she passed, we became friends.” She blushed. “Not very chatty, though. Think she got some issues herself.”

  “Did she know Mr. Browne?”

  “No idea. Murray was a little crazy, I guess, but I don’t know if he was ever in the ward.”

  “All right, one last thing. Does the phrase, ‘The Pallid One,’ mean anything to you?”

  She looked puzzled. “No, should it?”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. “No, probably not. Thanks for your time, Miss Jimenez.”

  She smiled, and it put lights in her green eyes. “Carmelita. Ya lo sabes, Tom.”

  I smiled back. “No cuando es un asunto oficial, I don’t.”

  “Muy bien,” she smirked. “Detective Wilson.”

  I made a circuit of the Lair, interviewed the other patrons and dancers present, but learned nothing new. I called the Borderlands House psych ward and learned that Browne had briefly checked himself in almost a year ago, stayed one week, and checked himself out. Couldn’t tell me why, but said he’d been well-behaved and cooperative. When I asked to speak to Maria Vasquez the woman on the phone said she was out sick and was expected back in a day or two. Said Vasquez was quiet, but good with patients. Said there’d been a minor incident back in March with a couple of the lecherous older men in the ward, but it had been handled. She couldn’t recall Vasquez having any contact with Browne during his stay.

  I looked Vasquez up: another Latina about Jimenez’s age, maybe a little older, and almost as pretty, with dark hair that hung past her shoulders; a U.S. citizen for nearly twenty years, no criminal record. I doubted her involvement or usefulness.

  I returned to the Lair the following night and interviewed Peraza, a twenty-something with dark eyes and large breasts. She was disgusted at the mention of Browne, not surprised or upset by his passing, and tight-lipped. Said she was working during Browne’s approximate time of death, which I confirmed with the manager on my way out. I looked her up and found a previous arrest for drug possession, when she was a teenager. Paid a fine, spent six months in jail, and had been working at the Lair since she turned eighteen. Born and raised in Raptor Mesa. I doubted her involvement, too, but she’d seen Browne on a fairly regular basis in the months before his murder, and her reticence made me suspicious. I decided to try and get a warrant to search her home. You never know what might prove useful in a case like this—or what weird things people are into.

  The silver moon and the summer air help Him guide my hands. We are both naked, and I kill her like I did the adicto: a quick sting in the throat while we kiss. Her arms fall away from me and she stumbles backward, quivering and gasping shallowly like a fish. She looks at me before she loses balance and I see confusion in her face. I want to take it back, but He caresses me and breathes in my ear, and I know it is what He wants.

  She lands on her side, on top of an Opuntia tangle, and rolls face-down in the sand; the cactus thorns stick in her skin, turning her into a mutant hybrid of some spiny creature. The gasping stops. I kneel over her and touch her trembling hand, wanting to cry but knowing He would not approve. Then she is still.

  He appears, then, a pale shadow in the moonlight, and tells me to finish my work. I don’t want to, but I know He’ll never unmask for me otherwise. I must make Him happy. I must see His face.

  Last night Carmen Jimenez never showed up for work. She was reported missing by a friend this morning. Nobody had seen or heard from her since night before last, and nobody kne
w where she’d gone.

  I’m kneeling over her corpse now, less than half a mile from where Browne was found. In the boiling Texas sun the flies are imperturbable. She’s naked, lying on her back, full of prickly pear spines on one side, small puncture wound in the other side of her neck, clothes in a loose pile just a few yards away. When I found her there were a few black vultures gathered around. I scared them off with a couple of shots from my Beretta, but they’d already taken the softest pieces of her.

  There are bites missing from her torso and limbs, though, that aren’t the vultures’ work. Ragged crescents and ovals made by a smallish mouth, spaced far apart on her body. Such deliberate placement was not detectable on nearly-half-eaten Browne. I touch Carmelita’s skin and my fingers come away bloody. There’s a throbbing pressure in my head and a tightness in my chest and I think I may be sick, or cry, or both.

  Delicately, gripping its edges with thumb and blood-tipped forefinger, I pull the playing card from between her teeth: the King of Hearts. On the back another typed couplet:

  * * *

  Though songs are sung and tears are shed,

  The Pallid One is never dead.

  * * *

  “Goddamn it,” I sigh.

  The blood is pounding in my ears. I’m thinking of Moses when a shadow falls over me. Before I can turn the pain comes, sharp and quick, in my back. It’s gone as quickly as it arrives and now I feel tired and much too warm on this already hot day. I pitch forward and heave myself to one side to avoid landing on Jimenez. I’m nauseous and dizzy, on my back in the blood-speckled sand. I can barely hold my head up, can barely breathe. My head is pounding. Maria Vasquez stands over me, wearing frayed jeans and a stained John Lennon T-shirt, syringe held up in one latex-gloved hand. Behind her a tall, thin figure looms, nearly twice as high as the man-sized creosote bushes. It wears tattered pale robes that flap in the breeze, almost yellow with age and dirt. Its face is covered by a featureless bone-white mask, ovoid and smooth. I try to lift the Beretta but it’s so heavy and my hands are trembling. I just want to go to sleep.

  After I’ve done my work I wipe the blood from my lips and take one of the last two cards from my pocket: the King of Spades.

  * * *

  But death is not the end, rejoice!

  The Pallid One has made His choice.

  * * *

  I place the card in the detective’s mouth. The Pallid One stands beside me and whispers His approval. I want to ask Him how He knew the detective would be here, how He knew he’d be alone, how He knew I would succeed—but to ask such questions would only annoy Him, I’m sure. He says He will unmask for me now, if I’ll just follow his last instructions. Of course I will. He tells me to take off my clothes. I do. He tells me to take the last card, the King of Diamonds. This one has nothing typed on it. He tells me to put it in my mouth. I do as He tells me and stand facing Him, staring up into that shining oval. My tears are no longer sad. I regret nothing. I am not afraid. I have earned my reward.

  He lifts a pair of slender, ashen hands and—carefully, tenderly—removes His mask.

  18

  THE DARK SIDE by Andrew Shaffer

  The beep jolted Nick Ligotti awake. “We’re preparing for descent,” a voice said over the intercom. It was the deep baritone of an older man. “We’ll be on the lunar surface in approximately ten minutes. The temperature is…well, it doesn’t matter what the temperature is, does it?”

  The recording got a few light laughs from the rubes in economy. Ligotti had heard variations of this joke dozens of times. He’d almost smirked the first time he’d heard it. Almost.

  Malaysian was one of the few airlines that even bothered to give the impression their flights were piloted by actual human beings. Apparently, it soothed the nerves of the elderly passengers. Ligotti put more faith in the ship’s guidance systems and ground control than in flesh-and-blood pilots. Computers didn’t down a few beers before flying; computers didn’t get distracted by cheating spouses. People were inherently flawed creations. God may have made humanity in His image, but Charles Babbage one-upped Him.

  “You were snoring.”

  Ligotti glanced at the aisle seat beside him. It had been empty when he’d dozed off. A boy of eight or so was sitting on his knees, staring at Ligotti as if he were a zoo exhibit. Fitting, since Ligotti’s only distinct memory of the zoo he visited as a kid was the napping Triceratops. So wild, so majestic…so lazy.

  A sharply-dressed male flight attendant walked down the aisle, giving each passenger’s lap a cursory glance. The airlines hadn’t figured out a way to dispense with flight attendants yet, because people couldn’t be trusted to buckle their seatbelts. People. Flawed creations.

  “Face forward and buckle up,” the flight attendant told the boy.

  The boy sat down and buckled the seatbelt.

  “If you snore, it might be a sign of sleep apnoea,” the boy said to Ligotti. “My dad had sleep apnoea. He had to be hooked up to a machine every night—”

  “No offense to your dad, but I don’t need a machine to breathe.” Ligotti pulled the SpaceMall catalog out of the seatback pocket and thumbed through it.

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “I’m not going to see a doctor, because I don’t have sleep apnoea,” Ligotti said without looking up from the magazine. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” the boy said. “If you stop breathing during the night—”

  “I’d rather die peacefully in my sleep like my grandpa, and not screaming like the passengers in his LRV.”

  “Your grandpa died in his sleep? Even more reason to see a doctor. Sleep apnoea can be hereditary. That means—”

  “I know what ‘hereditary’ means,” Ligotti said.

  Weren’t this boy’s parents worried that their son was out of his seat? Ligotti flipped the pages absentmindedly, and stopped on a page of lawn gnomes and assorted other outdoor ornaments.

  The boy carefully studied him, then whispered, “You’re a fed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The black suit and tie.”

  Ligotti sighed. The rest of the passengers, including most of those in business class, were dressed in more casual threads. Feds didn’t have a uniform per se, but they were required to adhere to a strict dress code when on the clock. Ligotti was salaried, so he was pretty much always on the clock.

  “I’m a property assessor,” he explained. “A tax man.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Work is boring. That’s why it’s called work.” Ligotti shoved the catalog back into the pocket. He just wanted to land, take the shuttle to his hotel, fap to some adult entertainment, and fall back asleep. He’d taken enough barbies to knock out a man twice his size for a week. They were beginning to pull him back under. His eyelids felt like lead blankets….

  “My mom says if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

  Ligotti snorted. “Is that so?”

  “I’m going to be an artist. I like to draw. That way, I’ll never have to work.”

  “That’s because you’ll be unemployed,” Ligotti quipped.

  “My dad was unemployed.”

  “Then what happened? He get a job?”

  The boy paused. “He died,” he said quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” Ligotti said.

  “It’s okay,” the boy said, perking back up. “I don’t really remember him—except for his sleep machine. Mama says he was a real prick.”

  The boy’s frank manner when speaking about his deceased father might have shocked another passenger, but Ligotti was unfazed. He glanced around the cabin, looking for the boy’s empty seat. “You traveling with your mom?”

  The boy fidgeted with the TV controls on the seatback. “She’s on Miranda.”

  “Traveling alone?”

  “I’ve flown alone lots.”

  Ligotti nodded. “So what’s on the Moon?”

  “Grandma.”

  “Whereabouts?”
<
br />   “Huntington.”

  The Far Side of the Moon. In less polite conversation, the largely impoverished area was referred to by its original nickname: the Dark Side. Not that it was lacking in illumination—both the Near Side and Far Side receive roughly the same amount of sunlight. No, the difference wasn’t sunlight. The difference was darkness of another sort.

  “You don’t sound like you’re from the Far Side,” Ligotti said.

  “Soon as my dad died, Mama moved us to Miranda,” the boy said. “She said she didn’t want to raise no moony.” For this last bit, the boy affected a twang.

  Ligotti laughed, though he probably shouldn’t have. Wasn’t much funny about moonies. His gaze drifted out the window. They were passing over the featureless dunes on the Far Side—barely lit up at the moment, in the days-long twilight.

  The closer they cruised to the surface, the more settlements he could pick out amongst the fine grey sand. This wasn’t, to say the least, prime real estate. The near side, with its breathtaking views of the Earth, was far more populated. Out here, though…well, “harsh” wasn’t a harsh enough word to describe the living conditions. And he was going to spend the next eighteen months knocking on airlocks and poking his nose around this dirt hellhole.

  As the ground drew closer and closer, Ligotti closed his eyes and silently prayed for an accident. A glitch buried deep within in the ship’s software, revealing itself at the moment before touchdown, resulting in a terrific crash into the runway—an inferno, quickly extinguished by the Moon’s lack of oxygen. Before it went out, the fire would burn through every body on board, delivering them from this godforsaken rock in a matter of seconds. Was it suicide to pray for your own death?