by DC Malone
“I think they’re already here,” I replied. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon.”
“Jeez.” I briefly considered turning back to the futon and going back to sleep, but from the nonstop rapping at the door, I doubted my visitor was going to give up. “Who is it?” I asked Luka. “What do they want with me?”
There was a moment’s hesitation on the line. “I—I don’t know, Meredith. They have me out of the loop on this one. My gut tells me it has something to do with what happened with Gladys. You know, the vampire—”
“I don’t need to be reminded about that, Luka. Not something I’m going to forget anytime soon.”
“Of course.”
The knocking at the door came again, followed by the muffled sound of a woman’s voice.
“Luka, I had better get this before they punch through my door. I’ll call you and let you know what it’s all about.”
“Alright. I’m sorry I couldn’t have given you more warning.”
“It’s better than nothing. At least my brain cells are firing a little more than they were just a minute ago.”
I disconnected from the call and started snapping open the locks on my door. It took a few seconds, and I half expected the knocking to resume before I finished.
I opened the door to find a young lady smiling at me from the other side. Young was the operative word. The girl didn’t even look to be out of her teens. She wore clothes that would have been well-suited for an internship at just about any business in the city—a crisp white blouse paired with perfectly creased tan slacks. Her hair was jet black and parted in the middle, and her pristinely even complexion was a shade that made my slowly awakening stomach grumble for a café latte.
“Um, can I help you?” I scanned her hands for boxes of Girl Scout cookies, but she wasn’t packing.
“Ms. Bale? I’m Gwen.” She jutted a hand out, and I shook it awkwardly. “Can I come in?”
“Are you—”
“With the Congregation?” she finished. “Sure am.”
I stepped clear of the doorway and Gwen charged through with all of the gusto of a cheerleader auditioning to be part of the squad. Her straight, even hair seemed to whoosh with every peppy step.
I couldn’t figure if this were some kind of actual Congregation business, or if I was simply the butt of a joke. Maybe one of the higher-ups decided it would be funny to have me babysit their granddaughter or something. Either way, I was going to need some coffee to get through it.
“I’m going to put some coffee on. You want some?”
Gwen wrinkled her perfect little nose and shook her head. “Never been able to stand the stuff. So bitter.”
“Suit yourself.” I went about dumping some coffee and tap water into my ancient coffee maker while Gwen stood watching.
“I’m sorry if I woke you. I bet you’re wondering why I’m here.”
“It’s crossed my mind.” I hammered down the button on the machine and it hissed and burbled to life.
“I’m a Custodian.”
I looked up from the coffee maker to find Gwen still wearing her perky little grin. She didn’t seem to be joking. “So… what? You’re here to clean for me?”
Her smile widened and she let out a sparkling laugh. “I’m not a janitor. I’m a Custodian for the Congregation. My charge is knowledge. The knowledge of our people, to be more precise. And I believe there is much I might learn from you, Ms. Bale.”
“Your charge is—What is that even supposed to mean?” I looked desperately to the coffee maker, needing something to clear the fog from my head. There was only about a hand’s breadth of dark liquid in the carafe, but I still jerked it from its place and emptied it into yesterday’s mug. I gulped at it greedily, before turning my attention back to Gwen.
“Better?” she asked.
“It’s not worse.” I walked back toward my futon, and Gwen padded along behind me. The heat and caffeine of the coffee were doing their thing, but I still didn’t feel like I was firing on all cylinders.
“I just want to ask you a few questions,” Gwen said, hopping down onto my futon without invitation. “I promise it’ll be totally painless.”
“What kind of questions? And will it take long? I have somewhere to be pretty soon.” I sat down beside her. The futon was the most comfortable place in my apartment, and she wasn’t getting it all to herself.
“Questions about you. Your background, your life. The puzzle that is Meredith Bale—that’s what I want to know about.”
I sighed. It wasn’t my favorite topic, but I figured telling her what she wanted to know was likely to be the quickest way to get the kid out of my hair. She had a look like she was an overachiever trying to get the scoop for the school paper, and I didn’t doubt she’d hound me until she got just what she wanted.
“Okay,” I said when I had slurped out the last dregs of my coffee. “I grew up in the system. Never knew my biological—”
“No, no.” Gwen held up her elfish hand. “We know all of that. It’s a matter of record, and we don’t have trouble acquiring things that are a matter of record.”
“So, what do you want to know, then?”
“I want to know what’s not a matter of record. I can guide you if you like.”
“You’re going to have to,” I said. “Because I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Great! We’ll start at the beginning. What’s the first thing you remember?”
“The first thing? Ever?”
“That is the beginning.”
“Uh, I don’t know.” I considered for a moment. “Maybe being in St. Anthony’s. That’s the orphanage. I was probably three, maybe a little older. I have a vague recollection of hiding in a cabinet and something about stealing a pile of washcloths.”
“Excellent.” Gwen covered my hand on the futon with one of hers. “Now, go back a bit farther.”
“Farther?”
“Before St. Anthony’s.”
“Before? There is no before. Not for me, at least.”
“Don’t be silly.” Gwen squeezed my hand, and something lurched in my chest. “There’s a lot before. Let’s look together.”
“I don’t—” I didn’t get a chance to finish the thought, as something subtle but important changed with my perception.
It started with a smell. The usual, vaguely apple-cinnamon, smell of my apartment was replaced with an odor of wet stone and a tang of something acrid. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant and, more than that, it was familiar. Overwhelmingly so.
I jerked my hand away from Gwen. “What are you doing to me?”
“Nothing that’s going to hurt.” She held out her hand, patiently waiting for me to return mine. “I’m just helping you to remember. The Congregation wishes to know more about you, and a lot of that will start with your biological parents. If we can figure out who they—”
“You can make me see them?” I interrupted. I wasn’t completely sure how I felt about that. I had, of course, always wondered about them. But it had always been more of an abstract kind of thing, like wondering about long-dead ancestors. Now that it was more concrete, the thought made me oddly nervous.
“You might see them,” Gwen said, still holding her hand out to me. “But anything we learn could be useful. Names, locations, uniforms. Any detail you pick up on is valuable. It could lead us to more information about you.”
I hesitated. “Will you see what I see?”
“No, I’m not psychic. Just think about me as an amplifier of sorts. I’ll be depending on you to report back what you find.”
I reached out and took her hand again, feeling a little better about the whole thing. If I found that the personal details of my life were a little too personal, I could simply keep my cards close to my chest.
“Alright,” Gwen said, “it can take a little bit to dig into your memories, especially really early ones. Just close your eyes, give yourself the time you need, and remember that
you’re still right here in your own home.”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Only, darkness didn’t come as expected. Instead, I saw a bright orange light that bobbed and danced only feet away from me. It was a flame, and it cast gentle, ever-changing patterns of yellow and orange against the dark, glistening stones of the walls around it.
“I see a light. A torch, I think.” My voice sounded far away to me.
“Interesting. Can you move toward it? Look around?”
In my mind’s eye, my perspective shifted to allow a view of the area around me. I was in a long stone hall or tunnel, lit only by the torch on the wall ahead of me.
“Why am I not a baby?” I asked. “If this is my memory, shouldn’t I be, I don’t know, smaller? Maybe lying in a crib or something?”
“Uh, you’re not?”
“No, I’m standing in a hall or passageway of some kind. I’m at least as tall as I am now. Maybe even taller.”
“That’s weird.”
Gwen’s assessment didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence.
“Why don’t you try looking around. See if anything makes sense or feels familiar.”
It all felt familiar, but I didn’t want to tell her that just yet. In my mind, I moved closer to the torch. The area beyond was robed in inky blackness, so I pulled the torch from its sconce on the wall and held it before me to light the way. I nearly dropped it when I saw my hand and arm in the flickering light. My pale flesh was wreathed in thin, tattooed, lines of black and crimson. Even as I watched, the tattoos pulsed and writhed across my flesh.
A sound tore my attention from the sight of my strange arm. It was a voice, low and harsh and made up of a thousand pieces. It called me by name. But that name was not Meredith.
I flinched away from the sound, dropping the torch to the stone at my feet. Something large and lumbering shifted in the darkness before me.
“What—?”
“What?” Gwen echoed, sounding too far away.
I didn’t reply. A large piece of the darkness broke away and moved closer. Its presence seemed to push back the guttering light of the torch. The voice came again, uttering that formless sound that was my name.
I stared hard into that moving darkness. Stared until something began to ache between my eyes. Stared even after the torch gave up its final gasp of light.
In the pitch black, that other thing of darkness finally took shape. It was a face without form, an entity beyond the need for shape or structure. It was the darkness. And I knew it by another name as well.
Father.
Chapter 5
Gwen gave a startled squeak as I ripped my hand away from her. “What is it? What did you see?”
“Nothing,” I lied. I felt suddenly cold and clammy, and my heart was racing. “Just a room that went dark after the torch went out. Maybe it was part of a nightmare I had as a child.”
“Maybe.”
“Either way, I need to get going. I have a meeting in…” I checked my phone and found that it was already one. “Right now.”
A knock sounded at my door, right on schedule.
“Okay, but we’ll need to try again,” Gwen said. “Maybe we’ll get something more next time.”
“Sure,” I said, ushering her toward the door. There was no way I was doing that again. “Give me a call and we’ll set something up.”
I opened the door to find Carter waiting on the other side. He didn’t look like he’d managed to get any rest since I last saw him.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Yes, thanks,” I said, half-shoving Gwen through the door. “You ready to go?”
“Uh, yeah, but there’s a change of plans.”
“Not a problem.”
We took the stairs down and out of the building, and I beelined for Carter’s car, giving Gwen only the most perfunctory of goodbyes. I didn’t want to come off as too chummy because I was half-afraid that she might want to ride along and continue with her probing.
After Carter got in and pulled away from the curb, he gave me a sideways look. “What was that about? Pushy door-to-door salesman, er, saleswoman?”
“Something like that.” He had the heat going in the car, but I still couldn’t suppress the shiver that ran through me. I felt like some of the creepy cold from that stone hallway had followed me back out to the real world. “She wasn’t exactly selling anything. But she was pretty pushy.”
“That’s too bad. If she’d been pushing Girl Scout cookies, I could have gone for a few boxes.”
“No such luck. The treats she had weren’t the kind filled with peanut butter.”
“I don’t have any idea what that’s supposed to mean,” Carter said.
I sighed and held my hands in front of the dash heat vents. “I don’t either. It sounded witty in my head. So, about that change of plan…”
“We’re going to skip the morgue,” he said. “There’s been another murder.”
“Already? You think it’s Compton?”
“No, he has an ironclad alibi. We had him in custody at the time the murder was committed.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty airtight. You think it was an accomplice?”
“I’m not sure what to think anymore. Serial killers typically work alone, but maybe this is something else altogether.”
“Still thinking about that cult?” I asked.
“Maybe. Or some sort of mass hysteria that results in a string of copycat killings.”
“Sounds pretty farfetched.”
Carter laughed. “Sure does. But six months ago, if you’d told me we’d have four murders by strangling in less than three months, I’d have told you that was pretty farfetched too. We didn’t have that many in the previous five years put together—I looked it up. I’ve even started entertaining the idea that this might be mob-related, but I don’t know how Compton or Hull might fit into that notion. The others too, for that matter. It’s all just so strange.”
It did seem strange. I knew that Compton had killed Hull in his office—had seen it myself—so I knew he was responsible for at least one of the murders. If it turned out that the others were all committed by different people, what did that leave us with? I could probably get behind the idea that this was some sort of organized effort—a string of murders all perpetrated with a similar goal in mind. What didn’t make sense to me was why they were all stranglings. There were more efficient ways of murdering someone, and those other ways weren’t so hands-on, so to speak. Was that the point? Was someone trying to send a message?
But that still left the matter of the strange images on the walls and ceilings. If each of the murders were being carried out by different people, how were they all managing to leave the exact same kind of artwork at the crime scenes? Was it supposed to be a kind of elaborate calling card? Was there an artist following the murderers around for the sole purpose of leaving that message?
Nothing much about the murders was adding up to anything that I could understand. I hoped that would change when I saw what happened to the next victim.
We drove for about twenty minutes until we came to an apartment building in the Upper West Side. The building was rundown and did not look like the kind of a place you’d expect to find a murder victim wrapped up in any kind of high-stakes organized crime.
“The victim lived here?” I asked, trying hard not to make eye contact with the group of grim-faced teens and twenty-somethings standing sentry at the nearest street corner. “You’re sure this one isn’t just a random killing? I don’t want to come off as judgy or anything, but this place looks like it has seen its fair share of murders.”
“Yeah, I don’t get it,” Carter said as he opened his door. “If there’s a pattern with the murders—some common connection between the victims—I’m not seeing it.”
I got out and walked with Carter to the double doors of the building’s entrance. There was an intercom and Carter used it to have someone in the office buzz us in, but that particular security feature se
emed unnecessary, given the state of the door. It looked like an ill-timed sneeze might blow the thing open.
Inside, there was a cramped common area, a long bank of mailboxes along one wall, and an area down a short hall to the left that led to elevators and stairs. Junk mail and other debris littered the floor near the mailboxes, and the several waste bins—which appeared mostly empty—seemed to stand in silent witness of the tenants’ less than stellar aim.
The place bore the overwhelming odor of must, metal, and desperation.
“Fourth floor,” Carter said, guiding me down the hall and toward some doors marked Stairs. “Elevators out.”
“Can’t say I’m too disappointed.” I eyed the slightly ajar doors of the nearest elevator as we passed. If it hadn’t been out of commission, it likely would have been before it carried us up to the fourth floor.
The stairwell stank of what can only be described as biological odors, and by the time we hoofed our way to the fourth-floor landing, I was gasping for air and trying to not think too hard about what I was sucking into my lungs.
Through another set of doors and onto the main area of the fourth floor, the smell wasn’t necessarily better, but it wasn’t as confined as it had been in the stairwell. We crossed paths with a large man in what may have been a latex muumuu or an oversized trash bag with holes cut out for his arms and legs. He gave us the stink eye as we walked by, and he followed that up by making loud obnoxious oinking sounds when we were a bit farther down the hall. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was supposed to be an insult because he thought we were cops, or if that was simply the language of love for him and his people.
Apartment 421 was our target. Two uniformed officers were loitering next to the door, and the sounds of loud talking and bustle greeted us before we entered.
“Al in there?”
“No, not this time. He had something to take care of.” Carter smiled. “Disappointed?”
“Oh, yeah. He made quite the impression. I was thinking of asking him to take me away from this world of crime and death.”
“Pretty much what I figured. I’ll see about passing him your number the next time I see him.”
