by G. K. Lund
He gasped as the pain intensified and it became clear he was aware of what was happening to him. He reached one hand out and buried his fingers into the earth as he ran the fingers on his other hand through the water that flowed by – ever uncaring. He inhaled with force, but the pain got the better of him as his heart wanted no more. It ended in deep and pained grunts as he slowly crumbled, his upper body falling forward, tilting to the side.
That was all it took. He was already dead as he fell into the water’s cold embrace, the little motion enough to send him floating away from the bank as the slow current carried him onward, his tired legs now finally getting their rest. There was no change where he had been. No trace of him or anyone else for that matter. The river would wind freely for some time yet before humans would wrangle it like an animal, making it conform between their large and intrusive dwellings. I hoped someone would find the old man before he reached the coast to be washed out to sea. I didn’t know why I cared.
“Dude,” a man about Old Ben’s age said with accusation as he almost walked into me.
“What?”
“Yeah, nice job standing in people’s way, asshole.”
I blinked and looked around. The stench of the city came back and almost knocked me down for a moment. Then, I realized I was back. People crowded the sidewalk. They were everywhere around me, their smells of perfume and bodies filling the inside of the nose. I looked up and stared at the gray apartment-complex in front of me. It barred my sight of the river now, but I recognized that I was too close to the body of water to find Peter. I glanced down at the phone in the hand. Peter’s name showed on the screen still. I hadn’t been watching the old man for long. Why had I been watching him at all? I knew what had happened there, but not why. And why was it important to me? Was it even important to me? I didn’t like the confusion it made me feel, nor did I like the unease that manifested itself in the body. It made me glance around, like prey expecting a predator to pounce. No such thing around me, but predators came in different shapes, didn’t they?
I decided to put the phone back into the jacket pocket. If I was that far away, I should at least manage to get out of Harrow before calling Peter for directions.
Chapter 14
“How difficult can it be to find a priest in this city?” Peter asked as he ran both hands back and forth through his hair in frustration. It made strands of it stand on end, making a child seated at the table next to ours burst out laughing. His mother looked apologetically at Peter who patted the hair down again. We were in a coffee shop in a part of town named Charlottetown, but according to Peter, no one called it that. Instead, it was known as Charton. People are lazy I guess. Charton constituted the main area for commerce, interspersed with shops, cafés, and restaurants as well as clubs and bars for the nightlife. As I looked out the large window I could see streets buzzing with life. The roads were heavy with traffic, and the sidewalks with people walking to and from on their incessant errands. Above the tall buildings surrounding us, I could see Ashdale’s only skyscraper – which Peter informed me was City Hall and the mayor’s office. It looked somewhat like a gigantic factory chimney, though with more concave sides. The coffee shop itself was a little dark and brown, though with a clean style. They all seemed the same to me, not that it mattered. I was there for the dark liquid of calm and alertness. That particular day was the day I had decided to try a new version despite my former reservations. The smell was good, the color light with foam on top. The texture and taste though… I grimaced and forced the body to swallow. It was too thick, and the dark-roasted taste ruined by the production and the added milk. Spitting it back into the cup would for certain make the child squeal with glee. This swill was not the sweet and earthy taste I’d gotten used to so far.
“Did Be… did I like this before?” I asked Peter who had gone back to hammering away on the keyboard. He’d been looking for the priest for two days now, not finding a trace of the man. I had been doing nothing. And time passes so slowly when you have nothing to do. Nowhere to go.
“Like what?” Peter asked while barely glancing up. “Oh… no. You drink it black.”
I frowned while looking at the cup. It had to be the body then. It probably remembered what it liked. Since I was tied to it – shackled, to be honest – I liked it as well.
“Anyway,” Peter continued, oblivious to my taking the cup and getting halfway out of the chair before interrupting me. “I can’t find anything. I think we’re going to have to stop looking in the digital world. The first thing I can think of is talking to someone who might actually know the guy, and I have—”
A laptop bag landing on our table startled the both of us and made the mother at the next table stare at us with annoyance.
“Mind if I join you?” Detective Jones smiled wide with her lips pressed tight together.
Both Peter and I stared in silence, surprise and confusion stunning us for a moment.
“I’ll take that as an invite,” the detective said as she pulled out a chair and took a seat. I was still halfway out of mine, but sat down and put the coffee cup back.
“I have something to show you,” Jones continued as she grabbed the bag and pulled out her laptop. I realized I really needed to learn how to use those things properly. Not counting Peter and Jones, I could see eight other people using them in the coffee shop alone. It was a useful tool in everyday life.
“Um… can we help you with something?” Peter finally managed to get out as he stared at Jones while she booted up her laptop. Unlike me, he’d not met her before, only heard about her, and he was taken by surprise.
“Why, yes you can,” she said, smiling even more now. A smile I had come to believe should not be taken at face value. She was a danger to me. That was one of the few things I was certain about.
“Peter, this is Detective Jones,” I said. “She thinks I killed a man.”
She gave a demonstrative snort at this. Peter nodded. “Yeah, Walter told me.”
“And about that man… well, I have something to show you, Mr. Reed,” she said and turned her laptop toward me so I could see. Peter moved his chair a little so he could do the same. What she had to show me was a video, grainy and colorless. It showed what I assumed were places in Ashdale as these were obviously surveillance videos.
“See, I have been collecting surveillance tapes from a large area around Central Bridge these past few days, and a couple of them show some interesting things.” She controlled the viewing, clicking buttons to skip between the different clips.
“That’s Okanov,” she said as we saw a blond-haired man in dark clothing walk past some buildings at a brisk pace. He kept his head down and his hands in the pockets of a hoodie. There were several of these clips as he had been caught on camera many times. “We can’t really see his face,” Jones continued. “He knew how to be unseen despite the digital eyes that are everywhere. Since he turned up dead though, we knew what he was wearing. Take in the height and hair color… it is him.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why are you showing me this?”
“I’m getting to it.” She glanced at a guy seated at a nearby table who was staring at her. “Unless you have X-ray vision, there’s no point is there?”
The man visibly blushed and looked down at his own screen. I looked at them. What was that? She even rolled her eyes, before moving to the next clip. Then it dawned on me. What can I say? I was slow and new to this. She had quite symmetrical features, large eyes, and cheekbones that helped frame them. Dark shiny hair, and a body that looked to be in a healthy physical shape. That had to be what had silenced Peter this much as well because unless he was engrossed in his computer, he was usually a talker.
“Are you paying attention, Mr. Reed?” Jones asked, and I realized I was staring at the laptop with blank eyes.
“Sorry, can you run it again?”
She sighed, irritated by me, but she had been all along, so why stop now? She did do as I asked though, and I saw what appeared to be
two men fighting in an alley. The camera was not aimed straight at them, and it was difficult to discern any details as it was filmed during nighttime. It was obviously a fight though. Fists hitting faces, expertly delivered kicks, and a few that might have connected more by luck than anything.
“Any of this ring a bell?”
I shook the head.
“You think that’s Ben?” Peter asked, too shocked to stay unsettled anymore.
“I don’t know…” Jones smirked. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re insane if you think he can beat up someone like that.”
Jones raised an eyebrow. “Not much for male ego at this table I see.”
“Is this proof?” I asked. I didn’t like this. I might have been on the level of an infant in many things, but I understood that even though she couldn’t prove this was Old Ben, it was as difficult to prove it wasn’t him. I seriously doubted it though. He had been in a dark headspace that night. I suspected he’d had only one goal when he set out from his apartment. Fighting with and killing another human being, had not been part of that.
Jones didn’t answer my question. Instead, she continued with her video clips, the next one showing one entrance to the bridge, and a young man walking on to it. He was dressed in jeans, shirt, and jacket. This didn’t show with any clarity on the tape, but I knew. I had seen him up close that night. This man had blond hair as well but walked slowly and was oddly relaxed. His head bent forward a little. That struck me a bit… wrong, and I realized it was because the body usually didn’t move like that. I might be in it now, but I suspected I moved pretty much the same as Old Ben usually had. Back and neck straight. No, this man was a defeated man. He’d lost a battle that was hard to win. I knew that much. I knew I had seen it many times. It was a hard battle when the enemy was your own brain countering your every move. Trampling on you, making you feel worthless and like shit.
Jones clicked a couple of buttons again, and the time frame shifted to a minute afterward. A limping man came walking the same way. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought him drunk. The darkly clad blond man was clutching his head and reeling as he walked onto the bridge with unsteady steps, and out of view.
We sat in silence for a moment. Only the hum of multiple voices around us could be heard. Then, Jones closed the lid of her laptop. I knew she was watching me intently, but I was engrossed with the sight of Ben walking on to that bridge. How could she not see it?
“What is this supposed to prove?” Peter finally asked. He looked uncomfortable now, and not because of Jones. There was only sadness. I knew what Ben’s friends suspected, but didn’t talk about. The memory loss was what made both them and the doctors let me be to a certain degree. They thought I didn’t know. That I was not a threat to myself anymore since that’s what Old Ben had been.
“You were there, Mr. Reed,” Detective Jones pointed out. “On Central Bridge, at the same time as Okanov. I have other clips of you walking through the city as well. Your movements fit the time frame.” She looked smug as she said this, and I didn’t like it one bit. I decided to start doing something about it.
“What about the hammer?” I was pretty sure it couldn’t be connected to this crime. Old Ben did not have it in him.
“What?” she said and gave me an unhappy look. She didn’t want or like this question.
“The hammer that you collected from the apartment. Is it the murder weapon?”
“Are you worried it might be?” she countered.
“Nu-uh,” Peter broke in. “She wouldn’t be sitting here showing us these clips if she had found the murder weapon at your place. She would have arrested you.”
I raised an eyebrow at this and looked at her. She frowned before answering. “No. We found no blood traces on it.”
“So, you have nothing on him. Only some blurry tapes showing some blond dudes walking around Ashdale,” Peter continued, smiling as he was on a roll now. “Anyway, Central Bridge is always full of people. Are you saying no one saw anything that night? Two guys fighting and then falling into the river?”
Jones sighed and sat back in her chair. “There was a suicide that night at about the same time. Some guy on a high most likely. He washed up later that day. Arms full of needle marks. A lot of people tried to stop him. They didn’t see Okanov go into the water.”
I stared at her in stunned disbelief. A suicide? Who? “Was it another blond guy?” I asked before thinking again. Damn it. Why could I not keep the mouth shut?
Jones stared at me for a long time. Clearly judging this question from all angles. “I don’t know,” she said at last. Our little staring session had drawn the attention of the child by the other table who joined in. “Why do you ask?” Jones added.
“Never mind,” I said, the words quick and with purpose. “I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said. The tone of her voice not concealing the disbelief. “You don’t know anything, do you? All that amnesia. How inconvenient for you.”
“Hey, lady,” Peter shook his head at her words. “I think that’s enough.”
“Do you, Mr. Klein?”
He made a grimace at the question. “Yeah. And if you know my name, then you’ve been checking up on Ben. And you came here instead of his home or calling him to the station. You didn’t want Walter to be around, did you?”
“Who?” she asked, all innocence.
“Oh spare me. There is something called harassment, you know.”
I certainly did not know this, but the comment made her angry. She grabbed her laptop and bag and got up. “We have uniforms all over that area searching for the murder weapon. We should find it in no time.”
“Excellent,” Peter said. “Maybe you can start looking for the real killer when you find it.”
Jones was about to answer him but thought better of it. Instead, she looked at me. “Do not stray too far, Mr. Reed.”
We watched her leave in silence. As the door to the coffee shop closed behind her, Peter exhaled and gripped the table. Then he stared hard at the child who was still participating in the staring act as his mother was on the phone. Peter won the contest in three seconds. “Man, she was scary,” he said to me. “Scary and hot. But mostly scary.”
“We need to find Father Moreau,” I said, the voice low and determined. “I need to find out what’s going on, and he’s the answer. I know it.”
“Well… what about Scary-Cop?”
“It might help her as well. All I know is that I need to find Moreau.”
“Okay then.” Peter closed his laptop. “We don’t have many options, but we need to start talking to actual people. The digital world can’t help.”
“Do you have anyone in mind?”
“Yeah. I figure we start with his own kind.”
Chapter 15
In the large area of Curtain Fields stood what was called Ashdale Cathedral. Standing next to it, it looked massive, but even before Peter informed me it wasn’t actually a cathedral I had managed to come to that conclusion on my own. It had a general cruciform shape, built in stone and several gargoyles up on its walls. Small bestial faces that were fleeing from the church, though forever stuck in that form. Large stained-glass windows decorated the same walls, and on the eastern wall was a large round rose-shaped window. It was for some reason colored blue, not red as one would expect. Despite the shape and material, the building itself was relatively small. It couldn’t be more than a hundred and sixty or seventy feet and about half that in width. What had given it its name, though, had to be the spires. Five in total, one on each end, and one in the middle. They rose about a hundred feet into the air, and they looked a little out of proportion to the rest of the building.
“Yeah, well… they wanted something grand when they built it,” Peter said when I asked about this. We stood, straining our necks while looking up at the spires. They were narrow on top, and the copper roofs bright green from corrosion.
“There wasn’t much room
though. The theater had been built a few decades earlier, and people had started populating the area. I guess it was easier to build up. It’s actually called Our Lady’s Church, but everyone just calls it the Cathedral.”
“How do you know this?” I asked as we started walking toward the entrance again. “You don’t seem to be a historian.”
“Nah, but I live here in Curtain Fields, and anyway… we had to come on a guided tour in college.”
“Why is it called Curtain Fields?”
“Because,” an unfamiliar voice broke in behind us, “the church was built after the theater, and what was known as Farmer Fields got its name after that old and famed institution.”
We turned to see a black-clad man approaching us. He looked to be in his forties, a little gray by the temples, a few lines by the eyes and on the forehead. He was dressed in a black suit, with a black shirt to match and a white collar that did its job in identifying his employer. He stopped in front of us with a friendly smile and shifted his grip on a couple of binders he was carrying. He looked like he had come straight from some meeting.
“Father Chester?” Peter asked as he shook the man’s proffered hand. The priest nodded before we introduced ourselves.
