Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  An attorney from the District Attorney’s office had already been in to review the case. Emma would probably be tried as an adult for James Parker’s murder and the attempted murder of Gordon Parker. There was no question as to Emma’s role in Gordon Parker’s shooting. But the possibility of a second person in James Parker’s murder was the kind of thing a good defense lawyer could use to sneak in enough reasonable doubt. It wouldn’t take much to convince a jury that a teenage girl from a good family with no prior criminal record might not have been capable of planning and carrying out a cold-blooded murder all by herself.

  If Darrell Ward existed, Martinez and Shirdon had to find him. If he didn’t, they had to prove it. But as every Bigfoot enthusiast and alien abductee knows, proving a thing doesn’t exist is far more difficult than proving it does.

  Shirdon rubbed her eyes. With James Parker’s killer behind bars, she’d been hoping to start actually sleeping again. But this case was turning out to be far from over. “Might as well have another go before her lawyer convinces her to stop talking to us.”

  Shirdon and Martinez entered the interview room and sat down across from Emma, but the girl kept her head down on the table.

  Martinez slid a can of soda toward her. “Emma? I brought you something to drink. I know you must be tired and wanting to get some sleep, and that can happen a lot faster if you help us find Darrell Ward.”

  Emma kept her head cradled in her arms. “His name is Senz. Nobody calls him Darrell. And like I already told you, I don’t know where he is.”

  “Are you sure you even know who he is, Emma?” Shirdon asked. “Because so far we haven’t turned up anyone matching your description of Darrell Ward.”

  “So maybe that wasn’t his real name. I only got the name ‘Darrell Ward’ off one of his books—just like I already told you.”

  “Okay,” Shirdon said, “then tell us again what happened after you shot Gordon Parker.”

  At first Emma didn’t answer. Then she sat up and stared at a spot on the wall as if Shirdon and Martinez weren’t in the room. “First I shot Gordon Parker, and then I shot Senz. Then my mom was there, and then the cops, and now I’m here. That’s all.”

  “Then tell us again why you shot Senz,” Martinez said. “Why shoot your best friend, Emma?”

  The girl grabbed a fistful of her hair and let out a howl of frustration. “You guys just don’t get it, do you? Senz wanted me to shoot him. He wanted to sacrifice himself to a greater principle, just like Seneca. Just like Socrates. To die a noble death is the greatest fate for the greatest souls.”

  “And do you think he died a noble death, Emma?” Martinez asked. “‘Cause we didn’t find any trace of blood from that shot you claimed you fired at him. Not even a drop.”

  “Well, maybe I missed.”

  Based on her marksmanship with James and Gordon Parker, Shirdon found it unlikely that Emma would miss such a willing target. Or maybe that had been the point to begin with. “Then what happened to Senz, Emma? Did he just disappear off the top of the mountain somehow?”

  “Like I told you already, I don’t know.”

  Martinez leaned across the table, but Emma kept her eyes on the wall. “You know what else, Emma? Gordon Parker just came around enough for the detectives at the hospital to talk to him. You know what he said? He said he didn’t see any young black male at the top of Cathedral Point. He said he only saw one person—you. Your mom didn’t report seeing anybody else, either.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t have seen him, because Senz was hunched down in his spot in the corner of the ruins, just like he always is. And by the time my mom got there, Senz was already gone. Like I told you already.” Emma suddenly swung toward Martinez and looked him directly in the eyes. “I know you think I’m crazy. That I just made Senz up or something because I don’t have any real friends. That’s what my mom thinks, too. And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care what she thinks, I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

  “You might care what the District Attorney thinks,” Shirdon said. “He’s going to try you as an adult, Emma You might care when you’re sitting in prison for the rest of your life.”

  But the girl slumped farther down in her chair and went back to staring at the wall. “Maybe you weren’t listening earlier. I don’t care about that, either.”

  Shirdon felt like gripping her own hair and screaming. “Okay. Right. A noble death.”

  Martinez frowned, studying the girl. “What do you care about, Emma?” His voice was gentle, the question sincere.

  Emma sat straight up in her chair, her eyes bright and alert for the first time since she’d been arrested. “I care about Senz. I care about Nostri.”

  Shirdon’s voice was less gentle. “But I thought you said Senz was dead.”

  “No, I said I shot him.”

  Martinez tried one more time. “So if you think he’s still alive, you must have some idea where he might go.”

  “He could be anywhere and everywhere. People vanish off the face of the earth all the time.” Emma turned toward them again and flashed a sudden, secret smile. “And sometimes they come back.”

  Martinez stood up. “I don’t think there’s anything else to learn here. Emma, someone will come soon to take you back to your cell.”

  Before they even left the interview room, Emma had put her head back down on the table.

  Martinez paused again in front of the one-way glass. “Her defense team will probably go for a guilty except for insanity defense.”

  “And I’m not sure I’d disagree,” Shirdon said.

  “What? You think she’s crazy? That she made the whole Senz thing up?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s telling the truth. Maybe she’s telling what she thinks is the truth.”

  Martinez shook his head. “There’s still the hair sample. Although that could have come from anywhere. Hell, knowing this girl, she could have put it there herself, to throw off the investigation. She could have dreamed this whole ‘Senz’ thing up right from the start. Or it could just be a coincidence that the hair that ended up with the note matches up with Emma’s supposed accomplice.”

  Shirdon smiled for the first time all day. “I thought you didn’t put much faith in coincidences, Monte.”

  “I put even less in phantom murderers that vanish without a trace.” Martinez gestured in at the girl still sitting at the interview table. All of a sudden, she looked astonishingly young and vulnerable. “You know, change the appearance around, and that could be my own daughter sitting there.”

  “Come on, Monte. Radical vegetarianism or no, Hannah’s a good kid.”

  “I’ll bet Emma is a good kid, too. Or at least part of her is. And that’s the thing that gets me, Cass—it’s as if all of a sudden kids walk through the magical puberty portal and mutate from the cute little beings you know and love into these strange, terrifying creatures. And the cute little kid is still there somewhere, but it’s sharing space with this hormonal monster like some two-headed evil twin or something. I don’t know. I’m probably not making any sense.”

  Shirdon sometimes wondered how anyone with kids stayed sane. Or maybe they didn’t. “You’re making sense. It’s just that sometimes sense stops having anything to do with it.”

  Then Martinez asked the same question everyone had been asking since Emma’s arrest. “If Darrell Ward is real, though, where is he?”

  “I wish I knew,” Shirdon said. “It’s possible that Emma did intend to kill him and missed. It’s also possible that she’s lying to protect him, to make people think he might be dead. Maybe after Emma’s mom showed up at Cathedral Point, Darrell Ward took off the back way down the mountain and went off the radar the same as he was before all of this. There’s millions of kids out there who fall through the cracks in the social service system. Darrell Ward could be one of them. Then again, it’s also possible that he exists only in the mind of one very mixed-up young girl.”

  “Well,
the DNA from that hair sample is real enough,” Martinez said. “If and when Darrell ‘Senz’ Ward ever does show up, we’ll be ready for him.”

  A police officer arrived to take Emma back to the holding cell. Before leaving the interview room, Emma turned and stared through the one-way glass as if she knew the two detectives were there watching. The secret smile gave a last, brief appearance before it and its owner disappeared from sight.

  Shirdon was about to offer to buy first rounds at the Slammer when she noticed a piece of folded up paper lying on the table in front of where Emma had been sitting. Back in the interview room, she smoothed out a dirty notecard that looked as if it had been read and reread many times.

  “How’d she get that past search and confiscation during booking?” Martinez asked.

  “I don’t know.” Shirdon could just make out the faded, hand-written lettering on one side of the notecard. “It says, ‘The human race should be granted a pardon.’”

  “Let me guess—our wise sage Seneca again.”

  Shirdon flipped the notecard over to reveal another message. “The ink on this one’s still clear and dark. She must have written it more recently.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It says, ‘I endured incredible trials because I could not endure myself.’”

  The two detectives stood staring at the notecard in silence until Shirdon folded it back up again. “Come on, Monte, let’s take this down to evidence and then get out of here. It’s up to a jury now to decide whether or not an almost seventeen-year-old kid named Senz ever existed.”

  Martinez glanced at the empty chairs around the now empty interview table. “And whether or not he still does.”

  * * *

  Three days later, Emma Kaster was charged as an adult with the murder of James Parker and the attempted murder of Gordon Parker. Her lawyers were already preparing a guilty except for insanity defense, but they hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a plea bargain, depending on what the D.A. had to offer. At a standing room only press conference, Emma’s defense team addressed at length what the media had already dubbed the “Senz Question.”

  Before the lawyers had even made it out of the negotiating stage, though, the case was being tried in the court of public opinion. So far, the jury was still out on whether or not Darrell “Senz” Ward was an actual person, a myth, or some combination of both. Whatever the case, most people agreed that the truth might never be known. Then again, a myth has a way of eventually becoming its own kind of truth.

  Web sites about Senz began popping up all over the Internet. One featured a real-time stream of “Senz sightings” from around the world. The latest update was from a user named Swampy54 reporting a Senz sighting at “0300 hours outside a nightclub in Berlin.” Another site included a database of names and addresses of every person in the United States with the misfortune of being named Darrell Ward, with the plea that the “real Senz please send a private email with proof of who you really are.”

  The biggest and most popular site was from a group calling itself “Nostri Now.” The homepage was a five-thousand word manifesto about the “moral imperative to transform one’s moral, political, and philosophical beliefs into practical action.” Their slogan was “Impotens Fortuna”—fortune that cannot be resisted. In a video posted on the site, the group’s self-appointed “Emperor” appeared with a blurred-out face and voice distortion effects. In a repeating loop, the faceless form issued the following call to arms:

  “Each citizen of this global community of humans must be held directly accountable for his or her beliefs. A belief is not simply an abstract concept for one but a series of concrete consequences for all. We hold to no political party or agenda except one—put your beliefs to the test of your own life; put your principles into practice on yourself. So those who want to let pedophiles out of jail must then employ the pedophiles at their children’s schools. Those who want to poison the earth must do so on the land where they live, in the water their children drink. Those who want open borders must invite the new immigrants to live in their homes, must provide jobs for them in their businesses. Practice into principle; your beliefs, your life.”

  The group’s primary demand was for all voting records to be tracked and recorded in a national database so that each person could be held accountable to his or her decisions.

  “If you vote for politicians who want to end social welfare programs, your social welfare benefits get cut,” the Emperor explained. “If you vote to cut funding for education, the cuts begin with your kid’s school. If you vote to build a drop-in shelter for homeless teenagers, it gets built in your neighborhood. You vote it, you live it.”

  Getting an early start on its own accountability system, the site included an interactive voting profile for each member of Congress with external links to relevant information from his or her personal life. For instance, the profile for a senator with a consistent “yes” voting pattern for military action and engagements included links to profiles of his three adult children, none of whom had ever served in the military. The same senator’s profile also showed support for a measure to cut funding for veterans’ hospitals and a “no” vote on a bill meant to increase veteran job-training and education benefits.

  Rumors about Senz’s identity and whereabouts multiplied and spread across the Internet. It was said he’d been a child chess prodigy and had a photographic memory. Some sightings reported him as tall and handsome, others as slight of build and ordinary-looking except for his “extraordinarily penetrating eyes.” One sighting claimed that he was horribly disfigured and always tried to cover his face with a hoodie. It was said that after disappearing from Cathedral Point, the U.S. Army had recruited him into an elite squad and he was off somewhere in the Middle East, hunting terrorists. Others claimed he’d escaped to Central America to join a utopian farming cooperative and renounce all ties to the modern world. Some said he was building an underground network of spies to infiltrate the government, or that he was somewhere in Scandinavia, working on a wind farm. Some said he was in hiding, secretly moving from one place to the other, waiting for the right moment for the revolution to begin.

  Some even said that “he” was actually a “she”—specifically, a “she” named Emma Kaster about to go on trial for murder. An online fundraiser set up for Emma’s defense raised over fifty-thousand-dollars within the first week.

  Across the Internet and spray-painted on walls, billboards, and bridges in towns, cities, and stretches of rural highway from New York City to the Australian outback, an “N” in the shape of three crossed swords began to appear. Sometimes the symbol would appear by itself, and sometimes it would be accompanied by graffiti. The words were written in different languages, in different styles and ways, but their meaning was always the same:

  Nostri Lives.

  Nostri Knows.

  Nostri Is Coming.

  Nostri Is Here.

  DEVILS IN DARK HOUSES

  The debt that each generation owes to the past,

  it must pay to the future.

  —Abigail Scott Dunaway

  PART I

  1

  The harder it rained, the louder they got. The Hound huddled beneath the piece of plywood, listening. Always listening. Tonight the voices said things like, “Jealousy and drink were the cause of the trouble,” and, “Girls, whiskey, and pay-off money is all it takes to run a bawdy house in this town.” Loggers, blacklegs, gamblers, sailors, whores. Sharp-elbowed fast-talkers, scheming shanghai specialists, scoundrels and rogues run out of their own land to make a fresh start in the West.

  “That’s who formed this town, and you’d better not forget it,” the Hound told the rain.

  But the rain didn’t answer back. Tonight the rain was talking more to itself than to the Hound. Tonight the rain was remembering.

  “Rain stuck in the past just like Iceman. Sticking up out of that ice for, what? Over five thousand years,” the Hound reminded himself. “Then some clown co
mes along and pulls him out, just like that. Never even asked. Just went ahead and pulled him out, and the shit’s been hitting ever since.”

  The Hound stood up and rummaged around in his shopping cart. He knew he had it somewhere, the article torn out of a genuine newspaper from a genuine library. Not that the Hound believed that just putting a story in a newspaper automatically made it true.

  He dug to the bottom of his most valued plastic bag—the blue one, thick and shiny, with a yellow smiling face on the side. Still not one hole even after all these years. That’s how it was back before the government stopped allowing plastic bags.

  “Found it!” the Hound told the rain. He searched out a relatively dry spot at the top of his leg and smoothed open the creased and disintegrating article. “Right there in the Alps, it was. September, in the year of our world nineteen-ninety-one. Because that’s when the world always ends—September, every damn time.”

  The Hound held the paper close up to his good eye—hell, his only eye, after the right one had to go.

  “Says here Iceman had the blood of four different people on his clothes and weapons. And they thought they were just going to pull him out of the ice and call him a great historical find and that would be the end of it?” The Hound shook his head and chuckled. “At first they thought he died a natural death. Of course he didn’t die a natural death! Died of the stone arrowhead embedded in his left shoulder. Says right here in this library newspaper that the arrowhead ‘severed one of Iceman’s arteries, most likely causing his death.’”

  The Hound carefully refolded the article and tucked it back inside the blue plastic bag with the other scraps of paper and assortment of coasters, torn ticket stubs, bus passes, advertisements, take-out menus—places the Hound had never been, full of people the Hound would never meet. But none of those fancy people in those fancy places knew what he knew—the newspaper article might have gotten those facts straight, but it left out the most important part, like the newspapers always do. They left out the part about freeing not just a five-thousand year old dead man from the ice, but freeing a five-thousand year old murdering murder victim from the ice. There was no way Iceman was going to stay quiet under those conditions.