Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

“Help me,” the tape pleaded, and then the stop button was tapped. The wind died off, the last bit of it shaking the string but not hard enough to trigger the rest of the apparatus into motion.

  Halloran was out of sight. Keeping my gun out, I walked the clearing. Lines of bins and boxes, crates and heaps of junk were everywhere. A bit of movement caught my eye and I gave chase, leaping a bin spilled on its side just in time to see John Macdonald in a long black gown vanish behind a curtain to what looked like another maze. The walls were a hodgepodge of orange partitions, old doors, crates and bins, shower curtains, and screen dividers with bamboo drawings upon them.

  How many mazes did he have in this yard? It was his personal, sick little playground.

  Closing in on the place where he had vanished, I saw that the curtain was next to the maze’s entrance. The room there was fixed up like an arcade, two pinball machines making cheerful noises as lights blinked on the displays. The walls were covered in space posters and cardboard stars with glittery outlines.

  Standing to the side for whatever protection a screen divider afforded me, I edged aside the curtain he had disappeared behind. A gloomy hallway ran out of sight, presumably along the maze so he could watch his victims panic and flounder.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  In the distance were sirens. They weren’t close enough. I’d be damned if I let him sneak out of this yard and get away to do this somewhere else.

  I went in.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He dipped and turned and twisted through the maze, as silent and graceful as a cat. He knew which doors would open to his private hallway; he knew which screens weren’t backed up with rebar. Of course he knew! He had built every inch of it, knew it like he knew himself. And this one was his new favorite.

  Sometimes they fought him every step of the way. Sometimes they came together like apples and pie. This was the second kind, everything pulling together like it had been meant to be this way all along. The floor plan, the themes, the props, it was as easy as one-two-three. The other two were being a pain in the ass, but this one charmed him so greatly that he could mentally solve the problems in the others while toiling within his lucky third.

  Ninety percent perspiration and ten percent inspiration! This maze had those values reversed.

  He hadn’t expected to see the car pull up in front, but he had known what they were the second they got out. Police. Police in an unmarked car. No one ever came here except solicitors on rare occasions. The presence of the cops sent a jolt of rage through him as he watched from the window, retreating to the backyard before they got to the door. He needed to decide what to do.

  He had been so good at leaving no trace behind, but of course those girls, those fucking little girls at Shady Days . . . That was what had screwed this up. That was why he still had a maze sitting unused in a foreclosed house on Geller Street, and cops at his house. How in the hell they had tracked him here . . . it was beyond him to figure out.

  But it pissed him off. He had been pissed off since the kid slipped through his fingers. It was usually no strain on him to be patient, to work slowly and methodically to a goal, to stand strong in the face of setbacks, but to come so close and get nothing but shit in return made him wild to catch anyone he could to run the Geller maze. It would have pissed off God to create the earth yet not be able to set humans upon it. He had built this wonder and no one came! All of that angst and toil for nothing, a miscarriage of a longed-for dream.

  No. No. No.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  He had overstepped. Kids were a bad business, just as he had originally thought. He regretted that. Now he didn’t care if he ran a kid over at Geller, but he really wanted a kid to run this one.

  Instead, he had a cop.

  Dark brown hair tied back. Short. Solid. She had an interesting face, pretty though not beautiful, and vivid blue eyes that had hardness to them. Not meanness but hardness. He hadn’t had eyes like that in one of his mazes before. The woman from Bounce had eyes soft with wonder and fright; the man’s eyes were blinded with panic.

  Cops would have hard eyes from seeing shit, like soldiers did. They saw death and fear and pain all the time. The scarecrow freaked her out but she didn’t scream or lose her head in terror and shoot; she’d run after him to the maze instead of running away. He couldn’t give her Quell to mess with her mind and that was too damn bad. But this was still a fascinating twist. At least this maze was almost ready, the things he had left to do just basic housekeeping tasks before he committed every detail to his blueprints to be reconstructed elsewhere.

  Maybe in a few months.

  No, more like a year. He wasn’t happy with the other two mazes yet.

  But now those plans were ruined. They had found him. And he hadn’t had any time to pack up some of his shit and put it in the pick-up so he could drive away. That was too bad as well. He should have kept an emergency bag in there, some clothes, some food, and some money. Too late now.

  A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

  They were going to try to arrest him. But try was the operative word in that sentence. As soon as he was done with her, he would run down one of his secret passages to the very back of the yard, invisible to the policeman if he got in. Then step up the stairs made of boxes thump thump thump, leap the fence and the pick-up was on the other side under a tarp. The keys were in his pocket.

  Just as importantly, the other key had arrived today in the mail. He had just been opening the envelope, hands shaking with relief and excitement, when the cops turned up. There hadn’t been time to unlock himself from the cage. But that was okay. That key was in his pocket, too.

  He didn’t need to drive his pick-up around to the road when he quit this place. Behind his property, the wire fence lining the nearest pasture had gone down in one place several months ago. The cattle were rarely moved to the field this close to the homes, so whoever owned that property hadn’t noticed the fence yet.

  But he had. He would drive over the fallen part and into the bovine-less pasture, jerk left to the dirt road there and follow it to the gate. You only needed a code to get in; it automatically opened if you wanted to get out.

  Then he was home free, driving down roads through great expanses of pasture and the occasional vineyard. By the time they figured out how he’d escaped, he would be on the freeway headed south. Once he got to San Francisco, he would ditch the pick-up and find himself some new wheels after he freed his aching, pus-leaking dick.

  He would treat himself like a lover tonight, spread salve gently over his wounds and put away the cage until next time. He had taken his punishment like a man, and earned his reward.

  They thrust and grunted and squirted and sank back weakened, most men. He, on the other hand, emerged stronger. He was the dominant; he was the submissive; he was the sadist; he was the masochist; all of this together made him untouchable. Whole unto to himself, a complete circle, while the rest of the world was broken.

  It wasn’t just new wheels he had to find. He needed a new home, too. And he would need some new stuff. This yard was a goldmine; he would have to start afresh.

  That was all right. It wasn’t like he didn’t know where to find shit. A couple of years of raiding trash, cruising the free to good home listings in papers online and off . . . His mother had had a friend all the way down in Bakersfield, a guy twitchy from heavy drug use in his youth, and frail from other medical problems. He’d lived alone in a home there, at least he had a decade or so ago. No wife. No kids. No housemates. Just him and a dog and a room full of porn he watched all day long while banging off. If he was still alive and in that nice ranch house . . .

  That was what it was about this maze! Problems got solved in these walls.

  He would drive to Bakersfield once he had different wheels, and get intimately acquainted with the things people threw away. This would take years to build back up. Years to collect, years to go over every piece to ensure it had no identifying markers that co
uld be traced to him, years to clean it and wrap it and all of the rest that had to be done . . .

  He could wait. He was a slow burn.

  Slow burn. He liked how that sounded. A fast burn destroyed nerve endings in no time; a slow burn was much more painful.

  Good things come to those who wait.

  Dipping through a curtain, he stopped to pick up his Grim Reaper mask. It was insane how many of these costumes his mother had gotten, fifty of them put in a dumpster behind a store after Halloween. It looked like mice had gotten into them, so the store had just tossed the lot even though most were unmarked. And then Mom carted them home so mice could get into them, since her mind never worked.

  Once the mask was on, he picked up the scythe. He had several of those, too, swiped from God only knew where.

  Now he just had to wait for the woman to catch up.

  At first he was impatient. After all, the sirens he was hearing could be more cops.

  But Death waited. And they would never find him in this yard. If he couldn’t get to the pick-up in the back, he would crawl through the underground tubing that would release him off to the side. Edge up the planks over the hole and wait until no one was around before running.

  Death was always patient. Because everyone came to death in time.

  He crossed the scythe over his chest and looked in the mirror.

  Perfect.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Pale blue sheets dipped low over my head. They were stained brown where water had collected in the past. The fabric was thin enough that the light, though muted, shined through and allowed me to see with relative ease.

  The only noise was coming from the arcade to my side. Seeing a spyhole, I stretched up to look in. Ragged edges around the hole told me that I was looking through one of the posters on the wall.

  He wasn’t in there. The wind was swaying a doll that hung from the ceiling on twine. More twine connected it to a pinball machine, and a quarter was taped to its stuffed pink hand. A small paper cup with more quarters rested on the side of the game.

  Pulling away and straightening, I moved on down the corridor. My finger was on the trigger. The walls of the corridor weren’t decorated, but there were piles of things on the floor. Torn space posters fluttered in the breeze, pinned down with a mini-pinball machine that looked like a toy for the preschool set. One of its legs had broken off. These items were too thrashed to use as decorations, I guessed. So they had been discarded over here.

  The arcade had turned into a hallway that branched up ahead, as I saw through the next spyhole. Then my corridor arched out to encircle the dead end. The light grew dimmer, the thin sheets above me giving way to thicker tarps.

  A spyhole gleamed when I turned the corner. Disliking this short corridor, its twists blocking my view both front and back, I peeked through the hole to see if Macdonald was on the other side.

  No. The second room of this maze was a Halloween scene of plastic pumpkin baskets and stuffed witches propped around a cauldron. Instead of bins or partitions, the walls of the room were made up of old doors. Smiling tissue ghosts and paper skeletons were attached to them, along with signs shouting BOO and TRICK OR TREAT!

  The decorations were so benign that it was doubtful even a toddler would be scared in this room. Candy was scattered over the floor and piled up in the pumpkins at several of the doors; grinning bats dangled from strings above. The breeze did not reach in here to move them. Joke headstones lined one side of the room. Here lies Ima Farting. Rest in pieces. I didn’t read the rest.

  Silly. Safe. Soothing. Some prison psychologist in the future was going to have a field day with John Elliot Macdonald.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  My spine stiffened to hear the faint, maniacal laughter. He was carrying around a little cassette player like the mannequin had had, or the giggling was a recorded clip being played on a cell phone. This guy only spoke when he had to. When it was a part of the game in luring someone into a feeling of complacency. But I was already here, so he didn’t need to bother speaking to me.

  I edged around the turn to a corridor bathed in deep gray. A sense of foreboding settled over me. He had the advantage here. But the sirens were louder now, squad cars pealing only a few blocks away from this house. Emboldened by the noise, I pressed forward.

  The arcade. Halloween. The other mazes had each had three rooms before their victims died inches from the EXIT sign, so I should be coming up on another room soon. This stretch of the corridor had no spyholes, only walls of planks and a tarp stretched tight on top. The air was musty from inactivity, and pressed into the dirt were hundreds of footprints from him passing back and forth.

  Scrape.

  It was a metal sound. The scythe. I didn’t know if that was also a recording or if he was scraping the actual weapon against something to freak me out. Either way, it was effective. It was also coming from my right like he was just inches away on the other side of the boards.

  Could he see where I was? I didn’t think so. There was no camera equipment anywhere, and the planks went all the way down to the ground. He couldn’t see my feet. But he had to know I’d followed him into the back alleyway of the maze.

  There was a knothole in a board, too small and irregularly shaped to be intentional. Stepping around a tiny pile of trash, I looked through it.

  He wasn’t in the narrow corridor. But he could be beyond it. Shifting, I tried to see ahead. There was the next room, a blur of color beside the branch that led to darkness. Interesting. He ran people through his mazes by night, creating one lit path and one unlit to herd them along. It was afternoon now, and in the undecorated branch I could see faint gray light coming in. That one wasn’t a dead end.

  I wanted to get outside. Moving down the corridor, I tested the various components of the wall for their sturdiness. The bins and crates could not be budged, and the strip of board fencing was solidly in place. Beyond that was a Dutch door, nails holding the top half shut. I flicked on my flashlight and ran it over the bottom half of the door. There were no nails on that half, and the latch was undone. Reminded painfully of my punctures as I tested the handle, I pulled.

  It opened to the maze’s hallway. I flipped off my light and ducked in. Then I closed the door behind me, and gave my surroundings a quick lookover. Behind me ran the hallway back to the Halloween room, although a curve in the maze rendered it out of my line of sight. Ahead was the fork. He had dressed up the last room as a crowded toy store with a mannequin positioned at a cash register. A gigantic stuffed giraffe stood at the center, surrounded by baskets and bins of baby dolls, balls, plastic animals, and a myriad of other items. A disco ball slowly rotated overhead, lights trailing over the bicycles and stacks of board games and stuffed animals.

  Tinny carnival music was playing. Shiny blue and red sheets hung over the walls to add to the festive air of the store. Pinned to them were dozens of paper dots in rainbow colors. I was sure a spyhole or two was incorporated in there somewhere. On the far side of the room was a corridor that crooked. Even as I watched, a green arrow hanging from wires turned on and blinked to indicate I should go that way.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  It sounded like the voice was coming from the toy store. But it didn’t have places for an adult to hide. I could see through the legs of the giraffe and mannequin, and the stacks of board games weren’t very high. The register was resting upon a narrow podium. He was somewhere else.

  I entered the unadorned hallway, wishing the music in the toy store would shut off. It wasn’t very loud, but it was getting in the way of what I needed to be listening for. A cold sweat breaking out on my forehead, I traveled down the corridor as the light strengthened. The flashlight wasn’t necessary.

  Scrape. Scuffle.

  The sirens were at a shriek now, and there was no way that he could not hear them. But he wasn’t running. No, he was still messing around in the maze. Arrogant. This was a display of the same arrogance he had shown in leaving the silk mill’s door o
pen and the gate unlocked. It was why he had picked the hay maze on a property where a woman was currently residing. He was so sure that he could get away without consequences, that he had every contingency planned for, that he was willing to play a game here with me instead of fleeing. Perhaps he had escape routes to let him get out of this yard. Even without them, the yard was bursting with junk that went incredibly high in places. He could dodge and hide for quite some time as uniforms struggled to clear it.

  I continued to creep along the corridor, searching for spyholes and finding none. The partitions framing it were two lines of unbroken plastic in dark blue. Sneaking to the turn, I took a swift glance around the corner. The corridor ended only ten feet beyond that. There were boxes blocking off the end, but they were only two high.

  The backyard. In the snarl of this maze, it appeared that I had moved closer to the house. The steps to the dirty back door were rotting, and atop them was a wide plank to walk. Glancing up to the partial view I had of the house, the windows on the first floor were too coated in filth to see through, and the windows on the second had boxes and fabric pressed up to the glass.

  Of course he wasn’t waiting in plain view beyond the exit. But I could feel him nearby, a warning signal flaring in my gut. Sliding along the partitions to the yard, my eyes roved from the door to the house to the sides of the exit to the boxes. They weren’t wrapped with barbed wire, and didn’t seem to pose any other danger than a tripping hazard. The flaps were open on one, and inside was a jumble of toys. What he had put in the maze was newer stuff; the dolls and stuffed animals in the box were marked and old.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  Wanting to cram whatever was making that giggle down his throat, I continued to edge to the exit. Then there was a sharp thunk, a curved blade punching through the partition only a foot away from my face.

  There was no way he could have seen or heard me! Yet he’d known my approximate position. The shock of nearly getting gored wore off in a hot second. Getting around the blade, I ran the rest of the way to the exit. The plastic of the partition squeaked behind me as he tried to withdraw his scythe.