by Titus, Rose
“Rick, hold on. There aren’t any of you people in that part of town, are there?” They were, it seemed, concentrated in the old part of town, where they settled in almost a century ago. “What the hell were you doing there anyway?”
“Just seeing someone, that’s all.”
“Seeing someone?”
“Yeah? So?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“Well, after I left this person alone to get some sleep, I wandered back to see if the homeless guy was still alive. He was okay, sort of bruised, and smelled pretty bad. Can’t stand people who don’t wash. But, anyway, I ran into him and asked if he was okay. I took him to McDonalds to get him food, and we had a talk.”
“About what?”
“Well, basically, it seems that this kind of stuff has been going on for a while. Street people, homeless kids, bag ladies, hookers, all disappearing. But since nobody cares, the cops never know much. People have been disappearing, at least ten or fifteen years, maybe even more. It’s only a few times that bodies are found. When bodies are found they are always mutilated in really ugly ways, or sometimes half eaten. The street people have a legend, they call this guy the sasquatch, or sometimes the ape-man, because he is so big. I saw him. He is real. People are terrified out there. The thing kills men, women, and now they say even kids are missing. All the street people, the people no one want. Some say he is a cannibal who eats parts of people before violating them. Some say he eats people while they are still alive. I know, sounds disgusting. I don’t know how true it all is, but it really annoyed me to listen to it.”
The phone rang, startling both of them. Martin rose to answer it. “Hello? Yeah. Uh-huh. Where? Shit. Okay. I’ll be there.” He hung up.
“Bad news?”
“They found another body. It’s a woman.”
He finally awakened at dusk. He heard the innkeeper’s wife snarl behind his back that he would not wake up all day because perhaps he was a drunkard. He laughed silently. If only they knew.
Pavel had only been away one night and already he missed deeply the ones he now considered to be his family. He missed Yuri. Yuri was like the brother he never had. He missed Yuri’s patience and quiet dignity. And he missed the two little ones who were constantly underfoot, constantly annoying him in one way or another. He now wished to hear them playing noisily outside his window, with their mother scolding them. And he missed Yelena the most.
His own family had been killed, hunted down and butchered long ago, when things had begun to change. When the night ceremony was outlawed, all those found participating in secret under the cloak of darkness were put to death. Yuri’s own father was hauled away to be hanged; the temple, once filled with silver, was looted, and Pavel’s people were slaughtered or driven away.
Few people remembered. His people were legend now. Some said that it was because his people had too much influence. The nobility wanted for themselves the hearts of the people. And they were now free to terrorize unrestrained, burn homes, destroy villages.
Pavel rose out of the uncomfortable bed and reached for his boots, his sword and cloak, and gathered the few things he traveled with.
He needed to begin moving on again, to deliver the treacherous girl home to her murderous father. But he wished he could simply leave, exit through the rear door to the inn, go to his horse and ride away, abandon the wench to fend for herself. And he could not.
“Why couldn’t he?” she demanded. “That’s what I’d do!”
“Why? People were different then. They had this unheard of thing called honor, and duty, and—”
“And why didn’t he just do whatever he wanted with that other girl, whatever her name is? Helena.”
He grew irritated. “I told you why.”
“Well, I don’t understand.”
“I do not think any modern person could understand.”
Instead of continuing to contradict him she began to laugh uncontrollably. “I do not see what is funny. Oh well, at least it’s good to see you happy about something, finally.”
“You’re just so serious all of a sudden.”
“Me? Now, look,” he continued.
The forest was dark and soundless; Pavel knew that was a bad sign, for if there was no song of night birds or cries of animals, then there had been trouble. Or there soon would be trouble.
Perhaps during the day while men ventured into the forest there was a hunt, with many men and horses and hounds. He hoped that was all.
Or perhaps there were bandits nearby; the silence betrayed their presence? He listened, but could hear nothing.
Could there have been a battle close by? He inhaled for the scent of blood in the air. No. Another village burned? No. There was no trace of smoke.
He attempted to converse with the woman as they rode but she remained silent, and so he ignored her until she let out a sharp wailing cry.
“The gods save us! Not now, woman! It is too early.”
“I am ill, you fool. Do not mock me!” She choked, coughed, then vomited onto the forest floor, but much of it landed on the mare’s soft brown coat.
“You are indeed not well, I see. There is a stream ahead. You may get some water.”
“I only wish to die. Why do you not let me? I am miserable.”
“Yes, so am I! Come on, you shall wash your face, have some cool water, and be in your own bed before the dawn,” but Pavel did not know where he would rest.
Martin rose up from the edge of the toilet bowl. He spat the rest out, trying to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth. He had been a cop more than 20 years, but it was the first time the job made him throw up. “Shit, oh shit.” It was terrible. He could not get it out of his mind.
He stumbled out of the bathroom, shuffled weakly to his little girl’s room, and opened the door. She was there, in one piece. Everything was okay.
Thank God.
He shut the door.
He knew he would not sleep at all now. God, he thought, how the hell long can they keep this all covered up? The papers had a tiny feature on “a body found in an alley, cause of death unknown. Police are investigating for a possible homicide.”
Cause of death unknown! She was butchered.
There was not much in the local papers about the mess found on the doorstep of the library, right in the center of town, either. Only that a homeless man was discovered, cause of death unknown. Someone, somewhere, held onto some very tight puppet strings. And he was beginning to wonder if Rick and Alexandra were telling the truth, about their people not being involved, at least. They ran stores and nightclubs, but they didn’t run the town newspapers.
And tonight there was a new victim, this time a woman.
He shivered when he thought about it, felt his guts heave. He choked it back, swallowed. Her face, her whole face, was just so brutally done in, it would take a while to identify the victim.
He wretched, coughed, and thought about it. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Her stomach had been torn open, also; a bloodied, empty cavity. In his hallway, he fell to his knees and let go. He threw up a second time. It spilled onto the carpet. Martin sunk to the floor and wept quietly.
He somehow felt responsible for it. He deserved to be the one in the alley, torn apart, not her, whoever she was. Because he couldn’t stop him, it, them, whoever, whatever, was responsible for the hell that existed on the dark streets.
Help me, man! Help me! Don’t let him kill me, man —
He wept silently, buried his face into the carpet to muffle the sobs so his little girl couldn’t wake up and see her daddy falling apart.
The homeless man was finishing his food; he ate like someone who had never seen food before. He smelled bad. He looked bad. And everyone in the cheap, greasy, brightly lit fast food place was glaring at them both. “You don’t eat at all, do you?”
“What kinda question is that?” Rick wore his metal framed amber sunglasses. The artificial lights annoyed him.
“I think I know who you
are now.” He loudly slurped his large Coke.
“Jimmy Hoffa?”
“Come off it, man.”
“Okay. I admit it. I’m really Elvis. The aliens from Pluto brought me back to earth.”
“Don’t shit me, okay? You don’t eat nothin’, right?”
“So?” He smiled slightly, a tight lipped grimace. He knew what was coming, and he didn’t care. He had ceased to care long ago.
“We know you guys are around, you know. We see you, hanging around that place together, we see what sometimes falls off the delivery truck, we see it when it spills and gets all over the pavement.”
He would need to remind Leon to speak to the delivery people, again. “Yeah? So?”
“So, like why the hell do you care about us? No one else does.”
“Okay, that’s simple. If we don’t locate this dirtbag, a lot of people are gonna start looking at us. ’Cause you’re not the only one who knows. Want some more fries? You can have all you want.”
“Why me? I mean, don’t you guys, like, you know, just eat people?”
“Nope. And the stuff that fell off the truck was from a slaughterhouse. And I won’t do nothing to you,” he spoke quietly. “Look, you’ve seen it. You got a look at it.”
“Yeah, people on the street say it’s an ape man, like a primitive guy, or something, a cave man. It don’t talk at all, just drags people off, rips ’em apart, dumps the bodies somewheres. Police let it go on, too. Yeah, and I do want more food. And coffee, too.”
“Will you talk to someone for me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause you’re a little scary yourself. Can I still have the food? I want another burger now, too.”
“Yeah, sure.” Rick hid the fact that he was annoyed. “Stay here. I’ll get it for you, okay? Look, if I promise no one will hurt you, will you talk to someone then?” He stood up to get in line.
“I dunno. Who?”
“A cop.”
“Don’t like no cops. I had a nice cardboard box to sleep in once, and the cops took it away. It was all I had.”
Rick sighed and stood up to go wait in line. “Look, I’ll get your burger and coffee, then when I get back we’ll talk more, okay?”
The old man in line in front of him smelled worse that the young vagrant; he smelled of cigarettes and sweat. Finally after a wait he got up to the counter. The girl who took the order had four inch purple nails and pink hair, and a gold ring in her nose. She handed him the food, took his money and gave him change, and then told him that he was cute. He ignored the girl and made his way back to the table, but the vagrant was gone.
“Oh hell.” Rick tossed the food away in the large plastic trashcan that had We Are Happy to Serve You! printed on it. He was glad that he never frequented the place. He left.
It was a few hours before dawn, yet everyone was there. After Dark was filled to capacity, yet the music was stifled, its dark interior was quiet. Rick sat in the corner by Alexandra. Lina and Alex were across from him. He looked around. Yes, they were all there, everyone, even Leon. Especially Leon. He wasn’t really one of them, but he was there. He was always there.
Irina slowly stood up before them and spoke. “Most of you have heard about the recent troubles. There have been several violent deaths, of an extremely savage and brutal nature. One was close to our location, with some incriminating graffiti. “
Anxious whispers filled the room.
“Most of the information has not been released to the papers, but it is only a matter of time before we are all in terrible danger. Many of you are not old enough to remember the terrible persecution of the old country, but it can happen again, and it can happen here, if we allow it.” She spoke until it was nearly daylight.
The soft morning light poured gently through the window and Rick went to close the curtains.
“I wonder if that strange fool who is new in town has anything to do with any of this scandal,” Alex grumbled. He and Lina lived a several miles away, in the less crowded part of town, where people had small yards and gardens in front of their homes instead of pavement and streetlights. Rick had asked them to spend the day at his place, as their drive home would not be comfortable.
“Oh, he is harmless,” Lina nearly laughed at the idea. “A harmless New Age type, or so I hope.”
“None of them are harmless,” her husband growled.
Rick pulled off his black leather boots and let them drop on the floor by the couch. His leather jacket landed on top of the boots. And he landed on the couch, rested his head on the single small pillow and pulled the woolen Navajo blanket over him. “You guys help yourselves to the fridge,” and he shut his eyes.
In minutes Rick could hear Alex wander into the kitchen and start to complain about the state of his disorganized home. “No, Lina, I won’t shut up. And I don’t care if he hears me. He ought to clean this clutter up.”
Rick laughed quietly. He loved to annoy his older brother, his very much older brother. Born in the old country, son of Irina’s first husband. They both had their mother’s dark hair and dark eyes, yet they seemed worlds apart and could almost never agree on anything.
“Rick,” Lina whispered.
He lethargically opened his eyes and turned to see her kneeling by the side of the couch staring at him. “Yeah?”
“What’s her name?”
“Huh? Who are you talking about?”
“The girl. You know, the one you said was suicidal ’cause her crazy rich parents drove her nuts.”
“Laura.”
“Laura What?”
“Rivers. Why?” He was tired and grew irritated.
“Could she be the daughter of Augustus James Rivers the Third?”
“August James Who?”
“You know, he’s got this big, big estate in the northern part of the state. Kind of an eccentric, they say. Gives to extreme political causes. Someone wrote a tell-all book about the family, that he’s a real control freak or something. He owns vineyards, breeds race horses, and has a private jet, owns several companies, and everything.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is the same family. I never bothered to check it out. I’m too busy keeping her from going through with it.”
“I read in the paper where she’s supposed to be already dead. But Jim Ellison says there’s a rumor that she’s still alive, that she ran away from her crazy family. He says he interviewed a maid when he was digging into that family awhile back.”
He thought a moment and recalled some of what she’d told him. “Yeah. I know. She told me when she went out on her own that he disowned her and claimed to everyone outside the family she died in a yachting accident, or something like that, and she said he even staged a funeral, put an obituary in the paper, all that. She told me one night she even saw pictures of her own funeral in all the newspapers. Can you imagine? The kid says she’s depressed ’cause she doesn’t fit in, but her father sounds really bad. I guess she wasn’t making any of that stuff up, then.”
“Is she pretty?”
“What?!”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So. She’s pretty!”
“Lina!”
“Rick, Gabrielle would have wanted you to go on with your life.”
“Come off it.”
“You can’t mourn her forever.” She suddenly became serious.
“She’s just a kid,” he moaned. “Just twenty four, or something.”
“So? Gabrielle was twenty two when you met her.”
“Look—”
“You knew you would outlive her. You always knew that.”
“Yeah. But why so sudden? It wasn’t fair.”
“She knew you would outlive her. She would want you to go on and be happy again.”
“Let me sleep, will you?”
She left.
Alex was lucky. Lina was strong and young and vital. And she would be for a very long time. He would not have to fa
ce letting her go.
And after so many years he could still feel the cold pain. He could still feel the dread of hearing the phone ring, picking it up, getting the call from the hospital.
McMurphy was in one of his good moods again, if anything about him could be called good. Martin watched him in action. How he hated to watch him, yet he could not pull his eyes away. He was on the phone to someone, Martin wasn’t sure who, and he was bragging about picking up three different women in one night at the same bar. He laughed about how stupid they were after a few beers.
Martin could still taste the vomit in his mouth.
Did Rhonda ever get in touch with him? he wondered. She was probably better off now, anyway, without him.
McMurphy was a mystery to him. What strange forces shaped his heartless self-serving personality? Was his mother a sewer rat and his father a poisonous snake? Or did this slime even have parents? Did he just materialize out of some dark void, come from some alternative reality where all the inhabitants were sociopaths?
And he especially hated the way McMurphy smiled. It was a big, bright, extremely white smile. It seemed pasted onto his face somehow. From McMurphy, Martin learned to really wonder about people who smiled a lot.
Could the man be crazy?
Or maybe he was just a jerk, plain and simple.
No one in the department knew where he came from, or where his family was. No one knew if he even had any family, or what his background was. Most people liked him at first, but not after working with him for a few years.
Some of the younger officers who were nearby listening in on the phone call began to laugh along with McMurphy, and Martin knew he liked that. He liked the admiration. But the few who knew him, really knew him, simply went on with their paperwork, their own phone calls, or whatever.
Did no one in the department, the entire universe, have the guts to just tell the man to shut the hell up? Martin looked at his watch. It was near the end of the day; he decided to leave early.
“What are you?”
“Huh?” he looked up. “What do you mean, ‘what am I?’ You already know. Why even bother to ask.” The ground was cool and felt soft as he knelt on it. “Of course we are not supposed to pick these, but after dark, who’s watching?”
