by B. V. Larson
After the fourth set of knocks, I put on my sunglasses and twisted the knob, which squeaked as the lock relented. I let myself in.
“You’ve got balls,” Holly said, standing inside in a long pink T-shirt and little else.
“People keep telling me that,” I said, smirking. I could tell she’d heard my knocks, checked the peephole, and decided to take a pass. I didn’t hold it against her. After a long night, I probably looked like hell.
She had a tattoo on her bare thigh I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a hummingbird hovering around a flower. Right then, I thought I wouldn’t mind watching her pole-dance. It must be quite a show.
“What are you doing back here?” she asked. “At frigging daybreak, no less?”
“Sorry,” I said, “but I’ve got new information and I was wondering if I could crash here. I’m dead tired.”
“Get a room. You’ve got the cash.”
“Hotels in this town want plastic.”
“Not the crappy ones.”
“OK,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Holly stared, then shook her head, sighing. “OK, you might as well come in, since you have already turned my lock into Jell-O.”
“It will turn back, as long as the lock hasn’t been twisted to an impossible position,” I said.
“I know that.”
After ten more seconds of hesitation, she finally stepped out of the way and let me in. I sank onto her couch with a sigh.
“Look,” she said, standing over me with her fists on her hips, “we both have Tony’s money, and we had a nice chat yesterday. But we aren’t roomies. You got that?”
“Yeah.” It was a good pose for her, so I admired the view.
“What did you do, anyway, kill somebody?” she asked after staring at me suspiciously for a few long seconds.
I squirmed a little. I must have had that kind of look on me, the look of a hunted, worried man who was grateful to be in a relatively safe place. I had to wonder how often she’d seen it before.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Holly began rubbing her temples. “I don’t believe this,” she said.
“You got any beer?” I asked, knowing that she did.
She got me the beer and slammed it down on the coffee table. “You’re like one of those bums my mom used to let move in with us,” she complained. “I never should have fed you.”
I chuckled. I drank the beer and ate the open bag of chips she tossed onto the couch beside me a minute later. The beer was lite and a little warm. The chips were half-stale, but I was hungry. After a breakfast of champions, I fell asleep on her couch.
Coming to her place and crashing was becoming a habit—one I didn’t half mind.
I woke up to the sound of a ringing phone. It wasn’t a traditional ring, nor was it a traditional phone. It was a cell phone, and as I blearily opened my eyes, I saw it was buzzing on the coffee table.
I groaned into a sitting position and reached for it. Holly showed up and snatched it away.
“It’s mine,” she said.
I shrugged, leaned back, and stretched. I looked for a clock and found one on the TV set, which decorated one wall of the apartment. It was four thirty in the afternoon. I’d been out for a long time.
“Hello? What?”
I looked at her curiously. She stared back.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. She handed me the phone. “It’s for you.”
I took the phone and looked at it dubiously. Who knew I was staying with Holly? I wasn’t happy that anyone knew I was here. My last unknown contact had fired three rounds through a door to kill me. I thought about waving the phone away, but she’d already blown it by handing it to me.
I put the phone to my cheek. “Hello?”
“Draith? It’s McKesson.”
“Of course it is. How’d you know I was with Holly?”
“You were both at the Tony Montoro event. Call it a lucky guess.”
I frowned at his use of the term event to describe a murder. “What do you want?” I asked.
“Were you at the liquor store this morning?”
I hesitated. I kicked myself for that hesitation. “What liquor store?”
“That’s a confession in my book. The kid lived, in case you wanted to know.”
“I didn’t shoot anyone.”
“Yeah, it was the wrong caliber. I checked. Besides, the kid said it wasn’t you, it was some freak chasing you.”
“What do you know about the freak?” I asked.
“I know he wanted to kill you.”
“I figured that much, but why?”
“Because you are still alive. I think the subtle attempts they’ve made haven’t worked, so they’ve stepped it up, going for a more direct approach.”
I thought about that for a moment. It sounded like I was in trouble, not just unlucky. How many times could one person be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
“You’ve been holding out on me, Jay,” I said.
He laughed. “What about you? After a full day of nosing around and stirring up trouble all over town, you never even called.”
“I was getting around to it,” I lied.
“Let’s meet and talk.”
“We’re talking now,” I pointed out. “Where did that freak come from?”
It was his turn to hesitate. “Where all this crap comes from. Another place.”
I decided to drop some names to jolt him a little. “You mean out of another existence? That’s what Rostok called it.”
“You’ve met Rostok?”
“And Ezzie too.”
He fell silent.
“You there, McKesson?”
“That explains some things,” he said. “You’ve gotten in deeper faster than I thought you would.”
“Give me something I can use, then. Share some real information.”
“All right,” he said. “You want to see what we’re up against? I’m on the way to a disturbance right now. Get a ride and come out to Henderson.”
He gave me an address. I hung up and looked to my left. Holly was sitting there on the couch, staring at me like an irritable cat.
“Your tail is lashing,” I said.
“What’s up?”
“I need to get to Henderson.”
“I told you to steer clear of the cops. Now they are calling my cell looking for you. This is bullshit.”
“At least you know I didn’t kill anyone. They would have done more than just call if I had.”
“Am I coming with you?” she asked.
“Can I bum a shower and a ride?”
Holly heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes. “I just bought a car. How did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Tony’s money?”
“Shut up about that.”
In the end, I got the shower and the ride. Thirty minutes later, we were driving down Interstate 515 to Henderson, a suburb south of Vegas. Her car was far from new. It was a nondescript Ford from a better decade. The seats were cloth and mine had a rip that kept scratching my right arm. The ride was free, so I didn’t complain.
The address was in a pricey neighborhood full of McMansions. I had Holly stop at a drive-through to let me get some instant food before we went up into the hilltop neighborhoods. We finally rolled up to the wrought-iron front gates and watched them swing open automatically. I was still chewing.
Holly hung her head out the driver’s window and stared at the camera that had swiveled to watch us. She didn’t drive into the open gates. She let the car sit there, idling.
“Are you sure this is the place?” she asked dubiously. I could tell she didn’t feel comfortable in a rich neighborhood.
I pointed through the windshield up the driveway. There was a fountain circled by concrete and a single, featureless sedan. There were two other cop cars there as well.
“That’s McKesson’s car, isn’t it?” I asked.
“I guess so,” she said. “Why
don’t you just walk up there? I’ll wait in the car.”
I looked at her, swallowing the last of my breakfast. “What did they do to you?”
“It’s not what they did. They were—threatening.”
“Did they say something? Or did you just get a bad feeling?”
“A little of both. They know about the objects, Draith. Be careful. They might even know about Tony’s sunglasses. The only reason you still have them is because they are hoping you will lead them to more players—more objects.”
I stared at her for a moment. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah.”
“According to your logic, I must walk in there. Being nosy is the only reason I’m still breathing. Now isn’t the time to turn chicken and disappoint them.”
She shrugged. “I guess not. Be careful.”
“OK. If you change your mind, come up after me.”
“I won’t,” she said.
I got out of the car and walked up the driveway. I had the feeling I was walking into the lion’s den, but I’d felt that way before. I knew somehow the sensation was part of my regular life, even before the accident. I supposed one couldn’t be an investigator of actual paranormal events without being stubbornly determined about it. Normal people would have long since run off and sought counseling.
Before I reached the door, three police officers wearing rubber gloves walked out and got into the cars. Two were uniforms, one was a woman with wild hair, normal dress, and rubber gloves. They glanced at me but said nothing. They spoke quietly among themselves and then drove off. It looked like an investigation team to me. I steeled myself, expecting to see something unpleasant inside.
McKesson met me at the door, which was an elaborate affair of iron-bound wood and cut glass. The door alone must have cost ten grand. I marveled at it as I followed him inside. The entry was gray-white marble tiles—the real stuff, not something made of vinyl or polished cement. Yellow plastic crime scene tape was all over the place, but it had been pushed aside.
The mansion was two stories and clearly built in a better day when people in this part of the country were richer and crazier. There were cupolas with Greek statues stationed under soft recessed lights, a grand spiraling stairway that would have caused a southern belle to swoon, and a huge saltwater fish tank that filled one curved wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
I walked toward the fish tank first, noting the glass was cracked. The tank was half-full of cloudy water. Inside, a few exotic fish floated on their sides.
“That looks expensive,” I said.
“It was expensive. Must be a thousand bucks worth of sushi in there.”
“Who owned this place?”
“Some dot-com guy who lost his bank account over it. They rented it out to some people who called us about a week ago. We found the place like this. Never found the residents.”
I looked at him sharply. “A week? About when I had my accident?”
“Same night,” McKesson said, returning my stare.
“Why’d you bring me here?”
He pointed at the fish tank, and I looked at the dead fish. There were lights inside the tank, making it a bright point in an otherwise dim room.
“What?” I asked. “Do you want me to scoop out the dead ones?”
McKesson snorted and flipped a switch at the base of the tank. The lights inside it went out. I could see through the tank now. There was a darkened kitchen beyond. Three islands could be seen in the kitchen—it was big enough to run a restaurant.
I frowned, noticing dark shapes laid out upon the counters and overflowing the sinks.
“Are those body parts?” I asked.
“Yeah. But they aren’t human.”
I felt a chill. I didn’t want to walk back there into the kitchen. Not if it was full of chopped up monsters.
“Not—things either,” McKesson said, reading my mind. “They are animals. Someone bought out a butcher shop. Sides of beef, legs of lamb, ham hocks, and at least ten buckets of lard. They even cut up a fifteen-pound turkey.”
“What the hell for?”
“Now you know why you’re here. They’re cultists of some kind. These events always attract them like beetles to a corpse. Don’t you specialize in investigating this sort of thing?”
“I specialize in unexplainable events,” I said. “Not loonies with knives.”
McKesson rubbed his chin and shook his head. “You know, a couple of years ago I would have agreed with you. I would have dismissed these people as freaks with a collective mental problem. But if you do something like this and it works—I mean it really has a measurable effect on our physical world—can they really be dismissed as crazy? Like a thief or a robber, they are doing something with a purpose. A bad purpose, but a purpose nonetheless. They aren’t simply deluded.”
I stared at him for a second. I wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for these freaks or having some kind of philosophical episode. Either way, I didn’t have any answers for him, so I just shook my head.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“No, there’s more downstairs.”
McKesson led the way past the kitchen to a dark stairwell leading down. I glanced to my right, where stacks of meats were spread all over the granite counters. I squinted in the gloom. Were those catch basins lining the counters? Had they defrosted the meats and caught the juices? Why?
Shaking my head, I followed him down a narrow stairway. As wide and grand as the stairs were leading up from the marble entry, this stairway was ignoble, dingy, and dimly lit. The steps were made of wood planks rather than ringing tiles. Our shoes scraped and the planks creaked as we descended.
The cellar had a single purpose: to store wine bottles. Unlike the kitchen above, the cellar wasn’t trashed. I fully expected a cluster of candles and a pentagram painted with old, brown bloodstains. I found neither, however. The center of the cellar was clear, with the wine-laden shelves shoved back against the walls. On the cement tiles there were only two things: a scorch mark and a single, severed finger. It was grayish in color.
I stopped following McKesson when I reached the bottom of the creaking steps and spotted the finger. That was close enough for me. I recalled distinctly Jenna’s tale of a warping of space in her suite’s bathroom. Could this have been a similar phenomenon?
McKesson turned back, saw me lingering at the stairs, and chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This finger’s pointing days are over.”
“Do you know how it got there?”
“Not a clue.” He stepped in front of it and squatted, staring down. He obscured the finger from my view, which was just fine with me.
“Why did you guys leave it there?” I asked, taking a step or two forward despite my misgivings. My eyes were roaming the cellar for other oddities. “Couldn’t you just take pictures and put it in a baggie or something?”
“Normally, that would be the procedure,” he admitted. “But this isn’t a normal finger.”
I frowned at his back. “Because it’s gray? Isn’t that normal for an old, dead digit?”
He shook his head and looked back over his shoulder. “It’s pretty fresh, they tell me. Maybe less than a day old.”
“A day?” I asked. “You mean it just appeared recently? After you came to check this place out?”
“Yeah.”
“Was the scorch mark there before?”
“All week.”
“But not the finger.”
“You’re catching on.”
I hesitated. “Does it have a spur-like growth on the back of it?” I asked.
That comment brought him to his feet. He turned toward me with a hand on his gun. It was the same weapon I’d taken off him the night we’d met.
“How did you know about that?” he asked.
I told him about the man who’d chased me out of the convenience store. He’d had strange gray hands like that.
McKesson took his hand off his gun. “So—a stranger came throu
gh and somehow lost his finger doing it. And he immediately tried to assassinate you. At least, that’s what you’re claiming.”
“I guess so. Unless there is more than one of them around. I didn’t see a missing finger on the man I encountered.”
The detective was frowning and thinking hard. “It’s not supposed to work this way,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“When these disturbances, confluences, intersections—whatever you want to call them—when they open up, they’re like small natural storms. Things might wander in and out, but beings aren’t supposed to purposefully come through into our existence.”
Into our existence?I thought. But I didn’t ask him what he was talking about. The meaning was plain enough, if disturbing. I didn’t want him to think too much about what he was divulging. I desperately needed information.
“That’s what happened to Robert Townsend, isn’t it?” I asked. “He went through one of these openings.”
McKesson looked at me. “The newlywed guy? Yeah, I think so. Now, let’s get some air. This place is stifling.”
Detective McKesson and I left the stucco mansion and walked outside. It was early evening now, and the cool breezes felt good on my face. McKesson checked his watch. It was gold and old-fashioned, with hair-thin metal hands that ticked over the face.
That watch reminded me I had a question for McKesson. “How are these objects made?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
He laughed. “I thought I was the detective.”
“Come on,” I said. “It can’t be critical information.”
“I don’t know how they’re made.”
“I think you do,” I said.
He gave me a sidelong glance, then gestured down to the street. “Your ride took off on you.”
I turned and took a step down the driveway. I squinted westward, into the dying sun. It was about to fall behind the Spring Mountains. There, at the bottom of the driveway, was the open gate. Holly’s car was gone. My mouth twisted in disappointment.
“Don’t even think about begging for a ride,” he said. “I’m not leaving here just yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’m waiting for something to happen.” He lit a cigarette and we watched the sun go down.
