Hold Me in the Dark

by Newbury, Helena

  I shook my head. “He’s not like any normal killer. He’s going where the math tells him to go and it says to go here. I’m sure of it.”

  “My guess is, he’ll find some quiet storeroom, or a closed-up store,” said Calahan. “We’ve got to tear this place apart. He’s got her here, somewhere, and we only have four minutes!”

  Carrie looked at him, looked at me...and nodded.

  I let out a long sigh of relief. She believed us!

  “I’ll make sure the NYPD have all the exits locked down,” said Alison. “Even if we can’t find him in time, we can sure as hell stop him leaving. Wish we knew what he looked like.” She ran off.

  My stomach lurched. Just for a second, I considered...what if it was my brother? I could give them a description….

  Calahan saw my expression and grabbed my arm. “What is it?”

  I shook my head and looked away. “Nothing.” God, what’s the matter with me? My brother was dead. I knew it couldn’t be him. But the crazy theory was still haunting me and I’d been a half second away from blurting it out. At which point Calahan would realize I’d completely lost it. Or even worse, he might believe me and send the cops looking for a guy who’d been dead for a year, while the real killer slipped the net.

  I risked a glance at Calahan. He was giving me that look: he knew I was hiding something. But to my relief, someone called him away.

  I took a deep breath. We’d got here in time: just. That was all that mattered. We could stop the killer. We could save her.

  But as the time ticked away, I started to panic. Reports were coming in every few seconds from the close to one hundred officers and FBI agents searching the mall...and none of them could find anything suspicious. Just as the deadline arrived, the last officer reported in: nothing. What are we missing?

  Carrie lowered her phone from her ear. “The security office has been through every camera. No killer.” She gave me a worried look. “Is it possible you were wrong?”

  “No!” I snapped. “No, the math is solid. This is the location, This is the time, it’s happening right now! She’s—” I spun around on my wheels, trying to look in every direction at once. “She’s here, somewhere! We have to find her! He’s killing her right now!”

  Carrie nodded. She got it. She was as worried as I was. But there was nothing she could do. The killer just wasn’t there. Carrie ordered the mall searched again. And then a third time.

  We searched for two hours and found nothing.

  “Maybe we scared him off,” offered Carrie. “He got here, saw all the cops—”

  “No,” said Callahan. “Not this guy. He plans each killing, he knows exactly where and when, he’ll have had some plan….” He looked at me helplessly. All of us looked helpless, even super-agent Alison.

  An FBI agent ran up to Carrie. “There are a lot of press outside. They want to know why the mall’s closed off.” Carrie cursed.

  “We missed it,” I mumbled. “He was right here and we missed it.”

  “Not possible,” said Alison firmly. “We’ve checked the entire mall. Are you sure about the location?”

  I felt my face heat. What if I was wrong? What if the murder had happened a block away, what if Clara was lying dead somewhere and it was all my fault? But I was so sure of my math. The two coordinates had put the location exactly here.

  And then a chill crept across my mind. Two coordinates. Two dimensions. We hadn’t thought about—

  I looked down at my feet. “What’s underneath the mall?” I asked in a strangled voice.

  Calahan got it immediately and cursed. He grabbed a janitor, almost pulling the poor guy off his feet. “What’s below us?” he yelled.

  “Nothing,” the man shrugged. “I mean, there’s an old subway tunnel, but they closed that back in the sixties.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “You can’t! Not from here, there’s no connection to the mall. You’d have to go to the station on Broadway and then follow the tunnel back until it branches.”

  Calahan was running almost before the man had finished speaking. Carrie whipped out her phone and called the New York Transit Authority and told them to shut down the trains.

  I raced over to the window and looked down the street. I could see Calahan running at a dead sprint, shoving people out of the way. At the end of the street, he disappeared into a subway station.

  Minutes passed. Carrie, Alison and I all looked at each other, our faces white. Carrie was sending him backup, but what if the killer was still there?

  My phone rang. My hands were shaking so much, I could barely hit the button to answer. “Hello?”

  Calahan was panting. “I’m here,”

  He must be right below us. I looked down at my feet, as if I had x-ray vision. “And?”

  More panting. Then he whispered a curse. “And we’re too late.”

  37

  Yolanda

  IT TOOK ME fifteen minutes to get down there. I had to navigate the crowds on the street, then find an elevator and a ramp down to the tracks, and finally pick my way through fallen debris in the old, abandoned tunnel. Twice, I had to double back to avoid piles of bricks that someone with working legs could have just climbed over. But I wasn’t giving up. I owed Clara more than that.

  As I got closer, I started to feel that familiar wrongness. I slowly lifted my phone, pointing its flashlight at the curving walls of the tunnel. The surface was alive with equations, all glistening wetly in the beam. Fresh blood. With all the competing flashlights sweeping back and forth, it almost looked like the writing was alive. I shuddered and pushed myself another few feet.

  And then I saw what was ahead of me and my hands locked up on the wheels. My body just refused to go any further.

  There’s a feeling you get when you’re standing on the edge of a cliff. Even when there’s no wind, you feel like the drop could just grab you and pull you in. This was like that, but a thousand times worse.

  Ahead of me, there was...nothing.

  The tunnel didn’t end in a wall or a barrier. It ended in void: a featureless, matte black nothingness that filled it floor to ceiling, darker than the deepest, darkest hole. When I swept my flashlight beam across it, the light was swallowed up.

  I shifted in my seat, panic clawing at me. It felt as if I was going to fall forwards into it...and once inside, I’d never stop falling.

  The equations changed as they got closer to it. They stretched out as if being pulled, twisting and spiraling towards the blackness and then vanishing as they reached it.

  It looked like...it looked like a black hole.

  And right at its mouth, stretched out on the floor as if being sucked in, was Clara.

  Fighting every instinct, I forced myself forward. In my head, I knew it was an optical illusion, just like the tentacled things and the spiders at the other crime scenes. But knowing that didn’t take away the panic. The floor’s level, I told myself, it must be. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if I was inching the wheelchair down a steep slope towards the void, and at any second I was going to start sliding and be unable to stop.

  By the time I reached Clara, I was a sweating, nauseous mess. I looked down at her face and wanted to weep. Except for the paleness of her skin, she looked just like she had in the photos. The woman we’d sworn to protect. My fault. If I’d been a little smarter, if I’d thought in three dimensions instead of two…. I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to look away.

  Calahan was kneeling over her. He looked up at me and, from the look on his face, the guilt was eating him up, too. “You shouldn’t be down here,” he muttered.

  “I can manage,” I said, and moved back a little. One wheel went into an unseen dip and I lurched sideways, almost spilling out of the chair.

  Calahan jumped up and grabbed my shoulders, steadying me. Then he glared. See? I told you!

  I glared back, then looked away, my face going hot. I was defensive, as usual, I wanted to prove I didn’t need his help, or a
nybody’s. But I could feel the tender strength of him as he loomed over me, ready to shield me from anything, and that made me melt.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  He grunted. Something had changed. He’d always been protective but now that we were together, it felt like it was dialed up to eleven. He’s worried something bad will happen to me...oh God, is that what happened to Becky?

  I wanted to ask him but I couldn’t. I’d seen the pain talking about it unleashed. I had to wait for him to tell me. What if he never can? What if this thing just kept eating him up from the inside and there was nothing I could do about it?

  I tried to focus. We had a job to do. But when I started to look at the equations, I found I couldn’t concentrate. The black void was almost close enough to touch and I kept feeling like I was going to fall sideways into it. It was the psychological equivalent of standing next to the speakers at a thrash metal gig, impossible to ignore.

  I thought that if I proved to myself it wasn’t real, it might help. I wheeled myself slowly forward towards the blackness.

  “Careful,” warned Calahan.

  I kept going, getting closer and closer. It was impossible to see where the end of the tunnel was. I knew there must be something solid there but the blackness made it impossible to get any sense of depth or distance. I held one hand out in front of me, rolling forward inch by inch—

  “Don’t!” said Calahan in sudden panic.

  Too late. My fingertips brushed something soft. Powdery and yet greasy….

  I looked down at my hand in revulsion. My fingers were coated up to the first knuckle in—filth.

  All subways are dirty. The soot from all the traffic on the streets finds its way underground and it mixes with the rat droppings and the human debris, the skin cells we slough off every day, the bacteria and viruses we leave behind. All of that mixes together and blows through the air as tiny particles, too small to see. Blow your nose, after a day riding the subway, and the tissue will be black.

  The tunnels...they’re the dirtiest of all. A thick, sticky layer of muck builds up over everything. This tunnel was a dead end and every time a train passed by it, the dirty air was rammed into it with no way to escape. It had built up on the end wall, where I was now standing. And after fifty years of the dirt drifting into the corners, undisturbed, there were no more corners: the end wall had become a perfect bowl shape. A smooth blackness made of concentrated filth. That’s what the killer had used to create his black hole illusion. And I’d just put my hand in it. I wanted to throw up.

  I returned to Calahan, wiping my hand over and over on my hoodie. I was going to have to throw it out. I wanted to burn everything I was wearing and take a very long shower. The stuff must be in my hair, in my lungs. Worst of all, the stuff coated the floor. Clara was lying in it, just discarded like a toy, like she was nothing. That thought brought me close to losing it. This is our fault! We should have stopped him!

  More cops arrived. “No one touch anything!” Calahan yelled. “We haven’t got photos yet! Where’s the photographer?”

  “On her way,” said Alison, walking over. “We didn’t plan on needing her. We thought—”

  She broke off guiltily but I knew what she’d been going to say. We thought we were here to catch the guy.

  I didn’t want to look at Clara’s body but I forced myself. I could feel tears burning at the corners of my eyes. It was just so wrong. She’d been young and alive, with friends and dreams and—I felt my throat close up. I wanted to scream and rage: who could do something like this?

  The doubt crept into my mind again. My brother?

  No. No way. My brother would never hurt anyone.

  Clara’s hand was resting palm-up in the dirt, her five fingers curled slightly as if reaching for something. The tears finally came, rolling down my cheeks. I stretched down to her. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” And brushed her palm with my fingertips.

  Her hand closed on mine.

  38

  Yolanda

  I SCREAMED. Calahan was at my side in two big strides. He saw what was happening and hollered down the tunnel: “PARAMEDIC! Get the paramedics in here!”

  He squatted down beside Clara, shaking his head in disbelief. “I checked her pulse when I found her,” he said. “I couldn’t find one....”

  He’d gone sickly pale. Oh God, if she dies, because he missed it….

  The paramedics ran up. Calahan frantically gave them the story and then we backed off to let them work. They rigged up bags of blood and saline, filled needles and pushed them into her veins. I grabbed Calahan’s hand and squeezed it tight.

  It seemed like an eternity before one of the paramedics turned to us. “She’s stabilizing,” he said. “She barely had a pulse, the blood loss had slowed it right down. Not surprised you missed it.”

  “Will she make it?” demanded Calahan.

  The paramedic hesitated, reluctant to promise, but he relented when he saw the look in our eyes. “Her chances are good.”

  We both let out a long sigh of relief. It was the first good news we’d had in a long time. And with the guilt lifted, I could think clearly for the first time. We knew how to solve the location equations, now. I could work out the one at this crime scene and that would tell us where the final killing would happen. This time, we could stake out the place well beforehand. We could finally catch this guy.

  Alison hurried over. “We found something,” she said, and held up an evidence bag. In it was a tiny square of thick paper, smaller than my fingernail, with a smiley face on it. Calahan and Alison exchanged knowing looks. “That explains a lot,” said Calahan.

  “Does it?” I looked between them, feeling stupid. “What is it?”

  “LSD,” said Alison.

  I drew in my breath. Partially because it did explain a lot. I hadn’t been able to understand how anyone with such a precise, mathematical mind as the killer could also draw stuff that was so disturbing. But a mathematician who was tripping on LSD...that would make sense.

  Mainly, though, I was relieved because that proved once and for all that the killer wasn’t my brother. We’d both known kids at college who took acid, claiming it “opened their minds,” but we’d been drilled too heavily as kids on how fragile our minds were. No way would he ever do drugs.

  “Okay,” called one of the paramedics. “We’re ready to move her.”

  They began to lift the stretcher. Alison, who’d been searching the scene beside them, jumped up and stepped back out of the way—

  It seemed to happen in slow motion. Her foot came down on a loose piece of debris, she stumbled, fell backwards—

  I saw what was going to happen. “No!” I screamed.

  Alison hit the tunnel wall, slid down it and landed heavily on her ass. She sat there stunned for a second. Then she looked behind her at the wall and her face fell as she realized what she’d done.

  She panicked and her hands went back towards the wall to try to push herself up. “No!” yelled Calahan. “Don’t move!”

  She froze, her face pale. Meanwhile, the paramedics lifted the stretcher and hurried Clara off to the hospital.

  Calahan ran over to Alison and I arrived a few seconds later. Calahan held out his hand. “We’ll do it in one move,” he told her. He was trying to keep his voice level but I could hear the fear and so could Alison. She nodded, eyes huge, and took his hand. With one big heave, he pulled her to her feet….

  I stared at the wall. Where she’d fallen, a patch of equations a few feet square had been reduced to a smeared mess. Alison clapped her hand to her mouth as if she was going to be sick. I knew how she felt.

  “Yolanda,” said Calahan shakily, “which equations were those?”

  “The location for the final killing,” I said in a small voice. “There’s no way to work out where it’s going to be.”

  39

  Yolanda

  THE OTHER FBI agents gathered around Alison, reassuring her that it was an acci
dent, that it wasn’t her fault. But she just shook her head, inconsolable.

  Calahan turned to me. “If we can’t figure out where,” he said, “can we at least figure out when?”

  I nodded. The time equations were still intact and I had a good handle on them, now, after having figured them out twice before. But the tunnel wasn’t the easiest place to concentrate, filthy and claustrophobic and the equations were only lit by my shaking flashlight beam. The walls made every tiny sound echo and everyone was talking at once.

  “Everybody shut up!” yelled Calahan. “Let her think!”

  They all went silent. I flushed at suddenly being the center of attention. But to my surprise, there were no sneering faces and no one rolled their eyes. They were looking at me with respect. I was one of the team, now.

  I read through the equations and then went deep...and soon, I had the answer. “Tomorrow morning. Ten thirty-one a.m.”

  We all looked at each other, worried. We had less than a day to stop the last killing.

  “What about the who?” asked Calahan. “If we can figure that out, we can protect them.”

  I began to search the equations. I was getting a feel for how the killer’s mind worked, now, so I could go faster than before. And I was focused: I knew how important this was.

  But the longer I worked at it, following the twisting, spiraling paths of equations, the more I felt myself being drawn in. The rest of the tunnel, Alison, even Calahan, all faded away until it was just me and the numbers. Normally, that’s heaven. But this was unsettling, like the difference between swimming in warm, blue water where you can look down and see the bottom, and suddenly realizing you’re out of your depth, far from shore, and you’re not sure you have the strength to swim back.

  Someone touched my arm and it felt...distant. Like my mind had slipped right out of my body. I focused on the sensation and groped my way back to the surface, which took a frighteningly long time. Then, with a sudden lurch, I was back in my chair, blinking at Calahan.