Evan felt like he had just fallen into some funhouse mirror version of reality where cause and effect no longer ruled; where up was down and in was out and when you shot a man three times in the chest he didn’t die.
There was no body on the sidewalk, no body on the street.
A man who had been shot three times, a man who should be bleeding – or dead – on the street… was nowhere to be seen.
Mystery
“I hit him,” Evan said. He looked at the sidewalk. There was no blood there. No nothing. “Blood should be here. He should be here.”
Listings looked up and down the street. There wasn’t much to be seen. It was the middle of the night, and there wasn’t a car or a person in sight. Their only company was a few moths fluttering around the flickering lights of the few streetlights that hadn’t been shot out in this crappy part of town.
“You take east,” she said. “I’ll take west.”
“Wait,” said Evan. “We shouldn’t –“
But his partner was already moving off, and was half a block away before he could sufficiently gather his thoughts to do anything.
“Dammit, Listings.” He shouted, “Call it in!”
“Fine!”
She kept moving, but he knew she’d call it in. She couldn’t be controlled, but at times she could be directed. Like a wild horse that refused to be broken, but occasionally consented to let someone ride her. They had had a tough time in the beginning of their partnership, until Evan finally managed to break through her tough-as-nails exterior, through the tough-as-tougher-nails interior, and find what was at the center. What she was made of. She was about justice. About righting wrongs, about finding evil and punishing it. And the dozens of partners she’d gone through just hadn’t known how to deal with that, how to yield to her and yet keep her as a part of their lives, a part of their partnership.
Evan had figured it out, eventually. He still wasn’t sure how. But what they had worked. He didn’t know what he’d do without Listings, and hoped she felt the same about him. That he mattered, that he made her better.
For a second he saw the knife at her throat again. Saw how close she had come to just… ending. For a second he saw Val’s face next to Listings’, and saw both of them dying. Dying, then living, then dying, then living. On and on forever, with him watching, him suffering.
Evan tried to pull himself away from that thought by looking around. But he didn’t like what he was seeing. Didn’t like that he had come here and found himself twisting in some kind of setup, had shot a man point-blank and the man hadn’t died. Even with a bullet-proof vest, three shots at that range should have broken his ribs, maybe knocked him unconscious.
And Evan didn’t think the guy – the killer – had been wearing a vest.
How do you know? He could have been wearing a robot suit under that coat.
But even his own voice in his mind sounded false. No, the killer hadn’t been wearing a vest.
So where was he? Where was the killer’s body?
Evan should be looking at a dead man right now.
He glanced westward. He could barely see Listings.
He sighed, and moved east. He didn’t expect to find anything, but knew that he should go at least to the end of the block. What if the psycho was propped up behind some mailbox, bleeding out and just waiting for a late-night stroller to come by so he could have a last chance to stab someone?
Though chances are in this neighborhood anyone out strolling probably deserves the stab.
The street was largely dark. All the businesses he could see were shuttered, brown roll-down storefronts splattered with graffiti and gang tags. Some of the cheaper – or poorer – business owners opted instead to leave their storefronts open to the night air. Evan suspected they were probably selling drugs or involved in other activities that required an open door at night.
“How long will we play, Evan?”
Evan froze. He turned. To his left was a dark alley, a forbidding chasm with tall walls that disappeared into a pitch black eternity. And he had just heard the voice of the killer, the words of a man who should be dead but who sounded not merely whole but amused. As if all this was part of the game he had arranged for them to play.
“Listings,” said Evan. He whisper/yelled it, hoping against hope that his partner might be nearby. He pulled out his cell and dialed. The call went to Listings’ voice mail.
The smart thing would be to wait. Wait until Listings came back, or even better call for backup and go in with a squad of guys who were all armed to the teeth. If the killer got away, well, that happened sometimes when you played it safe.
Only Evan couldn’t do that. Because this wasn’t just a man, wasn’t just a killer. He had something to do with Val’s death. And Evan had to know what.
He moved into the alley.
His eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the bar. Had adjusted further to the lesser light of the street. Now they struggled to find a way to pierce the black hole that enveloped all just a few feet off the street. The walls went up forever, disappearing into night, gray-white graffiti tattooed angrily onto them as high as the taggers could reach.
“I never would have killed anyone if I’d known this would happen, Evan,” said the killer.
Evan spun. The voice seemed to come from everywhere, from his right and left side, from his own mind.
He wondered if he was going crazy. If Val’s death, if not knowing what came next had been too much. Maybe he was already insane. Insane and hearing voices inside his head, coming from all around and surrounding him.
And, mostly, coming from farther down the alley.
He kept walking.
He could make out a few grays, shapes that at first seemed cut out of fog but that he could vaguely see were pallets and boards and boxes and trash. They were big enough for him to see, big enough that when he saw something out of the corner of his eye it scared him. He kept thinking he saw movement. But whenever he turned to face it, there was just another spray-painted shape on the wall, or a broken board leaning against a mangled box.
“But now we’re locked into this game,” said the killer.
Evan kept moving forward. He didn’t know what was happening, exactly. Didn’t know how the killer was doing this, or what he was up to, but he felt like he had no choice but to continue onward. To do otherwise would be to admit he had fallen into a world of madness, or to relinquish his own autonomy.
I walk forward because I wish to walk forward. Maybe I do the same thing over and over, maybe I do things that make no sense. But they are my choices, and that makes it bearable.
Evan realized the words in his mind were becoming almost a chant, a prayer to combat the fear he was feeling. He kept moving forward, gun clenched in a hand that was slick with fear-sweat. But he wanted to stop. Wanted to run screaming from the alley. Wanted to forget this had ever happened. Even – especially – if it meant forgetting what the killer had to do with Val.
“Ring ‘round the rosey, then ashes to ashes we all fall down.”
Evan cocked his gun. “Come on out,” he said. “We’ll end the game.”
The killer laughed that mad laugh. Evan’s brain peeled apart, his mind fractured a bit. He wondered if insanity was a contagious disease. He thought it might be.
“If only I could,” said the disembodied voice of a man who should be dead.
A light flashed just behind Evan, and he twisted. Leading with his gun, expecting to see the dead-mad eyes of a killer behind him.
Instead, he was greeted by the slight form of a young woman. She stood framed in an open door, pale yellow light flowing around her, bouncing off her hair.
It was the girl from the bar. Rainbow Hair.
From the front, she was just as exotic as she was from behind. Her skin was lightly tanned, with traces of freckling. Her ears were pierced four or five times each, and she had a stud in her left nostril, and two bars pierced her left eyebrow. A ring curved around her lower lip. Large, a
lmond-shaped eyes stared at the gun that Evan was pointing at her, though she didn’t seem particularly scared by it. She looked like she was probably Cambodian, maybe Vietnamese.
“Geez,” said Evan, pointing the gun skyward and thanking whatever angels were watching over him that he hadn’t pulled the trigger.
The young woman blinked. Her eyes widened a bit in recognition. “You,” she said. Then the eyes squinted in disdain. “Bad mojo, man.”
Evan wasn’t sure how to take that. No one seemed to be reacting the way they should tonight. The drunk hadn’t left them alone, the bullets hadn’t killed the crazy, and now the girl in the alley in the middle of the night seemed totally unconcerned about the strange man with the gun.
“Did you see someone go by here?” he said. It was as much a kneejerk reaction as a well-thought question, as though he had lapsed into rote copsmanship when faced with one too many ridiculous moments in an evening determined to throw logic to the wind.
The woman shook her head. “Did you?”
Evan had to resist the urge to gawk at her. What was that supposed to mean?
“Close that door,” he said gruffly. “Get inside and stay inside.”
He turned back to face deeper into the alley. The spot between his shoulder blades itched, as though he half-expected the punk woman to stab him instead of retreating to safety.
She didn’t stab him. But she didn’t go inside, either. At least, not that he heard. The light stayed on behind him, and silence reigned in the alley.
Silence, and darkness. The light from whatever store the woman had come out of wasn’t very strong, and within a few feet he had returned to the depths of the alley’s abyssal reaches. Darkness, deep and black. He felt utterly isolated. But not alone. No more than a rat in a maze is alone as it is forced to walk through unending passages that spin around and in on themselves, knowing that some floors are electrocuted, some lead to food. But always it will do the same thing again, over and over, under the watchful eyes of the maze-makers, until it fails and dies.
Evan was isolated, under glass. But not alone, no. Watched. Watched in the deep darkness that was everywhere, in the black alley…
… that ended in a sheer wall.
The two buildings that formed the walls on either side of him apparently connected directly to the backside of another, larger building, creating a dead end at the back of the alley. The wall ahead went straight up, and Evan saw no doors or windows or even a fire escape within reach.
So where had the voice come from?
Where had the killer gone?
Was any of it real?
For a moment he saw Val’s face, staring up at nothing. He saw his wife’s eyes, blank and glassy and flecked with blood, and wondered if he might still be in that room. Maybe the maze he felt himself in was just a construct of his mind. Perhaps he was not really here, but there. Perhaps perception was a lie, and reality was love and blood and death and a man lost within them.
But no. He remembered too well the sound of the madman’s voice on the phone, laughing as he taunted Evan about his murdered wife.
Evan wasn’t insane. Or at the very least, if he was, he was the kind of insane that still lives in reality. He wasn’t locked in a white room somewhere. He was here in this place, now.
Evan looked around. There were a few back doors that emptied into the alley, many of them covered by security gates, others wrapped with chains. No way the killer could have gotten through.
No way out of here. Not unless he had flown.
Or unless Evan had imagined everything.
He walked out of the alley. His gun was still in hand, and if anything he went even slower on the way out. Looking for something he might have missed, trying to find a way the killer could have lured him down here, then gotten out.
He saw nothing.
The bits of trash were still too small to hide under or behind. The doors were all shut and locked – even the one the punk girl had come out of was now locked, as grim and unyielding as every other way in or out of this passageway.
Evan tried every door on the way out. Every door was locked. They all felt cold, most of them moist with the condensation of a cool night. No one had touched them.
The killer was not here.
He had called Evan from in here. The voice had been real. But then… he had just disappeared.
“How do you kill a man who’s already dead?”
Evan heard the words, and didn’t know if he was hearing something real, or just remembering what had been said before. The only thing he knew, without doubt or confusion, was that he was very, very afraid.
Mystix
When Evan finally emerged from the alley he felt like he had come out of a dark wilderness. Like a prophet of Old Testament times, an ancient seer who had descended to the gates of some netherworld and now was returning to tell what he had observed.
Only Evan wasn’t sure what he had seen. Or heard. With every step he took back into the street, the voice that had sounded so close to him seemed to drift further away. Rationalization – the grown-up equivalent of a blanket pulled up high so the monsters can’t get you on the darkest nights – started to rear its head.
Maybe I didn’t hear it.
A step into the street.
Maybe I heard it, but it wasn’t real.
Another step.
Someone tried to kill Listings. I discharged my weapon. People’s minds get weird on them when that kind of stuff happens.
A final step.
I imagined it. I must have.
Fewer than a third of the street lights were still operating here, but they seemed brighter than the sun for a moment. If he had owned sunglasses, Evan suspected he would have been tempted to put them on. He felt normal, like emerging from that dark slit had been enough to put the craziness, the impossibility, of the night aside for a moment.
The feeling disappeared, though, when he heard the killer’s voice again. It didn’t sound like it was coming from his mind. In a way, that would have actually been comforting – every cop knows, or at least hears about, men and women who lose it working one of the hardest jobs in the world. So to start hearing voices rattling around in his skull, to see gremlins tearing at the wings of his brain-plane, would have been something he could have coped with on some level. In our enlightened age, even madness makes a certain kind of sense: once it has a name, it can be manipulated, controlled, conquered. Even if that name is insanity.
But Evan had no name for what happened as he stood under the uneven yellow light of a streetlamp. Standing there, almost gasping from some unnamed and perhaps unnamable fear, and he heard the voice.
“I’m going to kill you forever, White.”
The voice was the same. A normal voice, pleasant even. The kind of voice that usually says “Have a nice day” or “You take care now” or “Drive safely, neighbor!” or any of a million other pleasantries that wrap us in a safe cocoon of non-essential communications. But it wasn’t saying those things now.
“I’m going to kill you forever, White.”
It wasn’t in his mind. It wasn’t anything as simple as madness, as one more cop who’s lost his marbles after seeing one too many innocents hurt and one too many bad guys get away with it.
No, the voice came in his ear. His right ear. It had location, it had direction. The words were almost whispered. Like the killer was close enough to lean in and smile as he said the words. A joke between friends. Only this joke would end in blood and death.
Evan spun, his gun pointing the way to…
… nothing.
He whipped around, turning the other way.
Stifled a scream when he saw a form staring at him from one of the shadowed areas of the street. Then the figure moved, and as it did he knew he wasn’t looking at his quarry. He knew that walk as well as he did his own.
“Wow, White,” said Listings. Her own gun was out as well, but she looked relaxed. Just a jaunt in a horrific part of town in the dead of ni
ght looking for a man who tried to kill her moments before. Situation normal for her. Her hair was mussed, but even that just added to her allure, to the sense that she rolled out of bed looking like this, to the fact that with her what you saw was actually what you got. “Jumpy much?”
Evan turned and looked behind him. Back into the alley. It beckoned, the darkness both repulsive and alluring. He felt he was being pulled into something he didn’t understand, couldn’t handle.
Couldn’t escape.
He didn’t realize he had actually taken a step toward the alley until he felt Listings’ hand on his arm, jerking him back to the here and now.
“Was it him?” she asked.
Evan stared into the black mouth of the alley. No longer hypnotizing him, at least not with his partner’s warm hand on his arm. But still calling. The dark, the black beckoning.
He knew what she was asking. Not simply, “Did you see him in there?” although that was part of it.
No, she was asking other questions. Bigger questions. She wanted to know if Evan had recognized the man. If he had seen him before, if the killer was someone that Evan could link to what had happened to Val.
He thought for a moment. Still staring at the alley, silently willing answers forth.
Nothing came. Nothing ever comes out of darkness. Darkness is a destructive force, the thing that happens when light has expended itself, when photons die. Things don’t answer from death. Only silence can be found. Only cold.
Evan finally exhaled a long breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know.” He shrugged. Tried to shed the mantle of confusion that had wrapped itself around him. It didn’t work. “Regardless, he got away.”
Listings looked up and down the street. “Damned if I know how.”
“Yeah,” said Evan.
He realized he had taken another step toward the alley. He didn’t know why. Maybe he hoped that if he looked again, he might find something this time. Maybe he hoped that if he went there he would simply settle into the darkness and cease to be.
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