CrimeSeen2014.06.09

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Tuyen needed strength.

  She laid the milk and egg before the statues as an offering and bowed her head to pray. She didn’t know what she would say. Didn’t know what she could ask for that would help her now.

  Something clinked behind her. She turned.

  She could see the whole apartment, from the sink and stove and refrigerator in the “kitchen” to the small entertainment console in front of the queen bed. A small bookshelf with works in English and Vietnamese and a second-hand chest of drawers completed the furnishings.

  Nothing out of place. Nothing that could have moved. Nothing that could have made a noise.

  Yet something had.

  A cold wind blew around her, a whirlwind of frigid air, and with it a smell assaulted Tuyen’s nose. For a moment she was catapulted back to the final days of Gramma’s life, the hours when she had been unable to control her bowels, the life flowing out of her not in poetry and peace, but in a neverending stream of painful diarrhea.

  She turned back to the statues.

  The milk was there.

  The egg was gone. Partly gone.

  The white lay in a rancid pool at the feet of the statues, not clear as it should be but yellowed and lumpy. The yolk was gray-green with a brown film. Together they looked like a cancerous eye, staring up at her in mute agony.

  It was the source of the smell that pounded at Tuyen, that had started a headache thrumming behind her eyes. The egg was new – she had just bought it a day ago, maybe two – but it had gone rotten in an instant. Curdled by the same force that had made the air chill in her apartment and the blood freeze in her bones.

  The shell was gone. There had been no cracking, no sound of shattering shell. It had just disappeared, leaving a putrified interior behind.

  “Bad mojo,” she said. She sounded fine. She sounded calm.

  But it wasn’t true. She wasn’t fine, she wasn’t calm. Tuyen was terrified. Terrified, and she knew without a doubt that she was in danger of something worse than mere violence. Her offering had been stolen, and mocked. She was being told that she had no help from the old ways. That she could look forward only to corruption.

  Tuyen had always been able to see things. But she looked at the corrupt eye of the egg and knew that sometimes sight was a curse; sometimes it was better to be blind.

  Anamnesis

  Evan dropped his keys on a table in the foyer. They jingled and the sound echoed against the tile floor and the echo reminded him how empty the house was.

  It had been empty longer than he knew. Longer than he had been prepared to deal with. And even now he wondered if he was really facing it all. If he was ready to admit what had happened, even to himself.

  It wasn’t easy to find out you had been living with a lie, to find out everything you believed about your life was wrong.

  Evan had seen it countless times. In the faces of beaten women who insisted on going back to their husbands because they couldn’t quite understand the simple reality that sooner or later their spouses absolutely would kill them. In the hostile refusal of young men – boys, really – to testify against leaders in gangs that had left them to rot during robberies that went bad.

  Humans excelled at many things – art, war, math. But they were perhaps best at the skill of lying to each other. To themselves.

  Would he ever believe – really believe – what had happened?

  Maybe. Maybe later, when he was a bit farther from everything, when time had given him some perspective, and when he wasn’t so bone-weary. He could actually feel the circles under his eyes, like red-hot bands that made his eyes burn and his face ache with exhaustion.

  A sound interrupted his thoughts. It was low, a gentle squeak. Then another. It sounded like –

  (bedsprings moving, bodies rolling)

  – something moving in the house.

  Evan’s gun was out before he realized it, full seconds before his mind had drawn the conclusion his body had already reached.

  He was alone.

  There was no one but him.

  But there was a noise. There was a sound.

  So something was wrong. Something didn’t belong.

  He heard the killer, laughing in his mind. The voice saying, “Ring ‘round the rosey, then ashes to ashes we all fall down.”

  He thought about calling Listings. But the idea of calling her about a mere sound, especially here, where he had found Val – it was too much. Too hard.

  He went in alone.

  The living room was first. When Val was alive he had always joked with her that it was the dead room, because no one actually lived there at all. It was the room she kept pristine for company, the room that was always clean, always in order.

  Not anymore. Evan didn’t turn on the lights, but even in the gloom of the pre-dawn morning, he could see the heaps of trash, the coats he hadn’t bothered to hang up. It looked lived-in now, if not cared for.

  There was nowhere for anyone to hide. And he could see no one.

  He moved on.

  The kitchen was small and messier than the living room. Takeout boxes, beer bottles. It looked more like the kitchen of a frat house than that of a grown man. Evan supposed that should bother him, but other than his job and Listings, he had found surprisingly little to care about of late.

  The sound repeated. A creak.

  Evan turned. Back through the living room. Into the hall.

  He didn’t own a mansion. He was a cop, so he made enough money to subsist at levels that would make a starved alley cat only slightly jealous. The house was small, and the hall had only three doors. All were open: he never had houseguests, so closing up behind him made even less sense than cleaning up last night’s kung pao chicken.

  But he couldn’t see into any of the rooms. And now the sound had stopped.

  He led with his gun. Having a firearm was useless if it wasn’t at the ready, so he kept it aimed at center-mass-level, ready for anything.

  The first room was on the right. A bathroom. The small frosted window in the wall allowed light from the street to stream in, illuminating everything with a ghostly glow.

  Nothing in there. There was a bath/shower combo, but the curtain was drawn to the side. Other than that, the only other place anyone could possibly hide was a cabinet under the sink, and Evan decided to take the risk he wasn’t being stalked by an undersized midget.

  He moved on. The next room. It was a spare bedroom. Someplace that he and Val had talked about furnishing with a crib and toys and some small feet to mess everything up. But after years of trying, they finally realized they weren’t going to be able to get the most important of those fixtures.

  They talked about turning it into a study. An office. A craft room. A guest bedroom.

  It stayed empty and unfurnished.

  Evan looked in and saw four walls, an open closet holding only empty space.

  And the sound came again.

  Squeeeak.

  His heart had been pump-thumping along. Now it began beating at dangerous speeds.

  It wasn’t his imagination. It was the sound. The same sound he had heard before. The day he found Val.

  He moved into the hall. Taking footsteps that he knew were normal in size and pace, but that felt like he was pushing through some diabolical combination of cement and Super Glue.

  Squeeeeak.

  He couldn’t see in the last room. The bedroom.

  His bedroom, though he slept on the living room couch more often than not.

  The door was open, but the angle was bad for him to see in. The darkness seemed to gather around him, to become a cloud that wrapped him not merely in deep blackness, but in a kind of blind terror.

  He kept moving forward.

  Squeeeeeak. Squeeeeeeeak. Squeeeeeeeeeeeak.

  The gun seemed to draw him forward. He wondered if he would have been able to continue without it.

  The muzzle pushed into the room. His arm followed. Then his chest. His head.

  The darkness f
ell away from his eyes, the blindness dissipated.

  He saw…

  … bodies writhing on the bed, under the sheets…

  … a beautiful face, looking up at him.

  “No!”

  Evan fell back a step, his hand going to his face as though he might wash away what he had just seen, what he saw every moment of every day. He felt the cold metal of his firearm, smelled gun oil and brass and steel.

  He blinked.

  The bed was empty. The bodies were gone.

  But he wasn’t alone.

  He didn’t know how, but he was certain someone was with him. Behind him.

  Warm breath touched his ear. “How long will we dance this dance?” said the killer.

  Evan spun, facing the man, almost punching out a shot before realizing that he was alone. The killer was gone. And for a moment Evan wondered if he had ever been there. For a moment he was certain he must have imagined everything that just happened. He was losing it. What had happened to Val had pushed him over the edge.

  Then he saw something. It was in the hall, where he had just been standing a moment ago.

  He leaned over.

  Picked it up.

  It was an egg. Not white, but brown, the kind of thing that farmers and organic food nuts ate. As he picked it up, Evan realized something was wrong with it.

  It was light. Insubstantial, almost fake.

  He turned it over in his hand, feeling its texture. It had the feel of real eggshell, but even as he felt it, it crumbled in his hands.

  There was nothing inside.

  Squeeeeeeak.

  Evan didn’t turn. He didn’t look into the bedroom, and he wasn’t sure what scared him more: the idea that something was there, or that nothing was.

  Intrusion

  Evan called Listings. Then he walked around his house a dozen times, still unsure whether it would be better to find something or not.

  He finally sat down on the couch. He had to push aside a blanket and a few coats and something that looked like it might have been a slice of pizza at one point to do it.

  He had his gun in his hand the whole time. He wasn’t sure what it would do for him against a person who could appear and disappear at will, not to mention the killer’s apparent imperviousness to bullets, but it made him feel better to have the thing in his hand.

  He sat, but couldn’t sit still. He tapped his feet and patted his free hand against his knee.

  His gun hand did not move. It remained tight against his right thigh, clamped around the grip of his sidearm, finger on the trigger.

  He wondered if he should just get up and do another check of the house, but recognized that if there was anything to be found, he was just going to trample it underfoot by doing that.

  So he sat.

  And a moment after deciding to remain where he was, Evan fell asleep.

  He felt himself sliding into slumber, and part of him was shocked that he could do so. He had just had his home invaded by someone who meant him harm. He was under some kind of attack by forces he didn’t understand.

  But he was also tired. And his body was screaming at him. He needed rest.

  He closed his eyes.

  He dreamed.

  The dreams were the kind he had been having more and more since Val died: the kind he couldn’t remember after waking. He only knew they involved him being in places he didn’t want to go. That the people he loved died in the dreams.

  That the dreams terrified him.

  He felt something tapping on his shoulder. It repeated, and only gradually did he realize that he was feeling something outside of the nightmare that had trapped him. He surfaced slowly, clawing his way out of the fearscape that he had fallen into.

  The tap came again.

  This time Evan woke. He erupted out of sleep in a blind panic, grabbing for the gun… and realizing it was gone.

  No, not gone. It was pointed at him.

  Only for a moment, though. Then the muzzled lowered and he could see Listings’ face behind it. “And that kind of reaction is why I took the pea-shooter away before waking you,” she said. Then she pursed her lips and added, “You are a scaredy little man-bitch, aren’t you?”

  Evan blinked as she put the gun back into his hand, after a moment in which she appeared to be verifying he wasn’t going to shoot her with it. He holstered the weapon, still trying to shake off the dream. The unknown dream.

  “Thanks for coming,” he finally said. He looked around, realizing that daylight was streaming in through the windows, wondering what time it was, wondering how long he had slept.

  “Of course.” Listings shook her head at the mess in the living room. “See, this is why I never stay over. It has nothing to do with my being a…” and she put up a pair of air-quotes before continuing, “… ’cold-hearted woman who’s afraid of her own emotional barriers.’ It’s –“ She broke off, the dry humor leaching out of her voice. “What’s wrong? Why’d you call me?”

  “He was here.”

  All traces of humor erased themselves from her face. There was no rage on her face, no fear. Rather it was as though a blank curtain had fallen over her features, covering all emotions and ensuring that no one could get a read on her. But Evan knew her well enough to understand that was her most serious defense mechanism: to withdraw, to hide from the world. She would never run from a physical fight, but she’d hide her feelings. She’d block the world from hurting her heart.

  “What?” she said. “The guy? How’d he find your place?”

  Evan shrugged. “Same way he found my phone number. And my wife.”

  “When was he here?”

  “Right before I called you. I think.”

  Listings frowned. “You think? What does that mean?”

  Evan stood and walked down the hall. He heard Listings follow him. Her footsteps were muffled on the carpet, but they were solid and real. She was one of the last things tethering him to life, one of the last solid anchors he had to a world that had stopped making sense the day Val died.

  He stopped at the door to the bedroom. Looking at the bed, part of him here in the hall with Listings, part of him here but on a different day, with a different woman.

  “I caught them here,” he said. “I don’t remember anything of it but her face, looking at me. Like she wasn’t surprised. Like she wanted me to know.”

  Listings’ voice snapped like a whip. Catching him on the edge of an abyss of self-pity he was about to tumble into. “Focus, White. Where was the bad guy?”

  Evan answered, but didn’t take his eyes off the empty bed. “He was behind me.” He stared at the rumpled sheets, the covers that had rolled into a winding serpent in the middle of the mattress.

  Listings looked around the empty hall. “You saw him?” she said.

  Evan shook his head. “Just heard him.

  Listings put a hand on her head, like this was giving her a headache. “You sure?”

  Evan pointed at the small bedside table. “He left a present.”

  Listings went into the room and looked at the table. “What the hell…?”

  She picked up several tiny bits of eggshell from where Evan had placed them after the empty shell shattered in his hand. Then she rubbed her fingers against her jeans, her face crinkling in disgust as she felt the slime that coated the brown and white bits.

  Even from here, Evan could smell the greasy layer of scum that covered the shell. Rotten, rank. It smelled like death.

  An electronic tone jarred the silence. Listings jerked, then put the bits of shell back on the table and fumbled for her phone.

  “Who’s the scaredy little man-bitch now?” said Evan.

  Listings flipped him the bird. “You only say that because my penis is bigger than yours.” Then, before he could offer a rejoinder, she turned on her phone. “Listings,” she said. A moment later she nodded, said, “Okay,” then turned it off again.

  “That was the captain,” she said. “Wants us back at the station.”
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br />   “No rest for the wicked.” Evan started to nod, then realized that below the miasma of the egg there was a different smell, something less powerful but still unpleasant. He suddenly realized he was still wearing the same clothes he had walked into the bar with; that he reeked of sweat and fear and the stale odors of a day that had lasted far too long. “Give me a minute to change,” he said.

  Listings shook her head. “He sounded in a ‘now’ kind of mood.” She looked at the shells. “I’ll call the CSI guys and have someone come by and look at this. But we gotta go.”

  “Captain say what it was about?”

  “Yeah, it was that video.”

  A chill writhed through Evan’s spine. He looked at the empty shells on the bedside table. He wondered what they meant.

  Listings wiped her fingers on her jeans again. She stared at the bits of egg for a moment, and then walked out.

  Evan followed. He didn’t want to anger Geist by keeping the captain waiting. He also didn’t want to piss Listings off.

  But mostly he didn’t want to be alone here in this place that held only the evidence of an impossible intrusion and the memories of the dead.

  Notes

  Geist was at the same carrel in the A/V room that Evan had been in. Like Evan, he hadn’t changed his clothes – looked like he hadn’t gone home at all. That wasn’t unusual. The captain was a man who took his job seriously. He was usually at his desk before anyone else arrived on shift, and generally stayed hours after others had closed up shop and left for the day. That was part of why Evan had always trusted the man, had always looked up to him. He was more than a mentor, he was an example, in a time and place where examples – at least of the good variety – were harder and harder to come by.

  The captain was watching the security tape, staring at the distortions with his face so close to the monitor it looked like he was trying to inhale it. On the desk next to the monitor was a pad, and Geist’s hand was going a mile-a-minute as he took notes. Of what, Evan had no idea: whatever the tape held was still a mystery, and anything it held was still locked behind those blurred lines.