Evan’s hands clenched around the phone and the gun. He turned around, whirling in every direction as though he might triangulate the killer’s location. “I’m going to find you. I’m going to find you and –“
“And what? Shoot me? Kill me?” The laughter grew louder. “Please. Please try. I’d truly like to see that.” Then the laughing stopped. Cut off as quickly as if the killer had been decapitated mid-giggle. “But not yet, Evan. Not yet. I still have one thing to take.”
It seemed like a crate of daddy long-legs spiders had just been dumped down the back of Evan’s shirt. Electric tingles and frozen pinpricks rode their way from the base of his skull to his tailbone. He remembered the “notes” Geist had taken before being murdered, the papers that had fallen to arrange themselves into an impossible message:
I’L KIL Evry 1 U LUv
Evan was still standing at the edge of the roof. He looked down into the alley, a dark gap between the forever-light of a city that never quite slept.
Listings was still there. Laying far below, a twisted island floating in a sea of dark blood.
He looked away. “There’s nothing left to take,” he said into the phone. “Nothing I love.”
The killer didn’t speak for a moment, as though weighing Evan’s words. “Maybe. But there’s one more person who helped you. Even if you don’t love her, I bet it’ll still bother you when I gut her.”
There was a subtle electronic click. The sound of a call ending.
The sound of a countdown beginning.
Gone
Evan was back down the ladder before the words had even sunk in. Circling his way back down the snake, dialing at the same time.
The phone rang.
Rang.
Rang.
Picked up. “The number you are trying to reach is busy or no –“
Evan swore. He hung up and redialed. Halfway down the fire escape.
Same result.
He was thinking about his aunt as he dialed the third time. She was nothing like Tuyen. She was conservative, quiet, and would probably prefer death to a pierced nose.
But when she prayed, when she prayed about something important – the way Tuyen had been praying – she always closed herself off from the world. She shut the blinds. She lowered the lights.
She turned off her phone.
Evan knew that Tuyen had done the same. Knew it the same as he knew the killer was going after her next. There were things that he could just tell, things that he felt after years of working as a cop. Things that made sense, the same way gravity made sense. They just were, because that was the only way they could be.
Tuyen was in danger.
And he couldn’t call her.
Still, he went to dial again as he clanked down the last set of stairs. Because maybe he’d get lucky. The world had turned inside out tonight, so maybe this instinct of his would be wrong and he’d be able to reach Tuyen, to warn her.
His fingers froze on the third digit. He never dialed the fourth.
He went down the ladder in a daze, gaze never wavering from what he had just spotted. What he hadn’t seen.
He jumped the last six feet, landing in a spray of loose gravel, hands going to the ground and coming up black.
He looked around. Spinning again, turning around as he had on the roof. Only he wasn’t looking for a killer this time. No, he was looking for something else.
“Listings?”
She was gone. Her body had disappeared.
And more than that. Even the blood had somehow been scoured from the cracked asphalt of the alley. Just like Geist, the killer had taken her. And not just taken her, but taken her so completely it was as though the world had devoured every trace of her presence, every particle of her ceasing to exist.
“Listings!”
He was screaming for a dead woman.
He knew she wouldn’t answer.
Tuyen.
Tuyen is still alive.
He ran from the alley. Toward the church.
He was there in only a moment. It was dark, shut, forbidding.
He ran up the steps, funneled toward the entrance like an insect in a pitcher plant.
Evan hammered on the door. Not just with his hands, but with the butt of his gun.
“Tuyen! Someone! Open up! Open up, dammit!”
The church remained silent. Dark.
He pulled on the door.
It did not open.
“Tuyen!”
Faith
Tuyen’s grandmother had been a tiny lady. Small to the point of being miniscule, but with a loud voice that commanded attention. Tuyen hated that sometimes, hated the fact that all too often she would come home between jobs and Gramma would say “Come in and tell me about your day” and it wouldn’t be an invitation but a command.
But Gramma couldn’t really help herself. She was a woman of Power. A woman who had come from the Old Country and made a place in a new world. She had carved out a life, had survived more danger and loss than Tuyen could even understand. So she had earned her strength, deserved her strength.
Still, the fact that she so thoroughly ran all life in the apartment had occasionally been a bother.
And Tuyen wished that she was here. She would give anything for Gramma to return, to provide her presence and lend her aid. Gramma had known the great secrets. She had passed many of them on to Tuyen before she died. Many, but not all.
Enough? Perhaps.
At the least, she had given Tuyen enough knowledge to be well and truly afraid.
Even here in the crypt, surrounded by saints, Tuyen felt terror clutching at her. There were ways to cast out demons, but she knew they all required one thing: faith. Real belief, true conviction.
The crosses wielded as weapons against monsters in movies were of no value in reality unless held by a hand of conviction. The charms she hoped to craft would not function unless she could bring herself to a place where she not only knew God’s will, but believed in it enough to follow it.
This would be hard. “Many know all about God,” Gramma often said. “Few know enough about themselves to trust Him over their own stupidity.”
She often looked at Tuyen with knowing eyes when she said those things. Usually after Tuyen had just gotten a new tattoo or another piercing. Things Gramma did not approve of, because they were not in keeping with tradition, and did not show respect to the temple of her soul. On those days Gramma spoke to her with extra concern, because she was worried that Tuyen no longer believed.
She was wrong, though: Tuyen had always believed. Just as she had always seen behind the realities of life to the truth of things, she had always believed in God. But believing in God was far easier than trusting Him to save you. Than putting your life in His hands.
She suddenly felt cold, as though her body were reacting to the low point of her thoughts. She felt like she was falling into a pit of doubt, someplace dark and frozen, a place so far lost that even the fires of Hell could not find it. She hadn’t moved since Detective White had left, her hands had been pressed against frigid marble walls for what seemed a lifetime.
She pulled away, feeling her joints ache. The pain was pleasant in a way. Pain was a reminder of life. That was something else Gramma had said. “Only the dead cannot feel, only the demons have no pain,” she would whisper on days when her arthritis was so bad she could barely get out of bed.
But hearing Gramma’s voice in her mind was different than having her here.
Believing in God was different than trusting Him to save.
Tuyen opened her eyes. For a second she wondered where she was, as everything seemed strange. Then she realized she was still in the crypt, only it appeared different to her because…
… the lights had dimmed.
She was cold.
The lights were dim.
She turned slowly. But knew. Knew before she saw.
“Did you really think this place would keep you safe?” The ghost smiled. “The spirits of
the dead can’t keep me away.” He was wearing the same black coat that Tuyen had half-glimpsed through a dark window before.
Only now she saw him up close. She saw all of him, head to toe. Nothing unusual, nothing unique. He didn’t glow, he didn’t phase in and out of sight.
She could see him perfectly.
Her eyes widened.
“I didn’t realize it was you,” she said.
The ghost’s forehead wrinkled in confusion so sudden and obvious it nearly appeared a parody of itself. “What?”
“I know your name,” she said. And dared to smile. She found her faith. She felt Gramma close by, if not in body or spirit, then in memory. She could hear the old woman whisper, “Say it,” and Tuyen knew that saying it was all she needed to do.
Still on her knees before him, but the power was hers.
She opened her mouth to say the word.
And the ghost swiped something through the air.
Tuyen spoke his name. Her mouth formed the word, the short syllables that would give her power.
But no sound came.
Instead she felt warmth flood her mouth. She gagged. Coughed. Choking. Blood.
He had cut her throat.
She saw the knife in his hand. The blade of a ghost, but solid enough to cut. Real enough to kill. It was flecked with her blood.
Arterial spray arced in front of her. It splattered the white marble walls, sprayed across the floor. It spilled down the front of her shirt, painted her breasts in a new and awful tattoo, one she never would have wished for herself.
She fell to hands and knees.
The ghost watched. He was smiling. She could feel his smile.
She tried to talk again. She just needed to say one word. Just one word. She would have the power if she could say his name.
She vomited blood. That was the only sound she made.
Darkness congealed at the edges of her vision. She only had seconds. She looked around for something. Anything.
There was a small table where she had put her purse and her phone. The phone was blinking: a missed call.
She wobbled toward the table on hands and knees.
Her hands started sliding in front of her. She couldn’t figure out why, then realized abruptly that she was skating on a thick layer of her own still-pumping blood.
She reached for the table.
The ghost swept it aside.
The phone flew against a wall and smashed. He laughed.
The purse slammed into the wall as well. The few contents rained down on her. Not much: a few dollars, some receipts. A lipstick, a few other things.
She curled around it all.
Twitched.
The ghost, the spirit of a madman, leaned in close and licked his lips. His knife raised high.
Her fingers moved. It was all she could move. Her body felt empty. Her fingers were still under her control, but not for long.
The killer’s knife fell. Then again, and again, and again.
It hurt at first.
Then it stopped hurting.
Then everything stopped.
Held
Evan thrust his way through the bamboo screen, pushing into Mystix and hoping that he would find Tuyen there.
This had been his only option. He had to find the girl, had to ask her to shift her preparations. To find a way to get Listings back.
Listings had disappeared. She was gone. Perhaps gone wasn’t the same as dead. Perhaps he could find her again.
Still, even as he swept into the shop he knew that his hope was one born of terror and madness. There was no coming back for his partner. Her body had been snatched away by the killer, but she had been dead when it happened. Lifeless and cooling in the night that cared not at all that the last person Evan loved had been stolen from him.
“Tuyen!” he shouted. “Tu –“
The second shout shattered at the edges of speech, broke into a million tiny fragments too small to hear, joining with the silence so instantly that it would have been impossible for an onlooker to tell when the scream ended and the stillness began.
He looked around and realized that the shop was different. There were no customers, no one tended the cash register.
It was dark.
“Tuyen?” he said. There was no response, and he did not expect that there would be. Evan had knocked on countless doors, cased countless businesses in his time as a cop. And he, like most of his fellows, knew that empty buildings had a feeling. Not just quiet, but a sense that the breath within them had departed. As though the inhabitants of homes or the patrons of businesses, once leaving, took with them whatever vicarious form of life the places enjoyed. To look at an empty building was to look at something truly dead, and most good cops could tell by looking at a house whether there was someone in it – even hiding – nine times out of ten. You just felt them. The life reaching out in your soul, touching the life in theirs. Sometimes the life was filthy and stained, sometimes the mere fact of its proximity made you feel like you needed a bath. But the sensation was a real one, and one that could be counted on in determining how hard to search an empty place.
Mystix was dead. Not just empty, but… rotten. It felt evil in here in a way that Evan didn’t remember it feeling before.
With that thought, his eyes were drawn to the curtain that cut the shop in half. It seemed to weave in the darkness, though he couldn’t feel any movement of air that would have caused it to roll like that. Even if there had been air conditioning or a fan, he didn’t think they would have been sufficient to cause the heavy cloth to billow.
He moved to the curtain. It grew larger as he did, stretching not just from floor to ceiling but seeming to encapsulate his entire world. It was a horizon of darkness.
And what beyond?
His gun was out, held in a hand that shook. He used it to part the curtain, leading slowly with the business end of his weapon.
But what would a gun help? he wondered briefly. How do you kill a man who’s already dead?
Still, the gun was what he had, so the gun was what he would use.
He pushed the rest of the way through the dark curtain, the rest of the way into the dead heart of the store.
He took a single step into the dark section at the back. A single step that he didn’t even need to take, because he saw what was waiting for him the instant his eyes adjusted to the blackness behind the curtain.
His gun drifted down. There was nothing he could do here. Nothing he could do to stop what had happened, to turn back the clock.
“Tuyen,” he said. The word was a sigh, a curse, a prayer all wrapped into one.
The totems were untouched, the articles of blasphemous intent lay all around him just as they always had.
On the back wall, the python gagged on the monkey, which in turn crushed the baby jackal, which then held the tail of the python in its eternal grip. A circle of intimate, painful death that would never end.
Tuyen was in its center. She had been hung with wire to the horrific emblem, thick-gauge silver strands cutting the flesh of her arms and legs. No blood welled from the lacerations, though. And it wasn’t hard to divine why. Not hard at all.
Her chest and stomach were bloody. Wounded time after time, stabbed over and over again. Just like –
(Val)
– Listings. Just like Geist.
Her throat had been cut.
But that was not all. Apparently Tuyen had earned extra ire from the killer, because in addition to those already-deadly wounds, he had visited one more atrocity on her.
Her eyes had been cut out. Not neatly, not easily. They had been hacked out of her skull, so brutally and deeply that Evan could see ragged chips of bone around the edges of the twin pits that had profaned a once-lovely face. The black-and-red gaps stared at nothing and everything and Evan suddenly remembered her in the bar, the first time he had seen her, holding the hand of a drunk and saying, “I’ve always seen the truth.”
Evan’s gaze rose from Tuye
n’s disfigured face. Something was written on the wall above her, above the creature that gorged/gagged/vomited on itself in a despicable circle around her.
Words. They were darker than the dark paint, somewhere between black and brown, and Evan could tell even in the dim light that the killer had used the young woman’s own blood to paint the message.
sHe WoNt sEE ANyMor
And just below that, another line. A few more words to seal the message that had already been left in the form of corpse after corpse.
I’LL NEvEr stOP
As he stared at the words, his phone rang. Evan accepted the call, not bothering to look at the screen to see who it was. He knew.
“I won’t, you know,” said the familiar voice, the tones flirting with madness.
“Won’t what?” said Evan.
“Stop. Much as I want to, I can’t.” He laughed, and the flirtation became a full-blown love affair. The man’s insanity had ceased to be something that defined him. It simply was him now. “Not in my nature, I guess. Not after all that’s happened.”
Evan kept his eyes fixed on the bloody words painted on the wall. “I’m going to figure out a way to end you.”
The killer sighed. It reminded Evan of a child’s coo, a sound of hope and restrained glee. “That would be nice,” he said.
“I’m going to find you.”
“That won’t be hard. I’ll be where this started, where it ends.”
“The bar.” It wasn’t a question. “One hour.” He played a hunch, hoping he could gain a measure of power over the unnamed specter that had determined to destroy him. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one you’ve been looking for.”
Evan looked at Tuyen. He didn’t want to; could have gone the rest of eternity without ever looking at something like that again. But he felt drawn to her. Her eyes remained sightless gaps, staring at a reality so horrible they had chosen to withdraw. Her body was cut and tortured. Her arms and legs cruelly lashed to the evil totem.
Her hands….
Evan cocked his head. He stepped closer to the back wall. Closer. Then he was moving so fast it was a marvel he didn’t run into anything.
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