The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

“You’re the veterinarian,” Sammy says, his voice desperate. “Was hoping you could tell me.”

  “How’d you know I was a veterinarian?” Mitch says.

  It looks like a dog. Only hairless. And pale. And huge, bigger than a mastiff. The tongue, which hangs from its open mouth, is tar black. Beyond the animal lies a tangle of copper wire, three hubcaps, and some sheet metal.

  Juniper says, “How’d you get that thing up in here by yourself?”

  “Wasn’t easy.”

  When Juniper says, “Help me get it inside,” the other two men swing their faces to study him. He knows his fear shows in his expression, clench-jawed enough to crack a tooth.

  “Inside? Inside the shelter?”

  “Why would you want this thing inside?”

  Anything Juniper says, they’ll ask more questions, so he says nothing. He leans forward, the tailgate biting his belly, and grabs the animal by the ankle. Cold, clammy, the muscle rolling around beneath the skin, the sensation like handling an uncooked turkey. He leans back, and the leg unfolds, and he leans back farther, and the body drags a few inches. “Help me out, would you?”

  Mitch takes the front two legs, Juniper the back, and when they heft the dog off the tailgate, they can’t manage the sudden weight and it thuds to the ground. Maybe one hundred fifty pounds, maybe more.

  “Can I help?” Sammy says.

  “You just get the door.” Juniper readjusts his grip and so does Mitch, and they hoist the dog up. Its head lolls as they stutter-step toward the shelter with the rain battering them.

  Sammy holds the door, the wind gusting, bullying a mist inside. They scrape their shoes on the mat, but not enough, the floor still slick when they negotiate the dog past reception and into the lounge. “Where do you want it?” Mitch says through gritted teeth, and Juniper says, “Up on the coffee table.”

  Sammy squats and hooks a hand under the dog’s belly, hoisting it up. A checkerboard knocks to the floor, the pieces clinking and rolling under the couches and chairs. The dog is too big, its long legs spidering over the edge of the table, but with some nudging, it balances there. All their eyes are fixed on the animal. The dog’s snout is wrinkled, a nest for needled teeth. Its skin is bald except for a white bristling along the hump of its back.

  “I suppose we ought to call somebody?” Sammy says.

  Mitch lays a hand tentatively along the animal’s ribs, which press through its pale skin, as if to ascertain no breath stirs inside it. Then he smells his palm and wrinkles his nose.

  Sammy says, “Maybe we should call the police department?”

  “I’m a veterinarian, and I’ve never seen an animal like this one.”

  “Maybe some local breeder is up to something funny?”

  “I’ve never seen an animal like this. Not like this. Not that I’ve seen.”

  “What do you think, Mike?” Sammy only now notices that his friend has left them, gone to stand by the window, where he stares out at the rain, the streaming designs it makes on the glass.

  Juniper takes his time responding. “Help me carry it to the walk-in freezer, and I’ll take care of it from there.” His voice matches the strained feeling inside him.

  “The freezer?”

  “What in the hell do you want to put it in the freezer for?”

  He can see their reflections in the glass, the questioning glance they share with each other. He faces them, forces a smile. “The thing’s dead, right? So there’s no rush. I don’t want anyone driving over here in this weather, and I don’t want the thing stinking up the lounge either. First thing tomorrow, I’ll make some calls. You leave it to me.”

  Chapter 4

  SOMETIMES LELA FEELS like her life is a race that she will never win because it will never end. As soon as she fulfills one deadline, another three appear. There’s no time to reflect, to feel any sense of accomplishment. She never looks back. Everything angles forward. She lives in the future tense.

  It’s not as bad as it sounds. No reflection means no regret. She lives without regret. How many people does she know—too many—who spend their days unloading their worries on social media or to their therapist, because they keep churning through their mistakes. I shouldn’t have challenged my boss during the meeting, shouldn’t have slept with that guy I met at the bar, shouldn’t have given away my vinyl collection, shouldn’t have ignored my mother when she kept calling out of loneliness. She doesn’t need any lead-weighted anxiety to distract her, burden her, when she lives life at a sprint. The past is past. All that matters is how right now will lead to soon enough.

  Work dominates. Work makes her happy. Her sister doesn’t believe this. Her sister often says things like, “When someone’s on their deathbed, they don’t say, ‘I wish I had worked more.’ They don’t reflect fondly upon all the time they spent at their desk. They remember birthday parties and camping trips and church suppers, time spent with family, friends.”

  Lela doesn’t bother arguing with her. Her sister lives on another planet where logic doesn’t apply and Jesus hands out candy canes and rides around on a hovercraft made of white clouds. But if she did respond, she would bring up their father, an architect who spent his career blueprinting and supervising the construction of office buildings and restaurants and churches and houses all over the metro. Whenever they were driving, Dad never took a direct route, always going out of his way to visit a building of his, and when they passed it, he would slow and point and say, “I made that.” That’s the kind of satisfaction she feels every time she picks up a paper and sees her byline. “I made that.” As much as she hates fiddling around with computers, she knows that online archives have given her words even greater permanence. They’ll outlive her. That’s her idea of the afterlife, immortality. She prays at an altar built from twenty-six letters.

  Because of this she neglects most everything else. Sometimes forgetting to shower, brush her teeth, eat. Never remembering birthdays or anniversaries. A man she recently dated called her self-absorbed, but that was absurd, since she spent no time acknowledging herself, all of her time chasing down the stories of others. She was absorbed, that’s all, lost in the adrenaline-spiked labyrinth of headlines.

  She feels bad for her niece, Hannah, who has grown up in a house full of crosses. As if the girl didn’t have enough to feel lousy about—nearly blind and barely a teenager—her mother’s idea of a fun birthday party is a piano recital followed by a Bible reading followed by off-brand Fudgsicles. It’s amazing Hannah hasn’t turned out to be a total freak. Instead the girl is the definition of poise and cool, never complaining, always ready to fire off something witty or interesting. About her mother she says, “I tried paying attention to you, but then I fell asleep for a thousand years.” About an NPR report she says, “Successful sanctions should involve depriving people of cat videos.” About a political debate she says, “I hope this guy wins a Grammy for best broken record.” The kid cracks her up with her smartassness and startles Lela with her maturity. Sometimes she feels like they should swap roles, so that Hannah might be her cool aunt. Maybe Lela should spend less time at the keyboard, if only to spend more time with her.

  Lela just got off the phone. A yellow legal tablet sits beside her, its pages ink-scratched with notes. First she talked to the race coordinator for the Willamette 10K. Then she set up an interview and photographer for tomorrow morning, when at the farmers’ market she’ll meet with a local artist who sells birdhouses made from crap she pulls out of Dumpsters. Lela will follow through on both stories—she always does—but god, they’re so boring and pedestrian compared to the one she’s stumbled upon. The Rue. Undertown. The construction site. The deformed skull. The men who pursued her. There’s something here—some wonderful trouble—that thins the line between reporter and detective. That’s her favorite kind of story, the kind that makes her feel like she’s not simply educating or entertaining, but inciting change and potentially thrilling an audience. When you know someone’s pissed about what you’re writin
g—when you know you’re potentially in danger—that’s when you know you’re doing your job.

  Rain drums the hood of her Volvo. The skull sits on the dash. The designs on it draw her attention, and not for the first time she wonders what they mean. The recesses of the eyes and nose remain pocketed with shadows, no matter how frequent or bright the lightning. She has sprayed her hands twice with sanitizer, but they still feel filmed from her handling of the skull, somehow infected. So she wraps her spring roll in a napkin before dipping it into a plastic cup of peanut sauce. A take-out container of pad thai steams on the seat beside her.

  She is parked two blocks from the Rue. She wants to return to the site—to investigate the tunnel, to go beneath. The storm must have sent everyone home, but then again, the crew might be working through the night to clear away any evidence. They probably think she’s reported them. She ought to report them. She will report them. But not yet. Because once the police get involved, she will be interrogated and stuck at the station for hours she doesn’t have. And, let’s be honest, she hates working with others. In fact, she’d rather shove a screwdriver in her eye than work with others. This way, she hands over the answers to the PD at the same time she hands over the story to the paper, rather than waiting for some overworked, cigarette-stinking detective in an unmarked Dodge Shadow to slowly, stupidly work his case. It belongs to her. She’s subordinate to no one.

  She hasn’t seen anything, no movement other than a rain-soaked concert announcement torn by the wind from the plywood barrier. And then a dog—that’s what she thought it was anyway, though it appeared too big, too pale—trotting across the street in the near distance. She promised herself half an hour, so she’ll wait another five minutes before pulling on a rain jacket and creeping close.

  Then a police car careens around the corner and sends up a wave of water. No siren but its cherries are flashing. They color the rain and the puddles and the windows all around. It blasts past the Rue and stops at a building down the block. She sits up in her seat and wipes the condensation off the windshield. “What’s this?” she says.

  She can barely make out the two officers hurrying their way inside. They’re soon joined by another squad car, and then another, and then another, all with their racks throwing light, spinning the street with color.

  She spends so much time alone, with only her dog to keep her company, that she’s gotten in the habit of talking to herself. “More trouble,” she says. Because in journalism, only trouble is interesting.

  ❖

  Her name was Carrie Wunderlich. She worked as a receptionist and massage therapist at a chiropractor. No way she could afford a place in the Pearl on that salary, so she must be a rich kid leeching off her parents. The cops know that and not much else. Pretty, nice, mostly kept to herself. That’s what her neighbor said, the one who called 911 in a panic, freaked by the screaming heard through the wall. “The kind of screaming you hear in a horror movie,” he says, “when someone’s being torn to pieces by a monster.”

  An accurate description of what they find inside the one-bedroom apartment. The door is splintered in its hinges. The lights are on. The blood hasn’t yet dried, still glistening, obscenely red. The forensics team wears booties over their shoes and the carpet sucks and gurgles beneath them. Their camera flashes match the lightning outside. The couch cushions are shredded from errant knife slashes, the foam soaked through. At first they aren’t sure whether they are dealing with one body or two or three. Then someone starts counting limbs. Then someone finds the head of the boyfriend—that’s what they’re calling him anyway—in the fridge.

  They can’t understand how this much carnage amounted in so little time. And the security cameras tell them nothing, the system overloaded by the power surge, but soon they contact other businesses in the area and ask them to review their tapes. The storm had chased everyone inside, so it’s no trouble spotting the heavyset figure who marched down the sidewalk, not hurried, but driven, staring straight ahead, oblivious to the rain. He had longish, almost orange hair parted in the middle. He wore sunglasses. No rain jacket. His white polo was splattered with blood so that it appeared almost tie-dyed. The only trouble is, they can’t get a clear shot of his face, every image blurred, as though he were half-erased.

  Flies buzz the air. Dozens of black fat-bodied flies. Too many for this season, too many for a modern apartment with its windows fastened shut. The flies taste the gore and batter themselves against the windows and orbit the lights. The detectives swat at them and breathe through their mouths and say, “Where in the hell did they come from?”

  Everyone stares at the framed print hanging over the gas fireplace. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Stamped in the center of it, the bloody print of a hand—a red right hand—with thick and thin lines oozing from its bottom.

  Lela doesn’t see any of this, not firsthand, but a patrol officer fills her in after she slips him a twenty and she eavesdrops on the tenants clustered nervously in the foyer. The red right hand is what bothers her most of all, though at first she isn’t sure why. The red right hand, the red right hand, like some face in a movie she recognizes but can’t place, making her chew on her pen and wonder, Where else have I seen you before?

  Her pen cracks beneath her teeth. And just like that, she’s broken through and found the memory she’s looking for. When she visited Tusk’s apartment, so many years ago, to write the retrospective on Portland’s most notorious serial killer, the walls and ceiling and even the floors were busy with designs, some chalked and some painted. Many were of a red right hand.

  The same red right hand—she now recalls—that marked the plywood wall surrounding the construction site. She hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time, but it’s clung to her like the afterimage of a slap.

  Then she spots someone outside. Across the street. Watching. Lump, the street preacher. He’s cloaked with garbage bags, so that he appears like part of the night, but she’s certain it’s him. The rain has paused, but lightning still webs the sky. He’s pacing and the storm’s strobe-light effect makes him appear to leap from one part of the sidewalk to another.

  She knows how people treat Lump. As if he weren’t there. She’s seen them—in Pioneer Courthouse Square and along the Willamette River—staring at their phones or turning their heads away as if they’d prefer to forget his existence altogether. But he was there. Watching the city. Watching them all. He roams Portland day and night and knows it better than any beat cop or security camera.

  She pushes through the entry, into the cool night, arrowing toward him. At that moment a crow flutters down from some high sill of the building and lands on his shoulder. She can hear it kak-kak-kaking from across the street. He pets its feathers and whispers to it.

  “Hey!” she says, and starts across the road. “Lump! Can I buy you a coffee? Can we talk?” She sees him there one moment, frozen in a blue blast of lightning, but when darkness comes again, he has rushed into the shadows, merging with the night.

  Chapter 5

  TWENTY YEARS AT The Weary Traveler have taught Mike Juniper patience. He has encouraged people to take their meds, to sit down with counselors, to change and wash their clothes, to submit to delousing. He has talked a woman out of stabbing her ex-boyfriend with a pair of garden shears, and he has talked a man out of leaping off a ledge. Juniper’s voice is calm, his words slowly uttered, as gentle and convincing as his hands, which take his clients by the elbow, the shoulder, leading them in what he hopes is the right direction.

  But tonight his patience is thin. Old men tend to take their time—reading the newspaper, puttering along country highways, gathering change from their pocket at the cash register—but Sammy and Mitch are more than old. On any evening, he’d need to encourage them upstairs, to brush their teeth and find their bunks and call it quits, but tonight they’re confused and they’re scared and they’re not able to walk more than a few steps before turning back the way they came. They keep asking questions. What hideous breed of
dog was that thing? Shouldn’t they call the cops or animal control? Why deposit the dog in the freezer among the pork chops and chicken breasts and ice cream?

  That’s what they’re calling it. A dog. But Juniper knows better. It’s not a dog. It’s a hound.

  He hurries them along as best he can, monitoring them in the bathroom, trying to shush them in the halls, promising to talk again first thing in the morning. And then, at last, he is alone. People think he’s crazy to run The Weary Traveler without a twenty-four-hour staff. He hires out janitorial and he brings in cooks and counselors during the day, but otherwise he’s on his own. He has to be—for moments like this.

  He clenches his jaw until his teeth ache. Paces an uncertain circle in the lounge. Off one of the tables he picks up a chess piece—a black knight—and fidgets with it absently, twirling it, tossing it up and down to catch, squeezing it so tightly it bites his palm.

  Inside the shelter everything is dark except for the glow of the cross hanging above the reception desk. Outside the rain slows to a drizzle and then surges again. Lightning strikes nearby and for an instant the night vanishes, replaced by a blue-white ghostland diamonded with a million raindrops that appear frozen in the air.

  The security, lighting, and temperature at The Weary Traveler are controlled by a software system linked to Juniper’s smartphone and the tablet mounted near the entry. At nine o’clock the front door locks, the bolt sliding into place with a shunk he can hear from the lounge. This is followed by a whirring gust as the heater ramps up, nudging the temperature to seventy degrees.

  The window darkens with the shape of a hooded figure walking past. He turns into the alcove out front and tests the door with a hard rattle. At first Juniper believes this to be one more client—someone hoping to escape the storm—but then the crow squawks and clacks the glass impatiently with its beak.

  Juniper goes to the door and taps the tablet mounted there. The screen lights up and he punches in his security code and opens the Nest app and overrides the locks. Lump slumps inside. Water glistens and dribbles from the folds of his makeshift poncho, a collection of many torn garbage bags. A black cowl of plastic surrounds his face, but he pulls it back now. His face appears like something that grew out of a rotten log. Gray and bumpy, almost fungal. But Juniper doesn’t turn away.