The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  She braves a quick glance—yes, there it is, beside the pile of books—and then starts toward it, edging along the wall. She sweeps the flashlight back and forth. Gilded lettering and brass lamp stands flash back at her. Probably she is imagining things, but she can’t help but feel that skin-tightening certainty that she is not alone. This is confirmed a second later by the thud of a book knocked off a shelf in the near distance followed by the click-click-click of something scurrying away.

  She quits with the caution and sprints for the desk. She shoves her hand inside her purse and half expects her knife to be gone, replaced by something fanged or clammy. Then her palm rounds the grip. She yanks it out and thumbs the blade and holds its point before her. Her arm shakes. The blade quivers with light. “Who’s there?” She doesn’t like how her words come across as a shriek.

  She gets behind the desk, as a defense, and in doing so knocks her hip against the landline phone. It gives a quick chirp as the receiver pops from the cradle. She considers calling the police, but it would be minutes before they arrived, and then she would have to explain why she was hiding out in a closed store and what she was doing with human remains in her possession. She takes a deep breath and tries to convince herself the noise came from a rat—there are plenty of those infesting downtown—or a cat, like the ones roaming the feminist bookstore on the east side.

  But the skull won’t allow her to calm down. This skeleton key. It pulls at her. As if it contains some haunted gravity. As if it would draw the very shadows out of the night like crows dragged into a funnel cloud. The skull makes her feel as though she ought to be afraid. It’s right to be afraid.

  A minute passes, maybe two, before she shoves the notebook, pen, and skull into her purse and then shoulders the strap. She wills herself to move, but it’s difficult to come unfooted. To travel from light into dark.

  She heads for the staircase, where she has just two flights of stairs to chase down. Her footsteps echo through the store and make it sound like she’s chasing herself, so she pauses every few steps to address the silence. The farther she goes, the more relief she feels, so that by the time she hits the lower level, the Orange Room, she’s convinced of her foolishness.

  That’s when she notices again the sound of claws clicking. Fast and constant. Like marbles dropped down a stairwell. The emptiness of the building manipulates the noise so that she can’t be certain whether it comes from above or below or before her. Then it is gone.

  She trades her knife to the other hand and wipes her palm dry on her shirt. She cocks her head, listens. She tries not to feel, not to taste, not to see or smell, tries to make every nerve in her body twist into a receiver so that she might hear better.

  There. Beneath the rain, she again catches the click-click-click of something pacing the Orange Room. It is already down here. Or it was always down here. Or there is more than one.

  She waits. Her eyes ache from looking so hard, tracking through the tables and shelves and carts and pillars and potted plants. There is the dark and the rain falling through the dark, so that it appears the night is moving, is alive. Everything is a threat. She does not run, but moves in short, quick-footed steps to reduce the noise of her passage. And then, from around the corner of an aisle, it appears. The hound.

  Dog doesn’t feel like the right word. It’s as large as a man on all fours and hairless except for some white bristle along its back. Hound. That’s the only description that fits. It gives a huff and starts toward her in a loping, sidelong way. The distance closes between them quickly, twenty yards, fifteen. She can’t help but scream—and the hound drops down and springs into a leap. She stops mid-stride, pivots sideways, and swings her body behind a bookshelf.

  She hears it clack its teeth. She hears the air swoosh, displaced by its body. She hears it hit the floor and fall on its side with a grunt. Then she hears it scrabble upright and start toward her again. She runs. She can’t see clearly—her flashlight wobbling and the shadows pressing in—but she runs as fast as she can, hoping she doesn’t catch her toe on a raised tile, slip on a fallen novel. And she can’t help but look back.

  In doing so she nearly swings her flashlight into the fanged mouth of the thing. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but she swears its tongue is black. In the split second it takes her to process this, she veers into the bookshelf—hard—knocking her shoulder into one of the dividers.

  She hears something splinter—hopefully the wood—and her body spins painfully around before hitting the floor. She loses her grip on the knife and flashlight but holds the purse tight. The hound tries to slow, but can’t keep its footing on the tile. Again it slides past her, rolling over, righting itself with a snort.

  She stands, and they face each other, both panting. A thick rope of yellow drool descends from its chops. The hound is too close. She can’t outrun it. So she changes her strategy. The bookshelf beside her is ten feet tall. She springs into motion and ladders her way up. One of the shelves snaps beneath her weight, and the books rain down on the hound, already below her. It doesn’t bark, but it whines in a way that sounds like metal sharpened on stone. She drags her body on top of the shelf, and rather than pause, she leaps for the next aisle.

  When she pushes off, the bookshelf wobbles and groans. She hits the floor in time to see it slowly tip away from her. For a moment it appears as though it might fall back into place, but she gives it a shove and it loses its battle against gravity. With a great clack, it strikes the bookshelf beside it, which then tips into the bookshelf beside it, and then the next, and the next, dominoing onward, hundreds of books flitting their pages before thundering to the floor.

  She doesn’t wait around to see if the hound survived. Before the last shelf has fallen, she is already bounding up the steps that lead to the exit on Eleventh. She hunts for the lock before realizing the door is open, gasping in and out with the wind. Something crunches underfoot. What turns out to be a pair of reading glasses. Daniel’s? Was he attacked when he left her earlier that evening?

  She doesn’t have time to think, but she can’t help but feel a needle-prick of dread. She hopes he isn’t hurt, hopes he merely dropped his glasses, hopes he left the door unlocked because he was absent-minded and not dead. Because of her. This won’t be the last time she worries she’s brought harm to those close to her.

  She races into the night, pounding forward, almost to her Volvo, the only car on the street. She fumbles in her purse for her keys, drops them in a puddle, and only when she crouches down to snatch them does she notice her tires. Flat. Slashed.

  She regularly walks between Powell’s and The Oregonian offices. Tonight she runs. The sidewalks are gummed with leaves, and the gutters are creeked, and the streets puddled from the rain. She keeps swiping her face, everything blurred, from the downpour or her tears, she isn’t sure.

  She is getting close—another block, hang a right, she’ll be there—close enough that her run slows to a stumbling walk. She breathes in ragged gasps. Her heart jitters in her chest. Her eyes pulse. She grips the purse with both hands as if it’s somehow holding her up.

  Then her breath catches, though she needs the oxygen so badly. Because another hound is bounding toward her. It is one block ahead and on the opposite side of the street. This one is shorter than the other, with black spines of fur prickling its back. It does not howl or bark or snarl. There is no sound outside the splash of its paws.

  Until the bus blasts its horn. The scroll of its electronic sign reads OUT OF SERVICE. The driver crushes the horn with his hand and opens his mouth into a black O of surprise. The hound tries to change direction, jackknifing in the middle of the street, but the bus catches it.

  Its body strikes the grille with a wet thud. The brakes scream. The hound rolls under, thumped once, twice, by the wheels. The bus skids to a stop and leaves behind a black smear of what could be burned rubber but looks like blood. The hound won’t follow her any farther, though it wants to; its back legs remain still, while its front paw
s continue to twitch and claw the air.

  A final burst of speed takes her around the block—to the marbled lower level of her office building. She shoves open the glass doors and enters the brightly lit foyer, where her heart jitters and the rainwater drips off her and she gulps for breath so that she might answer the security guard who stands from his desk and keeps asking, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong?”

  Chapter 9

  SARIN SAYS THEY shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. Sure, it looks bad—a grotesque murder, the mark of a red right hand, a location proximate to the Rue. But maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe it’s a copycat.

  She’s speaking to Juniper but talking to herself. She’s worried, he can tell. Her usual smirk has bent into a frown. She can’t decide whether to stand or sit. She smokes her way through three cigarettes in five minutes, dragging on them so hard, he can hear the tobacco sizzle. Normally, after a blood infusion, she gives off a ruddy glow, appears somehow fuller than before. Her face is caked with makeup, but the foundation seems to crack now, along her forehead, the sides of her mouth, as if she is aging before his eyes. She has unhooked from the donor bags, and her body is stamped with Band-Aids that she scratches at absently.

  “But let’s say it is him,” Juniper says. “Let’s say it is Jeremy Tusk. Do we wait for the fight to come to us?”

  She waves away his words as though they were smoke. “Tried that last time. Almost got me killed.”

  “So what, then? Tell me what to do.”

  She uses one cigarette to light another. “Did you come armed?”

  He’s come a long way since that moment in the warehouse so many years ago. He holds open his jacket and shows her the shoulder holster that carries a Beretta Storm Compact and two clips. His utility belt is weighed down with a flare, a flask of holy water, and custom-made, iron-coated handcuffs. Then he hoists his pant leg, revealing the ankle-sheathed KA-BAR serrated knife.

  “There’s my Boy Scout,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Where else?” The cherry burns bright and the smoke tusks from her nostrils. “When you’re hunting for demons, you go down.”

  ❖

  Good doesn’t always look like how you imagine it. Sometimes it cusses and wears a leather jacket and motorcycle boots and chain-smokes. Sometimes it deals a little on the side. Sometimes it kills.

  This isn’t Tusk’s first life. And it isn’t Sarin’s either. She keeps coming back, over the years, the centuries, like a trick candle flaring back to life. She isn’t sure what to call herself. Custodian or guardian or soldier. “I guess I’m like a bad cop. And a bad cop’s better than no cop, right?” She likes to think of herself as anti-heroic, but Juniper knows better. She fights the dark. She takes an interest in the larger metro, but she can only claim the east side of Portland as her territory. There is a balance to the world—of light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil, yin and yang, up and down, spicy and sweet, Sonny and Cher, however you want to think about it. And she operates by a more simplified, elemental version of any religious doctrine: “Any time things get too dark, the world goes blind.” This she says with a spark of her Zippo.

  There are others like her, Juniper included. Everybody’s met a few of them. Those who claim to hear voices or see things no one else can, who follow hunches and suffer from vivid dreams. They’ll burn sage and talk about your aura and claim a ghost visited them during the night. Whatever you want to call them—touched, sensitive, prescient, special—they are tapped into a higher frequency than the rest of the population. Dogs have a sense of smell ten thousand times more powerful than a human’s. Some insects can sense radiation, and some birds can see temperature. The rare person is similarly heightened. Usually their awareness develops with the onset of puberty, as if some new antennae grew along with their body hair. The severe cases tend to claim a territory and occasionally fight to maintain their control of it.

  “The best way to think of it,” Sarin once told him, “is like a spectrum. I’m high on it, you’re low on it, but we’re both on it. And when you’re on it, you make a choice as to which side you’re going to soldier for.”

  The men Sarin killed that day in the warehouse, they didn’t just want the east side for drugs. They wanted it for the dark. There was a time when Juniper would have rolled his eyes at this, but he was willing to believe anything at that point. Getting a black, squiggling ball of cancer ripped out of your chest and seeing three people crumble to ash will do that to you.

  He is enlisted in Sarin’s fight. He owes her. Downtown Portland isn’t her turf. It belongs to Babs. Here Juniper keeps a low profile as Sarin’s eyes and ears on this west side of the river. He has his own life—his own quieter way of fighting the dark, devoting himself to the shelter—but his work there occasionally entangles with his obligations to Sarin. Such as the time when the Portland homeless began to disappear. Because Jeremy Tusk was killing them.

  Back then Tusk taught as a lecturer at Portland State, the same place he had earned his PhD in philosophy, but he was terminated midway through that spring semester when he stopped showing up for class. He had presented at several conferences on Carl Jung, and his dissertation concerned occultist pathology. It was never clear whether Tusk chose his apartment at the Rue or the Rue chose him. His research consumed him, and he maxed out his credit cards buying rare books, some inked in blood and bound in human flesh. These were his tutorials as he performed rituals—with red candles and black eggs and moonstones and goat’s blood—one of which called from the other side a dark force that would empower him. It worked, but not in the way he expected. A demon inhabited him. His body became its puppet. And it was hungry. Feeding on the homeless and prostitutes, the disenfranchised, the invisibles, those who would not be missed.

  Except by Juniper and Sarin. This was their vocation—the poor, the weak, the sick—and when several of Juniper’s clients vanished, he started asking questions. First to the police, who said, “Maybe they went to California. Shouldn’t you be happy? Isn’t that your goal? Reduce the needy?” Juniper then turned to the streets, offering cigarettes, beer, egg sandwiches for information. There were rumors of a shadow man. Someone who came out at night to hunt. Every shelter was full every evening, and those who were turned away might not make it to morning. That’s what his clients said. And this shadow man left his mark—a red right hand—on sidewalks, buildings, windows all throughout Portland, claiming it, like a dog pissing on posts.

  So Juniper patrolled the streets, checking in on encampments in Forest Park, beneath the Burnside Bridge, the abandoned Victorian on Sauvie Island, offering up snacks and toilet kits, the occasional six-pack of beer, asking if anybody had seen anything. While Sarin spent those same nights curled up in alleys, doorways, pretending herself to be a victim. Waiting.

  And then Tusk came. She was curled up on a bench in a tree-studded park walled in by high-rises. It was 3 a.m. The city was dark except for the intermittent streetlamp, and silent except for a low-grade hum rising off the semis on the freeway. He walked past her several times, circling experimentally, before pausing a few feet away.

  She watched him through her eyelashes, feigning sleep. He wore loose-fitting khakis and a billowing dress shirt that could not hide how dumpy he was. In his hand he gripped a sawed-off baseball bat as long as a forearm. He hadn’t cut his hair in a long time and kept the greasy strands of it parted in the middle and tucked behind his ears. She knew him by the shadow he cast. It did not match his body. The head like a Halloween gourd—the back hunched—the arms long and hooked, and the fingers the same.

  She was tucked into a sleeping bag the color of a dried-up tongue. One of her arms reached inside it, where she kept a long blade made of silver. Tusk breathed through his mouth. Took a step closer. She thought she might smell him. An oniony sweat.

  “You,” he finally said. “You’re the one who thinks this city is yours.”

  The sleeping bag was unzipped, and
she threw it off easily to slash at him as he lunged for her. He shrieked—like some nightmare bird—and retreated a few steps. One of his fingers dangled by a stubborn ligament, and the open knuckle pumped blood. He smiled through the pain. “I can’t wait to take a bite out of you.”

  “Come and get it,” she said.

  His voice did not match his body, too low and guttural and big-tongued, a beast’s. “I’m not alone you know. I’ve been busy. Gathering shadows.”

  At that moment every streetlamp in a block radius fizzed out, and the shadows came alive. One raced past in the shape of a bear, huffing and grunting and making a wind that made her eyes water. What looked like a tall man with a buffalo head stepped out from behind a nearby tree. The others were not so distinct, just blurred figures that scurried and oozed and gibbered and moaned. Something slithered through the grass. Something rattled a sewer grate. A carnival of shadows.

  Tusk was not a man, not anymore. He was a vessel. Something had inhabited him. Something old and powerful and sulfuric. All this time he had been murdering for pleasure but with purpose. He murdered in the name of darkness, and darkness answered. The Rue was a place of summoning, a night-black doorway with a knife as its key and Jeremy Tusk—or whatever his true name was—its gatekeeper.

  Sarin should not have come alone, but remained in place until what looked like a two-headed buzzard swung out of the sky and raked at her forehead with its shadow claws. She screamed and the night screamed back. All at once the shadows came for her—knotting around her like a slow cyclone—and she could not run fast enough, slash hard enough, scream loud enough.