The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  Tusk circled behind her, close enough so that she could hear his haggard breathing. She turned but not soon enough. He swung an arm and clubbed the back of her head. The world went black, then came back into haywire color briefly before unconsciousness rushed in for good and she fell flat to the ground.

  His car was parked nearby—an old Lincoln as long and formal as a hearse—and he hefted her and dumped her in the trunk. There he bound her wrists and ankles, taped her mouth, before driving away.

  Thirty minutes later she woke inside his apartment at the Rue. Her mind felt as tenuous and wounded as a leaf eaten down to the veins by insects. She forced herself to concentrate. Her vision wobbled into focus and the first thing she saw was the great red eye sketched inside a triangle on the wall. Palm prints surrounded it, a five-pointed constellation made of red right hands. Beneath it was a shaker desk that had been converted to an altar crowded with candles black and red. Their flickering light made the eye appear to move, to focus in on her, and she knew it might as well be so. Among the candles were figures built from sticks and bones and hair and ligaments, some in triangular and trapezoidal designs, others tied together in way that appeared almost buggy.

  The room was otherwise empty except for black flies dirtying the air and the runic symbols chalked across the hardwood floor. She could hear him coming—the footsteps shaking the very air, as if there were many bodies smashed down and contained within his—and she pretended sleep.

  He wore a black silk robe, unbelted and flapping around him like wings. He was otherwise naked. Beneath his considerable belly, a worm of a penis curled. He carried in one hand a long black dagger and in the other a can of Sprite. He sipped from it.

  He could scissor off her toes, saw open her belly, hammer her teeth from her mouth, and she could feel the pain, the same as anyone. Just as she could die, the same as anyone. But she was more than a standard sacrifice. To kill someone like Sarin meant a black feast, a midnight Sabbath, a sundering of the balance in favor of the dark.

  Some demons made people sick, and some demons made people go mad. Some made forests drop their needles and birds fall dead from the sky. A demon might guide your hand to a rifle’s stock or to a thigh beneath a table or to a rope that will wrap around your neck and tighten when you fling your body from a balcony. You have seen the work they have done. A graveyard is defiled. A man brings a pistol to work; a boy brings a pistol to school. A semi lurches across the meridian to strike a school bus. These are singular episodes, containable maladies.

  But every once in a while, one of the old ones will come. A Destroyer. And when the old ones come, the darkness organizes, becomes a widespread contagion. In Germany, where train cars crammed with Jews thundered toward smokestacks belching ash. In Rwanda, where machetes flashed in the night. Even now, in Juárez, where people are kidnapped and their headless bodies stacked up outside shopping malls; and in Iraq and in Syria, where men wrap themselves in shawls like shadows that can survive even the desert’s sun and record videos of heads hacked from shoulders.

  Tusk was inhabited by one of the old ones. Tusk had become the puppet of a Destroyer, and he was assembling a court of shadows. And if Sarin died by his hand, he would grow more foul and potent, capable of cracking open a doorway at the Rue that would spill shadows freely from it.

  A fly landed on her eye, and she blinked it away. She waited until Tusk passed by and attended his altar, scratching a Lucifer match and lighting a black candle and muttering something under his breath. It was then she attacked.

  Her ankles and wrists remained bound, but this did not stop her. She rose from the floor as quietly as she could manage. And then shoved forward. She battered her head into the small of his back. This knocked him into the desk. Immediately she dropped to a crouch. His body reeled back. When it did, she was beneath him, tipping his body at the knees. He bleated like a goat when he fell. The floor silenced him. The dagger clattered away. The Sprite pooled and fizzed.

  She aimed first for his groin, and then for his larynx, ulcerating every nerve and paralyzing his breath. This stole her a good ten seconds, during which time she secured the dagger and freed her ankles and then her wrists. He was coming at her now, scrambling up from the floor, a head taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and she held out the dagger just in time for him to accept it. The point jammed into the recess of his belly button, the target that presented itself to her first.

  She yanked upward, unzippering him, and he staggered back with his eyes wide and his hand on the hilt that now rose from his sternum. This did not stop him from speaking some incantation, even with blood bubbling from his lips, and she fled that place—the flies battering her—and ran through the shadow-tangled night and did not pause until she was pounding at the front door of The Weary Traveler, where Juniper took her inside and into his arms. She could not stop crying for a long time, and when she did, she could only say, “He’s gone. Thank god it’s over.”

  ❖

  Except it wasn’t. He’s back. Tusk—or whatever his true name is, the name of the old one who inhabited him—has returned. Juniper feels it and Sarin does too. This is why they walk side by side through the nighttime streets of Portland, hooded, their boots clomping through puddles, their hands free at their sides, ready to reach for a weapon.

  Tunnels run beneath the city—the Portland Underground, they’re called—a maze of them that connect the Willamette docks to the basements of many waterfront hotels and bars, long ago used for shipping deliveries to avoid street traffic, now a crumbling curiosity. Walking tours visit some of them. Others are occupied by the homeless. Others few know about.

  Like this one, in the Pearl District, where Sarin leads him. They enter an alley heaped with garbage bags. A figure waits for them here, next to a Dumpster, beneath a fire escape. Lump. One of his crows squawks a greeting. He stands beside a grate, steel, the size of a door. He is also on the spectrum—somewhere closer to Sarin—able to translate and manipulate the shadowy patterns of the world. “You’re sure?” Sarin says, and Lump nods and kneels and yanks the grate. It croaks and flakes rust. A metal staircase leads down.

  Juniper doesn’t like to think about his previous life. But sometimes a memory will sneak up on him—him sitting by bedsides or preaching before packed auditoriums, promising miracles, describing a candy-coated heaven—and the sensation is equivalent to biting into tinfoil. A sickening surprise. But some of the old words still ring true. Like this verse from Mark: “In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

  Instead of uttering words from behind a pulpit, he is slinging from the streets a gun, a knife, his fists. This feels like a far more honest and effective way of living up to the same message—defending the light—which he supposes makes him a kind of ass-kicking version of the Great Commission.

  Lump wishes them good luck and Godspeed, and closes the grate behind them before hurrying off on some other business. The air below the streets is cold and thick and mildewy. The walls are brick-lined, and between the bricks moisture weeps. Juniper and Sarin walk for a hundred yards. They don’t lower their hoods, keeping their faces obscured. He can hear music pulsing, like the blood beat of the earth. From the ceiling dangle red glass Christmas lights, like fiery roots, faintly illuminating the passageway. The music grows louder, a pulsing electronica. They take one turn, then another, before the tunnel straightens out and thirty yards ahead they can see it.

  The club is called The Oubliette, the letters etched into the stone archway that is its entrance. Inside, strobe lights flash, silhouetting the figure who stands in the doorway. A bouncer, bigger than Juniper, with tattoos of eyes over his eyelids so that it appears he is always watching. A line of thirty or so people waits to get in, all of them shaved and tatted and dyed and make-upped and pierced in a way that would seem strange anywhere other than
Portland.

  The bouncer presents a tarot deck. He selects a card and holds up its back side to a kid with an orange Mohawk and quarter-sized tribal plugs in his ears. “The Magician,” the kid says, and the bouncer flips the card over to reveal the same before waving him through.

  Some of the people in line complain when Juniper and Sarin cut past them—saying, “Wait the fuck up” and “Yo, check yourself”—but they don’t pause until they arrive at the bouncer, and he holds up a hand to block him. “There’s a line.”

  “We got business,” Sarin says.

  The bouncer’s eyes slide to Juniper. “You don’t look like you’re here to party.”

  “Like she said. Business.”

  “What’s this business bullshit? Business with who?”

  “Babs.”

  “Babs is busy.” He squints, trying to discern their faces below their hoods. “He’s in a meeting. Said not to be bothered.”

  Sarin is fast, the lie spoken so quickly that for a moment Juniper believes it. “That’s why we’re here,” she says. “For the meeting. We’re late. Don’t make us any later.”

  The bouncer scrunches his eyebrows, which pulls the star-point of the pentagram down his forehead like a drawn blade. “I wasn’t told shit about—”

  He doesn’t get a chance to finish, because Sarin has slammed a Taser into his neck. Instantly he drops to the floor. His body spasms. Juniper turns to the crowd of people waiting to get in. “Come on,” he says. “Free beer. Free beer, everyone!”

  They hesitate only a second before charging inside, bullying their way toward the bar, and then Sarin and Juniper step over the bouncer and through the doorway and enter a ballroom-sized space with stone pillars interrupting it. At the far end of it, atop a short stage, a DJ with oversize headphones and a forked goatee works the turntables. Maybe a hundred bodies writhe to the music, cast in the silvery strobe light in various poses, their hands running along their bodies one moment, thrown to the air in celebration the next. Glow sticks smear the air neon green, pink, orange. At one point the music cuts off in a pause—and everyone goes still, frozen like an otherworldly garden of statues—and then a whistle blasts and the heavy bass returns, and everyone explodes into motion again.

  The bar is long and scarred, with backlit shelves that make the bottles glow like potions, and a mirror mossed over with age. The centerpiece is a tank full of whiskey with a body floating in it. The Drowned, the signature drink, costs five bucks a shot and supposedly brings health and happiness and luck. Two bartenders try to deal with the sudden crush of bodies reaching across the counter, snatching whatever is in reach. “Free drinks,” the voices call. “It’s all free.”

  Sarin points to a door beside the bar. It has been glopped over with red paint so that it appears made of muscle. They start across the dance floor, shouldering people aside, most of them too caught up in the pulsing music to notice. Six cages dangle throughout the room, and in them men and women dance, dressed in black or red leather if they are dressed at all. Juniper spots a woman who appears to have a tail and a man with his naked body painted black and white to resemble a skeleton. He isn’t sure of the gender of the person who has mere slits for eyes, nose, and mouth.

  More and more bodies shove up against the bar, all of them crying for free drinks, free drinks. One of the bartenders smashes a bottle over a head. The other shoves and punches and screams over the music, “Back off! I said back the hell off!” Somebody hurls a pint glass and it shatters the giant tank, and a flood of whiskey pours out, carrying the drowned man with it, his body flopping to the floor.

  Sarin and Juniper pass by unmolested. Juniper expects the door to be locked, but the knob twists easily. He probably just imagines it as hot in his hand, as though the room on the other side were on fire. Flies buzz along the door, dozens of them, appearing like nail heads in the wood. He nods at Sarin. Only then do they pull down their hoods and draw their pistols and rush inside.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN LELA WAKES, it takes her a panicked moment to remember where she is. She throws out an arm and knocks over a mop and searchingly flutters a ream of paper. She stands and bonks her head on a shelf that clatters staples, pencils, paper clips to the floor. Then she sees the line of light at the bottom of the door. The supply closet at The Oregonian. The staff keeps a cot in here to sneak in power naps. She spent the night on it. Her neck cramps from a pinched nerve. Her clothes remain damp. She stinks like mildew and BO.

  She nearly trips over her purse and then checks it in a panic to make certain the skull is still there. She isn’t sure what time it is when she steps from the closet, but the newsroom is bustling and the windows burn with sunlight. She rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand and yawns so widely her jaw clicks. The Books editor glances at her and shakes his head and snorts out a laugh. “Looking good, Falcon.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight something.”

  “Shit.” The Willamette 10K, which she’s supposed to cover, has already started. But—no reason to panic—she should be able to make it to the finish line to interview the winner and round up some ambient details before heading over to the farmers’ market.

  There are obviously other things crowding her mind. Far more pressing than any empty-calorie civic-pride 500-worder. But she has never missed a deadline, and she doesn’t plan to this morning, no matter the circumstances. She shoves a stick of gum in her mouth and rakes her fingers through her hair and starts for the elevators before changing her mind and ducking down a stairwell to avoid passing by her editor’s office.

  Her wild memory of yesterday—the Rue, the skull, the murder, the hounds—might mean she’s gone nuts. She’s perfectly willing to entertain that possibility. Bad food, lack of sleep, too much coffee laced with too much Adderall, whatever—she could very possibly be an unreliable source, seeing things and making connections that aren’t there. Or . . . ? She’s dealing with what can only be described as extranormal, supernatural, the kind of weirdness that might appear in the novels she doesn’t normally read. She isn’t sure which possibility frightens her more. But she can handle them both. She just needs time to think, to process.

  In the lobby, the security guard tells her to hold up. He has a star on his shoulder and a baton on his belt, and his name tag reads STEVE. Some cream cheese whitens the edge of his mustache, and he holds a paper cup of Peet’s coffee that steams through the vent. He doesn’t seem to know what to say to her. Last night, she now recalls, he asked if she was all right and put a hand on her shoulder, and she knocked it away and said to mind his own business.

  “Some guy,” he says. “Some guy, last night, he tried to get in here. Said he was looking for you. Said the two of you had an appointment. Thought about calling your desk, but it was late and he wasn’t on the guest sheet and I didn’t like the looks of him, so I said you weren’t here. Said you’d gone. He asked where to and I said home, I suppose. Hope that’s all right? Hope I didn’t mess up anything for you?”

  “What did he look like?”

  Steve crags up his face. “Like, weird. Creepy. Young and old at the same time. Not sure that makes any sense. His body could have been a kid’s, but his face looked like a little old man’s. Know what I mean? He sounded funny too. Foreign or something. Like he was chewing on metal. Hope I did all right, sending him away.”

  “You did.” She eyes up the coffee. “Can I have the rest of that?”

  “This?” He examines the cup as though surprised to find it in his hand. “Um.”

  She says thanks and grabs it from him. Some coffee sloshes her wrist, but she barely notices the sting. She’s already out the door, knocking back the cup and digging out her cell. The phone is nearly drained, but she uses it to call Powell’s and asks for a transfer to the rare books section. The ringing goes on too long. The taste of coffee goes acidic in her mouth. She remembers the glasses on the ground. Daniel’s. She did this to him. This is her fault. Then, at last, he picks up, and she
lets out a shout of relief.

  “Lela?” he says. “Lela, is that you?” His voice is shrill and broken by a stammer. What in God’s name happened, he wants to know, and is she all right?

  She assures him she is, and tells him she’s sorry, and hopes that she hasn’t caused too much trouble. She was attacked last night. She’ll fill him in later. “Things aren’t safe right now,” she says. “If anybody comes around, asking about me, play dumb. You’ve never heard of me. You never saw that skull. You have no idea what they’re talking about.”

  “Oh dear,” he says. “This is all terribly upsetting.”

  She tells him she has to go, but she’ll be in touch. She has some follow-up questions.

  He lowers his voice. “About the skull?”

  “About the skull.”

  For the next two hours, this Saturday morning, she does her job. She shakes hands and asks questions and scratches down notes and hammers out copy and meets her deadline, but she feels barely present for any of it, as though she’s hovering over herself.

  Her Volvo has been towed, no surprise, so she takes the bus. She’s so preoccupied that she misses her stop and has to walk ten blocks to her apartment, the second floor of an old Arts and Crafts home. Once there she fails to recognize that her living room is not as she left it. Granted, she doesn’t clean very often, so it is difficult to see the mess overlying the mess. The walls are bare, but the floor is full. Small islands of T-shirts and pants and half-balled socks are staggered down the hallway, through the bedroom. Dishes and take-out containers stack up in the kitchen and collect clouds of fruit flies. Every corner is a leaning tower of newspapers and magazines. The couch is a coffee-stained nest of blankets. That’s her standard. But every drawer and cupboard door is now open, the contents disgorged.

  She should run back the way she came. She should call the police. But she doesn’t. The needling panic that bothers her now has nothing to do with her own well-being. It’s her dog that matters. Hemingway. That stupid German shepherd with the black mask and bad breath and one floppy ear, the one who sheds fur like porcupine quills, the one who nudges her awake with his cold nose, the one who chews up the furniture and drinks out of the toilet and normally yelps and scrambles toward the door whenever she comes home. That one. Her only companion.