Or maybe, probably not. Lela doesn’t say a word. The truth is, the more she hears, the greater her fear and guilt and doubt. She doubts everything she has ever believed. Rather than admit this, she says, “I need to make some calls.”
“Who are you calling?” Cheryl says, squeezing her hands as though trying to strangle the last bit of water from a dishrag. “The police?”
“Not yet.” She almost apologizes for getting her sister into this mess, but holds back. “Can you put something together for dinner? I haven’t eaten all day, and I think my head’s not on straight because of it.”
Cheryl opens the bedroom door and lets out a yelp. The black balloon floats into the room, dangling a silver ribbon like a jellyfish’s poisoned tendril. Lela snatches it from the air and squeezes it in her hands and pierces it with her fingernails until it pops into flaccid shreds. The air expelled smells ammoniac and makes her gag.
“Look at us,” Cheryl says. “Jumping at shadows.”
Cheryl closes the door behind her, leaving Lela alone. Lela plugs in her phone and waits two minutes before punching the power button. It sings to life. Immediately it registers twenty messages, which she ignores, along with the warning that her storage is full. She dials Josh’s number, and a few seconds later her ear fills with the pubescent crackling of his voice: “Hey.”
He followed up, as she requested, and has some intel. “I don’t really know where to start, so I guess I’ll just list off stuff I wrote down.” The Rue, for one. The address has a long history of ugliness. “I read your articles. The ones about Jeremy Tusk. Pretty good stuff. Kind of scared the shit out of me. Do you know that the Museum of Death—this place in LA—has a whole exhibit on Tusk? They have a bloodstained T-shirt and a few messed-up drawings he did and a diary he kept and even one of his skin-shade lamps.”
In the diary, Tusk talked about why he did what he did. Because the shadows told him to. That’s what he said. The shadows visited at night, sometimes in the shape of a giant bat that clung to the corner of the ceiling or a hunchbacked rat that roosted in his closet, and said they would hurt Tusk if he didn’t do as he was told. They knew about him from his scholarly articles and conference lectures, from the books he had harvested, from the ceremonies he had performed in the name of research. “They are hungry for flesh and thirsty for blood, and I am like their fork and their mouth, their instrument of consumption,” Tusk wrote.
But thirty years earlier—Josh is kind of surprised Lela never dug this up herself, it would have made for an eerie embellishment—in one of the Rue’s second-floor apartments, a husband killed his wife and then himself. And then ten years before that, the maintenance man hung himself in the furnace room. And thirteen years before that, a fire gutted the building and killed three families. And two years before that, a girl disappeared from her bedroom at night, never to be seen again. And then, in 1912, during the construction of the building, three laborers died when a steel beam collapsed. “I mean, I’m sure every old building has its share of bad luck, but this place seems kind of crammed with nightmares.”
“How far back did you go?” she says. “Anything before the building went up?”
“I was getting there. I’m kind of doing this telescoping thing, see. So I checked with the historical society and also consulted the library and City Hall archives. I didn’t realize how shitty the Pearl used to be. Like, it’s all foo-foo now. Galleries and lofts and bistros and whatnot. It used to be nothing but rail yards and warehouses and shacks for blue-collar immigrants. The Rue went up in 1912. For a while it was used by rail workers and the factory workers hired on at the Weinhard Brewery and area warehouses, then it was briefly a brothel, then it was just a shitty apartment building.”
“What about before 1912?”
“I can’t be sure about an exact address, so we’re talking about a more generalized area now. But in the mid-1800s, ten lumbermen were found in their camp. Dead. Naked. Some of them were hanging from trees, strung up by their guts. Others were laid out in the mud, their limbs cut off and mixed up, sewn into the wrong places on the wrong bodies.”
She doesn’t realize she has her eyes closed until she tries to scratch down a note. “Anything else?”
“I got a few fires and a smallpox outbreak but can’t be certain of the exact location. And then, on a whim, I checked out some Multnomah legends. There were a few that stood out. All of them about the Shadow People. Like, the Shadow People took bites out of the sun until there was no more light and a long winter came. Or the Shadow People would sometimes sneak inside of an elk or a wolf or a bear or a person and pretend to be them, use their skin like a costume to do messed-up stuff like eat babies or burn a village or shove somebody off a cliff. There were five Shadow People—it was like its own insurgent tribe—and they supposedly haunted an area off the Willamette where nobody fished, nobody hunted, because they didn’t want to get gobbled up by shadow mouths or raped by shadow dicks or whatever. But then I guess a bunch of warriors from all the local tribes got pissed and gathered together at a meeting in the Gorge and said they weren’t going to put up with this shit anymore. It was like an Indian UN meeting or something. And they banded together and finally took the Shadow People out in this shock-and-awe campaign during which the moon eclipsed and the Willamette ran red. Then they buried them, and even though they performed a cleansing ceremony, nothing grew over the burial site for many moons or some shit.”
“Jesus.” Her mind quickly links the five Shadow People to the five exhumed skeletons. That would make the skull in the other room a link to a time when darkness roamed freely. She shakes her head to clear away the thought, dismiss the connection. She is looking for a logical explanation for all of this, not more superstition. “Do you happen to know why five is always such an important number?”
“Five fingers to control a hand. Five senses to know the world. Five wounds to kill Christ. If you’re talking about a pentagram, the top point can indicate the spirit lording over the four elements of matter. Or, if you flip it over, the two points at the top and the one at the bottom are supposed to look like a horned goat with a beard.”
“I wasn’t sure about you at first, intern, but you’re pretty okay.”
“Thanks. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t get used to it,” she says. “I have a policy of giving out no more than one compliment per decade.”
“Oh, here’s one last nugget. The guy who built the building. Samuel Fromm. He was a known associate of Aleister Crowley.”
Night has fallen. Lela goes to the bedroom window and pulls aside the shade and stares out into the dark nothing of the backyard. “Why do I know that name?”
“The wickedest man in the world? Occultist? Practitioner of black magick? Come on, Lela. You really need to spend more time on Wikipedia.”
The bedroom door shudders in its frame and she opens it, and Hemingway pushes inside and nudges her with his cold wet nose and whines.
“All signs point to creepy. What about Undertown?”
“They seemed legit at first.”
“At first?” she says.
“Yeah, at first. They’re like a junior version of MongoDB. Obviously you don’t know what that is. They’re one of the biggest names in Internet databases. Storage centers for all web content and the junk people send and receive online. Undertown is a start-up competitor. They’re also in the business of tracking and ad serving.”
“But?”
“But I found a few sketchy news items recently. Out of Europe and on Al Jazeera. Database sharing of personal information. Undertown was housing data for some hospitals and insurance companies, and then allowing others to access the information for a fee. I didn’t have time to translate most of what I found, but it looks like they’ve got a lot of real estate on the Dark Net.”
“What’s the Dark Net?”
He tells her about the Deep Net, which is hundreds of times the size of the surface Internet, all the inform
ation that is unlisted, unsearchable, much of it legit, academic and government and military databases. The Dark Net is like the basement of the Deep Net. Mail-order drugs, weapons trafficking, human smuggling, terrorist communications, spy communications, insider trading, intellectual property theft, death porn, and kiddie porn. “Anything nasty or forbidden. Anything people don’t want other people knowing about. It’s the red-light district, it’s the torture chamber, it’s digital hell.”
Hemingway sniffs her butt and worms between her legs, and she shoos him away. “Do you need some sort of secret invitation or something? How do you get on to this thing?”
“It’s easy actually. You just—”
“You mean, you’ve been there? I thought you said it was only for underworld weirdos.”
“You have to wonder about somebody’s motives for being there, but there’s a contingent of normals too. Lots of journalists actually. Anyone looking for dirt but especially overseas correspondents. Bloggers too. People who worry about censorship. People who worry that if their location or identity gets leaked, they might end up killed or tortured or imprisoned. And then there are the nerds. Bitcoin traders and gamers and such. That’s why I go on there. For the free songs and movies.”
“Free as in you steal them?”
His voice cracks when he says, “I’m a poor college student working as an unpaid intern. I get a hall pass.”
“Go on.”
He explains that normally, when you’re accessing a website, you’re trafficked through multiple routers to get to a server. But the path is traceable. On the Dark Net, those routers would be masked and the URLs wouldn’t even be traceroute-able. “You’re no one.” The standard browser and network is available through TOR, and the websites are seemingly random strings of symbols capped by .onion. “Like kyxt5ww37e9ryb.onion or 7zh42mtc4n2n2.onion. It’s not like shopping on Amazon or browsing Huffington Post. Most of the websites look garage-made. Message boards and indexes, junk heaps of posts, links, files. Stolen PayPal accounts for sale, fake IDs for sale, movies for sale, people for sale. It’s hard to say how many people are down there. Some say four hundred thousand, some say a million. You’re off the grid—in an unfiltered, unmoderated, many-layered netherworld—and because of this you’re nearly impossible to police. It’s a maze of anonymity. And probably the majority of stuff going on down there is put-you-in-prison-for-a-long-time illegal.”
Hemingway whines again, this time swiveling his head toward the hallway.
“Hold on a sec,” she says.
But Josh doesn’t seem to hear her. “You might want to be careful if you’re looking for dirt on these guys. This could be some serious—”
She pulls the phone away from her ear, and his voice trails off to a garble. She hears something then. Not in the kitchen, where her sister putters around, but from deep in the house, what could be a footstep thudding or a cupboard door closing or a book toppling over on a shelf.
She rests the phone against her breast. Hemingway now creeps toward the hallway, his tail tucked and his body arrow-straight. The dog’s hackles rise and a guttural rumble issues from his chest.
Chapter 15
LELA DOES NOT SILENCE Hemingway, and does not call out for her sister, but tiptoes down the hall. At the threshold of Hannah’s bedroom, she pauses, not wanting to step inside and flip on the light, not wanting to look. If she doesn’t look, she can go on pretending that this night will be different from the last. She can remember all those other occasions when she investigated a noise and it turned out to be nothing.
She nudges the light switch. And sees the man, black-bearded and block-bodied, from the construction site. And from the woods behind Benedikt’s, according to her sister’s story. He is hunched over, with one leg planted on the floor and one arm steadying the tableside lamp he must have knocked into—while the other half of his body remains outside, lost to darkness.
Once he sees her, he pulls himself fully into the bedroom and stands upright. He is the same height as she, but far broader, with a short muscular neck that upswells from his shoulders. His beard grows too far up his cheeks, the black hairs like so many bristling fly legs.
For a finger snap, she knows nothing, just the vacancy of panic. Then Hemingway’s growl rolls into a snarl that crashes apart into spittle-flecked barking. Beside the dog, she feels a little stronger. Her hand goes to the first thing within reach. A book. Through the Looking-Glass, the Braille edition. She hurls it. It opens up midair with a flutter before the man knocks it aside. She grabs another book, then another, pitching them overhand—and the man slashes his arms in defense. When there are no more books, she throws knickknacks, a glass bauble, a yellow agate, a clock that splits his eyebrow. He curses her in a rough-edged language she does not recognize and then stomps around the canopy bed and crosses the ten feet of space that separates them.
“What’s going on?” she can hear her sister shouting from the kitchen. “Lela? What’s wrong?”
Hemingway lunges in between the two, his tail rigid and his ears flattened and his snout peeled to show his teeth. The man rears back. His boot strikes the dog’s breast with such force that Hemingway lifts several feet in the air before collapsing on his side, yelping and scrambling helplessly.
There is a small pink recliner with the shape of her niece worn into it. Lela darts behind it, gripping its back as if it were a weapon. The man edges one way and she another, so that they are circling the chair slowly, close enough to see the pores on his nose but not close enough for him to grab her. He tries. And then seizes the chair instead and flips it over.
She backs away as he continues his approach, matching him step for step. He seems in no hurry now, intentionally lingering, as if this were some terrible foreplay.
“Lela?” Her sister’s voice is closer now, coming down the hallway.
“Stay back! Call 911. Now.”
Lela debates racing for the kitchen to yank a knife from the block, but she doesn’t think she’ll make it. And that would bring the man closer to where Hannah rests in the living room. She retreats three fast steps, and in doing so her buckle chimes. She bought it at a flea market, an oversize brass rectangle that carries the shape of an elk anchored to a leather belt with a basketweave pattern. She twists off the buckle, slides the belt from the waist loops, wraps the leather around her knuckles once.
“Where is the skull?” he says, and she says, “Fuck you.”
His hands are open, and his arms spread to either side of his belly, ready to catch her if she runs, but not ready to stop the buckle when she snaps her arm, whips him across the face with it. He cries out and brings a hand to where his mustache split, revealing broken teeth and the red gleam of gum beneath. She does not wait, lashing him again and again, across the shoulder, the skull.
He goes low and barrels toward her and jams a shoulder into her stomach and smashes her into the wall. She feels the plaster crack and the breath whoosh from her lungs, making her go limp enough that he can argue her body into a hold that bends both arms painfully behind her back.
But Hemingway has recovered enough to attack again. The man cries out—his hot breath in her ear—and she looks down to see the dog’s jaws clamp down on his calf and shake hard enough to rip the fabric and the skin beneath.
The man releases her. He punches the dog in the snout, wrenches an ear. She stumbles away and retches from the bruised pain in her abdomen. Just as the man balls his fist and readies another blow to the dog, she swings the belt at such an angle it loops his neck—and she stations herself behind him and twists the supple leather so that it cannot be easily unbound. She leans back, putting all her weight into the knee that prods his spine. He claws at his neck and at her, trying to find his breath. They fall back onto the bed and the frame cracks and he makes swampy choking sounds.
He gets a grip on her hair and snatches out a handful, but she does not loosen her grip, not until Hemingway limps toward them. For a moment she fears her own dog—the wrinkled sn
out, the ire boiling in his gut making him unrecognizable—and then the fear gives way to relief when the jaws snap at the man’s groin, then his belly. He tries to kick Hemingway away, but there is no stopping the dog. It has succumbed to something base and frightful, the back-of-the-brain response Lela can very much relate to now.
There is a squelching sound as the dog snatches and tears and burrows his triangular face into the man. His body no longer writhes. One of his hands dangles at his side. She tells Hemingway to stop, but the dog won’t. She struggles to stand.
The man’s body flops away from her and thumps the floor and still the dog growls, bites, claws. She says it again—“Stop, stop!”—and only then does Hemingway pull back, his face a red mask. The dog licks its chops and pants and waves its tail hesitantly at her.
“Oh no,” her sister says. She stands in the doorway with a hand over her heart. “Oh Jesus.”
Lela spots some movement out of the corner of her eye. Outside the window, another figure stands, this one smaller, appearing like a child, round-headed but with an old man’s face. He wears a black turtleneck. He opens his mouth to reveal his tiny pebbly teeth—and then hisses at her before darting off into the night. She can hear his footsteps slithering across the grass and then pattering along the sidewalk until they are no longer discernible in the nighttime groan of the city, and only then does she relax and pull Hemingway into a whimpering hug.
Both their hearts are sprinting. She pets him and cries silently, and it takes a moment, through the smeared lens of tears, to understand what is happening. Her hands—as she roughs her fingers across Hemingway, scratching her thanks—should come away damp and tacky with blood. Instead she feels like she’s combing clots of dried mud from him. She wipes off her tears. Hemingway studies her with a cocked head. His snout, once red, is now gray, as if pasted with ash.
The Dark Net Page 14
