The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  And then Sarin sucks in one last bit of breath before falling back. Coughing and gagging. Her skin is now gray and deeply creased, the wrinkles on her face multiplying by the second so that she seems in danger of crumbling to pieces.

  The man tries to help Sarin, but she swings an arm, motions him away. She gags then. Vomits a black splattering mess. She has consumed and expelled the hitchhiker inside of Hannah. The puddle of it writhes with movement. Flies and moths and beetles and other unrecognizables with long legs and longer stingers crawl from the bile and test their wings and buzz away.

  ❖

  Hannah has never been so hungry. A plate of pancakes sits before her. She uses a knife to smear a hunk of butter across them. Then pours syrup until only the plate’s outer rim remains white. The smell is more than a smell. It’s a feeling, the sweet steam rising off them.

  She stabs her way through three cakes, saws off a triangle, brings it to her mouth. The cakes are so dank with syrup, they dissolve in her mouth. She relishes the sweet burst of maple mellowed by the wheaty wholesomeness—and then pulls back the fork, the tines sliding between her lips.

  It isn’t long before the plate is empty. She asks for more. More pancakes. Then four eggs, over hard, crisped brown around the edges. A little salsa on the side. Five sausages, one that she shares with Hemingway. Toast smeared with butter and grape jelly. A banana. A small cup of yogurt sprinkled with granola and frozen blueberries. Two tall glasses of whole milk and a short glass of orange juice.

  She eats quickly and without interruption. There is no noise except a happy grunt, a thirsty gulp, and the occasional knife-shriek across her plate. When she finishes, she leans back and rubs her bloated stomach. The fullness applies to her mind as well, confusedly jammed with information she has not yet processed.

  Only then does she take in the three adults and one floppy-eared German shepherd watching her. Her mother stands with her hands pooched deep in her cardigan pockets. The man—Juniper, that’s his name—has his arms crossed and his legs spread shoulder-width. And her aunt Lela sits at the other end of the table, stooped over with her hands tented together. “How do you feel?” she says.

  Never better. Cleansed. Enriched. Maybe she should feel crazy—given what has happened to her—the kind of crazy that makes you crawl into the corner of a padded room and bash your temple with your palm and hum nonsense songs. Maybe that feeling is there, but it’s buried deep, like a pain scrubbed away by a numbing shot that calms and warms her into a state of narcosis.

  “Should I make more?” Juniper says. “Or are you done?”

  “I’m done now. I’m good.”

  Juniper stands and lumbers toward her and pulls out the nearest chair. He studies her curiously for a moment, then puts out a hand. It’s three times the size of hers, cracked and callused. The skin of his forearm sleeved in bandages. Hannah looks to her mother, who nods, and then she allows him to take her hand. His grip closes around hers. “That was close. You got here just in time.”

  “Where’s the woman who helped me? Sarin?”

  “She had to go. Removing that hitchhiker took a lot out of her.”

  “It made her sick instead of me?”

  “Yes.” He appears uncertain how to respond. “But she’ll be fine, I hope. She’ll be back. She wants to talk to you more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she thinks you’re special.”

  “Is that what she meant? When she said, you’re like me?”

  He nods.

  “Is she your mom?”

  “No.”

  “Your sister? Wife?”

  “Not my sister and not my wife, no.”

  “I guess she seemed too old to be any of those things.”

  His laugh sounds like a bark. “She wouldn’t love to hear that, but yes, you’re right. She’s very, very old. Not her body so much as what’s in it.” He pats her hand, rubs the knuckle ridge. “Mother, sister, wife. She’s none of those things, but in a way I suppose she’s become all of those things. I don’t know what the right word is. Friend, colleague?”

  Hannah licks the syrup off her lips. “Does she think I’m special because I see dark things?”

  His eyebrows are thick black bands that raise now. “Your mother told me about what happened. In the woods.”

  “It’s because of my glasses. The Mirage.”

  He still has hold of her hand, a warm rough pocket. “Says who?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who says it’s your glasses? Your eyes are just your eyes. Some people can see better up close or far away or at night, but your eyes are just a biological apparatus, nothing special. We’re talking about a different kind of seeing here. The aperture is inside you. Do you know what that word means? Aperture?”

  “Like in a camera?”

  He nods. “Like in a camera.” He holds up a glass between them so that his face appears warped and magnified before setting it back down. “And sometimes it’s not until puberty when those who are tuned in—extrasensory, touched, on the spectrum, whatever you want to call it—start to encounter the world differently. Just about everyone guesses that there’s more to our lives than sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.”

  “Do you mean like Joan of Arc hearing the voice of God?”

  His big shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “Everybody’s got a different way of explaining it.”

  “Are you—what did you call it—on the spectrum?”

  “Yes,” he says. “The outer edge of it. Or the lower rung of it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know those cell towers you see on the hillsides?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sarin’s like that. And maybe you’re like that. Whereas I’ve got more in common with a bent antenna on an old truck.”

  “What if I never wore the Mirage?”

  “I suspect you’d find other ways to see, sense darkness all the same.” He digs his mobile out of his pocket and holds it up. “Lots of people have the same device, but would you believe they all weigh a different amount? Depending on how many emails or songs or photos or books might be on them. Digital information has mass, because everything has a charge. Everything is energy. Everything is a balance of positive and negative. And I can’t sense the difference between my phone and another, but the most sensitive scale might be able to. There are all sorts of things out there that I can’t sense, that most can’t sense. But you’re different. More than different. Yes, you’re high on the spectrum, but you’re somehow upgraded by the Mirage, and that makes you extraordinary, the next level of spiritual warfare. And that’s a good thing. That’s a very good thing.”

  “But I can tell from your voice it’s also a bad thing.”

  “You could say that.” His forehead creases with worry. “Earlier, at the restaurant, when the man came for you? I think he just wanted you as bait. A way of getting to Lela. But I think you surprised him. He must have sensed you were a threat to put a hitchhiker on you. If you’re a threat, you’re a target.”

  “They want to kill me.”

  “Or worse.”

  “What’s worse than killing?”

  “Believe me. There’s worse.”

  “Am I old too? Inside, I mean.”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “Aunt Lela is always saying so. She calls me an old fuddy-duddy sometimes, but other times she calls me an old soul.”

  Juniper looks at Lela, who gives him a pinched smile. “Maybe that’s so. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, you’re part of the light, which means you’re part of this fight.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” Hannah says.

  He leans back in his chair and settles his hands over his knees and cranes his neck toward her mother and aunt. “In the long run, I don’t know. But tonight, you’re stuck with me.”

  Chapter 17

  HANNAH IS TUCKED into bed and Cheryl wishes she could join her daughter there, but she can’t seem to settle do
wn. She is a parade of nervous tics, jittering her leg, chewing the inside of her cheek, squeezing the bridge of her nose, picking at her fingernails. She paces Juniper’s office while he sits at his desk, his eyes small but watchful beneath the ledge of his forehead. She knots and unknots the belt of her cardigan, pushes her hair out of her face. She doesn’t speak for a long time—and when she does, her voice comes in a skittish rush, saying the same things repeatedly with different words: “I don’t understand” and “Why would God let this happen to us?”

  Juniper lets her speak without interruption until now. “There’s no such thing as God.”

  This quiets and stills her, and she stares with a gaping mouth. “How can you say that? After what’s happened tonight?”

  “I’ve gone through the Christian thresher. I know all the Sunday school songs.” Earlier he filled a glass, all the way to the lip, with Scotch and ice. He’s drained it now, but fishes out a cube to suck. “It’s comforting, I know. The idea that Space Dad is watching out for us. And if you appeal to him earnestly enough, he’ll parachute down and grant you wishes. But I’m sorry to say that’s not the way it works.” He looks a little sad, and she thinks he must be drunk.

  Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s heard such a claim. She’s thought it herself, especially in the years since her church, the Light of the World, dissolved into an FBI investigation and tabloid news story. But at a time like this, the possibility of a godless world makes her feel as though the floor beneath her has suddenly revealed itself to be a rope strung hundreds of feet in the air. She can’t abide that kind of vulnerability. “Don’t say that,” she says, and goes to a bookshelf, pulls a leather-bound Bible off the shelf, hurls it at him. “You’re just going to make things worse!”

  The book opens up in the air, its pages fluttering violently. He holds up an arm to try to catch it, but it falls open-faced on the floor. “Maybe we should talk again in the morning,” he says.

  “God is going to take care of me and my daughter!” Her volume doesn’t make it sound any truer, but she feels like she needs to make the appeal regardless.

  His voice is gentler when he speaks again. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, okay? There’s hope. There’s plenty of hope. Believe, but believe differently.” He takes more ice into his mouth and crunches it down. “Believe in light.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means there’s plenty of good in the world to offset all the ugliness. But you can’t just sit back and expect someone to take care of you. You’ve got to fight for it.”

  But that’s exactly why she stuck with the cult even when it asked her to hand over all her money and wear a tinfoil pyramid on her head and hide in a cave system. That’s why she kept saying she was married a year after her husband took off for Alaska. She wants someone to look after her, damn it. She hates the whimpering defeat in her voice when she says, “You’re going to help us?”

  “Of course.” His face softens. “But you’re part of this struggle too. Believe in the light, but don’t forget to believe in yourself.” He swishes his glass of half-melted ice, then crushes a yawn with his fist. “It’s late.”

  She can’t sleep. Not after what’s happened. Not while her sister is gone. A few hours ago Lela went off on some errand she wouldn’t disclose, saying only that she had questions that needed answering. But she’d be back, she promised, before dawn. When Cheryl said, “I’ll wait up for you,” Lela said, “Don’t do that.” But she will. She doesn’t dare fall sleep, as though shutting her eyes will snuff her sister out.

  “If you’re going to bed, can I use your computer?” she says to Juniper. She has appointments stacked up all next week at the social services agency where she works. Those cases will now have to be relegated to someone else, because there’s no way in hell she’s leaving her daughter’s side after what’s happened.

  “You should sleep. I’ll let you use my laptop in the morning.”

  She snatches his glass and tips it back, the cubes knocking against her teeth, the meltwater at once chilling her mouth and burning it with the residue of whisky. “I’m sorry I threw the Bible at you.” She picks it up off the floor and neatens its pages and slides it back on the shelf. “Please, can I use your computer?”

  “Fine, fine, fine.” He rubs his eyes tiredly and splits open his laptop and logs his password and stands from his chair and motions to it. “I’m going to go pass out now.” He pauses in the doorway. “There’s a pretty hefty firewall on there, so your browsing might be limited.”

  “I just need to email.”

  “Should be fine, then. But if it isn’t, don’t wake me up.”

  He leaves her there—closing the door behind him—and she is overcome by loneliness. A part of her is maddened by him, and another part of her wants to follow him into bed. It’s been years since she had sex, and she doesn’t particularly miss it—it always felt compulsory and unclean to her. But on this, the most fucked-up day of her life, she can’t help but ache for the comfort of having someone beside her, a warm body that feels like a pillow and defense. She wants him, she wants God, she wants her sister. Someone, anyone, to offset the emptiness inside her.

  She opens up the browser and logs in to her email and sees the twenty or so new messages in her inbox. Some from clients, some from friends, others spam. She fires off several missives to clients and her fellow case managers, informing them she’ll be out of the office this coming week due to an unexpected illness in the family. She thanks them for understanding and apologizes for the trouble and reminds them that someone will have to make the home visit to Donna, one of her elderly shut-ins. She writes “Sorry” five times. She knows she says the word too often, but in this case it feels warranted.

  The clock reads 3:00 a.m. She’s in a daze at this point, only half-awake, her peripheral vision fogged up and her balance wobbly. So she isn’t thinking clearly when the laptop chimes and another email pops into view. She doesn’t recognize the sender—Cloven@hushmail.com—but she opens it anyway because of the subject line,YOUR SISTER’S FAULT. There is nothing in the body of the message except an attachment, a .wmv file that loads into a media player.

  At first she doesn’t understand what she sees—the picture appears smeared with black grit—but then something comes into focus. A sign. The Weary Traveler. The shelter they’re staying at now. The lamp beside the door glows orange. A few moths flit beside it, battering the glass. A hand emerges then, a hand that belongs to whoever controls the camera, black-gloved. It reaches into the open-bottomed square of glass and twists the bulb until it darkens. The hand drops to the doorknob. A gentle twist. Locked. The camera continues around the side of the building, down an alley, until it comes to a lighted window. In the dining room, Hannah lies on a table. The group of them huddle around her. The woman, Sarin, leans in as if to give mouth-to-mouth. Hannah’s body tenses and Cheryl screams and reaches for her, while Juniper holds her back. Here the video goes dark. She checks the feed and sees that it hasn’t paused but ended.

  She doesn’t realize that she opened more than a video when she clicked on the attachment. Within the program another was hidden. An .exe application. The computer hums as the Trojan sets to work, disengaging the firewall and eating its way through the hard drive. It does not limit itself to these files, but streams through the Ethernet cable that plugs into the walls and in a manner of seconds overrides the larger system. The mainframe forfeits control.

  Before she has finished the video—its time signature thirty seconds—the security system disengages. Next to the front entry, the red light on the alarm blinks, blinks, blinks, and then goes dark. A moment later the locks disengage, all over the building, their combined shuck sounding like a giant pistol hammer cocked. This includes the lower levels, the space beneath the basement that houses Cheston.

  That’s when the computer screen goes dark, as if snuffed by a hard wind. “What the . . .” she says, and strikes the keyboard repeatedly.
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  A script appears, lit red, running swiftly from the top to the bottom of the screen and scrolling down. She leans in to try to make sense of it. Her body stiffens and her mouth slackens and her eyes reflect the code as if it is her own blood circuitry.

  What happens next is out of her control. She is separate from herself. She belongs to the worm that possesses her and now the shelter. She does not know that she opens the desk drawer and wraps her fingers around a long-bladed letter opener shaped like a serpent. She does not know that she rises from the chair and walks slowly from the office and into Juniper’s chambers. She does not know that she stands over him in the dark. She does not know that he murmurs awake and reaches for her as if expecting a naked body. She does not know that she knifes him again and again and again until he goes still. She does not know that she descends one set of stairs, and then another, and then another, beyond the basement, to the room below. She does not know that she frees the man named Cheston from his constraints or that he pets her hair and nibbles her ear and says, “Thank you,” before snapping her neck.

  Chapter 18

  WHEN LELA CALLED DANIEL, he said, “I tried to leave you three voicemails to see how you were doing, but your phone is full,” and she said, “It’s been full for years. I can’t figure out how to delete them,” and he sputtered out an “Oh,” and a “dear,” and an “I see,” before saying that he had some answers and she ought to meet him in the Rare Book Room at Powell’s tomorrow morning, first thing.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  “Tonight?” A huffing pause. “You can’t be—but I’m already home. I’m in my pajamas, if you must know.”

  “I thought you slept in a jacket and tie.”

  “What? Why would I do that? I don’t under—”

  “Forget it. Tonight, Daniel. It’s got to be tonight. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  Again, a stammering response, but eventually he agreed to meet her at the northwest entrance in an hour’s time, and from there he led her upstairs to his desk, around which they stand now in a pond of light thrown by his green-shaded lamp. He cracks open an oversize book and licks his fingers and turns pages delicately and says beneath his breath, “Now where was it?”