The Dark Net
Page 18
Sarin explains. Cheston is gone. Cheryl is dead. Hannah is missing. And a virus has compromised the system.
A line of packaged syringes and bottle of morphine sit on his night table. She rips the plastic off one, needles the bottle, sucks in a fat thirty milligrams. “This is the part where you try to get out of bed and play hero. But that ain’t happening. Not today.”
He wishes he could argue with her, but he feels—with all of these blood lines feeding into him—as helpless as a tangled marionette. He doesn’t fight her when she stabs the syringe into his thigh, thumbs it empty. “Then what?” he says.
“You’re going to rest. I’m going to take care of it.” She shares a look with Lela. “We’re going to take care of it.”
“What are you going to do?” The morphine hits him hard. His eyelids feel suddenly burdened with concrete. He closes them, just for a second. All pain vanishes. His bed softens, as downy as a cloud; he is floating.
Sarin’s throaty voice speaks to him through the dark. “Stop them. Save the girl.”
Juniper cannot open his eyes. He teeters at the edge of an unconscious void and doesn’t realize that Sarin has already left him, that he speaks to an empty room when he says, “Or die trying?”
Chapter 20
THE TWO WOMEN spend the morning helping each other. Clearing out the shelter and locking its doors. Nursing Juniper. Pulling down Cheryl from the cross and bathing her body and toweling it off and combing her hair and wrapping her in a sheet that molds to the shape of her face.
They carry the shrouded body to the basement, and then through the hidden doorway and down the winding stairs—to the room. The room with the hinged chair with adjustable straps on it. With the cabinets and the tool bench and the floor dotted with dead flies.
Beside the body, Lela kneels. She doesn’t know how to pray, but she does her best to pantomime it, for her sister’s sake, braiding together her fingers and scrunching her eyes so tightly a few tears roll out of them. That is all the emotion she allows. She is obviously hard-shelled. She feels but she keeps it deep inside.
“What am I supposed to tell people?” she says, and Sarin says, “You tell them the truth. That she’s gone missing.”
There is an incinerator here, and they feed the body into it. After Sarin clamps the door in place and cranks the dial and the flames whoosh and a crackling sounds, she puts a hand on Lela’s shoulder and says, “You understand why we have to do it this way, don’t you?”
Lela says, “No one would understand.”
“I’m afraid most people live in a different reality.”
Lela listens to the ashes swirling and moaning through the vent pipes. Waves of heat pour off the incinerator. “That’s where I was living until yesterday.” Her affect is flat, her eyes bruised with fatigue and sadness, and she keeps her hands balled into fists, as though trying to contain herself, keep anything else from slipping away.
Sarin shrugs off her leather jacket. She looks unarmored without it. Bony, a bit hunched. Old. She walks to a line of cabinets and opens one up and pulls from it a Kevlar vest that she slips into with some difficulty. Then she digs out two pancake holsters that she fits around her shoulders and a third to tighten around her waist. Into each of these she tucks a 9mm. The jacket bulges over the top. She flips her hair out of the collar. The ammunition—all silver-topped cartridges with crosses cut into them to do more damage—she shoves into her pockets and into the duffel bag she pulls down and unzips. Then she turns to study Lela and asks the young woman to give her a sit rep.
Lela knuckles away a stray tear. “What?”
“Tell me what you know. I’ll tell you what I know.”
“I honestly don’t know what I know. Except that I’m really fucking scared.”
“Do your best.”
They talked about some of this last night—when hovering over Hannah—but Lela gives her the whole story now. About Undertown, about the Rue, about the skull and the small man, about the murder and the red right hand, about the hounds, about Hannah and the woods and the wolf mask and the bite marks and the man who crumbled to ash. About the book, Lock and Key, and what she learned from it.
While listening to all of this, Sarin finishes a cigarette and starts on a second. “So where’s the relic? Where’s the skull?”
Lela glances at her canvas purse. She set it in the corner, and there it bulges like some sated belly.
“Bring it here.”
Lela takes her time. Walking to the purse and kneeling beside it. Tucking her hair behind her ears. Clearing her throat. Pulling the skull out and holding it away from her body. Even when she carries it to Sarin, she doesn’t hand it over. “You can’t just give it to them.”
“Who said that was my plan?”
“You can’t break it either,” Lela says. “I tried.”
Lela tells her about what happened last night at Powell’s. Daniel yelled at her—told her to stop, wait—when she snatched the skull off the desk and headed for the staircase. The railing bit her belly when she leaned over it and hurled the skull down. She expected a satisfying shatter, like a dropped plate, but instead the skull merely tocked the concrete landing and thunked down the stairs and rolled to a stop. She chased after it, chucked it against a wall, slammed a door on it, no luck. She pulled down a fire extinguisher and hammered at the skull until the metal dented and cracked and spewed white foam. There was no use. The bones were somehow shielded, more than petrified.
Sarin reaches for the skull, and for a moment both their hands are on it. She tugs and Lela holds fast. It’s only when Sarin says, “Enough force, you can break anything,” that Lela lets go.
“I don’t see how there’s any way out of this,” Lela says.
“I hear you.” Sarin sets the skull on the duffel bag. “Lose-lose situation, right? They want the skull, but we can’t give them the skull, no matter if they’re holding the girl hostage.” On a whetstone she sharpens the blade of a knife with a snick-snick-snick. “But don’t worry. There’s always a way out. And it helps that they’re out of time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tonight’s Halloween. Fall climax. Rituals are essential to these people. No question in my mind, that’s when they’re going to do what they’re going to do.”
“Shit,” Lela says. “When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out.”
“Zero Day.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It was something we heard before. About Zero Day. That Zero Day was coming. I think it’s come. I think it’s now.”
Lela says, “What’s our next move?”
“They’ve been chasing us. Now it’s time to chase them.” She tucks the knife into an ankle scabbard and tells Lela she’s headed to the Rue. “Below. That’s where we’ll find your niece.”
“What are they going to do to her?”
“They’re going to kill her of course.” Sarin expands upon what Lela already knows, telling her the Rue is a black site, a night chapel, spoiled land, a kind of charging station for evil. “They’re all over the place. The Paris catacombs, Guantánamo Bay, Lake Powell, the Bellagio, the House on the Rock, the Golden Gate Bridge.” There are at least two others in Oregon alone. The Rajneesh compound and the Lava River Cave. “Years ago, Tusk was trying to open the gates to the Rue.” She tucks a grenade into the pocket of her leather jacket and pats it. “If he had gotten away with killing me, it might have worked.”
“Because you’re special?”
“I kind of prefer the word spectrum, to be honest. Sounds more like the weird affliction it is. Anyway, Tusk doesn’t have me, but he’s got the next best thing: your niece. He’s going to try again. And this time, he’s got help. Some sort of organized campaign I don’t fully understand. A legion of shadows.”
“Tusk is dead,” Lela says, not in denial, trying to understand. “I saw the autopsy photos.”
“Who do you think put that knife in him?” She thumps her chest. “I’m talking
about Tusk. But not Tusk. He was just the puppet. A conduit.” She points at the chair in the center of the room. The one with the hinges and the belts, the one with a dried slick of blood around it. “We had him here. We had him and we lost him, and now people are dead and dying. We fucked up and now I’ve got to make reparations.”
“What was his name?”
“Cheston.”
“But not Cheston.”
“Exactly. Just another puppet like Tusk.”
“Who is he, then?”
“Who is it? That’s what I intend to find out. The name matters,” Sarin says. “The name of the demon. Think of it like a chatroom. You’ve got somebody named BikerBoy123 or PimpDaddyJ who’s logged on. He’s being a jerk, harassing and threatening others. You think he would act like that if everyone knew his real name? If he could be called out? Maybe even sued or prosecuted for harassment? His home visited by anyone seeking some vigilante justice? It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it’s all I’ve got. Knowing the name solidifies the target, increases its vulnerability.” She reaches into another cabinet and pulls down a wooden box full of dynamite and pats it. “That way I can hurt him, not just the shadow of him.”
Lela wants to come, but Sarin refuses her, saying it’s too dangerous, saying she needs to remain at the shelter. “Because someone needs to look after that big dummy Juniper.” And because this is where the girl will come, and there is a very good chance she might come alone.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. I might not be coming back.” Sarin coughs into her fist and it comes away black, a memory of last night. She holds it up as evidence. “I believe I’ve almost reached my expiration date anyhow.” Whatever sickness she stole off Hannah, it’s in her now, rooted deep.
❖
Night is coming. In downtown Portland, the trick-or-treaters are few, but men and women prowl the streets in costume. A gang of skeletons. A woman dressed as a fairy and another a nurse. Here is a mummy wrapped in toilet paper, a zombie in a dirt-smeared shirt, and a middle-aged man who appears to be dressed as werewolf Tinker Bell. Bars are crowded with twenty-somethings with ultraviolet tans who pretend themselves into something sexier, scarier. From balconies and condo stoops, jack-o’-lanterns grin and sputter with candlelight. From an open window, the Velvet Underground plays from a stereo.
A pumpkin lies in the sidewalk, shattered to a pulp, its brain an extinguished candle, a sharp-toothed half-grin all that remains of the face. Sarin steps over it. The pockets of her jacket and pants bulge and clink. So does the duffel bag she trades from hand to hand, varying the weight that’s heavy enough to make her lean to one side and hold out the opposite arm for balance. The skull’s impression pushes through the fabric.
Lump travels beside her. Three crows pace him, sometimes lighting on his shoulder, sometimes taking wing and circling the air above as though to scout the way. One rat and then another scramble from under a Dumpster to join their company. And then a gray squirrel. And then some swallows. Leaves crunch beneath their feet. The air purples and the shadows spread. Every mother tells her frightened child that a room is the same whether the lights are on or off. Nothing has changed but the ability to see. But that mother is lying. Everyone knows that bad things come in the dark. And now the dark is here.
And the dark has Hannah. She and Sarin are part of the same tribe, made of the same stuff. Doomed DNA. One foot in this world, one foot in the other. Saving her feels like saving some version of herself, giving Sarin permission to finally rest. The last few years, she has felt so tired. There is only so much pleasure you can mine from the world before you lose your capacity for awe. There are only so many fights you can take on before you lose your will to make a fist. Earlier, when she pricked Juniper with a syringe—doped him with morphine that melted the strain from his body and ironed the creases in his face—she felt a momentary jealousy. He had been excused from the pained tension of living. She’s ready for that. She coughs. Sometimes so hard and so long that she has to pause and rest an arm against Lump. People would be wise to avoid the blackness she spits on the sidewalk.
They walk through the purpling twilight, nobody giving them a second look—they fit in with all the other costumed characters—until they pass an alley. A voice calls out from the shadows. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Sarin skids to a stop and reaches a hand inside her jacket, closing it around the grip of a pistol. And then a man emerges from the shadows. Mid-twenties, a failure of a mustache clinging to his upper lip. He wears tight jeans, a white T-shirt upon which he has Magic-Markered HI, MY NAME IS SATAN. “Who the hell are you?” He puffs a cigarette. “Oh, wait—I got it.” He points to Lump. “Monster.” And then to Sarin. “Monster hunter.” The kid takes a final drag that burns the cigarette down to its filter before tossing it on the sidewalk and heading back to the bar.
Only then does Sarin release her grip on the gun. She crushes the spent cigarette butt before continuing on her way, her heel smearing ash and kicking up sparks as she travels deeper into the Pearl.
Chapter 21
HANNAH DOESN’T RECOGNIZE FIRE. She knows the smell of its smoke, but not the way it moves. The ever-changing color and dimensions confuse her. It is a bird’s wing. It is a silk scarf. It is sunlit water. In fact, it is a candle. A black candle a few feet from her. She tries to concentrate on its flame—focus all her attention on the way it pushes back the darkness—because that’s the only thing that keeps her from screaming.
She doesn’t know where she is—Babs’s office at The Oubliette—but she knows it lies belowground. The air has the taste of earthworms, and she can sense the enclosing weight of the dirt above and below and all around her, as if she were trapped in a tomb. There are roots threading from the ceiling, but so are there coax cables and Christmas lights. One wall is lined with filing cabinets, and the other is stacked with television screens fuzzed over with static. There are USB hubs, power strips, cooling fans. Tangles of cables and cords. Laptops streaming with what looks like a red rain.
She doesn’t know what happened to her mother, but she knows the man who took her had blood on his hands. And she doesn’t know what will happen to her, but she knows it can’t be good. Her cheeks are trailed with salt from all her crying.
A cool breeze bothers the air and the candle-flame snaps and bends. There are many candles set throughout the space—some on the floor and some on a desk and some on the filing cabinets. They illuminate the bricked chamber, maybe twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide, with several pillars interrupting it and two dark doorways channeling from it.
She lies in the center of this space. She stares at the candle, so she does not have to see what surrounds her. The massive pentagram chalked on the floor. The strange bones—some of them still clotted with dirt—arranged neatly at each tip of the five-pointed design. The bones are riven with ciphers, and the rib cages have obsidian blades run through them, and the skulls have black candles fitted onto their domes, and the wax dribbles and melts down their sides like flesh taking form. They came from the graves beneath the Rue, and they appear at first like the skeletons of men, but the skulls are warped strangely, one with nubs on the forehead, another with a shovel of a jawbone, another with eye sockets so big you could fit a fist through them.
One skull is missing. The one that would occupy the point of the pentagram directly above her own head.
The cold of the stone floor seeps into her back. Her wrists and ankles are bound, but even if they weren’t, she wouldn’t move. She is surrounded. How many are men and how many women, she doesn’t know. They wear black robes and masks. Wolf masks and bird masks and bear masks and deer masks with antlers branching out the top. All except one. He is dressed in red and shuttles among them and speaks sometimes in English and sometimes in what she recognizes from school as Latin. She knows his voice. Last night, at the shelter, when she slept, he is the one who seized her, pulled a bag over her head, dragged her into the night.
Then there are the hounds. Two of them. Hairless and pale, black-gummed and needle-toothed. Their eyes are the bluish white of a hard-boiled egg, the eyes of the blind, but she knows they see. They pace the floor, winding among the masked figures. When they lick their chops, their saliva snaps like the electricity flowing into the room.
Yes, it’s easier not to look. It is better to study the flame instead. If she looks at the flame, she doesn’t have to see the darkness. The darkness that oozes off them—the same as the man in the woods behind Benedikt’s. A shawl. An aura. Whatever you want to call it. A pollutant that infects the air around them. The flame. She needs to look at the flame. The flame happily blinds her.
What else can she do? Nothing. Here is the thing she hates most about being a kid: you don’t have any agency. Everybody tells you what to do, and you do it or else. Her current condition is an exaggerated version of this, infantile in her total helplessness as she lies in wait for this room full of masked strangers to do with her as they wish.
The red priest carries a chalice. He offers a sip to each in attendance, an unholy communion. They raise their masks to taste. Every now and then, she catches a word she knows. Cloven and leviathan and abyss and doorway and Zero Day and hail. That is what they say before each of them drink: Hail.
From the desk the red priest selects a metal disc, a miniature gong, and approaches Hannah. He does not intrude upon the pentagram, but circles its perimeter, pausing at each corner to strike the gong. The sound—like the howl of a metal-throated wolf—lingers in the air. He waits until it stills to strike again. The hounds follow him, listening keenly. When the gong sounds for the fifth time, he reverses his cycle around the pentagram and removes from each skeleton the obsidian dagger or spearhead that pierces it, tossing them aside with a clatter. The cords trail behind him wherever he goes. Everything feels mismatched, too old, too new, a rupturing of worlds.