Dark Eye

by William Bernhardt

  “We need a warrant,” Patrick cautioned.

  “You’re a fed. Don’t you carry them around in your back pocket?”

  “No. But I can send a fax via my cell phone. And my address book has the numbers of a lot of judges.”

  Well, that wasn’t too shabby. Granger put a phalanx of officers around the perimeter, and we waited.

  An hour later we were inside.

  The ground level was perfectly ordinary. Tacky furniture, no food, a dinky television. But I knew there had to be more. It didn’t take me long to find the basement door. It was locked, not that it mattered.

  The light switch didn’t appear to work, so we had to resort to those cool pencil-thin flashlights like you see cops use on television. It was dark and dank, stereotypically basement-like. There was no wind, but I felt a chill just the same. I usually got my impressions from people, not places, but this little dungeon had a palpable ambiance. It was terrifying, threatening, oppressive. Insane.

  “Maybe you should stay upstairs,” Patrick whispered to me.

  No. In truth, I still felt weak, nauseous, barely able to stand, but I wasn’t going to let them shut me out. I inched forward, shining my light ahead. The more I saw of this room, the more I recognized. The warped wooden walls. The high window, probably the only source of exterior light-and the passageway for the sound waves that brought me back here. The table. His goddamn table with the restraining straps. And there was a stench. A putrid, almost unbearable stench.

  I heard a sound, sprang around. The beam of my flashlight crisscrossed the room. Just Granger, creeping up behind me. This was a big basement, I saw now. Maybe it was just an illusion, but it seemed as if it was bigger than the house. Like it stretched on forever.

  Then I jumped. Way up in the air, like a human bottle rocket. Dropped the flashlight and everything. And I had practically been expecting what I found. But that isn’t the same as seeing it.

  There was a body hunched behind the table. A corpse. My God-had she been there the whole time I’d been held down here? The whole time he’d been playing with me?

  It was Fara Spencer. Her eyes were wide open, her face frozen in an expression of fear or panic or whatever her intense final horrific emotion had been. Her skin was gray and seemed stretched, barely covering the prominent bones of her chin and cheek. She was naked, with a huge blood-caked cavity in her chest. She’d been decomposing for more than a week, but you could still tell who it was. Even if you wished you couldn’t.

  I clamped a handkerchief over my mouth. The nausea was almost overwhelming. “Call the coroner,” I muttered.

  “Already on it,” Granger said, and I guessed he stopped to dial his cell, and Patrick was getting a close-up look at Fara, which explains why I was the first lucky devil to see the really big surprise Edgar left for us.

  For me.

  At first I thought it was plowed soil. Had he been gardening down here? I wondered. Potatoes, maybe? But my first impression was wrong. There was dirt, and evidence of digging. Two spades were propped up against the far wall.

  Not a garden. A graveyard. A real one, this time.

  The mounds went wide across the floor and deep into the background. But they weren’t buried. Not entirely. As if to create a memorable tableau, he’d left parts sticking up out of the ground. A decayed arm. A rotting leg. Sometimes a face. And at this stage of decomposition, they all seemed sadly the same. Small. Young. Female. Dead. Long dead.

  My God, I thought, as the aching in my gut, in my heart, intensified to unbearable proportions. Must be more than a dozen of them.

  We thought Edgar had five victims. We thought he began with Helen Collier.

  We were wrong.

  My head became unbearably heavy. My legs began to ache, pinpricks running up and down them. I remember thinking, I ought to get to a chair. But there was no chair, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to that table. I heard Patrick scream out my name. I saw the dirty ground, the corpse-strewn soil rushing toward me.

  And then I was out.

  So they finally found it, he observed, smiling to himself. The audi-tion. The warm-up act. It seemed more impressive, viewed from this height. Almost disturbing for its… wastefulness. But this had been the work of his previous incarnation. Not him. Another person altogether.

  He had expected them two days ago, and was startled to see not only that they finally arrived, but that they had brought Susan with them. She must’ve insisted.

  She had not been drinking. Had she resisted the temptation he’d laid before her? Had he broken her, or had she somehow managed to reassemble herself? He would have to wait quietly and watch. Proceed with the new plan, with the implementation of the secret he had been given. And when the time came, hope that Susan was ready for him.

  No wonder he had found himself attracted to Susan. It was all so clear now, now that he knew everything.

  She was the Vessel.

  He put the binoculars back in their leather case. It would be so easy to pick them all off, one by one, leaving nothing but a few more corpses littering this potter’s field. And why not? He could do anything now, anything at all.

  He’d had to isolate himself these past few days, return to the texts, meditate. Commune with his totem. He eventually realized that his flaw was not so much in his actions, nor in his plan-but in himself. He could not force the offerings-they had to come willingly. These paltry reincarnations were woefully insufficient; something far greater was necessary to merit the meed he desired. And he had to secure a Vessel worthy of the soul with which he sought reunion.

  He was a new person now, a new man with a new plan.

  He was ready to Ascend.

  His long days in the xeric wasteland had been fraught with temptation, but he had resisted them. His passage had been filled with torments, but he had weathered them. His last night in the Spring Mountains had been the time of his translation. He had offered his very essence, everything he had. He had gone without food, without water, re-creating the vision quest that first revealed his true destiny. He’d stripped and pounded himself with sand, abused himself with the cactus flower. He’d bled and he’d wept. And when at last he’d fallen down on the rocky crag, exhausted beyond reckoning, he believed he had failed.

  The truth had come to him in a dream, as did all knowledge of that other blessed world.

  “You have done well,” said the voice, the one that could not be ignored. “You have pleased us, and so you shall become one with us. The time of your Ascension is at hand.”And so the voice which he had once heard in his head became his own. He became the totem. And the totem was he.

  He looked down now upon those pitiful fools, scurrying about like infantile ants. He laughed, and even his laughter was filled with power. He was the mountain now, and they but grains of sand, a part of him, but not of him, in his world, but not of his world. He was invulnerable, indomitable. He had slipped beyond the boundaries of time and space-By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named Night, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly… / From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime… / Out of Space, out of Time…

  He stretched his arms toward the sky, letting the stardust settle all around him, feeling at home and at one with the cosmos. I am larger than death, he knew, and greater.

  The man I once was is no more.

  I am the Raven.

  26

  After I came to, I stayed outside the basement while the crime techs did their work. There was nothing I could contribute at this stage. Better to let the experts work unimpeded. I took another pill, rested in the backseat of Patrick’s car. I still felt drawn, unsteady. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was embarrassed. Fainting was so amateurish, and worse, so… girlish. Even if I did just get out of the hospital. It was exactly what the old-guard grunts expected someone like me to do.

  After another hour or so, I got bored and slowly made my way inside. I saw Amelia Escav
ez outside the house. She had a football-sized metal frame on the ground and was pouring plaster inside it.

  “Another tire track?”

  “Footprint. Wanna see?”

  I did. “Think it’s him?”

  “A definite possibility. There are several of them around the place.”

  “Anything that might help us find him? A distinctive tread, maybe?”

  “I don’t think so. But it’ll be good for confirmation if you do catch him.” She quickly corrected herself. “When. I mean-after-”

  “I know what you mean.”

  I entered the house. Crime lab guys in coveralls were working over the shack, upstairs and down, hoping against hope for any trace of a clue that might tell us where this man was now. Using something called gentian violet, which stained skin cells left behind on adhesive surfaces, they’d managed to lift prints off a piece of masking tape. But since Edgar didn’t appear to have a record, that wouldn’t get us far. Ditto for the hair and fiber traces. As always, Edgar hadn’t given us anything that would help us find him. Didn’t even have the courtesy to leave a forwarding address.

  When I got to the basement, I found Darcy hunched over the remains of Fara Spencer. Now that was a bizarre sight. Here was a kid so innocent, so gentle, he literally wouldn’t step on a spider. Terrified of puppy dogs. But he had no difficulty working around a corpse. Of course, the corpse could do him no harm now, but that wouldn’t comfort most people. Only Darcy’s brain was free from those irrational emotional associations we have about the dead.

  “Did you ever eat bugs?” he said when he saw me approach.

  I don’t know. Maybe it was the combination of that horrible corpse-which was crawling with bugs-and the suggestion of eating them that made me certain I was going to heave, the only thing that would be even more embarrassing than fainting. I placed a hand against the wall to steady myself and willed my stomach to behave. Most importantly, I kept my eyes locked on Darcy-not the corpse he was scrutinizing, and not the field of corpses that lay beyond.

  “No, my tastes run more to meat and potatoes.”

  “Did you know that some people in some countries eat bugs all the time? I don’t like eating bugs. When I was in grade school, some of the other kids told me to eat bugs and I did. But then they laughed at me.”

  I’d wager he got a lot of that in school. “I don’t blame you for not liking bugs.”

  “But I do. Bugs are cool. Except for spiders. Just not for eating.” He grinned guilelessly.

  Well, of course-what little boy didn’t like bugs?

  “I used to collect them, but my dad made me throw them all out.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “Then I started reading about them in the library. Did you know that blowflies love dead bodies?”

  “I, um, think I heard that mentioned at the academy.”

  “They love to lay their eggs in dead people. This body has bugs all over it.”

  “Yup.” I didn’t look.

  “Do you know how long it takes a blowfly to go from egg to larva to pupa to adult?”

  “Oh, the answer’s on the tip of my tongue…”

  “When it goes from egg to first instar larva, it’s about this big.” He held his fingers only a few millimeters apart. “Then it sheds its skin and goes to second instar larva-this big.” The fingers widened. “Then it sheds its skin again and does the third instar.” His fingers were more than ten millimeters apart now. “After that, it becomes an adult.”

  “That is so cool. You know, I should go to the library more often.”

  Darcy pointed at the squirmy, whitish bits crawling out of Fara’s nose. “Those are third instar. She died ten days ago.”

  I did a double take. “But how could you possibly-”

  “It takes eight days to get to the third instar.”

  “But you can’t know when it was born.”

  “Blowflies like to lay their eggs in dead people two days after they die. Eight days later, these bugs are third instar. So she died ten days ago. Right?”

  The things that emerged from that wild gallimaufry brain of his. I wondered if maybe he was just talking through his hat, trying to impress me. But I really didn’t think he possessed the slightest instinct for deceit.

  “He’s right.”

  I turned and found Jodie Nida, the coroner’s assistant, standing behind me. “You know the five stages of decomposition?”

  “Um, gross, grosser, more grosser…”

  “No. Initial decay, putrefaction, black putrefaction, butyric putrefaction, and dry decay. Each is associated with a different type of insect infestation. Your young associate was describing the putrefaction stage-that’s when blowflies like to join the party. The gas formed by bodily organisms causes the body to swell. And smell. Blowflies groove on that. Which is why the body has those larvae crawling in and out of every available orifice.”

  “Except her mouth,” Darcy said, not looking up.

  Jodie examined the body. Bugs all over the nose, the eyes, the ears, the cavity in the middle of her chest. But not the mouth. “You’re right, kid. Guess they didn’t like her lipstick.”

  Darcy tilted his head to one side. “Which do you think would be grosser-her lipstick or that big hole in the middle of her chest?”

  Jodie chuckled. “Blowflies have different tastes than you and me.”

  “I had this teacher once, Miss Overton, who tried to kiss me on the forehead every day. She wore lots of lipstick. I thought it was yucky.”

  We all laughed, which was pretty amazing, given the circumstances and surroundings. Here we were, standing in a field of corpses. And what does Darcy think is gross? Lipstick smooches.

  And you know what? He’s right.

  “Twenty-two corpses, total,” Patrick announced.

  My eyes closed. “Jesus God. All young girls?”

  He nodded. “Brace yourself. You’re about to be inundated with white shirts.” So he knew how respectfully we locals spoke about his brethren. “No question now but that this case is federal. And major.”

  Just as well, much as I hated to admit it. It wasn’t as if we were closing in on him. “Anything new from forensics?”

  “No. But they have instructions to copy us on all reports. And there will be a lot of them.” He looked at me, and his eyes seemed to soften. “I’m thinking we need to spend the night together.”

  Could he possibly mean what he was saying? After what happened to me? “Are you saying-”

  “Pull an all-nighter. Like we were in college. Rework the profile from top to bottom, incorporating all this new information.”

  I stared at him. “That won’t take all night.”

  He looked back at me. “Then we’ll have to think of something else to do.”

  My cell phone rang. I opened it up, not even thinking.

  “Hello, my dear. Glad you made it home all right.”

  I tensed up, my back rigid. Bugs were crawling all over my skin, sending prickles of fear coursing through me. I could never mistake, never forget, that voice.

  I mouthed to Patrick, “It’s him.”

  “I made it, all right. No thanks to you.”

  “Susan, you wound me. Did I hurt you?”

  “Damn straight.” I realized this probably wasn’t the psychologically soundest technique for extracting information, but I couldn’t help myself. I hated the bastard. I hated him. I could never forgive what he did to me.

  “I caused you no physical injury. And I gave them a fair clue so they could find you.”

  “So what do you want? A medal?”

  “You.”

  My heart stopped. I almost couldn’t speak. “You-had me.”

  “Not your body. Your mind. I want you to see what I see. I want you to join the enlightened. The name Pulaski is etched on the rolls of Dream-Land. You are to be the Vessel.”

  “What about the other girls? The twenty-two we found in your basement. Were their names etched, too?”

  �
�I haven’t given up on you, Susan. You’re very special to me.” He paused. “I slept with you, Susan. Did you know that?”

  “I-I-” The gorge rose in my throat. I felt physically ill.

  “While you were sleeping. I held you close, pressed up tight, your naked body against mine.”

  “You-”

  “It was meant to be, Susan. I knew that. Every time I touched you. Our destinies are intertwined.”

  I screamed into the phone. “You had no right to-”

  “I did what had to be done. Just as I do now. You will come to understand this, Susan. Soon. The Day of Ascension is almost upon us.”

  “What’s going to happen? What are you planning?”

  He sounded rapturous. “Something immense. Something spectacular.”

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “It starts tonight. The new offerings will be chosen. And it ends as the prophet would’ve wanted it.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The end of the world, Susan. The end of this world. The start of the world to come.”

  And on that note, he hung up.

  “We have to put our plans on hold,” I told Patrick. “I mean, for the-the-you know.” I stuttered like a stupid schoolgirl. “We should go on patrol. Even if it’s hopeless and futile. We should try. Tell Granger to get every man he has out on the street.”

  “You think Edgar is going to do something tonight.”

  I felt a chill spread through my entire body. “I’m certain of it. I don’t know what. But he’s starting something. Something new, something horrible. Something worse than anything he’s done before.”

  Judy and JJ and Tiffany waited until they were sure no one was watching, then tiptoed past the PARDON THE INCONVENIENCE cones and slipped behind the door.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this!” JJ squealed.

  “Me neither,” Tiffany said breathlessly. “Wait till we tell the rest of the squad. They’ll die!”