“I had Josh do me a favor,” Holly said, while I studied the unfamiliar address. “It’s across town, but if you take the train, you should be able to get back before dinner.”
“Okay,” I said, shoving the paper in the pocket of my black jeans. “What do you want me to do there?”
Holly smiled enigmatically. I’m serious. Someone with talent could have made an amazing portrait out of that smile.
“Look into it, Preston. I’m certain you will know what to do when you the time comes.”
“I will?”
“Certainly,” Holly said, nodding encouragingly. “I believe this affair will end up strengthening your position in the long-term. I trust your instincts in these matters.”
“Which matters are we talking about?”
Holly leaned forward as if she had something to tell me in confidence, and I stretched across the table in an effort to hear her hushed voice.
“Someone begin posting inquiries online three days ago. They were subtle about it, but not subtle enough to avoid creating a few ripples here and there. Josh noticed and told me. It took him a few days to rundown a physical location. Then he waited for another posting, in order to verify it. But that’s the place…”
I shook my head slowly.
“I don’t get it, Holly. Who are they? What kind of inquiries?”
“I’m not sure who they are, except that they’re from out-of-town. But I am sure of one thing – they are looking for a girl, Preston, a prodigy who they claim was kidnapped from some sort of institution…”
I felt as if the world had fallen out from underneath me abruptly, leaving me standing there, rooted in place.
“The Institute,” I said stiffly, through lips that were numb and unresponsive.
“That’s it,” Holly agreed. “Oh, yes, Preston? One other thing. They aren’t just looking for a girl. The posting claimed that she was kidnapped, by a man whose description sounds an awful lot like you.”
“That’s a very odd coincidence,” I managed, trying to catch Holly’s eye, wondering what we were playing at, but her clear blue eyes gave me no more answers than they ever did, untroubled by even a hint of concern.
“Isn’t it, though?” Holly exclaimed, sounding delighted. “You should be extra careful, Preston. The man they are looking for, the kidnapper? The posting said that he was some sort of paranoid schizophrenic serial killer. Isn’t that awful?”
***
My mouth was dry. I had a soda from the machine at the train station and drank metallic-tasting water from the drinking fountain at another, but it made no difference. Every time I swallowed, I tasted formaldehyde, arsenic, lead at the back of my throat.
Six bodies.
Oh, man... six bodies? Was that possible?
Of course it was. That and more besides.
What would I do for April? Let’s talk about what I would not do. That is a much shorter list.
The train rattled and jumped on endless steel rails, buckled and twisted over time underground, lying in pools of frigid water. Looking out the window, I imagined sparking electrical cords, huddled masses of shambling homeless, black-eyed rodents in the shadows. It didn’t take much imagining. I had spent much of a sweltering June in Las Vegas living in a storm drain.
I have been told that the worst part of being an alcoholic is the blackouts. I have some sympathy for the idea. I do not, however, agree with the focus on the morning after, waking without any memory of the night before. To my mind, that represents a successful blackout – no auto wrecks, bodies, or impregnated teenagers to hide, nothing to connect you to whatever horrible shit you have done. I’m not an alcoholic, but I would worry more about when it all finally catches up with you. The phone call from the woman you can’t remember, a low voice murmuring ambiguous threats. The man you have never met before calling out your name in a crowd. The girl in bed beside you, the one with hickeys on her neck and scars on her wrists who will not wake up. The marks of the steering wheel imprinted on your hand, the tangible wreck of the car. The blood and the damages.
That is what had my teeth grinding all the way out to the edge of the city, friction building like the sound of the steel wheels on the protesting rails. When I left the train station it had begun to rain, gentle and cold. I put my hood up and kept a brisk pace across the flagstones of the square, as old as anything I had seen in the city. The plaza contained something that looked grotesquely like a church, but all of the imagery that covered it was unfamiliar. The statuary crawling across the length of it suggested the crossing of humans and fish, some sort of terrible hybrid beings, lorded over by giants of their kind. The entrance was sheltered beneath a bas-relief that suggested vast, tentacle-faced things, looming over a city that was tiny by comparison. I tried not to look too hard at any of it, hurrying past with my eyes fixed on the map that Holly had drawn me.
Within five blocks, I knew with sickening certainty that I was lost. An alarming feeling for anyone, but all the more so for me, considering it is completely unfamiliar. The architecture was oppressive, every contour of the crumbling buildings suggested hostility on the part of their creators. I wondered how anyone could live in a wasteland that surpassed even the one I called home, but the streets were filled and spilling over. People with pale, round faces brushed by me, speaking a language that I had never heard but that was maddeningly familiar, the whites of their eyes made luminescent by a trick of the light. In the corners and in the alleys, I could see weathered faces and sun-browned skin behind the flare of matches and pipes. There was music everywhere, a piping that was reminiscent of a flute, playing in keys that sent shivers down my spine.
The traffic suddenly parted and I jumped aside to avoid a procession of men wearing silicone filter masks and turbans that hid everything but their sickly yellow eyes. The way they walked suggested a great and pompous weight, and the men who guarded them carried automatic weapons and wore uniforms that screamed private military contractor. I faced the wall until they passed, and I was not the only one. Whoever they were, everyone here was afraid of them.
I walked about in what I already suspected would be a vain attempt to find a landmark or a street mentioned on Holly’s map, anything that would give me an idea of where I was, and tried to figure out a move to make. If the information I had been given was true, then they were much closer to us than I had thought – maybe the incident with the woman at the train station had actually drawn further suspicion. Assuming that I could trust Holly, or Josh and his nebulous sources. While I did not exactly suspect Holly of anything per se, I did not think her above manipulating me for her own ends. That had not bothered me too much before, but it was suddenly of paramount importance.
If these people were who I was afraid they were, then they would have to be dealt with, before they could confirm April’s presence. I wondered what to do, and tried to make sense of street signs that led me to one dead-end after another.
The air was humid and thick with the smells of unfamiliar spices and exotic incense. Something like a fever gradually came over me, a visual sheen that permeated everything I saw with an oil-slick shifting light. Like gears halting, I felt the machinery of the world coming to a standstill around me, somewhere impossibly far from home, in a city that decayed under a moon that even I had to admit was alien. I could feel every bone in my skeleton, the old fracture lines in my skull, a subtle and terrible vibration. It was in the movement of the air in my lungs and the fluid in my eyeballs. Street signs that I could not read took on an ominous appearance, a language that made my eyes sting and water. The shop windows were filled with objects designed for malevolent and incomprehensible purposes.
The man in the new suit had to say my name three times before it registered.
“Mr. Tauschen,” he said, taking a firm grip on my forearm. “I need you to come with me. We need to have a conversation.”
All of my movements seemed to happen in slow motion, as if in a nightmare. I wanted to cry out, to run away, but it was
as if my body had been waiting for an opportunity to betray me and obey orders from the outside. The stranger led me by my upper arm like a recalcitrant child and I went with him, my mind screaming in helpless protest. I watched him take a plastic disposable syringe from his pocket; the contents tinted a soft green. He tapped the syringe a couple times to rid it of air bubbles, then slid the needle into the vein in my forearm. I could not even manage to register a protest. I was locked inside my body, a foreign thing that I inhabited helplessly as no more than an observer. The voices of the people passing by me sounded like an awful sort of music. The hum of the neon lights hurt my stomach. After walking a couple of winding blocks, his hand latched to my arm, supporting me as much as he was leading me, it started to rain.
I could not even put my hood up to keep my head from getting wet. That was somehow the most upsetting part of the entire experience.
The bottom floor of the building was some kind of restaurant full of old people, bent over plastic trays and steaming bowls of colorless liquid. The man in the suit led me up the stairs on the side of the building to the second story and through the first of two identical doors. It was hard to say whether it was an apartment or a hotel room, the decor was so noncommittal and the furnishings so rundown as to be utterly without character.
Why couldn’t I help myself? Was it the injection?
No. That had not helped – correction, I thought, fighting off the warm fuzziness that settled on my forebrain – it was not helping. My resistance had collapsed before that happened, though…
The two men inside the room did not seem particularly happy to see me. At least one of them must have been a smoker, the one with a red face and an unnecessarily loud voice, because the room was thick with the smell of stale cigarettes and burnt matches. A fourth man sat silently on a cot on the far side of the room with evident disinterest.
Compulsions, I realized groggily. They must have built compulsions into me, at the Institute.
I was searched, but not very well. I had been searched a thousand times by much more determined people, complete with cavity probing, and learned the hard way how to hide things so they could not be found. These men were lazy, so it was a simple matter of moving what I did not want them to find so it was never in the wrong place during the pat down.
I wasn’t sure whether the compulsion that I had nicknamed ‘come-hither’ was fading over time, or if I had developed an innate resistance to it during the years I’d spent away from the Institute. Regardless, my rebellious limbs were starting to reluctantly obey me.
The compulsions were like locks, chambers built into my mind that compartmentalized function, walling me outside of the areas that controlled my actions, my body, and my initiative. Perhaps they had weakened with age. Maybe I had simply been free of the Institute for too long. It was even possible that hanging out with April had rubbed off on me and I had learned something.
Unlikely, but no matter. Like locks, I could see now that they could be opened with the right tools. In this case, those tools were thoughts; words shaped just the right way. I could not speak April’s language, but the images were stored perfectly in my memory, waiting for me to remember them. I should not have been surprised that April had already taught me what I needed to know. I puzzled over the compulsions, surprised how fast they fell apart once I learned the trick of it.
Had my chains always been this loose? Had I simply never noticed?
All of the men wore brand new suits, creased and pressed into sharp edges. The suits were fundamentally identical, though each wore a slightly different tie. The silent man in the corner wore black calfskin gloves over his hands with exaggerated knuckles and looked at me as if I was a present he was dying to unwrap. The ugliness of his smile was partially hidden by a beard and sunglasses. It did not take a genius to figure out his job.
Behind the façade of my smile, I was busy. My fingers moved exactly as I told them to.
The men were not gentle about putting me down on the wooden chair in the middle of the room, but they limited themselves to tying my hands behind my back with a plastic zip tie for restraints. I wondered if they had even bothered to read my file.
“Alright, Mr. Tauschen, let’s have a chat,” the man who had found me said, sitting across from me in a chair identical to my own and fixing me with watery blue eyes. “Where is she?”
I was already aware of the other compulsion built into me, because it has haunted my entire life. I am compelled to answer direct questions. Silence is never an option for me. Clever on their part. Shows foresight. Moreover, this compulsion was too deeply embedded to consider trying to disassemble it.
Unfortunately for these men, I had formulated a work-around years before. When the compulsion was implanted, no one had thought to compel me to answer honestly. This probably explains a lot about my character.
“My name is Preston. And where is who?” I grinned as if I had made a joke. “You lose somebody?”
The smoker tossed a file on the floor in front of me, pictures of April spilling out across the floor like actresses’ headshots. She was wearing the generic blue hospital gown and slippers issued by the Institute in most of them.
Unbidden memories swam in front of me like the visions of a starving desert saint – April strapped to a chair with Velcro, her chin bloody from biting her tongue, hands torn from where her fingernails had dug into her palms, vomit smeared across the front of her gown. Her eyes peaked out from behind matted hair as I entered the room, and they paralyzed me. She tried to smile at me despite everything.
I had no idea how many times the red-faced man slapped me, trying to remove the stupid grin from my face. He had no luck. Others have tried harder, with no more success.
“Margaret Essex,” the smoker shrieked in my ear, waving a photo at me. “You sick bastard! What have you done with her?”
He smacked me a couple more times for good measure before the man who brought me here pulled him back, obviously playing Good Cop. His voice was calm, friendly, and a little sad; He appeared to sincerely regret that my behavior had brought us to this point.
“Is she still alive, Mr. Tauschen?”
I didn’t need to see my smile to know that it was ghastly.
“The girl in the photos? Never seen her before in my life.”
“Right,” the Smoker wheezed. “Probably mix up on the ID. All a big misunderstanding.”
“I know you aren’t a bad person, no matter what the reports say,” the Good Cop said firmly, giving me an encouraging look. “I know you don’t want anything bad to happen to Margaret. We don’t want anything bad to happen to her either. All we want to do is to bring her back to her family.”
That was too much for me. I laughed aloud, enraging the red-faced man again. His level-voiced friend was forced to restrain him.
“Family? Please. Next you are going to claim to be the police. Or private detectives that were hired to find her, right?”
The man who had found me nodded civilly.
“That’s right,” he said, mildly encouraging. “The Essex family hired us. They want her back where she belongs, safe and sound.”
“Sounds about right.”
“With her family. We know that you think you are protecting her from something, but it is something that you made up. You have to understand that you are not a well man. According to what I have read, you have trouble with the difference between fantasy and reality. Seen anything strange recently, Mr. Tauschen? Anything you can’t explain?”
I shook my head.
“Strange, in this city? Nah. This place was pretty dull until you guys showed up.”
“I’m not sure what you think is going on,” the Good Cop said, sighing and crossing his legs while the red-faced man lit a cigarette. “I know that you are subject to delusions of persecution and paranoia. I know that you’ve had problems with the law in the past, but I’m not entirely certain you realize how deep you’ve gotten this time. Margaret Essex, the girl you kidnapped – her
parents are very powerful people. If you hurt her, if you have done anything to her, then they won’t be satisfied by anything short of you being locked up in a small cell for the rest of your natural life. If Margaret is okay, though – and I think we both know that she is – and if you were to help us find her, well, I think we can work something out that will satisfy all parties. Not a reprieve, exactly, but considerably better than spending the rest of your life in solitary confinement.”
“You ever been to prison, Preston?” The red-faced man leered and blew cigarette smoke in my face. “Don’t think you’d care for it, much.”
“I’ve been locked up once or twice, but I was always innocent,” I said, winking. “How are things back at the Institute? Crowley still run the show?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the man who found me said patiently. “We are here at the request of the Essex family, seeking the safe return of their daughter…”
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 13
