by Lake, Keri
1
Lucy
Present day …
There was a certain beauty in destruction.
I up-angled my Nikon and snapped shots of the thick column that'd been marred by peeling paint and irregular patches of white and brown. All around it lay crumbling remains of the abandoned Thorn Apple Valley slaughterhouse, once the pillar of processed meat along the industrial corridor on the east side of Detroit, and since one of the city’s many ruins. Years later, the place still smelled like rotted meat and death.
Urban legends, likely those propagated to scare away any vandals, claimed that the homeless were brought to the old slaughterhouse and ground up into meat used to make hotdogs and burgers that got sold by the roach coaches scattered throughout the city.
Not even that gem of a story kept me from scaling the wall to get inside.
A lightning bolt flash from my camera hit the surrounding darkness, reminding me that I was alone in the basement of the place, while the beam of my flashlight against the column's top half gave a majestic glow to the otherwise dark and gloomy fixture. Beyond it, a ratty archway separated me from the staircase to the upper level overhead, where rusted wire mesh, blown out concrete, and piping created a crosshatch across the ceiling, making it look like a bomb had exploded on the top floor, opening the gates to the hell where I stood.
It amazed me, the way some things could still stand after so many years of abuse. What one person saw as decayed, beaten, and destroyed over time, I saw as strength, a mast that could still support an entire structure while slowly rotting away at its foundation.
Perhaps there was an optimist in me, after all.
I’d been given the assignment to photograph the innards of the graffiti-ridden building after rumors spread that it’d been purchased by Simon Renwick, founder and owner of the largest chain of game and movie rental franchises in Michigan. After my career plans had gone to shit on a shamrock, I'd taken up a regular gig in photojournalism at a small independent news publication, called The Detroit Muckraker. My best friend, Craig, who happened to be an award-winning journalist and conspiracy-monger, had asked me to get some shots for a piece he’d been working on about the acquisition.
Making a point never to break into the places I photographed, I’d gained access through an open window on the main level. Some assholes busted out windows, or tore away particleboard to get inside, and that just seemed to be asking for trouble. Even climbing in through the window crossed a fine line, but at least it’d only be considered a misdemeanor if I was able to establish an easy point of entry. Anything else came with the risk of arrest, not something I was willing to chance.
I stepped over crumbled piles of plaster and rotted wood, aiming my camera at different angles to capture well-balanced snapshots of the annihilation surrounding me. I’d gotten good with the camera, a graduation gift from my mother just before her stroke. The inscription inside the accompanying card had read, 'As you focus on your goals, never lose sight of the beauty that surrounds you'.
My mother probably expected me to take pictures of flowers and sunsets with the gift. I was certain she’d have never given me the damn thing, had she’d known I’d taken such a morbid curiosity in urban exploration. If she were still alive, she’d probably hate the images I captured of the city. I could almost hear her saying, “Why photograph such garbage, Lucia?”
I had, what therapists might call, an unhealthy obsession with death. Not necrophilia, or any of that weird shit, just death itself. The slow and gradual disappearance of life, much like the buildings I photographed, much like my family, much like my career.
Abandoned and alone.
In truth, I was probably a little crazy on top of it. From an early age, I’d worn the seal of an outcast, showing up to school in my dad’s fedora hats and his oversized, clunky old watches. I was probably the only kid in the sixth grade who listened to The Rolling Stones and The Beatles because they were my dad’s favorite bands. He’d insisted my mother name me Lucia, or Lucy, after the song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. That was what she’d told me once, anyway. I'd never really known my biological father. He left us when I was only ten.
Planting my knee against the gravel, I flipped my camera upward, capturing the last few shots for the day, of a large bulbous boiler. It reminded me of something out of a steampunk movie, with its steel surface and dials.
The shadows patterning the walls and floor began elongating, telling me that darkness was closing in and threatening to consume me in the belly of this place. I never stayed past dark, but I’d gotten so caught up in the twisted metal, hanging like sculptures, and the cracks in the concrete that drew images across the floor, the endless angles that were a photographer’s wet dream.
I’d lost track of time, but in truth, I liked being amid the ruins. Like I stood in the aftermath of shattered dreams, it reminded me that something could still remain, in spite of all that annihilation. Some called it ‘ruin porn’, and for me, the more damaged, the more drawn to a place I seemed to be. Capturing the images felt like I was collecting the story behind the building. Never adding to the damage, though. I had a motto I lived by when I explored—take pictures, leave footprints.
It'd started out as a hobby, at first—one Craig liked to give me a hard time about, filling my head with horror stories of women getting hacked up by psychotic building dwellers, who preyed on unsuspecting ruin junkies—but when he realized I had no intentions of dropping the exploration gig, he'd offered me a job. From that point, urban exploration, or urbex as it was called, became a regular thing for me. The pay was utterly pathetic, but the hours and flexibility allowed me the freedom I’d been craving since my mother’s death.
It also allowed me to pursue some freelance design projects that, like photography, didn’t keep me afloat on their own but, at least, kept the bills paid and my addictions in check.
Almost two years earlier, I'd checked myself into rehab after waking in the bathtub, nearly drowning myself after I’d taken sleeping pills with alcohol. I wish I could’ve said it was a one-time thing, but I’d been taking the drug for months for my insomnia, and I’d reached the summa cum laude of addiction, or maybe the abyss. The moment when all addicts finally admitted they had a problem.
After rehab, I’d needed something to feed the yearning to disappear from the world for a while, so I'd picked up the camera and never went back to the drugs again.
The buildings spoke to me. They allowed me to weave in and out of their destruction and gave me some level of peace—a moment when I was vulnerable yet brave, as well as scared shitless and high as hell from the fear.
As I breathed in the unseasonably warm October air that smelled of metal, decayed, rotting wood and mold, I realized I'd loitered too long. Soon the place would be completely dark, with scrappers on the prowl. It was one thing to run into the homeless out on the streets, where most were cordial, but catching them stealing scrap metal from the buildings could be a very precarious situation for an unaccompanied young chick. Besides that, I’d promised to get to the club early and help Viktor with some marketing graphics.
While my college plans for graphic design had taken a nose-dive, I'd bathed in my shit circumstances by taking a job at Sphinx, one of the high-end strip clubs only about five minutes from downtown. Not for the stripping, but to design some of the marketing materials for the club and manage the backend of the website. I’d actually done a few years at school in Graphic Design, earning just short of a bachelor’s degree while thinking I’d make a fanciful living designing websites for large companies, so I guessed it was fitting. Except that Sphinx was the black splotch on my resume that told potential employers I’d gone bottom of the barrel in my career.
I convinced myself any design work, even for a sleezy strip joint, where half the dancers were blowing clients in the john for extra cash, would put me one step closer to my big plans. Maybe it would. Maybe all my failures in life would pay off in one of those God works in mysterious ways
mantras my mother used to throw at me, when she couldn’t bear to admit that we were royally screwed, sometimes.
Standing up from my crouch, I slid the strap of my camera over my neck and cracked open my bottle of water, turning the cap left, then right, then left, as always, and sipped the cool fluids as they coated the dust thick on my throat.
A distant crackle from behind somewhere steeled my muscles, and I twisted around, peering into the darkness. Staying quiet, I listened, but after a minute, nothing had materialized, and I sipped my water again. Probably a rat. Not that rats put me at ease, but they, at least, could be stomped on.
A tap tap tap had me swinging back around in time to catch a flicker of light bounce around the doorframe of the exit.
Shit. Scrappers? I backed slowly from the light, my fingers curling around the strap of my pack, and I slipped my arm through the other strap, preparing to run.
A tha-thump tugged a gasp from my throat, and on instinct, I ducked behind the giant steel boiler, just catching the scuttle of footsteps beneath. An arc of light cut through the darkness. Beneath the bulbous, rusted kettle structure, I could see shoes, four sets, beating across the gritty concrete, until they gathered around what was a good-sized hole in the floor, one I’d almost slipped in earlier. Perhaps it’d once been a sump pit in the building’s heyday.
A shiny black mass, a garbage bag, smacked the ground, kicking up a plume of dust. It slid toward the hole, where one of them tried to stamp it in, before realizing the package must’ve been too wide.
“I told ya, asshole.” The disembodied voice, tinged with irritation, carried over the rustle of the bag as it moved back across the gravel, opposite the pit. “Gonna have to dump it one at a time. It’s that rigga motis shit.”
“Rigor mortis, dumb fuck,” another voice disputed.
An object fell into the hole, grayish in color, bent into a slight L shape that ended on a star of splayed fingers, like a severed … arm? Another followed. A foot with an attached calf, cut to the knees. I slammed a hand over my mouth as another arm fell into the hole, making a wet meat sound as it hit the other limbs.
Oh, my … shit. Cold branches of fear skated down my spine.
I’d heard stories about the place being haunted, and part of me wondered if what I’d just seen was nothing more than a hallucination. Not real. Not real.
A scream sat parked at the back of my throat, and I closed my eyes, willing the images away. Starting with my pinkie, I rubbed the pads of my thumbs across each fingertip in an effort to calm the frantic beat of my heart, counting two circles across each, to my index finger, then back to my pinkie.
Th-thunk. Another body part dropped in.
Something like instinct had me tugging my camera from beside me, but I aimed it at the scene and clicked record.
“Jesus Christ, this shit stinks.” The deep voice, gritty and hearty, like a smoker’s voice spoke above the thump of meat. “Can’t tell if it’s her, or the fuckin’ hogs.”
I sucked in a shaky breath and tightened my stomach to keep a whimper from escaping. The bottom of the camera tapped against the gravel, not loud enough for them to hear over the laughing and dumping, but enough that I was reminded how fucking scared I was. My whole body trembled by the time a mass of ratted blonde locks told me they’d discarded all of her.
A human woman. In pieces.
I didn’t know what kept me recording. I’d never want to replay it again, but it felt like I was offering the victim some modicum of justice. A small measure of assurance, if only to her memory, that someone had seen what'd happened to her.
From the angle where I filmed, I caught sight of the lower half of the man facing me and zoomed in at an object perched on his belt. The lens focused, bringing clarity to the word Police above the state seal, with Detroit etched below it.
Oh, God. A cop? Bile rose in my throat as the badge mocked every false sense of security I’d placed in the police. Maybe it was fake. Like those rumored stories that circulated in college, warning women not to be out alone on campus at night, and to avoid anyone claiming to be a police officer. Maybe he was a wolf dressed as a sheep.
Or a really fucking corrupt cop—because how the hell could any decent person do something so awful?
“Damn shame.” What sounded like the voice of an inner city man, with a distinct Detroit clip to his consonants, cut through my thoughts. “I ain’t never seen a woman act like that on the shit. Bitch was crazy.”
“Crazy enough to report that shit, so don’t go gettin’ all sentimental on me.” Another voice, whose tone and pitch seemed younger than the first two, carried an air of impatience and irritation. The movement of his lower half and the placement of his hands on his hips told me it was the cop.
As one of them crouched, rubbing his hands on a kerchief, I zoomed in on a tattoo at his wrist. A seven, encased by a circle, simple in design, as if it’d been sketched on him.
Seven Mile Crew? I’d heard of the gang that’d terrorized the city for years.
Another man tapped the shoulder of the first, and I slid the camera toward him. His wrist also bore the circle seven tattoo.
As their flashlight clicked off, I let out a shaky breath—until the beep beep beep of my camera told me I’d run out of battery.
The flashlight flicked back on.
“You hear that shit, man?” One of the men twisted toward where I hid.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit.
“Place is fuckin’ haunted. It was probably the spirit of the hogs coming after your fat ass.”
Boisterous laughter had me sucking in tight breaths through my nose. Too close. A quick sweep of that flashlight and they’d find me. I scrambled back from the boiler, and a cold hard wall hit my spine. A squeal slammed against the back of my teeth, and I clamped my mouth around it. I rounded the wide column, hiding my small body behind it, and watched as the flashlight sliced upward, lighting the darkness that kept me cloaked.
“I’m telling you, someone’s here, shithead.”
Keeping myself behind the column, I glanced over my shoulder. Across the basement was another staircase. If I booked it, I could make it across, so long as they didn’t have guns. I’d have stayed put, but the flashlight advanced closer, and with each sweep, the light threatened to bend just enough to see me, sending my nerves bouncing beneath my skin.
With only the narrow shadow of the thick column keeping me unseen, my breaths arrived on a pant. Sweat slid down my temples. My body went cold. Rigid.
The flashlight came to a halt only a few feet from where I sat crouched. Mouth agape, I didn’t dare emit a single breath, while the surrounding dust kicked up by their boots tugged at my throat for a cough.
“You’re fuckin hearing shit,” the older, gritty voice chided. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Stay still. Stay still. Don’t move.
The flashlight clicked off again, and I expelled a shaky open-mouthed breath, my muscles sagging with relief. A good thirty seconds passed before the sound of footsteps signaled their retreat. Inching backwards on my hands and knees, careful not to rattle the gravel beneath me, I backed away from the column, toward the staircase behind me and away from where they went, not daring a breath.
Bright light hit my face, dead on.
I let out yelp and scrambled to my feet. My boots slipping across the gravel, I made a run for the exit.
“I knew it! Fuckin’ bitch!” The thump of boots trailed after me.
I ducked around another column and raced across the open space.
A shot rang out, the bullet pinging against a concrete pillar to my left.
My legs burned. Throat burned, with the air I sucked in through my mouth.
I hit the stairwell and booked it up the first flight, rounded the landing, and up the second. A whimper escaped me when the men appeared in the doorway below, and another shot bounced off the railing.
“Head her off the other way!” one of them commanded.
Panic burst inside
my chest, and a cool rush of adrenaline coursed through my veins. I didn’t want to be the next body dumped in that hole.
I finally reached the main floor and sprinted across the open span, where rows of beams lined the ceiling, the hooks still hanging off the tracks.
Oh, Jesus Christ, please don’t turn this into the next Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I swear I’ll go to church after this. I’ll volunteer at the homeless shelters. I’ll tip twenty percent instead of fifteen, and I promise I’ll stay the hell away from bacon for the rest of my life.
Up ahead, the door leading out to the side entrance, where I’d crawled through the window, stood like a beacon of hope.
I pushed speed from my legs, my backpack thumping against my spine. Almost there.
Another shot whizzed to the right of me, and I slid around the corner. The small window still sat ajar, and I tossed my pack through first then jumped up, pushing my upper half through the frame, and teetered forward.
A hand curled around my ankle, and a scream ripped from my throat. I kicked once, twice, my heel making contact each time. As soon as the grip fell away, I face-planted the dirt and, swiping up my pack, pushed to my feet.
Boots beating across the open field, I put as much distance as my legs would hammer out, crossing over the rusted train tracks, and scaling the concrete wall, before I dared to look behind. Only when I’d ducked down on the other side of the wall, about a hundred yards off, did I peek from my hiding spot, watching the men emerge from the building.
The first beam of a flashlight cut across the field I’d just sprinted over, and shots rang out. More flashlights emerged from around the side of the building, and when they closed in on me, I spun around, flattening my back against the concrete wall, and pulled my knees in tight to my body. I couldn’t run, or they’d see me.
The circle of light swept over the field, as the men appeared to walk the length of the wall behind me, and when it hovered over top of me, lighting the field beyond, I held my breath.
