Darker Than Noir

by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith

  “I haven’t!” Susan almost shouted. “I swear, I’ve never seen it before.”

  “Anyone else with keys to the house?”

  “No.”

  I turned to the first page. “‘At first it seems impossible,’” I read aloud, “‘or even worse, insane. But the more one considers the possibility—”

  “‘—the saner it seems,’” Susan finished. She kept talking. I closed the book and watched her. Her expression hadn’t changed, but her gaze was fixed. Staring at something only she could see. Reciting a book she’d never read.

  She spoke, uninterrupted, for nearly twenty minutes. Some of it was in English. I flipped through the book, trying to catch up to her. She stopped mid-sentence, breathed in deeply, blinked, and saw me again.

  “There’s a spare under the flower pot,” she said. “On the front porch. But I doubt anyone’s used it…nothing’s missing from the house, so—”

  “‘At first it seems impossible,’” I interrupted her, and she was off and running again. I left her to her recitation, went to the kitchen. The house phone sat atop a small cabinet tucked in the corner. I picked it up out of its cradle, then flipped the doors open and found what I was looking for. I returned to Reggie’s office. Susan had picked up the book and was flipping ahead; she stopped at a certain page and began reading it silently.

  I dialed her number on my cell. The cordless began to ring in my other hand. The sound almost shook her out of her reverie, but not quite. I handed the cordless to her. “It’s for you,” I said quietly. She took it.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Stop reading,” I said into the cell phone.

  “But I haven’t finished yet,” she said.

  “If you keep reading,” I said, watching her watch me, knowing she wasn’t seeing me, “you’ll die.”

  “No,” she said. I could hear the tears in her voice and see them slide down her cheeks. “No, he told me, he told me.”

  “What did he tell you,” I whispered.

  She smiled triumphantly. “I can bring him back,” she said. “He told me. It’s in here. I have to keep reading. I haven’t gotten to the page yet.”

  “Stop reading,” I repeated, not sure where else to take this, but she’d already hung up the phone and returned to the book. I looked down at the page. 439. I picked up the Yellow Pages I’d taken from the cabinet, flipped it to page 439, and slowly slid it over the book. Her eyes slid down the page, memorizing the listings for Hearing Aid Sales & Repair.

  I sat down on the chair in the corner of the room, half-watching Susan, half-reading the book. A forlorn apology. If Abner was anything like that twisted old fuck Malcolm, I doubted he’d been the apologetic type. Maybe a different meaning of the word. An account…a defense…an explanation.

  The both of us sat reading in silence for some time. When the phone rang I’m afraid I may have yelped a little. Both of us slammed our books shut, thump-thump. Susan stared at me, awake now, fully awake.

  “I think it’s for you,” I said.

  ***

  “Susan.”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Stop reading. If you read too far, you will die.”

  She looked at me as we both listened. I grabbed one of the spiral-bound notebooks and began to scribble. “I-I’ve read it,” Susan read off the page. “I’ve read it all.”

  Pause. “You’ve read page 487?”

  “Yes.” Another pause. Some background noise—a hushed conversation.

  “Go to the cemetery,” the voice finally said. “Not tomorrow, not in an hour—now. Bring it with you.

  “Go to his grave.

  “If you’re ready, that is. If you’re prepared to sacrifice everything for him.”

  “I am,” Susan said. She wasn’t lying. The phone went dead.

  “Alright,” I said, looking her in the eye. “How much can you remember?”

  “I…bits of it are coming to me. There are things I…I guess I was told to forget.”

  “You’ve probably been hypnotized. Repeatedly. At some point, maybe at a party, maybe during a conversation, Reggie told you he knew how, right? Made a joke of it. After the first time, it’s easy. Post-hypnotic suggestion.”

  “I don’t…yes. Maybe. It sounds right, but I don’t remember that yet…”

  “You’ve been dreaming of him.”

  “Yes.”

  “No. You wake up, and you think you have. You have vivid, detailed memories of him. Specific conversations. Let me guess—you don’t usually remember your dreams, yes? But these you do.”

  Susan nodded. “But why?” she asked.

  “You tell me,” I said, seeing if she would take the bait.

  “I…maybe it’s like you said. Maybe there was someone after him.” She tried to wrap her brain around it. “Maybe, maybe he’d found this…that book…and these people, the Order, maybe they wanted to kill him. But he’d read it already, and he knew.”

  “What did he know?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “The secrets inside it,” she said. “Life and death secrets. Life after death.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “No, listen!” she insisted. “He must have known, he must have known, all those phone calls…trying to protect me from it…God, it all makes sense now…he knew they would try to kill him, they must have, they must have arranged it all, the accident…he knew he had to die, to protect me! To keep them away from me! So he let himself die, and, and…”

  “And?”

  “And now he’s reaching out! He wants me to bring him back! The book, the ritual…look, I know it’s crazy,” she said, desperately grabbing my arm. “I can’t believe I’m saying any of this. I know it’s insane.”

  I smiled. “Yes,” I said, “at first, it seems impossible.” And her eyes went dim again as she recognized the words. “Or even worse, insane.” She was fighting it. I could see the struggle in her eyes. But the conditioning was too strong to ignore.

  “But the more one considers the possibility—”

  “—the saner it seems,” she said. “For many years now, we have studied—”

  “Yes, you have,” I said. I handed her the Yellow Pages again. “Stop reading. If you keep reading, you’ll die.”

  “No,” she said, taking the book. “If I keep reading, he’ll live. He’ll come back to me.” And she dove back into the book, looking for the secrets of resurrection amongst ads for plumbers and Chinese restaurants.

  I tore a blank sheet of paper out of the notebook and began writing. I wrote down everything we’d spoken about, everything I was about to do, and everything I knew about the Order—what I’d told her, and what I’d kept to myself. I stuck it inside her book, about a hundred pages ahead of where she was reading. When she snapped out of it, I hoped she’d do what I asked.

  I picked up Renzer’s forlorn apology. It was time to meet the new Order.

  ***

  Thump-thump. I picked myself up off the ground and looked down on the headstone over which I’d stumbled. URICH, LOVING FATHER AND GRANDFATHER. I hadn’t thought to ask Susan where Reggie had been buried and had been stumbling around for fifteen minutes, trying to conduct a search in the middle of the night with only my cell phone for light. I was always best working on the fly, but sometimes improvising just wasn’t good enough.

  JOHNS. KLIGOFF. DEVEREUX. Shit. And then I stumbled over a stroke of good luck. About ten feet ahead of me, a match flared in the darkness. A cigarette tip glowed bright enough to make out the vague shape of a robed man, leaning against a tree. I had a hunch if he turned around I’d see that familiar seven-pointed amulet around his neck.

  All I had to do was knock him out, put his robe on, and find the others. I smiled. The smile froze on my face as I felt something hard and metallic pressed to the back of my head. Even for me, that was a particularly short run of good luck. “Stand up,” said someone behind me. I complied.

  The smoker turned around. “Hey,” he said, startled.

/>   “Yeah, hey,” said the man holding the gun to my head. “Nice work.” I heard a sound remarkably similar to the hammer of a revolver being cocked back. “Who the hell are you?” he growled. With his other hand he patted me down, pulling the book out of my waistband underneath my jacket.

  “I know who he is,” said the smoker. “He’s the detective she went to.”

  “Why don’t you take those hoods off?” I suggested.

  “Shut up,” said the man behind me, and he slammed the butt of his gun against the base of my skull. I flopped forward onto the ground and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw they had dragged me some distance and dropped me beside a headstone. DARMAN. “Thanks, guys,” I said, remembering to rub the back of my head. “What’s the fare?” I grabbed the stone and pulled myself up.

  Six of them, surrounding me. All were covered from head to shins in the same red robes; all wore the heptagram and goat’s eye of the Order. One of them held a lantern; he set it atop the headstone, beside Abner Renzer’s apology, and in its glow I noticed the machete in his hand, the axes and pistols in the hands of the others.

  “Hello, Reggie,” I said.

  The man with the machete slid the hood off of his head, and I recognized the face I’d seen in numerous photographs in Susan’s home. “Hello, Mr. Webb,” he said. “No offense, but I was expecting someone else.”

  “No shit,” I said. “So who the hell’s Darman?”

  Reggie looked at me. “What makes you think I’m not Darman?”

  “I’m just wondering if you burned up a John Doe from some morgue,” I said, “or if you killed someone and took his place.” One of the hoods to my right mumbled something.

  “Shut up,” Reggie said. He looked at me. “You’ve seen my face, so you may as well know my name. It’s—”

  “Renzer,” I said. “That was fairly obvious.” Renzer looked slightly annoyed, but covered it fairly quickly. “I notice you didn’t answer my question, which means you killed someone, either way.” I didn’t say that his honesty told me he didn’t intend to let me leave this cemetery alive. What was the point?

  “Where,” he said calmly, “is Susan?”

  “She’s on a train,” I said. “To DC, or maybe Buffalo or Cleveland.” One of them swung something heavy against the small of my back, and I grunted. “She’s gone. She’s gone and she won’t be coming back. You’ll have to start over.”

  “You idiot,” Reggie said. “You have no idea what a mess you’ve made of this.” He motioned to his men. “Show him how displeased we are.”

  “Watch the jacket,” I managed to say, before a fist knocked the wind out of me. A baseball bat smashed my kneecap in. They surrounded me, kicking and stomping. A blade slashed my palm open. This was just the warm-up. When they were satisfied that I truly didn’t know where Susan was going (for all I knew she was still reading the goddamn Yellow Pages), they’d put a bullet in my head.

  “Wait,” I wheezed, putting my cut hand flat on the ground. “Wait. Please. No more. If you needed her to do something, I’ll do it.” I let my voice quaver. “That’s what this was about, right? You needed her to—”

  Reggie shook his head. “You won’t do,” he said. “For one thing, unless I’ve totally misread this meeting, you don’t love me.” Well, he had me there. “For another, you haven’t read the book. You certainly haven’t read page 487, or I’d know it.”

  “And what’s…what’s on page 487?”

  “The culmination of the ritual,” he said. “Old Abner wrote it all down. He died before he could make it work, you see.” I could tell Reggie was winding up to tell me the whole story. Just aching to tell somebody. “My great-great-grandfather. He found the symbols, he meticulously constructed the entire ritual, but he couldn’t make it work. Grandfather, he came closer.”

  “Malcolm,” I said. Reggie smiled.

  “You’ve followed the family, then. I’m flattered. Then you know that his attempt at it apparently failed as well. Spectacularly, I’d say.”

  “A calamitous ratfuck of the highest order, I’d say,” I said. “But Malcolm wasn’t the conjurer you make him out to be, just a pimp and a charlatan. I’d say.”

  Another round of kicks. “Trying to goad us into beating you unconscious so you won’t talk,” Reggie said. “Above and beyond the call of duty, really.”

  “I’m a professional,” I said. “Look, you’ve lost. She’s gone and she’s not coming back, and you’re out of time anyway. I know this has to be done by midnight tonight. See, I’ve read the book.”

  The look of shock on Reggie’s face…man, moments like this are why I do this job.

  “Bullshit,” he whispered.

  “Reggie?” one of the hoods said nervously. “You said—”

  “Bullshit!” Reggie screamed. “That’s bullshit. That’s impossible.”

  “You read the book?” another asked me. Me. Reggie was losing control of his little club.

  “Cover,” I said, “to cover. A lot of it was arcane symbols anyway, it was a quick read. Bo-ring.”

  “There’s no way,” Reggie said.

  “Of course, after you mentioned page 487 on your last call to Susan—I heard the whole thing, by the way—curiosity got the better of me and I re-read that page, just to make sure. Nothing special.” I looked at Reggie. “Was something supposed to happen to me, when I read that page?”

  “You read the page,” Reggie said, in complete disbelief.

  “Yes,” I said. I stood up. No need to grovel anymore. “And I’ve waited…for quite some time…for an explanation. Tell me what you expected to happen.”

  “By now,” Reggie said, in a diminishing voice, “it should have started. You should have grown more distant. More…more pliable. You didn’t read it.”

  “I did,” I said. “More times than you know. What. Was. Supposed to happen?”

  “You should be gone,” one of them said. I noticed they were backing away from me. “Your soul.”

  “You should be an empty shell,” Reggie said. “By now, your spirit should have been sucked out of your body. Trapped on page 487.”

  “Sucked out by the book,” said the acolyte with the axe.

  “But why?”

  “It needs a vessel,” said an acolyte.

  “It needs a host,” Reggie said. “My grandfather tried it, and it didn’t work. The soul wasn’t fully…extracted. It couldn’t take hold. There was a struggle for the body.”

  “What needs a vessel?” I asked, trying not to sound excited. Finally, an answer after all this time. “What?”

  Silence.

  Finally, Reggie Renzer spoke. “The demon,” he said. Clutching his machete tightly. Murder in his voice.

  The demon.

  They were trying to summon…a demon.

  “You’re shitting me, right?” I said. “A demon? All this time, and that’s what this has been about? A fucking demon?”

  Hands grabbed me from either side. “Stretch him over the stone,” Reggie said. “On his back.” He hefted his blade. “Love, you see. That was supposed to make it work. Susan’s love for me, her being haunted by my memory, was going to make her willingly sacrifice her body. For my sake, you understand. And our…our benefactor, would have an empty, untroubled vessel to take for himself. It was going to work this time. And you…

  He lifted his machete high.

  “Fucked…”

  He swung it down, burying it in my stomach.

  “…it all…up!” He wrenched it out, to hack at me again.

  I grabbed his wrist.

  “If that was your plan,” I said, “then you had no plan.

  “And you’re an even bigger fool than Malcolm was.”

  I twisted my hand slightly, snapping the bones in his wrist. He screamed and fell back. At this point the others noticed I wasn’t bleeding.

  “Look at this,” I said, putting fingers through the hole in my shirt. “This was brand new. Ruined.” One of the hoods swung a club at me,
and I grabbed the club with one hand and snapped his forearm with the other. They all began to run, even the fellow with the shattered arm. Reggie was crawling backwards on the ground now, unable to take his eyes off of me. He was pissing himself.

  “I can’t begin to tell you,” I said, “after all these decades, how utterly disappointed I am, to hear that this…fairy tale…is what it was all about.” I stepped on his ankle, breaking it. “Or how many sleepless nights...they’re all sleepless, now, of course…I spent reproaching myself, for having throttled that fool before he answered my questions.”

  Reggie’s eyes bulged. “You! No! You’re the one!”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I wasn’t the one. There is no one. And there’s no fucking demon, either. Your grandfather wasn’t burned to death by a devil’s displeasure—one of his fucking imbecile acolytes knocked over a torch and set the house on fire.” I grabbed him by his robes. “So he probably had no idea what he’d really done to me. Did he. And you…know less…than…him.” He howled as I snapped a finger backwards with each pause.

  “Look,” I said, and his eyes goggled as I unbuttoned my shirt, and showed him the gaping wound. The older one.

  He hadn’t been the first Renzer to put a blade in me.

  “What did you say? A hollow shell?” I said. “Not entirely wrong. Go ahead, touch it. Poke it with a stick if you want. No pain. Nothing feels bad, or good, anymore. Abner should’ve apologized for his apology…I don’t sleep. Or eat. Or fuck. Or want. Anything. I can’t even give a damn about not giving a damn.” I leaned forward and caved in one of his ribs. Just to remind him this was still happening. “The soul, it turns out, is not a requirement for life. It just makes your life worth living.

  “So now, Mr. Renzer, there’s just one craving.

  “One sensation, that dulls the pain of…soullessness. Just a little.

  “I’ve abstained for so long. So…long. But tonight…”

  Reggie Renzer had started to play up his infamous past because he thought it made him look cool. Scared other kids. Then he found it was a good way to get a certain kind of girl into bed. Then he started to think he understood what he was studying. Then, of course, he made the classic mistake of thinking it was all so easy.