by Dias, Jason
“It did. You did. Oh, but you had no idea what the deepness of your mind wished for. Ever since Ayame told you about herself, ever since you met her girlfriend, you have wondered. Not in ways you could hear out loud, but in ways I could smell. I gave you what you wanted.”
“Stop. I can’t control you. I can’t do anything to you and it’s driving me crazy. But I want you to stop. To… To go away. Leave this town and don’t come back. Let me forget there are things like you in the universe.”
“One more kill, my love. There is one more priest who lived an evil life, and I will have his soul before I go. You will help me.”
I stepped into a fresh pair of underwear, her eyes on me as I did. “Can’t you let him go? Haven’t you done enough?”
“When all the church is in flames I will have done enough. I showed you why I hate them. Hypocrites and sinners, rapists and torturers. They will all suffer, every one, beginning with the most guilty. I wish I had a guillotine that I could cut off their heads and make them look back at their headless bodies while the life drained out of their bloody skulls.” Flat, uninflected speech. Describing the weather.
“I have to try to stop you.”
“You cannot. Oh, my love, the world is full of problems. Your climate change, and your democracy slipping away through indifference. Cancer and heart disease. Death itself. People die all the time and you cannot stop it, Chérie. I am death. You cannot stop me any more than you can stop the tides. The headsman has pulled the rope, and the guillotine falls.”
I went to my dresser for a bra. “But I have to try.”
“You needn’t. But do try, if it makes you feel good.”
Something felt wrong. The material of the bra snagged on my right breast. Something there… a ring. A nipple ring. “What did you do to me?”
“You repeat yourself. I marked you. The bijou is a gift, so you always remember me.”
My fists tightened, but pain started in my head until I relaxed.
“This will be the way of it. The more you fight, the more you will suffer. In the end, I will take another soul whether you fight or not. Come. Finish clothing yourself. We have work to be about.”
I sighed. More horror in my future. Blunt, inescapable, probably gory. A job of work to do. “Let’s go, then.”
I finished dressing and ran fingers through my hair. Ysabeau led me to my car. “Easier than the bus, no?”
“Why don’t you drive? I feel unwell.”
“Me? Oh, I cannot see over the wheel, my love. I will drive you and you will drive the car.”
“Fine. Where to?”
“South.”
We were on the south end of town already. A few blocks and we’d be into unincorporated suburbs, then into the prairie. I started by heading west, towards the highway, then took the southbound ramp. It seemed right. We barreled through the night, the Caprice filling the lane and eating miles even as it devoured gasoline. We passed a town, a one-exit burg. Ysabeau did not comment so I kept rolling. As the next town approached, yellow halogen lamps making a dull glow against heavy night, she tapped my hand.
We left the highway, dropping to the crawling speed of small-town roads. Ysabeau pointed which way to go. We passed a local cop parked outside a convenience store. He waved. I nodded back. There were only a few streets, lettered A through G this way, named for trees that way. At the corner of F street and Pine, we stopped.
A house waited on a corner lot set back from both streets. A tall fence interposed. Behind the fence, fast-growing spruce trees formed a second barrier.
“What’s this place?”
“Safe house,” she said.
“How do you know about it?”
“You cannot hide from death. Not even in Samarra can you hide from death.”
That meant nothing to me. No more questions: Ysabeau slid out of the car, closing the door gently behind her. Alone she would need no stealth. Not being real had advantages.
I clambered out, too, and pushed the door shut as inaudibly as I could. I followed her into an alley, around back of the house. She hopped a gate between two tall Spruce trees shaped like rockets. I clambered along behind.
The back door opened easily. An alarm sounded, strident. Ysabeau shut the door behind me and it silenced. “What kind of safe house?”
“The Church owns a great deal of property. Did you know that?”
An oblique answer. “The Church runs a safe house? Why aren’t we surrounded by clergy with guns?”
“I made everyone go to sleep.”
She had knocked me out several times now. It still hadn’t occurred to me she might do the same to others. Not even when she killed that man without waking his wife, there in bed beside him. “Where is the guy you want?”
“In the second-floor bedroom.”
The place looked like it had been designed and furnished by old folks in the sixties. Green shag carpet, walls paneled in pine, evidence of an intercom system wired with radio. Family pictures in the stairwell. Ysabeau went straight to the room she wanted. The man lay on a twin bed, dressed but for his shoes. Just another late-middle-aged man.
He woke up, brown eyes alive with confusion. He just lay there and stared at us, Ysabeau at the foot of the bed, me in the doorway.
“Why did you wake him?”
“He is the last one. I want him to suffer.”
“I…”
“It is not to do with you.” She never took her eyes off him.
The man, Charlie, he pushed himself up against the headboard into sitting position. Through a mouth mushy with sleep, he said, “Who are you? Who let you in here?”
She just stared. He looked between her and me.
“Rounded up and dragged out of my house. Stashed down here, no information. Now two women standing in my room. Where is Mister Rothschild?”
“His house,” Ysabeau said, still not turning from Charlie. “Sam is fine. He is sleeping. He will slumber through your murder.”
“What’s this about?”
“You know.”
He shook a little bit. Already pale, he lost a little color. “They never proved…”
“Proof is for courts, Charlie.” She pointed at me. “Proof is for police. I do not need proof. I know.”
Shaking still, the quaver coming into his voice, Charlie yelled for help. She let him yell, his voice weak and tremulous like a lost old man. Then she pointed at him, stabbing with a finger, and he writhed on the bed, his shouts turning to screams.
“Pain is in your head,” she said. “I can give you pain or pleasure, fear or rage or calm. Now, I choose for you to suffer.”
I watched him squirm. I should have felt bad. Ysabeau must have been damping down my emotions because I felt next to nothing. Flat, blank, I waited for her to be done playing with him. In a remote recess of my mind, I celebrated that she hadn’t turned my senses to pleasure at this suffering, made me a sadist.
I wondered if she felt anything but hate. “What are you feeling?”
She did not answer me. Charlie went on screaming.
Downstairs, a thud. “Someone’s waking up,” I said.
“Another stubborn one. The longer I live, the more stubborn people grow. Go and placate him. This will be finished soon. Charlie, the man who owns this place is not cooperating with me. Your suffering will end sooner than I had planned.”
I complied. Nothing else I could do. Down the stairs into a living area with a floor sunken in a ring of couches. A man crouched on the floor there, uncertain and unsteady. He glanced up at me. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
“I’m here to help. Forget about me. There’s a murderer here.”
“Charles.”
“She’s killing him right now. Get out of here. Don’t stop next door. Go all the way to the end of the block. Across the road. The Seven-Eleven there. Use their payphone to call the police. Do it now.”
His head seemed to clear as I gave him directions. He climbed to his feet and shambled out the front d
oor, moving into a run as he escaped the pull of the deep pile carpeting.
I ran back upstairs. “You only have a minute.”
“I heard,” she said.
Charli’s corpse settled into the mattress.
“You did well. By the time the police arrive, we will be far away from this place. Go ahead. In your car. I will follow my way.”
“Follow? I thought this was the last one. Aren’t you going now?”
“I still need my coffin. I still need you.”
“To move it for you. To set you up somewhere new.”
“And then you are free of me. Serve me well and I can change your mind, your memories. I can make you forget all of this.”
That sunk in over a minute as we jogged down the stairs and out the back. “Forget?” My voice broke on the word. Tears welled up. I had never wanted anything so badly as to forget the last few days. All the terror and anger Ysabeau had been suppressing in me were evident in that feeling of hope. Then I sat in my car, alone.
Forget? The pain in my nipple where she had bitten me, tagged me with a cheap bit of tin, belied the idea I could ever be free of her.
Far away, a siren.
I gunned the engine and drove hard out of the neighborhood before merging anonymously into the flow of traffic on the highway, headed home.
Power
Home.
Sunup caught me sitting at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee. Without Ysabeau around to mess with my emotions, I retained only a sort of exhausted apprehension. I drummed fingers on the table, tapped a foot, and worried.
The coffee went slowly cold as light crept through the back window.
That I could not stop Ysabeau in the smallest thing did not make me feel any better. I’d witnessed two murders and could tell no-one. Even if she didn’t paralyze me with pain if I tried, who would believe the story? I felt complicit. Lady MacBeth, wandering the halls at night, dry-rinsing her hands.
My brain wouldn’t function. I tried to formulate some kind of plan. A way out, even a post-Ysabeau approach to living. But my thoughts were slippery. They slid out of my mind like a fried egg in a commercial for non-stick pans.
She would be back in her coffin by now.
Banned from work by an absurd fictional illness, nowhere to go. Might as well clean up the house. The gasoline had all evaporated. It took an hour and every towel in my house to scrub the lino clean and even then the smell lingered. It had penetrated down into the floorboards.
Someone knocked at the door. I glanced at the clock on the stove: 8:27. Went to the front of the house, sneaking a look through the front picture window. Outside, a black sedan sat at the curb. A peek through the peephole: Jolene.
I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you too, sweetie. Thought I’d drop by with good news. You don’t have any diseases I can identify.” She made to push past me into the house.
“Great. Want some coffee?” I thought about blocking up the doorway, preventing her from seeing inside. She’d detect guardedness, though, and become suspicious. Drive it like you stole it is great advice: to not get caught driving a stolen car, drive it casually.
“Love some.”
I preceded her to the kitchen. “It’s still warm.” The pot had timed out a few minutes ago.
She took the cup I offered and stuck it in the microwave. “Smells funny in here.”
“I was dicking around with a gas can and spilled a little. Should open a window if it ever warms up enough. It’s giving me a headache.”
We sat at the table. “So I’ll give you the all clear and you can return to work. Meanwhile, new cases keep turning up. I’ll tell you, it’s pretty frightening. I’ve called in the CDC. They have better sterile procedures and gear. I’m out of the autopsy business for bloodless, severed spines. I guess that turns your investigation around.”
“You know. It looks like Watanabe has more or less compiled all the evidence we need on Callahan. If he was alive, he’d die in prison. No-one to press charges on, Captain doesn’t want to push up the institutional chain, so I guess we go back to small city police business and let the feds handle the epidemic.”
We sat in silence for a while. Pretty common for us. It tended to be companionable. Today, though, my mind raced – keeping track of the various lines of deception in play and my exposure in all the bad business. No reason Jo would suddenly want to tour the house, accidentally discover the coffin, but still I sweated.
“It’ll be a few days, but my geologist said she could say right away that your sample didn’t seem like regular dirt to her.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t understand all of it. Dirt is basically made of minerals, like rocks pounded down into tiny granules. Things live in it and die in it. Worms eat it and poop it back out. All of that leaves particulate matter. She said your sample was rich and dark like Amazon soil. Full of humus.”
“Humus? Like you’d spread on a bagel?”
“That’s hummus. Humus is dead stuff. Lots of humus makes good soil.”
“Oh.”
“So, spill it. What’s the dirt all about?”
I didn’t want to lie. Various possibilities flashed through my mind. Maybe I was thinking about planting flowers out front. Sure. So why the secrecy about it? Nothing to say but the truth, and I couldn’t mention any of that.
“Sorry. Can’t say. I want to, but…”
“Ongoing investigation, right? If you can’t go through regular channels, you must be investigating someone in your chain. Is that it? Well, I guess don’t tell me. I’m a terrible gossip.”
That would do. Give people a little information, let them invent their own conclusions.
“I need a favor. Another favor.”
“Yeah?” Her eyes lit up.
“I need you to don’t tell the office that I’m cleared. Slow-walk it.”
She put this together with what she already thought she knew and drew a picture. “Oh. Well. You know, I need to totally sterilize my workroom. After lunch, the Feds will start showing up, and I’ll need to walk them through the story so far and settle them in. I could completely forget to tell anyone about your status.”
“Thanks, Jo. You’re a life saver.”
We chatted a while longer. She seemed to sense my heart wasn’t in banter. Another invite for dinner, and she left with a promise to call later.
Alone again. Eleven in the morning now.
I called Ricky.
“Hey. How’d you know Charlie would come down sick?”
Shit. He knew already. “I didn’t. Just a hunch. Don’t tell anyone, but the seizure epidemic angle doesn’t cover the whole story. I just wanted to hear you were safe, though. Where are you?”
“Office, like usual. Man, I could use a day off or even a three-day-weekend. Not young anymore, Dom.”
He sounded amiable. Could relationships like ours heal over time? Could we learn to live with the scar, the rupture? It didn’t seem natural, given that a third acquaintance of his had just died violently. “Well, thanks for trying to help. We’re closing up our case here. Captain doesn’t want to take on the Church.”
“That’s good. For us, anyway. In the short term. You know, one day we’re going to have to come clean with all of this. Face it. A good confession is balm for the spirit. Thanks for giving us time to do it our way. Clean. Not under duress.”
“Listen. There’s something else I want to milk you for.”
“I’m listening. But I’m pretty short on favors right now.”
“I know.” I stretched. The kitchen chair was not the best place to sit all morning. “It’s just… When it comes to spiritual matters, you know I’m pretty simple.”
He made some non-committal noise.
“I’m in a dilemma. I have concrete, personal experience with some, uh, phenomena that I know to be impossible. I can’t tell anyone about them. I know I’m not crazy because everyone else sees them too. I don’t know what to thin
k anymore.”
Silence for a few seconds. “Wow. You sound positively emotional. I’ve never heard you sound frightened before.”
“I am, Enrique. Don’t fuck with me. Throw me a lifeline?”
“Best advice I ever got on this stuff came from a priest. I know, of course it would. Hush a minute. I was talking to Jordan after a sermon. He’d just given this long talk about Jesus. The sermon on the mound. And he told the story like he’d been there, had personally witnessed the sermon. It was brilliant. Anyway, when nobody was around, I asked him about seminary. You know in seminary, future priests are exposed to all sorts of contrary information. Zoroaster, Isis and Osiris, Babylonian mythology. All of it predates the Old Testament, and in one way or another seems to tell the Jesus story before Jesus.
“Well, what he said was, ‘Doubt is for the clergy.’”
None of that made any sense to me. “So?”
“So, he was saying that for the rank and file lay Catholic, they need to hear that the universe is understandable. God is real, we have His word and His love. The layperson believes it utterly and without doubt. But the priest has his faith tested. He has what Tillich called ‘belief in the presence of doubt.’”
“I still don’t understand.”
He sighed. “It’s like this. Some things are true and false at the same time. You have to either have faith with total certainty, or learn to sit with the paradoxes. Stretch your mind. You’ll die one day, but your life still matters today. Whatever you’re experiencing that seems unreal, well, it is real. That doesn’t mean reality is broken.”
“I’m starting to see it. Thanks, Ricky. You’ve been so sweet. You should let me take you out for dinner this week to thank you.”
Another heavy pause. Then: “That’s not a good idea. It’s a surprise, and if you’d said so yesterday, I’d have been all for trying out a social engagement. It’s just that, uh, I’ve met somebody.”
“Since I last saw you?”
“Yeah. It was weird. Actually, she’s kinda weird. But special. Eccentric. But kind, smart. Pretty, in a petite sort of way. I’ll tell you about it another time. Maybe. I guess even that sounds like a commitment. We’re in a strange place now, aren’t we?”
