by Laurel Dewey
She roamed the periphery of the living room, reading and looking at the various postcards that were tacked onto the boards in thick layers. She’d pull one off a board and Jane would find three more hidden underneath it. One card had a single quote across the front: “We don’t have hoaxes anymore. We have engineered misunderstandings.” Jane smiled and continued to remove one card after another until she found one that made her take a break. It was a vintage reissue of a card that sported a 1966 ice blue Mustang on the front. Pulling it off the board, she turned it over and saw that it was unused. How odd, she thought. Staring at the depiction of her cherished ride, her heart sunk. She wasn’t sure if it was the damn car she missed or the guy who drove it away from her.
Tucking the card into her jacket pocket, she perused a few more pegboards of cards before noticing that one board stood out from the wall more than the others. Jane lifted it off the two screws and set it down, exposing another secret compartment. She tapped the door of the compartment lightly several times, testing its security. Either it wasn’t locked correctly or the lock had been compromised because the door opened. Jane turned to alert Harlan but stopped before uttering a word. He was onto level thirty-three and there was no way he could be ripped away from that achievement. Reaching into the twelve-inch square hole, Jane removed a single, plain, 8 ½ x 14 inch envelope that felt somewhat weighty. She turned back to Harlan who was still engrossed in his game and then quietly walked into the kitchen with the envelope.
Jane unhooked the envelope flap and lifted the contents onto Monroe’s cluttered kitchen table. It was a stack of 8 x 10 inch color photos. The first photo showed what appeared to be an African tribal village from the air. The photography was well done with vivid colors and crisp images. The second shot was taken closer to the ground but still in the aircraft. Jane turned over the shots to see if there was anything written or stamped on the backs but they were blank. Each subsequent shot seemed to tell a chronological story of walking into the village, showing lattice-roofed mud huts and young children. Jane stopped and pulled up the two shots of the lattice-roofed huts. They were identical to what she saw in her strange and disturbing vision. Remembering how that vision ended with a horrific scream from a child, Jane steadied herself. She snuck a peek outside the kitchen door to make sure Harlan was still occupied before returning to the photographs. There were several shots of children that appeared to be between the ages of two and six, dressed in their native garb. One child, a boy, wore a unique horn necklace around his neck. He smiled at the camera, holding out his hand.
Jane felt her mouth go dry as she turned to the next photo in the stack. There was a close-up of the same young boy with the necklace around his neck. But in this photo, his skull was split in two down the middle and pulled apart. It was clear that the brain had been removed from his cranium. Jane took several steps backward, pressing her back against the wall. She’d seen thousands of gruesome, murderous crime scene photos that involved children and infants but somehow, this felt different. This shot seemed to have surgical precision. She felt sick to her stomach as she moved back to the table. The next twelve shots would have challenged hardcore detectives who’d “seen it all.” Each one was worse than the one before. Every photo featured a close-up of another child under the age of six with his or her head split open in the exact manner as the one before, and each child had their brain removed.
Jane collected all the photos and shoved them into the large envelope. She sat down and tried to catch her breath and steady her nerves. One of the postcards Gabe sent Nanette Larson featured children in the Congo dressed in their native garb. Jane easily recalled Nanette’s comment about how, less than a week after receiving the card, she saw a story on the Internet about a coup in the Congo where tribal leaders were slaughtered, along with many children. But if this was connected to that massacre, where were the shots of the tribal leaders? Wouldn’t a tribal leader, Jane reasoned, be more valuable as some sort of photographic “kill prize” rather than a child?
Then her mind drifted to another disturbing yet probable connection. Suddenly, Patsy Cline’s “Through the Eyes of a Child” took on a sinister twist. Jane wracked her brain trying to come up with a suitable explanation for Harlan being compelled to include that song in his burlap bag. The only thing she could come up with was the abject terror in their young eyes right before they were killed. But that ran counter to the lines in the song that spoke more positively about “what a wonderful world it would be” to “see the world through the eyes of a child.” Jane scooped up the envelope and walked back into the living room. She started to put the envelope back into the hiding place but pulled it back out, closed the steel door and replaced the peg board on the wall.
After finishing her soup and grabbing a few stale chips, she walked out onto the screened in porch, sat in a comfortable recliner and waited. Occasionally, she dozed but quickly stirred at the softest sound. Harlan eventually joined her, bringing her a sandwich and then a bowl of ice cream from a carton in the freezer. And together, they waited. As night confiscated the daylight, Jane and Harlan pulled a couple blankets closer to their bodies. Two more sandwiches later with a pine needle beer for Harlan and a soda for Jane, they were still waiting. Jane had already chewed the skin nearly off one thumb and was working on the other one when she heard footsteps disturb the gravel pathway that lay cloaked in darkness in front of them. She slid off the recliner and stood up as Harlan followed suit. Out of the April shadows, Monroe appeared, looking tired and troubled. Harlan relaxed but Jane stood as if a steel rod replaced her spine.
“Where in the hell have you been all day?” Jane exclaimed.
Monroe opened the front door and rested his two rifles and .45 on a small table. “You know, I don’t even know your name,” he said with an eerie calm. “Should I just call you ‘mom?’”
Jane wasn’t sure what new personality had taken him over but it seemed to be a laid back one. “My name’s Jane and I’m nobody’s mother.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Monroe mumbled under his breath.
Harlan shot Jane a half-smile of agreement. “I need to talk to Monroe. Alone.”
Harlan worked his way around chairs and back into the house. “Damn, brother. I’ll say a prayer for you.”
Jane waited until Harlan was in the house and out of earshot. “Sit down.”
Monroe held firm. “You know, this is my house, right?”
“Sit down,” she firmly repeated.
He ran his fingers through his tangled hair. “Oh, man. Shit just got real.” He planted his ass onto the recliner across from Jane.
She grabbed the envelope and threw it at him. “Yeah, shit just got way real!”
Monroe didn’t touch the envelope. “This was hidden in my wall.”
“You said I could read or look at anything. And I didn’t have to pick a lock to get it. Don’t act so shocked, Monroe. You expected me to find it. That’s why you were gone so long. You wanted to give me lots of time. I’ve been waiting for you for almost nine fucking hours. I’m not sure who you are used to dealing with but—”
“Gabe didn’t do it,” Monroe suddenly interrupted in a low, modulated voice. He looked Jane straight in the eye. “You thought he did this?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“Wow. Even after everything I told you about him and what you probably already knew, you still thought he was capable of this,” he flicked his middle finger against the envelope. “Is that what your mind told you or is that what your heart told you? The heart and the mind are two separate elements that can often work against each other.”
Jane regarded Monroe with a puzzled expression. The syncs between the worlds were beginning to collide.
Monroe flung the envelope on the floor. “Jesus, how could you believe Gabe had a hand in that? I think the trickster got hold of you.”
“What’s that?” Jane asked, sitt
ing down.
“He’s within your head and outside of it. He enjoys making you suffer and his only goal is to destroy you. He hates those who love you so he feeds you lies and dismisses those who tell you the truth. He makes you doubt what your heart tells you and then whispers what you want to hear. His biggest fear is that you will wake up, so he waits for you in the darkened shadows and demands that you sleep. He needs to keep you enslaved. He’s gotta keep you afraid, addicted and unsure of yourself so you are paralyzed to act. He gains his strength by making sure you are weak.” He looked at her. “Weak enough to believe that the heart of the man inside your friend’s chest could even conceive of this, let alone do it.”
From what Jane could tell, it appeared that a sidewalk philosopher was now living inside Monroe. “Fine. Explain why you have those photos hidden away.”
“I was doing a job for Romulus and needed some codes. I got sent a link that wasn’t encrypted. That never happened before. Somebody slipped up, I guess. But I saw what I had and it was like a door swung open and I ran right through it and hacked into their system. I knew alarms would go off somewhere so I blew through what I could, transferred the data, yada, yada, yada, and got outta there. From the files I was able to steal, I could only decode three. Two of them were no big deal.” He pointed to the envelope. “That was the third file. There were no dates on it so I have no clue when they were taken.” He rubbed his face, obviously in great distress over the photographs. “I only showed those to two people…You’re the second one.”
“And what did Gabe say?”
“That he had no information about it. But that he was going to check it out. Look, part of what he and I used to do is help destabilize governments or groups or powerful officials. And lots of people die when you do that and it’s awful and gruesome. But this? If this was done to destabilize another fucking tribal whatever in the armpit of Africa, it wouldn’t look like that! You would have bodies heaped into mounds and a chaotic mess of gunshot wounds, high-impact attacks, machete slashes, decapitations, and on and on. What do we have here? We have a handful of later shots where you can see the elders of the tribe in the background, laying every which way on the ground but no close ups of them. From what I could tell when I zoomed in on the shots of the older people, none of them had their heads cracked open. But when you really look at the photos of those young kids, I think their heads were cracked open surgically.”
Jane scowled. “Jesus Christ, Monroe. You’re saying they were alive when this ‘surgery’ happened?”
“Yep. That’s what I’m saying.”
“For what purpose?!”
“There’s only one season to pick apples. But when it comes to organ harvesting, every day yields a new, fresh crop.”
Now the philosopher was becoming obscure. “What the fuck—?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” he asked offhandedly. “We are no longer people. We are potential harvesting machines. Parts is parts and we are the sum of our parts. And some parts hold more value than others. And the younger you are, the more likely those parts will be healthier and less likely to have significant problems.”
Jane pointed to the envelope. “Brains? I’ve never heard of a brain transplant.”
“I haven’t either.”
Jane waited, expecting him to continue. “And?”
“Well?”
“No,” Jane stated with a sweep of her hand. “You can’t sell that to me. No way!”
“Well, if they’re not transplanting it, there’s only two things I can think of. Either they are selling it for food,” he said cringing, “or they’re working with the cells or the tissue in some sort of medical experiment. And since Romulus isn’t hurting financially, I don’t believe they are selling it for food.”
Jane pondered for a long minute. A strange memory suddenly crept into her consciousness. “You know, when I was a kid, I read one of those ghastly fables that told the story of an ancient warrior who cut open the chest of a still dying soldier and ate his beating heart. There was something about consuming his soul along with the warrior’s courage that sprung through his heart at the moment of his death.” Jane considered it. “It was believed that a golden light entered his body as his soul ascended and that if you could capture the tail of that light within the still beating heart and eat it, you would hold the light of God’s immortality and be able to travel through all the worlds that parallel our universe. Immortality and the ability to space travel at will. That was what they craved in that fable. So, what type of power does Romulus crave?”
“Nothing short of everything,” Monroe shrugged. “Complete and utter power and control over everyone and every living thing. And they are willing to go as long as it takes for it to happen. They’re in no rush. As long as they keep the world off balance, they’re happy.”
“Okay. What does it take to strong arm that kind of ultimate power away from the people?”
“Not sure.”
Jane cocked her head to the side. “You capture the hearts and minds of the populace. Then you turn on them. And through one, you destroy the other. Through rejection of the heart, you kill the mind. Through sole submission of the mind, you kill the heart.”
He nodded. “They steal your mind through your heart. Control one and they’ll make you doubt the other.”
Jane suddenly understood the possibility that the hearts and the minds meme that began with the old man in her vision could actually represent two separate discoveries that Gabriel uncovered. Flashing back to the first vision she had where she followed behind Gabe and watched him kill the old man, he first examined the files on the man’s desk, separating out various files that he seized. He then turned and crossed to the file cabinets, removing the white binder with the IEB inscription. Jane had linked the two together prior to this point, but now she was open to the concept that there were two diverse issues at play here.
“You know the organ transplant business is big business with the elite around the world,” Monroe said matter-of-factly. “If they have the money, honey, they’ll hire someone to do the crime.”
“What kind of crime?”
“Stealing organs out of a body and selling it to the highest bidder. I set up a job once for a guy who was hired to get a young, healthy kidney for a diplomat.”
“Hang on.” Jane sat up and faced him. “If he’s not a surgeon, how’d he ‘get’ the kidney?”
“Oh, there was a surgeon there. We paid him off too. Unless he talked. They don’t like it when people argue with them. You do what you’re asked to do and you spend the rest of your life trying to forget it. Hey, Romulus isn’t the only one involved in organ harvesting. There are wealthy individuals who broker overseas deals. They find a young, strong man or woman who has the organ they need and they make a private agreement. Problem is, the donor is usually poor and destitute. So, getting some good money for a kidney looks like a decent trade. But what they don’t understand is that more times than not, they’ll be opened up and the surgeon gets what he needs and then does a hack job sewing him up or doesn’t give the person adequate drugs to prevent infection. Then the donor dies. But so what, right? They got what they wanted. Moving on. Nothing to see here, folks. It’s happening every day of the week, all over this fucked up world. Like I said, we’re just two-legged vehicles that carry spare parts for those who need an upgrade when their hardcore lifestyle turns on them.”
“That’s insane, Monroe.”
He leaned forward, his eyes equally insane. “I know that. I’m trying to get you to understand that these people are beyond cold blooded. They are soulless, Jane. They have more money than God, but they keep wanting more. More of everything. All they need is to keep us dumb, hopeless and stupid so they can keep the cream for themselves. You know, I’d feel sorry for Romulus if I didn’t want to see them all dead and burned up in a holy fire of retribution. It’s tough because I wish I could warn peop
le and tell them what I’ve experienced. But I can’t. And they wouldn’t believe me anyway. It’s like teaching a goat to sing. It’s a waste of time and it annoys the goat.”
“You mean a pig?” Jane corrected him.
“Nah. A goat,” Monroe said with a wink toward Jane.
Jane wasn’t sure what to make of the goat comment but let it go. She let him know that she reviewed the remaining numbered postcards Gabe sent him and that she would take them with her and then return them.
“They belong to you and Harlan,” he said with precision. “That’s who Gabe meant them for.”
“I talked to a woman who received a postcard from Gabe before he left the company. It was a photo of tribal children from the Congo. Why would he send her that card?”
His interest showed. “Not sure. I think as he started to see more shit he didn’t agree with he wanted to expose it but he knew he couldn’t. So, maybe sending the postcards to the woman was his way of getting the info out there and off his chest.” He pretended to appear more casual than he was truly feeling. “Which woman are we talking about?”
“Nanette Larson.”
“Humph. Okay.” Suddenly, he became taciturn.
“’Humph. Okay?’ What does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Drop it,” he said with a sudden edge. “Gabe made it clear that nobody crossed the line into his personal life. With him, there were places you didn’t go.” He reclined on the chair, drawing one of his rifles closer to him. “There were dark holes and regrets that he built steel walls around. I think it had to do with love and family.” He caught himself. “Shit. I’ve said too much already.”
Jane observed Monroe and the way he fidgeted nervously with his rifle. It was obvious to her that he was about to split again. While his mind decided which personality to call up next, she decided to use his transitioning time to get cogent information. “He had a girlfriend, didn’t he? More than just a girlfriend, in fact.”
