by Dan Wells
“Simon Watts?”
The man in the shadows looked up.
“Simon Watts?” I asked. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
“I don’t have to talk to you,” he said, once again rocking back and forth. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Who is the Dark Lady?” I asked.
Watts shook his head. “Everyone.”
Mills grunted, then called out a question of his own: “What did the Dark Lady tell you to do?”
“Stay here.”
“I mean before that,” said Mills. “What did you do in my motel room?”
“Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing—”
I took another step forward. “Simon,” I said. “Do you recognize me?”
He turned toward us again, leaning forward to get a closer look. He studied my face, and then his eyes opened wide, and then he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Mills fired his Taser, and Watts dropped to the ground, twitching.
“I’m going to need my handcuffs back now,” said Mills, but he didn’t actually take them from me. We stared at the body for a moment before he spoke again. “Are you going to run away from me, John?”
“You know me so well.” I said, “You tell me.”
“An ancient supernatural monster forced this man to do something to my room,” said Mills. “You want to see what it was as much as I do. So no, you won’t.”
I stared at him, then looked at Watts’s unconscious body. After a moment, I looked back toward the row of motel doors.
“I reserve the right to run away later.”
“And I reserve the right to shoot you when you do.”
I nodded and reached out my hand. “Allies until then.”
“Don’t put it that way,” said Mills. “It makes me sound stupid.”
“That ship has sailed.”
He frowned but shook my hand and holstered his stun gun. He took the cuff off my wrist and put it around Simon’s, and then we dragged his unconscious body to the fence and cuffed him to a thick metal post. Once he was secure, Mills drew his real gun.
“Stay behind me,” he whispered, and I dropped back half a step as we walked carefully toward the open motel room. We could smell the blood before we even reached the door.
Mills pushed the door open with one hand, keeping his gun up and ready in the other, but then we saw the inside of the room and all formality disappeared.
“Agent Fletcher Murray,” Mills whispered.
The body of a black-suited man was laid out on the floor of the room, surrounded by a pool of blood that soaked into the carpet and filled the air with a thick, noxious aroma. The man’s chest had been cut open, just like the Y incision of an autopsy corpse, with the sternum cracked and the ribs folded out like an old cathedral triptych. The arms had been severed at the shoulders and stuck into the chest cavity, wedged between the organs so that they stood upright and seemed to be reaching toward the ceiling. Even the fingers were carefully arranged, frozen in rigor mortis as if they were trying to catch hold of something distant and ephemeral. The man’s shoes were off, and something glimmered wetly against the soles of his feet. I moved to get a better view and saw that it was the man’s eyeballs, removed from his head and fastened somehow to the tender skin in the arches above his heels.
“What does it mean?” asked Mills.
“It means the Dark Lady’s not playing around anymore,” I said.
“Of course,” said Mills, “but look at it. It means something. It’s not just a message, it’s … art. Even the blood pool on the carpet looks shaped.”
I knew what he meant. The body seemed to be … written, almost, as if we were reading an ancient glyph in a language we hadn’t even realized we knew. I felt like I could almost catch the meaning of it, right at the borders of my understanding. Right at the tip of my tongue.
“There’s something in his mouth,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Mills. Neither of us could see it, but we knew it was there. He reached out carefully, holding onto the nearby bed to keep himself from falling forward and disturbing the scene, and reached a fingertip past the dead man’s teeth. He hooked his finger, frowned, and pulled out a small metal ring. “It’s from the shower curtain,” he said.
“Is there something in the shower?” I wondered.
“No,” he said, “it’s the shape that’s important. A circle. A cycle. A … ring, a bracelet, a pit, a hole, a portal, an eye. A wheel.”
“An empty plate,” I said. “An empty egg. An empty … everything. The end of life.”
“Circles have no end,” said Mills.
I nodded, as if everything were more clear than it had ever been before. “Then the killing will go on forever.”
CHAPTER 14
Keeping the crime scene clear was the hardest part—they didn’t just need the room analyzed, they needed the corner of the parking lot where we’d left Simon Watts, and all the space in between. Mills and another agent named Rebecca Sutton were working with the local police to collect as much evidence as they could, but guests and tenants kept poking their heads out of the other motel rooms, asking what was going on and were they allowed to leave and who had died and were they in danger and a million other questions. If the police didn’t get to them fast enough they just walked out, right past the crime-scene tape, demanding to know if they were under arrest. Mills and Sutton set the local cops to interviewing them as quickly as possible, getting their IDs and statements on record, while the two agents talked to the motel manager, trying to get contact info for any guests that weren’t in their rooms. I, meanwhile, was unceremoniously handcuffed to a pipe in Agent Sutton’s bathroom. I would have been offended, after promising Mills I wasn’t going to run away, but once again he knew me too well. I’d been lying through my teeth.
The pipe I was chained to ran up through the floor and into the bathroom sink, and it was solid enough that I eventually gave up trying to move or break it. Instead I took stock of my situation, studying as much of the room as I could see. I wasn’t actually in the bathroom, per se, just next to it—the motel room had a tiny tiled room with a toilet and a shower next to a kind of alcove with a sink and a mirror. Next to that was a small, doorless closet, which led out into the main room. If I stretched as far as possible I could just peek around the corner of the wall to see a small desk, a dresser with a flat-screen TV, and beyond that, the door and a curtained window. There were two beds as well, but I couldn’t see more than an inch of each. I knew from when I’d been led in that Agent Sutton had laid out her suitcase on one of the beds, apparently preferring that to putting any clothes in the dresser.
The sink and bathroom, on the other hand, had a few resources I might be able to use. Sutton had cleared out her personal belongings, including a safety razor—I don’t know what they thought I was going to do with a safety razor, but they’d kind of made a point of it, so whatever. Her toothbrush, had she left it, might have been a lot more useful: I might have been able to file it down or break it in half to create a sharp point, not so much to stab someone as to try to pick the lock on the handcuffs. I doubt either would have worked, as I’m not exactly a master thief. I really need to learn how to pick a lock.
Of the objects they did not take away from me, there was little I could use. I had two plastic cups, individually wrapped in thin plastic bags. I had travel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and a small bar of white soap. I had an empty black garbage can, about the size of a fast-food bag; it was pretty flimsy plastic and probably wouldn’t work well as a weapon, but you never knew. Maybe I could snap that into usable, bladelike pieces? Maybe, but I didn’t know how that would help me. Unless I planned to straight-up murder both agents—and somehow managed to kill the first one without alerting the second—hurting them in any way would only make my life harder, not easier. And I didn’t want to kill them, anyway. They were only doing what they thought was right.
What did I want? I could try to lea
ve Lewisville again, but where would I go? More importantly, I didn’t think I wanted to leave anymore. Yes, I’d decided to leave before, but then Mills had found me and told me that he’d known I would run, and I didn’t like that. It made me feel dirty, to think that I had a reputation for running away from problems. Sure, I was running from the FBI and half a dozen other agencies and groups that wanted me, but I didn’t think of myself as a runner. I fixed things, didn’t I? I made things better, no matter how much it hurt me in the process. And yet here I was, the guy who runs away from stuff. I didn’t want to be the guy who runs away from stuff.
But I didn’t exactly want to be the guy who lives forever in top-secret government custody, either. There had to be a middle ground. “The guy who slips away from the feds but sticks around to stop the Withered” felt like a good thing to be, but I had no idea how to actually pull it off. I didn’t even know where the Dark Lady was, let alone how to kill her. And who knew how many other Withered she’d managed to gather. Assu couldn’t be the only one.
Thinking about other Withered reminded me of the feral woman out in the desert, and at that thought my arm seemed to throb again, and I realized I’d never cleaned the wounds. Soap and water were the only things I had, but in this case that was exactly what I needed. I ran the tap until it was just shy of being too hot to touch, and then stuck my right arm in it and winced at the pain. My left arm, cuffed to the pipe, was too far to reach, but I eventually managed to wash the long, bloody scratches on both arms by soaking the one and then crouching so I could rub both arms together. It took a while, and I got pretty soaked, but at least I was reasonably certain I wasn’t going to get an infection. I turned off the water and sat on the floor, blowing out a long, exhausted sigh, and watched a cockroach scuttle across the linoleum in front of me. Okay, so maybe I still wasn’t super clean. At least I felt a little more clearheaded.
I didn’t squish the cockroach; most people would have, but I had a rule. No harming living things, even if those living things were roaches. Sorry if that’s gross. We all do what we must to survive.
I stretched myself out to full length again, looking into the main room, hoping I’d see something I missed. The desk had a phone, but it was a few feet out of reach, and who would I call, anyway? The police were already here, and they weren’t on my side, and I didn’t know anybody else’s phone number. Maybe if I could reach the lamp I could use that as a weapon, but again: what would be the point? I needed to escape, not hurt anyone. I looked at the rest of the items on the desk: a little binder with hotel info; a plastic card explaining how to use the pay-per-view; a notebook and a pen; a coffee maker—
—wait. A pen. The first thing I’d seen that I might be able to use to pick the lock on my handcuffs. But the desk was still out of reach. I stretched again, reaching my arm as far as I could, grinding my face into the wall to gain even one more inch of distance, but it didn’t work. My arm wasn’t long enough … but my leg was. I looked around for the cockroach, didn’t see it anywhere, and laid down on the ground, stretching my legs toward the desk. I was just able to hook my foot around the nearest table leg, and pulled it toward me, praying that it wasn’t nailed down or stuck to the wall. It came about a foot toward me until something stopped it—probably the cord from the phone or the lamp or the coffee maker, or maybe even all three. I managed to get both of my feet around it now, locking it between my ankles, and pulled it toward me with all of my strength. It gave abruptly, flying toward me as whatever had been holding it back suddenly broke or came loose; the lamp fell backwards off the far side, crashing against the floor and shattering the bulb.
I had to be fast. I climbed to my feet, grabbed the pen off the desk, and began picking it apart to get at the useful bits inside. It was a clicky pen, which meant it had a spring and various little plastic pieces; the spring was too soft to work, and the plastic too thick or too short. I stared at all the pieces for a second, then dropped the outer casing on the floor and stomped on it, over and over, until I managed to break it. It came apart in jagged, pen-length shards, and with my teeth and fingernails I managed to carve one of these down into a shape slim and pointy enough to fit into the keyhole on the cuffs. I probed the lock carefully, trying to feel it out, wishing I knew more about it. People in movies picked handcuff locks all the time—was it really possible or was that just a Hollywood thing? I felt resistance in several places, but couldn’t get any of the inner mechanisms to move.
The motel room door rattled; someone was coming in. I shoved my makeshift lock pick into the waistband of my pants and started fiddling with the broken pen bits instead; there was no way to hide what I’d done, and whoever was coming in would obviously take away my tools, but if I focused on the wrong tools maybe they would, too.
Agent Mills was talking as he came into the room:
“… call headquarters again and request—oh, for crying out loud. John? What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t come back here,” I said calmly, “it’s a surprise.”
One of the agents pulled the desk away from the entrance to my alcove, and then Sutton stepped around with her gun aimed straight for my center of mass. “Drop it.”
“I just said don’t come back here,” I told her. “At least Mills listens to me.”
“He’s trying to pick the lock with a pen case,” said Sutton loudly, and then she motioned toward me with the gun. “I said drop it!”
“Put it down, John,” said Mills from around the corner; the entry was too small for both of them to stand in. “You can’t pick handcuffs with a pen case.”
I kept working on the lock, though the fragment in my hand was too big to actually accomplish anything. “She can’t shoot me, I’m too important.”
“Ugh,” said Sutton, “I hate him already.”
“Use your Taser,” said Mills. Sutton smiled, holstered her weapon, and pulled out her stun gun instead.
I stopped working. “Are you really going to tase me?”
“Are you really going to let me?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Let you or make you?”
“It’s definitely ‘let,’” said Sutton. “I’m in a really pissy mood, and I would absolutely love to pull this trigger.”
I paused, then put up my hands. “What is it with you guys and stun guns?”
“Good choice,” she said. “Now put all those pen pieces in the garbage can and, while you’re at it, all that stuff on the counter, too. Then hand the can to me.”
I scraped up the broken pen bits, feeling the hidden fragment bite into my waist as I moved, and put them in the garbage can, then stood up and dropped in the plastic cups as well. I put my hand over the soap and stopped, looking back at her with a question: “Can I keep the soap?”
“You can’t keep anything you actually want,” said Sutton.
“I hate soap.”
“Put it in the can.”
I rolled my eyes. “You feds get so uptight when one of your friends is gruesomely murdered, geez.” I dropped the soap in the can, made a big show about looking for anything else, and then handed the whole thing to her. She took it carefully, keeping the stun gun trained on me with her other hand. I held up my hands to show her I had nothing left, and she shook her head. Whatever patience she had left, I’d worn it out.
Why did I always do that?
“You can’t pick handcuffs with a pen anyway,” said Mills. “You need a bobby pin.”
“Hey, can I borrow a bobby pin?”
“Can I shock him?” asked Sutton.
“Just ignore him,” said Mills. “He’s just trying to get under your skin.”
“Please don’t say it that way,” said Sutton.
“Sorry,” said Mills, “I wasn’t thinking.”
Sutton walked out of my field of view, and I thought about the dead agent just a few doors down, in the other room. I softened my voice. “Did you know him very well?”
“Don’t talk,” said Sutton.
“Agent Murra
y,” I said. “I’m very sorry. He seemed … well I guess I never met him. But I’m sure he was … nice?”
“Is this you being sensitive?” asked Mills.
I smiled, though no one could see me. “Yeah, I kind of suck at it.”
“Why are we talking to him?” asked Sutton.
“Because he’s been here longer than we have,” said Mills, “and he’s really kind of terrifyingly good at our job.”
“How good?” asked Sutton.
“According to the timeline I’ve pieced together,” said Mills, “he got into town about the same time we did. And while we piddled around and got some clues and whatever, he found and killed a Withered, all on his own.”
Sutton whistled.
I couldn’t help but smile again, even if it wasn’t entirely true.
I heard them sit—a creaking chair and a settling bed—so I pulled out my hidden lock pick and started working again, as quietly as I could. “I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “Are you going to let me go so I can stop anyone else from being killed along with him?”
“Agent Fletcher Murray was a friend of ours,” said Mills. “I only met him a few weeks ago, but Sutton’s known him for much longer. He was a good agent, and a good man.”
“So, let me go,” I said again.
“What can you tell us about the Dark Lady?” asked Mills.
I sighed. “I take it that’s a no.”
“Sorry,” said Mills.
“Then why should I help you, if I’m just going to get locked up?” I said. “Shouldn’t I get something out of it?”
“You get the knowledge that the killer is stopped,” said Sutton. “If the profile he wrote up on you is correct, that’ll be enough.”
I dug into a new area of the lock, feeling carefully to see if it worked. “Oh, Mills, you wrote a profile on me? That’s sweet.”
“Who’s Mills?” asked Sutton.
“That’s what he calls me,” said Mills.
I stopped, looked up, then shook my head. “I knew you gave me a fake name,” I said. “Agent Sutton, what’s his real one?”
