Nightmare se-2

by Steven Harper

  As Ara watched, the Ched-Balaar vanished. Vera ran her hands through short blond hair, started to stand, and came up short. Mystified, she raised a hand. It clinked. Her wrist was bound with a black wristband and chain that extruded from under the sofa cushions. So was her other wrist and her ankles. The air turned cold. Fear rose in Vera’s chest. She hadn’t created the chains. They would be gone. They would be gone now. But they remained. Ara’s heart started to beat faster.

  A blackness touched the room. Suppressed rage mixed with desire and …love? A door opened, and a man dressed in black entered. A wide-brimmed hat hid his face in shadow. He strode toward Vera, who screamed. Vera tried to gather her concentration to leave the Dream, to escape, but the couch moved beneath her and the cushions themselves folded themselves about her body. More chains snaked out and wound tight and cold around her body. Terror swept over Vera and disrupted her concentration. A knife appeared in the man’s hand and he loomed over his victim. He bent down and said something to Vera, who only screamed again. Rage swept over Ara in waves, and he slashed quickly. Blood flowed, and Vera cried out. It went on and on. Ara was vaguely aware of Inspector Tan vaulting over the furniture, trying to get behind the couch so she could get a look at the man’s face.

  And then Kendi was there-another Kendi. Ara glanced at her student to make sure he was also still beside her. He was, eyes wide, lips compressed. The man cut off Vera’s finger just as she died and wrote a bloody number on her forehead. Ara felt a tiny blank moment, a barely-discernable flicker as Vera’s Dream form vanished and was replaced by the power of the man standing over her. Dream Kendi swore, and the man lunged for him. Ara watched them struggle, saw the furniture erupt into movement, felt Dream Kendi’s own fear and terror. Finally Dream Kendi crashed through the window and disappeared. The man stood in the window for a moment, then howled once and vanished. Vera’s living room went with it, leaving Ara, Kendi, and Tan alone on a blank plain. Tan was breathing hard.

  Ara stood stock-still. Her mouth was dry as salt and she felt weak as a dishrag. A quick glance at Kendi showed he felt the same. His skin was ashen.

  "I didn’t see his face," Tan reported. "I don’t think he has one in the Dream."

  "We need to get out of here," Ara croaked. "Kendi, you go and I’ll make sure you get out before I follow, all right?"

  Kendi only nodded. A moment later, he vanished and the Dream energy around them rushed in to fill the empty space. Without another word to Tan, Ara herself let go of the Dream.

  Kendi sat shakily on the couch next to Mother Ara after she sat up. Rain pattered gray tears against the windows. Kendi’s hands shook and nausea oozed in his stomach. He had thought he could handle seeing it all again, but he had been wrong. This time he had felt the emotions of both people involved. Vera Cheel’s fear, terror, and helplessness stayed with him, mingling with a horrible mixture of rage and love. It made him sick and scared all at once, and he felt horribly alone.

  An arm came around his shoulder and drew him into a motherly embrace. Kendi buried his face in Mother Ara’s shoulder and for a moment pretended she was Rebecca Weaver. Everything was going to be all right. He wasn’t there. The Dream wasn’t real. After a while, he became aware that Mother Ara was saying these things aloud to him, and he let them sink in. Then he broke away, eyes wet with tears he didn’t remember shedding.

  "Are you okay?" Mother Ara asked. Her face was drawn and concerned. "I had no idea it would be that strong, Kendi. There’s no way I would have let you-"

  "It’s all right," he said. "I’ll be okay. But all life-it was horrible."

  "And we need to discuss it," Tan put it from the armchair. "Now. Before we forget any of it."

  "I don’t think I’ll forget any of it for as long as I live," Mother Ara said. "Aren’t you upset by any of this?"

  "I’m upset that the killer is walking free," Tan said grimly. "Let’s go over it. Talking about it may make all of us feel better, in any case."

  "Kendi," Mother Ara said, "why you don’t you go and-"

  "No," Kendi interrupted. "I want to help. He did awful things to her, and I don’t want him to do it again to someone else."

  "Let’s at least go somewhere else," Mother Ara insisted. "Maybe get something to eat. It’ll help us to concentrate on our bodies and dampen the emotions."

  The three of them decided to meet at a nearby restaurant. The canopy of talltree leaves kept them reasonably dry as long as they stayed under the branches, but they had to dash across the open spaces between the trees. They arrived at the restaurant damp and breathless.

  It was a little early for lunch yet, and Tan got them a booth at the back where they could talk in privacy. The restaurant was warm and dark, and the server was friendly. Mother Ara refused to let anyone discuss the case until their food had arrived. Once they had all eaten a little, Tan put her recorder on the table, and they described what had happened. Kendi was glad to discover that Mother Ara had been correct-it was easier to remain level-headed about the entire thing with some food in him.

  "My earlier suspicions were correct, then," Mother Ara said. "The killer has a very strong will, and he can attack people by forcing a new shape on the turf in Dream. That’s hard to do."

  "Agreed," Tan said. "Most Silent simply aren’t this powerful, just like most people don’t have the physical strength to kill someone with their bare hands. Good thing, too. Otherwise Dream killings would be far more common."

  "He knows the victims," Kendi put in. "I think he even …loves them? Or thinks he does. I felt that."

  "So did I." Mother Ara sipped thoughtfully at her drink. "Though he may not know them personally. He may be stalking them without actually meeting or talking to them first."

  "My research tells me that most serial killers do stalk their victims," Tan said. "If this one can find his women in the Dream, it means he may have touched them in the real world. That, and the fact that he’s doing his little finger trick, means he’s somewhere on Bellerophon. A relief."

  "A relief?" Mother Ara asked.

  "Yes. It’ll make him easier to catch." Tan tucked a stray strand of black hair back into her braid. "Imagine if he were on another planet. We’d never have a hope."

  "What was the number fourteen?" Kendi said. "He wrote it on her forehead."

  "He wrote the number twelve on the forehead of Iris Temm," Mother Ara pointed out.

  "Is he numbering them-his women, I mean?" Kendi asked, startled. "If he is, there must be a number thirteen our there somewhere."

  Tan gave him an appraising look. "We were thinking the same thing yesterday. Pretty smart."

  Kendi felt his face grow warm at the praise and he hid behind his juice glass.

  "There have only been three other Dream murders." Mother Ara put her elbows on the table. "Prinna Meg, Wren Hamil, and Iris Temm."

  "Which means there are either a lot of victims we don’t know about-and they aren’t necessarily on Bellerophon-" Tan said, "or maybe he isn’t numbering his victims but is doing something else. Maybe he’s using only even numbers for some reason."

  "I think there’s a dead body somewhere that no one’s found yet," Kendi said. He took a long drink of fruit juice. It was slightly tangy, just as he liked it, and he wondered about the strangeness of it. Less than a day ago he had watched a woman murdered and today he was drinking fruit juice. Vera Cheel would never drink fruit juice again, and that made him sad and angry, even though he had never met her. Not really.

  You’re being stupid, he told himself. You don’t even know if she liked fruit juice. Still, the feelings remained. He pushed the drink aside.

  Mother Ara sipped from her own glass again. "What do the women have in common? We’ve been over it before, but is there something we’ve overlooked?"

  "Female, adult, Silent, associated with Children of Irfan." Tan ticked her fingers. "Ages have varied from young adult to middle age. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to where they live, either, or to the dates or times he kills
them. If he was friends with all four of them, we should be comparing lists of people the victims were acquainted with."

  "We need more information." Mother Ara glanced at her fingernail. "It’s early yet. Maybe I should take another look at the murder scenes."

  "You?" Tan raised her eyebrows. "You’re a consultant, Mother Ara, not an investigator. And Kendi here is just a witness."

  "I can help," Mother Ara said. "I know how the Silent mind works-"

  "And I don’t?" Tan said.

  "Your partner isn’t Silent," Mother Ara pointed out. "I’m another Silent you can bounce ideas off and who might catch something you miss. It can’t hurt to have me along."

  "Me, too," Kendi put in quickly.

  Both women turned their gazes on him. "Kendi," Mother Ara began, "you can’t think-"

  "You just said that I’m an important witness," Kendi interrupted. "And you said that if the killer finds out about me, my life could be in danger, right?"

  "Right," Mother Ara said warily.

  "So it would be safest if I stayed in the company of the police-Guardians," Kendi said.

  "I could assign someone to guard you," Tan said.

  Kendi winced and tried not to show it. The idea of someone following him around all day and night-no. For one thing, it would be difficult to talk to Ben. "I can help, too. I saw things no one else did, and I felt some of the things-" a cold shudder passed through him and he tried to hide that, too "-some of the things the killer did. I might notice something the two of you miss."

  They argued further, but in the end, Tan agreed that it couldn’t do any harm for Kendi and Mother Ara to look around the murder scenes. Tan paid the bill and got up.

  "Since you’re both so eager," she said, "let’s start with Iris Temm’s house."

  "She died a year ago," Mother Ara said as they left the restaurant. The rain had let up, though the heavy clouds remained. "Hasn’t the place been sold?"

  Tan shook her head. "Only living relative was a sister. Woman can’t bring herself to go into the house yet or have someone dispose of the stuff inside. It’s stood vacant."

  The trip to Temm’s house involved three slippery walkways and a gondola ride. Kendi rested his chin on the gondola rail and watched green forest coast by below. The air smelled of rain and leaves. A bit of excitement grew inside him. Ben would probably be impressed that the Guardians had taken Kendi into the houses of two murder victims in one day, and Kendi could hardly wait to tell him. Then a bit of guilt stabbed him. These women were dead, and all Kendi could think about was impressing Ben? All life, he was selfish. Still, he found himself looking forward to going back to Mother Ara’s house and seeing him.

  They finally arrived at Iris’s tiny house. The windows were shut and the door was locked. Wet, dead leaves were scattered about the porch. Tan pressed her thumb to the doorplate and the lock clicked open. Kendi took a deep breath and followed Mother Ara inside.

  It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloomy interior. The air was stuffy and smelled faintly sour. After a moment, Kendi made out a living room filled with second-hand, mismatched furniture and an upright piano. A patina of dust coated everything. Kendi half expected to see a skeleton lying on the couch and chided himself for being ridiculous. Temm would have been buried long ago. Still, a vague feeling of unease crept over him. This was a dead woman’s house, and it had been left just as it was on the day she had died. The Real People told ghost stories, and he shivered at the thought of encountering a pale, angry Iris Temm with a number twelve dripping scarlet down her forehead.

  Tan opened a couple windows. The fresh air helped clear away some of Kendi’s unease but didn’t entirely erase it. "Look around," she said. "You can touch anything you want-the techs have been through half a dozen times."

  Kendi poked about the living room but saw nothing that caught his eye. A small foil-wrapped box sat on one of the wooden end tables and he took off the lid. A dozen chocolates, though an empty space gaped like a missing tooth. The remaining ones were covered with a white film. Kendi made a face and replaced the lid. Mother Ara, who was drumming her fingers on the piano, gave him an odd look but didn’t say anything. When Kendi moved away from the table, Mother Ara also reached down and took up the box.

  Next Kendi tried the bedroom. The dust made him want to sneeze but he held it back. It seemed disrespectful somehow to spray saliva in a dead woman’s bedroom. He opened a window to let in air and the smell of rain, then looked around. The bed was normal but had been stripped of its linens. Had Iris been on it when she was …? No. Mother Ara had mentioned that the body was found in the living room. Night stand, lamp, dresser. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  What were you expecting? he thought. A big box with the word "clue" written on it?

  A bit of thunder rumbled in the distance. Kendi reached for the closet, then hesitated. The knob was cool under his hand. Various childhood fears came back to him. This was a dead woman’s house, a dead woman’s closet. More thunder grumbled. Ghostly images loomed in Kendi’s mind, spirits reaching for his throat with hands that showed bloody stumps of missing fingers.

  "This bugs me," came Mother Ara’s voice from the living room, "but I can’t say why."

  Her words broke the spell. With a snort at his own silliness, Kendi flung the door open. He saw a perfectly ordinary closet. Dresses, robes, and blouses hung from hangers, all neatly placed. A series of shelves held sweaters. Several pairs of shoes made a perfect row on the floor, and several more were jumbled together in a heap. A bunch of scarves drooped from a set of hooks, one to a hook, all grouped by color.

  Something struck Kendi as wrong. He stared into the closet trying to figure out what it was. He looked harder, then stepped back to get the full picture. Something was out of place. Something-

  It was the shoes. Kendi knelt on the floor to get a closer look. Most of them were in a row, but a bunch were heaped up.

  And then Kendi had it. Everything in the closet was perfectly neat and tidy, including most of the shoes. The jumbled ones were the only messy part of the whole closet, and their presence didn’t make sense. He was reaching for a sandal when something made a slamming noise from the living room and Mother Ara cried out. Kendi jumped up and rushed out, heart pounding.

  Mother Ara was in the living room. A handprint in the dust on the piano lid showed where she had smacked it, presumably in triumph. Tan stood by the couch, her braid over one shoulder.

  "What’s the matter?" Tan and Kendi asked in unison.

  "The chocolates," Mother Ara said. "They were bothering me, but I couldn’t say why. I didn’t especially notice them before."

  "Neither did I," Tan rasped. "So what?"

  "There’s a chocolate missing. See?" Mother Ara opened the box and held it so Tan could get a look.

  "She probably ate one," Tan said. Then her expression grew interested. "You think the killer ate it? Might be able to find traces of saliva, but it’s a slim-"

  "No," Mother Ara interrupted. "I saw Iris’s medical records. Wasn’t she allergic to chocolate?"

  Tan rubbed her chin. "I think she was, yeah. So why-"

  "— would she have chocolates in the house at all?" Mother Ara finished with a victorious gleam in her eye. "Her boyfriend would almost certainly have known about her allergy and not given them to her. And she herself wouldn’t have eaten one. So who gave them to her and who took the missing one?"

  "It’s worth asking the boyfriend about," Tan said doubtfully. "Might have brought them over for himself. Or she might have bought them for him and he left them here."

  "I may be grasping at straws here," Mother Ara said, "but Iris was the twelfth victim. There were twelve chocolates in the box and now one is missing. What if the killer ‘gave’ them to her and then took one himself?"

  Tan still looked doubtful. "We’ll check into it, I guess. Don’t get your hopes up, though."

  "Maybe we should count the shoes," Kendi said.

  Blank looks followed. K
endi took the two women into the bedroom and explained. "Iris was too neat to leave her shoes jumbled around like that," he finished excitedly. "Maybe the killer did it or something."

  "But why would he?" Tan asked.

  "I don’t know," Kendi admitted. "But serial killers do weird stuff, right? Maybe this is one of them." He knelt down and started sorting shoes. With the air of someone who was humoring a child, Tan joined in. Mother Ara watched from the door. In short order, they discovered there were eleven shoes in the pile. Ten of them made pairs, leaving one extra. The trio searched the closet, then looked under the bed and in the dresser. The mate was nowhere to be found.

  "It’s a clue," Kendi said breathlessly. "Twelve shoes, but one’s missing. Twelve chocolates, but one’s missing."

  Tan was looking more excited now. "Twelve victims, but one finger is missing. The killer is taking souvenirs. Dammit, I can’t believe we missed this."

  "Fresh pairs of eyes," Mother Ara said. "Do you suppose there’s anything like this in the other houses?"

  Visibly restraining her enthusiasm, Tan got to her feet. "We should search through this house first. Look for anything else that comes in twelves-eggs, flowers, sets of dishes, anything. And good work. Both of you."

  Kendi glowed with pride and excitedly set to work searching the rest of the house, but no other sets of twelve came up. Tan gathered up the shoes and the chocolates as evidence, though she said there was little hope of finding anything on them.

  "The killer’s too smart to leave his DNA on them," she explained.

  "What about sweeping for trace DNA?" Mother Ara said. "If the killer came in to cut off Iris’s finger and take souvenirs, he couldn’t avoid leaving skin cells behind."

  "The same," Tan replied, "goes for all the other people who have ever set foot in this house. It’s at least thirty years old. If we sweep for trace DNA, we’ll get hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of sequences. It would take years just to sort them out, let alone identify who they belonged to. Come on-I want to get another look at Vera Cheel’s house."