by Platt, Sean
Caleb stared at nothing, tumbling known facts in his head, trying to pull sense from insanity. Usually, his analytical mind functioned with precision, spitting instant responses. Seeing the man who might have killed his wife clouded the process.
He bit hard on his inner cheek. The metallic taste of blood flooded his gums.
He ordered his agents to send video stills to headquarters, cross-check the system for matches. They had already issued regional Be On the Look Outs for the victim’s presumably stolen vehicle. If they couldn’t find a name to match the killer’s face, they’d continue to the next step, releasing info to the media to see if anyone could provide an identity or location of their suspect.
Caleb loathed releasing details to the press. He’d prefer to keep things quiet and make his job simple.
Beneath the white-hot heat of the media spotlight, it would be hard to kill the man once he found him.
Hard, but not impossible.
Caleb’s radio crackled through the silence. “Boss, you need to see this. In the master bedroom upstairs.”
Caleb ascended the steps two at a time then entered the room with an all-too-familiar sinking in his gut. Hundreds of DVDs and photographs were poured onto the bed, and two agents were starting at something on a laptop.
Caleb knew what was on the video before his eyes hit the screen.
A young dark-haired girl no more than eleven, underneath a naked bald man — the one from downstairs. The camera was zoomed in on the girl’s glazed eyes — this was not the first time she’d been raped.
She stared into the camera, held by someone, likely the girlfriend, judging from what the lens focused on most — the girl’s eyes. Caleb figured the camera woman was likely a victim at one point, too.
The child’s numb expression, as the bald man raped her, stabbed Caleb in the guts. Whoever the girl had been, that person had died long ago, leaving a shell not unlike those downstairs.
He averted his gaze, turning it to the bed, toward the pile of evidence. Caleb spotted a few other children in the photos, though none with the bald man. They were likely gathered from Internet newsgroups or traded with other pedophiles. The mind boggled at how many children’s slow deaths were chronicled in the mound of evidence.
Agent Ramirez handed Caleb a photograph of the girl from the video, the image no less shocking.
“Found that in his printer tray, which allowed us to secure an emergency search warrant,” Ramirez explained. “Then we found all this in the closet.”
If the rapist weren’t already a roasted slab of pork, Caleb would surely have run downstairs and put the gun to the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Twice.
“Did you see that?” Ramirez pointed to something on-screen.
Ramirez looked around the room and back at the screen. “The closet in the video — it’s this closet! He shot the video right here.”
Caleb looked at the screen. Sure enough, this was the room in the video. But who was the victim? The neighbors said the couple lived alone, and the other rooms in the home served as storage, showing no sign of any children living with them. Maybe it was a niece, a neighbor girl, or …
Something in the video caught his eyes.
“Rewind it.” Caleb pointed at the corner of the screen. “Okay, stop. Pause it there!”
Ramirez, puzzled, turned to the screen. “What are you looking at?”
It was hard to look beyond the evil in the foreground, but just beyond the monster, inside the closet, Caleb saw something that made his heart pound up into his throat.
He raced to the closet.
Light already on, contents strewn about from the earlier search. He tossed clothes and half-empty boxes aside, his hands furiously searching the back wall.
Only it wasn’t a wall.
It was a hidden door.
On the floor, behind a men’s size 12 Nike, an open padlock with a key sticking out like an arrow in a bull’s eye. Caleb’s eyes locked on the door as if he could will his eyes to see through it.
He wanted to spin around and ask how the fuck everyone in the room managed to miss a goddamned hidden door in the closet, but he didn’t want to alert whoever might be on the other side to his discovery.
He drew his gun and glanced back at his agents to make sure they were doing the same — every one of them was.
Caleb pressed against the door. It clicked and moved forward a half inch. He pulled it open the rest of the way, gun ready, to a 10 by 10 room, or rather a holding cell, painted in garish pink with a mattress on the floor.
Dirty sheets with Dora the Explorer.
Stuffed animals lay in a row along a blue pillow.
Stagnant air reeking of waste steeped in a bowl in the corner.
“Jesus,” someone said behind Caleb.
Where is the girl?
“We’ve got a possible missing child,” Caleb spoke into his radio. “Maybe kidnapped by our murder suspect. We’re sending a photo. Add this to the BOLOs.”
He instructed his agents to find out how many other girls were on the discs to see if they could verify if the dark-haired girl was indeed the room’s most recent prisoner.
Caleb glanced back at the monster on-screen and prayed the girl wasn’t now in the hands of something worse.
Two
The Amnesiac
Last night
He woke amid the darkness, breath barely budging from a shallow prison of angry lungs. The man gasped for air, nearly hyperventilating in the confined space. He tried to lift his leaden head but could barely move an inch. Walls surrounded him on all sides. His arms, he realized with dread, were fixed against his sides as though bound.
His mind scrambled to make sense of his surroundings. A horribly long minute later, his fingers confirmed he was captive in a box. The smell of earth. A coffin.
I’m not dead, his mind started to scream.
His mouth made sounds that refused to become words.
Panic set deep. His whispering breath reached for a pant, echoing against his tomb’s narrow walls in perfect time with his pounding heart.
What happened?
Why am I buried?
His voice whimpered through the suffocation. He heard his own cries of “No, no, no” as he tried to shake life into his limbs. The voice was part his, part child — mostly frightened animal.
His body bristled from a billion invisible needles, impeding thought and dulling his motion. Finally, with a strength the man didn’t know he had, behind a panic that could be borne only by waking in one’s grave, he shoved his forearms madly against the wood above. He heard a snap, then another, as his prison lid shifted ever so slightly.
It was the sound of triumph: freedom seemed possible, if he wanted it badly enough.
He clawed, scraped, and pushed at the darkness above with blunt, awkward blows, blotting the bulkhead with blood he could smell but not see. He fought his way upward, using first his arms and then his knees, finally his head — anything for leverage. His arms shot forward, no longer meeting resistance. The lid lifted and fell to the earth with a thick, muffled thud.
The moon mocked his confusion, a Cheshire Cat smile in the starlit sky.
He collapsed into the cold dirt, sucking crisp air into his stale lungs in bottomless mouthfuls, then exhaling breath in hot gusts of steam, which evaporated into midnight’s frigid air.
His body tensed from the nearby sound of movement, and he pulled himself upright to peer into the darkness.
Thick woods surrounded him. Tree branches pierced the gloaming like ink-stained daggers, barely illuminated by the pale silver moon. Shivering, he looked down at his bloodied bare arms and chest. His torn jeans were soaked in blood.
He would have screamed for help, but something — he wasn’t quite sure what — stopped the man cold.
Beside him, a shovel bulged from a mound of dirt: an invitation for his gravedigger to return and finish the job.
His head throbbed, his thoughts were mush, and he couldn’t rem
ember anything, much less how he wound up buried.
Jesus Christ, I was drugged, kidnapped, and Lord knows what else.
Another sound. Movement. A branch breaking.
He realized with a horrible certainty — whoever dropped him in the dirt wasn’t gone, or finished.
He glanced again at the shovel and swallowed. He forced his body into an awkward sprint, wobbly legs pushing him into a blind stumble.
Just run.
He raced from his tomb into the night, scrambling forward into the black forest as fast as his weakened legs would go. Sharp pain lanced his sprint. Branches clawed his flesh. Jagged rocks and warped roots turned the pads of his feet into gore. The man was certain he’d fall at any second, but instincts pushed him forward despite the pain.
He was prey, and expected his predator any second. Perhaps a scream, or a gunshot to split the silence and stop him in his tracks. He ran, every step of blind terror shoving him deeper into the horrible dark.
His thoughts ran even faster.
Who was after him?
What had they done to him?
And the puzzler to top them all: Who was he?
The man remembered nothing of his past. Not his occupation, not his location, not even his name. Stumbling through amnesia, he pressed against his pants pockets, searching for a wallet, perhaps some identification. There was no wallet. Instead, he found a balled up piece of paper, damp with sweat. He could see lights ahead, dots where the trees finally thinned. He looked for a place with enough light to stop and unfold the paper. As he got closer, his eyes adjusted to the squares and rectangles making up a row of two-story homes, backs facing the woods.
He moved closer and stepped from the woods into one of the few back yards without a privacy fence. He chanced upon a clothesline dipped low with damp garments. He snagged a shirt from the line as a series of lights flicked on along the roof. The shirt slipped from his fingers, and he scurried away, slipping in cold, wet grass, racing off with a final fearful glance back.
Agony pounded between his eyes and sent the amnesiac to his knees. He wanted to crawl to someone’s stoop, pound on a door and plead for help, but a whisper inside warned him against it.
Help can only hurt you.
Someone is searching. Someone wants you dead, and until you remember who, stay invisible.
He swam through ugly bits of blurred, incomprehensible memory, searching for anything that made sense. Vague flashes of people he couldn’t recognize, but nothing with clarity.
Maybe his memories were clouded by the pain. If he could find a spot to rest, everything else might fall into place. Though he’d woken just moments before, his body was about to shut down on him if he didn’t find somewhere to rest.
Part of him wondered if he had died. And perhaps his body’s reluctance to move meant it craved a return to its former state.
He didn’t want to lie down if it meant dying, though he couldn’t continue in this state.
He saw a shed behind one of the other homes without a fence. It sat far in the back yard, bathed in the shadows of several trees. He glanced up at the windows, black squares against slate. Either nobody was home, or — he hoped — the occupants were sleeping.
The amnesiac slid inside the shed and pinched his eyes at the dim light: lawn equipment, an old bike, and several large plastic storage containers. Easily enough room to lie down. He grabbed a pair of hedge clippers from a rack in case his pursuer found him.
He was about to shut the door when he remembered the paper in his fist. He set the hedge clippers down and looked at the crumpled note.
The man unfolded the paper and noticed his trembling hands. He tried calming his breath with little success and moved closer to the open shed door, seeking the moon’s scant light. The handwritten words proved easier to read than he would have thought.
312 Hanover Street
Trust Nobody. Especially the law.
Avoid the sunlight! Don’t touch anybody!
What the hell?
The man sat still for a moment trying to assemble sense from the words when he thought to find his reflection in one of the home’s windows. Maybe if he saw himself, he might trigger a memory.
But his body refused to cooperate.
Instead, the man collapsed.
A woman’s scream shattered his sleep.
A shrill, terrified rattle woke him with a start and swamped his mind with a horrifying reel of a woman in distress. At first, he thought the scream had come from being discovered in the shed. He reached out, searching for the hedge clippers, prepared to defend himself.
But he was alone.
The scream was coming from the house. Windows were no longer dark.
“Get out!” the woman screamed.
The amnesiac crept toward the shed’s open door. It was still dark outside, but the night seemed somehow more alive.
Did I sleep an entire day?
He could clearly see inside the large window at the home’s rear. The blinds were open to the scream’s source, a thin woman wearing a T-shirt nearly as black as the hair spilling just past her shoulders. She thrust a finger into the face of a bald man the size of a linebacker. He was terrifying from the back; the amnesiac could only imagine the atrocity of his face.
“Get the fuck out!” she shouted, her voice cracking.
The bald man swung a beefy arm and sent the woman sprawling to the floor like a rag doll. The amnesiac felt his stomach drop, shocked by the sudden violence.
And then it got immediately worse.
She fell out of view, then the bald man grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her back up. He punched her in the face, and she dropped again. He bent over, leaving only the top of his back in view. The hulking steroid case wailed on the woman, blow upon blow, elbows flying in and out of sight as he bellowed an incoherent mix of cursing and angry, random words.
He’s going to fucking kill her.
Without thinking, the amnesiac raced from the shed toward the sliding glass doors at the home’s rear. The first was locked. The second wasn’t. He shouldered through the verticals and into the bright family room where the giant was still battering the woman. She pled through thick sobs while shielding herself from his fury. Her arms had caught the brunt of the attack and were fire engine red from their effort.
The bald man was too busy with the beating to notice the intruder, allowing the amnesiac plenty of time to search for a weapon. He scanned the space, decided on a wooden chair from the adjoining dining room, then grabbed it, hoisted it above his head, and charged toward the bastard like a train off its tracks.
His footfalls were a siren to the bald man. He spun around — Oh Christ, that face — just as the chair came crashing down into the man’s head with a sick, wet thump.
The wounded man fell back on top of the woman as his hand reached out and grabbed a leg of the chair. He wrested it away from the intruder and flung it aside, regaining his footing surprisingly fast for such a fat man.
The hulking beast rose, his eyes a brew of confusion and cold, dark predatory rage as they locked onto the amnesiac. Sticky crimson and chunks of fatty tissue poured from a wound on his forehead and dribbled into his mouth, an angry maw of bad dental work.
The bald man did the unthinkable, venting a dry, heaving laugh before swinging a lumbering punch that missed its mark but caused the amnesiac to stumble back and tumble to the ground.
The bald man wiped blood from his face, glared at the amnesiac, and charged. His hands closed around the amnesiac’s neck, and a violent wave of energy exploded between the men. But instead of falling back from the explosion, the bald man could not pull away. His hands were fused to the amnesiac’s neck. The bald man’s hands, then his entire body, began to violently shake.
“What … the fuck?” His voice was garbled, eyes bulging as he shook.
The amnesiac pushed at the man’s arms, attempting to break free. But fate said no. Waves of energy tore through his body, as though his hands had wrap
ped a live wire. An invisible explosion of sparks burst from the bald man and into the intruder’s fingers, flooding first his veins and then his senses.
His body felt ablaze. Fire tickled his nerves then twisted into a feeling of impossible strength. The amnesiac watched, as if a spectator in his body, as the horrifying scene unfolded.
The bald man continued to convulse, his skin bubbling, a thousand currents writhing like snakes beneath his skin. His eyes were hollowed out holes of blackened smoke as thick ropes of blood poured over his engorged tongue and out his open mouth.
If the bald man still had eyes, the last thing he’d have seen would’ve been his skin burning ashy gray as the remaining life drained from his body.
An unearthly wail from the woman behind him: “Oh, my God!”
The amnesiac looked back as she flung herself forward to save the dying abuser who’d just tried to kill her. She tripped instead, falling into the amnesiac’s arms. Their skin touched. Her body shook, and a new fire crackled to life.
The amnesiac panicked and tried to pull free. He didn’t want to kill her but couldn’t break their connection. He fed off the fire, unwillingly, feeling it flood his body like the pure adrenaline of infinity.
Energy pulsed in his veins, radiating through his muscles, bone, and skin. He felt his every pore suddenly alive like never before. Some part of himself — some non-physical part — soared up and out of his body, spiraling into the heavens above.
He floated above the earth and surveyed the neat rows of houses and trees below. The night teemed with life. He closed his eyes, feeling the vitality of a hundred thousand living things below as surely as he felt the cool breeze whip by the body of his floating ghost.
What? was all he could think.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them back in his body, staring down at the mosaic of two charred corpses.
What the hell am I?
He stared down at the burned bodies in disbelief. Then at his own flesh, now free of the scratches, scrapes, and cuts that had lacerated his body minutes before. The pulse of new life beat hard in his blood.
