Issue #196 : The Instrument
[image error]
Davis leaned back in the chair and gazed down at the photographs, trying to not look as bored with the interview as he felt.
“So when exactly during all of this did you happen to come around from behind the dumpster?” Carlson asked as he scratched some notes on his pad.
“I told you,” the vagrant looked annoyed. “The noises stopped so I thought it was safe. I came out and found that guy slitting some poor bastard’s throat.”
“Right. Tell us again about what happened after that. What was the suspect doing?”
The vagrant nodded and seemed to look past them for a moment. “Yeah, I figured that part would be the thing. He had a…it looked like he was taking the blood and…look, you’re going to think I’m nuts.”
“Sir, just tell me, I promise we won’t think any less of you.”
The man snorted. “You know that don’t mean much if you already think I’m a piece of shit? Don’t matter. Okay, so I come around the corner. I see him making the guy dead and what I saw was a pen in his hand. He was holding the pen up to the guy’s neck, like he as trying to fill it. Like it was ink?”
That made Davis perk up somewhat, out of interest. He suddenly felt the weight of the pen in his pocket, the same pen he had found at the crime scene.
“What did the pen look like?” Carlson asked.
“I don’t know. It was a pen. How the hell do you describe a pen that you only saw from across an alley? It looked expensive, that’s all I can tell you.”
Davis had had that exact thought that night, as he bent down to pick the thing up off the ground. He thought it looked like the kind of pen that would go for a few hundred bucks in a high end jewelry shop. The thing certainly wrote like it was worth that much. It was the first time in his long career that he actually looked forward to filling out reports. It was almost like they wrote themselves and his hand was just along for the ride. It almost seemed like the pen did the work for him. It was an absurd notion but still, he wasn’t going to be giving it up any time soon.
He noticed Carlson staring at him expectedly. “Is that what you wanted me to hear?” he asked.
His partner’s face became noticeably disappointed as he shifted his gaze towards the back wall. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Davis turned back to their witness. “We’ll be in touch if we need anything else. Thanks for coming back down.”
The man nodded as he stood to leave the room.
“What was the point of that?” Davis asked.
“What do you mean?” Carlson responded.
“Who cares if he was trying to fill a fountain pen with the guy’s blood? We already knew he was crazy. It isn’t like the pen was the murder weapon. Nothing about any of this changes because of a pen. Why don’t you just forget it?”
“Forget it?” Carlson asked incredulously. “Are you kidding me? Do you remember anything you’ve pounded into my head over the last year? You never falsify a record, you never leave something out because you might think it’s irrelevant. Someone other than us has to make that call.”
“Okay, so you want to be the one to march up to the Lieutenant’s office and tell him that the perp was dipping his pen into the vic’s neck so he could get fresh ink for his pen? And by the way, we don’t actually have said pen, just some drunk’s version of what happened. It doesn’t make any difference. Pen or no pen, it’s an open and closed case. The victim is dead and the flat-foots out on patrol took out the suspect. Everyone’s dead. Please don’t keep this file open over a fucking pen.”
Carlson stared at him for so long that Davis was sure he was seeing straight through the bullshit, down to his real reason for begging off of this. After an elongated pause though, he finally nodded. “Fine. I’ll take the paperwork upstairs. You don’t need to bother staying around, there isn’t much left to do.”
The weeks following went by surprisingly quickly and uneventfully. What little work came across his desk was dispatched quickly and efficiently. The pen had become almost an extension of himself. When he needed to write something, his hand would be drawn to the pen, pulling it down to the paper as the pen itself did all the hard work. The ink was breathtaking, a deep-colored crimson that never seemed to fade on the page.
“Hey, Davis! You going for some kind of Goth award with this or something?” One of the clerks had yelled at him across the station one day, waving Davis’ paperwork around in the air like a loon, laughing at the formal-looking script which his handwriting had become. Davis ignored him. Let them give him as much shit as they wanted. Made no difference to him. Work was going well and he wasn’t going to do anything to get in the way of that. Promotions had to be right over the next horizon and he was going to get there even faster than he had previously thought.
Then the ink in the pen ran dry.
“What is wrong with you?” Carlson asked him, several mornings after the pen’s ink had dwindled down to nothing. “Did your grocery store run out of coffee or something? You look like you’ve been going like a week without sleep.”
It had only been a few days but already he felt completely out of sorts. And nearly every conscious moment, he felt his hand being drawn to the pen, felt the urge to take it up and write something, anything. But as much as he wanted to follow through with that need, it wasn’t possible. There was no ink. He tried going to the office supply stores. He stocked up on ink cartridges that looked like they would fit the pen. Several of them fit but whenever he tried to write, nothing happened, the ink would not flow.
Davis took the original ink cartridge from the desk drawer and held it up. It was made of metal, and the size of it made him think that it was meant to be re-used. Likely it dated back to a time when it would have been unheard of to go out and buy a bag full of disposable pens. But for all the jars and bottles of ink he purchased, nothing happened, nothing worked. The pen took some kind of specialized, exotic ink but he didn’t even know where to start, where to…
The guy had been dipping the pen in blood.
Davis sat up with a start and the pen squirted out of his hand, clattering across the desk. He lunged forward, his breath catching in his throat as he grabbed at it, trapping the pen against the side of the desk, just before it fell. Letting out a slow breath, he carefully rolled it back up onto the desk and placed it in the special protective case in his pocket.
This was getting even more crazy than it had been before. Any absurd notion he had considered leading up to that moment vanished in a fog of mental fracturing.
It was the blood.
That was the only coherent thought he could muster, the only explanation that made sense even though it terrified him more than anything else ever had. It was the blood. But it couldn’t be, it made no sense, it was crazy. Why would he even contemplate the possibility that somehow the pen only worked because…
It was the blood.
Davis shook his head. He was sitting in his apartment as the office slowly faded out of his consciousness. He vaguely recalled walking home but not much more than that. This had to stop, he needed his focus, his attention, everything that had been lacking ever since the ink in that pen had gone dry. How had he even managed to exist before he had it and what was he supposed to do now that it was gone? Because it wasn’t like he could just go out there and get blood, could he?
Could he?
Another day. And another. And another.
Another.
Finally, after another week, he found himself holding the ink cartridge to his arm, watching with trembling hands as his blood slowly dripped into the opening. In his mind’s eye, he imagined that he probably didn’t look that dissimilar from many of the other drugged out addicts he busted out there. Still, when he brought the tip of the pen to the paper and began writing, the ink flowed out, temporarily causing the pressure beating against his forehead to cease.
It was the blood.
But of course that little bit he had harvested from himself did not last. And it wasn’t like he could just keep perpetually bleeding himself. He had to find another solution because he could not stand an existence without his Instrument ready, whenever he needed it.
And in the waning moments of the final day, the last remaining pieces of Davis’ sanity dissolved down into the leavings of paranoid suspicion. The blood was what he needed, what he needed to collect in order for his Instrument to work. It was beyond his control, forces beyond his understanding had put him on this path. The only thing left was to deliver exactly what the Instrument required. Then, and only then would his sanity return as well as his sense of control and confidence.
The Instrument was what mattered more than anything.
Even more than him.
The Instrument was beautiful.
[image error]
