I was alone

01Nov

I passed the last of the costumed revelers on my way downtown. Most of them were drunk or recovering from drink and they yelled to each other and laughed loudly. The financial district, however, was largely deserted except for the handful of late night workers handling overseas markets— or trying to salvage their careers. Windows of the skyscrapers overhead were only sporadically lit. It was chilly, and the streets were wet from an earlier rain.

The foyer of the building was all marble, swirling in off-white and blue-green, like the color of dollars. I remember stepping in and realizing how much cathedrals, mausoleums, and old banks all looked alike. Couldn’t be a coincidence. Big columns ran down both sides of the hall. There was a row of four elevators at the back, just to the left of a little guard desk. Two rent-a-cops sat behind it, bored out of their wits.

One of them stood when he saw me. “Good evening, Detective.”

I’d burned all of my clothes from the adventure at the John D and changed into cargo pants, boots, and a heavy sweater. I had a gun strapped to my back underneath it.

“Do I know you?”

“They’re expecting you.”

He motioned to the elevators, one of which opened as if on cue. I stepped in cautiously. The button for the top floor had already been pressed. There was a camera in the ceiling. Someone somewhere was watching.

The doors closed and I rode to the top in silence. There wasn’t even any elevator music. There was only a soft ding at the top as the doors opened. The corridor was dimly lit and plushly carpeted. To my left, discordant chamber music emanated from the other side of a set of heavy drapes. About a dozen guys waited in the foyer, in front of the coat check. They were all in fancy suits with dark red vests. They were all armed, too. I could tell by the bulge of their coats.

A dozen.

Not even on my best day.

But they didn’t move. Except for one. He walked to the drapes and parted them. The music got louder and I saw one sliver of a beautiful view of the city. The ballroom windows faced north, back up the full length of Manhattan. Best skyline in the world.

“Good evening, Detective,” the man said. “Please go right in.”

I looked at the guards sitting in waiting chairs and leaning against the wall. They looked back. I stepped forward through the drapes, which hung not from the door but from the high ceiling. They covered the entire back wall. There was a giant crystal chandelier overhead, only dimly lit.  Revelers filled the long hall, but it wasn’t crowded. Many of them were costumed. Some wore those masks like the doctors had during the black plague, faces covered in hooked beaks. There was lots of chatter. They were celebrating something, although it got much quieter when they saw me.

High-backed chairs were place tastefully about in a staggered pattern such that one wouldn’t have to directly face another. Next to each was an elevated chafing dish that released wisps of smoke. An assistant chief of police sat in the chair nearest me. His pants were on the carpet around his ankles and he was having his dick sucked by a naked woman young enough to be his daughter.

“Detective,” he said, eyes rolling back in pleasure. “I’m glad . . . Oh. To see you’ve redeemed yourself. Although . . . ohhh . . . I admit I was looking forward. Ah. To bringing formal charges against you. Ahh. On Monday.”

“Charges? For?”

He tossed a hand into the air nonchalantly and let it fall. “Oh, something or other. It would’ve hardly mattered.”

I felt a little woozy then. The smoke from the chafing dishes had some kind of drug in it. I could smell it—that and the sweet odor of burnt flesh. I covered my mouth. I shook my head to clear it.

“Yessss . . .” he said. “Wonderful feeling, isn’t it?”

I turned away from him, forearm over my mouth, and saw the wall of beating hearts. Pairs of bubbling tubes fed and drained each organ. There were so many. And you could feel them. Shaking your chest with their beats. The collection filled the wall evenly from floor to ceiling. Each was individually illuminated inside an oblong crystal container: delicate decanter glass, rounded but irregularly shaped. Each was unique, as were the hearts inside. I never knew there was so much variation. I always thought human hearts were more or less the same. But they’re not. Some are larger. Some are darker. And some are stronger.

In the middle of the wide room, directly under the chandelier and directly over the giant pentagram knit into the dark carpet, a circle of high-backed chairs surrounded a young girl. She was standing, as if on display. Her dark hair hung in front of her face, which was turned in shame. Her nearly-naked body shivered from cold and fear. She wore a sports bra and matching panties, both sullied. The bra had a little pink flower in the center. Her arms were pressed to her side and she leaned slightly as if trying to slide away. There stacks of money on small side tables next the chairs, yuan and euros and dollars. At first, I thought they were auctioning her or something. But it was worse than that. So much worse.

It was a game. Next to her in the ring was a well-suited man holding a hand cannon, a shiny fifty-caliber revolver. They were playing roulette. They were gambling on which spin of the cylinder would blow her head clean off. Win or lose, one fat ante bought you a ringside seat to the action, close enough to feel the splatter. Like at Sea World.

I wondered what they did to the body after. While it was still warm.

The man with the gun was immobile. He’d turned his mascaraed eyes to me—as had the revelers in all the corners—but he didn’t move, and there was nothing to reveal his thoughts except the bulge in his tailored pants. Motherfucker had an erection.

I recognized some of the people in the chairs, men and women both. They were important. Mayors and talk show hosts and social media tycoons. They looked back at me without shame or fear. And why would they? I could’ve stormed in with an entire film crew in tow. What difference would it have made? They controlled everything. They had everything. And they wanted more.

I hoped Étranger would come bursting through the doors behind me then, tattooed palms filled with mighty magicks, and send them all to hell.

But he didn’t come.

No one came.

It was just me.

I was alone.

A light clicked on at the far end of the room, and I saw a chair. A throne. It was raised on a multi-leveled dais. It was bigger than the one at Étranger’s. Much bigger. The back fanned outward like a peacock’s tail. It was made of shining white bones. Human bones. Martyrs. So many of them.

Hands, clawing to be free.

Spines, twisted and broken.

Long bones, studded with nail heads.

And at the base, skulls. Jawless. Empty. Hollow. Yet still silently screaming. They were turned every which way as if pressed together by the sheer weight of he who sits.

But no one sat.

The throne was empty.

“We thought it might be you.”

A man stepped from the mostly silent crowd. Even the music had stopped. Everyone was watching me.

He saw the confusion on my face.

“Did you think you were the only one?”

I didn’t recognize him. He was older, mid 60s maybe, and well groomed. A rich man, it seemed, although I’m not sure I could’ve picked him out of a lineup of rich men. They all look the same.

A woman got up from the roulette game. She was in a beautiful designer dress, bone white.

“We set a dozen people against him,” she explained. “But most didn’t last. You were the most tenacious. The most fearless. The most reckless. You should be congratulated.”

I looked to the empty throne rising over the hall.

“Where’s the Lord of Shadows?”

Everyone laughed. It rose and fell softly like the chatter of birds.

“Right there.” The woman pointed to the empty throne. “You may kneel before him.”

Another man stepped forward, to my left and a little behind. He removed a white cushioned mask that looked like it had been made from the padded cell of a sanitarium. The mouth was pulled taut to one side, as if it had been hooked and dragged. It was awful. His face was dark complected and he spoke with a European accent.

“It was important that you act of your own free will. If we had cursed or enchanted you in any way, the wizard’s lapdog would have smelled it.”

I looked at the crowd. “Celebrating?”

“Indeed,” the older man, the one closest me, spoke again. “Today is a day of celebration. For there was only ever one. And now he’s gone. Thanks to you.”

I swallowed a lump.

He turned and raised his hand and the curtain on the wall parted and revealed a large screen. The already dim lights all but faded. Images appeared. Local news. Live coverage.

Bistro Indigenes was on fire. The whole building was engulfed in flames, consumed by bright orange pillars spiraling fifty feet into the sky. Firemen were battling the inferno on three sides, but they were only trying to contain it, to keep it from spreading. Everything inside was destroyed, or would be very soon. The art. The artifacts.

The chair.

I stared in silence as a perky bilingual commentator did her best to sound grave. Sports scores scrolled across the bottom.

“He was too well protected,” the woman in the dress explained. “The marks on his palms. His dog, the man Dench. A man without a heart is a man who cannot be corrupted. And the woman he keeps with him. Nearly two-and-a-half centuries old. Cursed with immortality. Not an easy woman to get around.”

“No, we never had to destroy him,” the man with the accent explained. “As with a dike, we needed only to poke a hole. The entire world would rush in to finish the job.”

I lowered my head. In my mind, I saw cracks in a window.

I’d been a weapon.

So fucking clever. Say the magic word, right?

Standing before the door on the roof of the sanctum, no one had yet said “please” in the man’s native tongue. It isn’t French. He wasn’t taken to France until later. It isn’t Portuguese, either, which is what they speak in Brazil. It isn’t anything anyone speaks anymore. It’s a tribal-specific dialect of a dead language, indigenous to the Amazon and only described in a single obscure monograph by husband-and-wife anthropologists Monsieur et Madame Étranger-sur-whatever. They described it at length. It doesn’t mean “please” like we would mean. It means something like “let us be brothers.”

I pulled my gun and pointed it at the older man, the one who was first to speak.

They all laughed again, longer this time. The chatter filled the room up to its height, where wasps were buzzing. Thousands.

“How do you think magic works?” he asked. “You think you pull that trigger and the bullet passes through me?” He shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. Only technology is so crude. One day, one of the acolytes of The Machine will invent a way to do that, I’m sure—become intangible to bullets—and you all will think you’re soooo clever.

“But tell me, which is more powerful: the abortive ability to let bullets pass”—buttons fell as he pulled open his expensive shirt—“or the aura that simply ensures none are fired at all?”

The skin of his white-haired chest was burned. Swollen and scarred with runes. Different than the chef’s. Harder. Angled. Hidden under clothing and forged in pain. I had learned enough to know that was probably significant.

I kept the gun level and released the safety.

“Do it,” he said, stepping closer.

When I didn’t respond immediately, he grabbed the barrel of the gun and thrust it at his heart.

“Here!” he said. “Right here. Don’t shoot me in the head. There’s some chance I might survive as a vegetable. Shoot me in the heart. Blow it out my chest. Then I will be sure to die, and my lords will greet me.”

I felt the trigger once. Then twice.

He smiled. “But first, perhaps you should take another look in the ring.”

I turned and recognized her immediately. The girl in the sullied underpants. She still had her arms curled around her half-naked body, but I could see her face then. She was older, and heavier, which made sense I suppose, but it was definitely her. Alexa. She was terrified. She didn’t recognize me, of course. How could she? We had never actually met.

I went to her immediately, but as soon as I crossed the circle in the carpet, I felt sick. I stumbled.

My audience moved, and fearing I was about to be overtaken, I planted my feet and raised my gun defiantly as I tried to get control of my body. I wanted to vomit. It was violently rising inside me, like a bubbling lake.

Then, standing there inside the giant pentagram-filled circle, gun swinging around, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Out the windows. In the distance. Past the lights and skyscrapers, there was a ring around the city—a green aurora that shifted and shimmered. It was enormous, miles and miles across.

I looked down. I didn’t see dark carpet. I saw a tunnel to a dark place. It was as wide as the aurora and so very, very deep. I had a sense of distance like I’d never had before. The human brain, you know, it does okay with numbers up to a point—a hundred or even a thousand. We can hold the total of that in our minds at one time. But once you get up to a million or billion or quadrillion, the numbers become abstract. We don’t have a sense of how far away the sun sits, 93 million miles from us, the same way we have a sense of the space between where we are and the nearest grocery store.

I had a sense then of distance beyond the human scale. And of beasts at the far end of it who were closing that distance at unbelievable speed. Six giants, all tentacles and wings.

The same ones I had seen in my dreams as a child.

They were coming. And an army followed.

In my distraction, the silent crowd closed, and I sprang to Alexa and took her arm. I held my gun aloft and swung it around.

“Stay back!”

But no one had moved. It had been an illusion. Or my head spinning from the nausea.

“Take the child,” the woman said with a wave, “if that is what you wish. She was nothing but a little light entertainment before dinner.”

“Consider her a parting gift,” the man with the accent added. “Take her and leave with our benediction.”

“But leave you will, Detective,” the old man said. “Your usefulness has ended.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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