Personal Effects: Dark Art

20

I barely remembered showering and dressing the next morning. Every element of the morning ritual—pedaling my Cannondale to the subway station, the rumbling ride on the LIRR train, chaining my bike outside The Brink, morning coffee, coworker conversation, elevator ride—it all streaked by like a traffic time-lapse video, all forgettably anonymous and unimportant. I did not visit my other patients this morning. I had a single purpose. Richard Drake.

I strode down the hallway of Level 5, taking a heartbeat to appreciate the steady lights above. I spotted Emilio Wallace, back at his post by Room 507, and waved. He raised a hand and made a half-hearted motion in return. The gesture reminded me of the ubiquitous robotic wave of a pageant contestant. He wasn’t smiling.

I repressed a shiver as I slowed my pace and drew closer. The hallway’s strobing mania may have disappeared, but Emilio appeared to have inherited it. His eyes blinked and twitched like a paranoiac’s. Black Samsonite bags hung above his cheeks. He hadn’t shaved. His lips trembled; he alternately pressed them together and blew air from them, sputtering nonsense.

I stared up at him. It was incomprehensible, whatever had happened to my friend. Emilio’s massive shoulders were unnaturally tight, kicking well past his collarbone. The man’s meaty hands seemed electrified, grasping at nothing, fingers playing invisible notes on a piano.

“Emilio,” I whispered. “Oh my God, man. Are you… feeling okay?”

His chisled face crumpled, then twisted into a spasmodic smile. The flesh around his bloodshot blue eyes crinkled. His capped teeth chittered. I wanted to hug the man. I wanted turn and run.

“Fffff. Fuh-fuh-fuh.” He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. It was heartbreaking. “Fuh-fine. Juh. Juh.”

“Just?” Just?”

He barked a laugh, nodding enthusiastically. The sound echoed in the empty hall. “Just. Just chillin’.” His crazed smile eked even wider.

“Dude, come on. It’s me. Zach. You know, ‘Yo, Z.’ We’re buds. What happened”

“Ffffollowed me,” he said. “Huh-huh-home. Huh-haunted. Haunted… housssse.”

I felt the blood leave my face.

“What followed you”

Emilio glanced past us—right, left, down the hallway—and leaned down, as if to tell me a secret. His wild eyes widened. He tittered.

“Thh.” His voice was a conspiratorial whisper. “The vuh-vampire.”

He was sick. No question. Absolutely none.

“You should go home,” I said.

“Home is where the sssstart is,” Emilio said. His face devolved into a bitter, saddened sneer. His voice was a low rumble. “Sssstarts there. Whi-whispers. Ink on the wuh-walls. Sluh-sliding across the walls.”

I took a step backward, and immediately hated myself for doing it. Emilio didn’t notice.

“Vacation,” I heard myself say. “Get away from this place, man. Take a week, damn, take two. Far away.”

“Need the muh, muh—”

“No you don’t, not this bad,” I said. “You should really go. Like, now. Think of your boys, man. You gotta be right—um—ah, fuck it. You gotta be right in your head for them. You gotta be their dad.”

He brightened… as much as his ticking muscles would allow. He nodded again, more slowly this time. More controlled.

I nodded back. “Okay, game plan, buddy. Let me in. I’ll be there for a bit, but when I come out, we’re going to the infirmary, getting you once-overed. After that, your ass is taking a holiday.”

“‘okay.”

“Katabatic,” I said. I gave him an encouraging smile. “Let’s do this.”

Keys jittered in trembling hands. Tumblers fell. Hinges shrieked.

I entered Room 507, for what I hoped would be the last time.

The room blazed white as I flipped the light switch. Richard Drake sat in his chair—I wondered, fleetingly, if he ever stood, or slept—and his eyes were open, blankly staring at the thing before him. The second chair. My patient had been busy, planned for company.

My gaze shifted to the wall on my right. Holy shit.

He’d been very busy.

It was another full-wall mural, drawn from the pastels I’d left, etched in the same incomprehensible, scratch-swirl style as its twin across the room. I pulled the cell phone from my pocket once more. The phone pinged, a new photo stored inside.

“It’s another amazing piece, Richard. It really is.”

“Don’t call me that,” Drake said. His voice had the inflectionless tone of an insomniac. “Go to hell. Go away.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“You won’t.”

“No. I can’t. Not built for it. But you’ve known that feeling.”

Drake’s eyes blinked slowly. “Yes.”

I sat down, watching him. His face was expressionless, inscrutable.

“I’m heading to my office soon, Richard. I’m going to fill out a form ahead of schedule—and for me, that’s something just short of miraculous—and I’m going to sign it. My boss will smile his peculiar elfish smile and say, ‘Very good, Zachary.’ My father will be furious. And your lawyer will do the Snoopy dance.

“You’ve sensed me spin and hustle these past four days, dribbling through my legs, trying to squeak past your defense. But you’re impervious. You’re a pro. And while I scrambled and fumbled and dug in, dug into your past, dug straight to Hell like you told me to, your tactic remained the same, Richard. You clutched to your sins and your guilt, convicting yourself, wrapping that black blanket tight.”

I sighed. The ancient chair beneath me sighed, too.

“You are not mentally competent to stand trial.”

Drake stiffened. His eyes widened slightly.

“I didn’t hear you,” he said.

“Yes, you did,” I replied. “I don’t know if that’s what you were gunning for—I don’t think so, but I’ll be damned if I’ll ever know. You’ve made sure of that. You’re a Gordian knot, Richard, and I just can’t find a sword sharp enough to cut through. The well’s dry. I’m out of gas. You’re so certain that your delusion is real, you’ve half-convinced me. You’re mentally ill. The key to freedom is in your hand—in your mind—but you’ve either forgotten about it, or you’ve chosen not to use it.

“And that forces my hand, because this is the last stop. There are no other doctors to stymie, no other mindbender tricks to pull. It’s just The Brink… and me. And you did it. You’ve broken me.”

Drake shook his head.

“No.”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s no other conclusion I can make.”

Fire glimmered in his eyes. His lean jaw tensed.

“No.”

I placed my hands on my knees. My voice was sympathetic. I was sympathetic. It tore at me to say this, to admit this. He’s cruel, Annie Jackson had said, and he was… but he had a reason to be, he was tormented by a life-changing error, a thing my heart knew I couldn’t live with were I in his shoes, and he deserved a fate better than the one he’d now endure. The one my signature would help sentence him to.

“Richard, the endgame isn’t next Monday. It’s now. Your view of the past is so resolute, so brazen, so inflexible, that there’s no reason to waste our time anymore.”

“I said no, damn you.” There was a tremor now, on the edge of his icy voice. “I’m sane. I know what I’ve seen, and it’s real. You know it’s—”

I spoke over him, insistent, my voice still low and sincere.

“Have you ever considered, just for a moment, that the past didn’t happen the way you think it did—or prayed it did” I asked. “I’m not talking about rewriting history. What’s dead’s buried; that’s what your son said. But what if there was never a burial… because there was nothing to bury”

Drake’s head cocked to one side in an agonizingly slow arc. His ear nearly kissed his shoulder now. He shook his head, as if trying to shake away a dream.

“I… don’t…”

“No, I don’t think you ever have,” I said, “and I don’t know if it’s true, but can you loosen your grip on the past to consider—for only a moment—that Alexandrov is still alive”

His green eyes were the size of half-dollars now. His voice was a whispered hiss.

“What? How did—”

“They never found a body, Richard.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

I leaned forward now, leaned in close. “This is it. The end of the line, the bottom of the ninth. If you’re going to convince me that you’re the crosshairs for Death—that you’re really the cause of all this misery despite your alibis—then you’d better do it now. So here’s the pitch. What happened in Russia? What is the Dark Man? Why ‘Night On Bald Mountain?’”

Richard Drake’s voice pitched low as he spoke. It was unsettling, unbalanced, like a warped LP record. This side of my patient was new. I watched him closely.

“In all my years—all those jobs—I never spilled a drop, never bruised a knuckle,” he said. “It’s classless, inhuman. No way to treat a living thing.” He sighed. “Until…”

“Until ‘the cowboys,’ the gun runners,” I said.

“Until him. Every game, every trick, every con, every incentive, even drugs. Nothing. The Ivan was bedrock, unflappable.”

He looked up at me now, and for a heartbeat, I thought he could see again. But his pine-green eyes still stared past me, vacant.

“We needed to know who ran the operation,” he said. “We needed it. I had to, you understand. I had to. Desperate measures.”

“You beat him,” I said.

Drake shook his head quickly, squinting, terrified by whatever he was seeing inside his mind.

“No, no, so much worse than that,” he said. “The things… Jesus… that was me… his face, his thumbs, his teeth, the saw, oh Christ, the saw and the blood and the sutures and the screams and laughing, always laughing at me, ‘pig-fuck-American,’ ‘fuck-your-mother-American.’ Trained. Better. Better than me. And through it all, I played that fucking song on the boombox, over and over and over again. Was it the music? Was it the broken bones and blood he’d lost? Seeing what was left of his face in that mirror? I don’t know… but I broke him.”

He dragged the back of his hand against his lips.

“He gave me an address, said it was the boss’ safe house. It was my job, my call. I didn’t order recon, didn’t think there was time. The house was a heap of ash when the goons were done. But.”

“Was it a double cross” I asked. “Did he…”

“Did he willfully sentence his wife and daughter to death? I doubt it,” Drake said. “He’d been in Red Show custody for four days by then. That’s enough time for a paranoid mob boss to split and whip up a double cross of his own, should the right hand try to stab him. These people trust no one. Evil. There’s a special place in Hell for people like them. People like me.”

Drake leaned back, the wood settling around him.

“He was the one who told me, you know. Alexandrov. I don’t know how he found out—either he had a mole, or one of us had gone hostile. Doesn’t matter. My career was finished, fucked. He told me that I’d killed his family. He sat there, chained to that chair, bleeding out of every hole God gave him, and he laughed and spat and cursed me. ‘Eye for eye, pig-fuck-American.’ Payment in blood. Spoke in a language I didn’t understand. Then told me that I’d be haunted for the rest of my days. I’d be the eyes of death, ‘the black harpoon.’”

His voice was flat now, businesslike.

“And so I hit him until he stopped laughing. Damned-near all of his teeth were gone already, so that part was easy. I took his tags and dumped him in the Volga.”

I stared at him, silent. His face was slack and expressionless.

“Eye for eye,” I said.

He nodded. A tear slid down his cheek.

“Your orders killed his wife and daughter—and a month later, you lose your wife and daughter. That’s not the work of a demon, Richard. That could be the bloodlust of a man you tried to kill. And perhaps the debt hasn’t been paid in full, not in Alexandrov’s mind. Perhaps he watched from afar, followed, preyed upon your friends, creating the illusion of the Dark Man… and you, so damaged from Russia, driven so desperate by the blood on your hands, made the illusion a delusion. The sinner needed punishment. What better punisher than Chernobog, Servant of the Black”

Drake began to moan as he wept freely now. His chest heaved, wracked by his sobs. He wasn’t a killer now, wasn’t a cruel man. For this moment, this heartbeat, he was a child, lost in the dark.

“I don’t know if he’s out there,” I said quietly. “But I think he could be. You didn’t physically kill these people; you’ve admitted that. If Alexandrov is out there, pursuing a vendetta, then that could help prove your innocence. You could even help me, feed me enough information that the cops—the feds, the CIA, whoever—might find this guy. If he’s still alive, he’s a ghost now. That means he’s safe. You could give him bones and blood again, make him catchable… again.”

I couldn’t tell if Drake was listening anymore. He covered his face, shuddering and weeping. He gave a low wail inside his hands, and now my vision was blurring, moved by the movement of his soul.

“Richard,” I said, “I can’t… Jesus… I can’t begin to imagine the fear you’ve felt, the terror of feeling watched, or hunted. I don’t know what it’s like to flee a new home, a new life. I’ve never lost friend after friend, town after town. What happened in Russia, I can’t fathom the pain… the ache… of that mistake—and I’m sorry that I can’t reach that, imagine it.”

My hand fumbled to the wallet in my back pocket. The chair creaked as I tugged it free, flipped it open, pulled out the photo from Gram’s shoebox.

I stared down at the trembling thing: me, Rachael, Lucas and Dad. Taken a year ago, when things were less complicated, less broken. I began to weep now, too. I wept for the face that wasn’t there.

“But I know… God, do I know… what it’s like to lose family. I saw her die, Richard. A soul doesn’t recover from that. It’s bruised, crushed. Your wife and daughter, gone. There’s no worse punishment. But…”

I looked at him now. His long fingers smeared the tears into his skin. His eyes were closed, but he was pulling out of it, listening again.

“Alexandrov might be alive,” I told him. “The Dark Man might not be real. Can you open your mind to that? That sliver of possibility”

I reached out, slowly, and placed my hand on his shoulder. His body flinched, but he did not pull away. His face turned toward my hand.

“Can you open your eyes and see that world, a world that might be”

The room was silent.

And then, Drake did.

He sucked in air through his teeth, squinting at the comparative brightness of the room. His eyes fluttered, cataloging the hand on his shoulder as if it were a new thing. His expression was exquisite and bittersweet.

Something that sounded like a laugh—a genuine, joyful laugh—surged from his throat. It sounded gruff and rusty, out of practice. I watched his eyes roam from my hand to his shoulder, then down to his chest. He pressed his hands there, drummed his fingers along his ribcage. His eyebrows raised, hopeful.

I’d never seen a smile so beautiful or truthful. He laughed again, more confident this time.

His gaze shifted down to his slacks, his loafers—he was tapping his feet now—and then racked focus to my Vans.

The smile changed. The glee transformed into something more serious and straightforward.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

His pine-green eyes followed up my leg, to my knee and to the hand there, holding the photo. And then they flicked to my face. Tears spilled anew, down his red cheeks. The expression on his face was new, too.

He was… terrified.

His voice was hushed, quaking, barely audible. “Oh no. You’re wrong, so wrong.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder, and he uttered a low sound: rrrrrnnnnn

The light above us flickered. The strobe show was back.

A noise, wicked and unholy, rumbled from my right. The sound of something large scraping against the cinderblock mural… now the screech of knives, sharpened on stone… of breathing now, lascivious and wet and hungry… and the clickity-click of dogs’ claws on tile.

“—nnno God, no.” Drake’s face had turned pale, sick. “The Dark Man is here, behind you, whispering, showing me how you’re going to die. Here. With me.”

And that’s when the room went black.

I gasped, reeling back into the chair. It was black and cold and oh no, black, no, dark, oh dear Christ Almighty, breathe, please help me breathe, no air, no light, no anything—

Richard Drake screamed. I felt a rush of air, blisteringly cold, rush between us. I saw nothing in the ink, but yes-no-yes, I could sense something growing there, growing taller between us, rising from a feral crouch, now towering above us. The frigid wind came in waves now, as if hailing from a paper fan.

As if it were dancing.

And then, that sound. Autumnal leaves.

Tktktk.

“No! God, no!” Drake shrieked. “Not just you. Your family. It’s showing me… how your family will die, too. No! NO!”

The light blasted bright again, and began its manic Morse Code stutter, bzzzt bzzzzzt, bzzzzt.

I bolted from my chair, whirling around, eyes wild, searching for the thing I’d heard. Nothing. Not a goddamned thing but me and the painted walls and Richard Drake. I turned to him, chest heaving, my heartbeat a thunderstorm in my ears.

He’d covered his face with his hands, was screaming like a damned man. I stumbled backward, toward the door, my gaze irresistibly locked on the crazy man in the chair.

“CURSED!” he howled. “TOO LATE! Too late for me, Mr. Taylor, and too late for you and yours. I warned you, and now it’s free, the cage broken, I can see, it’s here to play… and it’ll play, Mr. Taylor, play with you like a cat plays with a mouse…”

His next word was either prey or pray. I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t care. My back pressed against the metal door. I slammed my palm against it. I made a fist, and pounded. My voice was high, cracking like a teenaged boy’s.

“EMILIO! For fuck’s sake, GET IN HERE!”

The bolt clacked open and Emilio’s hands were on my shoulders, yanking me from the room. I was airborne for a half-second… and I then was bounding into the hall, nearly spilling onto the floor.

Emilio was a tree-sized blur, cannonballing into Room 507. His massive form was soaked in the stuttering light as he reached out, ready to restrain the still-sitting, still-screaming Drake. Emilio tore Drake’s hands away from his face. He leaned low to give Drake a verbal warning, per procedure—calm down.

Their faces were inches apart. Drake’s scream rose in pitch, impossibly raw now, like shattering glass.

I dashed from the doorway, down the hall, head spinning, brains popping like a bad fuse, emotional overload, tilt, tilt. Tilting, the world was tilting.

The lights out here weren’t flickering, weren’t growing dimmer. They were getting brighter. How is that possible…

Emilio bellowed, like a tyrannosaur. I spun on my heel, eyes focusing on the doorway.

The world went slow.

Emilio Wallace ran full-speed from the room, his muscled arms flailing, as if aflame. His voice was a tornado, a battle cry, a thing his fans heard years ago in Southwestern convention centers. Nuh-nuh-no, not them, he was screaming, I wuh-won’t do it, not my boys . .

…and then his six-foot-five, 260-pound body smashed into the tiled wall opposite the door.

He bounced off and staggered, stupid. His broken nose gushed crimson, covering his mouth and Superman chin in a horror-show goatee. He swayed once, then slapped his palms onto the wall to steady himself.

He stared at the cracked tiles and snarled. He swung his head forward, bashing it against the wall. Ghoul’s paint sprayed against the pale green.

“Nuh-NO!” he howled.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

Emilio drove his forehead into the tiles again and again, growling, now howling. A nightmare of flesh scraps and blood spritzed forward—then upward—as he hammered his skull against the wall. His face was covered in gore. His forearms and hands were slick, misted with blood.

And bashed again.

A tile broke loose and shattered on the floor. It was like a pistol shot. I ran toward him.

Roaring, he bashed again.

Meat spilled into his face.

And again.

A sickening, soggy crunch rang in the hall. My friend’s shoulders sagged. A terrible gurgle pushed through his blood-soaked lips… hhkkkkk… and he fell.

I stopped at his bloodied body. My eyes refused to work, to blink. It was impossible to look away.

The lights in the hall began to flicker. I shivered.

From behind me, I heard a skitter-slide of feet, the sound of millipedes and bad dreams. I felt something watching me, a thing old and awful, and very cold. And then, a blast of ice. A breath on my neck.

My eyes fluttered, rolled upward.

For the first time in my life, I was grateful for the dark.