Unkillable (13 page)

What happened? I happened. Me, a unit, an unbroken, unbreakable whole. The story of my mistakes written in my flesh for all to read, but my soul? My soul discovered – I suppose. I had learned something of what it meant to be me. That knowledge was a true possession that could not be taken from me by thief or trickster; by the disaster of the moment or the relentless, incremental destruction of the passing moments of mortal life.

Compared to that, what else mattered? The rest of it was just details.

One day the nurse said, “Your girlfriend is here.” I looked up to see Marie sitting by my bedside. Even as messed up and out of it as I was, my heart still leapt at the mention of the word -- girlfriend. She smiled at me. A sad smile, but all the same, it was, I think, the most beautiful thing I have seen in my whole life. Well, my second one to be sure.

“How are you?” I asked.

She nodded and looked off to the side, “I’m okay.”

“How is your stepfather?”

“He’s gone, gone. The Rat won in the end. When I got home he was lying on the floor, already dying. He looked up at me and said, ‘My name is Josue.’ Then he smiled at me. Then he died.”

Neither of us said anything. We just sat there in the hospital room, listening to the machine that was dutifully pumping saline and glucose into my veins.

Finally I said, “I don’t think The Rat won.”

Marie said, “I lost.” I couldn’t argue with that. “Vlade’s gone,” she said. The club burned down that night. There was a package for you at my shop. She pointed to the nightstand. On it was a brightly painted red doll. It was the Russian kind that held a smaller doll with a smaller doll inside it and smaller doll inside that one.

“A very strange man,” I said.

“If he’s a man at all,” said Marie.

“Yeah,”

“There was a note,” she said as she held up a piece of paper that had, “Something I didn’t have room for in my luggage,” scrawled on it in strange block printing.

I looked to Marie and started to give voice to my secret hope, “So, what are you doing?” It sounded impossibly awkward and stupid, but it was out there, so…

She said, “I am leaving. I can’t live in this city anymore. Too much power. Too much evil. Too many memories,” and the she trailed off, tracing a shape on her leg, over and over again.

“But,” I said. Marie came to the bedside. She leaned over and brought her face close to mine. I felt her breath move the tiny hairs of my eyebrows. She kissed me on the forehead. Then on each eye. Then on the lips, full and lingering. She placed her hand on my stomach and said, “Sleep.”

When I woke up, she was gone.

Days later, when I was feeling better and moving around a little, I turned my attention back to that nesting doll. One of the endless parade of vampire nurses – of course they were vampires, there only reason for existence seemed to be to visit me in the dead of night, when I was weak and disoriented and suck my blood – told me that the doll was called a ‘Matryoshka.’

I had always thought they were a pretty stupid kind of toy. You open one and instead of finding a piece of candy or $20 bucks or something you really wanted, inside is another doll for you to open. And inside that one, another doll. It was like a joke that didn’t have a punch line – a toy designed by a committee to provide small amusement to a bored person. Which is what I was, so I opened it.

Whattya know, inside the first doll was another doll. And inside that doll was another doll. And inside that doll was it ANOTHER doll?

No. This time it was different. Inside that doll was a police detective.

How do I explain it? How do I explain any of it? I opened the doll and a black cloud poured out. And then Detective Douglas Marsten poured out of the black cloud and onto the floor. He tried to scramble to his feet, limbs flailing wildly, knocking furniture around, collapsing into a corner with eyes as wide and frightened as any trapped animal. In his right hand was a gun, and it was pointing at me.

“Yu, yuh, yuh, you’re dead!” said Marsten.

“Yeah,” I admitted, “I was.”

Marsten just stood there, flicking his eyes around the room, and trying to put it all together. I had no idea what Vlade had done to him, and it was pretty clear that neither did he. But still, he was pointing a gun at me.

“Y’know, if you shoot me, I don’t think you’re going to be able to claim that I was fleeing the scene.”

The joke didn’t seem to register. He looked at the gun as if he was becoming aware of it for the first time. He gave me a little shrug and put the weapon back into his shoulder holster.

He sat down in the chair next to the bed and hung his head in his hands. He ran both hands through the ragged mop of his hair and let out a deep breath. Then nodded to himself and sat up.

Having gotten some kind of grip, he asked the obvious question, “How did I get here?”

I said, “You were in this doll.” I handed him the rest of the unopened Matryoshka. I damn sure didn’t want to open them. Who knew what else was in there? Marsten set the doll on the table and said one word, “Vlade.”

“Yes, Vlade,” I agreed

“What day is it?”

I just laughed, “Man, I got no idea. I was in a coma when they brought me in here.”

Then he said, “I have to go.”

Marsten came to visit me many times after that. I told him my story. He told me his. As a homicide detective, he had been investigating our mutual friend Vlade. Seems that bodies had a habit of turning up around him. He threatened to admit me as evidence. I laughed. Maybe the first good laugh of my newborn life.

We tried to make sense of all of it. I’m not sure we made any headway, but we each found comfort in being listened to.

Right after I had walked out of the morgue, he had tried to arrest Vlade. Something to do with narcotics, maybe not even a charge that would stick, but Marsten wanted him off the streets for a little while. Vlade and his men did not come quietly. There had been a lot of shooting.

Marsten had chased him several blocks and caught him. Had him dead to rights, ready to take him in, when something had happened. That’s really how he said it. Something.

He said that Vlade had mumbled something in Russian and waved his hand. Then there was rushing of black, like someone had thrown a curtain over him. “Russian,” I said, “Is English the only language you can’t cast a spell in?” We both laughed, even though Marsten didn’t really believe in spells. Even after all the shit he had been through.

After that, Marsten’s next memory was of my hospital room. We worked out that he had been in the doll a little bit more than two weeks He had fed his captain some story, real thin, but it was enough for appearances. Really, weren’t appearances were enough for people? If you were up and moving around, then you had to be alive. Didn’t you? Only a rare few people ever come to know differently.

The weeks went by. Time sped up when I started physical therapy. They told me that I would never regain full use of my leg. My hip had been crushed by that car, and it just wasn’t going to work right. The best I could manage without a cane was a zombie-like shamble. But I was okay with it. Better to look like the walking dead than to be the walking dead. Maybe I had learned something after all.

The next time Marsten came to visit, I could tell that something was wrong. He seemed preoccupied. Not his usual, smiling, big Mick self. I didn’t say anything. Somewhere along the way I had learned how to be quiet. Finally he said, “They fired me. I’m off the force.”

“Because of what happened?”

“That’s part of it. Not showing up to work for two weeks tends to piss off your Captain, but that’s not what tore it. It’s this new case. The Captain and I didn’t see eye to eye. Well, to be fair, the Captain wanted to see it my way, but the Chief -- well, he was playing politics.”

“What happened?”

“There’s somebody running around the streets killing women. Sick bastard, carves them up in intricate patterns with scalpels. Leaves the bodies where they can be found, like he wants to scare people. Precise cuts, like he’s a surgeon.”

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“There’s a pattern. Five women are dead. He’s not going to stop. We’ve got a serial killer, but the Chief wants to keep a lid on it. Doesn’t want bad press. See, if it’s just murder statistics, it looks better for his career. If he can keep a lid on it long enough, he can pass the buck to the next guy. And then he moves up to whatever position it is that assholes get promoted to when they accumulate enough slime points. Meanwhile, women are dying, and they’re going to keep dying.”

I thought about it for a long time before I told him. But really, how could it be any crazier than the things we had already told each other about? “I think I know who’s doing it.” Then I told him about the séance and my talk with Auld Jack on the cobblestones streets.

“Cobblestone streets? There’s only three cobblestone streets in the whole city. It was Mercer Street! Were you there when the Unwin girl got murdered?”

I nodded. “He asked me to kill her.”

“You killed her?” he said, rising out of his seat. He was really upset, clearly not the kind of guy who could leave his work at the office. But then, I guess Detective isn’t the kind of job you can hang on a hook at the end of the day.

“No, I ran away.”

“You didn’t do anything?” Marsten was very upset.

“No, I didn’t do anything. There was fog. I was dead at the time. Man, I had problems enough of my own.” Even as I said the words they sounded like a crappy defense to me.

Marsten gave me a look, the likes of which I hope to never see again. It was a look that showed me that beyond anger and hate lies contempt. He mumbled, “I gotta go,” and walked from the room.

The day I was discharged, he was back. He rolled me out in the wheelchair. As I stood in the raw air and sunlight for the first time since I had died -- breathing the fresh air from which all hospitals hoped to insulate their patients -- he took away the crappy rubber-footed old person cane the hospital had given me. In its place he gave me a jet-black walking stick. In the top, for a handle, was a piece of hand-blown glass, with a skeleton on the inside. It was very beautiful. I thanked him.

“Just so you know, there’s no hard feelings,” Marsten said. “I don’t like to lose. I like to get the bad guy. When I don’t it just kind of eats at me and… It wasn’t your fault.”

“No,” I said, “maybe some of it was my fault.”

Marsten looked me in the eye for a long moment and then gave a nod. As if I had passed some kind of test. “You need a ride someplace?” he asked.

“Ride? I need a life someplace. What am I supposed to do now? I have no idea. Go back to working at an electronics store?”

Marsten laughed, cocked his head to the side and said “I don’t think that fits you anymore.” We walked.

My cane clacked the sidewalk and the parking garage grew closer. “So what are you doing now?” I asked him.

“Me, I hung out my shingle. I’m in business for myself. Got clients and everything.”

“Clients? I’m impressed.”

“Well, one client. The family of Stacy Unwin. They’re rich and powerful and devastated by what happened to their daughter. When I told them how the police were botching the case, they hired me to continue my investigation.”

“Jack is a…” I found I didn’t have any words to describe what I thought Auld Jack was. I settled for, “a dangerous man.”

“So am I,” said Marsten.

“I don’t think you--”

He turned and blocked my path, “You don’t think what? You told me that it was about will. It’s about belief. If you believe something hard enough, it becomes magic.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Look, he’s out there. Right now, he’s out there. And he’s waiting.” Marsten pointed to the afternoon sun, hanging low in the sky, “Waiting for the sun to go down. Waiting to kill another pretty girl for no reason. See, he’s not like a serial killer. There’s no pattern. He doesn’t secretly want to get caught. He’s not really sending us messages. He’s just killing. Like he’s got a hole in his soul and there’s not enough bodies to fill it.

“Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to do anything about it. They want to pretend it’s not there. Because if they can pretend hard enough, then maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe, nobody’s career has to get wrecked. Well, my career is already wrecked. And there’s more important shit in the world than careers. There’s a man – if he is a man – in my city, making people dead. And he’s going to keep at it. And not the cutesy I’m-dead-but-I’m-still-walking-around kind of dead like you. No, it’s the long goodbye.

“So what are you going to believe in? Hunh? You’ve been to the edge and back. You know there’s good and evil. You know there’s something at stake. Help me.” He held out his hand.

“Help you do what?”

“Help me find him.”

“But I don’t know anything about--”

“You know more about this than anybody I know. You’ve done some kind of magic. Hell, it’s kind of your fault. Help me find the girl. Help me find your friend the undertaker. You know you owe him a visit. Help me undo what you did.”

I gave voice to the fear in my heart, “But what if I’m not good enough?”

“None of us are. We get the job done anyway.”

I shifted the cane to my left hand and took his right hand in mine.

“You’re hired,” he said with a smile.

“Is the pay good?”

“No,” he said, “but the hours…”

“The hours are good?”

“No, the hours are worse.” He walked ahead of me on the sidewalk, impatient to get started. “C’mon, we’re late for work.”

###

About the author:

Patrick splits his time between making advertising and writing fiction. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his lovely wife Kristy and his lovely dog, Annie.

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