Mackie
A quick stop at Nordstram and I looked more the part of police detective. Gray skirt, gray jacket, white blouse, and practical sneakers. I entered the store a movie star (people pestered me for autographs along the way) and left a cop (nary a single person recognized me except for the odd honk from a cop car). This made a wacky kind of sense—dress the part, be the part—and I accepted it the way I was accepting all the other Twilight Zone elements of my new life. I dropped my old clothes off at the precinct, tossing them into my locker. Yes, a locker bore my name on it by the time I’d returned.
Finding Dark’s apartment (I agreed with Sholty that Darren Dark sounded infantile) wasted the rest of my afternoon. I ended up at the Grimsby office of the FBI who proved as eager to help me as the GPD had been. In fact, I was certain that if I had just said, “Oh, sorry sir, I forgot my ID” they would have chided me for carelessness and considered me an FBI agent right then and there. I made certain to stay away from any “special offices” because I’d a feeling the FBI had the equivalent of Krueger (Mr. Cover-up) or the X-files or something worse and I definitely wanted to avoid that. I could end up locked away or God-knows-what. The office was not exclusively FBI because the RCMP also had a branch office here but as a rule of thumb the Mounties handled Canadian crime and the FBI handled American crime but within Grimsby their authority more or less blended together. The police called the FBI-RCMP task force just the “task force” but the citizens of Grimsby called them the Royal Feds.
I requested Dark’s file from the mundane looking GPD liaison and just bided my time waiting for it. They offered me an unused desk and I sat down hoping the empty in-folder on the desk wouldn’t suddenly fill with files that were now my “cases”.
Dark’s file, it turned out, featured a who’s who of the underworld, showing Dark conversing with seemingly every worldwide mob figure. Yet I couldn’t help wondering if photos were as phony as my “movies”. A series photographed recently in Grimsby, though, must have been legitimate. They showed Dark chatting with a local mafia figure that even I—shielded charity girl though I was—recognized. This particular Don was in the papers more than a Mafioso really ought to be. The photos followed Dark as he headed back to a Grimsby building that I recognized. Dark lived there.
And so had I. So our coincidental meeting was no coincidence because I knew everyone in our building—I was chairman of the “condo” committee— and it was impossible such a handsome man had eluded my notice. The FBI still hadn’t uncovered which unit he had lived in or, if they had, it was unlisted.
After a quick dinner at the FBI/RCMP cafeteria (an experience I vowed never to repeat), I caught a Taxi and headed out. By the time I reached my apartment and Dark’s it was—argh!—dark. I huddled in my jacket as I scurried into the building away from the fall cold. Maybe I should buy a trench coat and look the cop part. I certainly felt the part! This was the most fun I could ever remember having. My life, so devoid of purpose, had suddenly become so significant and important. It was so crazy yet exciting and, somehow, right.
Mother had bought me this condo because the security was airtight and the guard at the front desk challenged me immediately. I flashed my badge.
“I need to take a look around,” I said.
“What at?” he asked. “Do you have a search warrant?”
“Do I need to get one?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s our policy. ‘Police must either be invited by a guest or have a search warrant’. I could call the person you want to see.”
“The person I want to see is dead,” I said. “Which means I don’t need a search warrant. The name is Dark. What’s his number?”
The guard looked befuddled. I had no idea whether you needed a search warrant to search a dead person’s condo but neither, apparently, did he. “Maybe I should call the manager.”
“You do that,” I said. “Bill Debreau, the number’s 983-4213.”
“Oh, you’ve talked to him,” he said.
“Obviously.” What a liar I was. I never liked lying, though, and I really wasn’t enjoying it now. But I needed to see that condo.
“Dark, number 2913,” he said. He expected me to zip off but I crossed my arms. “What?”
“His key,” I said. “Give me his key.”
“Oh, right. Can I see that badge again.”
I handed it to him and he wrote down all the relevant information. Rolling my eyes, I snatched the key when he grudgingly offered it and marched off to the elevator. Number 2913? Interesting. Twenty-nine was my floor; thirteen was vacant and had been since Rebecca Albert had passed away last year. I reached my very familiar floor and started towards my own condo. Maybe I should have a peek. Some part of me that thought I would open the door and find myself asleep on the couch. I could imagine opening the door and seeing myself stare back!
That returned my thoughts to my encounter with Mother and Poe. I adored my mother. I was her devoted daughter. Mother had never been overly affectionate but she had willingly granted me everything I’d ever desired. Nannies had reared me but my mother had never been far away. “Your mother is an important, busy woman,” the nannies told me, “and she loves you very much but you aren’t to disturb her.” And I always accepted this because there were always exciting people like Poe about who kept me thrilled and entertained. It seemed very important to Mother that I be a good, Catholic girl and, partly because I had been so sexually dysfunctional, I had been. My life centered on religion and it was through the church that I became so involved with charities. My mother hoped I might become a nun and I’d considered it many, many times but something held me back. Well, men held me back because I loved the idea of men if not the actual reality.
But now thoughts of my mother… Well. I sought only to avoid her. Her answers might be the only way I could ever solve the riddle of the new me but I was certain those answers would include a dozen lies for every truth. Why this sudden distrust?
Poe. It was Poe. He was impossibly, even unbelievably, evil more so even than Kenneth the sommelier at Murray’s or maybe even Darren Dark. Poe was my mother’s lover; she must be deeply involved in his wickedness.
I wondered whether I had a feel for evil. But that couldn’t be so. I’d just been in a police station and no perps being processed had radiated evil. Surely one or two of them would. Or was it rather I sprouted a sense of good. I detected a number of cops there who I knew I could trust and who would trust me absolutely. Also, I’d sensed a number of people on the street who had seemed “good” too…
Anyway, I yanked my mind away from such confusing thoughts and focused it on the problems at hand. Mother claimed I was missing so I could be pretty certain I wouldn’t answer the door. But I couldn’t’ help myself. I went and knocked anyway. I didn’t answer.
Too bad. That at least would have made some kind of sense. With a sigh, I took the long walk down the hallway passing ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen … Nineteen-fourteen? What happened to thirteen?
“It was a very good year, thirteen,” Rebecca Albert had said to me the first day we meant.
“Oh?” I said. “Why so?”
“It’s the year my husband was born,” she said, and she laughed so hard, slapping my back as it were the funniest joke ever told, and her contagious enthusiasm infected me and I laughed too. How a heart attack could defeat such a vibrant, lively woman baffled me still. Her death had been sudden and shocking, never mind her age. She had always enjoyed perfect health…
Or had it been an accident? That thought chilled me. What kind of a world had I fallen into? And where was thirteen? I traced my hand along the wall. I’d had tea in that condo every other afternoon for five years. Where was thirteen? I saw nothing. Stepping back as much as the narrow corridor would allow, I studied the doorframes. They were evenly spaced along this particular corridor but the doorway to thirteen had disappeared. Crazy. But I was becoming accustomed to crazy. Starting at twelve, I pressed firmly against the wall every two or three feet. Oddly, considering later revelations, I did no damage to the wall. When I came to the spot where I expected thirteen, my hand felt cold and moist.
I pressed harder. Very hard.
It was as if I had lifted a kind of veil. The hallway lights flickered and now I could clearly see the door. But the walls and the doorway itself, here, were defended with some kind of horrible energy barrier. The wicked power glowed a dangerous red. Poe leaked this kind of power! It was sickening, like poison transformed into electricity.
This shield blocked my path. How was I going to get in? I pressed my hands against the shield and it felt like I was dipping my hands in toxic waste. What’s worse, evil desires invaded my thinking. I saw myself straddling the cute cop I’d seen earlier but his eyes were screaming with agony from the cuts and abrasions I’d given him as I…
Shit! I pulled far away from the wall. But where my hands had rested there were two distinct palm prints. Remarkable. My hands had defaced the evil energy—or purified it.
Purity? This was evil. Shouldn’t a prayer work? I tired a Hail Mary.
I lived in such a secular world that even a religious girl like me, when faced by honest evil, didn't really believe prayer will help. Well prayer did help. My prayer caused a strong ripple in the wall and the more I prayed the greater the ripple. It took time, faith, and a few more prayers but eventually the barrier fractured and then swiftly dissipated.
The mundane key fit and I opened the door, said “Amen,” and entered.
Darren Dark—maybe I should call him DD to feel less like a idiot—had had the apartment redecorated into something stylish and sexy. DD had clearly lived here ever since Rebecca Albert had died. Heart attack? Hah! The bastard had killed her to get to me!
Of course, I’d no proof whatsoever just a nasty, unfounded suspicion that someone had purposefully inflicted the problems besetting my life and they were not mere happenstance or self-inflicted. If my mother really was someone a thousand years or older—and at some level I didn’t doubt it—than who was I, really?
I shut the door. A coatrack next to the door was empty but several pairs of shoes were neatly lined on a boot tray near the door. Peeking into the closet, I saw a selection of Neuman Marcus jackets, one for all seasons, along with a stack of umbrellas that looked unused.
He’d had a strict streak of smartness, DD, I found as I explored. The apartment was beyond neat: it was excessively particular. I almost gagged at the odor of bleach and pine sol on kitchen floors. I began opening cabinets. He had no plates or dishes, per se: everything was disposable plastic. Styrofoam cups only. His cabinets were mostly filled with different kinds of coffee and in a crazy way I knew, without checking, that he had taken exactly the same amount of coffee from one before turning to the other, making sure he cycled through all of them before returning to the first.
Under his sink, he stored every imaginable cleaning supply and he had stacked boxes of still-rapped rags and towels. I could picture him disposing of each after one use—a fact confirmed when I checked garbage can. I also saw a newspaper that had been read but folded neatly before it was disposed. A bookshelf near the kitchen had a few magazines which were stacked evenly, alphabetized, and placed in consecutive order starting with the oldest first.
My, did I feel like a detective! Too bad I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I checked his refrigerator and the freezer was stocked with frozen foods, each dated and rotated properly so the oldest was nearest. God forbid you should eat the package marked November 14th before the one marked November 15th. Crazy, crazy, crazy.
DD’s kitchen opened into a living room where a shaggy green rug supported serviceable, weighty, baroque furniture. I pitied the furniture movers who had hoisted his couch into this building. Open white curtains framed a sliding glass panel door that in turn revealed condos’ spacious verandas. I wondered if he had ever slid the panels open: the veranda was completely empty.
I went to the door to the right of the veranda where the master bedroom continued the insanity. He clearly changed sheets every night and he had three dozen packs of new silk sheets on a table in this room. At least he kept the same comforter. A drawer full of condom boxes suggested the man might not be a celibate as had I expected. I found that idea oddly arousing though of course he repulsed me now. Anything remotely associated with sex, it turned out, nudged my thoughts in that direction.
Anyway, he had no closet. Odd. Where did he keep the Armani suits? I expected to find at least six that were exactly the same. Maybe he kept them in Rebecca’s guest room, I thought, and headed back through the living room into the guest room. Opening the guest room door, I flipped on the light switch…
…And freaked out. The walls were covered with pictures of me: the original me. He’d even plastered the roof with pictures. They showed me in every state imaginable: sleeping, walking, dressing, cooking, showering. I’d been his obsession and he’d clearly been following me for months. And where did he get all these pictures? Well, he had a row of high-tech equipment including surveillance monitors, microphones, a computer, a color laser printer, a copier. He had chillingly wired my apartment into his. I saw buttons that said “Mackie’s hallway light”; “Mackie’s bathroom light”. The electrician had told me I had a wiring problem that would take a couple of days to fix. He’d probably been the fellow who’d done this. DD must have paid him off. Or maybe my electrician was DD. Those sideburns, the beard… I couldn’t remember.
All of this scared me shitless.
I couldn’t resist turning on all the lights on in my apartment. This, alone with the monitors, proved I wasn’t at home and neither was anyone else.
Tapes of my life over the last month were labeled and placed chronologically in special shelf he’d constructed in the closet. Surely DD couldn’t have done this alone? When did he sleep? Maybe during spying on me because what could possibly be more snooze inducing? Well, I already knew he was crazy but he had dragged me into his crazy and I needed more information.
But now what? He would keep a journal. I rummaged through his impossibly neat desk and of course I found several journals, all impeccably neat, and written in a language that I didn’t recognize let alone comprehend. Shit.
His closet. All right, sometimes, my brain leaps tracks,. I went back to the master bedroom because Rebecca Albert had a walk-in closet in her room. Some power must be screening it.
This time, the closet didn’t just appear but I could sense a stronger version of the same power protecting it. I placed my hands on the wall and started repeating The Lord’s Prayer. Maybe ten minutes later the barrier surrendered. I thought my knees would give way. I felt drained as if I’d just run a couple of blocks for a taxi (in my old body of course). Since when does prayer exhaust me? I did rosery every day! Anyway, the closet was now visible.
And the shriveled, mummified body. It hung from a hook that pierced the mummy’s belly. My stomach happily offered to immediately regurgitate the FBI cafeteria lunch. But before I could, I heard a voice say, “She looks about thirteen years old.”
I spun around. What I saw in a odd way disturbed me more than the anything I had seen in the past twenty-four hours. Because I had developed an unconscious but very real vanity. Never had I seen, not even in my mother, a woman of greater physical beauty than I now had. Perfect body, perfect complexion, perfect everything. I was the most beautiful woman in the world, I was certain, and People magazine agreed.
My vanity bubble burst with a disgustingly small pin. The girl in front of me was at least as beautiful as I was. Petite, blond, buxom, with a golden skin tone that oddly shared with me the features of an anime character (giant blue eyes too big for her face, diminutive nose, toothy grin). I half-expected her to raise her fingers into twin peace signs right next to her face. As it turned out, I was spot on about this intuition for it was a gesture I’d see her make countless times.
“Yes, thirteen,” the girl said. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than that herself. “She died slowly on that spike. Her blood powered the spell. A virgin, of course.”
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“My name is Helen and I’m your sister. I’m very, very sorry. Please forgive me.”
“For what? Sneaking up on me?”
“No, for me killing you,” she said.
