The Hungry Dreaming, page 23
part #3 of Ghosts of Gotham Series
Someone had been preparing for an operation. On the counter, scalpels and suturing clamps and bone-crackers lay upon a pristine nightingale-blue plastic sheet. Beside it, two familiar sights: an antique, lacquered doctor’s bag, cracked leather with brushed brass fittings, and a Polaroid camera.
“Is that—” Nell started to ask.
It took Seelie a second to find her voice, trapped somewhere in the bottom of her throat. “It’s his.”
Instead of x-rays, the wall board displayed Dieter Rime’s photographs. Seelie recognized the books on Arthur’s shelves. And to their right, shots of a glass table and a knotty pine shelf she didn’t recognize. And more books, covers and titles lined up for comparison with Arthur’s collection.
“Think this explains why he wasn’t hunting for us yesterday,” Tyler said. “Rime found another Culper agent to kill. He had the same plan as us: compare their books, figure out which one can crack their code.”
Nell snatched the photographs, ripping them off their clips one by one.
“He comes back and finds those gone, he’ll know we were here,” Tyler told her.
“Thanks to the USB drive, we know what the Weaver Group is doing. The only thing we’re missing is motive, and the Culpers can tell us everything. Finding them is still our best shot at unraveling this mess. And we have to do that before Rime can murder the last of them. If anything can speed us up or slow him down, preferably both at the same time, it’s worth the risk.”
Seelie stared down into the metal tub. It was filled with salt. Gallons upon gallons of it, a bed of thick glistening rocks. She reached in and drew her fingertips along the salt, digging shallow furrows. Then she flinched, stumbling back, almost colliding with Tyler. He caught her before she could fall.
“What is it?” he said.
She pointed. Something was buried in the salt bed. Her search had exposed a patch of pale skin. The curled fingers of a limp hand.
Tyler shoved a fistful of salt away, then another. He took hold of the hand and pulled. It rose from the salt, trailing a slug-white arm behind it and the bend of a naked shoulder. Salt cascaded around the sides of a dead man’s throat, slit with surgical precision from ear to ear. The wound had been carefully, professionally stitched up again, the dried blood painstakingly sponged away. Tyler let the corpse slide back into the salt.
“Found the dead spy,” Tyler said. “What the hell was Rime doing with the body?”
Nell snapped a few photographs.
“The ancient Egyptians,” Seelie said, combing her memory. “They used salt. Well. Natron. Natural salt, from lake beds.”
“For what?” Tyler asked.
“Preserving the dead, so they wouldn’t rot. Getting them ready to be mummified.”
Tyler looked to the door on the far side of the room.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
The metal handle groaned as it twisted in his hand. The door rattled on its tracks, opening wide. They stepped through into the next chamber, bathed in pale light from above.
Tyler froze. Seelie’s lips moved without a sound, her voice lost in horror.
“Jesus Christ,” Nell whispered. “This is what he’s doing with the bodies.”
37.
The wire racks on the walls of the oval chamber, framed in the light of LEDs angling down from the ceiling above, were an assassin’s wonderland. Weapons from around the world, from modern and sleek automatics, to vintage Lugers and western revolvers, to museum pieces like an oiled, hand-polished musket. Long-barreled rifles with fat silencers. Shotguns. There were a hundred ways to kill in this room.
And at least twenty dead bodies. What was left of them.
Just their skin.
Meat hooks lined an overhead track, with an ornate brass hanger suspended on each hook. Two dozen human skins, expertly preserved, lovingly kept, dangled from the hangers like tailored suits. It was a dry cleaner’s shop from hell.
“Trophies,” Tyler breathed. “The bastard takes trophies.”
More sheet-metal doors ringed the room. A sound echoed from behind one of them, the thrum of water, like a shower on full blast. Before he could check it out, Seelie bit back a squeal that turned Tyler’s head. Tears glistened in her eyes.
She pointed to one of the skins. Then she lifted its hollow, eyeless face, its freshly scrubbed scalp of long black hair. Ragged holes along the pelt’s lips and ears showed the marks of old piercings.
“It’s Amber,” Seelie said, her voice a squeak teetering on the edge of a scream. “He…”
Tyler crossed the tile floor, two quick strides, and pulled her into an embrace. She buried her face against his chest.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“No.”
“He was chasing me. I led him to Ducky’s place. He killed him, killed Dee. Amber agreed to help him, and when she couldn’t kill me at the theater, he must have—”
“Hey,” he said, stroking her hair. “Hey. No. You didn’t do anything wrong. You couldn’t have known.”
Nell’s revulsion had settled into academic curiosity. And the tugging of her instincts, telling her she’d misread the evidence. She was thinking about her visit to the dealer’s apartment, her talk with the detective on the scene. Bodies in the living room and the kitchen, blood in the bedroom. Too much blood for anybody to lose and keep breathing.
“Three victims, and this psycho didn’t just kill ’em,” Detective Jordan said. “He stole a dead body.”
Like the body in the salt tub in the other room. Dieter Rime took trophies. She’d assumed the vic in Ducky’s bedroom was one of his other customers. But that was where he kept his safe. His stash of drugs. His livelihood. Why would Ducky let one of his junkie clients set foot in that room? He wouldn’t. Amber was his common-law wife. She lived there. Most likely person to be the blood donor.
But Amber had been alive and well, working with Rime, at the cinema later that night. Seelie identified the woman; Nell had sat right next to her, seen Amber with her own eyes. The theory was perfect until it collided head-on with the timeline and fell to pieces. Two sets of equal and opposite facts.
The shower sound stopped. A water pipe gurgled behind the walls and fell silent.
A steel-sheeted door to their left slid open. Jai Sahni, the squat and broad-shouldered man dripping wet and stark naked, stepped into the chamber of skin. His feet slapped down on the ivory tile, leaving smeared puddles behind.
He froze. So did they. They stared at each other.
“I told her,” Sahni said, “that she was being foolish. She said you could be contained. I told her the only way to contain a threat is to annihilate it.”
“You and Dieter Rime,” Nell said. “How’s that work? He brings home the bodies, you skin them? Which one of you is the sicko with the corpse fetish? Or is this a couple’s act?”
“I will confess to a certain…passion for the human form.” He stared down at his hairy chest, the bulge of his paunch. “You have me at a disadvantage here.”
Tyler took a step forward, curling his hands into fists.
“Deal with it,” Tyler said. “We’re sitting on this place—and on you—until the cops get here. Seelie, Nell? Go upstairs. Call 911. I’ll make sure the freak doesn’t go anywhere.”
Sahni deflated with a sigh.
“I prefer not to resort to violence in my own home. A cultured man does not shit where he eats. But, if you’ll offer me no alternative, so be it. Just give me a moment? I’d like to change my clothes.”
He reached up, putting his hands behind his neck like he was about to surrender. His fingers curled inward.
Then he started to peel.
His face distorted, slipping like a rubber mask, tearing away as his scalp slid down. His flesh made a rustling, squelching sound and then a wet pop as the top of his head flopped loose, dangling from his neck. Beneath was glistening red muscle stretched over a skull with a gleeful grin. His eyes rolled in their sockets. Behind the ale-brown irises lurked a second pair in icy steel blue.
His skin peeled away from his shoulders, slit along the back like an evening gown. As it did, as he twisted and wrenched his bloody arms free one after the other, he was transforming. His skull lengthened, narrowing, while he grew taller by the heartbeat. His bones were sponges squeezed tight in a clenched fist, now slowly decompressing, returning to their true shape. He let out a sigh of pure pleasure as he stretched out his scarlet arms to take in the humid, salty air, exposed muscle contorting.
Seelie had her Monopoly token in her hands. Her fingers glided over the tarnished metal race car, her gaze looking, looking away, checking again and again.
“This isn’t happening,” she whispered. “This is a nightmare.”
Sahni’s discarded, eyeless face made a liquid splat on the wet tile floor. He had shucked his skin to the waist now, like a pair of unbuttoned overalls. His flaccid cock slid down his hips, baring sexless muscle and bone beneath. Etchings adorned his bones. In every exposed spot, along his femurs and his collarbone and the curves of his ribs, a scrimshaw needle had drilled jagged Germanic runes into the ivory like dark tattoos.
“Oh,” he said in a familiar voice. “It is most certainly happening, Ms. Barron. You should have gone home when you were given the chance. Now we are much too late for anything but regrets.”
Nell knew him, even without a face. His lean and tall frame, his careful enunciation and his crisp accent.
Jai Sahni and Dieter Rime were the same man. No. Rime was the man. Sahni was a suit made of human skin.
When he was a security guard working for the competition, Nell thought, her mind racing, feverish, he didn’t go to work for Leda Swan. Rime murdered him. Skinned him. Wore him as a disguise to pull off the theft.
Rime reached down and peeled one of Sahni’s feet off. Then the other. He circled the chamber, slow, smiling, and now he left smears of scarlet in his wake. He paused beside one of the carefully hung bodies. Amber’s. He took her hand, his lidless eyes fixed on Seelie, and lifted the fold of Amber’s arm to touch his throat.
Then he spoke, breathless, in a perfect imitation of Amber’s voice.
“He has a gun, Seelie. He killed Ducky and Dee right in front of me. He’s crazy!”
Seelie shook her head, stumbling backward toward the open door. “No. No.”
He let the arm fall, dangling limp, and replied in his own voice.
“It is so easy to lure someone in,” he explained, “when they believe they’re meeting a trusted friend. My favored method, really. If Ms. Bluth hadn’t interfered, I would have taken you with ease.”
“What are you?” Tyler whispered.
“A soldier,” he said. “I am a veteran of the battles no one remembers. I have fought for nations long fallen, under flags you’ve never seen. I have fought under stars you’ve never seen.”
His eyes swiveled in their glistening sockets, studying Tyler for a moment.
“You, I’ll keep. I don’t have any men of color in my collection these days. It’s a practical consideration—I prefer skins that will make me less visible to the authorities, not draw attention—but what’s the fun of a wardrobe without variety?”
His exposed tendons stretched as he turned to regard Nell.
“You, I’m ambivalent on. As for Ms. Barron, your pelt will be put to good use. Namely, to keep your father pacified and thinking all is well, until the final contracts are signed and we have his money in hand. I’ve already been practicing your voice.”
Frozen in the grip of terror, all Nell had was her instinct. Her core drive, the one thing worth more than her own life: get the story.
“What’s it all for?” she said. “We know what the Loom does. The data it harvests could earn billions. Instead, you’re using it to hunt for spies and lucid dreamers. Why?”
“Over two centuries ago, Ms. Bluth, the father of your nation called upon a power he did not understand and could not control. My current employer was brought in by the opposing party, to set matters right and shift the odds in their favor. An ongoing process but, thanks to the Loom, one we’ll finally resolve in short order.”
“What’s in the grave? The one you’re trying to dig up.”
He walked as he answered her, sidestepping around the chamber, graceful without his skin.
“Have you heard the maxim that he who controls the past controls the future?”
“Sure,” Nell said.
“It’s true. Speaking of truths, I have good news and bad news.”
He reached to the rack on the wall. His wet fingers curled around the stock of a shotgun. An assault model, stubby and boxy and black as midnight.
“The good news is,” he said, “there is an afterlife. I’ve seen it.”
Rime lifted the shotgun from the rack and cradled it in his hands, leaving bloody smears along the pump.
“The bad news is, it isn’t heaven.”
38.
“Run,” Tyler shouted. Seelie was first through the door, diving through the gap, back the way they came. Nell was right behind her. Tyler grabbed hold of the barn-door handle and hauled it shut a heartbeat before the shotgun roared. The sheet-metal door bucked, and a fist-sized dent erupted like a blister.
Tyler ran to the tub of salt. He curled his hands around the far edge.
“Help me with this,” he said, and Nell and Seelie lifted from the other end. Its wooden struts squealed on the stained floor as they dragged the tub and its dead cargo across the tile, barricading the door. The edge of the tub slid up against the handle and wedged it in place.
The handle wriggled and the door jolted on its tracks, stuck tight.
The wriggling stopped. Nell slowly turned in place, one hand to her ear, focused.
“Listen,” she said.
Tyler heard it. The muffled squeal of rusted metal wheels rolling on a track.
“He’s circling around,” he said. “C’mon, we have to beat him to the stairs. We get out the way we came in, and then—”
And then what? His mind was scrabbling, clawing at the inside of his skull, trying to cope with what he’d just witnessed. If he had been alone, he’d think he was hallucinating, drugged maybe, something in the air down here. Mold? he thought, desperate for rationality. Can black mold make you see things? But Nell and Seelie had seen it too, and three people couldn’t have the same hallucination.
This was happening. This was real, as real as the shotgun in Dieter Rime’s hands, and denials would just get them killed. He’d get them all out, out to the street, back to the world Tyler knew.
He led the charge back through the warrens, following the twisting coil of power cables like string in a minotaur’s maze. Now he understood the sledgehammer holes, the makeshift barricades of bed frames and bolted-down chicken wire: Rime had transformed the bowels of the derelict spa into a killing floor. His personal lair and hunting ground. He knew this place better than they did; their only advantage was speed.
The tunnel broke open into a four-way crossroads. The cables snaked left. Before he could turn, a flash of green light blinded him.
The skinless man stepped into view from the right-hand passage. The pencil-thin beam of light erupted from a laser sight on his shotgun. Rime shouldered the weapon, wearing his wide-eyed grin.
Tyler froze.
He smelled food. Hamburger patties cooking under heat lamps. French fries roasting in a deep fryer and glistening with salt.
“French fries!” demanded a small, giggling voice.
“Tyler, talk to your daughter.”
“Oh,” he laughed. “Now she’s MY daughter.”
His head was full of wasps and his arms and legs were dead weight and he tasted orange soda in the back of his mouth. He hadn’t had an orange soda in five years. He was about to die, Nell and Seelie were about to die, and he was thinking about orange soda.
Nell grabbed his shoulders and shoved him to the floor. She landed on top of him and the shotgun’s muzzle lit the hallway like the flash of Rime’s Polaroid. A full-bore slug plowed into the wall above Tyler’s back and shredded a hole, turning rotten wood to sawdust.
Tyler couldn’t hear. The world was ringing, swimmy in the aftermath of the blast. Nell was yanking his hand, shouting something about having to leave, now, and just under the drone in his ears he made out the sound of Rime racking the shotgun pump.
Seelie took the lead, tearing for the stairs. He got himself moving. Left leg, right leg. That was all he had to do. Left leg, right leg, until he made it outside.
He braced for a second slug, but it never came. Rime was moving again, charting his own path through the maze. They pounded up the stairs, following their own footsteps in the dust. The first floor of the spa was just as dark and twisted as the basement, with all the windows boarded over and piles of debris strategically placed to channel intruders along avenues of fire. Killing funnels. Rime had another way up. Tyler’s only warning was a glimmer of green laser light playing off the moldy drywall five feet ahead.
He tried to shout. The jet-engine roar of the shotgun swallowed his voice whole and the corridor became a hurricane of splintered wood. He threw his arm over his face and veered left, down a passage in the other direction. Not the way they came in. Rime was tactical, cutting them off from the exit. They’d have to find another.
“Take Seelie,” Nell said, squeezing his shoulder, “find another way out.”
“What about you?” he said.
“Got an idea. I’m going to buy us some time.”
* * *
Nell had more of an impulse than an idea. But as she turned, doubling back, she knew the least she could do was give Rime a pair of targets to choose from. He was the resident minotaur in this maze, but even he couldn’t be in two places at once. She was winded, every breath inflaming a stitch of pain in her side, muscles burning. Keep running, she commanded herself. No excuses.
Monsters were real. Her hunt had just taken her from the story of the decade to the story of the century. She’d live to tell it to the entire world. She had to.
