ConMan
02-27-2015, 02:13 AM
The darkness greeted me again. It did every night. Not darkness as a lack of light, but darkness reflected from the inside. Places I've seen, people I've met, things I've done. All of this blurred past me as the inner mechanisms of my fevered mind transported me to a moment in the past. A moment I wished I could forget. She called out to me like a siren, and suddenly I was back at the lake. Mist clung to the grey, pallid surface. I told myself that I wouldn't be pulled in again, pulled under. Her soft voice carried across the lake. She wouldn't be on the outside, she would want me to go to her. The boat moved itself from the shore to my, and then to the center of the lake. Something drew me to the surface, to peer into the murky depths, as it did every night. The chill of the lake rose to my face, and I could feel my body begin to shake. She was there.
Clara Logan looked at me through the veil of time, and it was like I was 10 all over again. She started mouthing one word under the water. I knew what she was saying, and I knew what would come next, but I had to hear. I had to hear her voice one more time. My face breached the serene surface of the lake, and her arms swooped up to grab my face. She whispered the word into my ear.
"Why?"
I was falling again. Into the water, out of the boat, onto the floor. The rank smell of my sweat reached me even though I was about a foot and a half below the pool that inevitably forms during my night terrors. I tried to stand but my legs were shaking too hard and I dropped back down on to the floor. The bottle of whiskey, my usual nighttime companion rolled off of the nightstand and onto the floor next to me. I small drink of the amber liquid helped me to regain my wits a small amount, enough that I could stand comfortably. I reached out my shaking arms to grab the console pad for my apartment. It took a few seconds to boot up, but then all the walls were illuminated with an artificial glow that came from the the projector system being suspended from the ceiling. I checked the electrical output at the top of the main screen. It read 12/21/37, 3:27 A.M. the first day of winter. I swiped my fingers across the air and the screens switched to messages. 3 new messages. One from the City Times, requiring that I submit my newest edit of the article on pollution levels in The City. Another from my therapist reminding me to show up for today's meeting. Finally, one from..... Patrick?
Why would Det. Aren send me a message so early in the morning? It wasn't personal, he used his personal account to send me messages as a friend. This was business. What would a lead detective need a journalist for? I moved the screen off of the wall and in front of my face. Passing my writing desk the display lit the picture always sitting on the mirror, of Clara. I resigned myself to read the message. The floating display tailed me through the apartment it read,
Kyle,
I need your help, there's a new case working its way through the detective corps. Its beating me. Hard. I can't make heads or tails of it. Its bad. Real Bad Kyle. People are dying, people are going to keep dying. I know how you feel about the corps, but you have a chance to do the right thing here. Please come to the address I'm attaching at 12:30 today. I'll explain the rest there.
To do the right thing. He knew that would stick with me. I have a chance to do the right thing. I haven't done many things right in my life, he knew that would bother me. Working with the Detective Corps would be difficult, after I published an article about the corruption amongst the leadership. It hadn't gone over well. I'd have to worry about it later, if Patrick actually sent me this, he really did need my help, I couldn't just ignore that. The address he sent me wasn't too far from the psychiatrist, it wouldn't be too hard to go over after my appointment. Just to take a look.
"Is Kyle there?" Dr. Dyo asked. I pulled out of my daydream. Dr. Dyo looked mildly concerned. Maybe I should stop zoning out during these sessions.
"Kyle did you go back to the lake last night?" He already knew about my nocturnal issues, we had met so many times before.
"I'd rather not talk about it." I ignored the question, as I always had, and always would. Even just thinking about that place, made me start to sweat in my seat. Vision started to fade, the voice started to creep back into my ears. I had to control it. I would never let that place control me in broad daylight.
"Are we ever going to talk more about that place?" She wasn't pleased with my silence. We had discussed it once, at length. I nearly lost it here in this room. I didn't have to talk about it, I could handle it alone. She sighed.
"What about working with the Detective Corps? Are you going to help them?" I didn't remember mentioning that, it must have been before my daydream.
"Patrick needs my help so I'll help him. It's that simple."
"You've had issues with the corps before." The time on my watch read 12:12, I should leave. It felt like I had just arrived though, I hoped she would understand.
"Maybe I can do something right for once in my life." I rose to leave, she didn't say anything, so I wasn't sure if she approved or not. Or did it even matter what she thought? No, no it didn't. I didn't look back to check.
My junk car was landed on the pad. It recognized the key chip attached to my wrist, the engines hummed to life, and it slowly rose to my waist height. After climbing in I inputed the address and ascended into the traffic lanes, it would take about 10 minutes for me to arrive at the...... Block A Garden Complex. First I was pulling into the hover traffic lanes, then I was there. Somehow I must have zoned out during the flight, the car must have auto flown here on its own. As I stepped out onto the green grass, I saw Patrick talking to an older gentleman who looked displeased.
"....... make sure you watch hi..... Hello, Mr. Logan." He stopped midsentence when he saw me, and looked even less pleased. It was no surprise to me though, I had called him out personally for corruption in my last article. What concerned me more was the look on Patrick's face, he looked resigned, as if he was being forced into this.
"This way Kyle. " He beckoned over to me, drawing me over to where I assumed the crime was committed. "I wasn't completely honest with you earlier Kyle, there's a real reason that I asked you to be here, and it's not because you're a reporter, hell its not even because you're a genius, well maybe it.... We've got a situation. The boys are calling him, The Jackal. Real bastard of a man, a monster. He only does this at night and we can't figure anything out about him..... I don't know you'll have to see for yourself." He didn't make eye contact with me the entire time. What wasn't he telling me? He brought me through the woods and into full view of the lake. I had to stop in my tracks, I could barely hear any of the detectives. The lake in real life, looked so much like it. Like that lake. It started forcing its way into my head, I had to focus on something else. I looked elsewhere and saw what was floating in the lake.
"How?... I ... Who did this?" I was stunned and confused. In the lake floated dismembered corpses, held together to spell two words. They bobbed up and down on the rank water, never breaking their hellish formation. The bodies read, "Dear Clara". It was revolting. Or it was supposed to be revolting, I was stricken by a type of beauty. A horrible, monstrous beauty. But I couldn't deny it.
"Do you think its a coincidence?" Patrick asked me. I wasn't sure. I'd have to look around first. But what were the odds? What are the chances that someone else was related to a person named Clara, and also connected to a lake like this.
"There's a way to check." I whispered.
"How?"
"If its for me there will be a message in there."
"In there? We have to wait for the crime scene team to..... hey wait!" I was already gone, walking towards the hell lake in front of me. Something drew me to it, I think the scene was meant for me. If that was true then there would be a message. Right in the middle. Right where Clara would be. The calm water's surface broke when I lowered into it. I could barely feel the numbing water soaking itself into my clothes because I saw something that was invisible from farther away. A head, not connected to the rest of the hellish wording, but floating in between the two words. The teeth were clamped on something. A data disc was wedged into its open mouth. When I pried it free, I saw the face. It was my sister, not that wasn't possible, she was gone, forever. It certainly looked like her. My knees grew week and began to buckle, visions of places long past flooded my head. I couldn't breathe, god I couldn't even move...
"Why?" The word started echoing around my head. Why. Why. Why. I saw her face looking out of the placid lake. Reaching up to pull me in. Why. I had to push her down, she was going to pull me under too. Why. I didn't want to die. Why. Spinning. Falling. Being carried.
"Why did you do that Kyle?"
"I didn't want to die?!"
"What?" It was Patrick. I was back on the ground, covered in rank water. One of them must have carried me out. The data file was still clutched in my hand. I wordlessly put it into his.
"What's this?"
"Data file, it was, it was in there." I didn't want to name that place. Patrick called over some other detectives and told them to run it through a console.
"Does anyone but you and me know about the lake, Kyle?" Patrick was whispering into my ear, he didn't seem to want anyone else to know how it related to me.
"One.... one person. My psychiatrist Dr. Dyo."
"I'll need to send people to interrogate him," he pulled me up onto my feet. "its possible he had something to do with it, but you can go home now." Some detective I didn't know the name of helped me to my car.
"Auto- Pilot, home." Then darkness filled my vision.
The lake again. This time there were more bodies, but no Clara. How many people had died to make that mutilated mosaic. I don't know, didn't even ask. Quite frankly I hadn't even cared that much. The body parts moved around, swirling around the head in the middle until a full human formed. She looked so much like her, like Clara. It makes sense that I thought it was her at first. Her mouth formed one word. I didn't have to hear in this twisted fantasy to know what it was.
Why?
I collapsed on the floor next to my bed, saturated with sweat. I didn't remember walking up the stairs to this room, but I must have had a memory lapse, lost time if you will. I couldn't always remember what I was doing. I installed cameras to watch my habits to make sure I wasn't harming myself when I lost memory. Its possible that I could check later to see how I had made it up the stairs.
A message was waiting on the console. I grabbed the neck of the bottle next to my terminal and pulled the text file up. All it said was, watch this. A video opened on the terminal after the text faded away. What I saw should have made me sick to my stomach, maybe it was the whiskey, or maybe nothing could make me more sick than what I saw earlier that morning. A girl, a young girl, struggling for air, filled up the screen. She was pounding on a glass wall, air bubbles trickled out of her mouth, slowly draining away her life. The video ended and I hadn't moved. This wasn't like the last time, there was no obvious message for me to find, no location, no nothing. Just senseless violence.
Something behind the water tank caught my eye. An old decrepit sign, hanging from a wall. I had published an article about a rundown shopping complex under the City's Mall. It may have been a coincidence, or it may have been another message from the killer. I opened up a communication line with Patrick.
"I think I know where this is Detective." I scrambled around my apartment looking for the article, but none of them seemed to be in my writing desk. "It's under the City's Mall, in the basements. I wrote an article that can prove it to you, but I can't seem to find it."
"That's fine, this is exactly why we hired you. I'm sending a car to pick you up." He called out orders to other Detectives and they started moving. But I had stopped moving. My writing desk was completely empty. No articles, no paper, no data files, nothing. Not even her picture. Everything was gone, the room didn't look ransacked though, as if someone who knew me had come in and taken what they needed. I took the stairs two at a time down to the lobby. I could hear the police car waiting for me on the landing pad, but I had something I needed to do first.
"Mr. Nigma, can I ask something from you?" My landlord was on good terms with me so I figured he would agree.
"Sure, Kyle, what is it?"
"I need the video surveillance tapes from my room for the last week or two. Its important that I need it by the time I get home tonight."
"I can have them waiting on the front desk when you get back." The Detectives came into the lobby to get me. They pushed and dragged me into the cruiser. Sitting in the back seat, where the criminals were contained, I waited. They didn't say anything to me, didn't look at me, didn't acknowledge me. The silence suited us though, It gave me a chance to think about my privacy situation. Only two people other than the landlord and myself had keys to the apartment, and the door wasn't forced. Dr. Dyo and Patrick both had keys because they knew about my situation but which one of them could have gone into my apartment. My mind jumped between all of the possibilities, Dr. Dyo could have used his entrance into my mind to position the corpses. Patrick could have used our personal history to do it, betrayed my past, maybe he wants to be caught, thats why he was calling out to me. No, that didn't make sense, but, the Detectives were corrupt, I've always said that, maybe Patrick wasn't the saint I thought he was.
We landed at the shopping center. Patrick was waiting for me.
"Hey w...."
"Did you talk to Dr. Dyo?"
"We sent a couple of men to interrogate him, he seemed innocent. Is there anyone else it could be?" He seemed genuine, but if he was the intruder in my apartment I couldn't trust him.
"I think the killer is reaching out to me personally, I need to see the death scene." I avoided his gaze, as if letting him peer into my eyes would betray my suspicions. They lead me down into the catacombs below the shopping center. Left after left, right after right, until we finally arrived by the tank of water.
She was perfect. Suspended in time at the moment of her death. Pristine, beautiful. Whoever had done this thought of it as an art. They thought of it as the perfect example of beauty in the world. The moment of death. There weren't any more clues to be found, no hand extending to me, no one welcoming me at the door.
"I need to think, can someone lead me back to the shopping center?" A detective came up to me and lead me out of the dungeon, away from her shining beauty. He pulled me back out into the shopping center, the fluorescent lights stung my eyes for a moment, contrasting the dark sky outside. My favorite coffee shop was across the lobby so I made my way towards it. Only one man was sitting there, it was too late at night to be drinking coffee.
I tried to get these images out of my head, her face being overlapped with my sisters. The word flooding into my head. I needed to concentrate though, to try to stop The Jackal. It was 5 minutes before I noticed that the other man wasn't turning the page on his newspaper. He had been staring into the same spot on it since I had arrived. The title story was mine. The same story that had been stolen from my home. I leapt over to him and sat down.
"Hello, Mr. Logan. You may call me Hyde." The man whispered.
"How do you know who I am?" I didn't care what he wanted me to call him.
"We have a mutual friend, one who very much wants you to meet him."
"You're friends with the beast?"
"I would watch my mouth, he's more like you than you think."
"I'm nothing like that bastard."
"You'll have a chance to find out if you like." That stopped me, and intrigued me.
"Why would he want me to find him?"
"He's tired of doing what he does, but it would be dishonorable to quit now, so he has reached out to you, he deemed you worthy to find him."
"If he's been doing this for so long why haven't I heard of him before today?"
"He did not want to be found until now. Thats enough of that though, if you want to find him you'll have to make a choice." I didn't like the sound of that.
"What choice?"
"Our friend has taken 7 people hostage, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, all normal people. In 15 minutes the room they are in will collapse, and kill all of them. The choice is this, you may be told where they are held or you may be told where The Jackal's lair is." It was a test, another chance for me to prove that I am the same as the Jackal, that we both had that killer instinct, we both would do whatever we had to to get the job done. 7 lives and untold amounts of people, would be forever changed because of this choice. But it was my only chance, my only chance to find this monster of a man, and end him. And see his art again, witness the painter firsthand.
7 more people, on my conscience. Not his this time, mine, it would be my fault. But what if he kept killing, killed more than seven people, I would be saving lives.
"Time's running out, Mr. Logan."
"Where is he?" A smile trickled across the man's lips.
"This is the location address in this center. Don't bring your Detective friends either, it won't end well for you." He slid a data file across the table.
"Why's that?" I hadn't intended to bring them anyway, they might ruin this chance for me.
"Why do you think they asked you to help them?" The question took me off guard.
"Because he reached out to me."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because I'm a genius, he wants someone to play a game against." Thats what Patrick had made it sound like this morning.
"What if it's not because you're as smart as him, but as lost? You think like the insane, because you are insane. Don't trust them." On that note the man picked up the unpublished newspaper and walked out of the atrium, leaving me with a data file containing the Jackal's location. I'm not sure how long it took before I could move again, but I had 7 minutes remaining until those people died, those animals. No, why was that thought popping into my head. Why started bouncing around my head again. I was wasting time. Pushing the memories down into the recesses of my conscious, I left the atrium as well, and plugged the data file into a map.
The location appeared, light in red, on the terminal. I opted to download it onto my wrist display. The path to the hideout, went through the old section which was exposed to the elements by now. It had started raining when I was examining the most recent murder. Hard. My feet formed the path that I hadn't walked before, while my mind remained examining the display. Trying to predict where it would lead me. Left over Right, right over left. Repeat. I wound my way through the labyrinth of hallways in the center, eventually leading to an exit. I found myself on the 50th floor, on a catwalk that lead to an isolated tower in the center. Rain washed over the walkway, making it dangerous to make my way across. Often I slipped, holding myself up only with my arms on the handrail. The display notified me that I had 4 minutes until the 7 were killed. This made me lose my concentration, and I slipped. Grabbing onto what I could, I found myself steady, with my feet dangling above the drop. The sudden shift in weight had made the catwalk unstable and I was forced to grip the handrail the rest of the way.
When I arrived at the tower I found that it was an old overseer tower. They were used to control the population inside the center and had incredible surveillance capabilities. It was locked with an identification sensor. Perhaps the Jackal had entered my info to allow me entrance. He had. The door opened after it took a sample of my DNA and I was swallowed into the darkness.
Mirrors. Everywhere, behind me, in front of me, no matter where I looked I saw myself. This must have been an homage to the Jackal's own ego. Reminding him just who he was every time he entered his lair. Beyond the reflecting hallway was a large open room, with displays lining the walls. He was observing everything. The Detective Corps HQ, the Town Hall, the Shopping Center, the sites of both of the murders. He could view whatever he wanted, from this room, without ever having to leave. It's no wonder that he was able to go undetected for so long. I reached out to touch the console and it reacted to my touch. It lit up red, the videos went dark and another door in the middle of the room, previously hidden, swung open. I slowly made my way towards it.
The tension I felt before entering that room, was higher than when we found the bodies. And I was right to be afraid. In the room was one screen, playing nothing, and no light. When the display lit up it showed a dated video. A video I had long forgotten about. Two children were playing on a boat in the middle of the lake. A relative must have been filming it because she was talking about the vacation they were on. The girl fell into the lake. The woman filming paid it no mind, as her brother leaned over to pull her up back onto the boat. But just as she was about to break the surface, he pushed her back under. The woman grew concerned, but remained in the same spot, until the young boy did it again, the girl had yet to come up for air. She dropped the camera and ran at the boat, screaming.
Fear overcame me, confusion, anger. I didn't know what to feel exactly. But fear was there as it always was, hiding just below the surface. My eyes were drawn to a table in the middle of the room. On it laid my unpublished articles. And a picture of my sister. The one that was supposed to be resting in my apartment.
Time was up. A great movement from the Center knocked me off of my feet. Smoke stung my nose as I realized what the Jackal had done. He hadn't wanted me to beat him, he wanted to confuse me, scare me, then erase himself. He was playing a game, but not against me, with me. I ran back out into the rain, and the cool water splashing in my face, cleared my mind. I could still find him. He hadn't realized that I knew he had broken into my apartment. All I had to do was view the tapes, and they would be in my home when I returned.
Patrick was yelling at other Detectives, but I could barely hear them, there was so much chaos, looking for the cause of the explosion that rocked the Center. They did't know that they would find the Jackal's final masterpiece under all the rubble. I requested a Detective return me to my home, and when I finally regained my composure, I began on the tapes.
It took weeks, but I had time. I ignored all the newspapers requesting my articles and the Detectives said there were no victims after the 7 in the shopping center. But they always sent a Detective to visit me in my home, I never let them in, never spoke to them for longer than necessary, but I could see them looking into my eyes. Looking for the madness that Hyde told them they thought they would find there. Dr. Dyo requested to see me on a daily basis, but I refused every time. Nothing was more important than finding the Master, the Jackal.
I checked, then double checked the tapes. I had to confirm what I had seen. The truth, scared me, and confused me. But I finally had to admit that what I had seen was true.
No one had entered my apartment.
Clara Logan looked at me through the veil of time, and it was like I was 10 all over again. She started mouthing one word under the water. I knew what she was saying, and I knew what would come next, but I had to hear. I had to hear her voice one more time. My face breached the serene surface of the lake, and her arms swooped up to grab my face. She whispered the word into my ear.
"Why?"
I was falling again. Into the water, out of the boat, onto the floor. The rank smell of my sweat reached me even though I was about a foot and a half below the pool that inevitably forms during my night terrors. I tried to stand but my legs were shaking too hard and I dropped back down on to the floor. The bottle of whiskey, my usual nighttime companion rolled off of the nightstand and onto the floor next to me. I small drink of the amber liquid helped me to regain my wits a small amount, enough that I could stand comfortably. I reached out my shaking arms to grab the console pad for my apartment. It took a few seconds to boot up, but then all the walls were illuminated with an artificial glow that came from the the projector system being suspended from the ceiling. I checked the electrical output at the top of the main screen. It read 12/21/37, 3:27 A.M. the first day of winter. I swiped my fingers across the air and the screens switched to messages. 3 new messages. One from the City Times, requiring that I submit my newest edit of the article on pollution levels in The City. Another from my therapist reminding me to show up for today's meeting. Finally, one from..... Patrick?
Why would Det. Aren send me a message so early in the morning? It wasn't personal, he used his personal account to send me messages as a friend. This was business. What would a lead detective need a journalist for? I moved the screen off of the wall and in front of my face. Passing my writing desk the display lit the picture always sitting on the mirror, of Clara. I resigned myself to read the message. The floating display tailed me through the apartment it read,
Kyle,
I need your help, there's a new case working its way through the detective corps. Its beating me. Hard. I can't make heads or tails of it. Its bad. Real Bad Kyle. People are dying, people are going to keep dying. I know how you feel about the corps, but you have a chance to do the right thing here. Please come to the address I'm attaching at 12:30 today. I'll explain the rest there.
To do the right thing. He knew that would stick with me. I have a chance to do the right thing. I haven't done many things right in my life, he knew that would bother me. Working with the Detective Corps would be difficult, after I published an article about the corruption amongst the leadership. It hadn't gone over well. I'd have to worry about it later, if Patrick actually sent me this, he really did need my help, I couldn't just ignore that. The address he sent me wasn't too far from the psychiatrist, it wouldn't be too hard to go over after my appointment. Just to take a look.
"Is Kyle there?" Dr. Dyo asked. I pulled out of my daydream. Dr. Dyo looked mildly concerned. Maybe I should stop zoning out during these sessions.
"Kyle did you go back to the lake last night?" He already knew about my nocturnal issues, we had met so many times before.
"I'd rather not talk about it." I ignored the question, as I always had, and always would. Even just thinking about that place, made me start to sweat in my seat. Vision started to fade, the voice started to creep back into my ears. I had to control it. I would never let that place control me in broad daylight.
"Are we ever going to talk more about that place?" She wasn't pleased with my silence. We had discussed it once, at length. I nearly lost it here in this room. I didn't have to talk about it, I could handle it alone. She sighed.
"What about working with the Detective Corps? Are you going to help them?" I didn't remember mentioning that, it must have been before my daydream.
"Patrick needs my help so I'll help him. It's that simple."
"You've had issues with the corps before." The time on my watch read 12:12, I should leave. It felt like I had just arrived though, I hoped she would understand.
"Maybe I can do something right for once in my life." I rose to leave, she didn't say anything, so I wasn't sure if she approved or not. Or did it even matter what she thought? No, no it didn't. I didn't look back to check.
My junk car was landed on the pad. It recognized the key chip attached to my wrist, the engines hummed to life, and it slowly rose to my waist height. After climbing in I inputed the address and ascended into the traffic lanes, it would take about 10 minutes for me to arrive at the...... Block A Garden Complex. First I was pulling into the hover traffic lanes, then I was there. Somehow I must have zoned out during the flight, the car must have auto flown here on its own. As I stepped out onto the green grass, I saw Patrick talking to an older gentleman who looked displeased.
"....... make sure you watch hi..... Hello, Mr. Logan." He stopped midsentence when he saw me, and looked even less pleased. It was no surprise to me though, I had called him out personally for corruption in my last article. What concerned me more was the look on Patrick's face, he looked resigned, as if he was being forced into this.
"This way Kyle. " He beckoned over to me, drawing me over to where I assumed the crime was committed. "I wasn't completely honest with you earlier Kyle, there's a real reason that I asked you to be here, and it's not because you're a reporter, hell its not even because you're a genius, well maybe it.... We've got a situation. The boys are calling him, The Jackal. Real bastard of a man, a monster. He only does this at night and we can't figure anything out about him..... I don't know you'll have to see for yourself." He didn't make eye contact with me the entire time. What wasn't he telling me? He brought me through the woods and into full view of the lake. I had to stop in my tracks, I could barely hear any of the detectives. The lake in real life, looked so much like it. Like that lake. It started forcing its way into my head, I had to focus on something else. I looked elsewhere and saw what was floating in the lake.
"How?... I ... Who did this?" I was stunned and confused. In the lake floated dismembered corpses, held together to spell two words. They bobbed up and down on the rank water, never breaking their hellish formation. The bodies read, "Dear Clara". It was revolting. Or it was supposed to be revolting, I was stricken by a type of beauty. A horrible, monstrous beauty. But I couldn't deny it.
"Do you think its a coincidence?" Patrick asked me. I wasn't sure. I'd have to look around first. But what were the odds? What are the chances that someone else was related to a person named Clara, and also connected to a lake like this.
"There's a way to check." I whispered.
"How?"
"If its for me there will be a message in there."
"In there? We have to wait for the crime scene team to..... hey wait!" I was already gone, walking towards the hell lake in front of me. Something drew me to it, I think the scene was meant for me. If that was true then there would be a message. Right in the middle. Right where Clara would be. The calm water's surface broke when I lowered into it. I could barely feel the numbing water soaking itself into my clothes because I saw something that was invisible from farther away. A head, not connected to the rest of the hellish wording, but floating in between the two words. The teeth were clamped on something. A data disc was wedged into its open mouth. When I pried it free, I saw the face. It was my sister, not that wasn't possible, she was gone, forever. It certainly looked like her. My knees grew week and began to buckle, visions of places long past flooded my head. I couldn't breathe, god I couldn't even move...
"Why?" The word started echoing around my head. Why. Why. Why. I saw her face looking out of the placid lake. Reaching up to pull me in. Why. I had to push her down, she was going to pull me under too. Why. I didn't want to die. Why. Spinning. Falling. Being carried.
"Why did you do that Kyle?"
"I didn't want to die?!"
"What?" It was Patrick. I was back on the ground, covered in rank water. One of them must have carried me out. The data file was still clutched in my hand. I wordlessly put it into his.
"What's this?"
"Data file, it was, it was in there." I didn't want to name that place. Patrick called over some other detectives and told them to run it through a console.
"Does anyone but you and me know about the lake, Kyle?" Patrick was whispering into my ear, he didn't seem to want anyone else to know how it related to me.
"One.... one person. My psychiatrist Dr. Dyo."
"I'll need to send people to interrogate him," he pulled me up onto my feet. "its possible he had something to do with it, but you can go home now." Some detective I didn't know the name of helped me to my car.
"Auto- Pilot, home." Then darkness filled my vision.
The lake again. This time there were more bodies, but no Clara. How many people had died to make that mutilated mosaic. I don't know, didn't even ask. Quite frankly I hadn't even cared that much. The body parts moved around, swirling around the head in the middle until a full human formed. She looked so much like her, like Clara. It makes sense that I thought it was her at first. Her mouth formed one word. I didn't have to hear in this twisted fantasy to know what it was.
Why?
I collapsed on the floor next to my bed, saturated with sweat. I didn't remember walking up the stairs to this room, but I must have had a memory lapse, lost time if you will. I couldn't always remember what I was doing. I installed cameras to watch my habits to make sure I wasn't harming myself when I lost memory. Its possible that I could check later to see how I had made it up the stairs.
A message was waiting on the console. I grabbed the neck of the bottle next to my terminal and pulled the text file up. All it said was, watch this. A video opened on the terminal after the text faded away. What I saw should have made me sick to my stomach, maybe it was the whiskey, or maybe nothing could make me more sick than what I saw earlier that morning. A girl, a young girl, struggling for air, filled up the screen. She was pounding on a glass wall, air bubbles trickled out of her mouth, slowly draining away her life. The video ended and I hadn't moved. This wasn't like the last time, there was no obvious message for me to find, no location, no nothing. Just senseless violence.
Something behind the water tank caught my eye. An old decrepit sign, hanging from a wall. I had published an article about a rundown shopping complex under the City's Mall. It may have been a coincidence, or it may have been another message from the killer. I opened up a communication line with Patrick.
"I think I know where this is Detective." I scrambled around my apartment looking for the article, but none of them seemed to be in my writing desk. "It's under the City's Mall, in the basements. I wrote an article that can prove it to you, but I can't seem to find it."
"That's fine, this is exactly why we hired you. I'm sending a car to pick you up." He called out orders to other Detectives and they started moving. But I had stopped moving. My writing desk was completely empty. No articles, no paper, no data files, nothing. Not even her picture. Everything was gone, the room didn't look ransacked though, as if someone who knew me had come in and taken what they needed. I took the stairs two at a time down to the lobby. I could hear the police car waiting for me on the landing pad, but I had something I needed to do first.
"Mr. Nigma, can I ask something from you?" My landlord was on good terms with me so I figured he would agree.
"Sure, Kyle, what is it?"
"I need the video surveillance tapes from my room for the last week or two. Its important that I need it by the time I get home tonight."
"I can have them waiting on the front desk when you get back." The Detectives came into the lobby to get me. They pushed and dragged me into the cruiser. Sitting in the back seat, where the criminals were contained, I waited. They didn't say anything to me, didn't look at me, didn't acknowledge me. The silence suited us though, It gave me a chance to think about my privacy situation. Only two people other than the landlord and myself had keys to the apartment, and the door wasn't forced. Dr. Dyo and Patrick both had keys because they knew about my situation but which one of them could have gone into my apartment. My mind jumped between all of the possibilities, Dr. Dyo could have used his entrance into my mind to position the corpses. Patrick could have used our personal history to do it, betrayed my past, maybe he wants to be caught, thats why he was calling out to me. No, that didn't make sense, but, the Detectives were corrupt, I've always said that, maybe Patrick wasn't the saint I thought he was.
We landed at the shopping center. Patrick was waiting for me.
"Hey w...."
"Did you talk to Dr. Dyo?"
"We sent a couple of men to interrogate him, he seemed innocent. Is there anyone else it could be?" He seemed genuine, but if he was the intruder in my apartment I couldn't trust him.
"I think the killer is reaching out to me personally, I need to see the death scene." I avoided his gaze, as if letting him peer into my eyes would betray my suspicions. They lead me down into the catacombs below the shopping center. Left after left, right after right, until we finally arrived by the tank of water.
She was perfect. Suspended in time at the moment of her death. Pristine, beautiful. Whoever had done this thought of it as an art. They thought of it as the perfect example of beauty in the world. The moment of death. There weren't any more clues to be found, no hand extending to me, no one welcoming me at the door.
"I need to think, can someone lead me back to the shopping center?" A detective came up to me and lead me out of the dungeon, away from her shining beauty. He pulled me back out into the shopping center, the fluorescent lights stung my eyes for a moment, contrasting the dark sky outside. My favorite coffee shop was across the lobby so I made my way towards it. Only one man was sitting there, it was too late at night to be drinking coffee.
I tried to get these images out of my head, her face being overlapped with my sisters. The word flooding into my head. I needed to concentrate though, to try to stop The Jackal. It was 5 minutes before I noticed that the other man wasn't turning the page on his newspaper. He had been staring into the same spot on it since I had arrived. The title story was mine. The same story that had been stolen from my home. I leapt over to him and sat down.
"Hello, Mr. Logan. You may call me Hyde." The man whispered.
"How do you know who I am?" I didn't care what he wanted me to call him.
"We have a mutual friend, one who very much wants you to meet him."
"You're friends with the beast?"
"I would watch my mouth, he's more like you than you think."
"I'm nothing like that bastard."
"You'll have a chance to find out if you like." That stopped me, and intrigued me.
"Why would he want me to find him?"
"He's tired of doing what he does, but it would be dishonorable to quit now, so he has reached out to you, he deemed you worthy to find him."
"If he's been doing this for so long why haven't I heard of him before today?"
"He did not want to be found until now. Thats enough of that though, if you want to find him you'll have to make a choice." I didn't like the sound of that.
"What choice?"
"Our friend has taken 7 people hostage, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, all normal people. In 15 minutes the room they are in will collapse, and kill all of them. The choice is this, you may be told where they are held or you may be told where The Jackal's lair is." It was a test, another chance for me to prove that I am the same as the Jackal, that we both had that killer instinct, we both would do whatever we had to to get the job done. 7 lives and untold amounts of people, would be forever changed because of this choice. But it was my only chance, my only chance to find this monster of a man, and end him. And see his art again, witness the painter firsthand.
7 more people, on my conscience. Not his this time, mine, it would be my fault. But what if he kept killing, killed more than seven people, I would be saving lives.
"Time's running out, Mr. Logan."
"Where is he?" A smile trickled across the man's lips.
"This is the location address in this center. Don't bring your Detective friends either, it won't end well for you." He slid a data file across the table.
"Why's that?" I hadn't intended to bring them anyway, they might ruin this chance for me.
"Why do you think they asked you to help them?" The question took me off guard.
"Because he reached out to me."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because I'm a genius, he wants someone to play a game against." Thats what Patrick had made it sound like this morning.
"What if it's not because you're as smart as him, but as lost? You think like the insane, because you are insane. Don't trust them." On that note the man picked up the unpublished newspaper and walked out of the atrium, leaving me with a data file containing the Jackal's location. I'm not sure how long it took before I could move again, but I had 7 minutes remaining until those people died, those animals. No, why was that thought popping into my head. Why started bouncing around my head again. I was wasting time. Pushing the memories down into the recesses of my conscious, I left the atrium as well, and plugged the data file into a map.
The location appeared, light in red, on the terminal. I opted to download it onto my wrist display. The path to the hideout, went through the old section which was exposed to the elements by now. It had started raining when I was examining the most recent murder. Hard. My feet formed the path that I hadn't walked before, while my mind remained examining the display. Trying to predict where it would lead me. Left over Right, right over left. Repeat. I wound my way through the labyrinth of hallways in the center, eventually leading to an exit. I found myself on the 50th floor, on a catwalk that lead to an isolated tower in the center. Rain washed over the walkway, making it dangerous to make my way across. Often I slipped, holding myself up only with my arms on the handrail. The display notified me that I had 4 minutes until the 7 were killed. This made me lose my concentration, and I slipped. Grabbing onto what I could, I found myself steady, with my feet dangling above the drop. The sudden shift in weight had made the catwalk unstable and I was forced to grip the handrail the rest of the way.
When I arrived at the tower I found that it was an old overseer tower. They were used to control the population inside the center and had incredible surveillance capabilities. It was locked with an identification sensor. Perhaps the Jackal had entered my info to allow me entrance. He had. The door opened after it took a sample of my DNA and I was swallowed into the darkness.
Mirrors. Everywhere, behind me, in front of me, no matter where I looked I saw myself. This must have been an homage to the Jackal's own ego. Reminding him just who he was every time he entered his lair. Beyond the reflecting hallway was a large open room, with displays lining the walls. He was observing everything. The Detective Corps HQ, the Town Hall, the Shopping Center, the sites of both of the murders. He could view whatever he wanted, from this room, without ever having to leave. It's no wonder that he was able to go undetected for so long. I reached out to touch the console and it reacted to my touch. It lit up red, the videos went dark and another door in the middle of the room, previously hidden, swung open. I slowly made my way towards it.
The tension I felt before entering that room, was higher than when we found the bodies. And I was right to be afraid. In the room was one screen, playing nothing, and no light. When the display lit up it showed a dated video. A video I had long forgotten about. Two children were playing on a boat in the middle of the lake. A relative must have been filming it because she was talking about the vacation they were on. The girl fell into the lake. The woman filming paid it no mind, as her brother leaned over to pull her up back onto the boat. But just as she was about to break the surface, he pushed her back under. The woman grew concerned, but remained in the same spot, until the young boy did it again, the girl had yet to come up for air. She dropped the camera and ran at the boat, screaming.
Fear overcame me, confusion, anger. I didn't know what to feel exactly. But fear was there as it always was, hiding just below the surface. My eyes were drawn to a table in the middle of the room. On it laid my unpublished articles. And a picture of my sister. The one that was supposed to be resting in my apartment.
Time was up. A great movement from the Center knocked me off of my feet. Smoke stung my nose as I realized what the Jackal had done. He hadn't wanted me to beat him, he wanted to confuse me, scare me, then erase himself. He was playing a game, but not against me, with me. I ran back out into the rain, and the cool water splashing in my face, cleared my mind. I could still find him. He hadn't realized that I knew he had broken into my apartment. All I had to do was view the tapes, and they would be in my home when I returned.
Patrick was yelling at other Detectives, but I could barely hear them, there was so much chaos, looking for the cause of the explosion that rocked the Center. They did't know that they would find the Jackal's final masterpiece under all the rubble. I requested a Detective return me to my home, and when I finally regained my composure, I began on the tapes.
It took weeks, but I had time. I ignored all the newspapers requesting my articles and the Detectives said there were no victims after the 7 in the shopping center. But they always sent a Detective to visit me in my home, I never let them in, never spoke to them for longer than necessary, but I could see them looking into my eyes. Looking for the madness that Hyde told them they thought they would find there. Dr. Dyo requested to see me on a daily basis, but I refused every time. Nothing was more important than finding the Master, the Jackal.
I checked, then double checked the tapes. I had to confirm what I had seen. The truth, scared me, and confused me. But I finally had to admit that what I had seen was true.
No one had entered my apartment.