Chaos Read online

  She swept up the wasp killer in her hands and nevertheless sprayed the hell out of the vent and the wall, then plastered what was left of the roll of packing tape over the whole spot.

  ***

  Over the grounds outside the apartment, the night came on quickly. Under the night, the grounds began to change. The changes were subtle and gradual: shifting boundaries between grass and gravel, trees creaking and sinking their roots into new patterns in the ground, moonlight manipulated into distorted finger-shapes by the surrounding shadows. Beneath the apartment building, the black puddle spread outward again, pulsating, breathing, bleeding, pumping its reckless abandon into the world. In the spaces between things where night gathered thickest, the chaotic ones that Aggie knew as hinshing moved and chattered their own half-nonsense language.

  The residents of Bridgewood might have seen movement if any of them had been looking out a window toward the Old Ward. They might have caught blurred glimpses, or heard the irregular cadence of the chaotic ones’ speech. As it turned out, the few residents of the Bridgewood apartments were busy with their own thoughts and their own nighttime rituals. But the night wore on, and the chaotic ones were felt as chills, as ideas gone too far for comfort, as memories, both real and faulty. Also, of course, the chaotic ones were seen in dreams, beneath a handful of masks, a number of costumes. It was a common early symptom of the black puddle leaking through.

  The hinshing themselves did not sleep, and so did not dream.

  It was only a matter of time before they got inside.

  FIVE

  For the week following his discovery of the sticky note on his fridge, Larson set the foreground (and at times, simply the background) of his mind to figuring out two very important things. The first was the question of who was leaving him the notes. The second was how to decipher the hints the notes offered, and so have the woman in 2C for himself.

  Regarding the former, all the most likely suspects in his mind raised questions that left him largely unsatisfied. Mrs. Sunderman, the landlady, ostensibly had a key to every apartment. It was possible that she could have let herself in during one of his whiskey naps and left the sticky notes on his fridge. He was no longer the light sleeper he used to be. But why would she be leaving him notes? It was possible that maybe she saw a grieving man in him, a loss-stricken man, and wanted to offer him encouragement in a way she felt was unobtrusive. It was unconventional, even off-putting, but it had been his experience that New Englanders often had a quirky way of conducting affairs that they felt no need to clarify or explain to those outside. Still, how did she know what to say? How did she know about the fractals?

  The man in 2B was a writer, and the connection between writer and written notes seemed a possibility, though to what end, Larson couldn’t say. Maybe while Larson had been focused on watching others, others had been watching him. Maybe the writer from 2B had written the notes.

  Then there was the woman in 2C herself. She could have left the notes to encourage him. To entice him, maybe. Of all the possible leads, she was the one he hoped was writing the notes, even though it meant she was playing games with him. He didn’t mind games; he liked them, in fact, especially when beautiful women were playing them as a means to a most desirable end. Aside from games of chance, which were, in his opinion, foolish wastes of time, Larson thought of most games as puzzles. And solving puzzles, after all, was what he did best. It was what the city of Boston had paid him to do for so long.

  One of the things Larson had picked up in his years as a detective was that the solution to a puzzle was most often written between the lines. And the little details, abundant once one knew what to look for, pointed right to it. It wasn’t just the devil, but all his answers to everything, that were in the details.

  While his mind worked on that piece of the puzzle, he reread the next three notes where he had stuck them in a row across the fridge. They, too, had appeared overnight, but this time in different locations throughout the apartment. The first note he found stuck to the bathroom mirror. Its little yellow square with matter-of-fact print was inarguable.

  Follow the pink and gray lines. He smiled to himself. “Follow the lines,” he asked the empty room, “or what’s between them?” He didn’t know what the note meant. Was he supposed to follow specific train lines, like Boston’s Ell? Did it mean lines in a book? A line drawing of pink and gray? And what was significant about those two colors? He thought brains were gray, at least. Organs were pink. The body was constantly creating and recreating its own patterns. Pink and gray patterns. It was a stretch, but he supposed the instruction given in the note made more sense in conjunction with the others.

  The second note he found stuck to one of the kitchen cabinets, where he kept the coffee mugs. Larson thought it had something of a fortune cookie vibe to it. Catch the clouds while you can. In the context of the second note, maybe the lines had to do with something in or about the sky at sunset or sunrise. Perhaps where the first note indicated a direction or a place, the second indicated a time. When was the best time to catch a cloud?

  The third was, to him, the most puzzling of all. Although it was written in the same handwriting as all the others, the tone of it was different. The sentiment did not strike him as in keeping with the previous notes. It had a forlorn, almost desperate quality to it, not in the words so much as in between the lines.

  Take it all back.

  Yet somehow, this seemed the most important bit of advice of all, and the clearest. He’d lost so much over the last few years...so much. If he were to be brutally honest with himself, he supposed there was a big part of him that thought he’d deserved to lose it all. He’d had no family for some time; he believed one of the things that had made him a good cop was the time and freedom to be dedicated exclusively to the job. He could hone in on an idea and ponder it from every angle, study it in every light and thoroughly involve himself in it. In the end, though, that focused dedication had worked against him, particularly when such a precision tool was turned on another person. He’d been forced to take leave of absence from his job. He’d lost friends. Respect. Credibility. Sleep. He’d lost whole nights and days to alcohol. He’d lost the crucial ability of homicide detectives to detach from things when necessary. He’d lost Julia, if he’d ever really had her in the first place.

  And in spite of that big part of him that thought he deserved to lose everything, there was just as big a part of him, maybe bigger, that still wanted it all back. But wanting it and going after it were, and had always been, two different things, and therein lay the problem.

  That last note, though, somehow felt like a go-ahead, like he was being given both permission and encouragement at the same time. To have it all back again.

  To take it back.

  There was something very freeing in knowing providence, albeit in the form of anonymous sticky notes, was absolving him for whatever he needed to do to take it back.

  He found himself walking the sidewalk path around the apartments without any real conscious thought of having gotten outside. It was a cool night, its edges sharper only when the wind blew. He walked with hands thrust into his jacket pockets, head bowed. The sun was low but the sky still clung to the deep blue of the day.

  It was something internal, part gut instinct and part psychic connection, maybe, that suddenly drew his eyes upward to a window on the second floor. He was standing just below apartment 2C. The curtains were drawn. No light shone through from inside, but it didn’t matter. He stood there, transfixed and buoyed by his own internal illuminations, the discovery just above his head bringing all the notes into one focused message of crystal clarity.

  The gray and pink threads made fractal patterns amidst the cloudy white of her curtains.

  More importantly, there were suggestions between the lines. Come-hither suggestions. Soft commands. Ideas. Promises. He could read them as clearly as he could read the sticky notes.

  The sunlight was just so, at the beginning of its descent behind t
he hill on which the Bridgewood Estates stood—not too dim to miss the threads of charcoal gray and baby-pink and the subtler patterns between and beneath them, but not so bright as to blind the eye to them, either. He would have missed them, he knew, at any other time of day or night.

  The message in the curtains was clear. Pursuing the woman in 2C and winning her over would be the first of many achievements that would put his life back on track. The events of the next few weeks would all be unfolding permutations in a larger plan of life and love and elements greater than any one person. Whoever his anonymous benefactor was, whether the woman in 2C herself or someone else, he had been issued the greatest of all challenges, the most significant of all puzzles to solve, and at the heart of the solution would be what he needed. The idea of redemption seemed both smarmily melodramatic and out of reach, but a helping hand extended from the darkness to give him a leg up into a life of visible spectrums of happiness seemed possible for the first time in months.

  He realized that the sky had gone a kind of blue-gray, finished with streaking pink sunset clouds across its breadth. It was quickly settling into the deep of twilight, its moving darkness nestling and shrouding the landscape. He had been standing there under her window far longer than he’d realized. But he’d caught the clouds just in time.

  With a final glance up at her curtains, he smiled to himself and made his way back around to the front entrance. There was a bottle of whiskey waiting for him on the table by the couch, and he wanted to celebrate.

  ***

  Mrs. Sunderman, who had been living in the Bridgewood Estates longer than any of her tenants, had reached her fill of breathing poisoned air, drinking tainted water that ran through pipes suffocated by tainted ground, and eating food rotted internally by exposure to the insanity that clung to everything like an invisible second skin. She didn’t know—not consciously, at any rate—that she was being poisoned in these ways, nor did she realize that she had reached the saturation point, but there she was, poised on the brink of fireworking her own particular issues in imminent, unavoidable, unpredictable ways.

  Livie Sunderman, whose salutary title was an insisted remnant of respect for twenty-five years of mostly blissful marriage suddenly ended by a heart attack, lived alone in an apartment on the first floor. Her Marty, passed on some six years ago last May, had been a shareholder of the corporation which owned and maintained the new apartment building on the old hill, and had been appointed manager of the building with a bonus and his choice of apartment to live in. As another remnant of respect for dedicated and loyal service, Mrs. Sunderman was asked to step in as manager after her husband’s passing.

  She did not care for the sordid gossip which had nearly destroyed her chances of living her approaching golden years in comfort and modern style. She refused to listen to the rumors about what had happened on that land, nor lend any credence to the whispered notions that any part of the cause could linger to permeate her apartments. And they were her apartments in her mind—she was responsible for them, and while she felt no maternal or even professional responsibility for the tenants beyond what her job dictated, she was more than a little concerned for the well-being of the rooms those tenants occupied.

  What she did know of the Bridgewood Asylum’s history, the token of which those uppity nerds at the historical society had managed to preserve in the form of the Old Ward, she had simply shoved down and away from her conscious thoughts. She was not a particularly imaginative woman nor a superstitious one, and any silly suggestion that even the worst of tragedies could have an effect on the impenetrable cleanliness and respectability of new wood and glass and fiberglass was preposterous and unacceptable.

  The only element of that horrific past that she entertained in any way was a public statement attributed to one of the doctors of the old asylum: if the best trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he wasn’t real, then the second best was endowing the dangerously insane with the uninhibited confidence to carry out their own internal logic—logic of a sort that self-validates their sense of sanity in an otherwise mad world. This was somewhat in keeping with her view of other people, many of whom she believed were blatant in their impropriety and illogical, at least to her, in their thought processes. That they were driven by a logic of their own only they and the devil could understand brought some sense to the senseless for her. That it was a subjective application of the doctor’s sentiments had never occurred to her.

  The first match to the fuse of her mental fireworks was the maintenance man. She had first seen him when she padded out to the lobby in her sweats and slippers to get the morning paper. She may not have understood the internal logic of the forces driving the world toward headline-making tragedy, but it didn’t stop her from reading about it every morning over coffee. Some complicated system at the local newspaper office prevented the delivery man from leaving each tenant’s paper with his or her mail; instead, he stocked a newspaper dispensary near the tenant mailboxes from which those so inclined could take a morning paper. Mrs. Sunderman was so inclined.

  She didn’t notice the maintenance man until she had begun the return slipper shuffle back to her apartment. In fact, his sudden presence half-inside and half-outside the inert, darkened elevator made her jump.

  “Um...excuse me...excuse me there...can I help you?”

  A balding, middle-aged man sat up with a mild expression of surprise at being interrupted. His hands, she noticed, were unusually big and brown and lightly hairy, the fingers of one wrapped around a screwdriver while the other held a flashlight. He kept a tidy paunch tucked beneath work pants and a company shirt whose breast-pocket logo read Kintner & Sons Elevators.

  “Can I help you?” she repeated dumbly when he didn’t answer. Already, the encounter felt awkward and uncomfortable.

  “I’m here to fix the elevator,” he said, blinking at her. His voice had a kind of friction that reminded her of rough and gritty things—sandpaper and garbage disposals and five o’clock shadow.

  “The elevator?” She looked from him to the steel box surrounding him and back to his impatient face again. “I didn’t call anyone about fixing the elevator.”

  “You didn’t need to. The corporation sent me. Scheduled maintenance for six months after installation was part of the agreement.”

  Flustered, she opened her mouth to reply but then closed it. Scheduled maintenance? Why hadn’t anyone from the corporation or the elevator company told her? Strange men working on her building seemed important enough to mention. And how had he gotten in. Was the Godfrey Corporation now handing out keys to any old joe that claimed some job on the premises? It was outrageous. Still, she found an uncharacteristic reticence holding her tongue. She wasn’t sure if it was the sparkless look in his eye or the way he clutched both the screwdriver and flashlight, but the thought of arguing, of making a scene with this man, of even questioning how he’d gotten in let alone attempting to propel him out, seemed utterly out of the question.

  “I found a system bug, ma’am. I’m fixing it now.” He blinked his right eye rapidly as if trying to free an irritating eyelash.

  “Oh,” she said, and clutched her newspaper tighter. It was all she could manage. Most of her mind was already focused on composing the angry tirade the corporation’s president was going to get on the phone later that morning. This kind of ridiculousness would never have been allowed to happen when Marty was alive.

  “It’s a wiring issue. It’s nothing catastrophic. I can have it fixed in twenty, maybe thirty minutes.” Each of his statements was delivered as simple and inarguable fact. For just a moment, she thought she saw something small and thin swim beneath his eyelid, raising it slightly like a sea serpent cresting just beneath the surface of the water. Before she could be sure, though, the eye began to twitch again and he blinked it hard, trying to bring it under control.

  She gave him an uncertain nod. “I’m in 1B, when you’re done.”

  He nodded once, his right eye still twitching, a
nd then resumed his fetal curl around the side of the elevator, ostensibly working on something beneath an inner panel. She peered over him again and for just a moment, she thought she saw the distorted image of an eyeless man reflected in the shiny interior. She squinted, frowning, and took a step closer. There was no man—only the twisted shapes of light and shadow that constituted the reflections of shapes in the lobby. She hurried back to her apartment with her paper, her slippers making quick shushing noises against the tile.

  Before she closed the door, she heard the man say, “It’s only a matter of time, cupcake.” The door swung shut, though, before she could ask him to repeat or explain himself.

  She padded to the kitchen, muttering her indignation at the corporation’s thoughtlessness. As she poured herself a cup of coffee, she did her best to ignore her shaking hand, or the cool, sick feeling in her stomach.

  Cupcake. Only Marty had ever called her that, and not even him for the past six years.

  Cupcake. It was unprofessional and inappropriate—if it had been meant for her at all, that was. It was possible the man had been talking to...what, the elevator? Did maintenance people talk to their buildings the way sailors talked to their boats? Regardless of whether he had been talking to her or the elevator or an imaginary friend (an eyeless man, maybe), she might have been able to chalk up the nickname to coincidence. It was more than just the nickname, though. It was all of what he’d said.

  “It’s only a matter of time, cupcake.”

  She had a flash of recollection she had done her best the last six years to avoid. In it, her Marty had been sitting in his favorite recliner, feet up, as he peered at the newspaper through relatively new bifocals. One of his habits, both irritating and somehow endearing to her, was to read the most depressing or shocking headlines, shake his head, and comment about how the world was falling apart. He was not a survivalist type who stockpiled guns and canned goods, nor was he given to belief in the supposed portents signaling the end of the world—the end of the Mayan calendar, the conspiracies claiming that the government was supporting terrorist bio-weapon attacks, the statistics predicting a meteor hit, a solar flare, the timely eruption of Yellowstone. Marty didn’t think the end of the world would be a bang or a flash of bright nuclear light or celestial fire. He didn’t think the earth would be knocked out of orbit and go spinning off into space to be swallowed by a roving black hole. But Marty did believe the world as its people knew it would come to an end with a whisper or possibly, in simple stubborn silence. He thought the pestilence that would wipe out humanity would be indifference. The explosions that would take out major cities would be those internal kinds of individual and inexplicable violence. The genocide of millions would start with the rotting of their brains, the degeneration of their education, their desensitization to the ugly, violent acts that fenced them into their own private pens of pseudo-safety and blissful ignorance.