Chicago Prime 1931-v2

My Office above Sammy’s, Old Illinois

11:15pm

1. Enough for One Day

Mahoney and I left The Slipper. I got my guns back from the security guy, checked the mags to make sure they were still loaded, holstered them, and Mahoney did me the great service of driving me back to my office. I was running on fumes and needed some semblance of rest. And a drink. And a cigarette. It’d been nearly twelve hours since I had indulged in either of those vices.

Sammy’s was clear of police tape and dead bodies at this point. The usual patrons were scattered across the bar room in their normal places.

I stopped by the bar. Sammy was posted up at the spot I normally find him, scanning the room for those in need of refills, keeping a close eye on the ones who have had more than their fair share. Sammy didn’t mind people getting drunk, but he didn’t like people who were bad for business. One belligerent drunk could potentially cost Sammy a night’s worth of revenue, so he had a strict policy on kicking people out who needed it, no questions asked.

I nodded to Sammy. He gave me the eyebrows, reached under the bar, and pulled out a bottle of the Kentucky Brown I liked so much. He slid it to me, waved a hand at me and smiled. Sammy was good people.

I lifted my bottle in thanks to Sammy and dragged my tired feet upstairs.

The three flights I had to climb felt like fifty. Once I reached the top step, I stretched back and let out a groan of delight that I was only steps away from a decent amount of rest. Whatever else was true, if someone else was going to die tonight, I still didn’t have a clue who or where. I didn’t like it, but I had to accept it, and being tired and hungry basically guaranteed I’d never figure it out.

My apartment-office door was slightly ajar. Not cracked, but just not fully closed. My door was tricky. If you didn’t pull or push it closed hard enough, the catch wouldn’t latch into the strike plate right, leaving a weird bowing near the handle. I paused before going in, placed the bottle of whiskey down beside the door, and drew Delilah from her holster. I cocked the hammer back, placed my hand on the door handle, and barged in quickly, gun forward, sweeping the corners I knew vividly.

A horror-filled scream came from the couch.

I quickly turned to the voice only to pull my gun back suddenly.

“Mary Grace! What are you doing here?!” I asked, my voice betraying surprise and intrigue. It might have been the exhaustion overtaking my brain, but she was the last person I expected to run into tonight.

She had tears in her eyes, a look unlike the happy, joyful, and wonderfilled girl I’d seen a few hours ago. A look of desperation and fear.

I holstered my pistol and sat down next to her. She threw herself into my chest and sobbed. I hugged her instinctively for a few moments.

I reached for a tissue on the table next to my couch “Mary Grace, would you like to tell me what’s going on?”

Mary Grace could barely get the words out. Her voice was shaky and panicked. She hugged me tighter and cried harder.

The fact that she was here without Sophia tipped me off that something was wrong with her older sister. As much as I wanted her to just cry until she got it all out, I could feel  that time was of the essence.

I placed both hands on her shoulders and pushed her back. I gripped them softly and looked into her mascara stained eyes and asked, “Mary Grace, did something happen to Sophia?”

Mary Grace nodded without speaking.

She was too scared to speak. I was going to have to play twenty questions, at least until I could get her to calm down.

“Is she dead?”

Mary Grace cried harder, but shook her head.

“Did someone take her?”

She nodded.

“Did you see who took her?”

She handed me a note that she had been palming in her hand. She could’ve led with that, but fear and panic make people forget things.

I unfolded the note. The handwriting looked harsh and jagged, like someone had written it with a dagger instead of a pen. It read:

Dear Detective Jones,

You’ve been such a naughty, naughty boy! Our little game has only begun, and you’ve discovered three of my art pieces so far, but there will be four more before I’m finished. My show must go on! I would hate for you to miss the final act. It’s a doozy.

Don’t think of me as some crazed lunatic who’s only killing random women as some sick joke. No, my intentions are far greater than anyone could ever wrap their pea-sized mind around. But not you detective. You’re special. You’re the only one who can solve my puzzle. You and that perfect memory of yours are the only things capable of seeing what’s behind the curtains. You’re the only one I need for my ritual to be complete!

Anyway, don’t worry about Sophia, she won’t die tonight. I need my greatest opponent rested and ready for our battle of wits. I suppose it would be too prosaic for me to say ‘don’t go to the police, or else.’ We don’t want them ruining our fun at this point!

Love, 

The Rat King

P.S. I’ve sent something else with the girl that might help with the sleep troubles.

I spoke to Mary Grace as calmly, but as directly, as I could.

“Mary Grace, I want you to listen to me, and I want you to listen very carefully. First, stop crying.”

She stopped almost instantly, her glossy gaze transfixed on me, hanging on every word.

“Second, was there something else that came with the note?”

Almost as if she were under hypnosis, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a vial with red liquid in it and handed it to me.

I held it up into the light to see if there were any particles suspended in it. It was transparent except for the red color.

I placed it in my own pocket.

I refocused on Mary Grace.

“Who gave you these things? What did they say?”

She took a deep breath and composed herself. “A very tall man at the theater where we were practicing came up and gave me these things and told me to deliver them to you. He was strange looking, and had a very deep voice, almost hypnotic. Sophia had gone to the bathroom before then, but she never returned. When I went to look for her, I couldn’t find her! I only found your card on the bathroom floor.”

“Were there any other people at the theater with you?”

“Besides me and Sophia, it was our coach and some other actors. But it was just practice. People didn’t come in there unless they were practicing.” She was in full remembrance mode now.

“What’s your coach’s name? And this man, did he have a haircut that looked like someone had placed a bowl on his head?”

Our coach is a man named Lester Peabody. He wasn’t the one who handed me the note, though he does look like that. Do you know him? It was someone else. This other man had a very big smile. Almost uncanny.”

My mind was racing through all the faces I had seen in the past week, let alone the past 24 hours. No one except Lester’s face stood out as being particularly unusual.

But then I thought of that figure I saw before I descended down the elevator with Leo at the Silver Slipper. The circumferential smile on a tall figure. Maybe that was him. I had no way of knowing otherwise.

“Do you know where your coach lives?” I asked.

“He stays right next to the theater in Atlantis.”

The theater to which she was referring was the Jabberwocky Theater, and it was located right on the convergence point of all three districts. A piece of the Delaware Crater wraps around Old Illinois for a few hundred yards connecting to Atlantis. That’s where the Theater is. It was built as a symbol that all people could enjoy the arts, no matter their socioeconomic status.

So many things were piling up on my plate at once. I needed to go see the assistant Julia Smith about Jessica Callahan, Miss B was bound to make a surprise appearance at any time, and now I needed to go talk to the noodle man, Lester Peabody. All of this while avoiding Mr. Rock and Mr. Rumble.

I remembered I still needed to pay Don Caroselli a visit, as well as The Temperance Society.

But before I wanted to do any of that, I needed to sleep.

I walked over to the wall near the bathroom door and opened the door against it. I pulled down the Murphy bed that had stayed hidden behind it for several months. The sheets and blankets were in surprisingly good order. I smoothed it out and told Mary Grace that she was not only welcome to stay here, but that I highly advised it for her own safety. A familiar smile returned to her face. She eagerly accepted.

I walked out into the hallway and grabbed the bottle of whiskey Sammy had given me and poured myself a drink. Mary Grace eyed the bottle and me as it glug glugged into the rocks glass on my table. I thought about lighting up one of the cigarettes burning a hole in my pocket, but I decided that exposing this young girl to only one of my vices was enough.

I said to Mary Grace’s curious stare, “drinking’s for when you want to feel even better, not when you want to stop feeling bad.”

“Do you not feel bad?” She asked.

I took a sip while staring at nothing in particular.

“I drink so I don’t feel bad.” I replied soberly.

“So you always feel good, or you never stop drinking?” Her voice had a bit of an upward and then downward inflection in her question.

“Absolutes aren’t a part of the equation, Mary Grace. If I always felt good, I’d never need to drink. But, when I feel bad, my mind goes to dark memories that I can’t forget. Whiskey helps keep those memories locked away for a while.”

“My daddy used to say that memories are what help us move forward. We look back so we can remember where it is we need to go,” she said. I was rather impressed with this level of mature thinking. I certainly wasn’t thinking that way when I was nineteen. I also hadn’t started drinking or smoking yet. That wouldn’t happen till I was about twenty-five.

“Maybe so. Maybe so.”

I showered and cleaned up for the first time in nearly three days. I closed the door and made sure it was shut and locked all the way—which I thought I had done this morning. Mary Grace spent nearly an hour in the bathroom alone, but by the time she had come out and tucked herself in, I was asleep on the couch.

The vial remained unopened on the coffee table.

2. Head Space

I awoke with a start. My heart felt like it was about to beat out of my chest. I was halfway sitting up with my elbow propping me up. The vial was still there next to the half empty bottle of whiskey. I didn’t remember drinking more than just the one glass before going to bed.

I looked over the back of the couch and saw that Mary Grace was fast asleep in the bed. A rocks glass sat half full on the table next to her.

The sounds of Chicago Prime echoed in the distant night just outside my window. I was so used to it at this point, it was basically white noise for me. I was surprised it didn’t wake Mary Grace—until I saw the glass next to her bed.

I rubbed my eyes and turned my body facing forward. I sat for several minutes as my mind filled with more and more memories that the whiskey had kept bedded down for a few hours. I checked my watch. 2:32am. Almost 24 hours since Delaney had called me about Jessica Callahan, but it also meant that I had gotten a solid 3 hours of sleep.

I leaned over and picked the vial up and stared at it. What is it? Why would it make me sleep? Could it finally help me get more than just a few hours? My mind wondered what I could be capable of if I had just gotten a full night's rest for once without alcohol. I don’t care what anyone says, alcohol induced sleep is not the same as the real thing. Would this be like the real thing, or just something to replace the whiskey?

I leaned back into the warm embrace of the couch, closed my eyes, and stepped into my mind. It wasn’t a practice I performed often. It caused migraines, nausea, and sometimes vomiting if I stayed in too long. More often than not, I’d find myself more tired than before once it was over. It all happens in a matter of seconds, but it feels like hours. In order to access my memories at this depth, it’s best if I’m relaxed, on a couch or a chair, with little-to-no distractions around me. Otherwise I can only access specific parts at a time, just like a regular mind, but clearer and nearly-perfect. Nearly-perfect because if I misinterpret a moment I commit to memory, it’s still wrong, even if I remember it vividly. If there were a way to describe it in words, it would be something like this:

I woke up in a room back in Yazoo. It’s my old bedroom. A poster of Daisy Franklin—-the famous blues singer—sitting above my bed, her black hair a velvet blanket on top of her pale skin and dazzling white dress. Next to it is a poster of Jack Farmington, pitcher for the Mississippi Choctaws, clad in his home uniform with a donned baseball cap, and glove tucked under his arm.

My eyes sweep across the room to find my old oak chest of drawers adjacent to the desk my father built me in 1910. A stack of baseball cards lays askew in the middle of some old homeschool papers and vivid doodles from memories I’d yet to learn to control. I leave my bed and start making my way through the house. 

The hallway is full of people I’ve passed by in my life. They’ve never made any particular impression other than existing for the passing moments, so they exist in the hallway and spill out into the yard, wandering about the ever shrinking vastness of my mind. People of all shapes, sizes, races, ages, and sex, each face just as I had seen it the first time; same clothes and imperfections of their garments, same blemishes and scars on exposed skin. I can only focus on one person at a time. People only speak words if they’d spoken to me in real life. One can’t remember what someone sounds like if you never heard them.

I walk down the crowded second story hallway and reach the first door. The wooden door doesn’t creak when I push it open, but the several people inside are all people I’ve met personally, but have yet to be more than acquaintances. People like Captain Mahoney, the beat cop Stu Phillips, Senator Callahan, Diana the Memphis waitress, and Leo Wells the elevator guy—to name a few—-stand in the foyer of the house. Diana flashes me her charming smile and holds up a pot of coffee, saying “can I get you anything else, hun?” In a dreamlike tone. Leo is wearing his golden three-piece suit with a money-green tie, waiting patiently with both hands behind his back awaiting me to tell him to which floor I wished to go. Each one just as I remembered them. Mahoney stood closest to the door, as if he were preparing to move on to a different room in my mind.

I move back out to the hall and to the next room.

This door was iron, but like all cerebral doors, it didn’t voice any complaints upon opening. It looks like our old living room. Delaney, Sammy, my friend Anton Von Erlenmeyer, and Detective Johnson were in this room. These were people I’d known and with whom I had more than a superficial relationship. Johnson? I guess so. I’d known him since I moved here. Our relationship wasn’t always contentious. He wasn’t so bad back then. Erlenmeyer spoke to me with his thick German accent, telling me about some new chemical formula he’d discovered while making a new preservative for a taxidermist. Delaney and Sammy shake my hand and give me warm smiles. We sit and talk for beat, catching up on things in our lives we’d already witnessed together. Johnson looks different though—-different than he used to. His clothes are darker, dingier, like he’s been hiding in the dirty corner of the room where the light doesn’t quite reach. He doesn’t speak, but gives a solemn wave of his hand.

The last door stands at the end of the hall. I dare not approach it.

I go downstairs and out into the yard, walking the well-worn path to the shed. The doors are freshly painted and the wood is strong and sturdy. The inside is more massive than the outside insists, spanning what would be hundreds of yards in all directions if it were measured in non-cerebral space. Inside are rows upon rows,columns upon columns of different food-stuffs, medicines, poisons, aromatics, and whatever else you can’t think of, all in their specific jars labeled with names, tasting, and smelling notes. At the speed of thought, I scan every medicine, herb, drink, and poison I’d ever read about, heard about, and had encountered personally. Thousands of specimens in my memory, none I could ever forget. Nothing matched the pink little vial. Nothing matched the jasmine and ginger notes to any particular poison, toxin, or animal venom extract.

I move back into the house and into our old library. The room itself is larger than the library in Atlantis by orders of magnitude, full of books imbued with information that I had not only read in actual books, but every thought I’d ever had about anything since I was five years old, from serious ponderings of theology and the cosmos to passing remarks on another man’s choice of socks, all carefully categorized and organized in the library of my mind. Instead of each category being organized in an alphanumeric system, it’s organized by when I had the memory. For instance, if I had a conversation on October, 6th 1923 about apples, that would go after a conversation I had the previous day about zebras. The earlier the memory occurs in the day, the higher up the category list it goes.

I could search through my library at the speed of thought. In a matter of a moment I could be from one side of the library to the other. Depending on how stressed I am, it can take some focus to sift through the fleeting thoughts to get to what it is I’m actually looking for at the time. My mind jumped to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, then a more recent book The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. I tried to focus, but landed on Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

I focused hard, thinking of Sophia.

I zipped to the middle of a section I had marked Recent Memories, I found a copy of The Nutcracker—properly The Nutcracker and The Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann. I read back through it at what would essentially be 15,000 words a minute in my mind. Seven total victims planned by The Rat King. Three down, four to go. Sophia is on deck

I knew about the three victims already and how they lined up with The Nutcracker motif of these killings. Jessica Callahan is the foreign dignitary. Stacy Robinson and Christopher Cavelier are the Sugar Plum fairy and her Cavelier. But why them? And why me as the target nemesis? As far as I could tell, I’d never seen Cavelier in my life, nor Stacy Robinson. I’d seen only pictures of Jessica Callahan, but never met her personally. But, I have met Sophia, and even from our brief interaction, knew a little about her. Who did she represent?

My mind ran through all the other characters from the story and made a mental note about who was used and who was left. Clara, The Snow King and Queen, and The Nutcracker himself. Sophia was a girl, so that ruled out the Nutcracker and The Snow King. I had to deduce what I knew about the characters and match them to Sophia, just as I had the other three. Sometimes it was literal, like how it is with Cavelier. Sometimes a little more nuanced, like with Jessica Callahan. And possibly more abstract, like with Stacy Robinson. So where would Sophia fall?

I remembered the conversation with her back at her and Mary Grace’s apartment in Atlantis. I remember she wasn’t particularly wonderstruck about life, which led me away from Clara as a possibility. The way she was able to talk to Rock and Rumble struck me as particularly cold, even if she was pretty fiery. Maybe The Rat King was going for irony? Either way, considering the choices, the Snow Queen made the most sense. But that meant—if it were to be like Stacy and Cavelier—there would be a Snow King to die right along with her. It might be someone I knew or someone I’d seen before in my life. The odds were too good for it not to be. Then again, I’d never seen Cavelier nor Stacy. Somehow, The Rat King knew that.

At this point, my head started pounding. The overload of reliving so many vivid memories, the tens of thousands of faces I’d seen before claustrophobically flooding back into my memory. I zipped back to my room, laid in my bed, and closed my mind.

My eyes opened back on my couch in Chicago Prime. Fifteen seconds had elapsed.