R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

I knew her well enough by now to take her thoughtful tones seriously. “What if what?”

“Nothing.”

“Spit it out.”

“It’s just so… cheesy,” she said.

“Nothing original about murder, Molls.”

“Well,” she said, leaning over the map, “what if the fingers have been arranged, you know, in order…” Nolen answered her questioning hand with his pencil. “So that if you draw a line…”-she connected the two Xs marking the locations of Dead Jennifer’s index and bird fingers- “between these locations… and extended it…”

I laughed. She was right, it was cheesy, but then so was the bulk of the American public. Hell, even I had a weakness for skulls and eagles. Odds were the killer was cheesy as well.

“A cross,” I said. “Fuck me.”

“What?” Nolen asked with the anxious air of a keener struggling to keep pace with his more witty peers.

Molly handed me the pencil so that I could show him. “See,” I said. “If you join the location of the baby toe at right angles to the finger line… “

“And if you take the interval between the fingers…” Molly added.

I eyeballed several more Xs along the length of both lines. There it was,

Ruddick dissected into quadrants, the stick-thin shadow of the cross, with the intersection matching Molly’s hypothetical intervals perfectly.

“If Molly’s right,” I said, pointing to the crossing, “that’s where we’ll find her… what? Thumbs and big toes, I suppose.”

“Or her, ah… her body,” Nolen said, his voice as thin as his face was white.

The lines were hand-drawn and inexact, but they nevertheless intersected in a shaded region containing grey blocks instead of the orange the map-makers had used to represent other large buildings.

“What is that?” Molly asked, peering for a title of some kind. “Another factory?”

“Nashron,” Nolen said, frowning and nodding. “The deadest of the dead. Packed up before there even was a China.” The Nashron plant was old, positively ancient by industrial standards, built at the turn of the nineteenth century, long before zoning had become a going concern. A chain-link fence that had been skinned with scrap sheets of siding ran around the perimeter. The main structures loomed above, brick walls so stained and chapped they looked Roman, their monumental monotony broken only by the long rows of what had once been windows but were now empty frames, lattices of rotted wood about blackness-utter blackness.

“You gotta be kidding me…” Molly said as Nolen pulled the cruiser across the turf and scrub thronging about the gate. The headlights flashed across an old rust-scabbed sign with red lettering-something about legalities. A large commercial real estate sign had been planted to the right, shiny new even in the dark.

“Think of the story, Molls,” I said as Caleb cracked the door.

She glanced at me in her wry, endearing way. “Yeah, hey… I might even end up with, like, an in-depth special report.”

I grinned and winked. “I was thinking obituary.”

Not the best joke, I admit, given that we were hunting for Dead Jennifer’s thumbs and toes, but it kept me chuckling while Nolen sorted through keys for the lock-a land mine-sized thing hanging from a heavy- duty chain. Apparently Nolen and his deputies periodically accessed the grounds to check things out. “Tracking itinerants,” he explained, which I took to mean rousting bums.

I helped him yank back the gate, which was quite heavy thanks to the sheets of corrugated aluminum. Our flashlights probed the grounds: pale ovals revealing sumac, sundry weeds, and humps of rusted iron-old train parts by the look of them. We followed the remains of a concrete walkway. The night soared about us, painted the aural world behind the crickets and cicadas with utter silence.

We paused before a battered entrance: a heavy, metal-skinned door that had been smashed from its tracks. Our flashlights chased the shadows of weeds and debris deep into the structure’s interior.

“Eew,” Molly said with the bubbling beginnings of panic. “What’s that smell?”

I raised my flashlight to my chin, made a campsite face. “Me… I always fart before battle.”

“You eat potato chips or something?” Nolen asked without the whisper of a smile. He seemed remarkably at ease, given the circumstances. This raised my hackles once again. I much prefer weak people stay weak, if you know what I mean. The idea had occurred to me that pretty much anything could happen on this nocturnal expedition, and that the world would be captive to the facts as the survivors told them. Just where were Nolen’s patrolmen anyway?

I thought of my revolver stuffed in the bottom of my bag in my room. Fawk.

“Follow me,” I said, striding over the low heaps of junk and over the threshold. The factory interior was at once cavernous and cramped with ruin, like a mine shaft and an airplane hangar all in one. Another stinker slipped loose as I picked my way forward; it felt like a hot marble between my butt cheeks.

The building was largely open, broken only by the ruins of stairs that led to a series of hanging offices above. Debris had been scattered like flotsam, leaving patches of floor bare. Sweeping my light back and forth, I glimpsed graffiti, stick imitations of the baroque stuff I was used to seeing in Jersey. I saw the same FUCK UP NOT DOWN as earlier. Numerous metal posts stumped the floor, the remains of long-dead workstations. The air reeked of water damage and industrial squalor. In the sea-wreck distance you could make out blackened presses, machinery that had been too ancient to auction, or so I imagined, when the factory had closed.

Nolen and Molly seemed content to follow me. We creaked forward together.

My memory, as always, continued to torment me. This time with a Tragically Hip tune about fingers and toes. I did a mental version of blocking my ears and singing, “Na-na-na.” If Molly was right, if we did find Dead Jennifer’s thumbs-or her corpse-I would rather attach the experience to something more emotionally appropriate, like some old Sabbath tune. My memories, remember, cling to their original emotional charge. Mashing together recollections from opposite ends of the emotional colour wheel often jars me to the point of becoming nauseous. Imagine a mouthful of shellfish and ice cream.

I’m not sure what drew my eye the first time my flashlight scrolled over the work table. The relative cleanliness, perhaps. Whatever the reason, I found myself turning toward it, stepping across the wobbly backs of several smashed cinder blocks. The table was one of those old metal jobbies you used to find in high school shop classes, the kind designed to protect ducking and covering students in the event of a Commie nuclear attack. The thing was about as big as a snooker table, and probably just as heavy.

The message on its back lent a whine of horror to the silence. Molly’s “Oh, God…” were the only words spoken. Several moments passed before I breathed.

There it was: a cross in the plain fundamentalist style, made of some kind of wood… only turned into a swastika with two thumbs and two toes set at right angles.

We just stood there dumbfounded. I found myself at once knowing they were real and thinking they looked like dollar-store fakes. The nails, especially-like something dripped from a candle.

“He is insane…” Molly finally said, her face as ashen as the digits it regarded.

We all knew who she was talking about.

“No…” I said. “Nill didn’t do this.” I’m not sure where this insight came from, the sudden realization that I knew him-or his type anyway. Nill had taken a long haul from the crack pipe of power. Like Nolen said, the Thirds owned this town. Why remortgage with a risk like this?