James Baldwin - Stained Glass

The body hung there, motionless and mottled, his head grotesquely swollen. Moris was dressed for bed. The corpse hummed like an angry hive, bristling with the small wet sounds of chewing mandibles. The dresser on the other side of the room had been smashed open, the drawer flung at the walk-in wardrobe on the other side of the room. The shattered wood was half embedded in the door. Whatever had come in here was too strong for my blood.

But what caught my eye and held it were the symbols eked out in blood – or red paint that looked like blood – over the headboard of the bed. The number 13, drawn above two interlocking rings with eight spokes each. Underneath them, was the signature from Lily and Dru’s house. ‘Soldier 557’.

I passed my hand back over my head, staring at it foggily. Circles were a figure of completion, each one representing one whole. Two of something. Eight plus eight was sixteen. Two-eight-eight? No… two-sixteen. The corpse twitched as the bugs continued to feed. I couldn’t stay here.

I slammed the door behind me and coated the knob and lock with oil, keeping the tiny bottle close to my nose. With the knife ready, I thundered down the stairs and back into the abandoned den. I’d come here to find evidence. I needed to take something away, anything at all.

Falkovich’s office was a large room offside the den. Compared to the rest of the house, it was spotless – or it had been before someone had trashed it. The plants inside were dead, shriveled to nothing. Filing cabinets were overturned. His answering machine was torn from the wall, the cassette missing from inside. Only one thing had been left intact on the desk: a personal computer with a built-in screen. The person – or people – who trashed the office had pushed it to the edge of the desk, but hadn’t smashed it up.

Gingerly, I approached. I’d never touched a computer in my life. I knew what they were, vaguely, because I’d seen them in use in offices and warehouses. As far as I understood, they were interactive machines that stored documents, documents which might incriminate Falkovich. So why had it been left here, undamaged?

The first rule of electronics was to find a way to turn it on. After a protracted search, I flipped a switch and then pushed in a power button. The interface lit up and began to rumble and mutter to itself. I hung back warily, checking over my shoulder for the swarm, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the entire computer honked loudly, then ground in the way that some munitions did just before they exploded. I was already out the door by the time it had finished. When nothing happened, I peered back inside in time to see a company logo flash up, a picture that transitioned to a blank black void with a flickering cursor. I jumped again as the machine beeped and spooled text out down the screen of its own accord, and then loaded another image with four distinct panels. They read: Information, Microsoft Works, Your Software, and IBM DOS.

The most complex piece of technology I’d ever owned was a radio. Cautiously, I slipped back into the room and touched the Information heading on the screen, but nothing happened. Crestfallen, I looked over the keyboard and lit on the click-and-pointer to the side of it. I tried touching that to see if could be used to look at the Information doubtlessly stored on the computer, but accidentally hit a button. I suddenly found myself in ‘Your Software’, which was nothing but a confusing jumble of lists and pictures of manilla folders. I was officially out of my depth.

There had to be someone who knew how to access the information on this machine, but it wasn’t me. The thing I could do was take it with me. I tore the cables from the wall and hefted up, then took it outside to the car. It was tempting to leave it at that and drive away, but I steeled myself and went back into the house to continue the search. My eyes watered as I walked back into the sensory assault of dog piss, dead bodies and rotten food. Underneath that, there was the faint skin-ruffling reek of human desperation.

It was only once I closed the back door that I noticed that the swing was within the arc of another door set flush with the wall. They were on acute angles to one another, and set so close together that I hadn’t noticed it when I’d first entered the house. The back door had to be shut for this one to be accessible. I tested the handle. It was locked, but nothing that I couldn’t open. After a few minutes and a few taps with the knife hilt against the bump key, I turned the lock and pushed the door in to reveal a flight of stairs leading down. An earthy, musty stench rolled out into the sourness of the kitchen: very human smells of sweat, feces, and rotting food.

I braced the entry open with a bag of trash, stomach turning, then stripped off my wet jacket and then my shirt. I tied the wet tee around my face, pushing the knot around the back, and kept the knife down low on the way down. I didn’t want to be caught in nothing but a wifebeater, but if I didn’t have something over my nose and mouth, I was going to puke again.

There was a light switch which snapped when flipped, lighting a dim yellow bulb at the bottom of the stairs. The staircase was narrow, damp and squeaky. Underlying the hollow clomping of my boots was a heavy silence that hung in the dead air, until my foot turned a particularly creaky board and I heard something gasp from much further down. The sound quickly cut.

“Who’s there?” I stepped off onto the floor. Even with the damp rag around my face, it was hard going. Medieval gibbets probably smelled like this. “Come out, and no one needs to get hurt!”

There was no reply. With the knife held ready, eyes fixed ahead on the darkness, I patted the wall beside me for more switches. When I found them, the whole room lit up with flickering fluorescent strips that clunked to life, every other one dim or dead. It was enough to see what was causing the smell.

Cells. Rows and rows of cells, like the kind they keep dogs in at the pound. There was a camp bed at one end of the room with a gym mat laid on top in place of a real mattress. The center of the basement was cleared to make room for an ornate magic circle drawn in permanent black marker. The focus of the circle was an autopsy tray on a plain steel frame, and that was all. No blood. No tools. Just stark, clean metal.

I looked up. The basement ceiling was heavily insulated with exposed fiberglass batts. There was a bracket for fitting a surgical lamp, but no lamp was in evidence. My bet was that they borrowed and returned the equipment for whatever they did down here. The circle was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a triple ring executed with the same precision as the designs left with the body upstairs. The ring around the outside was the containment layer. Just inside of that, smaller circles had been interspersed around the ring like stations, each one emblazoned with an unfamiliar sigil: a squiggle something like an insect’s leg. They in turn were linked by the inner ring. The central design under the table was not geometric – or more accurately, it was not symmetrically geometric. The lines were precisely ruled, but the vaguely-star shaped design was off-center, with uneven points. There was scrawled writing inside and around the whole thing, alien and unintelligible. I was staring at it, trying to make individual words out, when a small whimper punctured the thick silence.

Slowly, I turned in the direction of the sound. It had come from the pen closest to the bed. I drew up beside to the door, flexing my fingers around the hilt of the knife, and glanced around through the wire.

It was the girl from the video. The one with the waist-length mop of red curls.

“ Bozhe moi. ” I uttered the oath before I could contain myself, coming around to stand before her. She shrank back until she was pressed to the far wall of her cell, legs drawn up, her cheek pressed against her hands. Her eyes were huge with animal terror. She was bound to a ring bolt by a heavy black collar and chain.