Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

She continues down the alley, and after the halfway point she starts to hear the noise. At first she thinks it’s coming from the telephone pole itself, from the grey metal box and the wires. It’s a humming sound, slightly electrical, a weird buzzing noise, sort of like a hornet, Lenore thinks suddenly, or a whole swarm of hornets, recorded on tape and played back a bit faster and louder. And then she remembers Woo’s tape of the inmates, Jimmy Lee Partridge and William Robbins. She knows the buzzing sound is coming from Vicky’s mouth. The buzzing sound is Vicky pumped on an unspecified amount of Lingo and turned into something horrible, a monster out of some child’s nightmares, a demon out of some fanatic’s fantasy. And with a language, or at least a sound, a noise, so disturbing it makes Lenore want to run to the other side of the city.

But she doesn’t. She continues to approach the pole at a consistent pace, void of any jarring motions. She feels waves of a heavy nausea pass over her and a sweat breaks on her forehead. She wonders if this is caused by Vicky’s noise or her own fear or lack of a hit of speed this afternoon.

“Why did you run from Darleen, honey?” she says. “You know Darleen wouldn’t hurt you.”

She starts to walk across to the pole side of the alley in an angle, talking the whole way.

“I’m your sister, Vicky. I’m here to help you, sweetheart. You don’t need to be afraid no more. I’ll take care of everything.”

She slows to a wedding-march pace for the last ten or so steps to the base of the pole.

“Now, come down here right now, Vicky. C’mon. Darken is waiting.”

If Max is wrong about Vicky having a sister named Darken, she’ll take some action against him. At this point she doesn’t know what it will be, but there’ll be some retribution, something to help him remember his mistake. But even if there is a legitimate Darken, Lenore has no way of knowing if Vicky is far enough gone to think she’s speaking with her. Normally, she enjoys a big gamble, a pure tough-odds situation. But her heart isn’t in this one. She thinks if she’d just gotten a chance for a quick hit of speed, a little crank to reheat the system, she’d be on her game, in full control of both rational thought and instinct. But right now the buzzing sound is bringing her close to vomiting.

She advances to the pole, stops, and stares up at Vicky. “You took some bad medicine this time, sister,” she says. “You come down and Darken will help you.”

The buzzing noise halts and is replaced by an awful combination of muted grunt and raspy breath. It’s as if the girl on the pole has had her tongue severed and is making a horrible effort to speak through her throat or nose. It’s as if there were some awful confusion in the prenatal stages and she never developed the skeletal structure necessary for speech. Lenore cringes listening to her pull air into the lungs, then try to pump it back up and out of her body, transformed into words she once had no problem producing.

Vicky starts to go through a series of terrible sounds, mostly choked-off, spastic explosions of wind and spittle. Then she starts to hyperventilate, exhaling more air than she’s taken in.

Lenore starts to panic a little and fights against it. “Just calm down, now, Vicky. Just do what Darken says, now.”

But Vicky gets worse, her arms start to flail and her body seems to buck away from the pole like she was losing all motor control.

“Who gave you the medicine, Vicky?” Lenore yells, now frantic. “Who gave you the drug, Vicky?”

Vicky hangs out from the pole with one hand on a spike. Her head is quaking on her shoulders. Lenore sees a small thin stream of blood seeping slowly from her right ear.

“Who?” she screams.

Vicky’s full mouth starts to vibrate, the tremble of the lips and all the skin within about a half inch of the lips, begins to increase geometrically, until the bottom half of her face is a sickening, surreal blur.

Then the vibration ceases all at once and her tongue comes in and out several times, complete with a white, foamy cover. Lenore takes a step forward, her eyes focused in on the mouth. It opens, trembles barely, comes together, and opens again to form a single word: Mingo.

Then, immediately, the convulsions set in again, and this time the whole body is affected. A hand flies up into the air and the gun explodes. Lenore sinks into a shooting crouch, arms extended up, gun sighted and ready to fire, but she realizes before squeezing off that the girl is just helpless to her own muscles and firing harmlessly in the air.

“For Christ sake,” she hears, and then Zarelli is beside her trying to yank her backward.

“You dumb fuck,” she screams, and refocuses on the pole just in time to see Vicky unconsciously drawing down on Zarelli. Then she hears that unmistakable noise, that one-in-a-million sound, gun-shot. Lenore takes air in and before she can think, she pumps out two bullets. Both of them enter Vicky’s chest left of the breastbone. Heart shots.

Vicky’s body heaves, weaves backward away from the pole, hangs a second, and then drops, dead weight, a mute stone, to the ground.

Things seem to start moving in a spastic, slow motion for Lenore. She hears a voice from the police line behind her yell, “Hold fire, hold fire,” and it sounds like it’s coming from the top of a third-world mountain, hundreds of miles away. She looks down at Zarelli, who’s lying flat on his back, arms crossed and up, covering his face. There’s no blood. He’s unharmed.

Lenore runs to the body, instinctively puts her fingers to Vicky’s throat, waits the useless extra half-minute. There’s no beat, no pulse, no trace of an even fleeting life. The body is in an odd position, as if Lenore had discovered it in bed, in the middle of a humid night, trying any placement of arms and legs in an effort to find comfort.

Lenore ignores procedure and rolls the body onto its back so that she won’t have to view the gaping hole of the bullets’ exit path. She can’t help seeing the two entrance’s bull’s-eyes, however. And then she sees something else. Situated in Vicky’s cleavage, lodged securely between her breasts, is the letter Q. It looks like a jewel, a small charm that fell from a broken and lost necklace.

Lenore hears the running footfall coming down the alley behind her. She takes the Q from Vicky’s chest, hides it in her hand, feels the rubbery, shiver-making texture of the item. She swallows hard, rises to her feet, and turns to face the troops.

Peirce sits in the Swarms’ library, surrounded by books. The room is in darkness. She hasn’t bothered to turn on a light. She finds herself wondering what will be done with all the books. Will they be donated to some library or one of the city’s colleges? Will they be inventoried and appraised and then sold off to some dealer, the proceeds given to the state?

She’d like to think of the books as orphans, but their size and bulkiness and lack of color prevent her. They have the look of textbooks, tomes that only a dozen people in the world can read the whole of.

The Swanns had no other family. Just each other. Why did two people need such an enormous house? A house like this should be filled with a noisy, multigenerational clan. It should be filled, regularly, with the sound of huge dinners that take hours to prepare and even longer to eat.

The silence in this place must have been awful.

Then again, maybe she’s got it all wrong. Maybe the house was like a huge fortress for the two of them. Leo and Inez locked up in paradise, every need taken care of and plenty of room to spread out.

It’s possible. She can picture herself making a home in a place like this. With Victor. Rolling around on the oriental carpets, foolish in this enormous private palace. The thought makes her reach for the recorder.