Apocalypse Island (6 page)

He is jolted from an edgy doze by what he is not supposed to remember, the grief and the despair nearly overwhelming him.

Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.

Chapter 11

Danny Wolf never knew if the voice or the images were real, because, by the time he’d grown to adulthood they were just unpleasant echoes of a time and place he was happy to be rid of.

And although the echoes remained, that’s all they had ever been.

Until now.

Now the echoes were getting louder.

At a time in his life when he should be happy—a chance to rebuild his life, put his past behind him, the most popular member of a kick-ass rock n’ roll band, able to make love to most any woman he wanted—now everything was coming unraveled around him. Nothing in his life felt good, nothing made sense.

And what was Hardwick up to? Was he playing some sort of game? What was all the unspoken innuendo? Hardwick knew something, or suspected something. It seemed obvious. But what did he know? How did he know? And why was he playing coy? Was there some method to his madness?

His glass nearly empty, Wolf picked up the newspaper he’d bought at the newsstand and opened it. The front page headline blazed out at him nearly stopping his heart.

CRUCIFIED WOMAN FOUND IN GRAVEYARD

The byline was by a reporter named Persephone Wilder. The name rang a familiar bell in Wolf’s mind but he could not put a face to the name.

At first the headline sounded like a joke. A terrible joke, aimed directly at him, piercing his heart like a lance. Then he realized it was no joke. It was this morning’s paper and it actually was the headline. He quickly read down through the article, his heart pounding. She was found by a worker early yesterday morning at Oak Hill Cemetery, her half naked and ravaged body tied to a large cross-shaped tombstone. She’d been stabbed to death and a cross had been carved on her torso.

Cross my heart and hope to die.

Wolf nearly stopped breathing as he remembered the dream; running from men with dogs, coming across a half-naked woman with a cross carved on her torso. How terrible he had felt for the young woman. How he’d wanted to help her, to take her someplace safe, but realized that those emotions could not be his. They must belong to someone else.

Heart pounding, he went back to the article. It described the victim as a goth or fashion vampire and went on to say that there seemed to be a great number of them around the city these days. Some were locals, most weren’t. They appeared at night, walking the city streets and frequenting the downtown clubs looking for action in the way of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.

The police were warning the young club goers to beware, to stay away if they knew what was good for them and if they couldn’t stay away then to be on guard and report anything or anyone unusual.

Unusual?
Thought Wolf. That was a joke. These days the entire night scene in the city was unusual-on-steroids. Strange bands of young people dressed as if each night was Halloween, had illicit sex in restrooms, cars and back alleys, drug deals going down in public places; drinking and fighting were spilling out of the clubs and onto sidewalks, streets and alleyways. And the police were having a hard time containing it. Johnny Redman, the singer he had replaced in
Bad Medicine
had himself become a victim of a knife attack in an alley outside one of the clubs. There were several rumors as to why he’d been targeted. One spoke of a botched drug deal. Another told of a kinky sex ritual that had had dire consequences. 

Wolf wasn’t sure why Portland’s night scene was the way it was. It seemed normal five years ago when he’d gone to jail. Now it seemed totally crazy. Perhaps the entire country had changed, not just Portland.

But he knew that even as the city did its best to clean up its image, things seemed to be getting weirder. The city council had even taken steps to revoke liquor licenses from some of the most troublesome clubs. To date none had been revoked. The weirdness seemed to be centered mostly in and around the Old Port section of the city’s waterfront district where there were a lot of old buildings and a colorful history. This is where most of the goth clubs were located. The area was a meat market, a drug store, a magnet for freaks. And he knew that anything was possible down there.

Wolf continued to read down through the article. It said that the cemetery worker who’d found the body had taken photos with his cell phone, had gone home and posted the photos on the internet before notifying police. The police were calling it one of the stupidest things anybody in Portland’s long and colorful history had ever done. In the twenty-four hours since the posting, photos of the crucified woman had become some of the most downloaded images on the net. Like a runaway virus they had found their way to every social network on the planet; Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube. And although those sites were taking steps to remove the images, it was too late; like a contagion they had found their way to millions of lesser sites throughout the web, impossible to stop once it got started.

The perpetrator was picked up and arrested, fired from his job, questioned and since released. Although what he’d done was in bad taste it wasn’t technically illegal, and the police had no reason to hold him. He had been eliminated as a suspect in the murder. Statutes were being searched, however, for some loophole that might make the amateur photographer pay for his crimes of poor judgment. The Portland Examiner had refused to run the images.

The article went on to say that the nature of the crime was so heinous, so blasphemous, that the mayor had challenged the force to solve the murder promptly or, as he’d put it, “there would be hell to pay.” Portland was a tourist town known for its low crime rate and he did not want this murder to scare away potential vacationers.

A side article on the front page caught Wolf’s attention. He left the main article and read the sidebar. Evidently Bishop Patrick Byrne of the Portland Catholic Archdiocese was up in arms over the blasphemous religious connotations the photos, as well as the murder, posed. They’d been hearing from disgruntled parishioners almost steadily since the incident had gone public.

Wolf vaguely wondered what the Archdiocese could have done to prevent any of it from happening and what it would do now to appease its flock.

He went back to the main article and continued to read down through it searching for the victim’s name. Sweat was pouring off him and his heart was pounding. Then he saw it and his heart almost stopped.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
It was Janet Owen. Wolf stared at the name for a long moment, hoping there was some mistake, hoping he was reading it wrong. He read the name over and over again wishing that he had the power to change it to another name, wishing it was someone he didn’t know. His gorge rose uncontrollably. He leapt from his chair, discarded the newspaper and bolted for the bathroom where he gave up the bitter contents of his stomach to the toilet bowl.

He came back into the room, shaken, retrieved the paper and read both articles for a second time.

He’d known her.

God, it was true.

He’d recently had a sexual relationship with her. She was a club girl, a fashion vampire, one of many who seemed to materialize out of thin air when the sun went down, roaming the streets and frequenting the downtown clubs like dark wraiths, and then disappearing back into their dens before the sun rose, not to be seen again until night. Little fools that they were. Thinking they were creatures of the night.
Wishing
they were vampires, sexy immortals.

So stupid.

Please, not Janet Owen.

Wolf could not remove her image from his thoughts, and as much as he wanted to, he could not remove her name from the story. He remembered seeing her naked for the first time and how he’d felt; both fascinated and a little repulsed. Although she was an attractive girl and her young body was lean and hard, she’d been covered in tattoos of an extremely blasphemous nature and he’d at first been unable to make love to her. He discovered, however, that if he closed his eyes and didn’t think about the markings on her body everything worked just fine.

She’d turned out to be a very good lover indeed. A little rough perhaps for his tastes, but good nevertheless, and he had gone back again and again for more of her sensual persuasions. In time he’d discovered that he didn’t mind the body art or her playful roughness. On several occasions she’d tried to pierce his neck with her teeth, but he’d pulled away and hadn’t allowed it. Disappointed, she said she’d wanted just a small taste.

“You’ve had plenty of tastes,” he joked, pointing to his crotch.

“Mmm, yeah, and it’s good,” she’d said, licking her lips, “but I want to taste the real thing.”

Wolf had adamantly refused to allow himself to be drawn into such a dangerous game. AIDS and hepatitis were both on the rise in the city and it was no wonder with all the weird shit going down. He hadn’t seen the girl in several weeks. Now he could not believe she was dead.

Still he wondered if there was something more at work here than mere coincidence. He put the paper down and pressed his fists tightly against his hot, wet eyes.

Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.

Come on, Wolf, you’ve got to keep it together. Somehow this has all got to start making sense. You just need to stay calm, remain rational. Figure it out. There must be a logical explanation.

But try as he might, he could not find one.

Doubts about his own sanity closing in on him, Wolf knew what he had to do. From now on he would come directly home from his gigs, lock the door and handcuff himself to the bed post. Yes, that’s exactly what he’d do. He’d go out now and buy them. There was a specialty store on Congress Street, not far from his apartment.

On his way to the specialty store he approached a group of young women walking in the opposite direction. They were all dressed alluringly and darkly. Halloween was more than two weeks away but it seemed that in Portland every night was Halloween.

“Hey, yeeeooouuu,” one of the goth girls said in a voice dripping with saccharine. “Want me to bite your neck?” The young woman lasciviously licked her plump, red lips.

“No thanks,” Wolf said and pressed past them.

“I could think of something else I’d rather bite,” he heard another of the girls say as he quickly moved out of earshot.

As he was nearing the specialty store he spied an internet café. He stopped and gazed in the window. The place was filled with young people surfing the web. He scanned the room and spied an empty terminal. Trancelike, he went in and sat down in front of the screen, clicked on Google and typed in “Crucified Woman, Portland, Maine”. He got more than a million hits. He clicked on the first one and the image of a very dead Janet Owen hanging from a marble cemetery cross came up. And it was everything the paper had said it was.

She was wearing a short black dress, cut ragged at the bottom with webbed sleeves and fishnet stockings. Typical goth attire. The dress was torn open at the top revealing her milk white breasts. There were stab wounds on her body and a large cross was carved on her torso.

Her head was canted to the side and her eyes were open, and to Wolf they contained an inconceivable darkness, a darkness that went beyond dead to some realm he did not dare think about. Looking into them was like falling into the depths of hell. Either she or her murderer had painted her eyes with some hideous black makeup that ran ghoulishly down her cheeks. Wolf thought his heart might break.

Feeling sick, he closed the internet connection and staggered to the door. Outside he pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the building’s wall, breathing deeply and fighting nausea until his heart began to settle down.

He returned to his apartment half an hour later with the set of handcuffs. No gig or rehearsal was scheduled for tonight, so before going to bed he drank more than half the bottle of whiskey hoping to dull his bleak thoughts. Drunk, he locked his left wrist to the bedpost and tucked the key under the mattress, put his head down and was asleep almost immediately.

Chapter 12

For the second time in as many months the ghost of his long lost lover was in bed with him, her gown thin as gauze, her skin glowing, her hair a black skein across her face.

She moved close to him, pressing her body to his, her pale lips touching his ear.

God, she felt so real.

You need to know something, Danny,
whispered the ghost-woman.
They wish to destroy you. Don’t let them. They don’t want you to remember. They don’t want you to tell.

But I
don’t
remember.

You will, and soon. Beware, Danny.

She pressed her body closer, so sensual. Though it was a dream—had to be a dream—he could not resist her and he slipped into her like butter.

Floating

An explosion at the center of his sex.

At the center of his being, shattering like glass, fragmenting.

Intense blue light engulfing him like a shroud.

He awoke with a start and she was gone. She hadn’t actually been there, of course. Even so, the intense blue light lingered.

Chapter 13

He rose at dawn, dressed and went out into the deserted city, wandering along its empty sidewalks until he came to a church. He stopped out in front, wondering why he had been drawn to this place. An attached metal plaque near the tall, wooden double doors identified the building as
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Wolf knew the building. He’d lived in Portland for most of his life and the cathedral was an enduring fixture on the city’s landscape. Even so, he could not remember ever stepping foot inside the place. He went up the steps and tested the door. It was unlocked so he went in. Just beyond the entrance and to the right, the holy water font beckoned. In an unconscious gesture Wolf dipped his fingers in and crossed himself. He knew that he had been raised in a Catholic orphanage until the age of eight. Although he could not remember the details of those years, or consciously remember exactly what the religious rituals had been, they now seemed automatic, as though they had long ago been burned into his psyche.