Fear the Darkness (8 page)

A hard case all right, Anderson thought, watching the chief warder leave. Tough. Sure of himself. Follows the regs to the letter, I bet. I can't see him being the killer. Enough foreplay, guess I'd better get to work.

She entered the cube. The smell was the first thing that struck her. The odour of burnt human flesh; after you smelt it once you could never forget it. She noticed dark marks on the walls. Smoke residue, she thought. And those yellow-brown streaks are bits of fat that spat sizzling from the man as he burned. A horrible way to die. There was a chalk outline drawn on the bunk where the body had been found, small holes left in the blanket where sample pieces had been cut out and sent for analysis, fingerprint powder dusted on the cube's fixtures and fittings - the residues of a dozen different forensics procedures. Apparently, the Tek-Judges had turned up little in the way of evidence that might crack the case. Now, it was her turn.

Moving to the centre of the limited floor space of the cube, she stood facing the bunk where Leland Barclay had died. Finding the stench of burned flesh in the air to be a distraction, she unclipped one of the pouches on her belt and pulled a small plasteen tub from it. "Rub-U-Want Unguent", the label read. "For Relieving Tired and Aching Muscles. Now with Synthi-Menthol Freshness!" Applying a generous helping of the gel from the tube to her top lip, she breathed in deeply, letting the cloying menthol scent clear her nostrils of the more gruesome odours of the cube. Then, replacing the unguent tube back into the pouch once more, she closed her eyes.

Get ready, Cass, she thought. A man burned to death here. This is going to be a bad one.

She breathed in deeply once more, letting the air ease in and out of her with the rise and fall of her lungs. Slowly, easily, like a tide washing gently against the shore, in and out. She let her breathing find its own rhythm as she opened herself to the psi-flux, all the while knowing she stood on the brink of experiencing every pain and horror Leland Barclay had felt as he died. She did not turn away from it. There was no protection for psi scanning a murder scene - it was all or nothing. She had to be ready to endure everything the victim had endured: there was no way to hold back the tide once it was unleashed. But she was ready. She had done this before. At times it seemed as though she had felt the pain of this entire city. She was a Psi-Judge and it was part of her job.

Breathing. Slowly. In and out. Rhythm. Her heart a metronome. Her mind an unblinking, all-seeing eye. She went to the place beyond rational thought, where the conscious and unconscious met. She opened herself fully to the psi-flux, lowering her defences, and waited for the pain to begin as the first tidal wave of sensation flowed through her. She waited and felt...

Nothing.

She felt nothing. No pain, no agony, no fear or terror. There was nothing there at all; it was as though the cube was no more than the collection of the physical objects inside it. Four walls. A floor. A ceiling. A bunk. A sink. A shower. A toilet. There was no sign of the other world. The psi-world. No psychic signatures. No imprints. No emotion. No thoughts. No evidence that any living thing had ever stepped inside it.

She felt nothing.

It was as though she was surrounded on every side by a blank space. As though she stood in the middle of a black hole in the middle of the psi-flux. Like she had abruptly been rendered blind and deaf, the senses she had relied upon her entire life were suddenly gone.

She felt nothing. And, with it, a new understanding grew cold and chill inside her heart.

Something was terribly wrong here.

"So you're telling us you found nothing?" Sector Chief Franklin said from his chair, his expression betraying his disappointment.

It was three quarters of an hour later, and Judge Hass had been busy. Emerging from the holding pens after conferring with Chief Warder Sykes, Anderson was summoned to an impromptu meeting in the SJS man's office to discuss her progress. Given the imperious nature of the summons, and the fact she harboured little in the way of kind feeling toward SJS, she had been tempted to send a message back telling Hass to go drokk himself. In the end it was a question of protocol. Strictly speaking, she had come to Sector House 12 to assist in Hass's investigation; the fact she was sure he would try and stonewall her in the usual SJS fashion was neither here nor there. Besides, Hass had made it clear Sector Chief Franklin and the Deputy Sector Chief Grimes would be attending the meeting.

Anderson might not have been a particularly political animal - few Psi-Judges were - but even she knew better than to snub the Sector House command structure within an hour of her arrival. Still, political animal or not, her presence at the meeting had since given her more insights than she ever could have wished into local Sector House politics.

"Not altogether the result we might have hoped for, then," Deputy Chief Grimes ventured his opinion from the chair beside Franklin. It was clear the two of them had a frosty relationship: every word from the Deputy Chief's mouth seemed full of subtle antagonism towards his superior. Pushed aside for promotion most probably, Anderson thought, sensing spite and agitation beneath Grimes's calm exterior. Psi Division said Franklin is due to be replaced as Sector Chief by Meryl Coolidge over at Sector One-Sixty. Grimes was probably hoping he'd get the job himself.

"Still, he shouldn't let ourselves become too disappointed," Grimes continued, nodding smoothly towards Franklin and making a show of patronising the older man as though he thought he was half-senile already. "Judge Anderson's investigation is barely an hour old, after all. They say justice wasn't built in a day."

"Indeed," Hass said, holding his hands splayed with fingertips touching in front of him. "Though, of course, methods of psychic investigation are notoriously unreliable. Not that I mean to impugn Judge Anderson's efforts in any way, you understand. Her reputation speaks for itself." His smile was of a cold, dead thing, dripping with venom.

He's typical SJS, all right, Anderson thought. Where do they find these guys? Under a rock? Or is there some secret cloning machine at SJS headquarters that turns them out by the dozen?

"The Dark Judges Incursions, the Apocalypse War, the Necropolis Event," Hass said, the smile fixed to his face. "Time and again, Judge Anderson has acted above and beyond the call of duty to protect Mega-City One. It would not perhaps be too much of an exaggeration to say, on occasion, she has performed miracles on our behalf. Of course, the
problem
with miracles is that in the end we begin to expect them every time. We forget, Psi-Judge or not, that for all her not-inconsiderable gifts even Judge Anderson is only human."

Hass paused as though waiting for her comeback, until apparently convinced she had ceded the floor to him indefinitely, he began again.

"And besides, another Psi-Judge has already scanned one of the previous crime scenes with no greater degree of success," he said, a hint of triumph in the smile now. "After the third murder I called in Psi-Judge Manley to ascertain whether there was any sign of pyrokine activity at the scene. He found none, confirming my thesis that the burnings were achieved by some form of technological means that has yet to be detected. You see there is clearly-"

"Uh-huh," Anderson interrupted him. "I'd love nothing better than to hear your theories, Hass, but we seem to have had some kind of communications breakdown about what I found when I scanned the crime scene."

"You said you found nothing," Chief Franklin leaned forward eagerly.

"That's right," Anderson said. "I found nothing. No psychic impressions, no residual memories, no lingering pain, fear, horror, or any other emotion. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. It's like the entire cube was a blank slate, and that's something that shouldn't happen."

"Really? I think you are being too hard on yourself, Anderson," Hass interjected as smooth and oily as a snake as he tried to steer the conversation back to the course he had originally set. "As I said, you are only human-"

"Oops. There's that communications breakdown again," Anderson smiled at him, chiding herself inwardly for the glee she felt at the way Hass seemed to develop a slight facial tic every time she interrupted him. "Let me put it to you this way: you have some perp sitting at home somewhere trying to make himself a bomb. He mixes the ingredients wrong and the whole thing goes
boom
. When you get to the crime scene, what do you expect to find?"

"I fail to see the point of this." Hass shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

"Humour me, Hass," Anderson told him. "Trust me, you'll get the point, soon enough."

"Very well." Hass pursed his lips in annoyance. "It would depend, of course, on the precise size of the explosion and the environment in which it happened. Generally, I would expect to see explosive debris, a bomb crater, human remains-"

"Exactly," Anderson said, noticing the SJS man's tic was growing more pronounced. "But the one thing you wouldn't expect to see is an empty room with no sign there had ever been an explosion there at all."

"I'm not sure I see what you're getting at," Franklin said, all three of them looking at her now.

"What I mean is, when things happen in the physical world you see evidence that they've happened. It's the same with the psychic world. As living creatures we leave a psychic imprint on our surroundings. We can't help it. When a man dies violently, burning to death alone in a confined space with no one to help him, that imprint should be all the stronger. So strong that, for months afterwards, any psychic going into the room would feel like it was happening to him - like he was drowning in the dead man's pain. But not in this case. Somehow, the cube where Leland Barclay died was devoid of any impression. It felt like no one had even ever been in the room, much less that a man had died there only a couple of hours earlier. The entire room felt blank, and believe me when I tell you there's no way that should even be possible."

She let her words sink in. She could see realisation dawning on the faces of Grimes and Franklin, even as Hass's expression stayed stubbornly tight.

"That's not all," she said. "After I tried to scan Barclay's cube, I had Chief Sykes take me to the cubes where the other perps died and it was the same in every one. All I could detect were the psychic impressions of the other perps who had been inside the cubes since the deaths. There was nothing left of the men who had died inside the cubes. Somehow, six men burned to death in screaming agony without it leaving any psychic impression whatsoever on their surroundings. You can take it from me that's just plain
spooky
."

"Spooky?" Hass's tone was barbed. "This is a murder investigation, Anderson, not some damned Tri-D ghost story. You'll be telling us next you give credence to Sykes and his claims of bloody messages appearing and disappearing on walls."

"I take it you don't?" she said.

"Of course not," Hass snorted, the subtle sniping of moments earlier now giving way to cold fury. "The whole thing is absurd. Messages in blood that leave no forensic trace behind? It's nothing more than a case of mass hysteria. Frankly, the fact that you would bring it up at all shows remarkably poor judge-"

The lights went off. Plunged into darkness, they heard the sound of a distant gunshot and screaming coming from somewhere outside. Running to the door with the others close behind her, Anderson opened it to see bedlam in the corridor. In the dim blue glow of the Sector House's emergency lights she saw a group of Judges desperately trying to disarm a middle-aged Judge, while nearby part of the corridor's walls had caught fire.

"No," the struggling Judge shrieked as the other Judges grappled for his Lawgiver. "You can't stop me, I have sinned. I must be judged!"

The restraining strap loosened in the scuffle, his helmet fell away to reveal a creased and weathered face now given over to screaming madness. Drawing her Lawgiver as she hurried closer, Anderson caught a glimpse of the name on the man's badge through the press of bodies. Brophy. One of the Judges behind Brophy brought his daystick down on the back of the man's head with a sickening crunch. Eyes rolling back white in their sockets, his hand slackening to release the grip of his Lawgiver, Brophy collapsed.

"What in the name of hell is going on here?" she heard Sector Chief Franklin roaring.

"It was Judge Brophy, chief," one of the Judges said, standing to attention. "I've never seen anything like it. He just seemed to go crazy, started raving about sin and damnation. Then he tried to set himself alight with the incendiaries from his own Lawgiver."

The lights came back on, flooding the corridor with their glare. With it, the fire control system went back on-line, triggering the sprinklers in the ceiling to begin dousing the corridor in water. While others saw to fighting the fire or securing Brophy, Anderson noticed that the Judge who had struck him was still standing in the same place, looking uncertainly down at the blood dripping from the end of his daystick. It was Whitby. He seemed to be in shock.

"Looks like the speedheal's worked its usual miracles, then?" she said, trying to break him out of it. "That shoulder doesn't seem to be giving you any more trouble."

"Anderson?" he looked at her dully. "You saw I had to do it. It was like he went futsie..."

"Put out that fire." She heard the sector chief's voice again, snapping orders. "Have Judge Brophy taken to med-bay in restraints. And, somebody, turn off those damn sprinklers. I want the preliminary reports on this incident on my desk inside an hour-"

"Sweet Grud," Grimes said. "The wall, look at the wall."

Turning with the others, Anderson followed the line of Grimes's pointing finger and saw it. There was a message in jagged letters written on the corridor wall in what appeared to be blood.

"Psi-bitch", the message read. "This house is mine. Leave it or you too will be judged".

"It's just like Chief Sykes said," Grimes's whispered. "Just like the deaths in the holding cubes. A message written in blood..." Grimes looked at Anderson. "Psi-bitch? No offence, Anderson, but I think he's talking to you."