Atmosphere (3 page)

"Looks that way. Unless it was self-inflicted, and I doubt that very much."

Frank locked gazes with Hector. "He must have been fleeing someone when he darted into the street."

Hector nodded. "Can you remember anything else?"

Frank closed his eyes, rubbed his chin, digging through the cloud of fatigue shrouding his memories. "Well, after I stepped in the blood," he said, pacing along the curb, pointing, "I followed it to the corner." Both he and Hector trailed the veiny smears, which ran a few yards down Mason, then up the curb and across the sidewalk into a thin alley. The two men peered wide-eyed into the dark of the alley like two young boys trying to drum up the nerve to descend into a darkened cellar.

"Hector...he came from here, the naked boy. I'm almost positive of it."

"You sure?"

"Hect, the blood. Look at it."
   

Hector Rodriguez turned around and silently motioned to one of his men with a wave of an arm. A young officer, maybe thirty years of age, trotted over. His badge read 'Muldoon'.

"Officer Kevin Muldoon, this is Detective Frank Ballaro, from the 12th." The two men exchanged handshakes and then Hector said, "Kevin, bring a light. I want to check out the alley." Muldoon jogged away and returned with a halogen flashlight.

"Kevin, we think the kid came from back there. We also think he was trying to escape from someone when the cab got him. Let's see if we can find anything."

Muldoon nodded and the three cops entered the alley in a single file, Muldoon in the lead, flashlight in his left hand. Frank kept a hand on his holstered .45.

They slowly shuffled forward, Frank at once feeling closed in; the cramped buildings snuffed out much of the growing light—it was probably dark here at midday—and the ominous gloom nearly swallowed up the flashlight beam. Litter blanketed the ground, newspapers, flattened cans, broken glass, candy wrappers, everything saturated with rain water. Their footsteps squashed over everything.

Suddenly, from within the near-distant shadows, a pained whimper pitched forth.

Muldoon stopped dead in his tracks. Frank glanced over his shoulder. "You hear that?"

"Keep going, slowly," Hector said, pointing with his chin. He heard it.

All of a sudden Hector's belted radio squelched, ripping apart the silence in the alley like a whistling firecracker. He grumbled a
shit
, fumbling to turn it off. As soon as the silence was resurrected, a sickly moan loomed as if in answer to the radio's cry. The three cops stood in position, listening to it as it leveled for a moment then tapered down into a gurgly cough before finally evaporating. The cry clearly claimed more pain than the unobtrusive snivel that preceded it, sounding like an animal with a leg snared in a hunter's trap.

Muldoon held the flashlight high in attempt to get a better angle, waving it around in ovals. "I can't see anything."

Frank tried to shove his lassitude aside, force some wheels spinning in his head. Throughout his career he had unwrapped numerous crimes clue by perplexing clue. But this? So far: blood led into an alley from where a naked, castrated man emerged in an obvious state of alarm, entrenched to the point where he ended up as a piece of road under the wheels of a cab. The poor bastard never so much as flinched before he was mowed down. And now, someone else here, hidden and hurt, someone who would no doubt provide another piece to an already intriguing puzzle.

They stepped forward, one step, and then the next, slowly and carefully, Frank considering two possibilities: one, the moan came from the perpetrator, the individual guilty of the heinous castration, the presumed murderer. Assuming this to be a likelihood, extreme caution had to be necessitated, defensive postures set in effect. He pulled his gun, finger gently touching the trigger.

Second, the unseen person could very well be a victim himself, henceforth requiring immediate medical assistance. This scenario, however, could not be trusted until an injured person in fact lay in their sights. Expect the worst, pray for the best.

They inched closer. From Frank's vantage he could see in the beams of Muldoon's flashlight a chain link fence separating a courtyard from the alley. From the shadows he saw a large tree growing just beyond the fence on the other side. A park bench sat a few feet to the right under the tree. The crooked branches and leaves of additional trees swayed like ghosts in the distance, their wet dying leaves sending a static-like noise through the air. To the right, four battered aluminum trash cans hugged the alley wall like barnacles on a ship's hull.

In the silence of the moment, Frank wondered if it could have been the fatigue shrouding his mind that concocted the pained cry—just as he thought it had conjured the blood on his shoes when all this started.

But then he heard it again, louder, more pained.

Positioning himself, Frank stepped to the left side of Muldoon. Shoulder to shoulder, they almost touched the alley walls. "Who's there?" he yelled, craning his neck but still unable to see the source of the moan.

Then, like a wicked alarm in the middle of the night, horrifying laughter sounded. It sent a dreadful chill coursing through Frank's body, as if a metal fork had been slowly scraped along a chalky blackboard. Shivering, Frank stayed motionless, feet rooted, listening to the shrouded cackle as its cadence rose and fell. He tightened his grip further on the .45. He and Muldoon looked at each other, nodded an affirmative, then edged ahead, Muldoon in the lead. In his peripheral vision Frank saw Hector hang back and quietly radio for assistance.

Frank was about to shout a
come out with your hands in the air so I can see them
threat when Muldoon uttered "Jesus-H-Christ" in a quiet yet panicked tone. Frank quickly stepped forward, in front of Muldoon, looked to the corner of the alley where Muldoon had the flashlight's beam aimed.
 

His heart trembled.

Flanking the right wall, a portion of the link fence had been peeled open from the bottom, exposing a hole large enough for a man to fit through. Between the hole and the last garbage can, two naked legs jutted out, covered with blood.

"I
need paramedics here now!" Hector yelled into his radio, a series of squelches and feedback breaking up his harried voice.

Frank and Muldoon stood opposite the body, unmoving, both men in halt and unsure of what to do at that very moment. In this tentative state, Frank dug deep into his mind and tried to remember if he had ever in his thirty-one year career seen anything as remotely grotesque, as horrible as the vision before him. He'd seen a great deal of daunting incidents, but could not recall anything equaling this, and he simply did what his mind allowed him to do at the moment: stand frozen with fear and awe and amazement. And Muldoon—well Frank could only assume similar feelings distressed him, perhaps to a point of even further torment than Frank perceived, given his limited exposure to such adverse episodes. He remained immobilized as well, gun lowered, agape and trembling.

It was quite a sight. A young man like the first sat naked in a puddle amidst a ring of refuse on the alley ground. He leaned back crookedly against the building wall, his entire body trembling like a machine. At first glance it seemed he was staring up at them, eyes rolling wildly and unable to pin their target, but in reality his tense face bore eyes turned up into their sockets, the whites glistening, shot with ruptured circles of blood.

Just like the first boy they encountered, this victim also suffered gruesome wounds to his groinal area. The penis and testicles had been castrated, reduced to mere shreds of flesh. A flare of blood rose up from his crotch in a wave-like pattern across his entire upper body, across his face and into his hair—which was saturated and standing at various angles. His thin arms, also coated in crimson, looked completely skinless, as if only raw veins and muscles were exposed.
 

When he was finally able to pull his sights away from the blood, Frank noticed a small object locked in the boy's hands. It was about the size of a grapefruit, round with maybe a half-dozen circular, six-inch spikes emerging from it. As Muldoon tried to steady the flashlight's beam on the boy's trembling hands, Frank could see his bloody fingers gently caressing the object, smearing the gore around in finger-painting circles, exposing a dark shiny hue beneath the deep wet crimson. Frank thought the object to be black in color, but couldn't be sure as it had so much blood covering it.

Something then happened, and as shocking and as paralyzing as the whole vision was, nothing could compare to...well it tempted their minds with madness, taking them beyond all the carnage and gore and into a more terrifying and disturbing persuasion of lunacy.

He
smiled
. Wide grinned, teeth ivory white and aglow beneath his red mask of death. A delineation of dementia gone overboard.

Frank's weaker rational personality spoke out to him, struggled desperately to convince him to break away, to flee this terrible wickedness, and even though it was his own voice, it was not that of Frank Ballaro the adult but that of Frank Ballaro the child, reminding him in his very own unfledged, high-pitched utterance that something as profoundly terrifying and evil-appearing as this was something not to be reckoned with—no matter what age he was, no matter what the circumstances might be. Frank strangely realized for the first time in his life that in some situations, such as this, the helpless child had more common sense than that of the rational adult.

But he resisted the urge to run. The strongest identity inside—the truth-seeking detective—again fought his less daring half—the source of the child's voice—and shut it down from making any weak decisions. It demanded answers, wanted to understand what afflictions had become of the young man before him, and it forced Frank to stay.

Something is very wrong
, he thought to himself,
something here, in New York City, this Friday morning, October 21st 1998
, and he had unwittingly taken the first of many steps that would presumably lead toward an explanation to this madness, had scratched at the surface of an incredibly terrifying mystery. Its substance was now under his nails. It was too late to run.

The boy's chest rose and fell. The smile suddenly vanished from his face and his lower jaw dropped. A foul odor rushed out in an almost visible gush. Rushing footsteps approached from behind, flashlight beams flying like nightclub lights. Breaking his inactivity, Frank quickly turned and glimpsed a team of paramedics scurrying down the alley toward them.

"Freeze!" Muldoon suddenly screamed.

Frank leapt at the sound of Muldoon's shout, felt a lump form in the back of his throat. He spun and saw something...something so
alarming
, so quick and dream-like and more frighteningly mysterious than the injured boy himself, that it at once became difficult to believe that what he saw actually happened as it unexpectedly did, right before his eyes.

A strange looking man shot into sight through the hole in the fence, perhaps six-two or three, arms long and lanky, shoulders broad. His entire body was ensconced in black; jeans, boots, jacket. His hands were covered as well, fitted with sleek mitten-like gloves. Even his eyes were lost behind large dark sunglasses. Only the pearl white skin of his face and bald head were exposed to the traces of the growing morning.

With spider-like finesse, the man stretched forward, grabbed the bloody boy beneath his arms and yanked him through the hole in the link fence, into the courtyard and out of sight around the corner of the building.

The air suddenly reeked of feces and urine, uncomfortably counteracting the panic that ensued. Hector screamed for back-up, the quiet alternative of the radio serving no purpose now. In the commotion, Muldoon abruptly forced the EMT workers against the alley wall, making room for additional police to squeeze through. One medic, a young girl with freckles and blond hair tied in a bun, screamed as she struck the brick surface.

Frank pressed himself against the wall opposite the EMT workers, his three personalities engaged in a whirlwind of conflict. This battle, in combination with his semi-suppressed exhaustion, stunned him to the point where he simply couldn't make a move, take action, and he remained frozen, allowing the oncoming police to engage in the pursuit while his minds chattered.

What the hell just happened? Did some guy just reach through that hole in the presence of armed police officers and snatch a castrated man away in mere seconds?
Yes, it had to be. No level of fatigue could drum up such a bizarre hallucination.

Muldoon followed his counterparts through the shed hole in the fence. Frank finally coerced movement in himself, and he and Hector followed.

The entire courtyard came into view. It was smaller than it had first seemed, perhaps only thirty feet across to the next building. It appeared from this angle that the only legitimate accesses to the yard were those from the buildings themselves; all the other alleys were fenced off.

Frank immediately saw streaks of blood in the grass, like trails of paint, the body clearly having been dragged away with the same quick determination as it had been scooped through the hole in the fence. Frank and Hector followed the messy streaks to a hole in the ground where the policemen stood circled about it, looking down inside and shaking their heads with what indicated utter disbelief. Muldoon and a middle-aged mustachioed cop with tufts of black hair jutting from the sides of his hat were shining their flashlights down into the hole. Another was crouched on his knees, tugging at a manhole cover in the grass at the side of the opening.