The Cursed and the Damned

Ledger

Over time, the methods of capturing the horror of a murder scene have evolved. First there was the sketch pad, then the printed image, and now digital photography. But the feeling one gets witnessing injustice still stirs the same passions within me.

I took a picture of the woman’s neck.

Whoever had done this was fully consumed by the bloodlust. Her carotid artery had been severed, her abdomen opened by wounds too deep and irregular for a knife. She lay beneath a laboratory counter, one hand reaching toward a telephone whose cord had been torn from the wall.

“Get one from this side, Lee.”

The detective held back his coat. To him, I was the photographer who preferred nights and never complained about the bodies.

I photographed the overturned stool, the blood on the refrigerator, the strip of blouse caught on a cabinet. Then I worked backward down the hall. A handprint low on the doorframe. A broken fingernail. Farther along, one shoe beneath the drinking fountain.

He had caught her more than once. Whether she had escaped or he had released her, I couldn’t tell. She had reached the laboratory believing the heavy door would protect her.

The manager waited near reception, holding water in a paper cup.

“Carla Rodriguez. Four years with us. Rowan graduate.”

“Any trouble here?”

“Carla?” He shook his head. “She worked. She took care of her mother. Bought things for her sister’s children. She was a homebody.”

Behind him was a photograph of the staff gathered around a birthday cake. Carla stood at the edge, holding paper plates.

“What did she do?”

“Quality control. She’d been working late, checking some results.”

“Results for what?”

“KR-17. Experimental cancer treatment.”

I wrote it down without attaching any particular significance to it.

“You find him,” the manager said. “Whatever you people have to do.”

I had heard that instruction in languages no living person spoke. It usually came before anyone knew what finding him would mean.

Nothing suggested that Carla had deserved an enemy. But a photograph and a grieving colleague were not the whole of a life, and I had learned to leave room between reputation and truth.

There was no doubt this was the work of a newly minted vampire. The question was whether Carla had been the unfortunate object of blind bloodlust, or whether he had come specifically for her.

***

Behind an old dive bar on Mott Street was a speakeasy known unceremoniously as The Coffin, where some of my kind gathered to drink and complain about the living.

Macky looked up as I entered. He had once been a British barrister. For the last fifty years, heavy metal and biker studs had been his thing. There was enough metal in his face to make an MRI an expensive undertaking.

“Ledge. Eleanor tonight. Thirty-six. Virgin.”

“You know I don’t drink from the living.”

“Eleanor’s beyond caring. Natural causes, before you ask.”

He poured. I sat beneath a shaded lamp while a siren passed outside.

“What’s troubling you?”

“Someone new in town. Someone I haven’t met yet.”

“Will the meeting go well for him or poorly?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Haven’t decided which column in your book?”

“Jury’s still out, my friend.”

People call me a hunter. Sometimes hunting is required. But finding a vampire is the beginning of my work. I am charged with judging what he does with the power he has been given.

In thrall, we become instruments of death. Compassion leaves us; cunning remains. A wolf does not consider the family of the thing beneath its teeth. But before the hunt, there is a person deciding whom to pursue.

“A bad one?” Macky asked.

“A woman in a laboratory.”

“And you’re hoping there’s a reason.”

“There’s always a reason. I’m hoping the reason isn’t ‘for the fun of it’ is all.”

He took my empty glass.

“Remind me how long you’ve been charged with unraveling whether the cursed are damned or just determined?”

“Not as far back as when Cain spilled first blood. But pretty damn near.”

I reached for my coat.

“I’ve got places to be, Macky. Keep some of that on tap for next time.”

***

Duke

The driver told me he was finished for the night.

Rain dripped from the loading-dock awning into a bucket. I held the delivery sheet beneath the light. His signature was beside the designation they had written on my daughter’s medication.

KR-17.

“I don’t make the stuff,” he said.

“Who signed for it at the hospital?”

“Call the office.”

“I did.”

He put his keys between his fingers. There was a little pink shoe on the ring.

I showed him Maddie’s picture. She was holding up a cake that had collapsed in the middle, laughing because I had asked whether we should eat it or fill it with cement.

“She had cancer. They said this might help. Now she’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.” He looked toward his truck. “But I just deliver it.”

“Somebody had to sign.”

“A nurse. Sixth floor. Ruth something. I don’t remember.”

He tried to move around me. I stepped into his path.

“Did they warn you there was anything wrong with it?”

“Mister, I didn’t kill your daughter.”

I heard each drop striking the bucket. Underneath it was another sound, quickening. His heart.

There was still time to leave. I remember that because I put my phone away. I had finished showing him the person he should have cared about.

Then he opened the truck door, and I caught it. The metal folded beneath my hand.

He began shouting. I held him there. I wanted him to stop talking about the office, about signatures, about all the things that made what had happened somebody else’s responsibility. I wanted him to pay for what he had done.

His face seemed to draw closer while the loading dock receded. Somewhere in the glass, two red points shone back at me.

Afterward, I was kneeling beside him. The keys lay in the water, the little shoe floating against his wrist.

I remembered his words, but not what I had done to make them stop.

It had been the same at the laboratory. A surge of energy. Then blood. Everything in between was like a dream.

I picked up the delivery sheet. He had given me a name. Ruth. I could still find out who had done this.

***

Ledger

The driver was the second. A nurse named Ruth Bennett was the third. The hospital pharmacist was the fourth.

By then, the city had given our newcomer a name of its own. I preferred Duke Larson, which appeared on a visitor’s badge recovered beneath the pharmacist’s body.

His daughter had died eleven days earlier. Nine years old. The photograph in the obituary showed a child wearing a paper crown.

I spent the following evening in the hospital’s records office. A detective wanted photographs of the pharmacist’s desk, and I took them. I also photographed the correspondence he had printed and locked in a drawer.

Carla had flagged discrepancies in the trial’s laboratory results. Ruth had reported two children becoming dangerously ill. The pharmacist had demanded that the remaining medication be quarantined. They had all known about the cover-up and known that the lab was using live children as human guinea pigs for a treatment that, as it turned out, was itself lethal.

Dr. Heller had overruled them. The cost was “worth the sacrifice.” That was what he had said. We are trying to abolish the curse of cancer from the world. The speech had gone on for some time. And they had not exactly bought into it so much as they had bought into the idea of staying employed. At the potential cost of these children’s lives. Including Duke’s daughter. Maddie. It was because of her all of this was happening. It was because of her that Duke had taken on the curse.

An email to the trial’s sponsor explained that reporting the incidents would jeopardize enrollment. Another instructed Carla to rerun her tests until the findings were consistent with the figures already submitted.

They had not been blameless. They had waited, deferred, obeyed. But the evidence showed them trying, however belatedly, to stop something their employer wanted continued. And so, it was not so clear that these were just deserts. What was clear, was that these were calculated slayings, and not the senseless rage of a cornered animal fighting for survival.

Duke had followed the drug from the laboratory to the ward, killing the people who had touched it. The distinction between causing a death and failing to prevent one had vanished somewhere along the way.

At the bottom of the correspondence was Heller’s home address, on the Upper West Side.

The pharmacist’s assistant had already given it to Duke.

“He said he needed answers,” she told me.

“Did he seem angry?”

“No. That was what frightened me.”

***

Duke

Heller opened the apartment door with the chain still on.

“Mr. Larson.”

He said my name the way he had in the hospital, softly, leaving room after it for something I wouldn’t want to hear.

“You knew.”

“I can’t discuss this here.”

From inside came the noise of a television. Somebody laughed.

I pushed. The chain pulled free of the frame, and he stumbled backward into a hall smelling of dinner.

“Dad?”

A boy stood near the living room, wearing pajamas and holding a game controller. He looked enough like Heller that I knew him immediately.

“Go to your room, Ben.”

“Who is that?”

“Now.”

The boy went, slowly. Heller waited until the door closed.

“Please,” he said. “My son’s here.”

Something in the apartment sharpened. I could hear water moving through the pipes, the television behind the wall, the boy setting down his controller.

Then a hand closed around my wrist.

“Duke.”

A stranger stood beside me. I hadn’t heard him come up the stairs.

“Let go.”

“You’re still here,” he said. “Stay here a little longer.”

I tried to pull away, but his fingers tightened, and the hall went dark.

***

Ledger

His memories came through the contact: the laboratory, Carla reaching for the telephone; the driver; Ruth kneeling on the ward floor, trying to tell him something he would not hear.

Farther back was the hospital room where Maddie Larson had died.

He had promised to take her home. She had made him describe the route, past the bakery where they bought the cookies with colored sugar. He told her they would stop if it was open.

There had been a point that afternoon when she apologized for getting sick again. He told her she hadn’t done anything wrong. She watched him carefully, as though she needed to decide whether he meant it, and he held her hand until she stopped asking.

Even after she could no longer answer, he kept describing the turns.

Later, he went into the hospital chapel.

“You let him do it.”

There was no one else there. Duke gripped the back of a pew.

“You can take anybody you want. Anybody. And we’re supposed to thank you for the time we had.”

He looked toward the crucifix.

“I could do better.”

The chapel fell away. There was no floor beneath him, yet he stood. The light had withdrawn to an impossible distance, leaving him alone in a place without walls.

I had entered that darkness before. I knew whose attention had turned upon him.

He had called out for his daughter. Something answered.

“Whom would you take instead?”

“The people who did this.”

“Then you shall choose.”

What followed had broken his understanding of himself. He had returned to the chapel carrying a power he did not recognize, with the memory buried beneath the mind’s insistence that such things could not happen.

No bite. No infection. A man had accused God of misusing authority over life and death, and been given the terrible opportunity to exercise it himself. A curse. Once written, it could not be unwritten.

I released his wrist.

He leaned against the wall. Heller had retreated to the far end of the hall, his phone in his hand.

“Call them,” I told him. “Then stay where you are.”

Duke looked at me.

“What was that?”

“Something you haven’t been able to remember.”

“I dreamed it.”

“You hoped you did.”

He shook his head, watching his hands.

“I don’t remember killing them.”

“You remember finding them.”

“They were part of it.”

“Carla was trying to expose it. So were Ruth and the pharmacist.”

I showed him the photographs of the correspondence. He took my phone, enlarged an email, and read it twice.

“Then why didn’t they stop?”

“Because they were afraid. Because they trusted the wrong man. I don’t know all their reasons.”

“You’re making excuses.”

“The driver delivered a package, Duke. He didn’t shoot the chemicals into her veins.”

His eyes lifted to mine. For a moment, I thought he would give me the phone and sit down.

Instead he turned toward Heller.

“What’s his excuse?”

***

Duke

Heller had put the phone down. I could hear someone speaking from it, asking for the apartment number.

“You had those reports before you gave it to her.”

He looked at the stranger, then at me.

“We didn’t know whether the reactions were caused by the treatment.”

“You told us there hadn’t been any.”

“If we stopped the trial, the funding would have gone. There were other children waiting.”

“So you used mine.”

“I thought we could still help her.”

“You told us.”

His face sagged. I had wanted that expression for eleven days. I had imagined it would give me something back.

“Yes,” he said.

The stranger moved between us.

“Step outside with me.”

“You heard him.”

“I did.”

There were people outside on the landing now. Someone called through the doorway, asking whether we needed help. An ordinary question from somebody who could still imagine that help was something you offered and then provided.

“And he gets to live?”

“At this moment, you still get to decide what you do.”

Behind Heller, the bedroom door opened. The boy looked at the broken chain, then at his father.

“Dad, the police are coming?”

Heller reached backward without taking his eyes off me. His hand found his son’s shoulder and drew him close.

I remembered Maddie doing that in the hospital, reaching for me without looking. Certain I would be there. Certain I could do something.

The boy had her life ahead of him. Birthdays. Bad cakes. Arguments over homework. All the ordinary things Heller would go on having after he finished telling the police how sorry he was.

I looked at Ben.

The stranger saw me look.

“No, Duke.”

“He ought to know.”

Heller pushed the boy behind him.

“Take me. Please. He hasn’t done anything.”

“Neither had she.”

Everything was still clear then. I could see the boy’s bare feet. I knew his name. I knew he had nothing to do with the laboratory or the hospital or the little bag hanging beside Maddie’s bed.

I moved toward him anyway.

The stranger caught me. For an instant I saw my own face reflected in his eyes, and then the red came up, taking the hallway and the boy and the last thing I could have chosen differently.

***

Ledger

He fought without speech, twisting toward the child even as I forced him back through the broken doorway. I had been judging his kind for centuries. I had been killing them almost as long.

I broke his neck before he could reach the stairs. Then, because that alone would not hold him, I put my hand through his chest and stopped the heart that would otherwise have beaten for another thousand years.

Heller had carried Ben into the bedroom. Through the wall I heard him say, over and over, that everything was all right.

It was a promise he ought to have learned to stop making.

I left the photographs of the trial correspondence for the detective, along with the location of the originals. Heller would have to answer to judges who could hear his defense.

Downstairs, I sat in my car until my hands were steady enough to open the book.

I recorded Duke Larson’s name, his daughter’s death, and the four lives he had taken. None would be omitted. Neither would the man who had wept in the chapel.

Then I entered the judgment in the column for the damned.

Beside it, where I kept the reason, I wrote the name of the child he had chosen.

Ben.