Harken

4 Evidence

The last time I’d sneaked out of the house, I’d nearly been turned into human rotisserie. Sometimes I wondered just how dangerous I could get if I didn’t constantly keep myself in check. Maybe if I’d tried to be more normal, I wouldn’t have found myself climbing out my window at midnight again, careful of even the slightest noise this time. Maybe then I wouldn’t have scraped my palms by scooting across the shingles until I reached the roof of our garage, dangling from the edge until the ground was close enough to let go. Maybe then I’d just stay at home and sleep at night, and surround myself with insignificant pains like how to get a hotter girlfriend or how to keep my boss from yelling at me for being late to work.

A girlfriend and a real job wouldn’t be that bad, would it? I thought. As if I had time for either. I stole across the grass still damp from the light shower that had appeared early in the night, and slipped through gate.

The emptiness of the street squeezed in like a quilt. There were no lights in the houses, no cars pulling into the driveways. One might have found more life in a taxidermist’s freezer.

I hurried down the sidewalk with furtive glances back at my house, its wooden panels appearing gray in the dim cast that covered the dismal street. My mom was probably (and hopefully) catching up on sleep, now that I didn’t have a car to escape with. No lights switched on as I walked with my hands in the pockets of my jeans. There were only the empty echoes of the city far away, and the ever-present blue fly zapper someone had forgotten to unplug before going in to sleep.

To be safe though, I’d told Spud to park at the end of the street. I could see the outline of his beaten brown Chevy pickup around the corner, the lights off but the engine rumbling low into the night.

“I knew I kept you around for something,” I told him as I climbed into the passenger side, the bench seats covered with an old mat stitched over its original material. Spud huffed as I closed the door.

“You owe me a good bunch of things for this,” he said, though his tone betrayed his phony annoyance.

“What about the free work I gave you yesterday?” I countered. “I think we’ll be even.”

Spud pushed on the gas to shut me up. The engine was far louder than my BMW’s had been—the sound made me wince, but there was nothing to be done about it. Most of his truck’s original pieces weren’t even there anymore, the radio from sometime in the 1990s but the steering wheel at least two decades older. A new sound system had been wired in messily with cables poking up from under the seat, and every time Spud slowed for a stop I had to push a speaker back under the chair with my foot. I only relaxed when we were a good half-mile from my house and Spud turned the headlights on.

The closer we came to the meeting spot, the more the anticipation inside me grew. What if the car was where I remembered? I hadn’t planned through what I would do next. If I found no car, the least it would do was convince me that my mom was right, and all of this had been my imagination. I wasn’t sure which I wanted more.

The truck wheezed as we crawled up the canyon road, everywhere around us still deserted and far too familiar for my own comfort. I stared out the side window as the trees and rocks rolled by, recalling my own quiet drive out. I’d left my house early so I was there on time, barely thinking about what I was about to do because it came so naturally. That job wasn’t supposed to be out of the ordinary.

Now the woods bore a sinister feeling. My eyes kept imagining things darting amongst the trees: the glint of an animal’s eyes, the face of someone watching us when it was only the withered side of a dying bush. I could smell the woods through the crack in Spud’s broken passenger window that didn’t shut all the way—branches still damp from rain, like the sharp scent in December when people started putting up their Christmas trees.

If I’d died out there, it might have taken weeks for anyone to find my corpse. It made me wonder how many other sets of bones might be spread out in those gloomy trees, never to be found again.

“Hey man?” Spud broke the silence. “You see something up there?”

I sat up straight. Spud’s headlights were weak and their flashlight-level radiance hardly penetrated much of what was in front of us. But far in the distance, around the bend we were taking, I could see a gravelly spot on the side of the road. And parked there, like a lonely hitchhiker resting for the night, was a silver Maserati.

“Holy…” I couldn’t finish. The closer we got, the more the lights shone on the car’s gleaming sides. When Spud’s headlights brushed with those of the car, the bulbs reflected like giant eyes, and all at once my fears were confirmed.

Like the flipping of a switch, I immediately returned to all of my original beliefs that the officers and my mom had done a good job of burying. Spud, so much in shock that his face had gone paler, pulled his truck onto the side of the road and faced the car, wrestling the stick shift into park.

Both of us sat wordlessly, the truck’s engine buzzing against our pounding heartbeats.

“Is that it?” Spud said. I nodded.

“I think so.” Part of me still didn’t want to believe it.

“So what’s that mean?” he said. “The whole murder thing? You didn’t hallucinate all that up after all?”

“I… I’m not sure,” I said. All along, I hadn’t expected to see the car there. But now that it was sitting in front of me—a real, three-dimensional proof of the things that’d happened…

I jolted out of my thoughts and pushed the door open, the sound of my footsteps against the rocky ground bringing back memories of twenty-four hours earlier. I hurried to the car, walking around the side as my reflection appeared in its tinted windows. It was the same car, no mistake. No one would have left something this expensive sitting this far in the middle of nowhere, not if they didn’t want it stolen. Not if they were still alive.

Spud appeared beside me, cupping his hands around his eyes so that he could see through the glass. I did the same. It was hard to see much. The seats inside were leather and the beige material had tightened back into shape long ago, since its driver had never returned. There was a briefcase in the passenger seat and a half-full bottle of water in the cup holder. I slid to the back window but the other seats were empty.

“Your clients are filthy rich,” Spud exclaimed.

“That reminds me,” I said. “He never paid before he tried to kill me.”

“Priorities, Scrooge,” Spud reminded me. He circled around the back of the car and to the other side, trying all the doors with his hands wrapped in the edge of his shirt. The doors were locked though. Adrenaline pumped through me so strongly that I didn’t care about making a proper entry. So I walked back to Spud’s truck, picked a long baseball bat from the assorted junk in the bed, and returned.

“Wait, what are you—!” Spud started to protest, but I swung the bat without letting him finish. Its heavy end cracked hard against the window glass but didn’t break through. Spud dashed to stop me but I slammed it again, and this time it worked, the entire panel crumbling like an eggshell.

“Are you insane?!” Spud shouted. It looked like he was about to pass out. “People can hear that!”

“No they can’t,” I told him, passing the bat into his hands.

“You’re lucky the alarm isn’t armed,” Spud hissed. “That’s all we need. W-what are you doing now?”

I’d gone back to Spud’s truck and retrieved a pair of work gloves from the tool compartment, which I slipped on. Careful to leave no fingerprints, I held my arm steady through the glass of the car window. My fingers found the lock and I pulled the door open, while Spud watched with a dumbfounded face.

Even the inside of the car smelled new, the scent of the leather having overtaken the enclosed space under the beating sun all day. I couldn’t slide to sit into the seat though, because now it was covered in glass. So I leaned my arm against the headrest, managing to snatch up the briefcase.

“I knew I was right,” I insisted, a thrill driving me as I dug through the glove compartment, finding nothing but a flashlight and the car’s owner manual. I lifted myself out and dropped the briefcase hard onto the car’s hood.

“Do you take diabolical joy in ruining precious cars?” Spud said, waving his hands. I didn’t reply, snapping both of the already-set combination locks. I clicked on the flashlight I’d taken and shone its beam down as I lifted the lid.

The briefcase’s meager contents were painstakingly organized: two pens hooked on a leather pocket and a single file folder encompassing crumpled papers. I accidentally picked the folder up by the wrong edge and a mishmash of printouts and photographs fell out.

Something immediately caught my attention. I passed the light to Spud.

“That’s you,” he said, aghast. On the top of the pile had fallen a sharp color photograph of me, in the motion of getting into my former car. It was bright daylight outside and I was in front of my house, the photo taken from far down my street.

“It sure is…” I confirmed sourly. I lifted the photo only to find another like it below, this one of me walking from the parking lot to school, and then another beneath that of me at the Santa Monica Pier, camera in hand. There was an entire album of photos of me, all from the past two days. Mr. Sharpe hadn’t simply been a deranged lunatic: he’d been stalking me.

Under normal circumstances, I should have felt violated. But I was far past feeling like someone had invaded my personal life. Too many other disturbing things surrounded this man, so that I only slid the photos aside and started to brush through the other papers.

I found a map of the Valley, showing a path in red marker that I suspected to be the drive I’d taken from home to school, then another tracing a path to the lot on which I stood. I found another scrap beneath that, the scrawled notes illegible to me. Then finally, a large strip of paper.

It didn’t belong with the others, a clipping from a San Francisco newspaper not sturdy enough to stand straight without me holding it at both ends. The page had been cut to show part of a single headline, ink faded and smudged at the ends. There was a row of four photographs in the middle, showing a middle-aged man and a woman, and beside them two nearly-identical boys with matching hair and gray eyes, much younger than my sister. They were obviously a family, all blonde except the father, who had black hair and a thin, graying beard.

But above the four, there was a distracting picture that almost leapt out at me the moment my eyes met the page. The face of a girl. She was about my age, with dark chocolate-colored hair that hung over her forehead, the rest pulled back behind her ears, skin lightly browned like most of the people at school who lived close to the Pacific coast. Her eyes were a shining blue, saturated like a photo editor had enhanced them unrealistically, a center of flaring gray that raced out in a bursting star. They should have been nearly indiscernible in the cheap newspaper ink, but they flashed with an almost unearthly vibrancy. She stared into my soul from the paper, through the camera lens… the Glimpse.

Ten thousand thoughts lay behind her eyes, but no words could describe them. It threw me off. With that much clarity, I should have been able to read her emotions precisely, but somehow I’d become too boggled to do it. I managed to pick out a few: amusement and happiness and joy. But there were thousands more hidden inside her. I could have studied them for hours.

It belonged on my wall. I needed her eyes on my wall.

“Who’s that?” Spud asked from beside me. I swallowed, having forgotten he was there.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“That’s really sad,” he told me, with far too much lament in his voice. “She was hot.”

For a moment I couldn’t figure out why he sounded so down, but then I noticed the headline at the top of the page: SAN FRANCISCO FAMILY DEAD, BURNED IN HOME.

I’d had the breath knocked out of me before. When I was nine, my neighbor Andrew Roscolli had lost twelve Pokémon cards to me in a bet, and in a rage he’d hit me with a baseball bat. That was the feeling that overcame me the second I read that headline. Instantly I was lightheaded, blinking, my throat dry as dizziness forced me to lean against the car’s side to steady myself. The cold metal brought me back, squeezing the edges of the newspaper so tightly that I crumpled it.

“Calm down, man,” Spud told me. What was wrong with me? I unfolded the bottom of the paper only to find that the article wasn’t a part of the clipping. There were names, though, in the caption: THE STEWART FAMILY. Steve and Margaret, with their twin sons Bobby and Steve Jr. And the girl: Callista.

My heart was beating faster now. I glanced to the top of the newspaper. It was dated five days ago. She’d been alive so recently. Barely gone. Freshly dead.

“You think he killed them too?” Spud said, voicing what I was too shaken to say.

“That would…make sense,” I agreed, gesturing emptily at the briefcase and then rubbing my forehead to ease the pounding headache that had arisen. Why? How could there be any reason to kill this family? Then go after me but leave my family unharmed?

Those thoughts made my insides reel. What are you doing, Michael? I didn’t know these people and there was no logical reason for me to act like I cared.

I folded the newspaper up immediately, not wanting to think about it anymore. Moving it revealed that there was actually one final paper in the bottom of the briefcase: an index card. I reached for it.

There was a scribbled note on the front, written in pen and smudged slightly by the writer’s hand. My name was written and circled with my business email address below it.

But to the right of my name was something else: a website address, also circled, with an arrow from my name pointing toward it.

“I’m on that!” Spud jumped to reach for his phone, but I was faster, pulling mine out of my pocket. I started my web browser. No connection at first. I held my phone up high, begging for it to work, until finally I managed to grab a strand of Internet through the trees.

It was difficult to type the long website address with my hands trembling and my sweaty thumbs sliding on the screen. Spud’s head pressed close to mine so that we could both see, the webpage loading slowly, every second feeling like forever. First came the black background, then some of the text, then lastly the subtitle at the top:

Only those who listen can hear what is true.

The website was arranged simply and had little design or flourish: only a plain black background, a long row of text for content and a sidebar on the right with links to archives. As I zoomed in on my tiny screen I saw that the archive dates went back for years, hyperlinks to hundreds of old posts. A blog.

The articles on the front page were truncated and showed only their titles and the first paragraph before having a link to read more. I scrolled down with my thumb and read the titles, most of them not making much sense to me. I saw one called THE FINANCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL CHIEFS OF INFLUENCE, and another THE AQUAFUEL TECHNOLOGY, and further down the page one called POST DEMOCRATIC PLAN OF ACTION.

Photographs broke up the page in several spots, and I paused on one of a pencil illustration of a coastline’s side view and deep under the sea that surrounded it. The picture showed a giant wave approaching the coastal city, but far away under the water was a long torpedo-shaped submarine. The title read, THE TSUNAMI DEVICE, and below that the beginning text:

Harken, all seekers of truth. I received this most recent correspondence and illustration from Anon this weekend, who reveals in it not only the further malicious intent of the Society, but their absolute disregard for the lives of those their procedures affect. For while even guilty offenders receive a trial, the humans who are in the path of these technologies fall to the side like slaughtered cattle, as witnessed by the …

And it cut off there, with a link for me to read more below the fold.

“It’s like a conspiracy theory…” Spud said under his breath. I looked at him, and he pointed to the page.

“These are all about secret government things,” he said. “Look at the titles: “Post Democratic Plan Of Action”? That’s like some sort of end-of-the-world theory I’d guess: what they’ll do when democracy falls apart. Like the black helicopters and Area 51.”

He gestured toward the illustration of the coastline. “This is about the tsunami that hit Indonesia a few months ago—see the date? It looks like whoever-this-is… this Anon person… he’s trying to say that it was a cover-up, and leaked it to this blog.”

“How do you know so much about this?” I asked with surprise.

“Don’t you ever listen to AM radio after midnight?” Spud asked, looking a little shocked that I didn’t. “I’m telling you, this is one of those sites. They pull out all this proof about a New World Order and aliens space ships and stuff. At least…what they call proof.”

He scratched his neck. “You wouldn’t believe how many of these things go through torrent sites. According to them, pretty much everything out there is a hoax by the government.”

“And you’ve read this site?” I said. He shook his head.

“No, never seen this one,” he replied. “I don’t really read much of it, just when I’m bored at night. Most of it’s on the radio. People call in all the time saying they know something. But you can’t take it seriously.”

Of course I can take it seriously. Because if the car was there, then I’d really met Mr. Sharpe. And if Mr. Sharpe existed, then he had tried to kill me. And if I was still alive, that meant he had failed, and the silver claws that I’d seen smashed through the roof of my car hadn’t been a delusion at all.

These thoughts caused everything I’d believed to be turned over. Many of my clients might have thought that my abilities were paranormal, and if it drove up sales I didn’t mind perpetuating that belief. But now that I felt I had seen something concrete, I didn’t know what was up or down anymore.

“What does this even have to do with me?” I asked aloud. It wasn’t like I knew anything about this stuff—no obvious reason for Mr. Sharpe to connect this site to me and come to the conclusion that I needed to be dead. Spud and I exchanged glances but neither of us had a good answer.

All this time, my thumb had been scrolling the webpage, and suddenly when my eyes turned back to the screen, my finger stopped abruptly. In the sidebar were links under a subheading labeled Introductory, bolded in cobalt blue with titles like FEDERAL RESERVE CARTEL and DIVISION OF EARTHLY POWERS. One in particular had caught my attention: THE SILVER-CLAWED GUARDIANS.

I clicked the link in the same instant I spotted it. However, I was greeted by a screen that required me to log in.

“What’s this?” I told Spud, gesturing. “Break through this.”

Spud snatched my phone and started to type quickly. However, his face showed from the start that he wouldn’t get far trying to break in. He tried a few logins and passwords but gave up without much of a fight.

“Are you serious?” I said with disbelief. “Just hack it.”

“You must watch too much TV,” he snarled. “I can’t just ‘beep! boop! beep! I think I’m into their mainframe, officer!’”

He looked at me resentfully. I wasn’t taking that answer.

“I mean, I can do it,” he went on with confidence. “I just can’t do it on a phone. I’ve got to be at my house. All my stuff is on that computer.”

I wanted to protest but I knew it would be no use. I clicked back and then tried the link again, even trying some usernames like ADMIN and easy passwords I knew were common. But Spud had already been on top of that. The tiny mention of silver claws had set off alarms in my mind. It meant I hadn’t imagined those either; someone else out there had an answer.

“Can you find out who runs this?” I asked. Spud didn’t look certain but there still appeared to be hope in there. So I tore off the edge of one of the photographs and scribbled the web address onto it, giving it to him.

“Can you do this first thing tonight?” I insisted. Spud winced. I could read him like a book: Not all of us can stay up all night working, Michael.

“Early tomorrow then? It’s Saturday.” I relented. He nodded.

“Don’t tell anyone,” I added. The hesitation returned to Spud’s gaze.

“Do you even know what this is?” he said. “I mean…we really just found out that there was a man who tried to kill you. Aren’t you worried about telling the police?”

I hadn’t even thought about it. I’d forgotten all about the terror I’d experienced the night before because all my thoughts had become enveloped in the embrace of the mystery that’d come up. It was like the murder attempt was suddenly just a small piece of something so much larger that the original fear had been scared right out of me.

“Let’s keep it to us for now,” I told him. “I just… I want to find out why he wanted to kill me. And they might not even believe me just because I found a car.”

“But if there was one guy, what if someone else tries finish what he started?” Spud asked. He sounded far more afraid for me than I was.

“Now you’re the one talking conspiracy theories,” I said, putting on a reassuring smile.

I was good at acting confident. It was enough to convince Spud to stuff the note into his pocket without any more protest.

Still, the racing feeling that shot through every vein in my body told a different story. A simple murder attempt against me was too large for me to comprehend—but now there was more. Unintentionally, my hands had unfolded the newspaper clipping one more time. I was greeted by the girl’s face again and the mysteries that it bore.

Who are you? Maybe if she’d been alive, she could have told me what was going on.

When Spud wasn’t looking, I stuffed the newspaper into my pocket. I couldn’t help but glance back over my shoulder as we left the car behind, the folder of photographs in my hand. With its window broken, the car didn’t appear nearly as prestigious as it had before. Now it was like a lonely, injured beast staring after us, warning me that I should stop now…that I was venturing deep into something that I shouldn’t.

Spud didn’t say a single word during our drive home. I could feel his anxiety from across the truck. He remembered to leave me at the corner and I let him go without trying to diffuse the anxious air. I knew if I said anything, it’d do little but frighten us both even more.

Getting back into my room proved to be much more difficult than getting out had been. My mom knew all my tricks now, and it’d be a shame for me to be found when I was nearly able to hang a “1” on the mental X DAYS SINCE MICHAEL WAS CAUGHT sign.

Luckily, we kept a long aluminum ladder stored between our house and the neighbor’s. But if I used it to get onto the garage, I wouldn’t be able to hide the ladder once I was up. Since I couldn’t go back in through my room, I lifted the ladder onto the side of the house and climbed toward my sister’s bedroom window instead.

The window was unlocked, as usual. That was our deal. My sister knew that I sneaked out sometimes to do work for clients, and it was her unspoken vote of support to give me a way back in again. She didn’t care about the college money she could’ve gained; she wanted to be screenwriter fresh out of high school anyway. If she’d been anyone else’s sister she probably would have turned me in long ago, but she was Alli.

I crept inside and eased the ladder away, so that it went across the space between our houses and tapped the roof of our neighbor’s. I stood like Dracula over the bed, arms frozen out as I listened for any stirring from my mom’s bedroom. Nothing. In the morning I would take the ladder down, but this was just in case she happened to walk outside before I could.

I checked on Alli briefly but she was still sound asleep, so I hurried out. I closed my bedroom door behind me but even then I didn’t think it wise to turn on a light. With careful steps I went to my desk, emptying my pockets onto it and crawling under the sheets.

I didn’t even try to sleep. Minute after minute, I lay staring up at my photographs and the ceiling fan, mind racing faster than its rotating blades. There were no answers for the host of mysteries that bombarded me, and I knew even though Spud had told me he’d work on it in the morning, he was probably at his house already trying to break into the website. I wondered if I had dragged him into something I should have left him out of. But I needed someone I could trust, and there was no one better than Spud.

When I was certain that the creaks of our house were not my mom coming to check on me, I rolled over and reached for the newspaper again, looking at it in the light from my cell phone screen. I stared at the photograph of the girl.

Did you really have to die? I wondered. Spud was right: it was a shame. A waste, even, when you got down to the gritty technicalities. This girl—Callista—she would have had an amazing life. Just looking at her, surrounded by that family—she’d have gotten some degree in a nice college whose air I’d never afford to breathe, and probably marry some genius guy who was starting up a million dollar company.

The girl in the newspaper certainly looked like she had everything together, yet I didn’t get a feeling of any arrogance that should have gone along with it. She’d been heading nowhere but up, and she’d actually deserved it.

Stop thinking about that stupid girl. She was dead, and I’d almost been dead with her. I tossed the paper back. I wondered if it was even a good idea to keep it anymore.

Sleep refused to come easily. I wanted to forget everything. But my brain wouldn’t allow that. It was for that reason I was taken by surprise when I finally drifted to sleep, and felt my skin brush with icy air.

I was running again.