Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“Cheers,” Helen said.

The Big Meow: Chapter Six

The light in the back room shifted and mellowed as lunchtime passed; the writers at the other tables drank their cocktails, packed up their briefcases and bookbags and went away: and still the People and the Silent Man and Helen Walks Softly sat and talked, the Silent Man scribbling on his pad every now and then for the sake of appearances. There had been much more cream after the initial shock wore off, and some more wine, and finally some lunch. The food had been wonderful, but Rhiow, watching the restrained and regretful way in which Urruah was washing his face after the meal, could see that he hadn’t had the inclination to do the kind of justice to his raw liver that he’d originally intended. She felt sorry for him again…but once more, she had to admit that they all had a lot more to think about at the moment than food.

Helen lifted her second glass of wine as the Silent Man drank about half his fifth cup of coffee at a gulp. “You should really cut back on that,” she said. “It’s going to make a mess of your nerves.”

They’re a mess already, the Silent Man said. And this beats the alternative. But he put the cup down. Look, I could use a map of this, and a timeline. It’s been too much bad news at once.

Helen nodded and started moving plates and glasses around on the table, and pushed off to one side the gloves she’d shed when the food arrived.

“Six more murders,” Arhu said. “And all ‘unaffiliated’ ehhif, out-of-pride types…”

“Transients,” Helen said, “or people who had no relatives or interested others who’d have noticed or cared when they vanished.” As she spoke, Helen started drawing with one finger, apparently idly, on the tablecloth; but where her finger passed, precise narrow lines started to show up on the linen, sketching out a bare-bones rendition of the area between downtown and the Hollywood hills, with Wilshire Boulevard the spine of the map, and various cross streets and avenues sprouting out of it on either side, like ribs from that spine. “Here, and here,” she said, adding a dot in one spot and another on either side of Wilshire, near the center of downtown, “ – these were the first ones. About a month ago. Both males, both apparently long-term vagrants who stayed in residential hotels down in the old Skid Row area, both in their early fifties. They both used all kinds of names at the places where they stayed, so neither has been positively identified. In this man’s case, they’re still trying to find dental records: in this one’s case, there was no way to find them.” She glanced up at the Silent Man. “I didn’t mention, when we started: his head was missing, too.”

He had been scribbling on his pad as Helen drew, making a copy for himself. Now the Silent Man paused. Now why on Earth?

Helen shook her head, kept drawing. “Here, and here,” she said, adding a couple more dots, again on either side of Wilshire but closer to Hollywood, “the next two. One of them was an escapee from one of the local psychiatric institutions, a man in his late sixties, possibly someone mentally or developmentally impaired. The hospital he got out of was a fairly tight-security kind of place: it’s hard to tell how he got loose. That would have been about three weeks ago.”

“When the earthquakes started,” Siff’hah said, leaning over the edge of the table to watch Helen draw.

“That’s right. The fourth one may have been another escapee, but from a different hospital. Same general presentation as the other victims, though. Found on waste ground – a vacant lot behind a bar, in this case – heart cut out.”

“Was that what killed him?” said Arhu.

Helen gave him a slightly cockeyed look. “That would do it for most of us, I’d think.”

“Oh, come on, I know that! I mean, was that how he was killed? Or did something else happen before he died and then they took his heart out?”

“Oh, sorry. No, nothing else happened, as far as the coroner could tell.” The look Helen gave Rhiow suggested that she was regretting the vast difference between the kind of forensics that would have been available in their home time and the kind available here and now. “The only possible alternate cause of death, in a couple of cases, was alcohol poisoning: or in one case, drinking booze that had been contaminated with denatured alcohol.”

Old-fashioned bathtub gin. Or else Sterno drinking, the Silent Man said, still scribbling away at his pad. Common enough behavior among the poorest bums down on Skid Row. The ‘canned heat cocktail’ is pretty popular down there.

“The coroner didn’t think either of those victims had drunk enough, or were drunk enough, to have died of what they drank,” Helen said. “His opinion was pretty much that whatever was used to cut their hearts out had done the real work.”

“They were all cut out?” Hwaith said.

“As far as the coroner could determine,” said Helen. “There was some question in the case of the headless man: I’ll get to that shortly. But the instrument used seemed to have been the same one in all cases: and it was very, very sharp. The autopsies all comment that the wound edges were as sharp as if a scalpel had been used. But no one makes scalpels with such big blades, or so strong: the incisions go right through the breastbone in every case.” She looked grim. “The coroner was getting very disturbed about that by the time he got to the fourth case or so. He said in one report that it was like someone had done this many, many times before, and was practiced at getting a heart out in just a thrust, a cut and a twist.”

They used to be big on that kind of thing down in Central America, weren’t they? the Silent Man said. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why nothing remains of those civilizations.

Helen threw a glance at Rhiow. He’s quick, she said silently. Aloud she said, “I’ve heard other reasons. Changes in the local climate, disease… But they were definitely into some behaviors that we’d think of as unhealthy.”

This, the Silent Man said, reaching out with his pencil to tap one of the dots Helen’s moving finger had left on the tablecloth, this is unhealthy. This is not the kind of thing that happens in L.A. And he frowned. But the Lady in Black did mention what’s his name…

“Tepeyollotl Night-Eater,” Rhiow said, “Lord of the Beasts of the Dark.” She could still hear the Whisperer’s distress at the mere sound of the name.

“Mesoamerican without a doubt,” Helen said. “I’m no expert, but the name sounds Azteca to me.”

Rhiow looked over at the Silent Man, feeling his growing unease and thinking how to continue along this line without freaking him out. The immediate association of cults with serial murder isn’t yet common in ehhif popular culture this early in the century, the Whisperer said in Rhiow’s ear. He may find this line of reasoning too bizarre to accept…

Nonetheless it seemed to Rhiow that the concept had to be broached. “We were talking about cults, back at the house,” she said. “Have you perhaps heard of any cult in this area that’s been trying to revive some aspect of the old Aztec rites?”

The Silent Man gave her an uneasy look. One that would take to killing people…as some kind of religious ceremony? he said. This many people?

“It’s not a very palatable idea, I’ll grant you,” Helen said. “It seems that many of the peoples of Central America enacted various forms of human sacrifice. In the beginning, at least some of them said they were trying to re-enact a sacrifice they thought the gods had originally made for them, in order to save the world. But it may have started as a development of what we call sympathetic magic. Take something personally associated with another human being – a lock of hair, a fingernail paring – and you can obtain various kinds of power over them. Take the concept a step further, by offering a divine being something profoundly important to you – your blood, your flesh – and you obtain a different kind of power over them. The gods are obliged to repay the favor by giving you something you want.”

The Silent Man frowned at the table, his expression quite still. “What one sacrifices personally is one matter,” Helen said. “Other cultures share similar concepts. But later on the Mesoamerican religions started to change. People less often offered their own blood…and much more often, someone else’s. In time the sacrifice became a way for populations to stay stable, for nations to dominate each other or dispose of captives of war. Later still a nasty inversion happened: wars were started to acquire enough captives to keep the sacrifices going. And the Aztecs were the people most enthusiastic about doing such things in large numbers.”

The Silent Man shook his head. But why would people do that now? What in the world would they hope to gain?

“Maybe nothing in this world,” Arhu said. “The Lady in Black hated everything she saw here. She thought that whatever she’d been doing had made her some friend outside of everything.” His tail was lashing now. “A friend who was going to put an end to it all.”

Urruah had for some while been sitting upright with his eyes half-closed, looking like an angry Egyptian statue, and saying about as much. Now he opened his eyes a bit more. “I’d prefer it too,” he said, “if all this was just down to some crazed psychotic ehhif with a deathwish that he’s projecting onto everyone around him.” He turned to look at the Silent Man. “But I don’t think we can afford to ignore any explanation, no matter how distasteful. Any one might be the right one, and we don’t dare blind ourselves to spare our tender sensibilities. There’s too much at stake.”

Their eyes locked. After a long moment, the Silent Man let out a breath, looked over at Helen again. There were two more? he said.

She nodded. “Here, and here,” she said, adding two more dots on either side of the skeletal map. One of them was much further north from Wilshire than any of the others. The other was much further along, past Hollywood proper and further into the mountains still. “Sixteen days ago,” Helen said. “An old homeless woman – the only woman in this new group – and a middle-aged man with a police record, a burglar. Both dumped, like the others, on waste ground.” She folded her hands on the tablecloth and sighed.

Everyone was quiet for a few moments, considering the map. “That missing head,” Hwaith said after a few moments. “I keep thinking about that. I mean, not that taking their hearts isn’t bad enough, but why the head too?” He flicked his ears sideways and forward again in bemusement.

Helen shook her head. “That was the most problematic case in the group,” she said, “since the heart wasn’t removed in the same way as the other ones were. That poor man’s ribcage had been almost completely crushed: at first the police thought he’d been run over by something. But the coroner’s report suggested side-to-side crushing. He didn’t know what to make of it, especially since there were no tire marks or anything similar to be found on the body. There was some speculation in the file that the dead man might have been involved in some kind of industrial accident – but that wouldn’t have accounted for the tearing that the rest of the body experienced. And what kind of industrial accident involves first crushing your chest and then pulling your heart out?”

Tails were lashing all around the table, the exception being Sheba’s: the discussion of the technicalities of the situation had prompted her to have an after-lunch snooze, an impulse that Rhiow could completely understand but had to resist. In particular she was keeping an eye on the Silent Man, who was still looking rather unsettled.