The Black Chronicle (3 page)

              Once satisfied he slowly rolled off of her and went to a white duffel bag he had waiting on the sofa behind them. He removed a collar, leash, and hood—all white. He hooked the leash to the collar, strapped the collar around her slender neck and tied it around the leg of the couch. He took one last look at her bloody tearful face before dropping the hood over her head.

              Sara could hear him walking away, climbing the stairs. She tried to roll onto her side so she could leverage herself up on to her knees but there wasn't enough slack on the leash to do so. She kicked and struggled and screamed as loud as she could. She would scream and scream and scream until someone heard her and called the cops or came and investigated themselves. Before long her throat was sore and hoarse but it was the only thing she could do. She couldn't just lie there and cry while her children were being hurt.

              Finally she could hear footfalls coming back down the stairs and then the sound of her two children Jake and Jordan crying. Mister’s warm mass was back on top of her again.

              “Don’t worry my dear one. You were never real. Neither were they,” he whispered through the cloth of the hood.

              This couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t. Then as of to assure it could and it was, came the cruel ripping of her pants.

              Jeremy Foster leaned back in his chair and folded his legs in a composed, gentlemanly fashion, though inwardly he felt about as composed as a rabid hyena…on meth.  His client, Evelyn Dursten, sat across from him jabbering nonsense with such rapid and breathless ease, it reminded him of an auctioneer speaking in Pentecostal tongues…on meth.

Evelyn had been with him nearly from the beginning when he left the FBI's elite behavioural unit to start up his own private practice in civilian therapy. For five years now, he had been a “custodian of the skewed,” as a colleague in the bureau had referred to him. Sometimes he missed the company of proper madmen.

              “I just . . . I don't know. It's not that I don't love him . . . I mean, if you had a goldfish for twenty years – though that's impossible because they only live, like, what? One year at the most – you would love it. But, okay, I guess that's a bad example because it's obviously not the same thing. It's like if you had the same hairdresser or, or, or, I don't know, like the same server at your favourite restaurant . . . ”

              “—Evelyn. I understand what point you're trying to make,” Jeremy interrupted. “Time has created a bond between you and your husband despite your perceived incompatibility.”

              Very discreetly he looked down at his Graham Swordfish wristwatch. His sessions with Evelyn were always an exercise in patience. Endurance may be a better word than patience. He groaned inwardly, sickened yet mesmerized by the way her lips parted and closed, barely perceptible, like hummingbird wings. Her vocal cords struggling to keep up with the never-ending prattle spilling from her mouth. It did, however, all ultimately translate in therapist-ese to “Cha-ching!” He was operating a business, after all. Which is not to say that he didn't want to help Evelyn. He really did. But he had learned a long time ago that some people just need to dump their shit on somebody. They aren’t looking for insight, or perspective, they simply need someone to listen to them vent. So he sat there and let her get it all out.    

              “—If I was going to go through all the trouble of making a potato salad, you would think he would assume I didn't hate his sister anymore.”

              “—I just don't see what the point of exercising so much is. It's not like he's single.” 

              “—I don't believe we ever landed on the moon. I don't know why he can't just accept that.”

              The cacophony of syllables crashed against him like an auditory tsunami until mercifully, the session expired and he very calmly, very happily announced:

              “Unfortunately we are out of time Evelyn. But I think we've unearthed some really important stuff here. Let's dog-ear this for now and pick it back up next week.”

Once she was out of the room he allowed himself a moment to decompress. A knocking at his office door broke the sweet silence.

              “Come in,” he said and his secretary Margret entered, her face ashen.

              “What's wrong?”

              “It's the hospital. I think something has happened.”

              An inexplicable feeling came over him—a quiet knowing in his heart. It somehow told him that it had finally happened; his twin brother Christopher was dead. It was the strangest feeling, this knowing without really knowing. Yet he knew it was true: Chris was gone.

              “Thank you Margret,” he said slipping into a kind of adjacent reality. He walked to the desk, each of the nine steps precise and mechanical. He picked up the phone, watching himself do so, noticing his arm and his hand and then his finger jabbing down at the blinking light.

              He held the receiver to his chest and waited for Margret to leave.

              “This is Dr. Foster.”

              “Dr. Foster, this is Dr. Alysulvun at Good Samaritan hospital. I regret you inform you that your brother Christopher has passed away. We require your presence to identify and claim the body.”

              “Uh, yes. Yes, of course. At the hospital?”

              “Yes sir. The general reception desk will be able to direct you once you're here.”

              “Okay, I'll be there.”

              “So sorry for you loss, Dr. Foster.”

              He didn't even have to ask, he knew it was suicide.

Jeremy avoided particulars with Margaret and instructed her to cancel his appointments for the rest of the day. Then, like a zombie, he put one foot in front of the other until somehow he found himself in the parking lot. For the first time since he’d driven it off the lot the two weeks prior, the new car smell of his BMW M6 Coupe failed to put a smile on his face. Instead it just made him feel like an asshole. The only thing his brother Christopher had ever driven was a bicycle.

How had he known he was gone?

              Jeremy turned the key and the engine purred to life. The drive down Cedar Oak and across    Jefferson was carried out exclusively by rote. It wasn't until he reached Wilshire that he made the very sudden decision that he couldn't face his identical brother's dead face in his present state. He knew would have to go home first to consolidate himself.

              Jesus, he would have to tell his son Charlie. That could wait for the moment too. Besides, if he called the house and spoke to his ex-wife right then, he felt as though he might cry.

Jeremy's condo was a tasteful pastel and hardwood habitat for one, situated within the very exclusive condominium complex of the Shoreham Villas, in West Hollywood. A vainglorious community where the ‘haves’ seemed compelled to congregate like moths to a light bulb; fluttering around the most dazzling point they can find, never really going anywhere. He felt the buildings were charmless and ironically uninspired, and in a resolved sort of way, suitable.

              He entered the perfectly chilled atmosphere of his home, calmly removed his shoes and gently placed his keys on the marble countertop of the kitchen island, just as he would any other day. He went to the cream coloured leather sofa to sit but something told him he should stay on his feet. So instead he proceeded to his bedroom’s en-suite bathroom and began to remove his clothes. He delicately removed his tie and hung it back up in his closet and proceeded to unbutton his shirt. There was a hanger he kept on the back of the bathroom door for when he got home and he utilized it.

              Shirtless, he stood in front of the mirror over the ironically double-sinked counter and lamented, albeit in a casual sort of way, the fact that he had nobody to share this present grief with. How long had he been an island?  How long had he remained the sole citizen of his precise, hyper-felicitous world?

              He looked in the mirror at the face, which until this afternoon, had not been solely his. He was tall and broad-chested and handsome and alone. Where a life led with a little more- what? Vulnerability? would have secured a wife, he had only an ex-wife. No girlfriend either, but plenty of those in the ‘ex’ column. Not even a cat.

It was never too difficult for him to find a date. But his needs for companionship of course  were never—could never be—met on an emotional level. As he inspected his lean, gym-sculpted body in the mirror, he realized that it was possible he had broken the heart of every single woman who had ever cared for him.

              It was starting to become clear, though that time would humble him yet. Time would eat away at his self-reliance until, as an old and decrepit man, he would finally be forced to acknowledge that he was not an island, or at least that he shouldn't be one.

              He leaned in close and inspected the grey which had started to crop up sporadically on his head, and at the hairline itself which was slowly, grudgingly, retreating from the un-winnable war.

              And now his brother was dead. Again he wondered how he’d known. Was it a twin thing? Had he been secretly hoping for it? He splashed water on his face and tried to wash the thought from his mind. No. He would not hope for that. Wouldn’t that make
him
the sick one?

              Staring in the mirror he reached up to the light switch on the wall and flicked it off. He could still make out the contours of the reflection of his brother's face.

              He flicked the light back on. Far from the first time, he wondered what cosmic flip of the coin had made him the chosen one. Why had he been born whole and blessed, while his brother had been cursed and lost?

              He flicked the light off.

              He flicked the light on.

              He flicked the light off.

              He flicked the light on.

              Off.

              On.

              Light.

              Dark.

              Off.

              On.

              Off.

              A shower, shave, and a good cry later, and he was back on the road, heading to his ex-wife’s house to break the news to his son.  

              The constant commotion of the newsroom was strangely comforting to Richard Lansdown. After forty years in broadcasting, he had come to rely on the chaos associated with covering the happenings of a turbulent world.

              By his calculations, he had paid his dues twice over. Had climbed the ranks to now sit as the network’s lead anchor. While he had realized all his professional goals, he had long ago begun to feel more like a mascot rather than a real newsman.

              As the lead anchor of the world’s leading news organization, he presided over a vast kingdom of resources and streams of information that flowed into the Los Angeles headquarters from all corners of the earth. But in the end, he was just the puppet monarch, who spoke only the words the shadow government of the network put in his mouth. Richard Lansdown the broadcasting legend, was nothing more than a spokesman, reading a script written by an army of reporters, journalists, associated contributors, producers and executives. And even then, he was only given those words that didn’t conflict in any way with the many and varied interests of the multinational conglomerate by which they were owned.

              He couldn’t even remember the last time he had gotten his hands dirty and done some real reporting. His job was to stay abreast of virtually everything. He had to at all times, as best he could, get up to speed on whatever was happening on planet Earth that was of reasonable import to the masses—and many things that weren't. Pop culture was Frankenstein’s monster, assimilating the youth of the world, and marginalizing the old and out of touch via passive annexation, to the point where one was forced to acknowledge the memes of the day, or be considered irrelevant. Why else would someone like him know who Snookie was or have any idea about “Gangnam style”? 

              Sitting trying not to get impatient as the hair and make-up artist prepped him for camera, Richard watched the young woman as she obsessively flicked at the wave of his meticulously sculpted, silver head of hair. A single strand in the front was not complying. He chuckled realizing their jobs were not so different.

              “Sorry Mr. Lansdown. Just trying to make it perfect,” she said, misunderstanding his amusement.

              “No, no. It’s quite alright,” he assured her. “You know I wanted to dye my hair when it started greying?”

              “Oh?” she asked too preoccupied with the rebellious hair to sound truly curious.

              “Oh yes. It was very controversial. The network felt very strongly that the grey added a certain . . . oh I don’t know . . . ‘credibility’ to my look. They even suggested a man of my age dyeing his hair may have seemed somewhat . . . undignified!”

              “I don’t even remember what my real hair colour is,” she said dismissively, finally defeating the stray hair.

              A production assistant giraffed his neck into the dressing room.

              “Five minutes to camera.”

              The young lady removed the paper bib from around Richard's neck and began to pack up her stuff. He tried to get a glimpse at the roots of her hair—it was a very good dye job, he decided. He wondered if she bleached it white first. He had heard that’s how it’s done but wasn’t entirely sure.

              “Thank you,” he said, smoothing out his tie and pulling himself to his feet.

The ‘newsroom’ set was bright and sterile like an operating room. There had always been something clinical about it that made it feel impersonal to Richard. The days of jittery nerves right before going live were long gone.  Even as the teleprompter flashed to life and the cameras switched on, Richard’s thoughts were elsewhere: Had Debra cooked diner? Who was on Conan tonight? Would he get home in time to watch it? Maybe she’d made her shaved pork. It’s probably just when you dye your hair completely blond that you have to use peroxide. A shaved pork sandwich while watching Conan would be a nice way to end the day… That’s right it was Ryan Reynolds on tonight. He really enjoyed his sarcastic humour. Was that Canadian humour? Was there such a brand?

              “Five, four, three,” the line producer counted down then switched to a 'hand count' for the remaining three numbers and the camera's ‘go hot'.

              “Good evening and welcome to News Hour. I’m Richard Lansdown.”

              Richard pivoted smoothly over to camera two and took his serious baritone new man voice down two notches to ‘sombre’.

              “He has struck again. The serial killer known as “Mister,” who has confounded police and terrorized the state of California since he first became active over five years ago, has claimed new victims, adding three more lives to the growing death toll and abducted another. Late last night the Los Angeles Police Department received an anonymous phone call believed to be from the killer himself, alerting them to the murder scene in Pico County, Santa Monica.  The police were directed to the home of Gregory and Sarah Whinner and their two children.”

“At the scene the body of Sarah Whinner along with those of her children, ages five and six, were discovered. They had been murdered and their bodies mutilated. The specific nature of their injuries are too graphic to relay in detail here. A special press conference was held this morning to address the public’s unabated concerns regarding the murders perpetrated by the individual whom some are calling, 'the Jack the Ripper of the twenty-first century'. During the news conference, Chief Randel of the Los Angeles Police Department referred to these most recent incident as ‘a horrific and inhuman act of unspeakable violence.' He later went on to cite the Mister killings as a prime example of why the death penalty is still implemented in the state of California and even suggested other states who have overturned the death penalty should perhaps reconsider that decision. Chief Randel seemed visibly shaken over his department’s inability to apprehend the serial killer.”

              The teleprompter flashed to coverage of the news conference indicating to Richard that he was off camera. He reached below the desk and grabbed his water. Maybe it wasn’t Ryan Reynolds after all, he thought. It could be Ryan Gosling. But he was Canadian too, wasn’t he? Which was the funny one?

              The line producer counted back down to hot camera.

              “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the friends and family affected by this horrible, crime. Special hotlines have been set up by the Los Angeles police department and the FBI who are urging you to contact them if you have any information regarding the crimes or the whereabouts of Gregory Whinner. As per his usual methods authorities are expecting Mister to upload a video of the killings to peer-to-peer sites. The police and the FBI would like to remind you that the downloading and possession of such videos is a criminal offence and subject to prosecution.”

              Richard turned back to camera two. “More disturbing news from Wall Street today. Could America be headed for yet another national credit score downgrade?