The Devil's Dream: A Nightmare (3 page)

Art looked over to the gun case on the floor. Two feet and a combination password away from safety. That’s how close Allison had been to staying alive. Or maybe she was still alive, just in serious pain. That was Brand’s modus operandi, wasn’t it? He hadn’t been able to kill any of the people previously because he needed them alive to create his ghastly experiments.
Except, in his mind, there weren’t any experiments happening. To Brand, the theory was reality, all he had to do was walk through the steps.

That would be the worst, if she was in some kind of suspended state, not dead, not alive, perhaps knowing the same fate awaited her daughter.

“And then on the wall above the bed...”

Art stopped listening to the detective. He hadn’t wanted to look there yet. He had purposefully avoided looking above the headboard, because he didn’t want to see the message. He didn’t want to face the possible implications, and maybe he had tried to hide that from himself earlier, but he couldn’t now. Art needed prayer and while he might hide things from himself, he couldn’t hide anything from God.

Give me the strength, Father
. God didn’t always listen, especially to Art, and he understood that. Put simply, God had a lot to do, and worrying about Art—with his foul mouth and temper—well that couldn’t always be at the top of His list. Maybe now though, this one time, God could alter His plans just a bit and listen. Because this shit might get difficult.

Art looked up at the bed and saw the maroon streaks which looked almost like a child’s finger painting—besides the message.

The question read:
How about we stop with the nonsense and end all this?

* * *

“
T
here’s nothing here
. I mean nothing. This detective feels pretty sure whoever broke in came through the bedroom window, but other than that—nothing. No DNA. No forced entry. Just Moore’s blood dabbled in a few places,” Art said into his cellphone.

“And the scribbling on the wall?”

Art sighed. “Well, by nothing, I meant nothing besides that. That is, unfortunately, a pretty fucking big something. They managed to get some partial prints and it checks out as a ninety-eight percent match with Arthur Morgant.”

“How do you feel about having the same name as someone who is going to be famous for horrible crimes?”

Art didn’t smile. “Man. Fuck. What do we do?”

“Elegant as always, Art,” Gyle James said. “How are the media stations down there playing it?”

“There’ve been a few stories, nothing major. They mainly just mention that Moore was involved in the Brand case a couple years back.”

A few seconds of silence came over the phone before Gyle said, “Arthur Morgant, that’s the escapee right? The one you told us couldn’t possibly be Brand. That one we didn’t need to worry about?”

“That would be him.”

“Just as long as you know I went to bat for you back then. So don’t say anything stupid this time because I can’t go to bat twice in this game.”

“I know,” Art said.

“There’s nothing else down there? No other signs of what might have happened? Why she was taken? What the message means? Where Morgant is? Nothing?”

“No. She’s gone. Her daughter’s gone. The house is empty and no one is hanging out that shouldn’t be. Family comes in tomorrow to begin gathering things. The police are questioning neighbors, but there isn’t a lot to use right now.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“The detective I told you about. Jake something or other.”

“Okay, stay with him for the next few days. I’m going to get some analysts on this and see what we can find out if we start looking cross country.”

“Yes, sir,” Art said.

“I’ll give you a call tonight.”

Art waited hours on the call before falling asleep, phone next to him and silent.

T
he moonlight
always fell down out here as if the heavens were trying to speak with Matthew. He had reveled in the beauty of science’s creations, marveled at the genius of an electron collider or a telescope. But here, in this place, the moon struck him just as powerfully; he saw it as gorgeous. It turned everything into a black and white hue and cast shadows all the way from the smallest blade of grass to the lighthouse he had come to visit.

He could only visit at night, so he was never able to see the place during daylight, but it was still something to behold now, for sure.

Matthew walked from his van across the graveled driveway and to the bottom of the lighthouse. The structure stood so tall, and yet the door he entered through was barely big enough to allow him in. He found the key in his pocket and twisted open the lock. Stepping inside, he left the beauty of nature for the beauty of his mind.

He hit a light switch and the building illuminated, cascading upwards in a series of rings.

He had two new additions, but he wanted to get a look before he started working. That’s what this came down to: work. What stood before him was work. What came next was work. His whole life, except for maybe the early years where he half listened to his professors and stayed inside his own head, had been work. There was a lot left to do,
a lot
, but soon all his work would end. He could finally rest and place down the yoke he had thrown on his shoulders all those years ago. He wanted a second just to admire this though, just a moment. It would grow much greater, without any doubt, but even now, he thought it rivaled everything produced by any other mind, ever. Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci—none of them could look on what stood before Matthew and say they could have done better.

It took Matthew two years to figure out that God had a sense of humor. Two years of struggling with the design, of not being able to create what his mind said was possible. Staring at a notepad, scribbling down formulas, sitting in a shitty Texas apartment with the heat having no end, he finally understood the reason he wasn’t able to extract the power he wanted: he was positioning the bodies wrong. The feet needed to be placed over one another. The arms outstretched. The bodies needed to resemble a dying Christ. From that realization, the whole structure before him was born, and he began building.

He had removed the steps that once wound their way upward along the edge of the lighthouse’s wall. Matthew hollowed out the building and then replaced it with his own ideas. A large pole stood implanted into the ground, shooting all the way to the top of the lighthouse, to where a light once burned for ships. Surrounding this pole, supported by beams sticking outward from it, were large, circular rings. The largest was at the bottom, and every ten feet, another (and smaller) ring was added. Until at the very top, the smallest ring had been placed, and Matthew thought he might be able to attach two people on it. If he was wrong though, and off one person, everything would still work. To be honest, his plans were a bit overkill. Better safe than sorry and all that, plus, Matthew was never short on dramatics.

Right now, he had two bodies attached to the rings and two more waiting in his car.

Jeffrey Dillan, and the woman who decided living with him would be a good idea, hung above Matthew. They had been hanging for the past two years, and looked nothing like the people he originally brought in here. Those people had been lean, fit, hair trimmed, alert. The people before him could barely be identified as human.

Their hair had passed far beyond their shoulders. Dillan’s beard continued to grow, reaching his collarbone now. The once fit muscles were all flab, looking like they were melting from the bones. Their hands were splayed out to the side, their feet lay one over the other, mimicking Christ on the cross. Matthew had designed it that way on purpose. It lent itself for a nice bit of irony, he thought. Metal poles connecting back to the ring passed through each of their hands, another through their feet.

Matthew walked over to Jeffrey Dillan, suspended ten feet in the air, his body naked. Two wires sprang from the pupils of his eyes and into the bolts drilled through his hands. The same for his girlfriend that hung beside him. A large tube ran from each of their mouths, down the outside of their bodies and across the floor to a giant barrel. Liquid food was pumped from the barrel once a day, containing all the nutrients that these two—as well as the two in the car—would ever need. The food supply was self-generating, pretty much. Like a compost pile, but one for humans rather than plants.

Jeffrey was still alive, which Matthew enjoyed almost as much as anything else. Everyone that hung on these giant rings would be alive for as long as it took to fill this light-tower. Right now, Jeffrey felt the pain of wires feeding through his eyeballs and into the soft tissue of his brain beneath. When food came through the tubes, filling up his esophagus, and spilling over his mouth because he couldn’t swallow fast enough, he knew it.

Jeffrey deserved it. Matthew had
heard
Hilman’s voice. He had heard it for the briefest of seconds and then everything had been shattered. Everything he worked twenty years for, everything he had come so close to capturing, had been stolen from him. They destroyed his mind, and then his body. Dillan made that possible, because Dillan’s lust for money allowed him to tail Matthew for months, allowed him to understand everything about the operation Matthew amassed.

At the end, though, Dillan lost his nerve and ratted.

Matthew heard Hilman’s voice and then heard it no more. All because of the man hanging before him. So, yes, Dillan deserved it. He deserved to hang here until his skin rotted from his bones and only a skeleton remained. Unfortunately, Matthew wouldn’t be able to give him what he deserved, because there wasn’t enough time for that.

He had a lot of work to do tonight, hanging up the woman and child that were in the van outside wouldn’t be easy. Tomorrow, he had his coming out party, as he thought of it. The time for thought was over, at least for tonight.

It was now time for action.

* * *

“
I
only spoke
with Agent Moore once besides the brief words I said before taking her. Kind of a, ‘hey, nice to see you thing’. I thought that I might speak to you a bit more. We’re going to be in this together, I think, but I’m not running away this time. I’m not searching for any of your law enforcement friends, so the chances of us ever actually meeting face to face is nil. And thus, I thought I’d give you a call. You can run the trace, but the analysts aren’t going to track anything. Do the cops in Texas have that kind of sophistication anyway? I doubt it, but I’ll wait if you need to plug your cellphone up to anything.”

All Art said was hello, and he had been answered with an almost stream of conscious one-way conversation.

“Who is this?” He asked, his cellphone still against his ear.

“My body is Arthur Morgant’s, the same one the cops you’re with probably fingerprinted from Moore’s house. My mind is who I’ve always been though, Matthew Brand.”

Art tried to swallow although his mouth had suddenly filled with cotton balls.

“How did you get my number?” Art asked.

“I looked it up online. I’ve worked on projects a lot harder than the ability to look up strangers’ phone numbers, Art.”

Art stood up and rushed across the room to Jake’s desk. He tapped the younger man on the shoulder and started pointing at his phone.

It’s him
, he mouthed.

“Art, take your time. I’m in no rush. Get your people involved; I’ll be here.”

Fuck it then,
Art thought. “It’s him. Brand, he’s on my phone. Can you guys track this?”

Jake bolted up from his chair. “Umm...no, not under this short notice.” He looked around for a second and then grabbed a notepad and pen. “Put it on speakerphone.” He sat back down and started typing into his computer, hammering out words, suddenly blind to everything else around him. “I’m going to try to get someone in here to trace it, and I’m going to contact your cellphone provider. Who do you have?”

Art held the phone a few inches from his ear. “Verizon,” he said, not understanding at all what the kid was doing.

“Hey, somebody get over here!” Jake shouted into the air, his fingers nearly breaking the sound barrier as he hammered on the keyboard. “You two,” he said at the cops walking over. “Take down every bit of the conversation that is about to happen. Every bit. Pens and paper right there,” he said, nodding to his desk.

“Sounds like everything is good on your end, Art. Ready to talk?”

Art looked around the police station. Twenty or thirty people in here and only three of them over at this desk ready to listen to what might be the most important professional conversation any of them ever heard. Or maybe it was bullshit. Just because someone said they were Matthew Brand didn’t make it so. For Art, he wasn’t comfortable with this. He wasn’t a negotiator. He wasn’t from Texas. He wasn’t a field operator anymore. Hadn’t been for fifteen years. He
managed
field operations. He developed strategy. He didn’t talk to psychos on phones and try to decipher what they meant. And here was this twenty-something computer geek, apparently, taking charge as if he’d been waiting for the call. Jake still hadn’t looked up from the screen as he frantically tried to get someone here who could install tracking software. The other two cops were looking at him now, waiting on him to do something, and he felt like he didn’t exactly know what to do. Talk to this guy? Talk to the man with the deep voice who claimed to have the mental state of the smartest man to ever live?

“How do I know you are who you say you are?” Art asked. He turned the speaker on and laid his phone on the desk.

“Well. That’s a good question. I guess I hadn’t really figured you might think someone else took Moore, but it makes sense. Did you ever check out the crime scene notes or photos from Dillan’s disappearance?”

Art had. He’d looked at them for hours, had considered even flying to California to look at the house himself. “Yeah,” Art answered.

“His tongue was in the sink. The kitchen sink. No papers spoke about that. No Fox News’ report mentioned it. I cut it out for obvious reasons.”

Art remembered the piece of meat sitting on the white basin, surrounded by blood and looking like some kind of small, dead, sea animal. The cops managed to keep that piece of the whole crime quiet, but... “Something else. That wasn’t the only thing not allowed out to the public.”

“I can’t tell if you really don’t believe me or actually think you might be able to get a trace on my location if you keep me talking long enough. Either is fine. You got a piece of my shoe print in the house. It was from the woman’s blood, when I dragged her in from the balcony where she had been tanning. Her nose was bleeding and I stepped in it, the right edge of my right foot. It wouldn’t be enough to identify my size, but you could definitely see the tracks. I remember looking at it but decided against wiping anything down because I knew no one would be seeing me for a while.”

Art saw the photo in his mind. They had tried to determine the type of shoe, but it was a dead end.

“At the very least, you have to know I’m the one that took Jeffrey Dillan. You can believe I’m Matthew Brand or someone else if you want, and you can question whether or not I took Moore, but you must believe that I took Dillan.”

Art looked at the two men scribbling on their pads of paper. Neither of them looked up or took a second to pause. Jake was staring at the phone, listening. Art noticed other people had gathered around. Everyone in the room was slowly migrating over to watch Art Brayden talk with the supposed perpetrator, and Art had no clue what to say. No idea what this conversation was about. No idea what to do at all. A man with thirty years of law enforcement experience and somehow he lost it all in the five minutes he’d been on the phone.

“Where’s Moore?” He asked.

“She’s with me. Or, rather, I know where she is. You needn’t worry about her. You won’t be getting her back, and if you did, her days of taking care of her daughter, or her daughter needing to be taken care of for that matter, are over. She’s in God’s hands now. Do you believe in God, Art?”

“I was baptized Catholic.”

“When was the last time you took communion?”

“At mass this past Sunday.”

“A true believer then!” Matthew shouted. “I think God is going to sit this one out, though, Art. To stop me, it would take a real intervention, I can tell you that.”

“Stop you from doing what?”

“You were there when I died, weren’t you? You and Moore?”

“Yes.”

“You heard my son speak then, didn’t you? You heard him ask me what was going on?”

Art closed his eyes. He didn’t like thinking about that part. They had saved a young girl and ended a madman’s killing spree. And at the same time, they had killed what sounded like a young man, someone who had no idea where he was or what was going on. They had killed him by destroying the glass house he was born into.