ARC: Seeds of Calamity

PROLOGUE - IV - Chasing ghosts

The phone inside the inner pocket of Becca’s coat rang. It was loud, annoying, one of those old, cheap models, typically used as burners. Donnovan had given the device to the girl right before she left.

“I’m gonna contact you only once through this, but when I do, you’ll have the name and the address of the son of a bitch. You smash it and throw it away as soon as I hang up, you understand?” he said, the girl nodding in agreement.

And there it was. Four days after the meeting with her uncle, and he already had the answer.

Gladly the man hadn’t tried to contact her in these four days, not even once. Which was a bit odd, but fortunate.

She heard about blackmailing from her uncle – he dealt in basically any illegal activity one could think of – and according to him, blackmailers usually clung to their victims, always trying to get more and more from them. Yet that didn’t appear to be the case with mister ‘If you don’t behave, I’ll expose you to the whole world’.

Even though the ringing of the phone was rather annoying, she felt a strange kind of peace while listening to it. Possibly because it meant that she would finally be able to have a name attached to the face she had to deal with.

Her heart pounded in her chest as the thought appeared in her head, because it also meant that she wouldn’t have much time to figure out how to deal with him.

Becca was having weird dreams, ever since her memories returned.

It was not as if she knew her real name yet, or be a hundred percent sure of who she was or what she did in the past. But she remembered things about herself, and she knew that her memories were dangerous, somehow. Perhaps that was the reason why she had been having these dreams. It probably was her own mind trying to make her remember piece by piece, without harming her psyche.

She recalled one of these dreams, as she answered the phone.

“Uncle?”

She lived in a vast palace with her family, but the members were always scattered into groups, hardly ever coming in contact with the others.

She remembered a fatherly figure, but it didn’t feel like her real dad, even though he had the authority of one.

You must be good, and you shall not harm the living.

“The name is Jeremy Rosenbaum. He lives in 3^rd street, number 805, downtown.” and the call went off.

Becca recalled seeing two of her brothers – both of them identical to one another, blond hair, slender muscular complexion, white skin and red, fiery eyes, though their clothing was blurred – fighting with a group of her sisters. Which was weird, since they outnumbered the duo by ten to one, and her brothers were actually winning.

She was about to flip the phone closed, but remembered Don’s advice, breaking it in half, and then throwing it in a trash can right next to her.

For some reason, there was nothing wrong about her sisters group fighting her brothers, but right after one of the girls was knocked hard to the ground, Becca was touched in the shoulder by someone.

Time to go back to your quarters, miss...

And her recollections ceased right there, before she could even remember what name she was about to be called for.

Although she remembered bits, those little pieces didn’t make much sense. It still wasn’t enough for her to feel whole once again.

However, she now at least had the name of the fucker who took away her peace.

It was enough for her to buy some ice cream at the convenience store, and go home, in order to enjoy the morning and feed her thoughts on what to do next.

***

“Oh my God, her face was peeled off?” Bertrand heard a cop exclaiming. It looked as if the dude was a rookie, seen that he went straight to the end of the alley to puke, his face green as a sick frog.

Fuck! The detective thought to himself. The rookie only saw the least horrific part of the scene.

Her innards were spilt all around, yet her body didn’t seem like blown up. The woman’s belly was torn open, and the only thing left inside was her heart. Her face completely peeled off. Surgically removed.

Not even the lips were left alone.

“It looks like our guy actually took her face and went home with it. As a souvenir.” Deputy chief Gonzales spoke, appearing by Bertrand’s side from out of nowhere. “Also, what the fuck are you doing here?”

He was about to ask her why she supposed it was a guy, not a girl. But he remembered the last time they ended up in a discussion like that.

Bertrand ended up with broken arguments, wounded pride, and a mark of a palm with five fingers around it on his face.

Still, he couldn’t understand why she got so mad at him, because wasn’t trying to cover for bad male behaviour. Much to the contrary, he actually helped the precinct to arrest a very large amount of bad guys.

All he wanted to know, was why any and every evil deed would be firstly put over a guy’s shoulder, being that there were pretty evil women out there too. But Bertrand chose to stay quiet and analyse the scene a bit more.

He scratched his back, feeling a little lump that wasn’t there before he put his shirt.

“My job, chief. I’m doing my job...” he replied, without any opening for debate. “The killer doesn’t live very far, or he comes downtown often.” was Bertrand’s statement. Gonzales stared at him incredulously.

“And how do you know that, smartass?” the deputy chief asked, reproachfully. “Is it one of those ‘I see dead people’ stunts you always play on us?”

The detective was already expecting that kind of response. He knew that she never believed him for a second on what he told the captain about the cases, and she very much possibly thought that he was the actual culprit behind most of the crimes solved by himself.

But this time he was caught off guard, at a loss of words as for what to answer her.

The PI felt weird while looking at that particular scene.

He didn’t feel only death, but also evil. True, inhuman, utter wickedness floated in the air around them. Yet no one but him seemed to be capable of noticing it.

Bertrand’s stomach revolved around as he felt the weight of two lives on his shoulders, and twitched his fingers, remembering how his mom died in the hospital bed, and how his dad beat him to a pulp after hearing from his own son, that they could have saved the woman he loved.

And there was another woman, another mother that wouldn’t get to go home to her family. There was a very low possibility, but it wasn’t impossible at all, that there would be another little Bert out there, carrying the weight of guilt inside him.

Work first. The investigator thought, moving towards the end of the alley, to talk to the rookie.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Whoever... Did... It...” the cop grumbled, between one vomiting and another. “Was truly... Evil...” and vomited again. He wasn’t looking as if he would be able to speak much more than that any sooner. Yet those words caught Bertrand’s attention, for some reason.

But it wasn’t possible.

There can’t be another one like me, so close, right?

“Alright, if you guys don’t mind, I need you to vacate the premises. I gotta take a few pictures before the cleaning crew come and fuck it all up, just because the forensics already did their job.” Bertrand told the cops around him.

Gonzales glared at him once again, grudgingly. She couldn’t accept that despite him being so suspect, she still had to obey him, just because her captain trusted him.

It just didn’t make sense.

Yet, she had to, so she ordered her boys to vacate the premises, and not long after, he was alone with the dead body. Not even the rookie was there.

Weird, I didn’t see him leaving. Bertrand thought, looking randomly at the blood in one of the walls.

And as if to turn his thoughts from something, he spotted a mark drawn on the wall, in an abnormally clean space, withing the absurdly large blood smudge.

It was something that resembled a pentagram, but upside down, with more details, and with what looked like a glyph in an ancient language.

It was already night when the PI was done taking the pictures, and was ready to take his leave, but before he could, his surroundings started crumbling down.

Literally.