Chapter 12
After the interview, Nathan left the precinct with a migraine building like a thunderhead above the prairie, mushrooming into a downpour. But he didn’t want to be alone in Helene’s apartment, despite his desire for darkness. He hoped the cold air would shock the tightening grip around the base of his skull and get his blood circulating normally, so he deliberately left his coat unbuttoned as he walked across downtown from the precinct, his hat and scarf in his backpack, and headed to Café Remor.
Nathan couldn’t help feeling that Inspector Villeneuve was more concerned with a clean closure for his last major case than the possible complications of the situation. Certainly, the retiring officer had an entire career behind him of investigating murders and crimes. No doubt he had ample experience with criminal psychology and the fickle nature of memory. The nanny strangling with a weak child in a fit of frustration and rage was definitely a simpler explanation than introducing another person into the narrative. But Nathan felt intuitively that Julie was telling the truth.
He took a table against the back wall of the cafe, in a nook made by the telephone booth and the tiny, single-occupant-on-tiptoes bathroom. He ordered an Americano, pulled out his phone, logged into the WiFi, and opened his new email account. He was surprised to see that the new email he’d created over the weekend had new messages.
He tapped the first message open and copied the French text into a translating app. Someone had found a stuffed animal near the subway entrance, perhaps this was what the sign maker had lost? Nathan opened the next message. This one sounded like it was written by a bored teenager. “Isn’t it a good thing the monster is lost?” the translation said. “Count yourself lucky. The fewer monsters the better.” The next email was spam marketed to lonely people with insufficient sexual confidence. Perhaps this whole approach was a waste of time.
He opened the last email and again copied the French text into the translating app. There was no greeting or salutation at the head. One short paragraph, signed simply, ‘Bruno’.
I know what you’re looking for. I work the night shift as a security guard and was on my way to work. I was standing on the 15-tram. When the tram doors opened I was looking out toward Plainpalais. I saw a large figure with a terrible face and horns, some sort of beast. He was struggling with something, but I couldn’t see what. The doors closed and I saw nothing else. The reflection from the light inside the tram is too bright when it is dark out. Today I see the article on the front of the Genève paper. I must have seen that little boy being killed. I will remember that image until I am ninety-nine years old.
Nathan stared at the translation window, dumbfounded. What sort of horns? What sort of beast? Brothers Grimm or Nightmare before Christmas?
Spurred to action, he tapped a button and responded immediately within the translator, copying the French text into an email reply. He asked if Bruno spoke English, and if he could show Nathan exactly where he’d seen the figure. Even if this person couldn’t give much detail about what he had seen, if he could confirm the timing and where the creature had been standing, it would be evidence that Ms. Jiang’s story was credible.
To his surprise, the man responded within a few minutes. ‘Very bad English. But we meet tonight.” Nathan agreed to 8:15pm, offering to buy Bruno a coffee, but the response was a short negative. “No. I show you where I saw the thing, then I go to work.”
* * * *
Nathan tucked his chin down to his chest, closing his neck off from the icy wind as he glanced around for Bruno. He wore a heavy coat, a black knit fishermans cap and winter boots—his nondescript uniform for evenings in Geneva. It was only just after 8, but in mid-January, this was already the deep of night. People didn’t linger. Collars were pulled up against the wind, and scarves covered mouths and neck as whoever was unlucky enough to be out at this cold hour rushed home. Nathan made a mental note to buy a heavier scarf.
He scanned Plainpalais. It wasn’t much of a park – nothing like the other lovely green areas in downtown Geneva. This was just a flat, open, mostly gravel covered space off the side of downtown, like the stage of a washed-up community theater where shows were rarely put on.
From some distance to the left, Nathan saw a figure his height shuffling toward him. His hands, too, were jammed into his pockets, head down.
Was this Bruno?
But before he was close enough for Nathan to see the color of his coat in the dark, another figure moved up to the first. They seemed to say a few words to each other, too far off to be overheard, then the second figure pulled something from his pocket and handed it to the first. The first slipped it into his pocket, and palmed something to the second, who pocketed it without a glance. Half an instant later, the figures had separated and were headed in opposite directions.
Fantastic park, Nathan thought. Petty drug dealers, and him. Who else would have such an important rendezvous in the darkness of mid winter? Bruno had agreed to meet Nathan on his way home from work, after his shift, so Nathan had suggested the bench closest to where the police cordon had been set up, thinking the location might help refresh the witness’ memory. Further description of himself seemed unnecessary. This was no blind date in a restaurant among many possible strangers. He was the only person foolish enough to linger outdoors this late.
Nathan clicked his heels together, Dorothy style, to warm his feet. Or take him home. Ever since the episode in the Park of the Reformers he’d become much more aware of the risk of being out in public. If something triggered another break down, he would be at the mercy of his surroundings. A dark, empty park, in the cold of winter seemed now like a foolish place to expose oneself. Let alone meet a stranger. The blackness seemed to be staying at bay, but the fear of having an episode while interpreting for inspector Villeneuve, or while in the police department, was slowly becoming as terrible a fear as the thought of dying itself.
A shiver ran down his back. He realized it was nearly the same time William must have died, at nearly the exact same location only a few nights before. If time could be overlaid upon itself, he would be sitting here, on this bench, watching it happen. Nathan realized his leg had started to twitch in a nervous tremble. He willed it to stop, but couldn’t still it. He suddenly wished he’d insisted on meeting at a different time. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but it was a lot easier to say so in the clarity of day than in the opacity of night. The hairs on the back of his neck were raptly at attention and he unconsciously stood from the bench and began walking away, his physiology ditching the appointment before his mind could even grant it permission.
A scuffle of gravel sounded abruptly behind him. Nathan snapped his head around to see what had splintered the silence. If he’d been less afraid, he might have yelled for help. But he was incapable of any auditory exclamation at all.
Standing behind the bench, not two feet from where he’d been sitting, towered the most freakish beast Nathan had ever seen. It seemed over seven feet tall, cloaked in a dark clothing made for a creature double his weight and half his height. Most horrifying of all was the creature’s face. Yellow eyes glinted above long, yellow, needle-like teeth that couldn’t be contained inside a lipless mouth, hanging open in a silent scream. Horns twisted outward from the beast’s forehead and where the nose should have been, only two holes where cartilage had melted away leaving a jagged gap in the creature’s face.
The creature shrieked an inhuman, piercing cry, as if angered at Nathan’s surprise move away from the bench. The noise jolted Nathan out of his bedeviled trance. Then, he did something he didn’t expect and couldn’t explain–something he wouldn’t have done consciously.
He took a step forward.
He faced the daemon.
The monster hadn’t expected to be confronted. Surprised by the motion, he wavered backwards, but then, in the millenia-old trick of asserting dominance and dissuading an aggressor, he raised his arms up from his sides, like every child who had ever dawned a white sheet.
Nathan saw something in the beast’s right hand. A flash of light from a streetlamp reflected off the metal. It was a narrow blade. The American didn’t wait. A fight between two unequally sized forces was dangerous enough. A one-sided knife fight would have a clear victor. Any contact would be scarring and possibly lethal.
Nathan took one step backward. The creature hissed. Then Nathan’s feet found their footing and he bolted out of the park and across the road, not even checking for traffic.
* * * *
Before he knew how he had gotten there, he was leaning against the back of Helene’s door, bolt ratcheted closed, panting. Now that he was safe, he was terrified. He had no idea whether the creature had chased him. He hadn’t had the guts to look behind him. He had heard one more shriek as he’d started running, which made his blood coagulate solid in his veins, and served as motivation enough to not look back until he was fiddling with the keys of the apartment door.
He let his knees buckle beneath him and slid to the floor. He pulled out his phone, thumbed in the passcode and opened the telephone app.
“I saw him,” he whispered as soon as the call went through.
“Saw who?”
“The monster. I saw the monster,” He whispered again, only now realizing how ridiculous he must sound.
“What monster?” The man asked, as if Geneva were awash with more than one unnamed beast terrorizing its citizens.
Nathan tried to speak in a normal voice, but it wasn’t easy. “The monster. Ms. Jiang’s monster. It tried to attack me.”
“Are you safe?”
“I’m locked in my apartment.”
“I hope it didn’t follow you home. I believe beasts like that must be quite persistent.”
Nathan hadn’t thought of that. The inspector was joking, but that was exactly the last bit of information he would want the monster to know. He didn’t answer.
“Come to my office tomorrow. I’ll be there by 10. If you feel you’re in danger, hang up and call 117 for the normal emergency hotline.”
The line went dead.
Nathan couldn’t tell if the inspector was taking him seriously. He strained to hear whether anyone or anything had come into the building while he’d been on the phone. The silence was thick and expanding so loudly in his ears that he wondered whether he’d be able to hear anything at all. He scuffed his boot on the ground, just to remember what sound was like.
No, he wouldn’t call 117. He’d told the inspector he’d seen something. He would describe it in the morning. Logically, he was out of danger, but he longed to call the police number and be issued a guard for outside his door. He knew it wouldn’t work that way. At best, someone might come and take a statement. But the inspector would probably do the same thing tomorrow.
Nathan forced himself up off the ground. In the safety of the dark, he went to Helene’s front window and looked down, not at the front door, but along the side street. He didn’t see anything unordinary. He closed her curtains as completely as he could, then turned on every light in the apartment.
He sat down at the table and laid his palms on top of his computer.
How had he been so foolish and walked right into it? Of course there were no daemon-faced monsters loose on the streets of Geneva. Nathan had seen enough evil in the world that he entertained the idea of dark forces that worked against good in the universe. But even if there was a darkness, he thought of it more like a virus than a humanoid monster. Evil monsters don’t parade about downtown Geneva. And viruses don’t strangle little boys. People killed people. This had been a person, a member of the population. A person in a mask and costume. And Nathan had been drawn out by him. When he’d put up those posters, he’d been naive enough to think that only the well-intentioned citizens of Geneva would see them. But of course, William’s killer might see them as well.
Nathan opened his computer and pulled up the email from Bruno. He clicked to reveal the email header and copied the IP address, then opened a new browser window. Nathan wasn’t a big computer wiz, but he knew enough of the basics. Every device had a unique IP address, a digital fingerprint. Depending on ‘Bruno’s’ incompetence, he might be able to determine where the email was sent from. It was a ProtonMail account, just as he had used for his posters, which was an email service famous for its security and encryption, but unlike some servers, it didn’t hide the IP information. Nathan did a Google search for IP reverse-tracking. He pasted in the IP address and pressed enter.
“Swiss cell phone” the search result turned up, “Registration Geneva.”
Not precise enough.
He pinched his eyebrows together with his thumb and forefinger, then returned to his email and opened a new message. Before going any further, he clicked in the corner of his computer screen and turned on his VPN. Living in Beijing had motivated him to get a subscription to one of the best VPNs on the market. You couldn’t live in China and access any of the Western news or social media platforms without one, and you can’t be a blogger or journalist without those necessary connections to the Western world. A VPN was necessary to get beyond the Chinese firewall, which frequently blocked even Google and Wikipedia. But a VPN was also general good practice for anonymizing your own information online.
With the VPN on, he returned to the email message. He typed in the name of a friend from university, one who now worked in cybersecurity. “What can you tell me about this IP address?” he typed into the empty email form. “A more specific location would be really helpful.”
The American made a quick hope-all--is-well greeting and pressed send. As he closed his computer, he realized that for the last hour or so, he’d been back to his focused self. He hadn’t even noticed the darkness. He looked down at his lap, one leg pulled up under him, the other stretched out peacefully under the table.
When Nathan eventually went to bed that night, he didn’t see replays of Beijing. He saw the creature from the park. The more his mind reviewed the event, the less connected it became with reality. The episode spun off into myriad branches of what could have happened. In one scenario, Nathan stood and walked away, long before the beast appeared, leaving him naive to its existence. In another, the beast didn’t have a knife, and Nathan fought him, suddenly a master of Krav Maga. In another, he reacted too late, clinging to the creature’s stranglehold on his neck until he passed out.
As the scenarios reached more and more frenzied heights, the dreams started converging on one final end. From a birdseye view, he saw his body sprawled out on the gravel, dramatic as a comic book scene, arms and legs in all directions, a black tar pooled around his core where blood should have been. In his dreams, the sun rose over the city bringing out the mothers hurrying by with small children on their way to creche and school, business men on their phones, and old men walking their dogs – and not a soul noticed his waxy form or the glossy pool of black on the ground.
Then, as the gray light of the earliest morning hour started to creep into Helene’s bedroom, Nathan woke, and in the liminal space between waking and sleep, a calm seeped in. The pool of black tar that glued his body to the gravel of Plainpalais had evaporated, and in his mind he saw once more the scene from the night before. He saw himself as if as a bystander, facing the monster behind the park bench. A whisper of the scream echoed in his ears. With great clarity, he saw the evening’s events as they had actually transpired.
He had taken a step forward.
He had voluntarily engaged with the form that scared him more than anything he’d ever seen.
He had stepped forward before any thought of running away.
Finally, Nathan entered a deep and restful sleep.
Chapter 13
“You saw a monster.” The inspector repeated after Nathan had recounted his story.
“Not a monster. The monster. The one Ms. Jiang saw.”
“The one she says she saw.”
“The one she saw, which came to attack me.”
“Or maybe—” The inspector pursed his lips, “—Somebody sees your poster, and plays a prank on you, sees the chance for a good scare.”
Nathan was genuinely surprised. He had thought the inspector would be pleased to have new evidence.
“It proves Ms. Jiang was telling the truth,” he insisted.
“All it proves is that you receive an email from someone claiming to have witnessed the boy being strangled by a third party. But this someone never shows up to the rendezvous—”
“Because he’s the person dressed as the monster.”
“Ah, oui. He’s the monster.”
“Yes! He set me up. He witnessed the monster because he did it!”
“Oui, oui—” The inspector picked up a tiny coffee cup and sipped his espresso, the very picture of apathy.
“I have the email message,” Nathan spluttered. He was loath to admit that the inspector was frustrating him, but it was too much. He took a piece of paper out of his bag, which contained a printout of the email from ‘Bruno’ in both the original French and the googled English translation.
“It’s not a native speaker,” the inspector said immediately, glancing down at the paper.
“I used an online translator. I don’t speak French, obviously.”
“No, I mean the original. It’s full of grammatical mistakes.”
Nathan blinked. He realized what a disadvantage he had here. In Beijing, he’d had an edge he took for granted, being able to speak the language so well. There he had understood cultural subtext in addition to explicitly stated words. Now the tables had turned, and he was reminded of his limitations to even put together key pieces of information. Not recognizing the writer as a non-native speaker seemed a fairly important clue.
“And Bruno—” the inspector continued, “—that’s a common Portuguese name. There are many Portuguese working in Geneva, thanks to the travel and work treaties with the European Union. Many more jobs in Switzerland than Portugal—”
“So the person that sent the email wasn’t French. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t be dressing up and terrorizing people in the park.”
“No. It doesn’t. But it doesn’t mean he didn’t see the article in the paper and is making a joke. Figured he could have some small fun.”
Nathan clenched his jaw, “I saw him. He was going to attack me. He had a knife.”
“That park has drug dealers. It isn’t Geneva’s nicest corner. Not dangerous, but not Buckingham Palace gardens. Perhaps you sat someplace you weren’t supposed to. Maybe someone wanted you out of their territory. Who is to know. Maybe some addict thought you might be worth some cash. Perhaps you escaped a mugging.”
“It wasn’t a mugging—“
“You went to a park, late at night, where a little boy was killed, and your imagination got away from you. You saw what you expected to see. That’s how the human mind works. We’re not as robust as we think. Did anyone else see what you think you saw?”
Nathan remembered the drug exchange he’d witnessed. If they saw, they probably weren’t the sort of reputable witnesses that would support his case. But he was doubtful they had still been around. He shrugged, dejectedly. “How do you know he’s not just a french man with bad grammar?” Nathan asked, hoping the inspector would at least share his mother-language expertise.
“He is not Swiss,” the inspector corrected.
“I know.”
“Typical Portuguese name. And the French. He learned it in France. Or at school. Not in Switzerland.”
“Why?”
Inspector Villeneuve read a line from the email, “‘I’ll remember what I saw until I’m ninety-nine years old.’” Then he repeated the text in French. “This is not how we Swiss would say this.”
Nathan wondered what was wrong with the sentence. The writer wasn’t necessarily a poet, but it seemed clear enough to him.
“How would ‘you Swiss’ say it?”
“Ninety-nine. The French means ‘four times twenty and ten plus nine,’ quatre-vingt-dix-neuf. The Swiss say ‘ninety-nine,’ nanont-neuf. Efficient. Logical. Like people that make their living with banking and watches, not poetry and procreation.”
The rubric of numbers in different languages seemed to often play a key role in his adventures. Back in Beijing, his tendency to mix up the numbers ‘nine’ and ‘seven’ in Chinese had caused him to stumble onto the wrong hospital floor and into the biggest news story of his career. Now, numerics were giving him insights into a potential killer.
“So he’s a Portuguese guy who learned French elsewhere. Maybe he hasn’t been working in Geneva very long.”
“Possible. Maybe he is one of the many workers who pendel between Portugal and Switzerland for work. On sait pas.” The inspector shrugged and handed the paper back to Nathan.
“He’s a security guard working the night shift.”
“So he says.”
If this person had indeed baited Nathan to attack him, he probably had not told the truth about his work. If the writer of the email and the monster were one and the same—and the coincidence seemed too uncanny to assume they weren’t—then the secondary markers, like the way he wrote numbers, were more telling than the information he volunteered.
Nathan had more work to do.
“Why don’t you go home,” the inspector said, straightening his coat. “Take a nap. You’ve had a long night. Take some sleep. I’m sure your mind will work better in the afternoon.” The inspector gestured dismissively at the paper in Nathan’s hand, “I have a meeting.” Nathan had not moved, distracted by a thought. “And a lot of paperwork to file. We charged Ms. Jiang last night.”
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Personal Update:
The year’s wrapping up, obviously, and it’s now a time when we look back and think about what we’ve gone through, what we’ve done, the relationships we’ve fostered, and the good memories—
My sister asked me yesterday what my greatest disappointment of 2023 was. She’s a cheery one, that sister of mine.
I thought about it for a moment. Then thought some more.
“I didn’t write enough. I wish I’d written more.”
She gave me that funny look, like I just said I’d rather have a bowl of chips and salsa than ice cream. “Really? —I thought you’d say «text redacted for security reasons»”
I thought about it for a moment.
“I mean. That certainly wasn’t a high moment. But—you can’t help those situations sometimes. Life gets you, things don’t work out the way you’d have chosen. You have to make peace with that. But still — I should have written more.”
So there it is. I’m embarrassed to admit (and I wont!) how long I’ve been meaning to get around to editing this particular story and getting it published, so I’m really glad we’re working through this project together. And the other book I’m writing in parallel — my goal for ‘24 is definitely to write more. I’ve stacks of stories to get through, and I’ve got to find a faster way to make them real.
This year was a lot on many levels, and certainly I’ve had so much to be grateful for, all year long. But it was still a lot. And despite that, I wish I’d written more.
So here’s to more story in ‘24.
What about you? I think it’s quite telling to think about what your biggest disappointment was — it highlights many levels of what your values are and your expectations for yourself. And is useful in planning the next year—
Happy second week of Advent! May these weeks be filled with people who are meaningful to you.