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crossoverficTitle: The Diabolical Dr. Wald
Author: La Onza
Fandoms: Twin Peaks, Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence, including some graphic descriptions of dead bodies.
Pairing: gen, perhaps a smidgen of Cooper/Albert slashy vibes if you like.
Characters: Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenfield, the Dark Wizard Grindelwald
Summary: In 1985, an FBI agent goes to Argentina to find a colleague, and encounters murder and black magic.
Buenos Aires, 1985
“You,” the young woman said, “are a G-man.”
“If you’re trying to impress me with your perspicacity,” he told her, smiling, “about a million people beat you to it.” He knew he looked every inch of what he was, took a benign pride in it. “You,” he said in turn, “are a journalist.” His smile broadened when she blinked in surprise, and he offered his hand. “Special Agent Dale Cooper.”
”Claire Murray.” She gave his extended hand a squeeze. “A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” They were in an airport lounge in Buenos Aires, waiting for an already-much-delayed connecting flight to Cordoba.
“I’m not really here in an official capacity,” he said.
She eyed him skeptically, then relented with a laugh.
“You probably get that a lot, don’t you?” she asked. “Reporters do too; you ask an innocent question and people think you’re digging for an exposé. As though it were impossible for people in our professions to have any interests outside of our work.”
“When, in fact, it’s only highly improbable,” Cooper agreed.
“Touché,” she said. “I am in fact here chasing a story.”
“On the Disappeared?” This seemed a reasonable guess; following the collapse of Argentina’s military dictatorship, the fate of the many abducted, imprisoned, and frequently executed real-or-suspected dissidents had become a much-publicized issue.
She winced. “That’s what I came down here for,” she said. “Me and everyone else, it seems. All picking at the bones of the Disappeared like a bunch of vultures.”
She caught his quick smile of private irony and misinterpreted it.
“It’s important, I know that,” she said. “I just…wonder how many times we can tell the same story of the banality of evil, you know.” She took a swig of her drink, something with Coke in it.
“I’ve got a lead on something else.” She gave him a cagey sidelong look. “Helmut Wald…ever heard of him?”
“I can’t say that I have,” Cooper said.
“No one outside of Argentina has. And there’s hardly any public information about him available here. But what I’ve heard from the gossip mill is, he operates some sort of asylum in Cordoba province, and rumor has it he’s working on an experimental cure for schizophrenia.”
“A cure,” Cooper said, impressed, “not a treatment.”
“It would be something, wouldn’t it?” Hope and uncertainty warred in her voice. “I figured it was worth a shot.”
“In my experience, chasing down rumors always leads to something,” he assured her. “Though usually not what I expected. However incredible rumors may sound, the truth behind them is often even more incredible.”
The airline didn’t get them to Cordoba until the small hours, but knowing Albert Rosenfield as he did, Cooper knew where to look first. The Cordoba morgue didn’t look as though it would constitute an ideal work environment under any circumstances, and the influx of human remains from recently exhumed mass graves was clearly more than it could accommodate. Partial skeletons laid out on sheets of canvas almost carpeted the floor. Along a countertop sat a row of skulls awaiting identification.
Albert stood at the far end of the room, leaning over a makeshift light table improvised from a florescent light he had apparently wrenched from the ceiling. As Cooper approached, he turned his curious gaze to the illuminated film: on the left, an ordinary dental X-ray, labeled “Espinoza, Chloe.” On the right, an obviously postmortem one – the mandible gone, facial bones cracked, some of the teeth missing.
“What are we looking at?” Cooper asked. He sensed rather than saw Albert look up and blink, his tightly focused attention flailing for a second, struggling to make the adjustment from a dead girl’s teeth to Cooper’s sudden, unexpected presence next to him. Then he rallied.
“Number three,” he said, tapping a molar on each X-ray. A similar streak of white showed the presence of a metal filling in each.
“Same filling,” Cooper said.
“Same filling, same root morphology, same girl. Seventeen-year-old Chloe Espinoza, disappeared while visiting a friend at the University.”
As he didn’t ask why Cooper was there, he must have guessed, but Cooper told him anyway.
“Gordon wants you to come back to work.”
Albert looked pained. ”I’m not finished here,” he predictably answered.
“Three months has turned into...”
“Cooper, look around you,” Albert snapped, his frustration suddenly boiling over. “They went in with back hoes. They shoveled bones into garbage bags.”
“Which is why they asked you to come train local investigators in proper excavation and identification methods,” Cooper reminded him evenly, “Not to unearth and identify every bone yourself.”
Albert crossed his arms and stared fixedly at Chloe’s X-rays.
“All of the serial killers that you and I have come across had between them less than a hundred victims,” he said in a low, bitter tone. “Here over ten thousand people were murdered by their own government.”
“I know,” Cooper said. He recognized the closest thing to a concession that he was going to get at present. “When did you last eat?” he asked. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“I have to call the Espinozas’ lawyer.”
“His office won’t be open for hours yet,” Cooper pointed out, smiling. When Albert was running on a round-the-clock schedule, he expected everyone else to do the same.
As it turned out, Cordoba didn’t run on Cooper’s schedule either, which is to say, Argentineans apparently didn’t believe in early breakfasts. They did however believe in very, very late dinners, so they found a bar-and-grill that served them sizzling plates of steak, kidneys, and sausage.
Albert, whose metabolism ran very efficiently on little more than nicotine and caffeine, took a few token bites and then sat nursing the disgusting lukewarm mixture of milk and coffee that he endearingly insisted was good for his ulcers.
Considering this, Cooper said, “You know, there’s something moving about the irrational beliefs of scientists.”
“It’s good to see you, Cooper,” Albert somewhat inconsequentially replied.
As they were leaving, they ran into Claire, apparently on her way in.
“What’s the word on the mysterious Dr. Wald?” Cooper asked her, and she threw up her hands. Albert moved to one side and ignored her as though she were a plate of mouthwatering grilled meats.
“No one wants to talk about this guy,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. You mention his name and they all get shifty-eyed. Even money doesn’t help, not that I have much to offer.”
“Are you going to try to interview him personally? Where’s his clinic located?”
“I’m still trying to find out,” she replied. “Whatever he’s up to, he’s sure not advertising it. Outside the city, there are lots of big private estates, and my guess is he’s operating out of one of those.”
Cooper found these revelations disquieting, to say the least. “When you mentioned it at the airport, it sounded like a straightforward alternative medicine story,” he said. “Now it’s starting to sound sinister.”
She got her cagey look. It occurred to him that she was awfully young.
“How sinister are we talking, Claire?” he asked.
“Well… You said yourself, the truth can be pretty incredible, right? Wald isn’t from here originally. He showed up about forty years ago…I mean, a guy with a German-sounding name, just turns up in South America after the war, and starts experimenting on people?”
It wasn’t hard to see where she was headed. “You think he might be a Nazi? A war criminal?”
“And it’s a known fact that Josef Mengele came to Argentina around that time.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Albert broke in, irritated out of his show of indifference. “Mengele died years ago, in Brazil.”
“So it was claimed,” she said, “But Mengele was a personal friend of the dictator of Paraguay, among other influential types. You really don’t think he could have faked his death if he wanted to? It put the Nazi hunters off his trail.”
“No, it didn’t,” Albert said. “The ‘Nazi hunters’ went to Brazil and confirmed it for themselves.”
“He certainly doesn’t sound like a man with nothing to hide,” Cooper said, trying to get back to the point.
“I didn’t say he had nothing to hide,” Albert said less combatively. “If Dr. Whosit is experimenting on human subjects, he probably has plenty to hide. I’m not even saying he couldn’t be a Nazi. There were others besides Mengele who thought a change of scenery sounded good when the tribunals started.”
“So you admit, it could be a great story,” Claire challenged him.
“It could be, I just don’t have high hopes for you writing it,” he shot back. “Only a tabloid hack would try to spice it up by invoking the dread name Mengele.”
“Well,” she said wryly. “I haven’t been called a hack for a while.”
“So you’ve been called one before,” Albert said.
Cooper held the door open for her. “Good luck,” he told her, “And be careful.”
“Let us know if you find Hitler’s brain in a jar,” Albert added.
Back at the hotel, a phone message awaited Albert. He scanned it and cursed. “From the police liaison,” he said. “He tried to reach me yesterday evening, but the phone at the morgue keeps going out.”
He commandeered the phone at the front desk for a few minutes, and hung up looking purposeful and energized.
“He wanted to pass on a report from Mina Dolores, a town about thirty-six kilometers west of here. Yesterday some workers blasting in a quarry opened up a cave that had a half-dozen human skeletons inside.”
“In a cave?”
“It must have another entrance somewhere. Looks like some death squad decided to use it as a ready-made grave. Guzman managed to impress upon the local police the importance of our seeing the remains in situ, so they put guards outside the scene last night. The chief’ll meet us at the quarry in an hour.”
“Albert…”
“You came all this way,” Albert said firmly. “You might as well see what it’s all about.”
“All right,” Cooper agreed. “Let’s go.”
The narrow road to Mina Dolores wound a scenic route through the sierras west of the city. The town first appeared as clusters of old, somewhat shabby houses along the bank of a river, then suddenly assumed the form of neat squares of Old World-style buildings and attractive greenery. By following the river road north beyond town and then turning into a rocky canyon, they found the quarry nestled between gently sloping green hills of largely untouched natural beauty.
Cooper pulled up to a chain-link fence alongside a number of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Albert rummaged in the back for a minute, then handed Cooper a large battery lantern and hefted a camera case himself. Thus equipped they walked to the gate, where a dispute of some kind was underway. The uniform on one of the men marked him as the police chief; the other was dressed in dirt-streaked denims and a wide straw hat. Seeing them approach, the big, square-built policeman curtly dismissed the other, and came forward to meet them with an unfriendly demeanor that seemed only partly a residue of his argument with the cowboy.
“Ruben Calvino,” he said, “Chief of the Police.” He held out his hand midway between them, and Cooper stepped forward to take it and complete the introductions. He knew that this was one of the reasons why Albert wanted him along – to “handle” the Chief, to deal with his ego, his sense of authority, his concerns about public relations, everything he said or did that did not contribute to getting the job done. “Handling” people was Albert’s term for it, and he considered it one of Cooper’s functions in his life.
“What’s the trouble here?” he asked Calvino, as the other man jumped into his truck and drove away with a screech of tires.
“It’s nothing,” Calvino said sourly. “Some of his livestock wandered away in the night. Stolen, he thinks. I told him I would look into it when I had time.”
They carefully picked their way down into the quarry. The sun was up, and the sparkle of newly exposed granite showed where the recent blasting had occurred. Ahead and to their right was the uninviting black gash of the cave, opening horizontally into the hillside.
There was no sign of anyone guarding it, a fact that did not escape Calvino. “I left two men here last night,” he growled, in a tone that did not bode well for the shirkers.
“Maybe they went inside,” Cooper suggested. “Does it get cold at night?”
Calvino didn’t answer. They were drawing near the cave entrance, and a powerful putrid odor was demanding their attention.
“I thought you said skeletons,” Albert said, for the smell was the ripe, gaseous stench of the not-long dead.
“Yes, skeletons,” Calvino muttered. His forehead was shiny with sweat and he eyed the dark crevice with dread. Cooper clicked on his lantern and stepped inside, Albert close behind, the Chief following reluctantly.
The cave was larger than Cooper had expected, with a high ceiling and walls that curved away from the reach of the lamp. As they moved deeper into the darkness, they saw the skeletons almost immediately, a pathetic assembly of exposed bones against the right wall. There was no way that those dusty fragments could be producing the pervasive smell of decay.
From further back in the cave came the buzzing of flies.
“Perhaps an animal died in here,” Calvino said uneasily. Cooper arced the light away from the skeletons toward the sound of the insects.
Shoes, extending from khaki pantlegs. Cooper advanced a few feet further and the light revealed the two corpses in their entirety, slumped against the opposite wall, tongues protruding from their bloated faces. A few small, dark stains on their shirts looked like blood. There were no other signs of violence.
“Your men?” Cooper looked to the Chief for confirmation.
Calvino was suppressing gagging noises. “You wanted to see, now you have seen,” was all he could say, his horror at the scene expressing itself as anger. He turned his back and tromped from the cave, his breath labored.
Cooper turned back to the crime scene. His ears picked up a sound that the buzzing of the flies had at first obscured.
“Do you hear that? A rumble, like a generator.”
“Just the flies,” Albert said.
“No, beyond that,” Cooper insisted. He swung the lamp away and headed in the direction of the low persistent sound. Fifty feet beyond the bodies, their progress was blocked by a cave-in.
“No telling how far this thing went, or where it surfaces,” Albert said.
Cooper did not reply. His attention was wholly absorbed by the slabs and chunks of fallen granite, which he could have sworn were emitting the low thrumming sound, and more than that, a kind of pulsing energy. He reached toward a large block and touched the rough surface and –
- somewhere a young boy was speaking –
- his vision went black –
- “in one, five and seven open the door…” –
- a network of underground caves, too geometric to be entirely natural –
- “The magician stole his gloves…” _
- A white calf lay dead, its body half in the river –
“Are you all right now?” That was Albert, steadying his arm, looking at him searchingly.
“I think so,” Cooper said. He found himself blinking against the sunlight. They were outside again.
“You should sit down,” Albert suggested dubiously.
”No, I’m fine now,” Cooper insisted. He took a deep breath of fresh air. “What about you?”
“I’m okay, Cooper.”
“What did you see just now?”
“Not much, because you dropped the lamp and the battery casing popped open. You didn’t answer when I yelled at you, so I grabbed your arm and walked you out here.”
Cooper stepped away from the entrance and studied the hill rising beyond. He thought about the spider’s web of tunnels that he had seen in his mind’s eye, and mentally projected that image onto, or rather into, the terrain. Right in the center, where the spider would sit, he saw a gray shingled roof amongst the trees.
He looked around for Calvino and called him over.
“Who owns that house?” he asked, pointing.
Calvino’s eyes followed his finger, then slid away quickly.
“I don’t think…” he began.
“Is it Dr. Wald?” Cooper broke in, and the big man shuddered, then walked away without a word.
“Well,” Albert said, giving Cooper a questioning look, “I don’t know what made you ask that, but I’d say you hit the mark.”
“Just a hunch,” Cooper replied, and Albert, who had after all known him a long time, accepted this. He didn’t argue with results.
“His behavior has been odd from the start,” Cooper said. “I’m going to keep an eye on him while he questions the quarry workers. I know whatever it was didn’t effect you, but still, be careful in that cave. There’s something not right about it.”
That afternoon, he found Albert in the climate-controlled room in the back of the local funeral home to which the bodies had been removed. He had little news of interest concerning either the quarry workers or Calvino, and didn’t bother to mention that he had gone back into the cave and found the rocks silent and cold.
“Well, I have plenty to report,” Albert said, “but what any of it means, I’m not prepared to say. See for yourself. You’re just in time for the external examination of Victim Number Two, Carlos Guertner.”
He drew the sheet off one of the corpses, and Cooper stared. A bread-plate sized circle of flesh over the man’s sternum had been reduced to grayish pulp. He had never seen anything like it. He recalled the corpses sitting semi-upright in the cave, their shirttails hanging out and marked by a few stray smears of blood, and voiced the obvious:
“There should have been a lot more blood at the scene.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Albert agreed. “His partner was the same. And though most of this damage – though nasty – is superficial, there’s a puncture wound…right here…” He took up a slender probe and inserted it in the middle of the mess. It slid in deep, angling upward.
“Stabbed in the heart?” Cooper asked.
In reply Albert drew the sheet off the other corpse. He had opened the chest cavity, and…removed the lungs? No, there they were, but strangely shriveled, a fraction of the usual size.
“Drained of blood,” Albert said. “Lungs, heart, pulmonary veins. You’re looking at blood loss of about forty percent. But no blood at the scene, except a few ounces on the shirts.”
He folded his arms and regarded Cooper quizzically.
“You were all over that quarry today,” he said. “I’m sure you’d have mentioned it if you’d come across four or five quarts of blood.”
“So where did it go?” Cooper wondered.
“Vampires? Aliens? Maybe the Mad Scientist took it.”
“I wouldn’t rule anything out,” Cooper answered, smiling. “What about the skeletons?”
“Not to be out-weirded by any Johnny-Come-Latelys.” He knelt by a body bag on the floor and unzipped the top. “Most of the exhumed skeletons I’ve seen, like my friends you saw back in Cordoba, show the mark of execution-style killing: a shot to the back of the head. Not these.”
Cooper knelt beside him and Albert lifted the skull and gently turned it. It was intact except for a small, neat, perfectly circular hole in the very top of the crown.
“Not a bullet hole,” Cooper observed.
“Nor a puncture,” Albert said. “It looks like it was carefully drilled.”
Cooper thought for a moment.
”I’m wondering if Dr. Wald’s experiments involve some form of trephination.”
“And these would be his clinical failures? Didn’t respond well to treatment?”
“Could be. Those caves extended to Wald’s house, I’m certain of it. How long will it take to identify them?”
“If they’ve been officially reported missing, it might not take long at all. The cave preserved them remarkably well, so it should be a fairly straightforward matter to type them by age, sex, and height, compare them against the reports, get the medical and dental records of any possible matches.”
By evening, they had learned all they could from the bones, and had a fairly detailed account of the five men and one woman to compare to missing-person reports. As they were checking into the Hotel Giardino, the woman at the desk told Cooper that there was a message for him.
“For me?” Cooper wondered if Gordon had traced him to Mina Dolores. But it wasn’t a phone message. On heavy old paper, written with a fountain pen in an elaborate assured hand, it read,
I wish to discuss with you a confidential matter of great importance. I will be in the garden of the Capilla Rosario and nine o’clock in the morning.
H. G. Wald
The woman who poured his coffee told Cooper that the Capilla Rosario was an historical Jesuit church located up the hill, just outside of town, and accessible by a flight of stone steps. As he and Albert approached it became apparent that “historical” in this case meant “ruined.” All that was left of the chapel was three stone walls and a garden of overgrown acacias. Both were unoccupied, apart from a life-sized statue of Jesus, or some bearded saint of similar appearance, that stood in the center of the garden.
The statue’s right hand was raised in benediction, and as he looked closer, Cooper saw that the space between hand and head was spanned by a large orb web, in the center of which sat the most unusual spider he had ever seen – bright red, with orange eyes and mouth, and a pinwheel of spiny protrusions on its back.
“Come look at this,” he said. “Ever see anything like it in your life?”
Albert came alongside him and looked. “No,” he said. “Damn.” And then, “Ever notice how so many spiders look like they’re smiling? What’s the evolutionary purpose of that, I wonder.”
“A deceptive charmer, that one,” said a reedy voice behind them, and they both turned, doing a little doubletake in spite of themselves at the appearance of the man who had joined them.
He was very tall, and very thin, and of indeterminate age. His face, the only uncovered part of his body, was a mask of bone sheathed with skin that resembled blank newspaper. He wore a light-colored suit that looked as though it had been stored in a trunk since the turn of the century. His hands were covered by leather gloves, his head by a snug leather cap, and his eyes by large circular spectacles of thick, dark green glass, like the bottoms of ginger ale bottles. This eccentric get-up somehow did nothing to make him appear comical.
“You like spiders, Dr. Wald? Is this one dangerous?” Cooper asked him.
The man inclined his head. “To flies,” he said, smiling.
“Are there deadly spiders in Argentina? To humans, I mean.”
“Certainly,” Wald replied, “There are deadly spiders everywhere.”
”Local cousins of black widows and brown recluses,” Albert said. His tone was neutral, his body language anything but. If he were a cat, every hair would have been standing on end.
“Tarantulas?” Cooper prodded him.
”Tarantulas aren’t deadly…yes, all right, Cooper, there are tarantulas.”
“In that Americans use the name for the indigenous bird-eating spiders,” Wald amended graciously. “The true tarantula is the Italian wolf spider, much smaller, but so much more elegant. Also, more venomous.”
“The venom of the tarantula was once thought to cause madness.” Cooper recalled.
“Indeed,” Wald said, giving him a quick, unreadable look. “But that myth has long been discredited.”
“Madness is your area of study, isn’t it?” Cooper pressed. “I’ve heard that you’re seeking a cure for schizophrenia.”
“A highly distorted version of the truth,” Wald replied. “The very concept of a ‘cure’ presupposes that the mind that straddles different realities is sick, broken…less, rather than more.”
“Anthropologists sometimes call schizophrenia the ‘shaman sickness,’” Cooper said, digesting this. “In some cultures the visions of the schizophrenic are viewed as sacred, inspired.”
“Such beliefs are everywhere. Think of the story of Agrippa’s apprentice.”
Cooper didn’t know the story, but didn’t want to interrupt, so he nodded.
“The advantage of modernity,” Wald said, “is that it strips away the tedious ceremonial invocations of angels and demons, recognizing that the greatest dangers and transports are all here.” He tapped his temple. “Its great failing, however, is in seeking to suppress those potent surges, rather than to use them.”
“Use them,” Cooper repeated. The words in Wald’s mouth had a cold, rather predatory air that repelled him.
“A theory, only,” Wald said. “I speak in theoretical abstractions, forgetting I had a specific concern to address. You gentlemen, I understand, came seeking the graves of the unfortunate victims of the Generals’ regime. Such has come to pass everywhere in this country, these past months. It amazes me, really, how casually m…modern young Americans unearth the dead.”
Albert’s eyes narrowed, and Cooper said quickly, “I think everyone involved takes it very seriously, Doctor.”
“Of course.” Wald shrugged as though it were of no importance. “But yesterday morning, I hear, you discovered the bodies of men that had been murdered only the previous night. That same night, a very unstable young man, Jose de Solis, escaped from my care, and I think it cannot be a coincidence. You see, he is troubled by a compulsion to kill. He came to me after murdering his wife in a most unique fashion.”
“Shouldn’t you be telling this to Chief Calvino?” Cooper asked.
“Oh, I have done so. He is fully aware of the situation, but as you have so kindly interested yourselves, I thought I had best speak to you as well. You see, I, too, take my responsibilities very seriously.”
This claim sounded as hollow as his smile.
Cooper was considering how to phrase his next question when the sound of screams reached them from the town below. Albert, who had been following the conversation with a tight, stony expression, jumped as if he’d been scalded.
Wald did not react, just stood there, smiling.
Cooper charged down the steps with Albert at his heels. As they reached the town, a shot rang out, from the vicinity of the riverbank, and again, a woman screamed. They hurtled toward the noise.
A crowd of shocked, frightened residents had gathered in a riverwalk park. Calvino stood in their midst, his gun drawn. At his feet lay a young man, a bloody knife next to one outstretched hand. Albert knelt by the fallen man, checked his vitals and then, quick-thinking son-of-a-gun that he was, his skull.
“Step away, please,” Calvino ordered. “This maniac was threatening citizens with a knife. He already murdered one unlucky girl.”
A woman sobbing in a friend’s arms drew a deep breath said, “I found him…he was lying on top of her! Sleeping on her body!”
The victim lay half-concealed in a bed of azaleas, her greenish-yellow nude body covered with black and red slashes, her eyeless face turned to the side. Cooper regarded her with a very heavy heart.
“Her name was Claire,” he said. “Claire Murray. She was a reporter, researching a story on Wald.”
“Poor girl,” Calvino said. “But the madman’s death puts an end to it.”
Cooper glanced at Albert, who made a quick, subtle gesture toward his own head that Cooper interpreted without difficulty. De Solis’s skull had been trephinated.
Cooper scanned the stunned faces of the assembly, and his gaze was arrested by a piece of paper that had been fixed to a lamppost. He cut through the crowd to examine it. It turned out to be a handwritten sign with a photograph taped in the middle.
His Spanish was good enough to get the gist: a man named Eduardo Ortiz had not come home the night before. He was always very reliable, so his wife was concerned. The face in the photo was that of the cowboy who had complained to Calvino about stolen livestock.
“It isn’t over,” he said to himself.
That day proved one of the most frustrating of his career. No one was willing to talk to him, except Ortiz’s wife, and she had nothing to reveal beyond confirming that a white calf had been among the missing animals.
Albert had lapsed into an impenetrable depression. “If de Solis did murder those men, I’d sure like to know how,” he muttered, but showed no inclination to act upon the desire. He went through the missing-person reports routinely, expressing neither surprise nor disappointment when he was unable to identify any of the six skeletons.
Cooper went to bed that night thinking that the past two days of death and mystery were simply going to end, without resolution.
He awoke in darkness, his head filled with peculiar vibrations. He knew at once what it was. The stones in the cave were awake again. Even at this distance, he heard them. He recalled how touching them had shown him the tunnels under Wald’s house, and the dead calf. He quickly dressed and slipped out.
The night was dark, the moon only a sliver in the sky. Cooper, who had cursed the dim illumination as he scaled the chain link fence around the quarry, was suddenly glad of it as he neared the edge. He crouched low, hoping he had not been noticed.
Wald stood at the entrance to the cave. Only his build and strange eyewear identified him; he wore a single, shapeless gray garment, and his hair, thin but long, hung white and lanky down his back. He looked like a vision of death, with his skeletal frame in its shroudlike robe, his spectacles in the dim moonlight giving his eyes the look of empty sockets.
Something was moving down the length of the quarry, a great black shadow the size of a car – an old American gas-guzzler, at that. Not one of those dinky imports. But it wasn’t a vehicle. The nimble way it moved over the rocky ground told Cooper’s incredulous senses that it was some kind of unearthly creature. Wald spoke to it as it approached.
“Your little spree has jeopardized an arrangement that has lasted for many years,” he scolded it, “an arrangement that I think has been satisfactory to both of us.”
It seemed to answer, in a whisper like rustling leaves. Cooper could not make out what it said, but Wald evidently did, for he answered sternly.
“You did draw unwanted attention. Even now, you are observed.”
The thing turned, and with heart-stopping quickness it skittered – there was no other word for the way it moved, despite its size – across the floor of the quarry and up the wall. Before Cooper could even get to his feet he was pinned to the ground by a limb that felt like an I-bar covered with bristling hair. Its enormous face loomed over him, a hateful prehistoric face, glittering soulless eyes, no deceptive smile for this one, just mandibles like pickaxe heads that opened to reveal a horrible sucking maw that reeked of rotting blood.
“No. Not this one. I have another use for him.”
The dreadful mouth withdrew a little, though the creature still held him pinned. Wald appeared and gazed down at him expressionlessly.
“Why were you not educated, I wonder?” he asked, not unkindly. ”Is the American system so slipshod? Well, no matter. I shall see that you do not go to waste.”
They drove back to Cordoba the next day, and caught the train to Buenos Aires.
“When we get to B.A. we’ll have dinner at La Cabaña,” Albert said. “I know that nothing lifts your spirits like clogging up your arteries.”
“My mission was successful,” Cooper said, with a worn smile, “I don’t know why I feel so discouraged today.”
“You don’t, huh,” Albert said. “Well, I know why I do. It doesn’t help.”
“I had strange dreams last night,” Cooper said. “Something about giant tarantulas…” He had hoped that saying this out loud would put the absurdity of it into perspective, but it didn’t. Albert, with unexpected sensitivity, showed no amusement either. He waited for Cooper to continue.
“I can’t remember,” he said uneasily. “Not in the way that dreams often fade, because they’re unimportant. It’s as though my memory were actively working against me somehow.” He looked at his hands. Something slithered through the back of his mind and he spoke it out loud before it could be lost. “In one, five and seven open the door.”
He looked up at Albert, who regarded him silently. Very distinctly, he repeated it. “In one, five and seven open the door.”
“’Open the door,’ huh? Sounds more like Bingo,” Albert said, and when Cooper got it, he had to laugh.
“Do me a favor,” he said, growing serious again, “Don’t forget it.”
Albert regarded Cooper with exasperation, and suppressed curiosity, and a touch of melancholy wonderment. Then he matter-of-factly said,
“You know I don’t forget.”
Author: La Onza
Fandoms: Twin Peaks, Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence, including some graphic descriptions of dead bodies.
Pairing: gen, perhaps a smidgen of Cooper/Albert slashy vibes if you like.
Characters: Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenfield, the Dark Wizard Grindelwald
Summary: In 1985, an FBI agent goes to Argentina to find a colleague, and encounters murder and black magic.
Buenos Aires, 1985
“You,” the young woman said, “are a G-man.”
“If you’re trying to impress me with your perspicacity,” he told her, smiling, “about a million people beat you to it.” He knew he looked every inch of what he was, took a benign pride in it. “You,” he said in turn, “are a journalist.” His smile broadened when she blinked in surprise, and he offered his hand. “Special Agent Dale Cooper.”
”Claire Murray.” She gave his extended hand a squeeze. “A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” They were in an airport lounge in Buenos Aires, waiting for an already-much-delayed connecting flight to Cordoba.
“I’m not really here in an official capacity,” he said.
She eyed him skeptically, then relented with a laugh.
“You probably get that a lot, don’t you?” she asked. “Reporters do too; you ask an innocent question and people think you’re digging for an exposé. As though it were impossible for people in our professions to have any interests outside of our work.”
“When, in fact, it’s only highly improbable,” Cooper agreed.
“Touché,” she said. “I am in fact here chasing a story.”
“On the Disappeared?” This seemed a reasonable guess; following the collapse of Argentina’s military dictatorship, the fate of the many abducted, imprisoned, and frequently executed real-or-suspected dissidents had become a much-publicized issue.
She winced. “That’s what I came down here for,” she said. “Me and everyone else, it seems. All picking at the bones of the Disappeared like a bunch of vultures.”
She caught his quick smile of private irony and misinterpreted it.
“It’s important, I know that,” she said. “I just…wonder how many times we can tell the same story of the banality of evil, you know.” She took a swig of her drink, something with Coke in it.
“I’ve got a lead on something else.” She gave him a cagey sidelong look. “Helmut Wald…ever heard of him?”
“I can’t say that I have,” Cooper said.
“No one outside of Argentina has. And there’s hardly any public information about him available here. But what I’ve heard from the gossip mill is, he operates some sort of asylum in Cordoba province, and rumor has it he’s working on an experimental cure for schizophrenia.”
“A cure,” Cooper said, impressed, “not a treatment.”
“It would be something, wouldn’t it?” Hope and uncertainty warred in her voice. “I figured it was worth a shot.”
“In my experience, chasing down rumors always leads to something,” he assured her. “Though usually not what I expected. However incredible rumors may sound, the truth behind them is often even more incredible.”
The airline didn’t get them to Cordoba until the small hours, but knowing Albert Rosenfield as he did, Cooper knew where to look first. The Cordoba morgue didn’t look as though it would constitute an ideal work environment under any circumstances, and the influx of human remains from recently exhumed mass graves was clearly more than it could accommodate. Partial skeletons laid out on sheets of canvas almost carpeted the floor. Along a countertop sat a row of skulls awaiting identification.
Albert stood at the far end of the room, leaning over a makeshift light table improvised from a florescent light he had apparently wrenched from the ceiling. As Cooper approached, he turned his curious gaze to the illuminated film: on the left, an ordinary dental X-ray, labeled “Espinoza, Chloe.” On the right, an obviously postmortem one – the mandible gone, facial bones cracked, some of the teeth missing.
“What are we looking at?” Cooper asked. He sensed rather than saw Albert look up and blink, his tightly focused attention flailing for a second, struggling to make the adjustment from a dead girl’s teeth to Cooper’s sudden, unexpected presence next to him. Then he rallied.
“Number three,” he said, tapping a molar on each X-ray. A similar streak of white showed the presence of a metal filling in each.
“Same filling,” Cooper said.
“Same filling, same root morphology, same girl. Seventeen-year-old Chloe Espinoza, disappeared while visiting a friend at the University.”
As he didn’t ask why Cooper was there, he must have guessed, but Cooper told him anyway.
“Gordon wants you to come back to work.”
Albert looked pained. ”I’m not finished here,” he predictably answered.
“Three months has turned into...”
“Cooper, look around you,” Albert snapped, his frustration suddenly boiling over. “They went in with back hoes. They shoveled bones into garbage bags.”
“Which is why they asked you to come train local investigators in proper excavation and identification methods,” Cooper reminded him evenly, “Not to unearth and identify every bone yourself.”
Albert crossed his arms and stared fixedly at Chloe’s X-rays.
“All of the serial killers that you and I have come across had between them less than a hundred victims,” he said in a low, bitter tone. “Here over ten thousand people were murdered by their own government.”
“I know,” Cooper said. He recognized the closest thing to a concession that he was going to get at present. “When did you last eat?” he asked. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“I have to call the Espinozas’ lawyer.”
“His office won’t be open for hours yet,” Cooper pointed out, smiling. When Albert was running on a round-the-clock schedule, he expected everyone else to do the same.
As it turned out, Cordoba didn’t run on Cooper’s schedule either, which is to say, Argentineans apparently didn’t believe in early breakfasts. They did however believe in very, very late dinners, so they found a bar-and-grill that served them sizzling plates of steak, kidneys, and sausage.
Albert, whose metabolism ran very efficiently on little more than nicotine and caffeine, took a few token bites and then sat nursing the disgusting lukewarm mixture of milk and coffee that he endearingly insisted was good for his ulcers.
Considering this, Cooper said, “You know, there’s something moving about the irrational beliefs of scientists.”
“It’s good to see you, Cooper,” Albert somewhat inconsequentially replied.
As they were leaving, they ran into Claire, apparently on her way in.
“What’s the word on the mysterious Dr. Wald?” Cooper asked her, and she threw up her hands. Albert moved to one side and ignored her as though she were a plate of mouthwatering grilled meats.
“No one wants to talk about this guy,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. You mention his name and they all get shifty-eyed. Even money doesn’t help, not that I have much to offer.”
“Are you going to try to interview him personally? Where’s his clinic located?”
“I’m still trying to find out,” she replied. “Whatever he’s up to, he’s sure not advertising it. Outside the city, there are lots of big private estates, and my guess is he’s operating out of one of those.”
Cooper found these revelations disquieting, to say the least. “When you mentioned it at the airport, it sounded like a straightforward alternative medicine story,” he said. “Now it’s starting to sound sinister.”
She got her cagey look. It occurred to him that she was awfully young.
“How sinister are we talking, Claire?” he asked.
“Well… You said yourself, the truth can be pretty incredible, right? Wald isn’t from here originally. He showed up about forty years ago…I mean, a guy with a German-sounding name, just turns up in South America after the war, and starts experimenting on people?”
It wasn’t hard to see where she was headed. “You think he might be a Nazi? A war criminal?”
“And it’s a known fact that Josef Mengele came to Argentina around that time.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Albert broke in, irritated out of his show of indifference. “Mengele died years ago, in Brazil.”
“So it was claimed,” she said, “But Mengele was a personal friend of the dictator of Paraguay, among other influential types. You really don’t think he could have faked his death if he wanted to? It put the Nazi hunters off his trail.”
“No, it didn’t,” Albert said. “The ‘Nazi hunters’ went to Brazil and confirmed it for themselves.”
“He certainly doesn’t sound like a man with nothing to hide,” Cooper said, trying to get back to the point.
“I didn’t say he had nothing to hide,” Albert said less combatively. “If Dr. Whosit is experimenting on human subjects, he probably has plenty to hide. I’m not even saying he couldn’t be a Nazi. There were others besides Mengele who thought a change of scenery sounded good when the tribunals started.”
“So you admit, it could be a great story,” Claire challenged him.
“It could be, I just don’t have high hopes for you writing it,” he shot back. “Only a tabloid hack would try to spice it up by invoking the dread name Mengele.”
“Well,” she said wryly. “I haven’t been called a hack for a while.”
“So you’ve been called one before,” Albert said.
Cooper held the door open for her. “Good luck,” he told her, “And be careful.”
“Let us know if you find Hitler’s brain in a jar,” Albert added.
Back at the hotel, a phone message awaited Albert. He scanned it and cursed. “From the police liaison,” he said. “He tried to reach me yesterday evening, but the phone at the morgue keeps going out.”
He commandeered the phone at the front desk for a few minutes, and hung up looking purposeful and energized.
“He wanted to pass on a report from Mina Dolores, a town about thirty-six kilometers west of here. Yesterday some workers blasting in a quarry opened up a cave that had a half-dozen human skeletons inside.”
“In a cave?”
“It must have another entrance somewhere. Looks like some death squad decided to use it as a ready-made grave. Guzman managed to impress upon the local police the importance of our seeing the remains in situ, so they put guards outside the scene last night. The chief’ll meet us at the quarry in an hour.”
“Albert…”
“You came all this way,” Albert said firmly. “You might as well see what it’s all about.”
“All right,” Cooper agreed. “Let’s go.”
The narrow road to Mina Dolores wound a scenic route through the sierras west of the city. The town first appeared as clusters of old, somewhat shabby houses along the bank of a river, then suddenly assumed the form of neat squares of Old World-style buildings and attractive greenery. By following the river road north beyond town and then turning into a rocky canyon, they found the quarry nestled between gently sloping green hills of largely untouched natural beauty.
Cooper pulled up to a chain-link fence alongside a number of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Albert rummaged in the back for a minute, then handed Cooper a large battery lantern and hefted a camera case himself. Thus equipped they walked to the gate, where a dispute of some kind was underway. The uniform on one of the men marked him as the police chief; the other was dressed in dirt-streaked denims and a wide straw hat. Seeing them approach, the big, square-built policeman curtly dismissed the other, and came forward to meet them with an unfriendly demeanor that seemed only partly a residue of his argument with the cowboy.
“Ruben Calvino,” he said, “Chief of the Police.” He held out his hand midway between them, and Cooper stepped forward to take it and complete the introductions. He knew that this was one of the reasons why Albert wanted him along – to “handle” the Chief, to deal with his ego, his sense of authority, his concerns about public relations, everything he said or did that did not contribute to getting the job done. “Handling” people was Albert’s term for it, and he considered it one of Cooper’s functions in his life.
“What’s the trouble here?” he asked Calvino, as the other man jumped into his truck and drove away with a screech of tires.
“It’s nothing,” Calvino said sourly. “Some of his livestock wandered away in the night. Stolen, he thinks. I told him I would look into it when I had time.”
They carefully picked their way down into the quarry. The sun was up, and the sparkle of newly exposed granite showed where the recent blasting had occurred. Ahead and to their right was the uninviting black gash of the cave, opening horizontally into the hillside.
There was no sign of anyone guarding it, a fact that did not escape Calvino. “I left two men here last night,” he growled, in a tone that did not bode well for the shirkers.
“Maybe they went inside,” Cooper suggested. “Does it get cold at night?”
Calvino didn’t answer. They were drawing near the cave entrance, and a powerful putrid odor was demanding their attention.
“I thought you said skeletons,” Albert said, for the smell was the ripe, gaseous stench of the not-long dead.
“Yes, skeletons,” Calvino muttered. His forehead was shiny with sweat and he eyed the dark crevice with dread. Cooper clicked on his lantern and stepped inside, Albert close behind, the Chief following reluctantly.
The cave was larger than Cooper had expected, with a high ceiling and walls that curved away from the reach of the lamp. As they moved deeper into the darkness, they saw the skeletons almost immediately, a pathetic assembly of exposed bones against the right wall. There was no way that those dusty fragments could be producing the pervasive smell of decay.
From further back in the cave came the buzzing of flies.
“Perhaps an animal died in here,” Calvino said uneasily. Cooper arced the light away from the skeletons toward the sound of the insects.
Shoes, extending from khaki pantlegs. Cooper advanced a few feet further and the light revealed the two corpses in their entirety, slumped against the opposite wall, tongues protruding from their bloated faces. A few small, dark stains on their shirts looked like blood. There were no other signs of violence.
“Your men?” Cooper looked to the Chief for confirmation.
Calvino was suppressing gagging noises. “You wanted to see, now you have seen,” was all he could say, his horror at the scene expressing itself as anger. He turned his back and tromped from the cave, his breath labored.
Cooper turned back to the crime scene. His ears picked up a sound that the buzzing of the flies had at first obscured.
“Do you hear that? A rumble, like a generator.”
“Just the flies,” Albert said.
“No, beyond that,” Cooper insisted. He swung the lamp away and headed in the direction of the low persistent sound. Fifty feet beyond the bodies, their progress was blocked by a cave-in.
“No telling how far this thing went, or where it surfaces,” Albert said.
Cooper did not reply. His attention was wholly absorbed by the slabs and chunks of fallen granite, which he could have sworn were emitting the low thrumming sound, and more than that, a kind of pulsing energy. He reached toward a large block and touched the rough surface and –
- somewhere a young boy was speaking –
- his vision went black –
- “in one, five and seven open the door…” –
- a network of underground caves, too geometric to be entirely natural –
- “The magician stole his gloves…” _
- A white calf lay dead, its body half in the river –
“Are you all right now?” That was Albert, steadying his arm, looking at him searchingly.
“I think so,” Cooper said. He found himself blinking against the sunlight. They were outside again.
“You should sit down,” Albert suggested dubiously.
”No, I’m fine now,” Cooper insisted. He took a deep breath of fresh air. “What about you?”
“I’m okay, Cooper.”
“What did you see just now?”
“Not much, because you dropped the lamp and the battery casing popped open. You didn’t answer when I yelled at you, so I grabbed your arm and walked you out here.”
Cooper stepped away from the entrance and studied the hill rising beyond. He thought about the spider’s web of tunnels that he had seen in his mind’s eye, and mentally projected that image onto, or rather into, the terrain. Right in the center, where the spider would sit, he saw a gray shingled roof amongst the trees.
He looked around for Calvino and called him over.
“Who owns that house?” he asked, pointing.
Calvino’s eyes followed his finger, then slid away quickly.
“I don’t think…” he began.
“Is it Dr. Wald?” Cooper broke in, and the big man shuddered, then walked away without a word.
“Well,” Albert said, giving Cooper a questioning look, “I don’t know what made you ask that, but I’d say you hit the mark.”
“Just a hunch,” Cooper replied, and Albert, who had after all known him a long time, accepted this. He didn’t argue with results.
“His behavior has been odd from the start,” Cooper said. “I’m going to keep an eye on him while he questions the quarry workers. I know whatever it was didn’t effect you, but still, be careful in that cave. There’s something not right about it.”
That afternoon, he found Albert in the climate-controlled room in the back of the local funeral home to which the bodies had been removed. He had little news of interest concerning either the quarry workers or Calvino, and didn’t bother to mention that he had gone back into the cave and found the rocks silent and cold.
“Well, I have plenty to report,” Albert said, “but what any of it means, I’m not prepared to say. See for yourself. You’re just in time for the external examination of Victim Number Two, Carlos Guertner.”
He drew the sheet off one of the corpses, and Cooper stared. A bread-plate sized circle of flesh over the man’s sternum had been reduced to grayish pulp. He had never seen anything like it. He recalled the corpses sitting semi-upright in the cave, their shirttails hanging out and marked by a few stray smears of blood, and voiced the obvious:
“There should have been a lot more blood at the scene.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Albert agreed. “His partner was the same. And though most of this damage – though nasty – is superficial, there’s a puncture wound…right here…” He took up a slender probe and inserted it in the middle of the mess. It slid in deep, angling upward.
“Stabbed in the heart?” Cooper asked.
In reply Albert drew the sheet off the other corpse. He had opened the chest cavity, and…removed the lungs? No, there they were, but strangely shriveled, a fraction of the usual size.
“Drained of blood,” Albert said. “Lungs, heart, pulmonary veins. You’re looking at blood loss of about forty percent. But no blood at the scene, except a few ounces on the shirts.”
He folded his arms and regarded Cooper quizzically.
“You were all over that quarry today,” he said. “I’m sure you’d have mentioned it if you’d come across four or five quarts of blood.”
“So where did it go?” Cooper wondered.
“Vampires? Aliens? Maybe the Mad Scientist took it.”
“I wouldn’t rule anything out,” Cooper answered, smiling. “What about the skeletons?”
“Not to be out-weirded by any Johnny-Come-Latelys.” He knelt by a body bag on the floor and unzipped the top. “Most of the exhumed skeletons I’ve seen, like my friends you saw back in Cordoba, show the mark of execution-style killing: a shot to the back of the head. Not these.”
Cooper knelt beside him and Albert lifted the skull and gently turned it. It was intact except for a small, neat, perfectly circular hole in the very top of the crown.
“Not a bullet hole,” Cooper observed.
“Nor a puncture,” Albert said. “It looks like it was carefully drilled.”
Cooper thought for a moment.
”I’m wondering if Dr. Wald’s experiments involve some form of trephination.”
“And these would be his clinical failures? Didn’t respond well to treatment?”
“Could be. Those caves extended to Wald’s house, I’m certain of it. How long will it take to identify them?”
“If they’ve been officially reported missing, it might not take long at all. The cave preserved them remarkably well, so it should be a fairly straightforward matter to type them by age, sex, and height, compare them against the reports, get the medical and dental records of any possible matches.”
By evening, they had learned all they could from the bones, and had a fairly detailed account of the five men and one woman to compare to missing-person reports. As they were checking into the Hotel Giardino, the woman at the desk told Cooper that there was a message for him.
“For me?” Cooper wondered if Gordon had traced him to Mina Dolores. But it wasn’t a phone message. On heavy old paper, written with a fountain pen in an elaborate assured hand, it read,
I wish to discuss with you a confidential matter of great importance. I will be in the garden of the Capilla Rosario and nine o’clock in the morning.
H. G. Wald
The woman who poured his coffee told Cooper that the Capilla Rosario was an historical Jesuit church located up the hill, just outside of town, and accessible by a flight of stone steps. As he and Albert approached it became apparent that “historical” in this case meant “ruined.” All that was left of the chapel was three stone walls and a garden of overgrown acacias. Both were unoccupied, apart from a life-sized statue of Jesus, or some bearded saint of similar appearance, that stood in the center of the garden.
The statue’s right hand was raised in benediction, and as he looked closer, Cooper saw that the space between hand and head was spanned by a large orb web, in the center of which sat the most unusual spider he had ever seen – bright red, with orange eyes and mouth, and a pinwheel of spiny protrusions on its back.
“Come look at this,” he said. “Ever see anything like it in your life?”
Albert came alongside him and looked. “No,” he said. “Damn.” And then, “Ever notice how so many spiders look like they’re smiling? What’s the evolutionary purpose of that, I wonder.”
“A deceptive charmer, that one,” said a reedy voice behind them, and they both turned, doing a little doubletake in spite of themselves at the appearance of the man who had joined them.
He was very tall, and very thin, and of indeterminate age. His face, the only uncovered part of his body, was a mask of bone sheathed with skin that resembled blank newspaper. He wore a light-colored suit that looked as though it had been stored in a trunk since the turn of the century. His hands were covered by leather gloves, his head by a snug leather cap, and his eyes by large circular spectacles of thick, dark green glass, like the bottoms of ginger ale bottles. This eccentric get-up somehow did nothing to make him appear comical.
“You like spiders, Dr. Wald? Is this one dangerous?” Cooper asked him.
The man inclined his head. “To flies,” he said, smiling.
“Are there deadly spiders in Argentina? To humans, I mean.”
“Certainly,” Wald replied, “There are deadly spiders everywhere.”
”Local cousins of black widows and brown recluses,” Albert said. His tone was neutral, his body language anything but. If he were a cat, every hair would have been standing on end.
“Tarantulas?” Cooper prodded him.
”Tarantulas aren’t deadly…yes, all right, Cooper, there are tarantulas.”
“In that Americans use the name for the indigenous bird-eating spiders,” Wald amended graciously. “The true tarantula is the Italian wolf spider, much smaller, but so much more elegant. Also, more venomous.”
“The venom of the tarantula was once thought to cause madness.” Cooper recalled.
“Indeed,” Wald said, giving him a quick, unreadable look. “But that myth has long been discredited.”
“Madness is your area of study, isn’t it?” Cooper pressed. “I’ve heard that you’re seeking a cure for schizophrenia.”
“A highly distorted version of the truth,” Wald replied. “The very concept of a ‘cure’ presupposes that the mind that straddles different realities is sick, broken…less, rather than more.”
“Anthropologists sometimes call schizophrenia the ‘shaman sickness,’” Cooper said, digesting this. “In some cultures the visions of the schizophrenic are viewed as sacred, inspired.”
“Such beliefs are everywhere. Think of the story of Agrippa’s apprentice.”
Cooper didn’t know the story, but didn’t want to interrupt, so he nodded.
“The advantage of modernity,” Wald said, “is that it strips away the tedious ceremonial invocations of angels and demons, recognizing that the greatest dangers and transports are all here.” He tapped his temple. “Its great failing, however, is in seeking to suppress those potent surges, rather than to use them.”
“Use them,” Cooper repeated. The words in Wald’s mouth had a cold, rather predatory air that repelled him.
“A theory, only,” Wald said. “I speak in theoretical abstractions, forgetting I had a specific concern to address. You gentlemen, I understand, came seeking the graves of the unfortunate victims of the Generals’ regime. Such has come to pass everywhere in this country, these past months. It amazes me, really, how casually m…modern young Americans unearth the dead.”
Albert’s eyes narrowed, and Cooper said quickly, “I think everyone involved takes it very seriously, Doctor.”
“Of course.” Wald shrugged as though it were of no importance. “But yesterday morning, I hear, you discovered the bodies of men that had been murdered only the previous night. That same night, a very unstable young man, Jose de Solis, escaped from my care, and I think it cannot be a coincidence. You see, he is troubled by a compulsion to kill. He came to me after murdering his wife in a most unique fashion.”
“Shouldn’t you be telling this to Chief Calvino?” Cooper asked.
“Oh, I have done so. He is fully aware of the situation, but as you have so kindly interested yourselves, I thought I had best speak to you as well. You see, I, too, take my responsibilities very seriously.”
This claim sounded as hollow as his smile.
Cooper was considering how to phrase his next question when the sound of screams reached them from the town below. Albert, who had been following the conversation with a tight, stony expression, jumped as if he’d been scalded.
Wald did not react, just stood there, smiling.
Cooper charged down the steps with Albert at his heels. As they reached the town, a shot rang out, from the vicinity of the riverbank, and again, a woman screamed. They hurtled toward the noise.
A crowd of shocked, frightened residents had gathered in a riverwalk park. Calvino stood in their midst, his gun drawn. At his feet lay a young man, a bloody knife next to one outstretched hand. Albert knelt by the fallen man, checked his vitals and then, quick-thinking son-of-a-gun that he was, his skull.
“Step away, please,” Calvino ordered. “This maniac was threatening citizens with a knife. He already murdered one unlucky girl.”
A woman sobbing in a friend’s arms drew a deep breath said, “I found him…he was lying on top of her! Sleeping on her body!”
The victim lay half-concealed in a bed of azaleas, her greenish-yellow nude body covered with black and red slashes, her eyeless face turned to the side. Cooper regarded her with a very heavy heart.
“Her name was Claire,” he said. “Claire Murray. She was a reporter, researching a story on Wald.”
“Poor girl,” Calvino said. “But the madman’s death puts an end to it.”
Cooper glanced at Albert, who made a quick, subtle gesture toward his own head that Cooper interpreted without difficulty. De Solis’s skull had been trephinated.
Cooper scanned the stunned faces of the assembly, and his gaze was arrested by a piece of paper that had been fixed to a lamppost. He cut through the crowd to examine it. It turned out to be a handwritten sign with a photograph taped in the middle.
His Spanish was good enough to get the gist: a man named Eduardo Ortiz had not come home the night before. He was always very reliable, so his wife was concerned. The face in the photo was that of the cowboy who had complained to Calvino about stolen livestock.
“It isn’t over,” he said to himself.
That day proved one of the most frustrating of his career. No one was willing to talk to him, except Ortiz’s wife, and she had nothing to reveal beyond confirming that a white calf had been among the missing animals.
Albert had lapsed into an impenetrable depression. “If de Solis did murder those men, I’d sure like to know how,” he muttered, but showed no inclination to act upon the desire. He went through the missing-person reports routinely, expressing neither surprise nor disappointment when he was unable to identify any of the six skeletons.
Cooper went to bed that night thinking that the past two days of death and mystery were simply going to end, without resolution.
He awoke in darkness, his head filled with peculiar vibrations. He knew at once what it was. The stones in the cave were awake again. Even at this distance, he heard them. He recalled how touching them had shown him the tunnels under Wald’s house, and the dead calf. He quickly dressed and slipped out.
The night was dark, the moon only a sliver in the sky. Cooper, who had cursed the dim illumination as he scaled the chain link fence around the quarry, was suddenly glad of it as he neared the edge. He crouched low, hoping he had not been noticed.
Wald stood at the entrance to the cave. Only his build and strange eyewear identified him; he wore a single, shapeless gray garment, and his hair, thin but long, hung white and lanky down his back. He looked like a vision of death, with his skeletal frame in its shroudlike robe, his spectacles in the dim moonlight giving his eyes the look of empty sockets.
Something was moving down the length of the quarry, a great black shadow the size of a car – an old American gas-guzzler, at that. Not one of those dinky imports. But it wasn’t a vehicle. The nimble way it moved over the rocky ground told Cooper’s incredulous senses that it was some kind of unearthly creature. Wald spoke to it as it approached.
“Your little spree has jeopardized an arrangement that has lasted for many years,” he scolded it, “an arrangement that I think has been satisfactory to both of us.”
It seemed to answer, in a whisper like rustling leaves. Cooper could not make out what it said, but Wald evidently did, for he answered sternly.
“You did draw unwanted attention. Even now, you are observed.”
The thing turned, and with heart-stopping quickness it skittered – there was no other word for the way it moved, despite its size – across the floor of the quarry and up the wall. Before Cooper could even get to his feet he was pinned to the ground by a limb that felt like an I-bar covered with bristling hair. Its enormous face loomed over him, a hateful prehistoric face, glittering soulless eyes, no deceptive smile for this one, just mandibles like pickaxe heads that opened to reveal a horrible sucking maw that reeked of rotting blood.
“No. Not this one. I have another use for him.”
The dreadful mouth withdrew a little, though the creature still held him pinned. Wald appeared and gazed down at him expressionlessly.
“Why were you not educated, I wonder?” he asked, not unkindly. ”Is the American system so slipshod? Well, no matter. I shall see that you do not go to waste.”
They drove back to Cordoba the next day, and caught the train to Buenos Aires.
“When we get to B.A. we’ll have dinner at La Cabaña,” Albert said. “I know that nothing lifts your spirits like clogging up your arteries.”
“My mission was successful,” Cooper said, with a worn smile, “I don’t know why I feel so discouraged today.”
“You don’t, huh,” Albert said. “Well, I know why I do. It doesn’t help.”
“I had strange dreams last night,” Cooper said. “Something about giant tarantulas…” He had hoped that saying this out loud would put the absurdity of it into perspective, but it didn’t. Albert, with unexpected sensitivity, showed no amusement either. He waited for Cooper to continue.
“I can’t remember,” he said uneasily. “Not in the way that dreams often fade, because they’re unimportant. It’s as though my memory were actively working against me somehow.” He looked at his hands. Something slithered through the back of his mind and he spoke it out loud before it could be lost. “In one, five and seven open the door.”
He looked up at Albert, who regarded him silently. Very distinctly, he repeated it. “In one, five and seven open the door.”
“’Open the door,’ huh? Sounds more like Bingo,” Albert said, and when Cooper got it, he had to laugh.
“Do me a favor,” he said, growing serious again, “Don’t forget it.”
Albert regarded Cooper with exasperation, and suppressed curiosity, and a touch of melancholy wonderment. Then he matter-of-factly said,
“You know I don’t forget.”
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