The Trinity Killer sat on the edge of Prospect Park Lake, his bare feet trailing in the cool blue.
Thinking.
His thoughts composed a single colourful dream: Visions of composing the ultimate lullaby, leading his fellow Dancers through the bloody streets, ribbons of hate streaming in his wake, the spider’s web of death dancing around his feet as he span and swirled though the wilderness of glass.
On the grass, the Village Voice’s bold headline was a noose around his neck, tightening: the Pontiac, it had been a mistake, his first, leaving it like that. He hadn’t been thinking.
He looked up again at the fountain-like plume of scintillating glass reaching out of the glass-frozen lake, it’s eddying twists and minute enclaves of sky-catching crystal attracting and absorbing the failing light. Beyond the reach of the supplicating edifice, the surface of Prospect Park Lake, edge to distant edge had crusted over with a film of red glass flimsy enough to ripple with the caress of the choked inner-city breeze.
He rocked slightly on his buttocks, arms around his knees, just rocking, rocking, and drawing comfort from the simple movement.
The world of glass in the failing light, sight and image diffused around the column of angry redness beneath the glass skin of reality, which it somehow reflected back into the gathering twilight, its body a thousand thousand angry fireflies hovering under the influence of a single malevolent mind. Manhattan’s tower of hate. Every city had one, its angry manhood eager to fuck with all the pretty pretties…
This was the coming of the time between times, between day and night, night and day, when the Guardians of The Dance could tread the streets in certain safety, quietly choreographing the moves needed to make up the next unearthly scene.
The Trinity Killer, an angel bathed in red, folded the newspaper and stood up, a film of crack-iced glass freezing the grass under his bare feet and spreading out from the pivot toward the line of thick trunked oak and spruce less than a hundred metres from his lakeside seat. In seconds, the crucified scarecrows behind which the failing sun was slowly melting into a languid twilight were nothing more than bones of coruscating glass, skeletal arms clawing at the sky, sparkling against the halo of the dying sun, catching and reflecting the whole spectrum of colours whilst somehow radiating only a sickly red tinge.
Around him ghostly slivers of red dazzled, catching and replicating the reflections thrown down on the mirror trees by the darkening sky.
The screams of his dead, desperate shrieking, pitches rising and falling in the single voice of terror rang out across the twilight park, as impossible as the dancer’s walking corpse. Pulses of red light came in waves, radiating off the central fountain-like plume of glass out in the centre of the lake, spreading outwards in tight ripples, each pulse accompanied by the lament of a tortured soul, a scream from dead lips.
Almost exactly as the voices finally fell quiet the crimson light within the glass pillar snuffed out, leaving behind a single, curiously iridescent, vapour that curled away from the base of the shaft.
What they could find out about a man three years dead, he failed to see. Carlos Lamenzo, the whispered Trinity, stared down at his bloody hands, as dead now as he had been that summer night three years ago when the Angel stepped down from its perch among the Cherubim around the crucifixion display nailed by its glass heart to the wall above the votive candles in St. Malachi's, and poured its twisted soul into his empty husk, breathed life where before there was nothing except the black of death.
That was the Secret of The Dance, and that was his secret as much as it was the Colour’s. His and his Angel’s, now that they were one and the same. That was why the Angel of Red had wound its cord so far, through the maze of twists and turns of the Otherworldly City, so far from the safety of the crystal tree to be beside, inside, its dancer.
He could feel the stirrings, the sympathetic pangs of need clawing at his stomach walls. Nothing in the world could have prepared him for this… Pain…
Wiping his hands off on his jeans, Lamenzo reached into his back pocket for the folded scrap of newspaper, the last grizzly souvenir of life before. It said little, a few lines in memoriam of a family cut down brutally. Multiple homicide. He knew the truth behind the words like no one else possibly could. After all, it was his story.
A woman, wreathed in a veil of pineapple yellow and jade green jogged by, ponytail bouncing lightly as her feet danced across the span of the wooden bridge, ignorant of the miracles flowering all around her.
The Trinity Killer watched her pass with eyes of fire, burning hot and so achingly cold, watched her pass…