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It was six o’clock on Monday evening when Gabriel parked his van about fifteen feet from the front gate of a well-lit cemetery. The place was empty now. No more people milling around like there had been yesterday.
He peered through his zoom lens, watched the backhoe cutting into the cold, hard ground and read the stone marker that leaned against the trunk of a large cottonwood. Gray polished marble inscribed with a fitting epitaph.
Poonam Eva Kapoor, 1978 - 2013.
There is no death, only a change of worlds.
The worker stopped the backhoe and seemed to be looking for something. Glanced around the cab and tried to find the remote control that had once been clipped to his visor. He shook his head, raised the boom and bucket and headed off toward the open gate, unable to lock it now. Never gave Gabriel’s van a second glance, just slid down the road, red soil dribbling from the loader.
Gabriel looked down at the remote control which was now sandwiched between the hand brake and the console. Memories played with his senses, making him laugh, making him cry. Then he studied the grave through the lens and the shovel leaning up against the tree, and he began to conjure spirits in that dark mind of his. It wouldn’t do to let Demon in. He saw and heard, and he knew enough already.
Gabriel had read A Time to Thrill, a book on convicted murderers on death row in Tehachapi State Prison, where one inmate stated that killing his first victim was like a trial run before the real deal. The trial run was the one that gave him the worst nightmares and the biggest rush. The real deal fueled all that pent-up anger and turned out to be nothing less than a hacked up mess.
Gabriel never wanted Asha to be a hacked up mess. she had been the quiet one, the girl who refused to take part in the torment, the girl who stood at the back and did nothing. But in so many ways that was worse because Asha could have saved him, could have been kind.
Gabriel shivered, felt the change in the wind, the sudden stench of something rotten. He pinched his nostrils to stop Demon leaking from the trees, the ground, the graves, because when he came he consumed him and Gabriel didn’t want to be consumed anymore.
“What we know from the dark ones we learn by someone’s experience,” Demon whispered. “Take me, for instance, I was five when it happened, when the first of the dark ones blew in under the bedroom door. I wasn’t afraid. I knew what it was. So, I opened my mind to let it in. If you open yours, you can see what I see.”
It worked every time. Because Demon was clever, always snickering and goading and stimulating the senses.
“Because it’s so beautiful,” Demon said, likely anticipating Gabriel’s hesitation. “Of course, the truth-seekers don’t think so. They’re spineless. Barking up the two-branched tree. But you’re different. I promised you’d be perfect and you are.”
And then he laughed like he always did. “You just don’t get it, do you? If you want to be in the driver’s seat, you have to let me in.”
Gabriel had always been of a different mind until the storms came. Some were big; some not so big. And then after a time he gave in, even when the words carried a sense of the ridiculous. The first time it happened he floated, an off-the-ground floating that took his breath away.
Tonight, he was very much on the ground, smelling only a residue of that nightmarish stench. Nothing special about a van parked on the broad shoulder outside the front gate, probably abandoned because it was old.
Now came the hard part. He drove into the cemetery and parked under the tree. If it wasn’t for hours of chest presses, dumbbells, pushups, squats, a whole routine, he would never have been able to haul that hideous load through the grass to where an open grave yawned up at a starry sky. Lurching and gasping, he rolled it toward the edge and watched it flop against the bottom.
“More exercise,” Demon reminded with a laugh to his voice.
A shallow pile of dirt still lay on the graveside and, six shovelfuls later, the body was patted nicely into its surroundings. There would be no hint of it when the mourners came and the casket was lowered. No one would know young Poonam Kapoor had a sleeping companion.
Part of him wanted the body to be found before then, because a game of tag isn’t much fun when played alone.
He looked up at that tree, at a smooth patch of wood barely noticeable behind a wrinkled shard of bark. Peeling off about six inches, he scratched the name Mahtab on the trunk with his knife.
Gabriel left the cemetery and drove east along Central Avenue and then north on Ash. Glancing up at the rearview mirror, he decided he looked tired and skinny. Actually he was tired and high. He did it to forget.
Parking near a small brown stucco house on Vassar Drive, he studied the road, the cars, the front door. The place of his next appointment.
There was slender tree to the right of that door still blinking with a solitary string of Christmas lights someone had forgotten to remove. A narrow alleyway separated the house from its neighbor, where tall blades of grass grew between the ruts, suggesting it was rarely used for cars.
Monday night, almost midnight. The sky was black, stars winking overhead and always in his favor. He was conscious of a crisp breeze that came in through the crack in the driver’s window, felt the prickle in his cheeks. He’d missed the delicatessen car that always pulled up outside the small adobe house with an order of food. Seven o’clock every evening. Funny how thin, rich girls always seemed to eat a lot. Especially alone.
As far as Gabriel could make out, there were no security cameras, nothing that would announce the presence of an intruder. But he wasn’t ready yet.
It would be three more days before he would kill again. Three more days before Demon told him what to do.
