Chapter Two: Hellin

Furtively, I walked toward his door, stroking Gorm, and trying to talk myself out of it.

Before I knocked, I noticed the keypad.

No one had keys anymore. Keypads were regulation for all buildings after about the year 2050. You had to go somewhere special and pay a lot of money to hire an old locksmith and get keys and locks installed. Passwords and codes were used for opening doors, starting up screens, cars and more sophisticated equipment… Even a dump like this had a pretty good, keypad-based security system, but I was in luck, because it was old and a few of the numbers were very warn down. The two, three, five, six and seven were almost completely gone, while the other numbers looked almost untouched.

I did not knock on his door, but instead pulled a pen from my coat pocket and wrote 2, 3, 5, 6, 7. I loved puzzles.

The drive home was considerably safer. Gorm fell asleep against my neck, and I let him sleep in my bed, since I had forgotten his basket at the hotel.

I sat down and wrote the letters that would go with each number. Abc, def, jkl, mno, pqrs. I stayed up all night, and soon discovered that the task of learning the password was going to be a lot harder than I had previously anticipated. I knew that the word was at least five letters long, and that at least one of the letters from each of these groups had to be used to make the right word. I thought that would be quite enough to go on, but I did not anticipate how difficult or frustrating it would be.

Finally, I fell asleep at dawn and slept until Gorm got hungry and woke me up by squeezing. I got him breakfast and made myself something, then listened to a message from my editor that was left on my phone. I called him back and assured him that my newest book would be complete by the end of the month, and that no, I didn’t have a title yet.

I stared at the numbers on my phone, my brain still trying to come up with the different combinations that could create a password.

Angrily, I had just decided that perhaps the code was just a number code and didn’t have a word that corresponded with it after all. I almost set to phone down, but my eyes caught something that made me stop.

7, 2, 5, 3, 6. Salem.

My eyes stared at the phone. It was so simple, and it had come to me so quickly, that I thought for certain it would be the code.

Biting my lip, I realized that I was planning to break into The Nephilim’s house tonight while he was out disrupting Samedi’s plans that we had overheard together. It was crazy, because there was no guarantee that he would have any information. It might be better to simply call some of Khufu’s friends at the police station and tell them about what I had heard.

My first instinct upon hearing that Mr. Sademi was in town was Elisabeth’s immediate safety. But she and Khufu had boarded and plane for Italy immediately after their wedding. She was far away from him, and with her detective husband.

Salem haunted my thoughts all day. I could not write, I could not read, I just curled in a ball on my sheets and played with Gorm all day, while catching up on some of the sleep that I had deprived myself of the night before.

I left my apartment at a quarter to ten, and took Gorm with me, since I did not dare risk losing him again. I arrived at The Nephilim’s home just before ten o’clock. My assumption was that he had already left to meet the bad guys. Same as the night before, the area around the crummy little apartment complex were he lived was dissertated, dark and dank.

I punched SALEM into the keypad, and felt a butterfly attempt to escape from my stomach as the door buzzed and opened. I slipped into the apartment quickly, and closed the door behind me.

The Nephilim’s apartment was as shabby as any I had ever seen or written about in my books. The only thing about it that was nice at all was the kitchen, which was filled with a lot of good quality equipment and culinary accessories. The rest of the house was grey. He had no furniture, except for a table in the kitchen and one chair. His bed was nothing more than a pile of comforters and pillows on the floor in the front room. Next to a very large box of bullets and a rack hung with two katanas, a Chinese broadsword and a very heavy looking kwan dao.

Perhaps the really remarkable thing I found that night, and the thing that would ultimately help me find Baron Samedi and so much more, was the back room. The living room was being used as a bedroom, and the one bedroom in back was empty save for the walls, which overwhelmed me on first sight. In place of wallpaper, there were thousands of photographs, newspaper clippings and notes that were pinned around the walls, vibrant as memories.

A red web was spun across the walls and over the room, I ducked under the crimson web and looked closely at the photos, beginning to recognize faces. They were people I had seen on television, in the papers, and a few I had seen in real life. There were criminals, some of them were masterminds of the evil arts, others were dumb thieves and drug addicts and dealers, some of them were completely innocent, the victims of crimes, or people who I had never heard of.

Each picture had a long red thread connecting it to someone else’s photograph, creating the web that had startled me when I first entered the room. I thumbed through the notes on a bomber who had attacked a hospital. The handwriting was tiny and cramped together, but easy to read, the space on the page was all used economically. Understanding the words and understanding the meaning was quite different however.

Some things were clear; Suspect former name of Banner, lived in Long Beach? Unsolved double homicide, Banner would have been eighteen, same age as victims. Same high school? Or Has a strange attraction to red cars.

But then there were lines that seemed completely irrelative to the crime, or were just confusing. I read and reread a line about a woman who had her car stolen by a couple of gang members; Pretty face, she looks like a girl that was destroyed. Or a bit about a school teacher who had seduced a few of his students; It hid in my closet and whispered things to me when I was alone, but it was never real, it was just her.

I tore my eyes away from the strange and cryptic messages that The Nephilim used to help remind himself of something I could not hope to understand. The other photos demanded my attention for a while, until I noticed one in particular, in the center of the wall and moved up to be above all the others. My eyes were easily drawn to it, because it had so many red threads that originated on this photo and spread out to many of the criminals and victims on the walls.

There were no notes on this photograph, but I did not take notice of this for several minutes, because my eyes were locked on it. The woman depicted was the most beautiful I had ever seen. Her almond shaped eyes were dark and alluring, framed by long black lashes, her dark hair was curled softly around a pale face, she was almost smiling, her dark red lipstick was slightly smudged, but everything complimented her and she was stunning.

Why was there nothing written about this woman? I did not recognize her, but she seemed to know me, by the way her eyes bore deeply into mine. What made her important? More important, in fact, than the others, for The Nephilim had a kind of silence about her? Curiously, I pulled the photo down and looked at the back.

I miss your hands and your kiss.

All my love, Hellin.

The handwriting was wide and loopy.

I put the picture back on the wall and noticed another beautiful woman on the board.

It was Elisabeth. The photograph looked like it was taken from her high school year book. There was one red thread, connecting her to husband Khufu, who was clustered with the other investigators who were looking for The Nephilim. His notes of Khufu were quite revealing; Possible crooked cop, his wedding was used as a meeting spot for some of Samedi’s associates.

I frowned, and searched the other photos quickly, and finally found Baron Samedi’s section of the wall. He had as many threads as Hellin, linking him to dozens of different evil doers and victims.

His notes were long, there were pages and pages pinned to the wall. I did not dare take anything, but I pulled out the notebook I always carried with me, and let Gorm wrap around my boot, while I copied down one particular pages marked; Former Addresses.

There was no hint at a current location, but I felt I might be able to find something from the old houses were he used to live. There were some more random facts that triggered my curiosity, I wrote these down as well, then satisfied that I had all the information that would help me, I prepared to leave.

But I stopped, and stared at Elisabeth’s picture. Why was there no thread to Baron Samedi? Why did it say nothing about the brutal assault she had suffered at his hand? Perhaps Elisabeth was new to his board. He might have only put her picture up there that day, and with a record so long, it was possible that The Nephilim could not know all of Samedi’s various crimes.

On the ground in the corner of the room, there was a basket of push-pins and red thread with scissors. I cut a thread and pulled it between Samedi and Elisabeth, and wrote a short note; Raped by Samedi at sixteen and cut almost to death; still has a scar on her throat. I wrote in my hurried, messy scrawl, I had to do something before fear convinced me to leave. I wanted to help the Nephilim discover a good reason for why Khufu would never cooperate with Samedi. He wasn’t crooked.

I uncoiled Gorm from my ankle and went back to my car, taking care to shut the door behind myself.

I woke up the next morning, early enough to watch the news. There was an interesting story about a foiled robbery, during which the involvement of The Nephilim was alluded to heavily by the reporters. I was disappointed by their report however, since they seemed to be implying that he was working with the robbers.

Then again, perhaps, I was being a little to trusting of a man who I did not know. I felt a little guilty for breaking into his apartment and invading his privacy. Particularly I felt strange when I thought of Hellin’s picture. Of course, I wanted more than anything to find Samedi. I rationalized, and thought to myself that The Nephilim was a criminal himself, according to Khufu and the rest of the police squad.

Still, I felt a connection to him. It was something I tried not to think about, because this was not about me, this was about Elisabeth. I could not let myself to drawn to him, simply because we… perhaps… shared a strange trait.

I had played it over and over again in my mind, as his feet lifted off the ground and he flew into the air, as if thrown by some invisible force. It was impossible, and brilliant, and the moment I saw him do it, I felt chilled, as my mind conjured images that I held dear, of a few times in my life when I had seen something that was supposed to be impossible.

The first time I changed my face, I did not know what I was doing. I felt sick and weak and it only lasted until I saw what I had done to myself. My fear of death and the sick shock I felt at seeing a girl my own age had affected me strangely. It had triggered something that I was only recently learning to control.

For a long time, I thought I was seeing things. I thought that perhaps it was one of those subtle tricks of the mind that everyone experiences, but does not talk about. A few weeks after Elisabeth was raped, I was staring at my face in the mirror and I saw my dark eyes momentarily change to look just like her pale ones.

Sometimes, people I was speaking to would look at me strangely. I was always worried that I was accidentally making myself look like them. Once I had accepted that this was something that I was doing unconsciously, and not a trick of the mind, I started watching for it. Like any puzzle I would solve, I was trying to find a pattern, or a secret to help me understand why and how it happened.

Then, I started turning into people who do not exist.

The first time I did this, it was while writing my fourth novel. I was trying to finish it by the end of the month, so I buried myself away in my home alone for days, writing and sleeping. I kept all my screens off and my phone dead. I finished writing the last of one hundred and twenty three thousand words. I cried a little, because I had killed a character I loved in the last chapter; an old woman, who was tired and amusing and greeted death.

I looked down at my hand as I dropped the pen, and felt it grow stiff and tired. My clear little white hand sprouted blemishes and wrinkles, exactly like the ones I had imagined on her hands. I stared at my hand and felt my face and wiry grey hair.

Since then, I often momentarily turned into my characters. I had once spent half the day as a twelve year old girl who was a particular favorite of mine, from a book that I still had not finished. Still, I was slow to accept what I was capable of, and I had only recently made any kind of real effort to control this power, and also, to prove to myself that I was not simply mad.

I tried subtle things first. I turned my eyes blue, took a picture and showed it to Elisabeth. She said that she liked my eyes dark. I started trying to change into people when I was alone. It was hard, and I always weak and dizzy afterwards, like I had just drawn blood. I was once sick for a whole day after making myself grow a beard.

This was not normal, what I could do, and I was not sure why I could do it, or even how it could be useful to me. Whenever I thought of how this could benefit me, I always felt guilty, and thought to myself that it would be dishonest to use it.

I debated about whether or not I should ever try to contact The Nephilim again, while I drove out to the one of three former addresses of Samedi that were close by.

Most of his houses were in other countries, there were two in South America, one in India, one in Egypt, one in China, one in England and two in Thailand. One of the old houses on the list was the one that he had lived in when he was Mr. Bathory’s partner, before his career as a full fledged crime lord really started, I saved this visit for last and went to the other two houses first.

One was on the edge of town, opposite of The Nephilim’s apartment. It was one of the only houses within the city limits. An extravagant mansion, with a gate and a keep out sign. I knocked on the door of a neighbor and asked him about Mr. Samedi, but received little information except that no one seemed to think anyone lived there or ever had as long as they could remember.

The second house was at the halfway point between the city and my old town. It was a farmhouse that was being rented out by a nice family, who admitted that they did not know their land lord, but occasional received mail that he signed with the initials B.S.

I asked to see these letters, but the farmer admitted that he never kept them, so I gave him my number and asked him to please call me the next time one arrived so I could get the return address. I knew that they would probably do no such thing. They had not even asked me why I wanted to know, and I did not blame them.

The return to my old town brought back memories, but not as many as I thought it would. I passed the catholic girls’ school where Elisabeth and I had met. The mortuary had been transformed into a parking lot for a nice looking department store that was having a semi-annual sale.

Samedi’s old house was empty, and the neighbors didn’t remember him, except to say that they read in the papers about how he and his partner stole from their clients.

Sitting in my car with the engine off, I wondered what I was doing.

My mind’s eyes reached back to the first night in the hospital that Elisabeth could speak again. I sat with her on the bed, while she stared up at the ceiling. I knew it hurt her to talk, but she was determined to do it, so I did not stop her, or suggest she rest the way her parents and the doctors and nurses did.

“I thought he was going to kill me,” she murmured.

“So did I.”

“So did he,” she pointed out, “I could have died, easily. Why not?” she was crying now and she reached out for me, expecting my hand to be there, so I gave it to her. “I always thought that if something like that ever happened to me, I would just do whatever he wanted so I could live. But I didn’t, I couldn’t. I was so angry. I was so furious… I wanted him to kill me, for a while there, when he left and I was bleeding out and felt myself get cold and dark, I thought he’d done me a favor, to finally kill me.”

The sun was bright through my windshield as the clouds that had been blocking it passed by. I blinked and glanced at myself in the rear view mirror. I focused and changed my face to look like Hellin’s, but it did not feel right on my skin, so I changed back into myself, put on my sunglasses and started to head home, trying to think up a new plan to find Samedi.