Chapter Three

The dark overcast ensnaring the sky peered through Peter’s living room window like an angry voyeur. Peter slowly pried his eyes apart, grime encrusting the lids. His apartment was lacking of any grace or luxury of any kind. From the creaking floorboards to the rats living in the walls nearest the kitchen, it was not a place that could be considered a reasonable dwelling by many standards.

Peter kicked his legs off the couch. His heels landed with a muffled thud on the floor, muffled by the many mismatched throw rugs and mats that littered the base of his home. Rubbing his eyes with the base of his palms, he stood up, swaying in his morning grogginess.

With one hand leading his way, he found his way into his kitchen. The kitchen, as anyone who cared to look could see, was not much better than the living room. A thin layer of dust had become a thick layer of hardened slime on the tiles of this room. His sink was laden down with plastic silverware and foam take-out boxes, his cooking skills had left home with his wife.

As he opened the door to the refrigerator, which was propped up on one side by a stack of terribly mistreated books, he became very aware that someone was in the room with him. He paused in his attempt to retrieve a carton of orange juice, three months past the expiration date, from the center shelf of the refrigerator and took a brief glance around the room. There was no one there. Feeling as if it were just stupid paranoia that he had collected during all those years on the job, Peter returned to his fridge to see if any digestible products were still inside the faulty appliance.

His eyes were sunken and his chin was flaked with small patches of dying hairs. His reflection appalled him more than most mug shots. Peter gurgled some mouthwash in the back of his throat, the image of his decrepit face disappearing from view.

He then threw his head downward and spewed the foaming liquid into the basin of the sink. He reached for the towel and patted his face. He peered once more into the mirror and recoiled in fear.

It was him in the reflection, however it was not. Blood was splashing out of every orifice, the reflection clawing at its face with flesh-encrusted nails. A gaping hole, void of teeth, tongue, and lips replaced the image’s mouth and it was stretching, as if it were screaming. Peter tripped backward over the toilet and fell into the shower, the back of his skull connecting with the tile of the shower. His vision blurred, but the image of the shrieking and blood drenched reflection did not leave his view until he had blacked out entirely.

****

The pain in his head he could deal with. However, he could not handle what he saw in that mirror. Peter pondered that brief moment of horror sitting in the back of a taxi on his way to the precinct. He was late and he knew that he would pay for it when Phelps found him. The barking would commence and he would not hear the end of it until he went home that night, he was sure of it. His palms were numb, fingertips stinging like the first feelings of frostbite. His eyes stared out of the window, but his eyes saw nothing of the urban landscape that passed his vision. Maybe it was the blow to the head, maybe it was that image in the mirror, but Peter could not focus on anything that passed his gaze, no matter what it was.

“Hey buddy, 18.53!” Peter snapped out of his deep, yet empty stupor when the cabbie was yelling from the driver’s seat that they had arrived. He threw some money at the man’s face with a very snide remark and left the back of the black car, in favor of the steps of his precinct.

The front door, always slightly off its hinge, creaked open. It did not lightly creaked open. The sound that would rival a banshee echoed around the busy atrium as Peter pushed his way past the stubborn door.

“How many times do we have to call those guys down at repair to fix this damn door?” Peter barked, more than he needed to, at the rookie sitting at the front desk.

Not waiting for any kind of stammered reply, Peter pressed his way into the crowded hallways of the understaffed police department. The worn hardwood floors creaked under foot as Peter struggled past a janitor with a vacuum. The only solidarity in the ground occurred when Peter’s soles smacked onto the concrete floor of the holding cells in the dungeon of the building.

The only souls down in this dank place were a thug that was rounded up two days ago for beating his girlfriend, a junkie that obviously came in this morning, and the man he had placed here last night. Though the flickering light bulbs made it hard to focus, Peter could easily see the man’s face.

“Good morning Peter.” His face was as if was still set in stone. His eyes remained red and unblinking in the light of the dying light bulbs illuminating his cell. His mouth was etched in the gash-like grin he wore the previous night, teeth meshing perfectly with each other.

Peter held up a set of handcuffs. “Place your arms through the bars.”

“Letting me go?”

“Not exactly.”

The man slowly rose from his seat as walked, sliding his feet heavily on the floor with every stride. He placed his wrists on the ledge of the horizontal edge that ran around the cell, connecting the vertical bars and waited patiently for Peter. Peter approached the cell, cuffs open and hands ready to grab the man’s hands.

“Unnerved a little detective? Something off today?”

“None of your business.” Peter reached the bars and reached out his hand to grab the man’s hand.

“Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

“What?”

“I heard that somewhere. ‘Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.’ I guess that would be true, wouldn’t you think so?”

Peter clasped his fingers around the back of the man’s hand and circled the cuffs around his wrists.

“C’mon.”

Peter knew that this was against protocol, but he did not care. He led the man from the dungeon and into the back stairwell. He pulled the man by the cuffs up to the top floor and into the only interrogation room in the building that did not have an adjacent room that peered in with a large pane of two-way mirror.

Peter pushed the man into a metal folding chair in that uninteresting room and bolted the small door.

“So you have me alone, do you?”

“Who are you?”

The man sighed, the grin loosening its grip on his face for a fraction of a second. “Why are we so caught up on this name business? Is it a cop thing?”

“No.”

“Then why?” Even though the man sounded genuinely curious, his face betrayed his intentions. He was simply trying to run out the clock of the 24-hour period that Peter was allotted to keep him.

Peter tried a different tact. “Because it’s common courtesy. You know mine, I should know yours.”

“Decency doesn’t become you Peter, stick to vulgarity and debauchery. Nevertheless, you are correct it is common courtesy.”

He sat there, his face stone still and unnervingly eerie. He then, for the first time, broke his gaze with a single blink of his eyes and relaxed his mouth so he was simply looking at Peter with a face that was moderately relaxed.

“Very well. My name is Alaric.”

“Alaric?”

“My father likes…unique names.”

“I can tell.”

Alaric pulled his arms up and over his head; wrists still shackled by the handcuffs, and rested his palms against the rear of his skull. He leaned back in his chair and cocked his head slightly to one side.

“So Peter…”

“What?”

“What do you want to talk about?” Peter didn’t answer. “There has to be a reason why you brought me into an interrogation room devoid of windows for others to indulge their inner voyeurs. Or is it because you are afraid to see your reflection again?”

Peter went bone white, his blood running as ice water. Alaric stared at him, unblinking once again, and cocked his head further to the right, almost looking at him sideways.

“Wha…” Peter could only murmur part of a word, nothing more.

“Having nightmares in your waking hours, are we Peter? Are you thinking that your mind, which has been wracked with chemotherapy, nicotine and late night disputes with a daughter that is ridden more times than a bucking bronco, is coming apart?”

Peter, almost by reflex, backed up against the door, trying to achieve as much space as possible between him and this red-eyed man.

“Believe me Peter; you have nothing to fear…yet.”

“What’s that mean?” Peter’s throat was contracted and dry.

“I mean,” Alaric said softly, bringing his hands back down to rest on his lap. “you have nothing to fear now. But just wait…”

He threw the pair of handcuffs onto the table, unlocked and undamaged. He leaned forward, his manic grin back in place and whispered, “You will.”