Vincent’s backyard was a gaudy concrete courtyard full of statues, pots, and cheap-looking—though undoubtedly expensive—Faux-Classical ornaments. A swimming pool lapped and gurgled in the darkness, storm-gray under the heavy, smoggy sky. The night wind had a bitter edge that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck, and I held the knife low, the blade turned away, as I advanced around towards the back door.
The garden bed just next to the attached sunroom was planted with rows of mature angel’s trumpets, and my nose was full of the dizzying vanilla smell of them as I unlocked the door with my bump keys. It was a strange plant to grown in a heavily trafficked place like this. Angel’s Trumpets, Datura, are very poisonous and are used to make one of the more terrifying drugs to come out of Colombia, scopolamine. I knew of it because it was an ingredient used to create zombies: the living slave sort, not the walking dead.
I turned on a small flashlight to scrutinize the second lock on the inside door. It was of better make than the last one, with a heavy bump-proof cylinder. Frowning, I put the keys away and, with the flashlight clutched between my teeth, got out a small tension wrench and picks. After five minutes and two broken picks, I was finally able to press in the trick tumbler and carefully, delicately turn the lock. Done.
I pulled a cap down over my ears, shouldered my tool bag, and padded inside with the knife up and ready, warily navigating the sunroom in the dark. Light spilled across the floor from a door further down. I let my eyes adjust, my breathing harsh in my own ears. The sunroom was pretty enough, like the rest of the house, though the plants that lined the glass sill along the far wall were brown-lipped and dying. Something about the stillness of the air was acutely uncomfortable, an eerie disturbance of the ear like a badly tuned violin being sawed at its highest key. Nothing was visibly wrong, but the place felt… hollow. Wounded and bleeding, like Nacari’s dump site.
The kitchen was expensively furnished, the air of the interior house cool and temperate, but I did not step inside. Every room had a motion sensor, but judging by the sensor lights, only the rooms beyond the kitchen were armed. The control panel was just outside the kitchen door in the sunroom, a ten-digit number pad with newish numbers.
The unsubtle way to deal with any electronic device is to draw a sigil on it and blow it with a push of blunt force power. A more skilled mage could probably do it without setting the wall on fire, but they’d still probably draw the cops. The problem a lot of spooks have is that as a true magus, capable of the Art, they tend to over-rely on their eldritch might. Being caught out by a problem that can’t be solved with magic has been the downfall of many spooks better than me. They have a prison just for us, somewhere out in Wisconsin, and you can bet there are mages in the police force: The Adepts of the Vigiles Magicarum. They track and profile spooks. Legends say that magi are a subtle breed, and it is always good to prove them right.
I took my flashlight and a small mirror and used the intense, reflected light to scan the surface of the keypad. The thing about ten-digit number locks like this one is that the owners very rarely change the numbers. If there are no breakins, they forget to change the code, or they do it infrequently—perhaps twice a year, if that. The codes are always four digits. People also often use their birth day and month or the year of their birth. I knew Vincent’s, but it was important to look and check first.
The light caught the delicate prints and smears of grease on the buttons. I leaned in and exhaled hoarsely against the metal a few times until they could be seen more clearly. To my surprise, only three digits were highlighted: Vincent had better sense than most. Three buttons, four numbers. One of them was a repeat. Zero had the heaviest prints and the most smearing, followed by one and four. I tried it: 0104. When I hit the key button, the sensor lights shut off.
Yes. Good password, but he had greasy hands.
Something clicked overhead. I froze, gut tightening, and only eased down when a puff of cold, crisp air blew against my face from an overhead vent. Air conditioning. There was mail on the kitchen counter, but it was all bills and junk. I rubbed my gloves on a soft cloth, and then started my investigation from the counter outwards. The pantry was stocked with snacks, and the refrigerator shelves were packed full of food of all kinds: amongst them was a box of reasonably fresh pizza with a half-empty bottle of beer beside it. The lit lights, the air-con, the alarms, the lack of mess… everything told me the same story. Vincent’s home had not been invaded and its occupant removed. It had been abandoned.
I trod quietly through the rest of the house, which was unlit, and the lights behind me gleamed off the knife blade. I passed through spills of cold, stale-smelling scent. The air of the den was heavy, humming with faint electrical discharge from the abandoned appliances. Signs of Vincent and Yuri’s habitation remained: impressions of their buttocks on the plastic sheets that covered the Romanesque furniture, an empty bottle of beer on the table, the small flask of cheap Polish vodka beside it. Two half-filled glasses and a stack of video cassettes sat beside the VCR.
Something nagged at me. There was no planning, but also no signs of a hasty, panicked exit. It was like they’d gotten up to go to the store and never returned. I glanced over the shelf of videotapes: half of them were pornography, the rest racing and action movies. The bottom shelf was devoted to videotaped TV shows Vincent had wanted to catch later on, recorded while sleeping or working. I ran a gloved finger over the stickers. The last date was the second day of the month. Vincent recorded the late-night wrestling for the morning.
I eyed the VCR, sitting on its shelf underneath the television. It was still turned on, and a red light blinked fitfully next to its shuttered mouth.
Tape slithered, and the cassette clicked and clacked its way to my hand when I hit the button. The sticker had no date or topic, but the tape had rewound. I pushed it back into the machine and turned the television on, cycling through the channels until I found the one which showed the video. After a flicker came the characteristic fanfare of the WWF theme music blaring while a wrestler stalked the studio hallways with a scowl. Satisfied, I reached out to turn it off but then paused, hand extended, as the video began to bleed to gray. The image and voices flickered, wavered, and then dissolved into black-and-white snow with an ear-splitting, hair-raising whine. The sound rose and fell, and as I watched, the fizzing snow began to separate and congeal into shapes like crawling insects. Like a carpet of bees. My skin crawled on my flesh, mouth full of the blinding white the sound created in my mouth and behind my eyes. Hastily, I turned it off and backed away. Well away.
The next thing was to see when the wrestling had been on. I took the TV guide to the lit kitchen to flip through it. WWF was on Friday nights, starting at nine p.m. The distortion had begun not five minutes afterward, and the four-hour tape had recorded all the way through to the end of its feed and rewound. My imagination filled in the blanks. Vincent and Yuri, nervously trying to develop some rapport over junk food and alcohol, had settled down to watch the wrestling after a trip out to the store, and then… something happened. Something which removed them from the living room as if they’d vanished.
I pulled my gloves up along my wrists before pressing on deeper into the silence of the house, up the spiral stairs that led to the bedrooms. I was accompanied by an eerie sense of displacement as I trod down the carpeted hallway, opening doors to peer inside. There was a personal gym, a studio, and a monstrously large bathroom. Nothing was upset. Nothing was broken or rushed. There should have been something other than the confirmation that Vincent, and probably Yuri as well, had both gone missing between eight and eleven the night before, but there was nothing. No scattered clothes. No missing toiletries. No sign of violence.