citizens a detour from the perpetuating cycle of poverty and crime they had been caught up in.
“Excuse me,” a man asked from under a white mustache, “could you direct me to your reference section. My grandson’s doing a report on our city’s history.” I gave the man a faint smile, without coming out of my musings, and pointed in the proper direction. He nodded a “thank you” and herded the child off.
But his face spun in my mind a moment, and while the hair was whiter, the face plumper, the mustache bushier, I knew then the man was Carlos Bonilla. A college student handed me several heavy books and her library card, and I scanned them through, stamped them with the due date, and handed them to her. “Due in 28 days, October 3rd.”
My grip didn’t release around the heavy antique stamp. I found myself stalking towards the reference section, feeling the weight of the stamp and thinking it would do. I flattened myself against a wall of books, and peered around the corner. Bonilla sat in a chair, his grandson on his knee, and a large print history book on the table. He asked his grandson if he knew how many days there were in a year. “A hundred,” the child replied.
He laughed, and the muscles in my arm coiled; I pictured the stamp hitting the back of his skull, pushing through (perhaps needing a second or third stamp). “There’s three hundred, and sixty-five. But in the bad old days, there were as many murders in Medellín in a single day as there are in a year now.” The boy cooed, unable to entirely grasp the breadth of what his grandfather was saying.
The muscles in my arm untensed. Bonilla and I were both old men, now, different men. And this was a different Medellín. And I wanted no hand in bringing any of us back to what we’d been.
Table of Contents
Fainting Game
I’m not any kind of detective, if that’s what you’re thinking. If someone were to label me, I’m sure it would be unflattering, something along the lines of a paranoid enthusiast. I’d take it as a reverse compliment; Woody Allen said paranoia is simply possession of all the facts.
How familiar are you with the game? It’s not quite as disturbing as the sex bracelets phenomenon a couple years back, but it’s in that same realm. If you’ve ever heard of autoerotic asphyxiation, guys who choke themselves to heighten their orgasm, it’s sort of the kiddie version of that. The oxygen deprivation brings on a sense of euphoria as blood rushes back into the brain; sometimes it’s sexual, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s done in groups, which is actually safer. It’s the kids hanging from a belt on their doorknob that die.
There’s actually been some research into it, which is of course incomplete, because it’s hard to tell the difference between a fainter and a suicide, and there’s really just way less paperwork for the latter. But for over a decade the CDC’s been trying to keep up on it, and their statistics say that almost 90% of those who die playing the game are boys. But it’s the age where it gets really, truly weird. For 11 to 16 year olds the numbers basically flatline, but at 13 there’s an inexplicable spike, like 50% more deaths than at any other age.
And the numbers have increased dramatically in the last few years; I guess that’s what being a fad’s all about. But last year it started happening here- of course by here I mean this side of the state. And it happened again. The third time it actually made it into the local papers, and not just into AP stories republished in the national sections; that’s how you know it was spooking parents.
I noticed a pattern. Nothing like a star on a map, or a distinguishable modus operandi, just a sameness. And it wasn’t just that my local paper ran the exact same article with the names changed for two victims- which I wrote a very detailed letter to the editor about, which of course was never printed. There was a familiarity to it, like that moment of déjà vu when you realize you’ve already read a book and you’ve just bought it again with a different cover.
I started following the deaths closer. I spoke to family members or friends. Talked to MEs. When I could, I looked at the scene, and the body. There are literally like thousands of asphyxiation deaths, but I looked into every one in driving distance. Most of them, it was just a couple phone calls, and there was a note, or tendencies or a long history of depression, maybe previous attempts. A handful of them were people who played the game with friends, and then tried it on their own. But some of them just didn’t make sense.
I found myself driving home at four in the morning, and I passed a truck, and I don’t know what it was about the driver, but something in his eyes just set off a chain of dominoes in my mind I didn’t even know I’d been placing. I turned around and chased him for four miles before I forced him off the road. In his headlights, whatever ominous menace I thought I’d seen in him was gone; he was just a young trucker from Virginia, who’d only had his CDL for a week. He’d never been in the state before, and was actually lost and unaware he was in the state at all. I apologized to him profusely and gave him some directions; I still wrote down his plate number. I know he wasn’t what I’d seen in the shadows of his cab for the briefest moment, but it also made me realize that what I’d seen was out there.
Even still, I mostly wrote it off at first. I mean, road-hypnosis induced delusions aren’t something to rule your life by, so I let it lie. And then there was a death in the neighboring county, and through a string of serendipities I was there within an hour of the body’s discovery. I spoke with his mother very briefly before a detective with apparently nothing better to do with his time took me in for questioning. I told him about my theories, and he laughed at me. I’d been practicing it on my coworkers, my mom on the phone, and pretty much everybody had that same response, but no matter how many times it happens, you’re never fully inoculated to people laughing at you.
The deaths continued, and I continued to follow them. There was never an “Aha” moment, no smoking gun or even a lingering bit of evidence. The sameness just became stronger, like the tingling of spider-legs on your neck half-imagined in the night. As I acclimated to the sameness, I felt closer to it. I wasn’t tracking him, because that implies some conscious process- I was navigating entirely by feel.
And that’s why I was standing over the body, because I was getting closer, but just not quickly enough. There’ve been twelve victims before tonight, and this boy was thirteen. I don’t think there will ever be another one, not even if you keep me here for a thousand years. Oh… Officer, now can I have my phone call?
Table of Contents
Murder on Holiday
I’d known beforehand that Robert Anderson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department, would be on holiday in Switzerland. At this later writing, I suspect I would not have curtailed my activities otherwise, but it seemed a beneficial coincidence. The initial Metropolitan Police response was pitiful, as I’d hoped. Detectives linked the death of Mary Nichols to murders by a gang of hooligans.
The papers whipped up a frenzy by suggesting a single murderer, ironic in that Nichols was my first; the previous victims had been unrelated. The agitation was enough that several Chief Inspectors from Scotland Yard were assigned to the case, and at first I feared my fun had been ended prematurely.
But I’d had run-ins with coppers before, and I had a powerful urge to get closer and squeeze- to know who and what it was I was up against. So I tracked the man who whispers said was wiliest of the three to a pub. I sat down beside him and ordered a pint, and just as it arrived, I turned to him as if I hadn’t seen him before and said, “Inspector Abberline?”
“Yes?” Abberline looked and sounded like a bank manager, but that was a factor of birth and of temperament. There was something watchful behind his eyes, and he immediately distrusted me- immediately distrusts everyone. It’s an admirable trait in a Chief Inspector.
“I don’t meant to bother you, but as you’ve no doubt deduced from my speech, I’m not local. And the White Chapel murders fascinate me.”
“Murder,” he muttered under his bristly mustache.
“Murder?” I asked.
“First two, they were different. There’s only one White Chapel murder.”
“You don’t think there will be more?” I asked.
“Oh, there will be. Women, I expect. He despises women. He must. Why else prey on them otherwise?” I felt pity for him. Why women? I will not make an argument of theirs being the weaker sex, because that is a secondary calculation. They were foremost whores. And as whores, they were women open to going places a woman shouldn’t with a man she does not know; in a word, they were vulnerable.
“Why indeed? It must be difficult, to try and think like that kind of, of m-“
“Monster. It is. Drinking and brooding helps. Hating helps. If I weren’t a married man, maybe I’d hate women better, catch him faster.” Something in his eyes flashed, something dangerous and intelligent, and I realized it wasn’t a sparkle from liquor. “What’d you say your name was?”
“I hadn’t, yet; Mudgett is my name, Herman Mudgett.”
“And you’re American. Trade?”
“Proprietor of a hotel in Chicago, or at least I will be once it’s completed. If you’ve a mind to see the white city,” I stopped short of inviting him.
He licked his teeth, snorted out of his nose indifferently, like a bulldog who's lost interest in a kitten.