Hallow Read online

Hallow

  Renato Carreira

  Copyright 2014 Renato Carreira

  Discover other titles by this author at:

  Cover by Guilherme Condeixa

  https://pipeandbookcovers.wordpress.com/

  Table of Contents

  0.1

  1

  1.1

  2

  2.1

  3

  3.1

  4

  4.1

  5

  5.1

  6

  6.1

  7

  7.1

  8

  8.1

  About the author

  0.1

  There was a loud popping sound in the corner of the big abandoned warehouse, followed by a sudden gust of wind that seemed to come from no place at all. It blew the dirty rags on the floor for a second and stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Everything remained the same, apart from the moved rags and the woman standing where there was no one the second before.

  She kept her arms bent and close to her chest and seemed to be bracing for impact. Feeling no impact, she opened one eye, then the other, and relaxed, lowering her hands. She looked at herself and made sure she was in one piece. Only then she looked around. There was a wall six feet away from her. One minor calculation mistake and she would have materialized inside, exploding in a cloud of brick fragments and guts. She thanked Creation for progress in time travel. They called it 'corporeal resonance', a physical vibration that could be captured across the continuum, indicating, with a variable degree of certainty, the presence and shape of inanimate objects. It was a relatively recent triumph in time travel technology and effectively tripled survivability rates. It was still a risky endeavor, of course, but not as much as in the time of the pioneers, when, together with other significant risks, timenauts travelled with complete acceptance that they would be trapped in the past for the rest of their lives, since the technology that permitted reverse chronological transit was still decades away from existence.

  She opened her pouch and took out a small gold medal hanging from a gold chain. The medal was shaped like an eight-pointed star, the symbol of the Divine Mentor. It had been a present from her mother when she graduated her sixth school cycle and, although she didn't consider herself a religious woman, not anymore, at least, she always kept the medal with her for good luck. She put it around her neck. It was completely against regulation, of course, but what Command didn't know wouldn't hurt them. There was some rule about bringing contemporary artifacts on missions and it was perfectly reasonable, but she planned to keep it hidden away and no local-timers would ever see it. Command was a bit too strict with safety rules. Probably because their technicians were always selected among people without any inclination to go on field missions and that left them too much time to worry about anything that could, and too often did, go wrong. If one day the Archbishop himself decided to travel, they wouldn't allow it, unless he took off his ring and chain of office. Which was comforting, in a way. The highest authority of the Church should obey the same rules imposed on lower-ranking members of the hierarchy.

  She took out a slate and a stylus and wrote her positive arrival report, following the template.

  Pos Arriv. No malfunc. No disab. On to target. Drop 1.

  To the naked eye, the slate remained black and empty, as it should be. No one would be able to read it without a proper intraocular scanner, which would only be invented five centuries later. She flipped open her marker, used the keyboard to enter the coordinates she had previously memorized and walked in the direction pointed in the screen until the arrow touched the glowing circle. Nothing on the spot but a small pile of rubble. Perfect for a drop site. She looked around, making certain she wasn't being watched, crouched and hid the slate under the rubble. There it would stay for centuries, travelling through time in the conventional manner, until the warehouse collapsed on top of it, until some other building was erected on the same location and collapsed as well, until it got buried under layers of sediment, to be found in her time with the help of locators capable of capturing its electronic signature within a radius of one mile. If someone should find the slate before and take it further than one mile, the message would be lost forever. That was still one of the downsides of time travelling technology. Until someone discovered a way to send inanimate objects on their own through time, timenauts were forced to communicate without any guarantee that their messages would reach the intended destination.

  She put the marker and the stylus back in her pouch and looked at her wrist chronometer. The numbers were going down continuously, as they were meant to be. There was plenty of time.

  She walked to the open warehouse door and looked at the blue sky of the past, taking one step, then another, and setting off on a final effort to assure her people that their faith in the Divine Mentor was not misplaced.

  1

  Walt Jenkins stopped at the end of the alley and waited for the others to gather around in a more or less orderly circle. There were seven foreign tourists (three couples and a lonely oriental traveler) and four local thrill-seekers (two middle-aged guys and a slightly older woman, apparently on friendly terms with each other; plus an acne-ridden kid with a bright red knit cap and a smartphone that seemed glued to his fingers).

  "Right. Welcome to Murder Lane." He raised his arms and directed their attention to the less-than-imposing surroundings. The backs of degraded brick buildings with black iron fire escape stairs going all the way to the top of the seventh floor on each side. Some windows were broken, others were open and letting out a delightful suggestion of food smells and exotic music being played loud enough to reach its continent of origin. Trash cans and dumpsters piled against the walls on the right while, on the left, some poor soul had spent the night on a bed of moist cardboard and was now probably sucking on a carton of cheap wine as first meal of the day. "It was here that on September 24th, 1907, Henry Oswald McCourt, known as The Belt Strangler, murdered his twelfth and final victim, a twenty-two year old prostitute named Olivia Masterson. The murder weapon was, as in his previous murders, a thick brown leather belt, which he tied around the necks of his unfortunate victim and pulled until she choked. On this night, which was to be the final night in this notorious serial-killer's career, McCourt followed Olivia to this alley, where she lived in a derelict house no longer standing, and put an end to her life, while her two sons waited for their mother upstairs." He pointed to an air-conditioner unit and heard the collective gasp of horror. That part of the description always had that effect. "But he wasn't counting on the neighbor watching the scene from a window across the alley." He pointed again, this time at an open window where a woman's head with rollers on her hair briefly appeared before disappearing again, looking vaguely outraged. "The neighbor, one Natasha Kulkina, a factory worker recently arrived from Imperial Russia, screamed and alerted a policeman passing by, constable Horace Nolan, who came running and killed McCourt with two shots on the chest when he refused to raise his arms as ordered."

  The kid in the red cap stopped fiddling with his phone to raise one hand in the air. That wasn't a class. When he signed up for the Urban-Mythic Crime Tour, nobody told him that he was allowed to ask questions. Still, Walt humored him.

  "Yes?"

  "When did you say this happen?"

  "1907," he replied.

  "Yeah, but what day?"

  "We seem to have a true aficionado among us," said Walt, making some of the others laugh briefly. "September 24th."

  "Ah."

  That ah sounded like a warning that there was more coming, but Walt pretended not to notice.

  "Now, if you care to follow me, we'll move on to our next..." The kid's hand was raised again. God damn it. "What?"

  "What day was that?"


  "I just told you."

  "I mean day of the week."

  He thought about it for an instant. For some reason, he was starting to feel cornered.

  "Wednesday?" He didn't mean to make it sound like a question, but it was too late now.

  "Ah."

  "What?"

  The kid raised his phone and pointed at the screen.

  "This calendar app says it was Tuesday."

  "I guess you're right. So what?"

  "So I think you're full of it."

  "What?" Don't let it be one of those days, Walt thought. Please, God. He talked to God on occasion inside his head, but it was never a specific God. Nor did he expect Him to be listening. It was just something he did, hoping slightly nihilistic atheists were allowed to engage in one-sided conversations with divine beings without being considered too absurd.

  "You're making it all up," said the kid. The other tourists started giving each other looks. Walt was very close to let the situation slip out of his grip.

  "Yeah? You got that from an app also?" he asked, smiling sarcastically. What else could he do?

  "Yes, actually." He pointed at the phone again. "It's called a browser. Google gives no results to searches for the Belt Strangler," he said. Oh boy. "Lots of people named Henry Oswald McCourt, but none are serial-killers."

  "Really?" Around him, the circle of tourists was moving from incomprehension to the beginning of outrage. Even the foreigners were catching on. Walt walked towards the kid and raised a hand. "Let me see that."

  As soon as the phone touched his hand it was flying towards the nearest brick wall. It hit the target with a satisfying crack and fell on the open dumpster below.

  The kid stared at him, his eyes wide open and looking absolutely horrified. Walt felt sympathetic. He knew how kids grew attached to their gadgets. The reaction was totally understandable. But there was nothing that could be done. The phone was destroyed and, in his defense, the kid was sabotaging his livelihood.

  "What did you just do?" he asked, raising his voice to a high shrill.

  "Hmm..." said Walt, looking the kid over and fixing his eyes on a particularly nasty zit. "I see some of us are a bit special. When did you start having difficulties understanding things?"

  Three tourists were already heading out of the alley, not wanting to stay for the rest of the show. Their loss. They had already paid for the tour.

  "You have to pay phone," said one of the foreigners in broken English. It was a fat blond guy with red cheeks and pale, skinny, hairless eggs coming out of cargo shorts too tight for the girth of his ass.

  "I have to pay shit," stated Walt.

  The Oriental said something too, not even bothering to say it in a language anyone else could understand.

  "You have to pay for it and give these people their money back," said the kid, taking a step forward and pushing his luck. Walt was taller and wider, but that didn't seem to change his mind.

  "Yes! Money back!" said Fatface Cargoshorts. "And pay phone."

  "No awesome tanga rod," said the Oriental. Or, at least, he said something that sounded exactly like it. One of the couples started going as well, but the remaining clients were getting dangerously restless.

  "Is any of it true?" asked a woman.

  "Of course it is," said Walt. He almost felt offended by their lack of trust.

  "I doubt it. I was checking it online as he spoke. Some of the stories are true, but he gets facts and locations all wrong. Others are completely made up. Like this one or the Twin Killers of North Street."

  "The Twin Killers of North Street are real," protested Walt. "I did research."

  "Where? The National Archive of Crap You Make Up to Fool People and Get Their Money?"

  Walt pointed his index finger right at the kid's face.

  "You're out of order, young man!" Somehow, it didn't sound as effective when he said it as it did when he heard someone else say it.

  "So? Is it true or not?" asked a woman.

  "Sure it's true."

  "He's lying," said the kid, determined to destroy his reputation as shock-tour guide who actually looked things up and cared. "He said two Irish twins killed nine sailors in North Street between 1892 and 1894. I checked. North Street didn't even exist back then. It was an empty plot of land."

  "You should be shame of you self," said Fatface, growing redder and redder.

  "Well?" asked the same woman.

  "Well what?"

  "He's accusing you of making another story up. Aren't you going to defend yourself?"

  Should he bother? He had started those tours three months before and managed to get a steady influx of customers only because he made stories up. If they wanted boring facts, they could take one of the other boring crime tours.

  "I'm telling you it happened. This kid knows nothing."

  "Where did it happen?" asked a guy. "If North Street didn't exist yet."

  "It didn't exist here," Walt said, hoping that would leave everyone satisfied so they could stop the questioning and move on to the next stop in the tour: the site of a gruesome multiple murder which he had also made up from scratch. "But there was a North Street somewhere else where the things I mentioned happened."

  "Where?", asked the same guy.

  "Paris."

  "Paris?"

  "I think. Or somewhere in France. But I'm pretty sure it was Paris."

  "There's a North Street in Paris?" asked the woman who asked him to defend himself.

  "I guess there is."

  "Don't you think that's a bit hard to believe?" asked a guy who had kept quiet until then. They were getting more confident. If they all started asking questions, he was done for. He found himself looking towards the end of the alley and mentally tracing an escape plan.

  "It's called North Street, but in French," he said.

  "You shouldn't be tricking people like this," said the woman from before. "You should give us our money back."

  "What a disgrace," said another foreigner in much better English than Fatface's.

  "I'll make sure to tell all my friends about this," said another woman. "You won't get anyone else to come on your tours. I have a lot of friends."

  "Good for you, lady," said Walt.

  "Don't you talk to my wife like that!" said the tall guy with a bald patch standing next to her.

  "Like what? I apologize for calling her a lady."

  "You piece of..." The guy moved forward, grabbed him by his shirt collar and was still raising his fist when Walt's forehead hit him hard on the nose, making it squirt blood on his wife's screaming face.

  Which was unfortunate because that was the exact moment when the police arrived.