Chapter 2: The Dorian Collective
Never Speak a Word
Boston 1988
The heat seeped through the walls, lingering like the smell of rotting food. Even the bricks of Harvey’s fourth floor apartment glistened with humid perspiration.
“Do you think they’re really going to care what you think? They’ve been doing this for a week.”
Dom sat at the edge of his mattress with his hands balled into fists. He wore nothing but a sleeveless undershirt, clinging to his clammy chest. If anger were a tangible thing, the room would have been filled with his.
“I don’t care what they think,” Dom growled. “Enough is enough. Someone has to stop them from making that horrible screeching noise up there. We can’t be the only ones hearing this, are we?”
Harvey, unlike Dom, held more pacifism behind his exhausted gaze. Neither of them needed any more reason for rage. These days were, indeed, the mad blood stirring.
“Well if you storm up there you’re on your own, Dom. I don’t want anything to do with that.”
Harvey’s answer seemed to amplify his roommate’s frustration. Dom bit his lip hard enough to break skin. The fidgeting of his right leg sent steady vibrations through the floor.
“I don’t get it,” Dom continued. “You’re always the first one to back down! Stand up for something in your life, Harvey. For once, don’t be a coward. ”
The air condensed into something more like liquid. The humidity of it hit Harvey’s lungs like a wet blanket.
“I’m not a coward. I’d just rather not argue, especially with people we’ve never met. Whatever they’re doing up there, I’m sure it’s beyond our control, so just let it happen.”
Dom pried himself from the bed and paced the length of his bedroom. Harvey leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. The scorching part of the day had already passed, leaving the walls drenched in shadows like splashes of paint. The entire apartment, without the usual glow of sunlight, had since dimmed into nothing more than dusky shapes and colors.
“I’ll tell you what,” Dom answered. “Come upstairs with me and I’ll let you be the voice of reason. You can keep me from doing something I’ll regret. Deal?”
Harvey snapped a crooked little grin, but a quiet enough to show hesitation.
“I don’t know…”
“Honestly, you don’t have a choice,” Dom chuckled. “Let’s go.”
Before Harvey could rebuke, Dom stormed from the room with his tricep in tow. He clutched hard enough at it to shoot a bolt of pain up his arm while the strange clanking noise amplified above their heads. They found the kitchen, then eventually the front door before Harvey swiveled away from Dom’s surprisingly strong grip.
“We can’t just barge in there and expect them to stop,” Harvey said, nerves rising at the thought of confrontation. “Plus, we don’t even know what’s going on in there. Maybe it’s just renovations.”
“Well we’ll see, won’t we?”
They stormed through the hallway, passing the older woman from apartment 45B whose name Harvey could never remember. She stared with her ever-critical eyes.
Ms. Roark, Harvey thought. Yeah, that’s it.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
The canyon wrinkles that lined her Mediterranean features compacted into a puffed snarl. She hunched slightly, enough to keep her from making full eye contact with the pair of young men.
“Do you hear that banging? From upstairs?” Dom asked.
She seemed noticeably perplexed, unloading a grocery bag of vegetables and artisan bread from her arms. When she began fumbling for her keys, the men wondered if she’d forgotten the question.
“I haven’t heard anything,” she finally answered. “This apartment building’s been quiet for three decades. The rest of Boston—well—that’s a different story, but here? No.”
Both Harvey and Dom looked at one another, puzzled.
“You haven’t heard anything?”
This was their neighbor. She should be hearing it as loudly as them. She returned her eyes to the fumbling of her apartment keys without an answer.
“Let’s just go,” Dom said. “Her hearing must be going.”
“Is not!” Her burst of energy caught them by surprise. “I’m as fit as a fiddle. How dare you mock me? I’ll tell you what, your generation—”
“What about it?” asked Dom.
His antagonizing miffed Harvey more than Ms. Roark’s silence.
“Dom,” he said. “Don’t be a dick.”
Ms. Roark caught herself fuming, took a deep breath, and waddled off into her dark flat.
“Damn kids,” she grumbled, slamming her door shut.
“Grumpy old bag,” Dom barked back.
But Harvey didn’t think so. Age had certainly not been kind to her, but he could tell she was still sharp—acutely so—but then why wasn’t she hearing the same scraping as they were, only one door down?
“Don’t you think it’s weird?” Harvey asked. “She’s our neighbor and she isn’t hearing it? It’s a jackhammer falling through our ceiling, for Christ’s sake.”
Dom shuffled into the stairwell and took the first flight two stairs at a time. Harvey struggled to keep pace. He answered as he propelled himself to the next floor.
“She’s losing it,” he said. “That’s what old people do. I bet she probably watches television with the volume cranked all the way up.”
Until now, Harvey avoided the kind of sweat a three-digit heat wave tends to bring, but the brisk climb up the stairs collapsed the dam of his open pores. They gave way to large rolling globs from his forehead to the creases in his face, disappearing into the fabric of his shirt.
Dom pushed open the door to the fifth floor. The hall was empty, despite the cacophony of noise pushing from the closest set of apartments to their left. The worn carpet underfoot—tread by countless rubber soles—was battered and flattened, a shell of its original forest green overlay.
Lamps mounted across the walls and caught dust in its open cylinders. Their static light pushed from the wall and out into the open air, seeping through frosty glass shields to bathe the hallway in an opaque glow.
Slowly, Harvey and Dom scurried into the corridor, scanning the apartment numbers lined vertically across each door frame. They found 55A and immediately shuddered. The clanking had evolved into something more of a violent scrape, setting Harvey’s jaw on edge like a pick breaking apart his inner molars one by one. Dom grimaced through the pain, rubbing his hand across the curve of his jaw as though it helped.
“Whatever it is, it’s not good,” he whispered.
“How has no one else complained about this?” Harvey asked. “It’s even worse up here.”
Dom peered around the corridor to the intermittently placed doors, some more maintained than others. He shrugged, inching closer to the source, but paused before knocking. A shrill voice emerged from deep within that caught his attention. He held his ear to the crack door’s seal, listening.
“So it’s done?”
“We found the frequency. It took awhile but it’s set now.”
“So what do we do next?”
“First, we take care of the bodies. We don’t need another investigation on our hands. This stays quiet. The Plan depends on it.”
“And what about this? We can’t just leave it here.”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We allow the mechanism to do its job. We give it as much time as we can give it.”
“And if we don’t have that time?”
“We’ll make time, but the truth is, the Plan has already taken hold. I matched the frequency. It can’t be undone.”
“How bad will it get?”
Pause.
“As bad as it needs to be.”
Dom retreated from the door with his arm still cocked. His eyes grew wider as he met Harvey’s.
“Do you know what they’re talking about?” he whispered.
Harvey shook his head, unaware of the conversation within until it grew louder and more articulated.
“Do you have to talk like Him, Aris? It’s deployed. We get it. Half of Eastern Europe may go up in flames. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not, but we have to move quickly. If we stay here, it’s only a matter of time before our covers are blown. If you couldn’t tell, we’re on thin ice.”
“You know there’s a reason why we chose this apartment in this city, right? The frequency only carries if it’s pointed through that window. If we move it too early, it may not stick.”
“Probabilities. Things can still go wrong. We can’t afford that, but we have no other choice.”
Dom turned to Harvey, confusion riddling his eyes.
“What are they talking about?”
A strange rattling radiated from inside the doorframe. The mechanism churned away—metal on metal—sending a slew of heavy tremors through the floor. Dom lost his balance and flopped to the floor in a mess of limbs.
“What the hell was that?”
The mechanism screeched to a stop, succumbing to its own deep silence.
“Shh. Did you hear that?”
A new female voice emerged as a scurry of heavy footsteps made for the door.
“Shit,” Dom groaned. “Hide!”
Harvey shuffled into a nook at the far wall behind the stairwell as the door to 55A whipped open. Dom hadn’t been so lucky. A young woman—younger than either of the men expected—edged into the hallway. She towered over Dom with a pair of vivid steel-cold eyes.
“Get up,” she said.
Her hair—bursts of mocha breaking through a sea of auburn—fell to her shoulders in pencil straight locks, pulled back behind her ears like the open curtains of a stage. There was a callousness in her demeanor that chilled the room, particularly in the way she crossed her arms over her chest. Dom found his footing, but not before she made her overpowering build apparent to him. Flat-footed, she stood a good four inches over him.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same,” Dom answered. “Are you new to the building?”
He peered into the crowded apartment behind her, angling at the hip to do so. A mob of bodies collapsed over a strangely spherical machine, dozens of hands working at its guts. A single metal arm rose to the ceiling with a slight bend behind a mysterious box that blinked red from the corner of the room.
“Are those your friends?”
“More like—” she paused, “—colleagues.”
Hands went out over the contraption like tentacles, squirming through the gears and across the metal guides.
“What does that thing do,” Dom asked, “besides make such awful noise?”
The woman paused, uncrossing her arms enough to reach out and take Dom by his sweaty shirt. The stretch of her muscles loosened so that her bulky frame narrowed.
“I really wish you hadn’t seen that,” she said.
From her hip, she revealed a needlepoint dagger. She held it out in front of her, letting its blade shimmer in the overhead lights.
“Now hold on,” said Dom. “What are you doing?”
She sniggered, keeping her eyes on the shimmering blade.
“Let me ask you a question,” she asked. “What do you think it is?”
The sarcasm in her voice felt like it’s own kind of dagger. Dom took a step back, his arms barricading him from the woman’s cool stare.
“This is a joke, right?” Dom laughed. Nervous coils ribboned the syllables as they roped from his mouth. “You’re not really going to use that.”
She grinned, but it curled across her jaw just enough to come off as slippery. She lifted the weapon to eye level ever so slightly.
“Listen,” Dom panicked. He retreated with a few clumsy pivots. “We don’t even know you! We heard that noise from downstairs and came up here to make sure everything was alright. That’s it. I swear.”
She lowered the weapon, hesitating.
“We?”
She attacked with such explosiveness that she had her arm wrapped around Dom’s collarbone before he had a chance to escape. Only her thumb stood between flesh and metal.
“Come out or I kill him,” she growled. “You have three seconds. Three...two...one…”
“Okay!” Harvey said. “Don’t hurt him.”
He edged out, walking cautiously into open space. Harvey’s presence, albeit submissive, tightened the grip across Dom’s chin.
“That’s close enough,” she said. “Not another step.”
“I don’t know who you think we are,” Harvey answered, “but it’s not who you’re expecting. We’re just two guys who live downstairs, right below you actually.”
“You were eavesdropping,” she growled, “so don’t give me that innocent bullshit.”
“It’s not eavesdropping if we overhear your obnoxiously loud conversation from the stairwell, is it?”
The sarcastic tone in Harvey’s voice surprised her enough to force a hollow grin from her otherwise irritated façade.
“I like you,” she said, releasing the blade from Dom’s neck to point it in the direction of Harvey. “You have balls.”
Dom squirmed enough to force the dagger back to his throat.
“We came to see what all the ruckus was. That’s all,” said Harvey.
“Ag!” A man’s voice echoed from inside the apartment. “What’s going on out there?”
Agatha tsk’ed from her stranglehold, shaking her head. The blade drew a drop of blood.
“Now you’ve done it,” she said. “You don’t want to meet him.”
A behemoth of a figure approached from inside the door.
“Ag?” the shadow asked.
“Give me a minute,” she answered.
She returned her focus to the white-knuckled grip of her dagger.
“Now,” she drawled. “What to do with the two of you.”
Harvey shivered. The blade tightened.
“W...we just w...want to leave. P...pl...please,” coughed Dom.
She balked, processing his anxious pleas.
“Drivers’ licenses,” she said. “Now.”
Harvey frisbeed his plastic card to Agatha’s feet.
“You too, hot shot,” she said. “No sudden movements.”
Dom reached into his pocket for his leather wallet and held it over his shoulder.
“Just take it,” he said. “There’s no cash in there anyway.”
She flipped through its sleeves until she came across the card, tossing the rest away.
“Dominic L. Warwick and Harvey M. Divvy,” she read. “Cute names.”
She finally released Dom from her stranglehold, pushing him away with her off hand.
“So you know our names,” said Harvey. “We get it.”
Ag acknowledged Harvey’s remark with a whisper of a smile, but it faded with the intensity that made her as intimidating as anyone Harvey had seen.
“If you say anything to anyone—and I mean anyone—about me or anything you’ve seen here, you’ll be choking on a mouthful of your own blood before you see me coming. Got it?”
Neither Harvey nor Dom offered a response, only a flurry of nods and the occasional whimper.
“Agatha!” a third voice boomed from within. “What the hell is taking so long?”
“Coming!” she said.
As she turned her eyes to Harvey, he noticed a twinkle in them that hadn’t been there before.
“Now comes the fun part.”
She cocked her arm for momentum, then slipped the blade deep into Dom’s lower left side. She closed her eyes and sighed. It was as if she was relishing the moment, enjoying the smattering of blood that had made it to her hands.
Dom gasped as she removed the blade.
“What did you do?” Harvey yelled.
His heart picked up. A knot of muscle formed in his throat.
“Relax,” she chided, holding the bloody dagger to her eyes. “He’ll be fine.”
Shock widened Dom’s pain-riddled stare. He collapsed to his knees, mortality rushing to his face in the form of a sickly white glow. Blood dripped into the waistband of his khaki shorts through the creases in his hand.
“He’s not fine,” Harvey barked, rushing to his side. “He needs an ambulance.”
Agatha walked to the apartment door and turned, wiping the bloody dagger with a cloth hanging from a hook just inside the doorframe. She let it drop to the floor as if it meant nothing to her.
“Believe me, a few stitches and he’ll be fine,” she said. “There are many weak points in the human body, but there?” She pointed to the wound with a shake of her head. “No severed arteries, no cut nerves, and I even stabbed him with a clean blade. I stabbed to maim him, not kill. I’ve done it a thousand times.”
A thousand times?
Harvey’s mind raced.
“Listen,” Harvey quivered, “you’ve done enough, okay? Just call an ambulance. Please.”
Agatha sighed, rolling her eyes to the open apartment door. Shadows moved in and out of view from within.
“And that would make you feel better?” she asked.
Harvey jumped to his feet, anger flexing the lanky ropes of muscles under the skin of his forearms.
“He’s dying,” he growled.
His threat of violence meant nothing to her. She simply turned to the doorway and called in to the number of bodies working inside.
“Kota!” she called. “Time’s up. Call 9-1-1 and pack up the sonoplier. We got a bleeder out here.”
A young bearded man emerged from the other shadows. Sweat beaded across his forehead, some dripping into the wiry patches of beard.
“Are you shitting me, Ag? You really can’t control yourself, can you?”
She let out a sardonic giggle.
“You know me too well,” she said, “but it’s time to go. Either we call the cops or he does. We need the head start.”
Blustered, Kota disappeared. He hadn’t ventured far considering the soft hum of connected dial tone drifting into the hallway. It came from just beyond the closest wall. He muttered a few indecipherable words, then reappeared with a sunken look of distress across his overtired face.
“Five minutes, people! Let’s move!”
It only took them three. The collection of men and women had dismantled the cacophonic machine and shuffled it out piece by piece into the corridor. Harvey counted eight of them in all—four men and four women—each endowed with a unique set of strikingly sensual features that tore Harvey’s concentration away from Dom’s painful groaning.
Agatha tailed the others as she found the stairwell, staring back at Harvey with her unaffected steely eyes.
“Some things are more precious because they don’t last long,” she said. “Remember that.”
Harvey narrowed his eyes, speechless.
And then she was gone, slipped into the stairwell like a ghost.
“I’m c...cold,” Dom groaned. “Please…”
Harvey reached down to the wound at his side. A puddle of coagulating blood had stiffened across the floor in a stretch of darkened red. His face had grown sickly and weak, eyelids drooping against their own weight.
“Stick with me, Dom,” he said. “Don’t close your eyes.”
A burst of noise entered the hallway from the stairwell. A pair of medics carrying a portable gurney charged onto the scene and slid into place on either side of Dom, carefully shuffling Harvey back against the wall. They spread the gurney out at his feet as everything blurred into fuzzy shapes and colors, lost in the anxiety of the moment.
“Sir?” one of the medics called. “Sir? Can you hear me?”
Harvey nodded, wide-eyed, but now he found himself on the floor, back against the nearest wall. Had he collapsed?
“Did you call this in? What happened?” the medic asked him. “Sir? Can you hear me?”
The featureless faces of Agatha and the others replayed in his head, but he couldn’t find the will to bring them back to life.
We’re everywhere, she’d said.
“Sir? Sir? Can you hear me?” the medic continued. He turned to his partner. “I think this one’s in shock.”
Harvey turned to Dom. An oxygen mask disguised his face, but Harvey could tell they were quickly running out of time.
“It w...w...was,” he stuttered, “...an accident. H...He fell. Is he going to be okay?”
He managed to stumble down the stairwell behind the medics and into the ambulance as they lifted Dom’s gurney up and into the cabin. Machines beeped and sirens echoed through the city as the ambulance took off. Harvey fell back against the wall into his seat.
“Don’t worry,” said the medic, patting Harvey on the shoulder. “He’s stable now. He’ll make it.”
But Harvey knew the real damage had already been done. He knew they would never feel safe again. He smiled with all he could muster—only the hollowest upturn of the corner of his mouth—then drifted his eyes to the window and watched as the city lights turned to stars.