Stella Dimitrio stares out of her office window at snow swirling like the murmuration of birds. Heavy snow is darkening the skies and cloaking the streets below. The puppet heads on the TV chatter about blizzard conditions, as if someone has moved Manhattan 2,500 miles north to the Arctic Circle. Another gleeful puppet lists the worst storms in New York's history reaching all the way back to the '47 blizzard and speculates this one is going to be worse. Stella learns a new word. This is a mesoscale storm. Instead of blanketing an area, the storm has concentrated on the island of Manhattan and has the experts scratching their domed heads.
Stella has a report to finish. Technically with a DI case, the report has to be coded. The details of the uncanny events have to be kept separate and referenced in the footnotes. Not the events themselves, the restricted file number they will be secured under. That was what she was supposed to do, but Stella throws it all on the screen. What happened. How she felt at the time. A preliminary note on the victim/perpetrator for her own files, and a completely uncensored stream of consciousness about how she felt about the actions of the Deviant twins, Barty and Bill. It helps her cope, externalising the confusion and fear, translating the internal conflict and tension to symbols on a screen. Later on, when she has calmed down, she will make a copy and edit it down to the official version, but for her own peace of mind, and any trials that might follow, she saves the original in her own case files. Probably paranoia, but you never know.
The puppet heads on the screen are joined by shots of the Rockefeller Center where a Barbie voice tells you that the snow is so heavy that you can barely see the Christmas tree lights from the street. No Christmas tree lights are seen as ordered. There are jams on the Brooklyn Bridge and gridlock back into the city. The Port Authorities have cancelled the ferries until further notice. Looks like the blizzard of 2016 has been cruised past and another '47 is definitely on the table.
What happened in '47?
Stella looks up winter '47 in Manhattan and swears softly. She checks her options but both the F and R trains to Park Slope are already cancelled because of the weather. She swears again and starts searching for hotels. Half an hour later and her options are reduced to rundown tourist dives at $500 for a night with free vermin and single lightbulb charm, or the office couch.
She looks out of the window at the solid white driving against the glass. She canโt see the buildings opposite.
Can I see the street?
Stella walks to the window, shields her eyes from the office lighting and looks down into a falling vortex of snow with no bottom in sight. No street now. No cars. It's like looking over the edge of a waterfall of ice.
The lights go out.
Stella screams.
Dammit, like a little girl. But the scream was instinctive, primordial, born from generations of truly evil things happening in the dark.
'Get a grip, woman.' She orders herself.
It isn't totally dark. Her laptop is still alive, running on battery power, its screen light wan and cold. Stella's office seems bigger in the dark, the windows onto the hurling void taller and wider. She shivers despite the heat in the office and that's a reminder, if she is stuck here all night it's going to get really cold.
And it's quiet.
Usually there are people coming and going in the corridor outside, the distant sound of the lift doors opening with a sudden babble of people exiting. Not now. Stella can usually guess the lateness of the hour by the lights of the offices opposite. But not in a blackout.
It must be late, the silence in the building tells her that. Her laptop confirms just how late she has been working and she makes a note to charge her higher rate to the DI Department.
Itโs alarming how suddenly a major city can feel lifeless in the dark. A fear of the dark is normal during a psyche's development. Children have a natural fear of the dark until about the age of eight when it abates. Nyctophobia in an adult is unusual and can be treated. Except when you are a single woman alone in the dark beside a churning void in a lifeless city. That isn't a phobia, that's just common sense.
And am I alone?
Stella can see her door and opens it, looks out into the dark beyond. The corridor disappears into deep black at both ends. A dark pool all consuming black.
So quiet!
'Hello?'
Stella calls again, louder this time.
'Hello!'
Stella needs to barricade the blackness. She closes the office door. She has a key in her desk drawer but that makes for too many trips backwards and forwards across an office that is no longer familiar. Stella gets to her desk and sits looking sightlessly at the screen. It lights her face, and when she turns her head to the window again her head is reflected from the glass so it hovers within the roiling snow.
Stella feels for her damned key in her damned drawer and fumbles her way across her dark office to the door. The click of the lock brings a fall in tension.
'For god's sake pull yourself together. Embarrassing. Do some work.'
The WiFi is out.
All she has from the outside world is what is already on her screen. She had spoken to Bill after she had left the young woman called Tink in Bartholomew's care. He had arranged for Stella to have access to the NCIC Missing Person Files for Manhattan. It was just a hunch, and her access was temporary, but the young woman in the Professor's house had a history somewhere. Tink had no true interpersonal skills, no grasp of reality, had invented a fantasy life for herself. It suggested a traumatised childhood and a very high percentage of traumatised children run away. Typical ages were between 15 to 17 years old, although that age bracket had been getting younger over time.
Stella had been concentrating on her report but there were a dozen potentials on her screen when the power cut hit. No, make that seven. Stella had searched for females in the New York districts, white, green eyes, and the dates based on Stella's guess at Tink's age today worked back to the 15 to 17 year age group. 1,095 white females had been reported missing in 2020. Stella had seven.
'Only 1,088 to go, Stella.'
Stella sighed and selected the first window.
It was a driving licence photograph of a 17 year old with a broad face and thin lips. Never going to be a beauty queen. Brunette, but hair colour can change. The second girl had curly hair and sulked out of the screen from a school photo. Self assured and angry. No fragility there, just hatred of the world that had treated her so badly. The third one had Stella's heart skip a beat. Was it possible? The hair was long, unkempt, but the face was heart shaped, the eyes large and frightened and cast away from the lens. Here was fragility in spades. Stella went through the remaining files but nothing else jumped at her the way this one did.
โWhat are the chancesโ Stella asked the girl.
Mary Jane Oakwood. Went to school one day and never came home. Reported by the school rather than her parents, a worried form teacher and headmistress. In and out of foster care for a few years. Albany kid. Figures. Albany is poor and violent and Welfare is a mess. She saw the bright lights and mistook them for safety? Is it you Mary Jane, are you Tink?
A thump at the window makes Stella start. The storm is growing fiercer. Stella sees her head reflected in a window that bows in the wind. All she can see is the rip of snow across the glass. There are no buildings, no lights beyond the glass, only the light of her laptop casting her gaunt face with its wide eyes and open mouth. The glass thumps inwards again, bowing so that her reflection snaps into a hall of mirrors horror and then back again. The dark river of ice pressing against the glass flows like a torrent as solid as water. The glass creaks.
And breaks.
Ice and snow blast into the office, ripping papers from her desk and shelves, rattling the door on its hinges. Stella is on the floor, blind and deaf from the blast of pressure and the blizzard of snow and ice. She has screamed again, this time an uninhibited surrender to primordial terror, but she could not hear herself above the roar of a wind that sucked at her office stripping it of anything loose.
Stella lies flat on the floor, gripping the leg of her desk, her chair tumbled out of the way. The light from her laptop vanishes, snatched out of the open window. Flicking away in a mad tumble. The noise is unbearable, like the howl of a jet, bleak and fierce and intolerant of human frailty.
Stella gasps for breath, the cold air thin is spiteful, refusing to fill her lungs. The snow is landscaping her room, building in the corners where wind dies, slamming into the surfaces of the office where it clings. Her office is turning into some fucking ice cave, some tourist trap cut into a glacier, not a modern office in a modern building in New York. Something primitive. Unnatural.
Then she hears it.
The voice.
A low guttural choke of a voice chanting something bizarre. It is snatched away by the roaring wind only to return again, distant, as if in the storm itself.
'"Ugu-ฤuโโ sagโ-ga za-e ba-ra-an-kud Luโ-meลก แธซul-gรกl ลกร -ฤuโโ-a im-ma-an-dibโ Dumu adama za-e ฤiri..."
It's the storm?
But that's not possible. Only Barty believes this psychophysical bullshit. And Bill, maybe. This can't be real. It can't be...
"...mu-un-kud-deโ Me-a-ฤuโโ..."
Stella crawls to the gaping mouth of the window.
She has to see.
It can't be real, but she has to see.
"...nam-tag-ga-ta za-e ba-ra-an-kar..."
Such a hideous voice. A guttural grunt of noise. Words vomited up from deep within some dark place. Evil. No. Not evil. There is no evil. You are a psychiatrist for gods sake. Remember the girl. Remember Mary Jane.
Stella reaches the howling opening into the vortex. Lies flat against the tugging of the violent snow. Inches her head over the edge. There is a darkness far below. A darkness into which the snow roars. A darkness that tugs at her body. Stella closes her eyes and tries to picture Mary Jane. A frightened blonde girl with a heart shaped face.
Isn't that what Barty does?
Call to their origin.
Pacifies them.
'Oh god, don't take me...'
Love your stories about Barty and Tink! Great characters and worldbuilding!
Whoa!!! Whatโs happening, I like to think of Tink as kind ? Just a bit edgy ? Hope she doesnโt harm the shrink !!