Crimson Fog June 2013

wouldn’t be much

eric james stone

Fogcrimson

June 2013

i am not what i am * for the love of sin

b y N e b u l a - A w a r d - W i n n i n g A u t h o r

Featuring

Dear Readers,I used to like my job. The day I first read the stories appearing in

this issue, that like became a bit less platonic. Today, my job and I just might go pick out curtains.

Because today I get to share these stories with you.This month’s Crimson Fog is a doozy—fresh, unconventional, and

occasionally twisted. We all love to watch the good guy take a few hits in his battle against evil. But at what point does the good guy become the bad guy? This issue features three tales of would-be good guys—a lawyer, a police consultant, and a military officer—caught in precarious circumstances.

Written by Nebula-award-winner Eric James Stone, “Wouldn’t Be Much” opens on a stage magician condemned to prison, the weight of guilt slowing his quick-fingered ways. But did he commit the crime to which he has confessed?

“For the Love of Sin” introduces a world where all people wear their parasitic past sins—invisible to all but a few—on their very skin. Then, the discovery of an impossibly sin-free corpse pits a sin-seeing consultant against the very officers he’s trying to aid—and the only family he’s ever known.

And finally, a fresh recasting of Othello’s pivotal scene, “I Am Not What I Am,” blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, past and present, destiny and choice. But will the Moor’s battle with fate tem-per his murderous rage—or push him over the edge?

Like it, love it, want to marry it? Feel free to share this issue’s link with friends, family, or anyone else who could use a little creepy in their lives. Thanks for reading,Andrea JakemanManaging EditorCrimson Fog Magazine

Crimson FogSubmissions are Closing

for SummerMore on Page 25

ContributorsAuthorsEric James StoneConor Powers-SmithGary CubaManaging EditorAndrea Jakeman

Layout DesignChris Taney

EditorsNyssa SilvesterSavannah WoodsSpecial ThanksBrett PetersonJustin MillerbergDaniel Friend

CreditsCover art by sxc.hu Letter from the Editor art by Dusty JCreative Commons license, some rights reserved. sxc.hu. Flickr.com: Dusty J

Table of Contents

7 27wouldn’t be m

uch“You killed him

through a magic trick?”

for the love of sinFam

ily: MU

RDER. G

enius: FAM

ILIAL

7

i am not w

hat i am“I’ll not shed her blood, yet she m

ust die.”

17

Flickr.com/krystian_o

wouldn’t be mucheric james stone

IIn my seven years as a public defender, I’d seen plenty of guilty clients who claimed they hadn’t committed a murder. Jason Vanderhoef was my first innocent client who claimed he had.

“Thanks for taking my case,” Vanderhoef said. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with close-cropped hair that failed to mask the fact that he was going bald on top. “I thought I could get by without a lawyer, but the judge didn’t like it when I told her I wanted to plead guilty.”

I looked at him from across my desk and nodded. “First, I didn’t take your case; Judge Keller assigned it to me. Second, I don’t like it that you want to plead guilty, either. It’s not every day someone walks into a police station and confesses to murdering someone, unless they’re crazy. Are you crazy?”

“No.”I creaked back in my chair and looked at him. “So why’d you

do it, then?”“Because he recognized me and would have turn—”“No, why’d you confess?”Vanderhoef ’s eyes fell to the floor. After a moment, he said,

“Because I didn’t mean to kill a little girl.”I jerked upright. “What little girl? You confessed to killing a

man.” I reached for the manila folder the police had given me. I’d skimmed through it without seeing mention of a dead girl.

He shook his head. “She’s not dead yet.”My stomach twisted. Two years out of law school, I’d been

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assigned to defend a child molester—a nasty piece of work who kidnapped children and kept them in cages in his basement for weeks before kill-ing them. I did my job: I got the guy life in prison on a guilty plea instead of going to trial with the death penalty on the table. I also got insomnia for three months. I really couldn’t understand what kind of man could do something like that. If Vanderhoef was another like him . . . I kept my voice steady. “Where’s the girl?”

“At home. They can’t afford a hospital.”

I was missing something. “Who can’t?”

“Barton’s family.” He must have seen my puzzlement because he added, “George Barton was the man I killed.”

“Perhaps you’d better start at the beginning,” I said.

“Right.” He took a deep breath. “I had a run of bad luck with the ponies, so I

owed a bunch of money to . . . some friends. I couldn’t afford to pay, but they agreed to wipe out my debt if I would play in a high-stakes poker game. A hundred grand to buy in.”

Tilting my head slightly to the right, I asked, “Why would they want you to play if you had no money?”

Vanderhoef held his hand up, palm toward me. He made a flourish with his fingers, and suddenly he was holding a playing card. He tossed it onto my desk, and it landed face up: ace of spades. “I used to work as a magician in Vegas.

Had my own show at the Florentine Casino under the stage name Mister Magnifico, Master over Mind and Matter. Ever hear of me?”

I shook my head.“Yeah, I never really hit

the big time. But the point is I know every card trick in the book, plus some that have never been written.

“I didn’t mean to.”

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wouldn’t be much eric james stone

In other words, I cheat. In fact, I cheat so well I’m now banned from every casino in the U.S. I’ve been think-ing about a trip to Europe, but I guess I’m going to have to put that off for now.”

I picked up the card and looked at it. Seemed perfectly normal. “If you’re so good at cheating, how’d you end up with gambling debts in the first place?”

He snorted. “I can’t palm a horse.”

Laying the card back on the table, I said, “So your ‘friends’ wanted you to cheat for them?”

“Exactly.”“What went wrong?”He shook his head.

“Everything went perfectly. I walked out of the game with six hundred thousand dollars. I turned it over, and they can-celed my debt.”

My brow wrinkled. “So what

does that have to do—”“Barton was in the game.

He’d’ve probably won if I hadn’t been fixing things. I saw him a few times in Vegas back when he played the pro circuit—the Florentine hosted a few tour-naments. He could bluff you into folding a full house.”

“Didn’t he suspect you of cheating?”

“Not during the game. I was disguised. But the next

morning I ran into him on the street, and I guess he put two and two together. Threatened to tell the other players what I did unless I gave him half the take. But, of course, I didn’t have the money anymore. So I had to kill him to keep him from talking.”

I glanced down at the doc-umentation on Barton. Six foot three, two hundred and thirty pounds. Vanderhoef looked about five ten and maybe a hundred and eighty.

“I had to kill himto keep him from talking”

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“Attacking him must have taken some guts—he was big-ger than you.”

With a shrug, Vanderhoef said, “He wasn’t expecting it.”

The matter-of-fact way in which he talked about killing Barton didn’t jibe with the kind of remorse that would compel a man to confess and plead guilty to murder. “You still haven’t told me about the girl.”

Vanderhoef sighed. “Right. A couple of days after I killed him, I read about it in the newspaper. Barton’s daughter needs a bone-marrow trans-plant and some other medical stuff. Her family had raised ninety thousand dollars, but they needed another hundred grand, and she was getting sicker, so . . .”

I remembered reading the newspaper story too, but I hadn’t connected it to this case until now. “The paper said Barton jumped in front of a train. It looked like a clear

case of suicide because he’d taken the donation money and gambled it away.”

Nodding, Vanderhoef said, “Once I heard about the daughter, I couldn’t get her out of my mind—she’s going to die because I cheated her dad out of that money. So I decided to man up and confess.”

There was the remorse I was looking for. But some-

thing still didn’t feel right. I reached for the file on my desk and flipped through it until I found the police report on Barton’s death.

“According to the witnesses,” I said, “there was nobody near Barton when he jumped in front of the train. So you couldn’t have pushed him.” I leaned forward in my chair. “Falsely confessing to mur-dering Barton won’t absolve you of your guilt over winning that money.”

“But I did kill him!” His voice was insistent.

“Attacking him must have taken some guts—he was bigger than you.”

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“The evidence says you didn’t. Just because you feel a moral responsibility doesn’t change the fact that he chose to commit suicide.”

Vanderhoef ’s lips tightened. After a few moments, he said, “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to reveal how I did it.”

“Judge Keller isn’t going to let you plead guilty just because you feel guilty. Look, if you want to confess to fraud in order—”

“No, I killed him. It’s just the magician in me that doesn’t want to reveal my tricks. But I’ll explain it if I have to.”

I frowned. “You killed him through a magic trick?”

“Magic, no. A trick, yes.” He took a deep breath. “You’re right—he was bigger than me, so there’s no way I’d win a phys-ical confrontation. But back at the Florentine, when I was Mister Magnifico, Master over

Mind and Matter, I did a combo magic-slash-hypnotism show. I used hypnosis to get Barton to jump in front of that train.”

“You expect me to believe Barton confronted you about the money, and then he let you hypnotize him?”

“Sort of. You see, in my show, I would give my subjects a post-hypnotic suggestion that when I said a key word, they would fall back into a trance. It’s meant for later in the show or if they come back the next night. Anyway, about five years ago Barton came to my show after he got eliminated

from a poker tournament, and he volunteered during the hypnosis part. So I said the word, hoping it would put him in a trance, and it did.”

I raised my eyebrows. “After five years?”

“Some people are better hypnotic subjects than others.

“I killed him. It’s justthe magician in me that

doesn’t want to reveal my tricks.”

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People who can really con-centrate, really focus on one thing, are the best. And if you’d ever seen Barton play poker, you’d know how hard he could concentrate.”

“What was the word?”“Rutabaga.” He gave me a half

smile. “It’s not the kind of word I use in normal conversation, so I wouldn’t accidentally put any of my subjects in a trance.”

I shook my head. “I thought hypnotism couldn’t be used to make someone—”

“—do something they wouldn’t normally do?” He nodded. “That’s true, to a point. If I had told Barton to go jump in front a train to kill himself, he wouldn’t have done it unless he was already suicidal. But he didn’t think he was jump-ing in front of a train.” Vanderhoef shook his head. “I gave him the suggestion that he was back in Vegas on vacation, and that it was really hot, and that it would be nice to go for a swim. He thought he was jumping into the Florentine’s swim-ming pool.”

•

Judge Keller accepted the guilty plea. I managed to talk her into giving Vanderhoef a twelve-year sentence, the minimum for second-degree murder.

Since there would be no appeal of his sentence, as the bailiffs took Vanderhoef away I figured that would be the end of my involvement in his case.

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I was wrong.Three days later, an investi-

gator for Allied Life Insurance stopped by my office.

“You’re the attorney of record for Jason Vanderhoef,” she said as she sat down.

I raised my eyebrows. “Yes.”“So you’re familiar with

the circumstances of George Barton’s death.”

“What is this about?” I asked.

“Mrs. Barton has re-filed a claim for the life insurance on her husband. Her original claim was denied because the policy does not cover suicide. However, because your client has con-fessed to killing George Barton, we are reevaluating the claim.”

“I see.” My niggling doubts about Vanderhoef ’s motives suddenly flared up. “And you came to me because . . . ?”

Below: sxc.hu

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“We would like to inter-view your client about the circumstances of George Barton’s death.”

“The guilty verdict isn’t enough to settle the question?”

“Your client’s confession, without any corroborating evi-dence, does seem suspiciously convenient for Mrs. Barton.”

I put on my best disbeliev-ing smile. “My client allocuted to committing second-degree murder and was sentenced accordingly. Are you seriously considering the idea that he confessed to a murder he didn’t commit and got himself twelve years in prison in order to per-petrate an insurance fraud?”

She blinked. “Well, when you put it that way . . . It’s really just a formality for our files.”

I nodded. “I understand. Technically, though, I was assigned to be Jason Vanderhoef ’s attorney in the

criminal case against him. I have no interest in represent-ing him in any other matters. So I suggest you contact him directly to ask your questions.”

She nodded, then stood. “Thank you.”

“Out of curiosity,” I said, “how much is the insurance policy for?”

She looked at me a moment, as if considering whether I had the right to such information. “Two hundred thousand,” she said, before turning and walk-ing out.

•

Six months later, I went to the prison to meet with Vanderhoef. The guards brought him into the visiting room, then left us alone.

Vanderhoef smiled at me. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I thought you’d like to know that Barton’s daughter

“Are you seriously consideringthe idea that he confessed to amurder he didn’t commit?”

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received her bone-marrow transplant yesterday. The doctors say her chances are pretty good.”

His smile broadened to a grin. “Really? That’s great news.”

“Was it worth it?”He frowned. “Was what

worth it?”“You made up the whole

thing, didn’t you? After read-ing about Barton’s death in the paper. There was no confron-tation, no hypnotism. You lied about everything.”

Vanderhoef folded his arms and leaned back in his seat. “Suppose I did. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! Yeah, you’ve done some bad things in your life, but you’re paying for a crime you didn’t actually commit!”

“If I hadn’t cheated in the poker game, Barton would have won the cash to pay for

his daughter’s operation.” He leaned forward, looking me in the eye. “If I let a little girl pay for a crime I did commit, I wouldn’t be much of a man, would I?”

•

I never saw Jason Vanderhoef again. When the warden summoned me out to the prison two weeks later, he handed me a sealed envelope with my name on it. Attorney-client privilege prevented the warden from opening the envelope Vanderhoef had left on his bed.

I tore it open and unfolded the piece of paper inside. There was only one sentence:

Of course, if I didn’t escape from my cell,

I wouldn’t be muchof a magician.

Flickr.com/Robert S. Donovan

I Am Not What I AmConor Powers-Smith

TThe bedroom lay deep in shadow. Beyond the high win-dows, the moon and stars hung like painted things, mere sym-bols of themselves, incapable of illumination. The lamps, the television, the computer all slept. The only light was the pure, white beam that shone from above, casting a small circle that found him as he entered, and moved with him as he crept across the floorboards.

The light must have been a hallucination, a lie his churning mind told his credulous senses. Yet he could see the blinding brilliances it made of the buttons and epaulets and medals on his dress uniform, could feel its heat through the thick wool, like heaven’s own sanction of the dark scene unfolding around him, the outcome of which he dreaded, yet was powerless to prevent.

He entered whispering, continued to whisper as he stole toward the bed. The words came all unbidden, as if written for him by some dark agency beyond his ken, as if he had repeated them countless times before. “It is the cause,” he breathed, “it is the cause, my soul.” He looked to the window, hissed in bitter irony: “Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! It is the cause.”

Across the long chamber, her shadowed form lay on the bed. “Yet I’ll not shed her blood,” he swore, his fingers slid-ing from the Beretta at his hip, “nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, and smooth as monumental alabaster. Yet she must die.”

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He crept on, hesitation plucking at his heels like well-remembered shackles. Yet he could not stop, as if he were merely reenacting a tragedy that had played out innumer-able times before, and was fated to continue into the end-less future. Perhaps he was another Sisyphus, doomed to reprise this scene for eternity; how else to explain this mad-dening sense of repetition?

All too soon he was beside the bed, kneeling by her sleep-ing form. Her nightgown was white lace, so thin it was almost sheer; the light from above found every elegant contour of her body, stirring the desire that formed so large a part of his love—and with it the jealousy that was the entirety of his hate. His fin-gers brushed the fabric at her left hip, beneath which lay the dark suggestion of her tattoo: the three ripe, red strawber-ries, which he had kissed so many times.

“When I have plucked thy rose,” he mourned, “I cannot give it vital growth again. It

needs must wither.” He leaned so near, his lips brushed hers as he whispered, “I’ll smell it on the tree.” He kissed her, spoke, kissed her again. She slept on, serene, steeped in seeming innocence. “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee and love thee after. Once more, and this the last!”

With his final kiss, she stirred, as he had somehow known she would. She gazed up at him from the bed, sleep thickening her voice, apprehension heaving her breast as she said, “Who’s there? Othello?”

“Ay, Desdemona.”“Will you come to bed, my

lord?”“Have you prayed tonight,

Desdemona?”She feigned ignorance,

forcing him to recount it all: her adultery with Cassio, Iago’s uncovering of the deed, the savage revelation of see-ing the handkerchief he had given her—which she had sworn to treasure even as she treasured his love—in the hands of Cassio’s trollop,

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I Am Not What I Am Conor Powers-Smith

Bianca. This last he had even photographed; he thrust his phone at her, the evidence shining from its screen, paling her skin like the spotlight of an interrogation lamp. In his rehearsal of her corruption, he found new resolve. By the friction of her stated inno-cence against his certainty of her betrayal, his reluctant heart took fresh spark, and fired anew the twin tinders of his pain and rage.

How many times had he spoken these words, lived the acts they described? She was his one love, yet he seemed to see a myriad of faces in place of hers, a multitude of Desdemonas stretching back into the dim past. When he spoke of Cassio, too, his mem-ory showed a hundred grin-ning cuckolders. A legion of Iagos seemed to whisper and cajole, wearing now the olive-green uniform of the Second

World War, now the Prussian blue of the American Civil War’s Union, now the pol-ished breastplate and feath-ered helmet of a Renaissance warrior, sword hanging at his belt in place of pistol.

Half-seen vistas from his past seemed to haunt the chamber, as if his whole his-tory were a spyglass, collaps-ing now on this fatal hour. One long wall seemed vanished; in its place yawned an enormous

cave, like those through which he had wandered during his flight from captivity. As in those dim, dementing cav-erns, a watchful silence held, as of the hidden presence of some waiting host.

The nearest wall, too, was gone. Where it should have stood, he glimpsed his gath-ered retinue: Montano, Gratiano, honest Iago; even false Cassio, surely dead by now, and so the only one

By the friction of her stated innocence his reluctant heart took fresh spark.

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among them with rights to appear thus, in spectral appa-rition. They, too, were watch-ing, waiting, knowing the inevitable conclusion as well as he did—and just as power-less to prevent it.

He seemed to see Emilia in the hall, approaching. Then he must make haste; then weakness could no longer fet-ter strength.

He lay strong hands on Desdemona’s lovely neck and squeezed, and murmured, “It is too late.”

She kicked and fought until she kicked and fought no more.

Now Emilia called from without, “What, ho! my lord, my lord!”

“Who’s there?” Why did he ask, when he knew already?

“O! good my lord,” she called, “I’d speak a word with you.”

“‘Tis like she comes to speak of Cassio’s death,” he murmured. Why did he speak at all? Why loose his thoughts like pardoned ene-mies into the world, there to indict him? But he could not be silent. “If she come in, she’ll sure speak to my wife.

My wife! my wife! what wife? I have no wife: O, insupport-able! O heavy hour!”

Finally he drew the bed’s curtain—so much velveteen shroud—and bid her enter.

She came and spoke to him—to him—of murder. “O! my good lord, yonder’s foul murders done.”

“What! now?”“But now, my lord.”“It is the very error of the

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moon,” he told the window. “She comes more near the earth than she was wont, and makes men mad.”

“Cassio, my lord, has killed a young Venetian called Roderigo.”

“Roderigo killed! And Cassio killed!”

“No, Cassio is not killed.”“Not Cassio killed? then

murder’s out of tune, and sweet revenge grows harsh.”

She made no reply. And here, time stopped.

For Sir Malcolm Henry, reality yawed wildly with-out moving.

Even now, he was a profes-sional. He didn’t break pose, nor allow his expression to change. His mouth didn’t gasp, though his mind did.

From the corner of his eye, he could see the others in the

Below: flickr.com

/kirtaph

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wings, preparing to enter: David as Montano, Eric as Iago, Paul’s unaffectedly clueless Cassio. They gazed back, almost as lost in his performance as he had been. He couldn’t see the audi-ence in their deep, dim cavern, and he didn’t turn to look, but four decades on the stage had made him an infallible judge of silences, and the one that held now was the rarest of all: stunned, rapt, gutted—the love-liest silence.

He’d thought he’d achieved complete immersion before, thought he’d truly entered the minds of Romeo, Hamlet, the Scottish King, lately Lear. But this was an immersion of another kind, so total he’d lost himself completely, had actually become the Moor, tortured and doomed by mounting jealousy, blind to Iago’s machinations.

He’d thought he’d experi-enced everything the theater could offer—a fair exchange, having given it everything in his power to give. Now he found himself atop an unsus-pected summit. He wanted to fall to his knees and weep

with gratitude. He was no longer an actor; he was some-thing for which there was no name, something glorious and unique.

He tried to place exactly when the wonderful spell had taken hold. He remembered Act II, Scene II perfectly. He remembered the next, in the garden, only partially. He could picture the painted sun in its painted sky, the plastic flowers and fiberglass trees, Eric walking beside him, look-ing dashingly sinister in in his desert camouflage and dark-blue beret (Sir Malcolm had resisted the modern staging at first, but it had proven no bar-rier to immersion after all). Simultaneously, he could pic-ture Iago, amid real plants, beneath a true Cyprian sky. He could smell the earth and the flowers, feel the heat of the sun on his face; the spotlight, he realized. He could feel the heat of rising panic and rage as Iago—not Eric, but Iago—murmured and hinted, pour-ing poison into his ear as surely as Claudius had done to the rightful king of Denmark.

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The rest was no part Sir Malcolm, entirely the Moor. He remembered, dimly, the unscripted tortures, pacings, hor-rors which had filled his time between scenes; which his mind, and this strange visitation, had woven; which were rapidly fad-ing now, as dreams upon waking.

His return to himself had come with the jarring halt at which the scene had arrived. Angela, as the dying Desdemona, was meant to

croak her third-to-final line. Sandra’s Emilia was waiting.

The pause, and Sir Malcolm’s revelation, lasted perhaps three seconds—long, in stage-time, but within the bounds of dramatic license. Quite long enough, however. Without moving, Sir Malcolm sig-naled to Sandra to go on as if the missing line had been spoken. She was young, but she was a professional, and she understood. “O lord! what cry is this?”

He delivered his reply with-out irony: “That? what?”

“Out and alas! it is my lady’s voice. Help! help, ho! help! O lady, speak again! Sweet Desdemona! O sweet mis-tress, speak!”

Sandra allowed a shorter interval for Desdemona’s next line—not forthcoming—before continuing, “O! who has done this deed?”

For the third time, Angela missed her cue. Sir Malcolm

was too euphoric to be annoyed; he was awash in magnanimity, expansive as the whole round globe. He could barely keep from laugh-ing at the irony: His time as the jealous Moor had elicited the exact opposite of jealousy.

He found he could forgive Angela her recent unfaithful-ness, even her attempt to hide it from him. She was too young and lovely a creature for an old man like him; he’d known all along that their time together

For the third time,Angela missed her cue.

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would be fleeting, and her own father couldn’t have chosen a finer partner for her than Paul, who was not just a good Cassio but a good man.

He had the next line, but first he was supposed to sweep the bed’s curtain dramatically aside, revealing poor, dead Desdemona. His hand was on the curtain, but he hesitated. All his euphoria was gone, frozen solid and smashed to icy dust by the chill that sud-denly filled him.

He heard himself speak the line—a line in a play, noth-ing of reality in it. “Why, how should she be murdered?”

“Alas,” said Sandra, “who knows?”

His voice broke as he deliv-ered, “You heard her say her-self it was not I.”

“She said so. I must needs report a truth.”

“She’s like a liar gone to burning hell.” Tears were spill-ing down his cheeks. Of its own accord, his hand swept aside the curtain. Of their own volition, his eyes sought the motionless form on the bed. He’d seen stage death count-less times. This was not it.

His next line—tonight, his last; the last, he knew, of his career—came in a whisper. Not a stage whisper, but a true, secret, shameful rasp. Even Sandra could not have heard.

Angela was nearer, but she could not have heard him had he shouted.

Still gazing down, Sir Malcolm whispered,

“‘Twas I that killer her.”Ri

ght:

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submissions are

closingUntil Sep 1, 2013

Your response over the past year has been astounding. We can hardly keep up!

That’s why we will be dedicating the rest of the summer to responding to past sub-missions and preparing accepted short stories for publication.

As of June 15th, we will be shutting down Crimson Fog submissions until September 1st, 2013.

That said, we encourage you to continue to prep your submissions for our re-opening.

Again, we can’t thank you enough for all of your hard work. Until September.

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for the love of singary cuba

II rose, utterly befuddled, from my kneeling position beside the corpse. “This guy is completely free of sins, Henderson. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The coroner arrived, and I backed off to let him do his thing. He didn’t even acknowledge my presence. Most people consid-ered me a freak and treated me like a pariah. I’d learned to live with it.

No doubt these guys had seen many crime scenes gorier than this one, but it was way too gruesome for my taste. The deader’s throat had been slit open. Jeez, so much blood . . .

Detective Henderson grunted from behind me. “That’s mighty curious, Pete. This sleaze ball—Manny Greer, street alias Manny the Snake—spent more of his life in jail than out. How do you figure it? You losing your touch or something?”

There was no way to figure it. No one was without sin. Everyone had the evidence of their prior misdeeds riding their bodies. Only a few sensitive people, those with special acuity like me, could spot those manifestations.

And that was the way I made my living, as a police consultant: Pete Conklin, sin-seer par excellence.

But here was the conundrum: The sins were always there. I could see them clearly, clinging and crawling like tiny glassine worms on everyone. On me, on Detective Henderson, on every-body, living or dead. We were all human beings, after all, and sin naturally went along with that condition. Some folks had more

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for the love of sin

of them, some less—but they were always there.

“No, Henderson, I haven’t lost it,” I said. “You want me to tell you about your latest sins? One of them is sitting on your left shoulder as we speak.” I watched him shiver and start to raise his hand, then abruptly catch himself.

“Don’t do that to me, Pete. Just don’t do it. I believe you.”

Isolating and extract-ing the sins of dead people could never, of course, pro-vide names and places. Sins were mute. But sometimes, simply identifying and cata-loguing them by their phe-notype could lead to motives, and once in a rare while that would crack a crime like this one, when there was little else to go on.

I stripped off my latex gloves and tucked them into a plastic bag inside the satchel

containing the tools of my trade: collecting vials and chemical fixatives, a few cus-tomized extraction tools, and a thick field identification guide-book. “I can only conclude that he’s been intentionally wiped clean. It might be that the killer didn’t want us to know about one or more of the dead guy’s

sins. And that implies the perp had sin-sensing capabilities. Or that an accomplice did.”

“That’s interesting, but it doesn’t do us a whole lot of good,” Henderson said. “It’s not like we have a list of all you cootie-spotters back at the office.” He frowned and added, “Unless, of course, you’d care to provide us with one.”

I looked Henderson in the eye and shook my head. “You know I won’t do that. You also know better than to ask me.”

“Can’t fault me for trying. I know you’ve got lots of contacts

“No, Henderson, I haven’tlost it. You want me to tell

you about your latest sins?”

June 2013 - 30

for the love of sin gary cuba

within that . . . whatcha call it, that marshal-filly crowd.”

“Hamartiaphily.” I’d cor-rected him at least a dozen times before about the craft name, derived from the Greek, meaning love of sin. “Yes, I personally know quite a few sin collectors out there. But I can vouch that none of them are murderers.”

Henderson only huffed in response. He knew the legal line as well as I did.

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” I said, wav-ing an arm toward the corpse on the floor. “It would have taken a lot of time to do a full wipe. Especially if the victim was so heavily riddled with sins, as you claimed. Why go to all that effort, if only one target sin was the prey?”

Henderson shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe the coo-tie-snatcher could see ‘em but wasn’t experienced enough to type ‘em. So he just grabbed ‘em all, figuring that the target one was in the bunch. I dunno. Just guessing.” He scratched his forehead. “And going along

with that, I suppose he didn’t want to take the easier route, which would have been to remove the body as it was and dispose of it where we couldn’t find it. Too much risk of dis-covery in that. But sitting here in this dive, he had all the time in the world.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else,” I said. “Look, Henderson, I have to get out of this place before I blow my breakfast all over your shoes. The stink of blood is really getting to me. Are you done with me?”

Henderson tilted his head toward the door, and I wasted no time leaving the murder scene.

•

I hate it when things don’t add up right—and they cer-tainly didn’t in this case.

Another scenario had entered my mind at the crime scene, one which I hadn’t floated to Henderson. What if the murder had been com-mitted by an overzealous sin collector, for no other reason than to glom onto a harvest

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of goodies that he could then sell to other hamartiaphiles on the open market? In other words, some sort of sick, psy-chopathic sin reaper?

But that didn’t ring right. The victim may have had a lot of resident sins, true—and they were all worth some-thing. But not much. The sins off any typical, two-bit hoodlum like Manny sim-ply weren’t that much in demand in this limited mar-ket. They wouldn’t appeal to any discriminating collector. It wouldn’t have been worth murder to obtain the small amount they’d bring.

Now instead, if a sin-seer were marketing a juicy sin of, say, Adolf Hitler, one with a good provenance? That could bring a tidy sum—on up into six figures. Sins of notori-ous historical characters were always in big demand. I’d recently seen an old Pol Pot mass murder sell at auction for close to a quarter-million dollars. But it would be hard to conceive how anything gath-ered from a local thug would be worth much to anyone.

I poured myself another glass of Scotch and shook my head. No, the more likely explanation was the one Henderson was already run-ning with. Still . . .

When all else fails, I thought, read the manual. I walked to my bookshelves and fingered the thick edges of the ten-volume com-pendium published by the Hamartiaphily Collector’s Guild. It held the definitive description of every known type of human sin that had been isolated and identified to date, close to fourteen thousand of them, cata-logued in the Linnaean taxo-nomic scheme that governed the system: family, genus, species, subspecies. The vol-umes were printed on quality stock, with four-color, glossy illustrations of the obverse and reverse sides of the best-known collected examples. My eyes drifted to the even-larger array of HCG supple-ments and updates that sat on the shelf below, many of the more recent ones as thick as the main volumes themselves.

June 2013 - 32


The study of human sin was complicated and ever evolv-ing. Where to begin?

I picked a volume off the shelf at random and flipped it open to a page showing HCG 14-54-13-230: family murder, genus familial, spe-cies premeditated, subspecies sanctioned. The illustrated example was a sin extracted from a Pakistani father who, with community approba-tion, had killed his unmar-

ried daughter because of her promiscuous sexual behav-ior. It displayed as a brown-ish-mauve color, and because the collected example was quite “pure”—that is, the man had felt no sense of remorse after committing the sin—its shape was symmetrical and regular. Specifically, in this case it took the form of a stel-lated hexecontahedron.

A very attractive specimen, to be sure. It would certainly complement any serious hamartiaphile’s collection. But this was not going to get me anywhere. I closed the vol-ume, reshelved it, and went online to check the hamar-tiaphily forum sites. Maybe something new had shown up there, something that might relate to last night’s crime.

It didn’t take me long to turn up an interesting post.

•

Every apprentice has a mas-ter, and mine was a rich, old, Dutch sin-seer and collec-tor named Gerd Vanderhout. He’d taught me everything I knew about hamartiaphily and had developed my youth-ful, incipient talent for seeing what few others could see. I owed him everything.

Family murder,genus familial,

species premeditated,subspecies sanctioned.

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In truth, he was more a father figure to me than any-thing else—which was easy to understand, since I didn’t even know who my real father was.

I drove to Gerd’s manor house, which was ensconced within a guarded, residential enclave on the wealthy side of town. He appeared at his front door in response to my knock, a little bit stooped but still taller than me.

“Peter! How nice to see you! But . . . it is not our normal chess day—is it? Or perhaps this old man’s brain is getting addled. No matter: Welkom, come inside out of the rain.”

I entered the foyer, sat my soggy umbrella in the stand by the door and removed my raincoat. “Please excuse my unannounced visit, Gerd. I have a problem, one that I hope you can help me with.”

“Ah!” Vanderhout raised one bushy, gray eyebrow. “Another titillating crime mystery, yes? Here, come into the library and let us have a glass of schnapps to take the night’s chill away. And you

can also be the first to see my latest acquisition!”

Gerd had one of the finest hamartiaphily collections in the country, comprised of a huge number of unique, one-of-a-kind items. Many of them had been selected for display in the HCG catalogs, being as they were the best prototypi-cal examples. Some were the only known specimens of a sin A

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subspecies. Gerd himself had been a founding member and president of the Hamartiaphily Collector’s Guild for a number of years, back in its early days. No one had better craft cre-dentials than him.

And no one knew more of what went on in the trade at any given time. I’d often consulted with Gerd on police cases. The man was a

fount of knowledge, full of insider information.

He poured a splash of liquor into two snifters at his bar. I took the one he offered and sat down in a comfortable wing-back chair in front of the low wood fire burning in his fire-place. Gerd moved to one of his many mahogany display cabinets and retracted a vial, then handed it to me.

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“Is it not exquisite? I obtained it from a collector in Cairo just the other day. There was quite the competition for it, but I prevailed.”

The sin took my breath away. I could sense the energy of its spectral radiation leak-ing through the leaded glass of the container.

“‘Exquisite’ is an understate-ment. I’ve never seen its match for color—and such perfect symmetry! Family avarice, if my eyes don’t deceive me. Although the shape of the crenellations seems atypical for that class.”

Gerd beamed. “That’s be-cause it is a previously undis-covered species, Peter. The provenance is somewhat shaky, but the specimen’s con-formation speaks for itself. I think it will justify a brand new HCG category entry—if my instincts are correct.”

I handed the vial back to him and took a sip of liquor. After Gerd replaced the pre-cious item on his shelf and sat

down in the chair next to me, I briefed him about the case. Then I handed him a printout I’d made of a recent hamar-tiaphily forum post.

“This looks like a new per-son on the scene. Have you any idea who he is? He’s try-ing to hawk some low-level sins that you might get from a

petty criminal like our victim.”Gerd glanced at the sheet.

“No, I do not recognize the user name. I presume he uses an overseas anonymizer service, like many in our trade do?”

I nodded. “Yes, I tried to trace him, only to run into a dead-end IP routing address in Romania. It’s going to be diffi-cult to officially track him down and follow up. Particularly since I have to abide by Guild rules. Naturally, I’d never reveal the identity of a fellow sin-seer to others outside the craft. That’s a given. Still, we are talking about murder here.”

“Which makes this a diffi-cult situation for you. If, how-ever, we are truly dealing with

The sin took my breath away.

June 2013 - 36


a renegade seer, we may be obliged to take matters into our own hands. What is the expression . . . ‘clean up our own house’?“

“But how do you pro-pose to do that? I question the wisdom of going in that direction. If it’s our man, he’s clearly very dangerous.”

Gerd reached over and pat-ted my arm. “Let me make some discreet inquiries, Peter. In the meantime, try not to fret. Everything will seem better in the morning, when the rain stops and the sun comes out.” He smiled and stood up. “Would you fancy a game of chess? That will help take your mind off these . . . distasteful subjects.”

•

I left Vanderhout’s residence late. The rain had stopped and a thick fog had drifted in to blanket the wet streets. As I drove home, I noticed that I was being tailed. Probably Detective Henderson or one of his lackeys.

This business was getting complicated.

What was worse, I dis-covered that someone had entered my apartment and gone through my things while I was gone. It had been a sub-tle job, and I might not have even noticed it—except that I’m scrupulous about filing my data CDs. I noticed that a pair of them was out of order in my desk file drawer. Looking fur-ther, I found other small hints of intrusion.

Henderson again, no doubt. I felt the heat rise behind my collar. Who did he think he was dealing with?

Fortunately, there was no way he could’ve found any sensitive information on other sin-seers, even if he had scraped my computer’s hard drive clean. Those data were safely stored where no one could find them without tearing the place down to its foundation. Still, I felt irate. I’d confront Henderson in the morning and demand that he back off on me.

Or maybe not. It wouldn’t be wise for me to cut off my nose to spite my face. The fact was I benefited greatly from my

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relationship with the police. By my consulting agree-ment, ownership of any sins I extracted from murder vic-tims for identification trans-ferred to me. And Lord knows I enjoyed a small but very tasty supplement to my regu-lar consulting income when I sold the best of the little bug-gers on the open hamartiaph-ily auction markets.

I took a deep breath and calmed myself down. There was one good thing, at least: It didn’t matter if Henderson knew about my relationship with Gerd Vanderhout. Gerd had never made any pretext of hiding his involvement in the craft. After all, it wasn’t an illegal activity. He was above reproach. And, while he might be questioned in the matter, Gerd was under no legal obligation to coop-erate. The courts had been clear on that.

Clear in more ways than one, actually. Physical sins couldn’t be admitted as evi-dence in any court of law. Who but a few could even see them? And how could a judge

objectively believe a person’s claims to be able to do so? Likewise, any descriptions, classifications, or analyses relating to the sins, even by persons known to be “expert seers,” were inadmissible. One might as well admit court testimony from a palm reader or a clairvoyant. We in the craft were fairly well insulated from the law, and Be

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that included freedom from search warrants and court injunctions related to hamar-tiaphilic affairs.

To be sure, individual sin-seers might help the cops with difficult cases, as I rou-tinely did. But any informa-tion we provided was strictly on an unofficial, background basis. I knew that some in the Guild took a dim view of my

relationship with the police—but I’d always cleaved closely to the spirit of our craft guide-lines pertaining to nondisclo-sure. I had my reputation to maintain, after all.

I took a shower and got into bed. I had almost fallen asleep when a horrible thought entered my head: What if the surveil-lance and the break-in had not been Henderson’s doing?

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What if other interested parties were in play?

Sleep evaded me for the rest of the night, while my brain tried to corral all the alternate possibilities.

Maybe it would be best for me to play it straight with Henderson.

•

Detective Henderson leaned back in his chair and exposed the soles of his shoes to me. “So let me get this straight, Pete: You think you were tailed last night, and you think some-one broke into your place. Anything taken?”

“No, but—”“Anything damaged?”“No, Henderson. Nothing

was harmed.”“Have you received any

threats recently? Any reason to believe somebody is want-ing to do you wrong?”

I stared down at the dust bunnies lying on the floor under Henderson’s desk. “At first I thought it was your own guys, poking around to glom onto my confidential information. I intended to

confront you about that. But then it occurred to me that it might have been some-body connected with Manny Greer’s murder. Maybe mak-ing sure the job was done cleanly enough. It freaked me out. I . . . I want some investigation done. And some protection.”

“Okay, duly noted. I’ll send a tech over to check things out, see if we can find anything tan-gible. And I’ll try to arrange a squad car to swing past your street more often on its regular patrol. Understand, that’s only because we’re colleagues, of a sort. Call it professional cour-tesy. But there’s no way I can pull anybody off their assign-ments to babysit you full time. Do you own a handgun?”

“No! Guns frighten me, Henderson. I’d never—”

“You came here wanting my help. That’s what I’m giving you, best I can. If you feel like you’re under threat, I’d advise you to buy a gun and carry it. The only thing to be afraid of with firearms is having the wrong end of one pointing at you. Better that you have

June 2013 - 40


a say in that, if it ever comes down to it.”

I felt a clot of phlegm lodge in my throat. It wasn’t the thing I wanted to hear him say at that moment.

Henderson lowered his feet from the desk and rose from his chair. “Look, Pete, you of all people ought to know how things work around here. Do you actually think we’re gonna give priority to some dead hoodlum when there are a hundred other unsolved

murder cases more pressing? Personally, I couldn’t care less about Manny’s physical sins—or, as you claim, the strange lack of same. Nor what hap-pened to them, if in fact they got plucked. Manny ended up right where he deserved to be. Regardless, there’s one big problem with his case: You won’t reveal the names of your sin-seer buddies for us to check out. You told me that

none of them were murderers. Forgive me, but I happen to hold the opposite view.”

My head spun. He was right, of course. I knew the name of every sin-seer in North America. At least one of them was a murderer. And evidence indicated that I might be the next victim. But I’d taken a solemn Guild vow. Breaking it would destroy me just as sure as having my throat slit.

“I . . . I just can’t do that. I wish I could, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Fine, that’s your right under the law. But it seems to me you’re making things more complicated for your-self, Pete. We can’t help you if you don’t help us.” He paused, looked down at the floor, then said, “There’s one other thing I ought to mention to you.”

“Another thing?”Henderson moved to the

front of his desk, crossed his arms, and leaned back against

“The only thing to be afraid of with firearms is having the wrongend of one pointing at you.”

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it. “The Commissioner’s been reassessing our consulting contracts. Budget crunch time, that sort of thing. I hate to have to tell you this, but he’s teetering on the edge of canceling yours. Not enough bang for the buck, he says. You know how it is: ‘What have you done for us lately?’ Sorry, but . . . there it is.”

All the blood seemed to drain from my head at that moment, leaving me dizzy. “But, but—what about the Strauss case, just a few months ago? You told me yourself that the sin of incest I recovered was helpful in cracking it!”

Henderson shrugged his shoulders in that aggravat-ing, condescending way he had. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The jury’s still out on that one—literally. Who can say what we would have uncovered with our own leg-work? How about the other

two-hundred-and-some-odd cases you’ve been called in on besides that one? I count maybe a couple of useful leads you’ve given us in all that while. At most.”

“Heck, I know there were a few more than that, Henderson. What about—”

“Be honest about it, Pete. You’ve been getting a free ride

from us for a long time, and you’ve done pretty well with it. The good times can’t last for-ever. You know that.”

I stared at Henderson in disbelief. This couldn’t be hap-pening to me! How else could I make a living? I had no for-mal education, no skills save one: seeing sins. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.

“Look,” Henderson said, “I’ll do what I can for you, but no promises.” He walked to his office door and opened it, a less-than-subtle invitation

“I hate to have to tell you this,but he’s teetering on the edgeof canceling your contract.”

June 2013 - 42


for me to get out of his hair. “You have to understand, Pete. A lot of folks around here just don’t appreciate your kind. To be more precise, you give ‘em the creeps. Hell, you even give me the creeps sometimes. Best you go on home and play with your cootie collection, and let me handle things on this end, eh?”

•

There have been a few times in the past, always under severe emotional distress, when I’ve been tempted to extract my own sins—even though I know that would lead to an excruciating, pain-ful death.

It was one of the first lessons Gerd had taught me, many years ago: Sins are symbiotic to humans. We cannot live without them. If we are sepa-rated, the power of our mutual longing will inevitably lead to human dissolution. Even the excision of a single sin from a living person could result in madness. A few unpublished, illicit experiments conducted by the HCG in its early days

had confirmed that. Gerd had once let me read some of those private accounts. They were horrifying.

Just as one could never undo a sin he’d committed, so too could that sin’s physical man-ifestation never be removed from a living body without severe psychical repercussions.

I stood nude in front of my bathroom mirror, looking at the horde of sins infesting my own body, from bottom to top, writhing languidly like so many crystalline larvae, occa-sionally exchanging positions, always on the slow move. They formed a colorful secondary skin, unseen by all but a few.

It was easy to remain pro-fessionally detached when viewing the physical sins that rode upon others. But it was never easy for me to wit-ness the evidence of my own wrongdoings, all my many prior sins of both thought and deed. How could I have accumulated so blasted many of them in the span of my short life? Hundreds and hundreds of them, infest-ing every square inch of my

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body—each one a reminder that I was nowhere near the person I wanted to be. Even more distressing was know-ing that I’d carry them to my grave—and what about beyond? Jesus Christ may have been able to cast out sins from the living, but I saw no evidence that anyone else had ever done so. I watched as a new sin appeared in the center of my chest, right above my heart, gleaming with the spectral glory of fresh manifestation: family hatred, genus self-loathing. I didn’t recognize the species and subspecies. I’d have to consult my HCG directory to nail them down.

•

“Gerd, I’m sorry for the intrusion,” I said. “I think I’m in big trouble. I’ve got to speak with you, and it can’t wait.”

The old man ushered me into his foyer. “Forgive me, Peter,” he said. “I have some guests in the library. Business matters. Please, would you mind waiting for me in the parlor? It should not take

more than a few minutes for me to finish up. Pour yourself a drink in the meantime. I will be with you as soon as I can.”

Gerd went back into the library. I heard a loud voice from within the room, muffled by the thick door: “But it’s the Sin of All Sins! And he has it! We know he does.” A

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I crept closer to the door and put my ear against it.

Gerd’s voice: “As I said before, he would have told me if he did. I am sure of that.”

The first voice: “So you con-tinue to claim.”

Another voice, heavily accented: “The man conspires

with the police. He is not to be trusted. Regardless of his prior relationship with you, Vanderhout, we have good reason to be suspicious.”

First voice: “We know it’s not in his apartment. If he does have it, it’s hidden. We must find out where it is.”A

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Gerd: “You are making a big mistake. Bigger than you know.”

Accented voice, laughing: “Really, Vanderhout! Is that intended as a threat? You can-not threaten us. You may have held power in the old days, but no longer. Now you’re just a weak old man, a has-been.”

I heard sounds of movement and took that opportunity to retreat to the parlor until the men left. When they did, a minute later, Gerd rejoined

me. I could see the signs of emotional distress written on his drawn face.

“Sorry, Peter,” he said. “Some unpleasant business, as it turned out—but no matter. What did you need to tell me?”

“Many things, Gerd. But now it seems more imperative to ask you to tell me things. I overheard some of the conver-sation from your library. It . . . seemed to cut close to home.”

Gerd sighed and bent his head down. He ran one hand through his sparse, gray hair and grunted. “Och, Peter. Things are spinning out of control, as you guessed. Those men are con-vinced that you harvested a spe-cial sin from Manny Greer. The one we all crave to own: the Sin of All Sins.”

“But of course I didn’t! The man was wiped clean, Gerd. I told you that. Nothing was there. Nothing!”

“I know that, and I believe

that. Others do not.”“But why would anyone

think that a low-life scum ball like Manny would harbor such a hamartiaphilic treasure? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“You are letting your brain speak instead of your heart, Peter,” Gerd said. “Do you honestly think that sins select people according to their class in society? Do you believe that powerful sins are only

“You may have held power inthe old days, but no longer. Now

you’re just a weak old man.”

June 2013 - 46


destined to be affixed to pow-erful people? If so, you are wrong. Dead wrong. You have learned nothing of what I taught you!”

Gerd walked to the credenza in the parlor and poured him-self a drink, his hands shaking visibly as he did so. “Sins are totally egalitarian by nature,” he said. “They do not care if you are Manny the Thug or Genghis Khan the Conqueror. They only want to be. To man-ifest. To cling.”

“To be with us,” I said.“Yes. To be with every one

of us. It is the only way they can achieve their bliss.”

“And so Manny managed to glom onto the greatest sin in all the world?”

“According to my infor-mants, yes. Look at it this way: We swim through an end-less sea of sins, each of them desperate to gain connection with us. You and I can only see the ones that have made a landing, so to say. And it does not take much to hook one. Just an impure thought, in many cases. Your man Manny apparently latched onto a . . .

what’s the word? A real doozy. The biggest doozy of them all. Or so I am led to believe.”

“Incredible. But who could ever know that about Manny?”

“Someone who is both a sinner and a sin-seer too,” Gerd said. “Someone who wanted that sin for himself. Someone who is determined to obtain it at any cost. My vis-itors tonight were not working for themselves. They are obvi-ously agents, in it only for the money. Their strings are being controlled by a higher person, unknown to us.”

“But Gerd, tell me what sin could possibly be worse than, say, genocide, or serial mur-der? Or running scams on elderly people? Or bilking corporate investors out of mil-lions? Manny couldn’t have managed to top those. He was too stupid. What exactly is the Sin of All Sins?”

The old man shook his head slowly. “Not anything we can conceive by way of specula-tion, Peter. It is something beyond our imagining. The Holy Grail of our art. The quintessential sin, comprising

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a superfamily that subsumes all the others below it.”

“If that’s true, couldn’t we project what it might look like from taxonomic analysis of known sin shape families?”

“Some have tried to do so,” Gerd said. “I have seen vari-ous hypothetical renderings. The best guess is that it takes the form of a hyper-icosahe-dron. We think it must have enormous spectral energy. But who can know for sure?”

He raised his eyes and looked at the high chande-lier in the center of the par-lor. “Considering the stakes involved, perhaps it would be best for you to stay here with me for a time, for your own safety. I have plenty of spare room in this dusty, old man-sion. I will call in some old friends of mine who owe me a favor, to act as . . . body-guards.” He looked back down at me, lifted his eye-brows, and smiled.

I nodded back to him. I could buy a toothbrush at the local drugstore in the morning.

At this point, I was scared. The chances that I’d get any

substantial help from the police were slim, and so I was thankful for Gerd’s offer of protection.

•

Sins occupy a space just a tiny bit removed from the one that most people can see. They are like the steamy fog that rises from a hot asphalt road after a shower in the middle of summer. Nothing but humid air, really—but invisible until after the rain and the sun con-spire to bring it out.

Me, I was sick of being able to see them. As I lay restlessly in the unfamiliar bed, I cursed Gerd for developing my latent talent in the first place. In the end, it hadn’t been worth it.

The Bible defined the worst sin as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the only unforgiv-able sin. But surely it couldn’t be that obvious, else we’d have already seen its manifestation in plentitude. Even so, since no one could actually under-stand the mystical nature of the Holy Spirit, maybe there was something to that notion. Maybe it took an incorrigible

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sinner like Manny to stumble upon that most perverse of thoughts or deeds.

And perhaps the physi-cal manifestation of the Sin of All Sins was not really all that breathtaking or complex to behold. It might be hard to identify, crammed amidst other sins. Maybe its spec-tral energy was actually not very strong. It very well may have disguised itself like that.

Maybe it looked like the hum-blest of everyday sins.

I rolled and tossed in bed, trying to will my brain to stop operating. These thoughts wor-ried me. Worried me deeply.

I knew it was impossible to destroy a sin’s physical mani-festation, even after the death of its original host. An early HCG study group had done experiments using all kinds of solvents, strong acids, flames, liquid nitrogen, noxious gases, you name it. All were

totally ineffective. Sins were robust and had an extraordi-narily long physical lifetime. The oldest, well-documented, extant sin I knew about was HCG 28-147-1-1, a singular genus. It had been extracted from a religious relic, the knucklebone of St. Agothis, who had died in the third cen-tury C.E.

I suppose it was fortu-nate for hamartiaphiles that

the plane sins occupied was only slightly askew from nor-mal sight. Otherwise, collec-tors couldn’t have appreciated their individual beauty.

And they were beautiful, to be sure. Each one splendid in its own illicit, unique way. Collectors assumed that the Sin of All Sins was the most beautiful item in all the world. Some would kill for it. Beyond its inestimable tangible value, its ownership would secure one’s legacy forever in the

“Considering the stakes involved,perhaps it would be best foryou to stay here with me.”

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annals of the Hamartiaphily Collector’s Guild.

Which was, I thought uncomfortably, just the sort of thing that would appeal to a person like Gerd Vanderhout.

•

I awoke to find myself tied immobile in a chair in Gerd’s library, with the residual scent of chloroform in my nostrils about to make me retch.

“Please forgive me for this, Peter,” Gerd said.

A couple of other elderly guys I didn’t recognize stood on either side of me. One of them held a small pistol in his hand.

Henderson had been right. True fear is facing the busi-ness end of a loaded gun. I tried to look away from it but couldn’t. That small, dark hole at the end of the barrel seemed to grow larger and larger until it subsumed everything else in my vision.

I heaved once against my bindings as a surge of adren-aline coursed through my body, bearing its primary chemical instruction: fight or flight. I could do neither.

Somewhere inside my head, panic quickly evolved into an odd sense of detachment. The room, the people inside it, the situation itself became sur-real. I found my voice, sur-prised that it was so coherent under the circumstance.

“It’s not like I couldn’t expect something like this to hap-pen, Gerd,” I said. “You were my last hope, and now you’re

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betraying me for the sake of your own greed. A variant of HCG 3-14, as I reckon it. I can see it blooming on your chest right now, ready to manifest itself. Bright as a new star. Weighing down your wings even further.”

My fingers teased at the knot that restrained my wrists behind the chair. Gerd’s ancient accomplices were

obviously not accustomed to this kind of sordid business. The knot was loose enough for me to unravel, given time.

“I had to be sure,” Gerd said. “Surely you can understand that. It is much too important for me not to follow up on.”

“You killed Manny Greer, didn’t you? Or had someone in your employ do it. And when your assassin came back

Below: sxc.hu

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empty handed, you figured he missed reaping the target you were after. I don’t know why I can’t see the evidence of your crime crawling on you, but it must have been you.”

“Camouflaging sins is a lit-tle trick I never taught you, Peter.” Gerd sighed. “And yes, sadly my newest apprentice has a long way to go before he becomes a competent seer. Not like you. You were my

pride, my best student. But your moral compass is . . . how can I say it? Too precise, too true for this business. You do not yet have the fire in your gut to play our game well.”

“So what is to come? Your geriatric henchmen here try to beat the truth out of me?”

Gerd stepped closer to me. “No. We simply remove one of your sins and see if your ensuing distress produces the answer we need to hear.” He held a sin-extraction tool in his hand. “And later, we

discuss your ultimate disposi-tion. Considering our position under the law, it is doubt-ful that you will cause us any problems. After all, who ever believes a sin-seer’s testimony? We are all charlatans, yes?”

Gerd laughed at his own joke.My breath caught in my

chest. “Don’t do it, Gerd. Leave my sins alone. You know I’ll confess to anything if the pain is great enough. Any tortured

soul would. It won’t do you any good! Best you just kill me now.”

Gerd only shrugged and stooped over me. I felt the slightest twinge in my upper arm.

And then, terror.It was the horror of separa-

tion, of infinite, melancholic longing. A pit of blackness beyond black opened up before me: the loss of all hope. Worse than death, a fate that granted no mercy, no succor. A pain beyond imagining for all eternity. I screamed.

“Camouflaging sins is a littletrick I never taught you, Peter.”

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“You only need to reveal where you hid the Sin of All Sins, Peter,” Gerd said. “And then I will replace what you are missing, make the pain stop, make you whole again.”

I screamed again, but by that time I had loosened the cords that held me in the chair. I leaned hard to my left, and the heavy chair fell over into the codger who held the gun. He went down, cry-ing out when he hit the floor. Did I break his hip? Another sin for me to bear. In my ter-ror I gained strength, loos-ened the rest of my restraints, and grabbed the firearm, which had slid a short way away from him. I stood and pointed the weapon at Gerd. “Put it back! Put it back now!”

Gerd, obviously shaken, replaced the sin on my quiv-ering arm. Relief flooded through me. “Peter, I know you are distraught right now, but you must understand how important—”

“Distraught! You’re a master of understatement, Gerd.” My hands shook as I held the gun. I fought a momentary impulse

to squeeze the trigger. “Sorry, I’ll take my chances elsewhere if you don’t mind. Down on the floor, now, everyone. Don’t move a muscle. And read my lips, Gerd: I don’t have your damned sin!”

Where to go? I didn’t know. I reclaimed my keys and wal-let, ran out of the manor to my car, and drove off, spinning wheels in the driveway, trying to reclaim my sanity.

I was sure that part of me would ever remain back in Gerd’s library, hovering over the edge of that black, bot-tomless pit.

•

I drove for days, deter-mined to put as much mile-age as I could between me and those who would seek me out. Every tick of the car’s odom-eter made me feel incremen-tally safer. I finally holed up in a small town in Idaho. There, I finally had a chance to think hard about what had hap-pened and what I was going to do. I couldn’t come up with any good options. Given their powerful resources, the Guild

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would eventually find me. I’d spend the rest of my life look-ing over my shoulder.

I couldn’t live like that.A full week passed before

I called Henderson. I never would have expected his grav-elly voice to sound so com-forting to me.

“Pete! Where the hell are you, man?”

“As close to nowhere as I can get. Probably not close enough.”

“Well now, that’s a real pisser. Here I go to the wall for you with the commissioner and get your consulting con-tract extended for another two years. Then you up and disap-pear on me!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Things got complicated. I got con-fused and . . . scared.”

I told him everything that had happened to me since the last time I saw him.

“Very interesting,” he said. “But what you don’t know is that Gerd Vanderhout was found dead in the library of his home last week. Gunshot to the skull, apparent suicide.”

I felt the blood rush to my head. My mind spun. It was a

double irony. Manny Greer, an incorrigible sinner, ended up dead for a sin he didn’t com-mit. And Gerd Vanderhout, the consummate collector, ended up dead for a sin he didn’t possess.

“It wasn’t suicide, Henderson. Someone killed him. A rival sin-collector, trying to steal a prize they thought he had— something that doesn’t even exist except as an imaginary figment in the minds of these insane people.”

“You have solid evidence of this? If so, you need to come back and give us your state-ment. We’ll protect you. Set you up in a witness protection program, if need be.”

I sighed. “No. It’s nothing but informed speculation on my part.” I looked down at my feet, then added, “Henderson, let me ask you something: Are you a religious man?”

“No, not particularly. Why do you ask?”

“Because I’ve been thinking lately that God doesn’t want us to be able to see sins like I can. It’s unnatural and ultimately corruptive. Even more perverse

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is collecting them like they were so many pretty baubles. After looking into that dark pit of despair at Gerd’s place, I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

There was a long pause on Henderson’s end.

“See the tears fall from my cheek,” he finally said. “You think you’re something spe-cial, being able to see sins. And maybe you are. But I’m no slouch at it myself. I wit-ness sin all the time, in my own way. And I too look into that dark abyss—every single day. The difference

is in how we deal with it. You’re running away from it. I fight it and try to bring justice to the wronged souls who can no longer speak for themselves. Make a stand, Pete. Here and now.”

I looked out at the high-way. An empty logging truck roared by, heading north toward a farther nowhere.

“You sound like an avenging angel.”

I heard him snort into the phone. “You don’t have to believe in God to do right. But if there is a God, I’ve got no patience with him. Yeah, sure, sure. We might all have to pay for our sins someday. But I’d rather present the check in the here and now. Come back to me, Pete. Help me catch the bad guys, make them pay now. I’ve been toy-ing with some ideas about how we can work together more closely. Up the ante, so to speak. Maybe become a little more proactive at this

game . . .”Every gut instinct I had,

even after all I’d been through, told me to protect the ano-nymity of my Guild col-leagues. But instincts can prove to be wrong. The clos-est thing I ever had to a fam-ily had shown itself to be rife with lunatics, single-mindedly pursuing an impossible chi-mera, doing terrible things in the name of their craft.

“You sound likean avenging angel.”

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And Henderson had nailed it: I was indeed running away, just like a frightened child who refused to confront the source of his fear. Perhaps I was try-ing to run away from myself. If so, I’d never find solace.

One thing was certain. The Guild killings wouldn’t cease. Not unless I helped stop them.

Another logging truck rum-bled past, this one filled with

cut timber, heading south.I made my decision.“There’s a lot a names on my

list,” I said. “At least a couple of them are murderers. Think you can sort them all out?”

Henderson chuckled. “It’s what I do, Pete. If you give me

the bullets, I’ll produce the retri-bution.” He paused, then added,

“Welcome back . . . partner.”

Righ

t: Fl

ickr

.com

/wes

t.m

June 2013 - 56


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Crimson Fog June 2013