Chapter on Chicago Chronicles

Scorched Earth — Saturday, 23 June 1990, 9:00 PM

Sat, 23 Jun 1990 21:00:00 +0000

The Torch / Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

Victor wrote the name on a cocktail napkin the way men write names they know are dangerous: small letters, steady hand, the pen pressed hard enough to dent the cardboard underneath. Lakeside Holdings LLC. Gerald Fisk. Morris and Peck, attorneys, Hammond, Indiana.

Darius folded the napkin and put it in his coat pocket next to Modius’s note and drove south on Broadway to the mansion on Miller Beach with the numbers already assembling themselves in his head. The mortgage. The shell company. The attorneys in Hammond, which was Lucian’s territory, which meant the money was Lucian’s money, which meant the elder Gangrel who’d sat in a moth-eaten armchair at Elysium and told Darius that the docks didn’t need a king was now buying the only bar in Gary and every Kindred in the city was about to find out what it felt like when the food supply changed hands.

Elysium — Friday, 2 February 1990, 9:00 PM

Fri, 02 Feb 1990 21:00:00 +0000

Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

The mansion on Miller Beach sat at the end of a dead street the way a casket sits at the end of an aisle. Two stories of timber and stone, porch light the only light on the block, the lake behind it black and restless in the February cold. Victor Salonika opened the door before Sable knocked.

“He’s in the drawing room.”

Nine o’clock. The hallway smelled like lemon polish and wet plaster. Modius’s hell-paintings lined the walls, figures burning in landscapes that looked like Gary through a cracked windshield. Sable walked through them the way she’d walked through the Robert Taylor Homes at fourteen: eyes forward, inventory running. Exits, sight lines, the particular weight of a building that knows it’s dying and hasn’t told anyone yet.

Aftermath — Wednesday, 17 January 1990, 10:00 PM

Wed, 17 Jan 1990 22:00:00 +0000

West Side / The Horseshoe / Telton Cemetery / Kiefer’s Gary, Indiana

The stevedore’s blood tasted like January. Cold bourbon and brake fluid and the metallic tang of a man calculating how many payments he could miss before the bank took the truck. Darius drank until the hunger went quiet and then he drank a little more, because the night ahead required a full tank and a clear head, and in this city the two were the same thing.

The Shipment — Sunday, 14 January 1990, 11:30 PM

Sun, 14 Jan 1990 23:30:00 +0000

Dock 7, Gary Exports Co. Gary, Indiana

The containers were already there. That was the first wrong thing. The clipboard said January 14 — arrival date, Dock 7, three units, no origin, no contents, initials L.C. — but when Darius came through the south gate at half past eleven, the containers were sitting on the concrete like they’d been waiting for days. Dark steel, forty feet long, stacked in a row at the far end of the dock behind the corrugated warehouse that blocked the sightline from the dispatch office. The work light in the middle container threw a rectangle of yellow across the ground that looked, from the service gate, like an open mouth.

The Oasis — Saturday, 13 January 1990, 11:50 PM

Sat, 13 Jan 1990 23:50:00 +0000

The Oasis, 75th Street / Modius’s Mansion Chicago, Illinois / Gary, Indiana

The razor fit in her jacket pocket the way a secret fits in a sentence — weightless until you need it. Bone handle, good steel, a dead man’s vanity she’d taken from a coat pocket at The Oasis two years ago when she was alive and working the VIP and the john had passed out in the booth with his wallet open and his throat exposed and she’d thought, even then, even before she knew what she’d become: You never know when you’ll need something sharp.

The Mirror — Friday, 12 January 1990, 10:00 PM

Fri, 12 Jan 1990 22:00:00 +0000

The Torch / Fifth Avenue / Modius’s Mansion / The Oasis, 75th Street Gary, Indiana / Chicago, Illinois

The Torch smelled like Friday even on a Monday. Spilled bourbon soaking into wood grain, cigarette tar layered so deep in the ceiling tiles it had become architecture, and underneath it the warm animal funk of human beings drinking because the alternative was thinking, which in Gary, Indiana, in January, was not an activity that led anywhere good.

Thursdays — Thursday, 11 January 1990, 9:30 PM

Thu, 11 Jan 1990 21:30:00 +0000

Telton Cemetery Gary, Indiana

The candles were votives — six of them, white, unscented, the kind you bought at the dollar store on Broadway in packs of twelve. The blanket was army surplus, olive drab, still in the plastic from the thrift shop on Fifth. There was a bottle of Merlot that Darius had taken from a liquor store display because he didn’t know anything about wine and the label looked serious enough to be respectful. He’d put all of it in a paper grocery bag and set it on the back seat of the Cutlass, and now he was driving east toward Telton Cemetery with the heater on and the Beast eating him from the inside out.

The Accommodation — Monday, 8 January 1990, 10:00 PM

Mon, 08 Jan 1990 22:00:00 +0000

The Torch / Modius’s Mansion / Fifth Avenue Gary, Indiana

Victor Salonika was drying a glass when he said it.

“Your friend in Roselle. The painter.”

Sable had been sitting at the bar for twenty minutes, nursing a drink she couldn’t taste, watching the door the way she watched every door, with her body angled away and her attention locked on the mirror behind the bottles where the reflection showed everything the room thought she wasn’t looking at. Monday night at The Torch. Four mortals at a table by the wall. A woman alone in the corner booth with a cigarette and a crossword puzzle. The jukebox playing Sam Cooke low enough that the song was more a feeling than a sound.

The Bookie — Friday, 5 January 1990, 10:15 PM

Fri, 05 Jan 1990 22:15:00 +0000

Gary Exports Co., Dispatch Office Gary, Indiana

The dispatch office had a light on. That was the first thing right about the evening. Everything after that was wrong.

Darius parked the Cutlass in the same spot he’d used on New Year’s Eve — south side of the loading bays, behind a dumpster that smelled like rust and fish guts even in January. He straightened his coat, checked his teeth in the rearview mirror out of a habit that no longer served any biological purpose, and walked toward the light.

Elysium — Friday, 5 January 1990, 8:00 PM

Fri, 05 Jan 1990 20:00:00 +0000

Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

The mansion looked like a skull with candles in it.

That was Sable’s first thought as she pulled the Buick up to the curb — the tall windows glowing amber from inside, the dark stone facade, the roofline sagging on the north side where the architecture had given up pretending it was still alive. Two men stood at the front door in the cold. They didn’t move when she walked past them because they couldn’t. Their eyes tracked her the way security cameras track: mechanically, without recognition, without will.

Haven — Thursday, 4 January 1990, 9:00 PM

Thu, 04 Jan 1990 21:00:00 +0000

Tolleston Gary, Indiana

The van was white and had no plates.

That was the first thing Sable noticed, before the headlights swung across the road and the vehicle pulled sideways across both lanes with the practiced geometry of a roadblock. No plates meant no registration meant nobody was supposed to know this van existed, and in Sable’s experience — which was longer than her twenty-one years suggested and deeper than any of them deserved — vehicles without plates belonged to two categories of men: the kind who were running from something and the kind who were collecting it.

The Torch — Monday, 1 January 1990, 1:00 AM

Mon, 01 Jan 1990 01:00:00 +0000

The Torch Gary, Indiana

She could smell the Hennessy before she saw him.

Not literally — not yet, not from the door, not through the wall of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and the particular musk of thirty human bodies generating heat in a room that hadn’t been properly ventilated since the Carter administration. But the memory of Hennessy hit her the same way: a trigger buried so deep in the animal part of her brain that the Embrace hadn’t touched it, hadn’t killed it, had just frozen it in place alongside everything else she’d been at twenty-one. The smell of Hennessy meant Big Six. Big Six meant the front row at The Oasis. The front row meant the weight of eyes that didn’t blink.

New Year's Eve — Sunday, 31 December 1989, 11:47 PM

Sun, 31 Dec 1989 23:47:00 +0000

The Docks, Gary Exports Co. Gary, Indiana

The last night of the year smelled like sulfur and frozen lake water.

Darius Cole killed the engine and sat in the Cutlass for a full minute, listening. The heater ticked as it cooled. Somewhere south — the projects, probably — a string of firecrackers went off in a ragged chain, each pop a half-second late, like applause from people who’d forgotten what they were clapping for. Then nothing. The deep industrial nothing that was Gary’s native sound: wind through chain-link, the groan of sheet metal nobody had come to repair, and under everything the low hum of Lake Michigan doing what Lake Michigan does, which is wait.

Nefer-Hotep — Hell's Highway

Sat, 15 Aug 1987 22:00:00 +0000

Sun Valley Inn, I-40 Corridor New Mexico

I have known the true name of every serpent in the Nile Delta, every star visible from the roof of Thoth’s temple at Hermopolis, every mineral that hides in the dark throat of the earth. I have carried these names across four thousand years of dying and waking and dying again, through courts and laboratories and battlefields and the long, dreamless intervals between lives. I have never misplaced one.