The Nocturne Chamber Part 3

My head was pounding before I even opened my eyes that morning. After an informative, but ultimately fruitless, night at the bar, I had turned up nothing concrete with which to aid my investigation. I rolled out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom, blinking the sleep out of my eyes as I brushed my teeth. I thought back to the day I first heard about the Weeping Door.

It was as innocuous a day as any. I was at the inner city police precinct station downtown, grabbing some information on a possible suspect in my current case, Walter Smith, who had previously been detained there. I had vacantly skimmed through the file, noting the physical description of the suspect and Walter matched exactly, and I remember feeling a certain anomie towards my work. Being a homicide detective for the state was a noble profession, it helped people, certainly. Perhaps it was inevitable that the investigation of those who ended lives never felt like it filled me with any sort of life, or excitement, or joy. Just case after case, open and shut, another criminal put away, another victim who's family found some peace now that they had justice. Justice.

I was sitting in the cafeteria of the station, where other police officers sat eating, talking, watching the basketball game playing on TV in the corner and loudly cheering. They weren't here because they wanted to be, they were here because it was their job to be. I guess I was having trouble finding where justice fit in, exactly, in all of this.

I was startled from my reverie by some sort of commotion in the hall, and, remembering that I needed to get back to my office, grabbed my blazer and walked out of the cafeteria, files in hand. The noises I had heard were coming from a man struggling against two officers. I assumed he was a vagrant, judging by his torn, dirty clothing and overall unkempt appearance. He fought mightily against his handcuffs, blood welling up around his wrists as he strained against them. The officers were trying desperately to calm him, and prevent him from hurting himself any further, but he just continued to flail around and scream. I could hear pieces of what he was bellowing; something about someone named Reggie, and a door, and how he was taken. I squeezed my way past, and saw another officer trailing behind, watching the proceedings with wide eyes.

I asked if he knew anything about what was happening with the guy they were dragging away, and the young officer said he was the one who found him. Over at the corner of fifth and eighteenth street. Said that he saw Reggie, a friend of his, going into some door in an alley and disappearing. He had a specific name for it though; called it the Weeping Door. I frowned, puzzled at what that information could possibly mean, and asked if he knew anything else about the area or the friend who went missing. He shrugged, said it was his beat and he knew the man, Ed, slept around that area a lot. Reggie, too. The door was a mystery to him, though he said he chalked it up to old Ed going through some withdrawal fevers and seeing things. The only reason he took him in was due to him causing a disturbance. I watched Ed vanish around a corner at the end of the hall, and listened to his cries for a moment longer before turning and leaving.

I spat out the toothpaste in my mouth, and splashed some water on my face before drying off. I headed back into my room and then from there into the narrow hall to the kitchen, dining, and living room area. Manipulating the coffee machine mechanically, I brewed enough coffee to have a hot cup now and a cold cup whenever I came home. As it brewed, I briefly opened the door to the fridge and glanced at the contents: a half-gallon of milk, probably spoiled by now, a shriveled tomato, two ragged bars of butter, one crusty bottle of ketchup. The usual. I poured half of the coffee into a thermos, plain and black. Locking my door, I headed down the hall to the elevator, and down from the fourth the the first floor.

I thought to myself on the elevator ride, and how ever since that fateful day, and encounter, with the strange vagrant named Ed who screamed endlessly of something about a Weeping Door. In the months that had passed since that nearly trivial event, a sort of acute awareness, one which I would attribute to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, overtook me. The Weeping Door, a dark door, a door in the water, always some sort of doorway. It was raining that day, or the door was leading into a sewer of some sort. Doors that came as if from nowhere at all, and then vanished just the same. All I had ever heard were whispers, and rumors. It was nothing I could build an actual case on.

So I had continued my tasks as they were assigned, day to day, the normal work procedure for one of my career. Open and shut, week to week, like the minute hands on a clock. All while the nagging thought sat in the back of my mind that there was something more, something to those small cases that no one could rightly explain. The kinds of stories similar to the ones old folks would tell their many grandchildren gathered around the fireplace on a winter night. The murmurs within the crowds, the ones made in the darkest alleys on the darkest nights, only seemed to confirm these feelings.

Against the perhaps perceived interest of my superiors, I had taken in upon myself to gather and compile information on the threat that beset us, though we could not see it, let alone give it a name. It was always there though, just beyond the fringe of sight. I thought that I noticed a little bit, just a little, every day, through even the most mundane aspects of my time spent. Like the other night at the bar.

The man had just been yet another result of a rumor, some hearsay I had heard in yet another place from yet another person. Mention of some strange happenings. I always grabbed onto them desperately, like a parent grasping frantically for their lost child. Last night, well, it was just another disappointment. All I knew, and all I'd ever known, was that there was some sort of door, and no one knew just where it would appear.

I walked to work quietly, as I always did. Head down, collar turned to the wind. It was getting to be the middle of winter now. No one would dare make conversation in this weather, lest they be turned to glass statues left to adorn the sidewalks; but, then again, this wasn't really the sort of city where people made small talk on the streets. The office for the State Homicide department was seven blocks north, and twelve blocks west from my apartment building. I walked every day to work there, no matter the weather, for I refused to get a car in the city. As far as I was concerned, everything I needed was within twenty blocks of me.

As I walked into the building and greeted the security guard with a tired hello, I saw some of the other officers coming from upstairs cast me some long glances before continuing on their way. I only dwelt on it a few moments before moving on and taking the stairs to my office on the third floor. Before I could reach the cold, brass handle, I heard my superior officer shout my name from across the hall. I stopped, and turned bodily to face him, and saw him gesture with his whole head for me to come see him. I did so with an exasperated sigh, quite sure I knew what was in store this time.

He asked me to close the door, and as soon as I did, a torrent of expletive filled explanations of my shortcomings came spilling out of his cavernous maw, most of it in the form of his disapproval of me digging into old cases that had been ruled unsolved and my general lack of interest in letting the rest of the department know what I was up to. I just shrugged at first, unsure what to say. He told me he was the same way when he was a rookie, that he would get fired up on some idea but not have enough hard proof, and obsess for months and months on something. I eventually caved after hearing his sympathetic reasoning, and explained just what had been bothering me lately.

I told him about the encounter in the precinct downtown, the rumors, the gossip among the vagrants and the underworld in the city, how they knew something of what was going on. It couldn't all be chalked up to chance, not at this point. He stared at me for a long moment, and then he smiled an empty, sad smile. He went on a long rant about health, and maybe something about a therapist he knew. I couldn't tell. I was thinking about going to the corner of Breyer Street, where I knew a gang of pick-pockets who had been murmuring about some sort of mysterious danger in the alleys lately. That, and I had already received the message I felt he was trying to convey.

He had paused, and with a slight start, I roused myself from my reverie and realized that he had asked me some sort of question. I blinked a few times, and, unthinking, placed my gun and badge on the desk in front of him. I didn't think I would be needing them, after all, as they had done nothing thus far to gain me access to the secrets I had been seeking. Perhaps I'd be better off without them. I stood slowly, and the chief's wide eyes followed me out of the room. I retrieved nothing from my desk, and walked out of the building without a word or glance in any direction other than straight ahead. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, I looked around, recalling my mental map of the city and calculating just how I could get to Breyer Street.