9. LUZ Y FER #2
I began to consider if this person really was just a “schizo” like the other posters seemed to think.
If I kept chasing the phantoms of that day, was I on my way to…
this, scrambling in the dark, ripping the wiring from my walls looking for fictional bugs?
I imagined Tanita coming to find me hunched in the corner of my office surrounded by eviscerated appliances and jars of my own piss.
Then I saw it.
08.23.2022 (18:21) – TWNVSTGTR: PAYDIRT! This explains the demonic interference I’ve been facing. I’ve finally found what the pendants are. The Seal of Lucifer. Closer than I’ve ever been. But so are they.
Attached was a zoomed-in grainy video still of the black pendant around one of the twins’ necks from a CCTV feed near a gas explosion in Chicago. He’d done his best to trace over the blurry pixels to extract a symbol: two inverted triangles.
I pulled out my notebook and found my sketch of the symbol I’d seen that day around the women’s necks. They matched. Twinvestigator had found what it was.
I kept going, looking for further posts about the symbol, but found nothing. His final post had been more than a year prior.
10.18.2022 (23:09) – TWNVSTGTR: After all my searching, I’m finished.
The trail is cold. The twins haven’t been seen in almost two years now.
I can’t keep doing this anymore. Whatever it was I was searching for is either gone or never existed.
Maybe you guys were right. Maybe I’m just another “schizo.”
After finally finding evidence of what I’d seen, a sliver of a possibility to explain what happened, I refused to let it just slip away. If this guy was delusional, then I supposed I was, too. He couldn’t be finished; I wouldn’t let him.
I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the reply button.
01.17.2024 (05:26) – You: You aren’t crazy. I saw them. The Javits Center. They were there.
I tried to stay up, some part of me hoping he still watched the thread, was still secretly as obsessed as I’d rapidly become. But soon, the morning light leaking through the window and a hangover already setting in, I fell asleep on the couch.
It was only a few hours before the shrill ring of my phone jarred me awake. Peeling my face from the couch leather and trying to wipe the dry from my eyes, I looked at the cracked screen. Tanita.
I took the call, eager to tell her that I might not be crazy. Or that I was at the very least involved in a kind of interesting group delusion. She must have heard the hangover in my voice.
“Jesus. Aurelio. Finally pick up and you sound like death.”
“I know. What time is it?”
“Like four. Listen. I just needed to hear from you. I’ve been getting worried. Even Quin is still calling me just to ask if you’re all right.”
“I’m fine. I’m fine, I think.”
“You think? Do you need me to bring anything over? I am still technically your assistant.”
“I’m fine, really.”
“Groceries? Clean clothes?”
It seemed that she’d already thought I’d gone full Howard Hughes. I chuckled. “It’s really okay. Listen, I found something. About what I saw. The woman. Women.”
The worry in her voice increased. “Oh?”
I started to tell her about the thread. About Twinvestigator. At first she simply seemed to feign interest. I imagined her looking up the process of ordering a wellness check in between her Huhs and Uh-huhs. But gradually she seemed to at least humor me.
“Well. I hate to agree that you sound pretty normal. Like, despite the content of what you’re saying.”
“Thank you. Look, I mean, whatever the case is, maybe there’s a good film to be made about my slide into insanity.”
“Mhm, the story of two strangers somehow developing the exact same bizarre fixation on this stuff would be a good watch. Did he respond?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t looked yet.” I pulled my laptop over and tapped the keys a couple times to wake it up.
The screen lit up, still on the thread. My heart jumped into my throat.
“Holy shit.”
“He responded?”
I looked at the replies. The first one had come in from someone else, another anonymous poster. I read them out to Tanita.
01.17.2024 (07:48) – Anonymous to You: Delete. Quick.
01.17.2024 (08:30) – TWNVSTGTR to You: So you were there when it happened?
01.17.2024 (08:31) – Anonymous to You: Don’t answer.
“Who’s telling you not to talk to him?” Tanita asked.
“I don’t know. They’re another anonymous poster like me. Could just be messing around, but…” I stopped. “Hold on. I think they’re typing.”
“Which one?”
“Anonymous is typing…”
We both waited. Tanita was silent, pulled into the narrative I’d constructed over the phone. The post blinked into existence.
01.17.2024 (16:24) – Anonymous to You: Hang up.
My stomach turned into a pit as my blood froze. I slammed the laptop shut, practically tossing it away from my body.
“What? What’d they say?” Tanita sounded excited.
My tongue stuck to my mouth. “They said… They said, ‘Hang up.’ ”
The phone line fizzed as we both sat in stunned silence. I was paralyzed, unsure if I should obey or defy the order of whoever it was who seemed to be listening in.
Two possible realities came into focus. Either Twinvestigator and I were complete basket cases, none of this was real, and someone inexplicably decided to log in to a thread from more than a year ago to mess with us and post Hang up on the off chance I was both on the phone and looking at the thread.
Or there was the possibility that we were sane—which at that moment had the previous night’s microwaved dinner snaking up my throat—that he really had been hounded by mysterious forces, that those forces had now turned toward me.
I had never found myself wishing so badly to be mentally ill.
“Aurelio,” Tanita broke the silence, “you’re not messing with me, right?”
“Meet me at the library,” and then I hung up.
I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet before washing and shaving.
Every time water splashed my face, I struggled to keep my eyes open, too afraid to close them for even a moment.
I needed to be in public. For the first time in a long while, I felt the need to be in a crowd, to find protection in the herd.
Keeping a brisk pace on my walk to the library, I stopped only to grab a pastry and a coffee to fill my cramping stomach. I looked over my shoulder, constantly scanning the faces of those around me for repeats.
I waited for Tanita for an hour. I thought about calling her, but I couldn’t use my phone again. I waited another hour sitting still and scanning the library patrons before I decided to use the lookup desk.
I typed in: Seal of Lucifer and hit Enter.
Recommended reading from the library system populated the page: Dante’s Divina Comedia; van den Vondel’s Lucifer; Milton’s Paradise Lost; the Apocalypse of John, Book of Revelation; Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem; or Augustine of Hippo’s Civitas Dei.
I skimmed them, clicking through to articles about the provenance of the name “Lucifer,” his representation in Paradise Lost as a possible promethean figure giving mankind free will, and the seal of Lucifer as being a symbol of the duality in man to do good and evil.
The name of Lucifer himself, the ruler over all that was meant to be dark, translated from Latin to mean “light-bringer.” Somewhere in the back of my mind, under the overwhelming panic, was the slightest amount of Mexican Catholic shame in how little I realized I knew about el diablo.
My frenzied research was interrupted by a system notification popping up on the screen:
You’ve been logged in for an hour. If other patrons are waiting, please consider allowing them a turn.
Tightly wound, I looked around at the mostly empty library and dismissed the message.
But it had now been three hours and not a peep from Tanita.
I had no choice but to try calling. As I reached for my phone, a man sat next to me at the computers.
I casually closed my tabs of research, warily keeping him in my peripheral as he opened a blank text document.
I pulled my phone out, hesitating with my thumb hovering over Tanita’s contact when the man loudly cleared his throat.
Glancing over, I saw on his screen, in large enough type for me to read, You shouldn’t have said where you were going on the phone. They’ll be coming.
He kept looking straight ahead at his screen, typing, We can’t talk here. 538 Johnson #6 in Brooklyn. Don’t go home first. Don’t get followed.
Before I could think to open a document on my screen to respond, he’d closed his and left. I sat there, my thumb still hovering over Tanita’s number, weighing my options. Whoever the man was, he’d already proven to be telling the truth. Clearly someone was listening.
I wouldn’t go home, but I couldn’t shake my concern for Tanita. Her apartment was only a few stops prior to Johnson Street, so I headed there first.
I buzzed her apartment. No response. Buzzed again. No response. I crossed the street, counting the floors of her building. The winter sun had already set, but no lights were on.
Walking the cobble streets near the English Kills, I routinely scanned the empty industrial streets as I questioned my sanity.
The empty truck depots and warehouses closed in around me in the twilight as I came to the sign for Johnson Street, my only path to find out what was happening to me. I buzzed #6.
A voice crackled over the intercom, “Up two flights. Close the door behind you.”
Climbing the stairs, I hoped that perhaps he had found Tanita as well.
That she would be on the other side of the door, which instantly swung open as the man from the library pulled me in before slamming it behind him and pressing an eye to the keyhole.
As he went to latch the heavy dead bolt, I grabbed his hand.
“No. You tell me who you are before locking me in with you. Where’s Tanita?”
His hand offered no resistance as he spoke, even as I white-knuckled over it. “What use would it be to tell you I’m a friend?”