The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne Read online

  The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne

  Smashwords Edition, 2015

  Story by R.S. Darling

  Cover Art by R.S. Darling

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  Chapter 1

  Batavia New York, December 6, 1941

  The woman was naked, that much was clear.

  Unfortunately, from five stories up, peering out and down through frost-lined glass, the only other details Virgil Montaigne could make out were the long dark hair waving in the arctic breeze, and the absence of footprints in the snow.

  “Better get back on the line,” Frank, a co-worker, said.

  Snapping Virgil out of these post lunch fugue states was becoming a daily chore for Frank; though Virgil imagined the man didn’t mind startling him, considering his friend was a ten year old in a man’s body.

  Frank slapped him on the back. “What the hell you staring at?”

  “Buggered if I know,” Virgil answered. “Some naked woman.” As the brunette headed straight for the rear entrance below, Virgil added, as if to himself, “She seems familiar though, sure as sure.”

  “Naked? Where?” Frank eyeballed the she-less world below. “You’re losing it, buddy, and not in a good way. Keep this up and Dorl’s gonna can your ass. Then you’ll have all day every day to fantasize about imaginary women.” He remained standing beside Virgil. If there was even a remote chance a ‘she’ was walking around, he was going to have a nice long gander, and that was that.

  Two minutes later the alarms started warbling. These bells were for intruders only; as far as every Batavian was concerned, there were three immutable laws: Do not murder, do not burn an American flag, and do not enter the Batavia Primary factory unless you are an employee with the attendant badge to prove it—which the woman had most definitely not possessed.

  It’s not that their work was secret—Batavia Primary’s president gave monthly tours to the local schools—but the methods for manufacturing products like anti-bruise serum (used in shipping fruit), and band aids infused with antibiotics and soothing aloes were all highly lucrative and patented. Mr. Dorl, many things, was not a risk-taker. No strangers and no unscheduled visits.

  Virgil and Frank traded opinions to the reason for the alarms; Virgil, convinced a mysterious woman had caused them, and pragmatic Frank blaming it on a fire drill. Meanwhile work throughout the factory ground to a halt. Precious moments ticked by while they deliberated.

  Womp-womp-womp.

  The secondary alarm, the one designed to instill fear and to light a fire under the collective ass of the workforce, succeeded the first. A procession of workers streamed outside.

  “Oh hell,” Frank blathered. “You feel that?” All jittery now, he grabbed Virgil, vainly trying to shake him free of his reverie. “Come on, that don’t sound like no drill now—” He shut up quick (a rare event) as the factory creaked and groaned and a tremor in the floorboards threatened to steal his legs from under him. In his panic, Frank left his coworker.

  For his part Virgil observed this sudden turn of events with almost preternatural calm. Later he would attribute this to momentary exhilaration: life at last was about to change. But that was later. Now he found himself thrust to the rough wood-planked floor by the workers from the back—those who mixed the anti-bruise serum in a batch blender as big as his bedroom. As effective as a kick in the stones, this snapped him to attention. He joined the stampede. Twenty-feet ahead the vanguard reached the stairwell. Terror-infused curses echoed down the stairs, but they were not followed by those who unleashed them. In the chaos a human bottleneck jammed the stairway. The workers of Mr. Dorl’s factory screamed out orders and panicked demands, but each shout was a single voice in a vast choir.

  The larger men shoved their way down, knocking smaller men to their knees, ignoring the cries of pain as they plunged headlong in acts of pure, even primeval, self-preservation.

  But even they failed to reach the exit at the bottom. The stairwell was as useful as a plugged toilet.

  Observing the madness, Virgil turned to the freight elevators. He had never used them—most employees were strictly forbidden—but “Damn the rules,” he cried aloud. Straining to focus on the imperatives, he managed to pry open the large brass-mesh doors and push the gate aside, but was then shoved forward against the inside wall of the cab by a dozen coworkers who had been watching his every move. He recovered and followed their erratic hand gestures, some of which he considered rather rude considering how they had just treated him. “Take it down!” they chimed in between the pulsating alarums.

  He gawked at the row of levered controls. “Blast! I’ll pull the wrong one, sure as sure.” But deductive logic led him to pulling the correct lever. The crammed car descended. Eternity seemed to pass. The tremors exacerbated until the elevator shook, loosing cries from its passengers.

  In a fleeting thought Virgil wondered if when he escaped he would be deaf.

  With a mere foot left before touchdown the car lurched and slammed to a halt, the brakes catching. Passengers wailed at the rumbling of the ironworks overhead. They scrambled to open the gate, but the mesh refused to budge, having twisted in the fall. More screams . . .

  And then abrupt silence as an explosion killed the warning bells and sucked the screams from the heaving lungs of the screamers.

  Fingers rent and bled in desperation to escape. As though in a dream, Virgil watched the procession from the stairwell emergency exit stream past the car. The people freely fleeing outside the locked nightmare did not notice or care for those in the elevator pleading for their lives. They had their own lives to consider.

  Virgil grabbed the gate and commanded Ralph, the hulking batch blend man, to help him. “On the count of three we pull.” The car jerked and everyone ducked as something crashed on its roof. “One. Two. three!”

  At Virgil’s count Ralph and the others tugged on the stubborn gate. Straining their muscles, they managed to yank it open about sixteen inches. Ralph scrambled to fit through but Virgil held him back. “Women first.”

  After liberating the women, the men squeezed out. Virgil looked back and saw Thomas, the foreman of the Inoculations Level, cowering in the corner.

  “Come on Thomas, it’s all coming down.”

  Thomas refused to budge, simply whimpering, “I’m too fat.” A blowout of the propane tanks somewhere overhead soiled the air with wood and brick and metal fragments, and the stench of death.

  “Are you telling me you don’t have an inoculation for fatness? I’ll be damned, that must be a first.” Virgil wiped his forehead. “Come on, take my hand. You’ll fit. Sure as sure.”

  Thomas managed a thin smile and reached for Virgil’s blackened hand. With strength that surprised even him, and which masked the cramps in his fingers, he yanked Thomas through the narrow opening and together they ran.

  They ran through the parking lot that seemed to stretch for miles as flames nipped at their heels, hissing as it licked snow. They ran past Virgil’s black ‘38 Dodge, Virgil sighing as they rushed by, fearing he would never see it again. They ran past the grove of trees standing frozen like silent sentinels at the far edge of the lot. Finally, they stopped and turned.

  A preamble of silence, then the
factory exploded from its base with apocalyptic tumult. A series of smaller explosions erupted as the lower levels caught. The lot quivered before sinking into an enormous chasm, Virgil’s Dodge swallowed up with the rest of the Dodges and Fords and Oldsmobile’s and Thomas’s flamboyant Series 62 Cadillac. It was as though the earth had grown a mouth that yawned for metal and brick nourishment. Within two minutes most of the factory and the parking lot were consumed by fire and earth.

  As he scanned the immediate vicinity in shock, Virgil observed a man standing at the extreme edge of the crater opposite them. The man wore a white suit. Fire-scorched rubble behind him made for a hellish backdrop. Virgil watched until the man turned and disappeared into the snow and smoke, donning a white trilby hat as he departed.

  Virgil walked home in a daze, oblivious to the finger pointing. He did not feel the layer of black dust coating his jacket and hair. Once home he plopped down on his brand new golden-weave wing back chair and hacked as dust puffed up. When it settled, his cat meandered over.

  “It’s gone, Plato. The factory, my job. Gone as gone.” The endorphins began to wear off.

  Later that night he mixed vanilla coffee with vodka. As he drank, things became clearer.

  “The rear exit was always locked. How did she even get inside?” he asked himself and God and Plato. And then, like a whisper from the booze: “He must have left it unlocked for her. They say Mr. Dorl comes and goes like the wind. Maybe it was time for him to go.”

  Wise cat Plato gazed up at his master in seeming agreement. Or maybe he was hungry.

  “Yes, Dorl caused it . . . the woman was his accomplice. God. They could’ve killed us all.”

  Hours passed in this drunken stupor filled with brooding, far-fetched theories. As vodka mingled with blood, manufacturing blurred dreamscapes, a clattering at the border of awareness woke him with a start. Seconds later someone wrapped his face in a black veil.

  An absurd thought occurred to him then: maybe it’s just my day to die.

  A final surge of energy emerged and Virgil fought his attacker. Managing to tear off the veil, he saw a man in dark clothing wearing a silly mask, a black fedora hat topping it off.

  Before he could investigate further, someone pressed a stringent, mind-numbing cloth over his mouth, and darkness prevailed.

  Chapter 2

  70 Years Later

  The crimson sunrise seemed to be mocking her. Lexi shook her blue and white Yankees quilt off and padded over to the highboy to replace blood-stained pajamas. The cuts from the other day were taking their precious time healing.

  A few errands were set to fill her day: visit Gramps, see what he wanted, head to the station, groceries, etc. How much longer could she eke out a living like this?

  “Let’s not start that train of thought again,” she said to Satan, her tuxedo cat. “That’s what got us going the other night.” It was called an automatic negative thought pattern, and no one understood that psyche term better than Lexi. She popped a couple of Excedrin (it always helped banish ugly patterns), scrubbed off crusty black blood, stuffed her bum into a pair of black jeans one size too small, and exhaled, relieved; no blood seepage from the wounds.

  Another forty minutes to put on her face and manage her hair. Lexi slapped on her shades as she exited the house. She climbed into her once pristine but now rusty red Dakota. The trip to Gramps’ would take sixteen minutes at an average of thirty-two miles per hour, depending on traffic—just enough time to enjoy the entire movement.

  Beethoven’s Ninth hummed out gentle caresses until the twenty-seventh second when the brass exploded in a prelude to soaring vistas yet to come. She never listened to anything else, except of course when she cut. The allegro of the first movement ended just as she pulled into Gramps’ stone drive sixteen minutes later, tires spitting pebbles, crunching leaf corpses. The door squealed as she exited the truck.

  “Shut up, door.”

  At least with a rusty truck she didn’t have to worry that the neighbors sharing Gramps’ narrow split drive would scratch it. Or, more precisely, that it would matter if they did.

  Gramps answered the door, chided her for being so skinny. Lexi marched inside, past the gun cabinet filled with the rifles and pistols of her youth. Ten minutes later she was enduring a cup of Gramps’ world famous vanilla and vodka coffee. Flavored piss, really. She had to drink or he would insist, singing its praises.

  “It prolongs life like nothing else. Look at me,” he would say, and she would try not to smile, but who can argue the wisdom of a centenarian? He looked good, a healthy pink in the morning sun; the bags under his eyes looking emptier than usual.

  “So what did you want to talk about, Gramps?” Lexi lowered her half-consumed cocktail.

  Virgil grunted to his feet and leaned ponderously on his bone-white cane as he shuffled over to the closet safe. Lexi turned to watch the news. Alison Van Heusen, the female anchor for 111 IROC News was explaining something about a cluster of space debris, but her outfit was so tight Lexi didn’t catch the gist of the bulletin.

  Virgil dropped an old oak box on the couch beside her. She started and looked down at it.

  She would have liked to have asked, what’s this? She said, “Oh Gramps, not this again.”

  Virgil plopped down on a wing-back chair so old and worn it was the same shape as its occupant. He leaned forward and flipped the channels as though he hadn’t heard her. When he found the station he wanted, Virgil pointed a gnarled finger at it and whispered, “I found him.”

  Lexi stared at him and wanted to wonder if senility had finally found him, but this obsession had always been there. She opened the box and removed a yellowed newspaper that looked like something from an Egyptian tomb. A black and white photo displayed a gaunt man, but that it depicted a man was the extent of its revelation; the image was so consumed with time as to be a mirage.

  Virgil grinned—a toothless expression—and continued pointing at the screen. He was using the TiVo she had bought him for his one-hundredth and Lexi warmed to see the ease with which he traversed the technology. The TV paused on the image of a man’s back. The man was grainy like old static, but he was all that was blurry; the building he was entering was Plasma crisp, along with the newscaster in the foreground and the highway in the background.

  Virgil’s smile was impossibly wide, and for the first time Lexi understood the expression ear to ear. “What? You think that man is Dorl?”

  “It is,” lowering his hand and dropping his grin. “Look at the picture, blurred in an almost unnatural manner. Every photo those rat-tailed reporters managed to take of him in the thirties and forties were exactly the same. Sure as sure.”

  “Kind of like the pics of Bigfoot,” Lexi mused.

  The picture fell back into the old box as she leaned over to take Gramps’ hand. Despite his age there was still a vestige of the strength she had known growing up. “Gramps, it’s time to let this go.” She stared into his eyes, but though he reciprocated she could tell that his mind was racing to the edges of his peculiar obsessive madness. “That man would be even older than you. You don’t actually believe he’s still alive?”

  Virgil tore his hand from her grasp and the old stern gaze replaced enthusiasm. “You sound like your father before he understood.” Lexi flinched at the familiar tone. Despite having been raised by an old man, her childhood had been filled with appropriate discipline and punishment. He patted her hand. “But it’s all right. You’ll understand, just as Michael did.”

  “No, I won’t.” She rose and made for the door, passing the gun cabinet on the way. She tried not to think how, if she wanted to, she could open that case and operate every one of those firearms, and even assemble or disarm the bomb parts he’d somehow managed to attain in her youth.

  A childhood spent field dressing instead of playing had its consequences, she was sure.

  “Lexi please, it’s starting all over again, and I won’t be around to stop him this time. Just take the box. Maybe you
could even check out that place near Denver I told you about?”

  “You mean the mysterious dark tower built somewhere in the Rockies?” She stopped at the tone in her voice. What kind of a girl snaps at an old man? She would have to cut herself tonight for this. To ease the guilt she walked over to the couch and retrieved the old oak box, stood on her toes to plant a gentle peck on Virgil’s cheek before whisking out the door.

  She walked to her Dakota and cursed the bubble-rusted fenders—she would have to fix them some day. Some day; that day after Saturday and before Sunday; that day that never comes.

  Even little old boxes have the power to attract. Eyes closed, fingers glided over the letters Virgil had soldered into the top. She spoke what she read through her fingers, “Who is Dorl?” She didn’t exactly peel out of Vernon Avenue, but Lexi sure wanted to. Xplod speakers belched out Beethoven at frightening decibels. “Fine,” she relented, glancing down at the box a minute later, “I’ll look through it.”

  Down Park Road. The pure black cat came out of nowhere, even though it was just sitting in the road.

  Lexi stomped on the brakes but did not swerve. Surprisingly, the Dakota stopped after only a short skid. Whiplash fast, her noggin slammed into Simon’s class ring on her finger where she held the wheel. Head whipped back after contact with the emerald. “Owee!” She held her forehead with her left hand. It came away red. Not a lot of blood, but enough.

  Vision remained blurry for five minutes and the migraine proved more than a match for Excedrin. Calling an ambulance was out of the question—how would she explain all her scars?

  The cat mewled before scurrying off. “Thanks a bunch, Misty,” Lexi moaned.

  Ten minutes later, bangs concealing the inchoate bruise, she pulled into the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office where she sometimes consulted as Special Psychiatric Liaison to the police. No one ever actually used that title though.

  “Hey sexy Lexi,” Simon said as she exited the Dakota. His kiss was not returned. “Okay,” he said. “I see you’re Hyde today. What brings you here, Hyde? I didn’t call.”