Three Disappearances That Never Happened And One That Did

by LJ

 

 Disappearance the First
Pre-Series

The corpse was a handsome young man, despite the contusions, scrapes, burns and bruises. She unzipped the body bag and began cataloging the evidence. It was a messy one, blood pooling onto the gurney, thick and red, but it wasn't coagulating. Something wasn't quite right.

She stepped over to the counter to take another glance at the initial report from the scene. A pipe bomb, of all things, had brought the guy to her lab --

-- Pain, agony --

-- She could feel his hunger, hear the growl as his fangs tore at her neck --

-- His eyes were blue, boring into her as she died, a look of absolute horror and surprise on his face --

Darkness. Utter, morbid darkness.

Joe Stonetree had investigated a lot of bizarre cases in his time at the Toronto PD, but this took the cake: a missing body, and a missing coroner, the very one who should have been examining the body. It didn't make sense.

"You'd think there'd be a trail," Detective Schanke, recently transferred in from Vice, told him. "Look at all the blood, Captain. The body was dripping. Weird."

Joe had to agree. He nodded. "There has to be something. Keep looking."

They kept looking - for hours, days, weeks. Months passed, and still they kept it open. And certainly it was never far from their minds: in the years that came, they would investigate every Jane Doe, every body that floated to the surface as the ice melted, every young woman stuffed into a dumpster. But they never found her. Or the body of the blond man.

Natalie Lambert and the John Doe had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

 

Disappearance the Second
I Will Repay

There could be no funeral without a body, no memorial service without full assumption that she was dead. But it had been a year now, a year since Richard had died, a year since Natalie disappeared, and all Sarah had were questions and memories.

In the beginning, there was hope: the sooner someone knew that a person was missing, the sooner the investigation began. And most missing persons - the ones who were found alive, that is - are found quickly. The longer they waited, the more likely that Natalie would be dead when they found her. If they found her.

She tried to help Nick Knight, but he always brushed her off, too bound up in his own grief, Sarah supposed. The few times Natalie had ever mentioned Nick to her, it had been obvious that he was special to her, but no one could tell her exactly what their relationship had been. Detective Schanke, who along with his wife Myra had been a tremendous help over the past year, had said that he honestly didn't know. So she tried to treat Nick like a member of the family, reminding herself what a private person Natalie had been and that with someone equally private, like Nick, no one would have known until a ring appeared on her finger. But Nick rebuffed her, was curt and taciturn and refused invitations to dinner, to celebrate Christmas and now Easter, to Amy's birthday. She'd even gone so far to try to throw a party for Nick's birthday, getting the date from Detective Schanke, because try as she might she couldn't find it on any of Natalie's calendars or planners, and Natalie had always been so good about remembering little things like that. But Nick had caught wind of the plan and snipped it in the bud.

So Sarah and Amy sat down to dinner alone and ate chocolate cake that day and remembered Natalie.

"Do you think Aunt Nat's dead?" Amy asked, abandoning her slice and letting the fork clatter as she put it down on the table.

Sarah gave up on her cake. "Come here, honey," she said, opening her arms and pulling Amy close. The little girl began to cry. "Honey, we can't give up hope..."

"Are we ever going to find her, Mommy?"

This time Sarah couldn't lie. She could lie about Natalie being dead; until there was a body, she could even lie to herself about it. But this was different. "I don't know, Amy," she whispered. "I really don't know."

"If she's dead," Amy said softly, "I hope she's with Daddy."

They went to bed early that night, tired from crying, and Sarah supposed, later, that that was why she had such odd dreams. She dreamt of the time when Richard died, of seeing him again, but different. There was something evil and menacing about her husband, something she could not recognize. In the dreams, she walked right up to the monster and Nick saved her before it was too late. But Natalie wasn't as lucky.

In the morning, when she woke, she tried to remember the day after Richard died. It was all a blur, but what she remembered most was how calm Natalie had been, as if it was all some kind of joke. It didn't make sense. She drank coffee as Amy ate her cereal and got ready for school and tried to concentrate on those memories. For a moment, she thought she had caught something in all the blur, something about Nick's eyes and the word 'forget', but she lost that bit of memory almost the same moment she had caught it.

"Are you okay, Mommy?" Amy asked as Sarah helped her with her coat.

"Yeah, honey, I'm fine," she replied. "I just feel a little more sad than usual today."

 

Disappearance the Third
The Fix

"And?"

Don Schanke sighed. "She's disappeared. We've been crawling all over that place and no one can find her. God, Myra, this is insane. Absolutely insane!" He stretched back and stared at the ceiling from his graceless flop on the couch.

Myra Schanke knew when not to push her husband into talking about things. She found the situation hard to think about herself: somehow, Natalie Lambert had escaped from a maximum-security facility the night before, only days before she was to be transferred to the asylum.

And it wasn't just that, or the fact that (so Don had told her, under a strict vow of secrecy) the video surveillance had suddenly malfunctioned and there was no record of how she'd gotten out. Or that the escape had been so perfectly timed: during the hour between dinner and the next visit from the psychologist who had been examining her.

Or that the judge had signed the paperwork just earlier that day that declared Natalie Lambert, former coroner for the Toronto Police Department, mentally incompetent to stand trial for the murder of Nicholas B. Knight.

"The part I don't get," Don finally said, still draped over the couch, "is how it all got started anyway. I mean, yeah, Nick had some weird problems, but how does a woman like Natalie - a brilliant, intelligent doctor, a scientist - turn a couple of food allergies and sun sensitivity into vampirism?"

Myra didn't have an answer for him. All the times she'd met Natalie and the few times she'd met Nick, they'd been such nice people. They were both shy one minute and headstrong the next, and they kept Don in line, something she'd been working on all fifteen years of their marriage. They were Don's best friends, aside from his bowling team. Not once had she ever felt anything but happy to be around either one of them.

"And why would she try to cure it with this ludovuterine stuff, anyway?" Don continued. "Do you know what it was designed for? Something to do with beef stock. Why inject a human being - or a vampire, for that matter - with something that was cooked up for cows? I really don't get it."

Myra stared out the window and watched the sun set. There were plenty of mysteries in the world already, she thought to herself, why do we need another set of them?

Natalie Lambert awoke to find herself chained to a chair, Janette's pale blue eyes watching her. It was obvious something had happened, and whatever that something was, it wasn't good. She'd prefer the insane asylum. "It wasn't enough, was it?" the vampire said. "To encourage him to drink animal blood, if any blood at all? To brew and concoct medications and false hopes, to pour them down his gullet like a sick dog? No," she continued, "you had to kill him, didn't you? You gave him death."

"It was an accident," Natalie whispered. "I swear, Janette, it was an accident. We didn't know how he'd react to the drug. He decided to go with it anyway. I swear, on my life, it was an accident."

Janette sneered at her, baring her fangs, her eyes turning deepest red. "We shall see, Doctor Lambert. Blood never lies."

The other vampires watched, but as she died, Natalie wondered who the tall, severe, blond man was. If it were possible, the look of hatred on his face far surpassed the one Janette had worn.

 

Disappearance the Fourth
Post-Last Knight

In Toronto, there is an old warehouse, converted into loft apartments in the late nineties, that cannot hold tenants for longer than two months.

No one can say for sure what the problem is. This is because no one will admit that there is a problem. The property manager has come to recognize the looks on people's faces when they come to him and say they want to move out, no matter what the consequences with their lease. He's learned to give them what they want and to let the details slide by. He's lucky and he knows it: it's an attractive enough place that he never has any trouble getting new people into the apartments.

It's a nice building, once you get past the industrial style of the place. The lofts are large and airy, all the comforts that young professionals or artists alike could want. The kitchens are all up-to-date with the newest appliances, the security system has been known to give the police trouble to bypass, and the neighborhood is cleaning up fast. The location is good - not perfect, but still very good - and thhe price is just right for the sort of people who are interested. But they never last very long.

James, the property manager, lives in the first loft apartment. It's just a saying, that it's the "first" apartment, not because it's the first you find by entering the building, but because it was the first one finished, the only one inhabited before 1998. The property had been put up for sale that year by its previous owners, a subsidiary of the de Brabant Foundation, but it had sat empty for more than a year before that. James had often wondered about the building and had even made polite inquiries on behalf of his employers over the years, but the answer was always the same: the property was not for sale. Then, one day, he'd received a phone call and everything changed. It piqued his curiosity but he knew well enough to be subtle and quiet about it. Perhaps if he'd been more nosy, he would have found out sooner just why he kept losing tenants.

At first, there had been complaints of strange noises during the night. This was nothing unusual; James had heard every story in the book and knew all about buildings settling, about people being in new, strange places, about the possibility of raccoons and dogs in the garbage. Time passed and things settled down. He relaxed and enjoyed the luxury of living on property; anything was better than the dinky little apartment downtown he'd been sharing with his ex-girlfriend. As an on-site manager, the company was more than willing to give him a discount on the rent. He couldn't be happier.

And then the voices came.

At first, he supposed that some of the internal insulation hadn't been done right and people were hearing their neighbors' TVs or radios or the people themselves, but an investigation proved that everything had been done properly. They ran experiments with the pipes, the electrical system, the gas furnaces, the windows: nothing. He began to hear the voices, too, a man and a woman arguing, but they didn't sound like any of the tenants, and they didn't sound like any TV show or movie he knew. And with this new job, he knew quite a bit.

The accountant who lived in apartment 3a came to him first, rattled and wide-eyed, refusing to tell him what was wrong with the place. At first, he was worried that the security system had failed, that someone had broken in and done something to her, and being a small woman and in a wheelchair, he knew she would have trouble defending herself, as un-pc as that sounded. But she insisted that she was all right; there was something wrong with the apartment, something terribly wrong, and she wanted to move out as soon as possible. He was struck by her insistence and, knowing how long the waiting list already was for the place, he agreed. That had been the first in a long line of requests to move out.

And it wasn't just the women. There was the guy who'd lived for a while in 2c, a great big fellow who could have been a stunt double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the guy who played professional basketball, and the guy who had a military record and taught at the university now. Men and women both, spooked out of their minds and praying to get out of their lease, but refusing to say why.

James keeps investigating: he gets second and third and fourth opinions about the walls, the sheet rock, the insulation; about the system of pipes that bring in water and gas and take out waste; about the windows that are double-thick to protect against a Toronto winter. Nothing odd ever comes up, but still the tenants come to him: the new ones complain about strange noises, unfamiliar voices, sometimes even odd smells, and the old ones come to break their lease. He lets them. He hears the noises, too, and the voices. He's smelled smoke in his living room and thought he heard an inhuman scream near the elevator. His new girlfriend gets annoyed when he continues to balk at the thought of her spending the night at his place. She breaks up with him soon afterwards (though, admittedly, that hadn't been the only problem) and he breaks open a bottle of scotch and tries to sleep on his living room couch. He thinks the alcohol will help, but it doesn't. He's wide awake. He's very, very drunk, but he's wide awake.

And then, approaching midnight, he hears a sound, practically right behind his head. It's as if the elevator door has been opened. A little frightened, but mostly confused, he sits up and looks and nearly faints.

A short, brunette woman is there, dressed in slightly outdated clothing. It's not his latest ex-girlfriend; in fact, he's never seen her before. Normally he'd welcome the intrusion of a nice-looking woman into his apartment, but this is a little different.

You see, the most disturbing part of it is that she's almost completely transparent.

"Hello?" he says, but she doesn't seem to even realize he's there.

She's crying, great big sobs like the world's ending, but before James can really react to that, he hears the sound of the elevator door opening again. He looks over to the elevator, but it's still closed. A moment later, an equally transparent man walks right through it.

"Tracy Vetter passed away, twenty minutes ago," the woman says.

"No," says the man. "It's not possible."

"Nick," the woman whispers, "it's true."

"Um, hi?" James says, waving his arms in an attempt to get their attention. "Could someone please tell me what's going on?"

They still don't seem to see him.

"Then it's my fault," the man says. "It's all my fault. LaCroix thinks I'm a fool bearing this guilt. Trying to somehow atone for what I have done. Maybe he's right. All it has ever caused is pain. And more death."

"It's not true."

"Tracy. Cohen. Schanke. How many others over the centuries, because of what I am?"

"And how many lives were you able to save because of what you are? You've more than made up for what you've done in the past."

"It's not enough. It's never enough! I'm leaving... Tonight."

"Uh, yeah, that would be great. Could you both leave, or at least tell me what the hell's going on?" James says.

Finally, they see him. He withers a little under the transparent man's stare but doesn't back down. "Who are you?" the woman asks curtly.

"I'm the guy who lives here," James tells her.

Suddenly, they look around, as if everything is suddenly new, and the next thing James knows, the transparent man marches right up to him and demands, "What did you do to my apartment?"

The woman pulls him back. "Nick, we're dead. Of course things are going to change."

James grabs the bottle of scotch and takes a big swig of it, shutting his eyes and praying that the transparent dead people will be gone when he opens them.

God wasn't listening.

"Now, as for you," says the transparent woman, "it's extremely rude to interrupt. You've just screwed up our death scene. Now we're going to have to start all over again. Do you have any idea how hard it is to haunt a building as big as this one?"

The bottle, being a cheap brand of scotch, is made of some kind of plastic and bounces instead of shattering when it hits the floor as James passes out.

"Great," says Natalie. "Our audience is unconscious. Now what do we do?"

"We could always take the night off, I suppose," Nick replies. "We should really work on not being workaholics now that we're dead."

Natalie frowns. "Huh," she says. "I never thought of it like that before."

[FIN]