1. One purse, faux-alligator, with a broken clasp [Faux? Hmm. Alligator? Double hmm. Something with scales anyway.]
2. One hair elastic, dark blue
3. A dozen mixed coins: two quarters, one dime, one Canadian penny, one English pound coin, the rest apparently novelty items from fictional countries
4. A portable sewing kit, with needles and thread, along with three fishhooks [Those aren’t fishhooks. My mom was an ER nurse, and those are suture needles.]
5. One pack of [what appears to be] chewing gum, brand unknown [The lettering looked Cyrillic to me, but I showed it to our janitor Dmitri, and he says it’s not.]
6. One compact, mirror cracked [It is badly cracked, but I swear, when I look at it, the slivers and shards don’t seem to show my face. I can’t tell what they show instead. Something that moves, though.]
6. One blue-and-white knitted mitten, child-sized [I overheard the prisoner begging deputy Reynolds to let her keep it, but when he refused, she just sighed and said it would find its way back to her eventually.]
7. Three marbles, translucent purple [They’re gone now. I killed the things that came out of them. Not fast enough, though, or I wouldn’t be acting sheriff now. Obviously, they weren’t marbles. She tried to tell us: “Take them if you have to, but incinerate them right away.” “We don’t destroy evidence, ma’am,” the sheriff said. Instead, the evidence destroyed him.]
8. A pocket-sized paperback Thracian-to-English dictionary [I didn’t think anything of this at first, but after she escaped and the marbles hatched and everything was over, I remembered her weird accent, and then I got all clever and decided it was a lead. Look at me, the great detective. My idea was, maybe there was a little ethnic enclave or something up in the city, like a Thraciatown or Little Thrace, and she might have people there who’d hide her while she was on the run. Seemed worth checking out. I’d never heard of Thracia or Thrace, but there are lots of little countries in Europe I’ve never heard of, probably. Anyway, I looked it up, and there’s no Thrace. That used to be what the Greeks called parts of Southeast Europe, and the name is still used for a part of Turkey, but it’s not a country or a people. Thracian, as a language, has been extinct for about fifteen-hundred years, or so the Internet tells me. So why am I sitting here looking at a well-worn English-to-Thracian dictionary with translations for modern words like “computer” and “airplane” and something called a “quantum decoupler”? I asked Deputy Hainsworth what he thought, since he’s the brightest guy left in the department, and he said maybe it was a prop for a movie. Pretty elaborate for a prop if you ask me.]
9. A tube of lipstick, “wine dark” color
10. The gun [for want of a better word] the suspect fired [for want of a better word] into the anomalous phenomenon [mouth, maw, yawning portal] that appeared in the south-facing wall of the Trusted Treasures antique store on Ash Street [The actual charges we booked her on included possession of an unregistered firearm. Plus, arson, since the store caught fire after she shot it, but I don’t think we could have made that stick, since I’m pretty sure the fire was a side effect; we should have charged her with reckless burning. Except, maybe, we should have given her a medal instead.]
11. Three of the bullets [They aren’t bullets! Bullets don’t move on their own. They’re gone now, anyway, not even fragments left. I loaded them in the gun that’s not a gun and used them to kill the things that hatched from those marbles. Nothing else worked. I think the marbles, or eggs, or whatever, came out of the hole in the wall of the bookshop before the suspect closed it—she stooped and picked up something small from the ground after the wall collapsed in on itself. The creatures ... they were like snakes, but when they slithered, parts of them would turn invisible or disappear, and the one that got the sheriff seemed to pop out of a hole in the air. It went in one side of his chest and out the other like a worm through an apple. The ME who did the autopsy said it looked like someone poked a red-hot wire right through him, burning a hole through his heart. The ME talked to the mayor, and they just wrote “heart failure” as the cause of death. If I want to be more than acting sheriff, I have to go along with that. These notes—which no one will ever read—are what I’m writing instead of a report.]
12. A scuffed silver locket in the shape of a crescent moon, approximately half an inch long, on a broken silver chain [This was removed from the prisoner’s purse at the time of her arrest and placed in property storage. There is no satisfactory explanation for the locket’s later appearance on the floor of her inexplicably empty cell, surrounded by what seem to be burn marks.]
13. A scrap of notebook paper, with the words “de malleus vermis” written in blue ink [The Internet translation thing says that phrase means “the worm hammer,” or maybe “hammer of worms.” Latin is weird. My search also popped up links for a book called the Malleus Maleficarum, which is some kind of old witch-hunter’s manual, and another called De Vermis Mysteriis. That got me excited, thinking there was a connection, but it’s just a made-up book from a story the guy who wrote Psycho came up with as a teenager. A couple of days ago I was talking to Cody Malone, proprietor of Trusted Treasures, and I mentioned the note, just on the off chance it might mean something to him. He told me he’d picked up a bunch of stuff from a storage unit auction, including a crumbly old book with “De Malleus Vermis” written in silver on the cover. The book must have burned up, he said, along with everything else in the shop. He didn’t have a chance to show it to his rare book guy, so he didn’t know where it was from, or if it was worth anything. Mysteriis all around.]
14. A photograph of the suspect, an unidentified adult male, and an unidentified female child, standing at a scenic overlook [I took this home last night—I’m not supposed to, but there’s nobody to enforce the rules but me I guess—and Constance caught me looking at it, sitting at the kitchen table. She leaned over me, kissed me on the side of the neck, and asked if that was the mystery woman. I said yeah, and she said, she’s pretty, and I said yeah again, but she had a scar on her cheek, like a burn mark, that’s not in this picture. Do you think that little girl is her daughter, Constance asked, and I said I don’t know, but see the mittens the girl is wearing? The suspect had one just like them in her purse. We’ve still got it in the evidence locker. You can tell she’s in love with the man beside her, Constance said. She’s looking at him the way I look at you. I squeezed her hand, but my mind was on other things. Did you see this? I pointed at the sky behind the three people, above the scenic canyon they were posing in front of. Looks like there’s two moons, doesn’t it? I said. Must be a spot on the film, Constance said. Must be, I said.]
15. A cell phone [That’s what the deputy who booked her in wrote down on the property list. It does look sort of like an old flip phone, but the keypad doesn’t have the usual numbers on it, just those weird squiggle letters like on the pack of gum, and the phone doesn’t turn on when you press any of the buttons. I figured it had a dead battery, and its charging port doesn’t fit any kind of cable I’ve ever seen. But yesterday, I was in the evidence storage, looking at all this stuff again—Hainsworth says I’m obsessed, but how could I not be?—and the phone, if it’s a phone, started to buzz. I was so startled I halfway drew my gun. Then I thought, hot damn, I have to answer this. I got the phone out of the evidence bag and it was still buzzing, but I was so keyed up, pulse pounding and palms sweaty, that I fumbled it, dropped it, caught it, bounced it from one hand to the other, nearly dropped it again, and finally got a good grip on it, but by then the buzzing had stopped. I opened it and the screen said some gibberish that probably means “missed call.” I’ve been carrying the phone around ever since. If it buzzes again, I’ll answer it. I just have this feeling, if there’s a call, it’ll be her. Why would she call? Well, maybe she wants her gun back. Or the mitten. Or the photo. If it is her, I don’t know what I’ll say. But the more I think about everything that happened, the more I think the call might start with me saying: thank you, and, I’m sorry we didn’t listen.]
Originally published via Patreon
