Milos played over the scene in his mind as he drove to work in the dark twilight of predawn. He asked the empty cab of the car, “What does the woman want? Does she want me dead? Weagley, the man was in worst health than me. Ha!”
Milos arrived at the outer facade of Rosehill, the building created by the same architect who had created the famous Chicago Water Tower. As with each morning, Milos superstitiously rolled down his window and reached out and rubbed the brass placard on the cornerstone here. It read Est. 1859. History. The place exuded it. The old things. The old days. That was what Milos liked about Chicago, her history.
“At least with the young lady doctor the medical facility assigned me,” he continued to muse aloud, enjoying the sound of his own rich voice that helped to keep his eyes open, “at least she is fucking easy to look at. What harm… what harm in a look? You tell me that, Enid. May God strike me down if I have had any evil thought about Dr. Stephanik. Although in that lab coat… with those legs… that wavy red hair and-”
He saw something like a shadow squeeze through the brick wall at gate's end, a flaw in the design of the enclosure, one routinely taken advantage of by neighborhood brats and hoodlums who, for some sick reason felt an attraction for graveyards after hours, and to do harm to headstones. It was a maddening routine, especially before, during and after Halloween, but now it was November. Such should not be the case.
Milos realized the moment he drove into the inner courtyard where he routinely parked in one corner, that something awful had happened here. A strange car squatting there at the gate, and three odd shapes scattered about it. Lumps of debris of some sort also scattered about.
They weren't homeless. They had a car. Some sort of drug for money exchange gone bad? They looked dead. But one was moving, the tall womanly form, nude from the waist up.
Milos rushed from his car to the woman, seeing that she had suffered a terrible knifing to the back, a huge scar in the shape of a rectangle running the length of her back. The two male forms, also stripped to buttocks had not been so lucky. In each case, the bastards who did this awful thing had removed whole chunks of rectangular flesh from the men, the flesh boats cut from them dirty and lying on the cement and field stone block floor of the courtyard.
Milos averted his eyes, but not before they registered the fact that one of the men lying dead was his friend, watchman Liam Rielsen. Milos moaned his name and crossed himself and looked over his shoulder in fear all in one fluid motion.
“Gotta get help… nine-one-one… hold on, lady… hold on!”
Milos rushed back to his car and grabbed his cellular phone and with his large fingers desperately punched the tiny numbers on the keypad, cursing the small pads as never before.
Finally someone came on and breathless, Milos shouted for help.
“Slow down, sir. Can you give me your location, your name, the nature of your emergency.”
“Nature of emergency! It's an emergency! Need an ambulance here for the live one, the woman. Need authorities.”
“Your name, sir.”
“Milos.”
“OK, Milos… is that your last name?”
“My God, woman! I am… my name… Milos Drivdnios. I am caretaker at Rosehill Cemetery.”
“The address, Milos?”
“ Every damnbody knows where Rosehill is! Ahhh Ravenswood… ahhh… fifty-eight-hundred block Ravenswood. Hurry!”
“Nature of the emergency, sir?”
“Murder! Two people murdered, a third badly hurt!”
“Please stay at this location and on the line, Milos.”
“At the gates of Rosehill… need ambulance. Help.”
“Help is on the way. Police assistance in three minutes dispatched to your location, Milos. Milos, take a deep breath. Help is on its way.”
“An ambulance for the girl.”
“On its way, I assure you.”
“Thank you, thank you.” Milos held tight to the phone as if it were a lifeline, his knuckles white. His lovely Rosehill, always a haven away from the world, from his problems, from Enid, from the traffic and the horrors of the street, even ironically a haven from the fear of a heart attack, as everything in the cemetery conspired to make you relax and feel the breeze and listen to the birds and see the life amid all the gravestones insisting on continuing no matter. Now his safe little haven had suddenly and violently again asserted itself as a place of death, and Milos felt the violation, and that deep within he no longer felt at ease here in his Rosehill. It had become a place of disquiet, not out at the graves but here, in his chest, inside him. His Rosehill that he had cared for for so long now, thirty- three years of his life, now harbored something evil that had come this way out of the world beyond the gates, and still it lurked in every shadow and in Milos's fear.
He must assume that the monster capable of ripping out backbones did not climb from the cemetery earth as some subterranean monster, but had driven that car in here, had the hands and legs and torso and brain of a man. A worst-case scenario indeed.
Another part of his mind disagreed. The thing that could do this was still nearby, staring from the darkness just out of his sight, its hunger for blood burning within it as strong as ever. Even though his mind admonished him that whoever did this thing used a precision cutting instrument or one hell of a sharp butcher's knife, and so must be human, still a part of his old-world genes believed it must be a wild animal somehow loose in the city, a wolf or tiger or lion escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo, however improbable that sounded, due to the precision carving this monster managed. Milos came around, his ears filling with an angry honking horn and a screech of tires. Morning traffic passed within twenty yards of the castle facade, and now the rush-hour traffic had picked up, workers at nearby factories along Ravenswood or the enormous neighborhood employer Miseriacordia-the Catholic charitable organization and school for the handicapped where the mercy and goodness of mankind evidenced itself every day.
Evil and goodness side by side, Milos thought.
Then his chest pains began.
But he couldn't think of his heart now. He must do what he could for the woman in so much pain. He rushed back to her as the 911 operator introduced herself as Gina.
“Gina, I may need help too before this is over. I got a bad heart, and this… this ain't doing me no good, neither.”
“I understand, Milos. Try to remain as calm as possible. I will alert the medic team about your condition. They'll know what to do.”
“Easy to say,” the man muttered in return, looking again on the nasty wound to the woman's back. Realizing now what the wound actually represented. “The shadow I saw… must've been him.”
“What is that, Milos?” asked Gina over the line.
“He was here, hunched over her when he saw my headlights. He panicked and ran off. I saw him the way you see a deer dash from sight, only a shadow. He was doing to her what he did to poor Liam and the other man when I frightened him off. Her wound is bad… but it could've been worse.”
“Thank God you arrived when you did, Milos. You're a hero.”
“I don't feel like no hero. I feel sick and… and helpless. How do you help someone you can't touch for fear of causing her pain?”
Finally, the sound of a siren, and in a moment, Milos saw the squad car pulling in beside his own. The spotlight was welcomed but the guns pointed at him were not.
“Hands up!” shouted one of the cops.
Milos also heard the metallic voice of a female dispatcher over the radio car's airwaves saying, “See the man, Milos… See the man, Milos, at the scene.”
“You fools! I am Milos!” he shouted back. “Do you wish me to have a heart attack now?”
The sound of an ambulance siren came thundering toward Rosehill. Milos handed the first cop his phone. “Nine-one-one-I call nine-one-one for you guys. I am caretaker here!”
The cops holstered their weapons, one of them joking, “Damn Dean-o-boy, 'nough lights and sirens to wake the dead.”
