I do not know what I did to draw the ire of Elias Quade. It could have been any number of things, or nothing at all, that he so detested in me. I cannot say what errant thought or wayward glance brought him into being, nor how he came to be the only other passenger on that 1:30am green line train.
* * *
His black flat cap was pulled low over his face, the lapel of his overcoat high over his neck. The train was empty, yet he placed himself in the seat across from mine. Too well dressed to be harassing women on a train late at night, but those are the type you have to look out for, the ones who nobody else expects the worst out of. Though I couldn’t see his eyes, I could guess that he was looking at me.
The intensity about him became more apparent the longer we faced each other. I couldn’t track his gaze, sure, but he made no pretenses about where it rested. He didn’t glance up or away or search the bus or any of the things that a person in his position would to lighten the tension of the situation. Neither did he possess the twitchy anger or ravenous desperation of a man at the mercy of his faculties. Whatever was to happen between us on that train, it would not be anything other than deliberate.
I tried to bury my face in my phone, but I didn’t quite feel comfortable taking my eyes off of him. I felt, baselessly, as if my gaze was tempering him, as if the great unspoken threat he posed towards me would only be realized if he left the scope of my attention. After a moment of trying and failing to read my text messages out of my peripheral vision, I put the phone away and simply watched. I did not make small talk or move to another seat; it was in my best interest for things to remain as they were. Every minute that passed was a minute closer to the next station.
At a certain point it became clear that he was getting ready to say something. His mouth opened and lips twitched slightly, preparing to form words. And yet I did not detect indecision from him. He was simply taking his time. I stiffened my lip, trying to give him as little reason as possible to believe I wanted to hear whatever it was he had to say. My efforts went ignored.
“Are you familiar with the work of Carl Jung?” he asked, finally. His voice was deep and smooth yet had an insistent tension behind it, as if he was forcing himself to speak through a chokehold.
“Carl Jung,” he said again, when I didn’t answer. “Among his ideas was that every person has a shadow, a part of their psyche that they suppress because they find it difficult or distasteful.”
I pulled my backpack towards my chest and nodded politely, unsure of what else to do. Either this man meant me harm or he was dangerously oblivious to the implications of discussing one’s distasteful psyche with an isolated young woman on a train. I hazarded a glance out the window, and spotted a familiar water tower. The next stop was still a long way off.
“Tell me -” he said, leaving a suggestive pause.
I realized he wanted me to give him my name. I hesitated a moment. “Maya,” I said, finally.
“Maya.” He said it with a certain reverence, and I couldn’t tell if he was being derisive or sincere. “Elias Quade,” he responded, presenting his hand in a mock bow before straightening up. “Tell me, Maya. Are you a selfless person?”
I looked at him, uncertainly. I hadn’t picked out anything conspicuous about the tone of his question. Yet I could imagine a hundred different unpleasant ways a conversation could go from there. I decided I might as well answer honestly. “I think so,” I said.
“You think so,” he said, softly repeating my words back to me. “I want you to be honest, Maya. If one is not honest about one’s shadow, then the shadow is free to act as it wills.”
His hand was in his overcoat pocket. He had large, men’s pockets. The kind that could hold just about anything. He leaned forward slightly. There was nowhere I could run.
“So tell me,” he said, “if it was you or someone else…” He trailed off, waiting for me to answer.
My death had flashed before my eyes the moment he sat down with me, but now my death was a foregone conclusion and all I could see was my corpse, crumpled lifelessly on the floor below. I swallowed. “I’m not going to tell you to kill someone. Whatever that means for me.”
He hesitated a moment, then sunk back into the seat.
“Oh, Maya,” he chided. “That wasn’t even close.”
* * *
I was in the bathroom with the water running. I didn’t even hear it happen.
When I walked out, Elias was waiting for me.
He was the first thing that struck me about the scene that awaited me. He had traded his hat and overcoat for a three piece suit, burgundy on white with a black tie. And so striking was that element of the picture that it took me a moment to realize that what lay on either side of the man were the lifeless bodies of my mother and father.
“Hello again, Maya,” he said. A bloodied butcher’s knife lay discarded on the countertop beside him.
I could barely squeak out a whisper. “What did you do?”
He shook his head, disapproval evident in his pursed lips. “Now, now, Maya. I told you there would be consequences for your dishonesty. I thought I made that clear.”
I backed away, falling against the wall. He was walking towards me now, his steps uncannily precise. Why was this happening? What had I done to deserve this? Why had this lunatic chosen me of all people to torment, after everything I was already dealing with? Because of Carl Jung? Because he thought I was repressed? Was this some sort of perverted game to try and break me, make me his?
“Fine,” I said. “I don’t want to die. I’m glad you killed them instead of me. Is that what you want to hear?”
He chuckled slightly. “If you say so, Maya. But I’ll leave you to it. You have quite the crime scene on your hands.”
He waltzed towards the door with disgusting unaffectedness, and I was left with the corpses of the last two people on Earth who had decided to care about me. And it was dawning on me that there was only one rational conclusion an onlooker would come to when they discovered this scene. I considered Elias’s immaculate suit, with not a drop of blood on it, and his thin leather gloves that surely hadn’t left prints. And myself, left alive for reasons that were beyond even my own understanding.
“Goodbye, Maya,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
* * *
I don’t know why I ran. Maybe because I knew they’d never believe me. Maybe I thought I’d have more of a head start. I don’t know.
The police cruiser stopped me on the shoulder of 53rd street. The officer was the father of someone I knew. Officer Barlow. He read me my rights as he escorted me into the back of the car. Just a formality, he assured me. He hadn’t put me in handcuffs, at least, so that gave me some level of optimism about the situation. But I knew it would only be a matter of time before things turned against me, especially if I told the truth about what I’d seen.
“You seen your parents today?” he asked me as we pulled away from the curb.
I stayed silent. Nothing I could say would do me any good.
“Look, Maya,” he said after a minute. His voice carried the faux stern tone of a man that considered himself a father figure to anyone under the age of twenty-five. “Between you and me, I know things have been tough for you. And you’re a good kid. I know that. Good kids make mistakes sometimes, and that’s just part of life. But there’s going to be a lot of questions and a lot of people saying a lot of things about you.
“And when that happens, you’re going to need a friend. If you talk to me, and promise to tell me the truth, I can be on your side. How does that sound to you?”
That was what these cops always did. Pretend to be your friend to get you talking, just to turn around and use it against you.
“I really need to use the bathroom,” I said.
* * *
“Oh my,” Elias said, chuckling, as I stepped out of the rest stop. “It seems you have another situation on your hands.”
Officer Barlow lay on the asphalt beside his car, blood pooling beneath him. Elias took an exaggerated step over his corpse, towards me.
I grabbed a loose brick from the ground beside me and brandished it like a club. “You’re a demon,” I said.
He eyed the brick curiously, then laughed. “This isn’t about me, Maya.”
I took a step backwards. His demeanor, his twisted logic, the way he killed so unfeelingly - maybe he really was a demon.
I heard a siren blare briefly, not too far in the distance. I eyed the body again. Surely the police would assume I had killed him. And they wouldn’t be gentle when they found me.
I ran before Elias could say another word.
* * *
I made it farther this time. I managed to hitch a ride three hours south, and catch a train west from there. I checked into a motel using a fake name and all the cash I had in my wallet. The events of the day weighed on me, but I felt a lot safer sleeping two hundred miles away from Elias.
A voice woke me up from a restless sleep. “You had better stop running, Maya.”
The light was on in the bathroom, illuminating the silhouette of Elias’s hat and overcoat as he stood in the entrance to my room. I glanced around for a weapon, but of course found nothing better than a pen.
“Just kill me already,” I said, trying to suppress the tremor in my voice. “I know that’s where this ends.”
He looked back with his same blank, knowing stare, tempered yet profoundly terrifying. The look of a man capable of inflicting worse fates than death. What he’d shown to my parents and Officer Barlow had been mercy. For my sin, whatever he believed that to be, he had chosen to inflict worse.
“Are you just tormenting me?” I asked. “When will this be over? Do I have to kill myself? Do I have to kill someone? To show that, deep down, I’m just like you?”
He smiled, a ravenous look in his eye. “Do you think you could? Kill someone, that is?”
The answer he wanted was obvious. “Yes,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re just saying what I want to hear, Maya. That’s not what I want. I want you to be honest.”
With that, he turned off the light and opened the front door. As he stepped through, he stopped and turned around. “And Maya?” he said. “Do turn yourself in. I promise things will be worse if you don’t.”
On that haunting note, he was gone.
* * *
I turned myself in to the local police station the next day. Whatever punishment Elias had planned for me would be worse than prison.
His actions confused me. I had originally assumed he wanted me to be free; why else would he have killed the police officer? But now he wanted me locked up. Maybe he had just changed his mind. Or maybe it was just the next step in his elaborate torture ritual. Maybe he knew that being a presumed cop killer would put me on the wrong side of the justice system and of the prison correctional officers.
Even my own defense attorney didn’t seem convinced of my story. At the very least, he wasn’t convinced that it would stand up in court.
“I think we can work out a good plea deal,” he said, his flimsy glasses falling halfway off his face in the process. “If we talk about your history in foster care we might get the jury on your side, so the prosecution will be eager for this not to go to trial.”
I didn’t take the plea deal. I didn’t want to lie.
After weeks of badgering, I let my him go ahead with his preferred defense strategy. It was the only sensible choice, really. But when I was on the stand, I told the truth. He spun that into his narrative, of course, saying I’d had a nervous break and that’s why I was blaming the whole thing on a mysterious shadow gentleman. My psychiatric evaluation didn’t give him anything particularly useful to work with, but he did the best with what he had.
The details aren’t important. I ended up in prison.
But I stayed vigilant. Some part of me knew that Elias would come back. And the prison had cameras. So from there, I would have a place to start.
It took two weeks for him to show his face.
The usual guard approached my cell. “Visitor,” he said.
* * *
“Maya,” Elias said, warmly. He was less threatening behind a sheet of glass, but only barely. “You made the right choice, turning yourself in. I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah,” I said, letting my words drip poison. “You won. I’m going to spend my life in here. But now you can’t get to me.”
He frowned slightly. “Were you paying attention to the trial?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Not really.” It had been a foregone conclusion, and I hadn’t been keen on listening to all the horrible things the prosecution had to say about me. As if they knew a single thing about me. As if any of it had even been me in the first place.
Elias pulled a binder out from under his arm and set it on the table between us. “I figured as much. So I thought I might read some highlights. Three things in particular.”
I sighed. I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect, but the man had already killed my family. Reading a few court documents couldn’t be any worse than that.
“First, the knife. It was taken from your kitchen, and your fingerprints were found on it.”
I nodded. That wasn’t too surprising. I’d certainly used the knife before, and Elias had used gloves.
He continued. “Next, the rest stop. Officer Barlow was found dead beside his patrol car. The forensic examiners identified signs of a struggle. The officer was shot five times in the torso with his own gun.”
I hadn’t realized Elias had turned the officer’s own gun on him. That seemed oddly brazen, inconsistent with the picture Elias painted of himself, at least. Maybe he just didn’t carry weapons.
“Finally,” Elias said, “you might be wondering why you got caught so fast. Well, it turns out your neighbor witnessed the murder of your parents through your front window, and, naturally, she called the police.”
“Wait,” I said. “If she saw the murder, then she must have seen the murderer.”
Elias nodded, a grin creeping onto his face. “She did indeed. And she testified to it, too. She even described the blouse worn by the murderer, the one found soaked in blood in your bathroom.”
* * *
It was another week before Elias visited again. By then I’d had time to think. About the way Elias had been haunting me. About the disturbing implications of what he had presented to me, whether or not they contained truth.
“You said something on the train,” I said. “About shadows. The dark parts of ourselves, the parts we repress.”
His eyes met mine with ferocious intensity. He began to lift up from his seat and lean towards the glass. He was excited. Watching me realize.
“Is that what you are?” I asked.
He slumped back down in his seat, the glow in his eyes dissipating into frustration.
“Honestly, Maya,” he said. “I don’t know why I bother.”