The Decay of All Things

The Past


Miss Parker was in the process of undressing when Jarod called. It had been almost a week since the bed incident, as she had come to call it, and she’d started to wonder when he would call again, how would things be between them. Of course, his impeccable timing meant that the phone rang just as she was standing in her bra and panties, searching for her nightgown.

“Are you there?” Jarod said, and she realised she had just picked up the phone, not actually answered it.

“Mmm,” she said, and sat down on the bed, looking out the window, and her tone was far friendlier than she’d meant it to be, “Where are you? Outside my window again?”

“Not tonight,” he said with a low chuckle, “What am I missing?”

“Red lace bra and matching panties,” she said, not meaning to say that either. She lay back on the bed, one foot propped up on the edge, staring at her own bare thigh, “Do you need to simulate that, or do you have an imagination of your own?”

“I have…” a long pause, “…a working model in my head.”

What did that mean? She tried to picture Jarod in he mind’s eye, and got a collage instead. Running, grinning from a helicopter, captured in a newspaper photograph, soulful in a DSA and a grainy memory of a boy from her childhood. Tousled hair and a white undershirt and a mouth she wanted so badly to kiss and almost did. The chest under the shirt that she sometimes imagined bare – a man come out of the rain with liquid black eyes, saying words that could undo her in a Florida hurricane. Wrists encased by cuffs and a pleading for her humanity.

And lord, she’d wanted to kiss that mouth.

“You’ve been quiet this week,” she said, and pushed herself across the sheets, stretching across the clean cotton – now washed of his scent.

“I thought you deserved a break after… after the Space Needle,” Jarod said, and she knew it wasn’t what he’d originally intended to say.

“And now you’re a million miles away from my house, and my window,” Parker said lightly.

“Do you resent me?”

For taking an opportunity she would have leapt at? Parker smiled. He had been a gentleman – Miss Parker, put on your robe – and she would not have given him even that, if their situations had been reversed. She would have stood and stared and feasted, and given herself promises of looking her fill and departing, but maybe her fill could never be reached. She used her job as an excuse to stare for hours at his picture.

“No-o,” she said, two parts to the word and two meanings. No, not for that. No, not anymore.

She didn’t resent him. She didn’t blame him anymore, either.

“Mmmm,” Jarod said, after a very long time, a heavy, sleepy sound. Pleasant. The kind of noise she would feel through her cheek and mouth and jaw if she were to lay her head on his chest, to let it vibrate up to her.

And she was back to picturing his chest again.

“So Jarod, I spilt, now what are you wearing?” she asked softly.

“Jeans,” he said.

“And are you a boxers or briefs man?” she asked, and laughed softly. As little as a year ago, she would have died of mortification before she had this conversation with him.

“Ah…” Jarod gave a soft huff, a little noise of embarrassment, “Neither, currently.”

She built a picture in her head – a working model. Jarod in jeans, bare-chested and bare foot, lying on a bed like her, phone to his ear. Long, tousled locks falling in his eyes, and maybe the stud above the fly of his jeans undone, showing the lack of underwear. A long, golden body; supple with muscle and sprinkled with dark curling hair that she could push her fingers into…

One finger trailed across her collarbone, slow and sensuous. She closed her eyes.

“Do you feel like the world has tilted, Jarod?” she asked. He laughed.

“It has imploded, Miss Parker. We are well and truly through the looking glass,” he said, and laughed again. She smiled, and the moment hung between them; comfortable, easy, silent.

Miss Parker pushed even further onto the bed, put her head on a pillow and turned the lamp off. She pulled her blankets over her in the darkness. “What are you doing?” Jarod asked, faintly quizzical, and she struggled to get one arm to her back.

“Turning the light off, getting under the blankets…” she strained, found the clip, “…and taking my bra off.”

She tugged the straps off each shoulder and tossed the bra out of the bed, settling under the covers. Starched sheets rubbed across her sensitive breasts, and she sighed. It was getting so very, very late. “What time is it where you are?” she asked. He hesitated, for just a moment, probably out of habit more than anything else.

“Well past the witching hour,” he said finally, his voice warm.

“All good Pretenders should probably be in bed…” she murmured.

“Yeah, well, I don’t have nice sheets like yours,” he murmured, “But if you ever feel like sharing…”

“I’ll let you know,” Parker murmured, and chuckled.

Her laughter faded, and the silence went on and on. It was a comforting silence that played out, and she adjusted her grip on the phone and settled against the pillows, half asleep, and listened to him breathe. So strangely beautiful and idyllic, and Parker had the drowsy inclination to ask him to call every night, as long as it would be like this.

“Jarod?” she said dreamily, on the edges of sleep.

“I’m here…”

“One day,” she whispered, and smiled at the thought, “One day, I would like you to come and share my sheets. Not yet, but someday soon.”

His whispered ‘goodnight’ was the last she heard before drifting off to sleep.


The Future


He put his grief away, folded it into a box and buried it beneath focus and determination, a driving need to find who had pushed the needle into her chest. His heart was a glacier. It covered the chasm.

Jarod found himself alone in a dark room with a naked corpse on a bed of bleeding rose petals, the shadows ebbing and flowing around them but her body was white, so white. Jarod knelt beside the raised altar of her death and pressed his face to her hand, feeling the grief break the ice and shudder up, coil around his throat and nose and pour out in sobs, in broken sorrow.

“Jarod,” a voice whispered, “Jarod, don’t cry.”

She was alive. He raised his face and she was sitting up, warm and soft and glowing with health, her hair falling in her eyes and a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. In reverence, he kissed the top of her knuckles and slid his hand across the curve of her belly. She drew him up and into her arms, and they fell together to the softness of petals and he kissed her mouth, tears mingling in humid desire.

“You’re alive,” he said, and she laughed. The sound played amongst the shadows.

Her skin gleamed ivory and Jarod kissed the long planes of her body, suckled at the dusky tips of her breasts and felt her hands weave across the muscles of his back. She was soft, female, and smelled of apples and roses. His hips were cradled between her thighs and it was natural to push forward, to sink himself in her slick depths and moan with the beauty of it. He moved with paced urgency, lifted her hips and swallowed her sighs.

“I love you,” he said, and kissed her again.

But her lips were cold. Her body was limp. Jarod opened his eyes to the blue tint of her skin and a jaw that was wired shut, and felt the stiffness of the limbs he was manipulating and the icy vice of the body he was penetrating, and made noises of soundless horror because he was screwing a corpse, he was screwing a goddamn corpse.

And he backed up quick and tried to put her down and extract himself and get away, but the sutures across her belly were splitting and blood was coming up, black blood that stank of death and decay and was swimming with rotting rose petals and he’d done this, he’d done this to her…

Jarod woke alone, in his bed, panting with fear and horror. He sat up, throwing covers off his sweaty body and raked his fingers through his hair. It was the third time that week he’d had the dream.

He dressed in the moments before dawn; hit the streets in the gritty early morning light. His feet slapped over concrete in an even rhythm, and he timed his breathing to it. It was cold, his breath steamed in the air. Summer didn’t exist this early in the morning. Running helped him not to think. He exhausted his body to blanket his mind.

He met Avery at the station in the room committed to the taskforce. There were pictures on the walls of women, and Miss Parker was the last. It showed her on the slab in the morgue, cold and dead, and reminded him of his dream.

“You alright?” Avery asked, and Jarod nodded.

“Any ID on Jane Doe?” he asked, and smoothed the edges of the glacier.

Miss Parker was Jane Doe. Jarod knew that she would never be identified, not in any legal sense. She worked for the Centre, therefore, technically, she’d never existed. She’d become Jane Doe.

“Nada,” Avery said, “How do you know this is the one?”

“She’s finer,” Jarod said, “The work was perfected. He was building up to her. That’s why the others were messy. It was just practise for her.”

Just practise. Miss Parker had been the target all along, and Jarod had kind of known from the beginning but hadn’t wanted to go there in his mind. Had thought he’d kept her safe. It was his fault. All of it.

“Will he stop?” Avery asked. There were six photographs pinned up, six corpses hanging on the wall.

“He wants to,” Jarod said, “He thinks he has. But he liked it so much he’ll have to try it again. But none of them will be as satisfying as she was. So he’ll have to keep trying and trying, looking for one as good as her.”

Avery looked grim, stroking his fingers over his moustache. They stood, side by side, almost ten years difference between them. Avery was wary of him, yet respectful. The distance is so great, Jarod thought, between me and every one else on this earth. The distance has widened. One of the final links was killed with a syringe in the heart. I shall drift into nothingness, and nobody shall claim me. Nobody will know what I am, now that she is dead.

“He knew her,” he said, and the knowledge welled inside of him, “She was an icon. He wanted to help her with death. That’s why he had to practise. So she wouldn’t suffer much.”

There was a pounding in his head. For a moment the photographs were animated, like little films hung on the wall in silence. They were all dying, slowly. Miss Parker was surprised when the needle was pushed into her chest – her mouth opened, she flinched at the pain, but couldn’t stop the plunger being pushed down. Her face twisted in agony. Her heart was arresting, the left ventricle collapsing. It did not take long before she went limp and still. The woman two photographs up was struggling against her bindings. That one had taken so long to die. He’d injected the air into her vein. It had taken so long to travel to her heart. An air embolism. It had been so painful, so drawn out.

Parker had only taken a few minutes to die. She’d been lying still, hadn’t needed to be tied up. Probably sleeping. Sleeping on a mattress in a tiny apartment on the West Side, fully dressed. No fighting, just death.

Go quiet, hush now; don’t fight it. No one can hurt you now.

“Agent Garrison?” Avery said, impatient, as though he’d said it many times.

“What?” Jarod said. The little films stopped, became photographs again.

“Is everything okay?” Avery said. Jarod nodded.

“Peachy.”

*