The Ascendance Ritual

Celebrities were terrific for the Millington tourist trade, the restaurateurs, the University, the congenitally floundering Coliseum that survived mainly on the Billboard/social media status of honky-tonkin’/flag-wagglin’ cosplay cowboys and sociopolitically suspect “motivational” evangelists.

To Curtis, celebrities were antibiotic-resistant hemorrhoids with a side-order of jackhammer migraines and super-strained, scorching STDs. Curtis nodded empathetically toward the coroner’s guys, who having hauled the remains of America's newly departed “Crown Prince of Horror” off through a gauntlet of demons, serial slayers, uber-goths, and fanboys, now faced a living nightmare of bureaucracy and media bloodlust.

Detective Mead scanned across the deserted deck of the SunUp Suites pool. The orphaned former Royale Plaza – acquired recently by the motley Highmark Family of Hotels – had failed to anticipate the cyclical brutality of Illinois’ climate. Highmark/SunUp had taken out a brace of marginal ground-floor rooms for an indoor pool and spa two years ago, but had left Daniel Prinze’s death scene out of corporate thrift or apathy.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Martel muttered again.

“And yet,” Curtis murmured. “Nobody at all saw him go over, huh?”

The hotel manager blinked. “The afternoon sessions and trade show were packed, the MacabraCon crowd tends to stay at the Red Roof or the Six, and we’re at less than half-occupancy. The conference is a big draw but scares off the tourists and business travelers.”

"It is a sight,” Curtis concurred. “Understand Mr. Prinze had lunch in the hotel restaurant an hour or two before he went into the, ah, pool."

“Prinze’d finished his morning signing, and we put him in one of the private event rooms. We don’t want another David Arquette dry-humping incident. These ‘people’ are like pit-bulls around fresh meat.”

“For sure. Man seem OK?”

“Ate his chicken cordon bleu in peace, had a couple mojitos, and went the back way up to his suite for what he called his ritual nap before the evening ‘festivities.’”

“VIP suite?”

“No. that’s been reserved for Mr. Khan. Simon Kahn.”

Curtis paused. “You got Simon Khan for this thing?”

Martel shrugged. “Khan grew up near Peoria, local boy. Donates to the hospital or University, pops up at his hometown high school prom to play some Springsteen. Even started that teen suicide thing. Face Your Fears. He’s supposed to be here any time.” The manager craned for a peek at the cracked tile logo at the bottom of the drained pool. “What fucking shitty luck.”

**

“I don’t even fucking want to know,” Curtis stated.

A grin spread across Chris’ bone-white, doll-like features. The teal nitrile gloves accessorized poorly with her yellow calico sundress and ear-to-ear “Glasgow smile.”

“You Holly Quinn or something?” he inquired.

“Harley. It’s Ronn-E. You know, the homicidal babysitting android? Ronn-E and Ronn-E 2?”

“Oh. Yeah. Why?”

“I was at the Con downstairs – they got Ronn-E’s mom, the actress – the mom who cloned Ronn-E from her murdered daughter…”

“Uh-huh. What happened here?”

Chris’ eyes sparkled under the macabre makeover. “Locked room murder.” The door to Room 425 was propped against the corridor wall, sheathed in plastic with an MPD evidence tag.

“Ah.”

“Well, an almost-locked room murder. Took it off the hinges to preserve any prints or tool marks. Prinze left the door open a crack but engaged the room’s swing bar lock to keep anyone from getting in. Zinc alloy swing bar with a hinged arm on the door jamb that swings into the catch plate on the door. Lot more secure than the old-school chain bolt, though if somebody really wants in…”

“Which apparently, they did not. So this thing can’t be ‘engaged’ from the outside?” Chris smirked reprovingly. “So, my guess is suicide? You said ‘locked room murder,’ which I’m to assume is your over-fueled imagination or my lack thereof?”

“Well…”

**

Curtis isolated the witness in the crowded lobby by his lack of scars, fangs, mask, wings, robe, horns, or preferred machete or power tool. The “Welcome, MacabraCon 2025!” marquee scrolled above the mosaic tile SunUp logo behind the front desk.

The athletic, bearded twentysomething smiled up at Curtis. “Detective Mead, right?”

“Professor Cooper, I assume?”

The redheaded man waved Curtis to the cushy chair opposite his. “Assistant professor, but Ethan’s cool. I think you know my boss, Professor Deshpande.”

Curtis knew the Arts Department chairwoman maybe too well, on a too-frequent basis. “You don’t seem, well, dressed for this.”

Ethan Cooper grinned back. “Had an earlier workshop -- I’ve fabricated a few weapons, prosthetics, and costumes for local filmmakers. Me and one of the fans who trailed me back to my SUV saw it from the rear lot. Very back row – I had a morning class, so I got here late.”

“And you saw Prinze go off the balcony.”

“Nah. I was loading a murderbot when my new ‘buddy’ Wayne yelped. Prinze was on the balcony, and Wayne spotted the other guy in the room.”

Curtis straightened. “Other guy? You or your fanboy describe him?”

Cooper plucked a thick volume from the ottoman between them. Seventy-two point scarlet letters hung above an ancient barn with a glowing loft window. Breeding. Larger all-cap type heralded its author. Simon Khan. The scholar/artist turned the book in his calloused fingers and displayed a towering, pleasantly menacing man with a broad forehead and what in a more unenlightened time had been known as a “Fu Manchu” mustache.

“This guy,” Ethan said.

**

“They said you could go on up in about 15 minutes,” Martel sighed, running a hand through thin black hair. “Well, ‘they’ being Mr. Khan.”

“Really grounded guy, travels alone,” the assistant manager breathed. “Tried to give me this huge tip just for walking him back up to his room —”

“Jesus, Grant,” his boss blurted. “Dead guest. Maybe take it down a notch?”

Grant, already a size or so smaller than his Tuscan gold polo, shrunk slightly. Even the huge sunburst behind him appeared momentarily to dim.

“You took him back to his room?” Curtis glanced at Martel’s anxious expression. “Thought he hadn’t arrived yet.”

Martel shot daggers at his junior. “Simon Khan’s probably the biggest VP we’ve had here since Gallagher. I didn’t see, you know, inconveniencing him.”

“Grant, right? What was Khan doing before you escorted him back to his suite?”

Martel stalked off to attend to a zombie in need. “Shit. Soooo, Mr. Khan gets here right after the afternoon session starts, and he wants to see the room where Prinze and him are – were – supposed to do the evening session. Hope he doesn’t cancel – I get off at 6, and I wanna get my, ah, book signed.” He reached under the front desk for a near-mint copy of Danny’s Covenant, the novel that had launched Khan 45 years earlier.

“Mm. You a Daniel Prinze fan, too?”

Grant’s expression soured. “No disrespect. He’s supposed to be like Khan’s successor, whatever, but he’s kinda, well, not a hack, but no Simon Khan. Yeah, Khan may be having a mental blot right now…”

“Block.”

"Well, I guess at 74 novels, plus seven books of short stories, he was bound to hit a dry patch. See, Mr. Khan, he was about to make this big sale to Warner Brothers. You read Kenneth? Guy trapped in some parallel universe, or he thinks so? Classic modern fable of post-9/11 dislocation and alienation. Woulda been epic. Then the studio changed its mind and signed to do three of Prinze's books. They got Gaga to star in the one, oh, you know, the one with the lesbian zombies? Ghoul on Ghoul? That’s what I mean. Khan could take a haunted toaster and make it a classic. Prinze had like one great book. Real literary shit, so I never read it. They had it on Prinze’s table on the trade floor. Everything else moved over lunch, but The Ascendance Ritual, well, there’s a stack of ‘em left in Prinze’s room. I think it pissed him – had like three drinks with his lunch, and Mr. Khan looked in on him to see if he was --”

Curtis blinked.

“Shit,” Grant reiterated.

**

“So, Detective?” Simon Khan inquired, sipping his room service beer. “Was Dan dispatched by a dastardly doppelganger?"

Curtis smiled. Khan dipped his salt-and-pepper mane. “You have to understand horror writers. Most of us were high school geeks and freaks. Sarcasm and eccentricity were our weapons against a cold world."

"Prinze, too?" Curtis posed. "I understand from one of your biggest fans he was a professor of Greek mythology, Mensa type. Even published a regular novel before he got into the scary stuff."

"The Ascendance Ritual," Khan supplied. "A modern retelling of the Icarus legend. Wasn't a bad read. Dan probably should've stuck to literature, but he wasn't content to toil in academic obscurity. When Ascendance tanked, he cranked out a quickie political horror novel, Hell To The Chief, and the public ate it up. TNT made a cheesy high-budget TV-movie of it, and Dan quit his university gig and became a writing machine, each book more popular and campier.

“That probably sounds like the kettle calling the potboiler black. See, I was too much of a bookworm to be the bad boy/black sheep, but I liked weed and Little Kings too much to score Most Likely to Pulitzer in the senior yearbook. Dan didn't have the outcast mentality necessary to fully grasp the basest human fears. But he wanted to , you know, belong. We met at a publishers’ party or something. I found him sadly amusing. I invited him to my place for supper the other night, him being in the area. But Dan was too busy crowing about his movie coup."

“That bother you?”

“Hulu’s picked up a Kenneth miniseries – a far better vehicle to capture the story.” The Maestro of the Macabre glanced at his vintage Mickey Mouse watch. “Hey, gotta run in a few minutes -- doing the evening show solo. Sorry, Detective, but I can't be two places at once. Right? Unless…”

“Yeah?”

“Well , there is bilocation - the ability to be in two locations simultaneously. The most common manifestation is the doppelganger, or 'double walker,' a so-called shadow self. Guy de Maupassant, the French novelist, claimed to have been haunted by his doppelganger near the end of his life. A variation is the wraith, a double an individual can project to a remote location.”

Curtis normally didn’t rise to chain-yanking, but he kind of wanted to see to what the chain was attached.

“Or how about good old quantum physics? Scientists at MIT proved an object at least as large as a molecule can be made to act like a light wave. It can then be split into component waves. The same molecule could exist in each of the two waves at once. Then there's mirror matter. Every particle, every atom, may have an identical 'partner.' That opens the possibility of parallel universes. Or beings."

“Yeah,” Detective Mead murmured. “Lemme think on that.”

**

"I wouldn’t exactly call it lying,” Ethan Cooper said. “More like hazing you, amusing himself, maybe formulating his next novel.”

Curtis was ready to call it for the evening, and the gawking Freddie Krueger doppelgangers in the booth over Cooper’s shoulder weren’t helping. “Wasn’t talking about his theories of the crime, though he almost seemed to be daring me. Like challenging me to prove he was in that room with Prinze. But then he lies about something frankly kinda stupid. Khan says he met Daniel Prinze at some party or something, can’t quite remember.”

Cooper swirled his appletini. “Nah. According to his Wiki, they met right after the Columbine thing, you know, the two boys shot up the high school? Mr. Khan got a group of horror writers together to help prevent teen suicide."

"Face Your Fears. They were raising money for it tonight. So why lie about something that’s black and white on the Web?”

"You think he actually killed Prinze? How? Why? Envy, jealousy? I mean, Prinze was the flavor of the month. But Khan is Khan."

“You and that kid saw what you saw, right? Khan talked to Prinze at lunch, said he was going on about his movie deal.” Curtis drained his Pepsi. “Assistant manager said Prinze was riding high on the Warner Brother deal, but was put off about the morning signing session.”

Curtis reached for the check, but the artist cut him off. The detective shrugged and scanned the packed booths across the atrium only to make eye contact with Jason Voorhees.

“Why you smiling?” Cooper finally asked.

Curtis’ face darkened. “I don’t know. Nothing to smile about, really.”

**

“Hey, you,” Curtis called.

Simon Khan’s doppelganger turned abruptly from two count ‘em two Ronn-Es with a horny grin kinking his handlebar mustache. After determining the guy in the durable Penney’s clearance suit was not cosplaying, he slumped against a table of hockey masks and razor-pimped gloves.

"Saw your video about a half-hour ago," the cop greeted brightly as the cloned androids peeled off. “We got your, uh, thing. It’s evidence now, but you can put in to get it after the trial, Mr…?”

“Vincent Carmody,” the false Mr. Khan mumbled. "Look, I saw Prinze a long time before he got killed."

“Yeah, I know that. You met Prinze at the signing, right, then paid him a visit with something else to, what, autograph?”

Carmody grimaced. “The CLOWN Prince of Horror? Naw, Simon wouldn’t see me even though I came all the way from Des Moines. I knew him and Prinze were buds, and when I see the hotel guy take the guy upstairs, and I wait for him to leave before I knock. Think I scared the shit out of him,” the counterfeit Khan chortled before catching Curtis’ face. “Anyway, I asked if he could maybe get Simon to sign it for me after tonight’s talk. He said to fuck off, and I like begged. Finally, he said, sure, he’d leave it at the desk after. I think maybe he was just trying to get rid of me.”

“You think?”

**

Simon Khan stepped off the elevator with a sense of trepidation. His “people” usually invigorated him, but tonight, he was exhausted. He nonetheless was a writer, a fantasist, and was curious, especially as the cop’s invite had been to Dan’s room.

The corridor was empty and the door removed, Khan supposed for evidentiary purposes. The suite was dark save a glow from deep within. As the author ventured further, he realized the light leaked from under the bedroom door.

“Detective Mead?” He called, nudging the half-closed door.

Simon’s eyes locked onto the figure across the room. Simon Khan stared at Simon Khan. The other Simon was draped in coal black and grinning mischievously, as if he were savoring the terror in his doppelganger's eyes.

Simon's heart then slowed, and he laughed, briefly.

"That us how a man can be in two places at one time," Curtis Mead explained behind him. The detective edged around him, and effortlessly hoisted the younger Kahn onto the bedspread. "One of those cardboard standup displays they used put in the bookstores until the brick-and-mortar chains started shutting down."

“Danny’s Covenant,” Simon Khan sighed, dropping onto the duvet. “Wait. Stalker Boy.”

“When they told you somebody’d seen you in Prinze’s suite, you were probably as confused as me, but you ran with it. You knew what happened. You saw it coming. And tried to head it off when you saw Prinze at lunch, right?”

“Where in hell’d you find it?”

“Stalker Boy wasn’t your only fan,” Curtis explained. “It was tucked behind the racks in the linen supply room down the hall -- Grant Rudolph couldn’t very well have hauled it down in the elevator. He knew where all the video blind spots were, and the housekeepers had finished for the day, so he could simply retrieve it later.

“Grant came up to personally deliver Prinze’s wakeup call, heard the screaming outside, and realized what had happened. Then he spotted the Holy Grail of Simon Khan memorabilia through the gap in the door. Prinze left it by the door where Carmody’’d slid it in after wearing him down, and Grant managed to finagle it out the same crack. Prinze was dead, so hey, right? As for you, you knew we’d likely never prove you were in the room. But I asked, who or what were you protecting playing games with me?”

Simon Khan shook his head. "Prinze was a brilliant guy, brilliant writer, but scarcely anybody would ever read his greatest work. He knew down deep he was a failure at horror. A popular failure, but a failure.”

"Then that damned fool boy came up here, begged him to get the king of horror to sign his collector’s item like Prinze was some kind of errand boy,” Curtis speculated. “Prinze sat here for a while, staring at 'you' and realizing he'd never be you, no matter the fame or money. Lemme show you something.”

Simon Khan trailed Curtis into the sitting room and through the balcony curtains.

"Kurt Cobain." Curtis murmured.

"What?"

“You were protecting Face Your Fear. What would happen if one of the founders, a celebrity at the height of his career, killed himself? Cobain, Amy Winehouse, they’ve already glamorized self-destruction. You'd rather people think you’re a diabolical killer rather than help Prinze become a romantic martyr.

"When the SunUp people bought this place, they plastered their logo everywhere – the lobby, uniforms, everywhere. Prinze's first novel, The Ascendance Ritual? Of course, you know who Icarus was. The dude who made wings out of feathers and wax and tried to fly to the sun. Only the heat melted the wings, and he fell to his death. Think maybe your friend wanted at least a poetic death."

Curtis nodded toward the pool deck below, and Khan moved to the balcony rail. It was cruelly vibrant even in the September moonlight.

Khan peered silently into the cold, blood-spattered stone sun…