style="font-size:15px;"> “Conspiracies? You mean like government cover-ups, that sort of thing?”
“No, not really. He was more …” Kenny sighed. “Listen, it’s a long story.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to be,” said Inspector Me, and glanced back at the girl. “Do you?”
“Yes, actually,” she said. “I have a christening to get to.”
“Oh,” said Me. “Of course.” He turned back to Kenny. “So maybe if you talk really fast, you can explain it to us.”
Kenny took a moment, deciding on the best way to avoid sounding like a lunatic. “Right,” he said. “For the past few years, I’ve been investigating some oddball stories. Nothing big, nothing major, but stories that get ignored because when you hear them, they sound insane. No newspaper is going to take this stuff seriously, so I can really only devote a small amount of time to them.
“It started when I did a piece on urban legends. You have all your usual stuff, modern myths and burgeoning folklore, some funny, some horrible, some creepy, everything you’d expect to hear. But I started hearing new ones.”
“Like what?”
“Just rumours, snippets of stories. Someone saw a gunfight where people threw fire. Someone saw a man leap over a building, or a woman just disappear.”
Inspector Me tilted his head. “So the modern urban legend is about superheroes?”
“That’s what I was thinking, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been hearing whispers about an entire subculture where this stuff goes on. Lynch said it’s everywhere, if you know what to look for.”
“I see. And did Lynch claim to be such a superhero?”
“Lynch? No. God, no. I mean, he wasn’t well, obviously. He had visions, he said. That’s what he called them, visions. He’d had them since he was a teenager. They scared the hell out of him. He was sent to psychiatrist after psychiatrist, given pill after pill, but nothing worked. He’d describe these visions to me and they seemed so vivid, so real. He couldn’t hold down a job, couldn’t maintain a relationship … He ended up homeless, drinking too much, muttering away to himself in doorways.”
“And this,” Inspector Me said, “was your source?”
“I know he sounds unreliable.”
“Just a touch.”
“But I stuck at it, listened to what he was saying. Eventually, I learned how to separate the ramblings from the … well, the facts, I suppose.”
“What kinds of things did he see?” asked the girl.
Kenny frowned. He didn’t really understand what gave a student on work experience the right to question him, but Inspector Me didn’t object, so Kenny reluctantly answered. “He saw the apocalypse,” he said. “He saw a few of them, to be honest. The first one concerned these Dark Gods, the Faceless Ones, whatever he called them. Someone banished them eons ago, nobody knows who, and they’ve been trying to get back ever since. When he was seventeen, Lynch had a vision in which they returned. He saw millions dead. Cities levelled. He saw the world break apart. He kept having these visions, and every time it would be some new aspect, some new viewpoint from which to watch the world end. He was convinced we were all going to die one night, a little under three years ago. He said these things, these god-creatures, would emerge through a glowing yellow door between realities. Of course no one would listen to him. And then the night came when the world was going to end … and it didn’t. And the visions stopped.”
“I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.
“It wasn’t over, not for Lynch. More visions came to him. He predicted the Insanity Virus, you know.”
“The last I heard it wasn’t a virus,” said the girl. “It was a hallucinogen. They got the guys who did it.”
Kenny laughed. “You actually believe that?”
Inspector Me looked at him weirdly. “You don’t?”
“It’s all a little convenient, isn’t it? As a Christmas prank, a radical group of anarchists drop a drug into the water supplies around the country – and then months later they come forward and admit to it? Anarchists, taking responsibility for their actions? That defeats the whole point of being an anarchist, doesn’t it? Do you know when the trial is? Do you know which prison they’re locked up in until it happens? Because I don’t.”
Inspector Me sat back. “This sounds awfully like a conspiracy theory, Kenny. What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, but Lynch said it wasn’t anarchists that did this. He said it was little slices of darkness, flying around and infecting people.”
To Kenny’s surprise, neither the Inspector nor the girl smirked.
“Do you know how many people reported seeing strange things over those few days?” Kenny continued. “I’ve read dozens of reports. There was a nightclub in North County Dublin that was apparently swarmed by the things, but it wasn’t even reported in the local paper.”
“Sounds like a bunch of people hallucinating to me,” said the girl.
“Lynch didn’t think so. He had a vision of those things spreading out, infecting the world, making everyone do crazy things, kill each other, drop bombs …”
“All right then,” said Me. “We have established that Lynch was psychologically disturbed, that he believed in a subculture of superheroes and evil gods. So why was he killed?”
Kenny blinked. “Uh, he was robbed, wasn’t he?”
“Was he?”
“Wasn’t he? That’s what the … that’s what the guy said, the Guard, the one who spoke to me. He said it looked like a mugging.”
“I see.”
Kenny frowned. “You think it’s got something to do with his visions, don’t you?”
“It’s a possibility,” said Me.
“Why were you meeting him this morning?” the girl asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Kenny, “I don’t mean to be rude, but why is she asking me questions? Why is she even here?”
“Work experience,” said Me.
“You accused me of murder. Do you make a habit of bringing schoolgirls into interview rooms with murder suspects?”
Me waved a hand. “Oh, I was only joking about that. I don’t really think you murdered anyone. Unless you did, in which case I reserve the right to say that I knew it all along. But she asks a good question, Kenny. Why were you meeting him?”
“For the past few months, he’d been having new visions, of shadows coming alive, of people dropping dead. His latest apocalypse.”
“What did he say about it?”
