#devilinthewhitecity

History is something I have always had trouble understanding. Not just connecting the events with the dates, people, and circumstances. What I can’t understand is how if history truly exists than how is the infallible nature of dysfunction and destruction a constant interjection? 

When I was younger all I wanted to be was a demolisher. I imagined myself sitting at the cab of the wrecking ball, knocking down anything I could be paid for. The sound of the swing of the wrecking ball as it cascaded bricks down street side like rain. 

Not too much longer in life, where those same bricks would have fallen, stands a much older version of me, still contemplating my function in life. In my hands I twirl the business card of my Uncle’s advertising agency, “WKRP”. At this point, i was heading down Wells st., contemplating an offer from them. They needed a part-time intern who if chosen for the job, could make it to a full-time status. The catch 22 was that I was not to tell anyone I had no experience whatsoever. 

All of this seemed simple and after the first meeting with the Agency’s representatives, I felt the weight of responsibility beginning to lift. Sitting in the confine’s of a nice Greek restaurant nearby, I discussed my potential with them. It was 2 reps who met with me and also the finest looking women they had at the agency, I assume to coerce my opinion. The thing that was odd about the interview was that it was highly personal, they asked more questions about me and less questions about what I do professionally. I didn’t know to be surprised or dissuaded by this, but I answered the questions diligently. 

At one point in the interview, I decided to ask, that for the position I was interning for, was I replacing someone? Despite it being a relatively simple question, their response was puzzling. The woman conducting the questions seemed to freeze on this, smiled and said “if there was, why would we need you?”, and that was the last of that. I brought up my discrepancy in experience and they seemed to ignore the inquiry altogether as if I said nothing at all. It was this point they started asking about my drug history. I responded by asking what relevance does it have and the older lady started explaining that she took these ‘special’ pills to control her ‘drug’ urges throughout the day at the agency. She also hinted that the best way in, was to take one of these. At the end of the interview she slipped me a bright Red pill in a napkin and said, “if you want to see us again, you know what to do”.

I went home that night to my little apartment. All I had was television and no roommates. It was all I needed really. As I sat on my couch, I twirled the pill around in my hand, wondering what kind of magic it might hold. I also couldn’t help thinking of it possibly being a backdoor into my mind, laced with Chinese brainwashing chemicals. For all I know, they never got rid of their last tech, and now they were wiring me to feed into his server database somewhere. Hell, I might be working more for that guy than the business then. The more I thought of the possibilities, I realized that even if the doubts were true, I had little choice but to take this pill. It was my test and I was going to pass it no matter what. I went to the sink and filled a glass of water, immediately taking the pill. It went down easy, I sank back into my couch moments later. Ten or so minutes in and nothing was happening. As I watched a newscast, I started noticing peculiar updates in the ticker headline below. The first read, “Man shoots police officer in old town, turns self in with gun”. The second read, “Monster in post office basement, trying to talk to people through fictional mail from nonexistent people”. I shook my head and the ticker returned to normal; War in Iraq, New videos from Al Qaeda. I started to doze off and as I did, I dropped the remote control, switching the channel. A loud noise came from the television, just as I felt that falling feeling into the chasm of sleep. I focused on the image being displayed, on the screen was a slow motion reverse of a horrible car accident. The focus was on a Woman’s face as it impacted the windshield. Little details refigured themselves as she drifted back from the glass, You could see she was quite beautiful before the start of the video. It was quite graphic for an advertisement and I found myself waiting for an Insurance company’s slogan or spokesperson. None was found, instead at the point she was safe back in her seat, it went to another person’s accident. This time a tire flew through the windshield and into the body of a 300 or so pound man, starting in a plume of a crimson gash from where it impacted. This video looked oddly real as well and extremely well shot. 

After about 5 of these, I started feeling really nauseous. I went to the bathroom and puked up this odd neon yellow puke, it must of been the pill I thought. When I returned to my living room, A man sat in the chair across the sofa, wearing a rounded type top-hat and a thick mustache. As I sat down, he seemed to pay no attention to me, repeatedly checking an old watch fixed to his coat. There was a coldness all around him, and an odd familiarity. He pulled out a book and began to read aloud,

“I watched you, I followed you. In health and in death. You like me, have led multiple lives and have been accused of the devil. I like you, have been alone and in the corner of a beast. In cell, or self we can find the means of freedom or unless solitude”.

He then vanished in to thin air, and the book appeared in my hands before me as if I just read that passage. I immediately shut the book, turned off the TV, 

and made the room blacker than night so I couldn’t even see my hand in front of me. 

The next morning, that odd cold still lingered as the sun rose. Even though I rested most of the night, I felt as if I got no sleep. Something would tug the blanket off of me, or a random noise would alert me awake. I never saw the full body of the Tophat man again, but I felt him in the room and I could still hear his voice. It was odd because when he spoke, it sounded as if a bigger and  meaner man was hiding behind his shoulder doubling his voice, but none was to be found. He also seemed out of place with time, not just by his watch piece, but his demeanor, something about him was lost, I could also tell he was a ghost and unfortunately not a hallucination. 

The reason I knew this, was because I had seem him before under much different circumstances. Before I moved from my hometown, I used to work many jobs, making money anywhere I could find it. As I got on a roll and made nearly enough money to get out of town, I noticed this strange man following me to and from jobs. He wouldn’t wear the Tophat as I had seen that night, or the old suit. He would have standard people’s clothes, but that same face and mustache. He never addressed me, but I got a vibe that he was watching me and as he got better and better at somehow finding me, I would find myself quitting the jobs to avoid his glare. I somehow knew his intent, even then was not in my favor.

Now that I recognized the man as he was, a relic seemingly, I began to wonder if he might of had something to do with my connection in the agency. I had been documenting this particular visage for years before and that it was coincidence that he was here now, did not seem likely.  

That was when the phone rang, on the other side of the line was my Uncle’s voice,

“We need to meet immediately. There is something I would like to talk to you about”, he said. 

It was a short L ride to the office. The entrance had a short security checkpoint, and I was able to get in. A lady at a check-in desk asked me who I was. Upon telling her, she instructed me with a maze-like list of turns and stairs that concluded in, “then you will be at the head executive office of your Uncle”. 

The building was very fancy looking, metal everything, with thick stone and crystal countertops about. There was a plastic smell to the place. People rushed to an there, with files and ideas. You could feel the synergy happening within. I navigated through the chaos and up 3-4 sets of stairs, where I finally found a calmer hallway, with only the names on the outside of doors. At the head of this hallway was my Uncle’s office. 

I knocked on his door.

A voice sounded from inside,

“Come in”, it said.

I entered through the big wooden door, to a very ornate and well set office. In one corner was a sand trap with a comb, it was perfectly groomed. The main light was a looming orb on the ceiling, looking more like something from a space craft than an office. Underneath it sat my Uncle in a Black suit, as I entered he tightened his collar and readjusted his files on his desk, paying particular attention to my shoes, which that day were nothing remarkable. 

“Sit down, stay a while”, he said pointing at the chair across.

I took a seat and waited for instructions.

“You might be wondering why we, I called you here today. I’ve been watching you for a while, and I know you have a particular set of talents most people would kill for. ‘We’ being an agency, wants to make it easier for ‘you’ to find the eye for your talents. This doesn’t happen overnight though and we need you to do the things we don’t want to, getting coffee, cleaning up for clientele, etcetera, etcetera. If you earn our respect, me might get a full time position for you, how does that sound?”, he said.

“That sounds great, sir.”, I said.

That night I could hardly sleep in anticipation of my job the next day. It was the first job I was excited for, not just for the payoff either. I found myself sleepless and anytime I dozed off some strange interruptions awoke me. I maybe slept for an hour and found myself half dozed off on the L to the office. It was odd, as soon as I left the apartment, the tiredness hit me like a ton of bricks. I almost slept through my stop, but something shook me awake on the train right as we neared the station. 

My first day was simple, they understood because of my history of insomnia, that it was an early start and they weren’t going to make that anymore complicated than it already was. I ran coffees, messages between leads of the company, and even helping with minor creative ideas here and there. Most of the people adored me, I couldn’t tell if it was legitimate or because they just wanted to appease my Uncle, who seemed to be both the leader and the shadow of the company, leading and looming over it’s every operation like a dark cloud.

The second and third days were still followed by sleepless nights. I began to wonder if I should try to contact the spirit that woke me up that night, if it was awakening me to try to talk again. Something about the haze of that pill seemed to break the barrier now impeding on the supposed visage. I didn’t understand how a pill could be producing hallucinations rather than inventing them so to speak. 

No full bodied apparition appeared again and I kept an eye out at the office for strange visitors in case he followed me around the job again. Many just took my odd behaviors because of it as paranoia of agency work; looking for spies from other companies and what not. The explanations to the various investigations seemed to still be fleeting.

I continued doing my tasks around the office, attempting to keep my mind off the Tophat man as much as possible in hopes that his presence might reduce. As I worked on broken printers, defunct computers and saw them work with the touch of my hand, I also started to wonder just how do things naturally break without direct negligence of function? Then my mind started to wander back to the Topcoat’s man old watch. It worked well, not because it was made that entirely, but because he made it work well I imagined. The more I thought about it, the more I thought what was he truly making sure of? A visage caught out of place with his time is only as much as that, whatever he was now, he was surely a ghost. What would a clock matter? 

With these thoughts, usually more problems presented themselves. Coincidental technical malfunctions that when sourced were problems no more than where things were placed, like the building had numerous dead zones. The more I tried to come up with theoretical explanations, the more I found myself going further down the rabbit hole; looking further at a consistent malfunction. It felt paradoxical some days; the solutions were bluntly simple. To me I could see the unpent energy leaking into their technology; their denial. Even my Uncle adorned a cross on his neck, under his tie, but it didn’t explain one thing we both saw. Kept hidden from me was a set of files on a server he had set up from the get-go, only accessible by him. In these files was numerous security reports of a Mustached maintenance man coming in and making inquiries on the buildings layout and businesses, but never doing subsequent work. He never let me know about this, in fact, he kept me completely unaware.

One of the things that bothered me the most was that strange Car accident commercial thing I kept seeing that night. I had this fear when I was younger of this thing called ‘Crash Test Dummies’. It was a cartoon that was literally about talking crash test dummies. There was short runs of action figures and promotions for it but most of it mysteriously dissolved with the company’s departure over lawsuits. It was peculiar though because the appeal wasn't particularly safety, in a way it was trying to make being a crash test dummy look cool, which in reality, dying in a car accident for scientific experiment is really not cool and painful for a mortal. Maybe I take things too literally, but that imagery reminded me of the underlying images that fueled my child-like fear of ‘Crash Test Dummies’.

Most of my nights were still sleepless, I couldn’t stop the numerous happenings. Lights would turn themselves on and of, I would find myself waking in up in strange places with no recollection of how or when I got there about the apartment. The wake up time for work was always early and I was always sleepless; I was burning the candle at both ends. Co-workers and even my Uncle started to notice so he cut back on my tasks, letting me leave early to get rest. I began to worry that my interest in the company was diminishing, and worse yet, when I was organizing a server structure the other day, based off an old folder set, I found evidence of an intern there before and possibly still doing work. Were they planning on replacing me? Why would they ever of hired me at all if he was still an active employee?

To make matters worse, winter was coming. In the city this meant soggy socks, shit seats, standing all the time and financial crunches like one could never imagine. My Uncle never was one for the winter and in the midst of this one he planned a trip to the beaches Florida. This left me in a higher position as most would be coming to me with their inquiries and many of the solutions I would have to formulate myself or at least I thought. When I arrived for the first day without him at the office, I was greeted by the Older woman whom I met in the interview. She was cleaning and organizing the main lobby and proceeded to tell me that she would be organizing my activities that day. With the days tasks, she left and other pill and a cryptic note, reading “take it or leave it”. 

Amongst these tasks and the arguably most important one was delivering the companies checks to be mailed out. Under special instructions from Etta, as she called herself outside of work, I was to mail these checks at a particular post office in the southernmost section of town. Doing most of my work on bike those days, I found this particular ride to be dangerous. The route was fraught with hot corners and red light districts, it wasn’t atypical to find gangsters patrolling those blocks as well. My bike was a fairly nice one and as I veered past groups of passerby’s I could see people eyeing it’s value and my awareness. The checks were rolled up in a sealed cardboard tube I had bundled in my messenger bag. I couldn’t help but think that myself, bike and checks was possibly totaling to a value over the apartment I returned to later. I disregarded my fears and focused on the path ahead. Potholes and open doors were my main obstacles those days, not to mention unaware city drivers. I would listen to the local radio to tune out the chaos around, sometimes it worked, sometimes it made it worse, depended on the broadcaster that day.  I recall that day that “Signed, sealed, delivered”, was playing as I neared that old post office. Something about the post office made me worried upon approach. It wasn’t the building itself, but a feeling I got from the area. I couldn't quite describe it but it felt a bit like reality went sideways there. Before this, things had been going quite well besides the visits from the Tophat man. I kept my supernatural concerns far from professional, besides the occasional personal suspicion of some strange coincidences. In the back of my mind, it was driving me quite nuts though, the possibility that this man was following me around, worried me. What was he looking for? Was he looking to expose faults in my pursuits? As I entered the Post office lobby, I overheard a distraught customer,

“Why won’t you let me in the basement?”, he said

“Sir, that’s for employees only, we keep extra mail in the main corridor”, the attendant responded. 

The man balled his fist and slammed it on the post office table.

“I just want to get down there”, he yelled.

“Not without this”, the attendant said and flashed a key.

The man grimaced and turned around muttering something to himself. 

I tried not to make eye contact.

As I approached the attendant she said,

“7th time today with that man and he’s not the only one. Crazies thinking they are talking to some sort of monster that lives downstairs”.

She proceeded to shake her head and continued,

“People these days, lord have mercy”.

“Just what exactly do they think is down there?”, I inquired.

“Some kind of beast, something to do with the Devil I hear. I don’t know if I believe much in it. I’ll tell you what though, some days when it’s awfully dark in here, you start to see the shadows dance on the walls, like there is some sort of gathering and the reason I take everyone’s shifts is because I’m getting Cataracts so I couldn’t know if it was shadows or my old eyes playing tricks on me. The others can’t stand it though, the one thing that gets to me. Is sometimes when I’m all alone, this old type of music starts echoing from the basement vents, as it’s all one system. Just this old melody I’ve never heard before, but for some reason I have, and it haunts me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop talking about this”, she answered. 

I handed her the tube and explained it was extremely important and had to be shipped as soon as possible. She proceeded to take the key she had pointed out earlier and brought the mail down to the basement, though there was a stack of to-be sent letters right next to her desk.

She seemed to be gone for an abnormally long amount of time. I turned around to see a Tophat and overcoat, hung up on a rack at the southern end of the room. I could swear it wasn’t there when I entered. I turned back to her desk, and tried to shake it off. She still hadn’t returned and I couldn't even hear steps from the basement. I turned around and briefly the overcoat hung as if a man running toward the exit filled it’s inside, then it dropped as if it was stagnant again. I left out the doors as fast as I could, not asking for a receipt. 

This in many ways was the coup that killed my internship. Those checks were the company’s Christmas checks and basically everyone was gossiping that I possibly stole there Christmas income when a ripped up cardboard tube was sent back to the office. Something or someone had taken and routed the money out of country and due to the culprit being what was a monster in the post office basement, nobody believed I didn’t have a part in taking both their hard earned money and bonus for the holidays. Without the CEO in office, much of the issue was compounding and caused a brief shutdown. In this time my Uncle was said to have started talks about taking me out of office for good, based on my current mental state. I began to wonder if the pills were helping me see this apparent evil, or had he deceived me into believing lies.

Upon return I was fit to train a group of interns and for some reason, when we had drinks afterwards, I let them know I was a fraud with basically no experience besides family relation. They could hardly believe me, that I would be trusted with such responsibility. It just slipped, after a man I saw with a rounded Tophat snuck in and out of the same bar, near undetected amongst the crowd. I could of been working on whim, but I felt this man was not a coincidence anymore. 

It wasn’t long before I was called into a sit down lunch with my Uncle where he explained my work with them would be coming to an abrupt close. He likened me to a criminal on a spree, explaining that he felt most of my talent and creativity was stolen from better represented sources. It was a blow to my personal ethics I still have yet to recover from today, coming from a man I respected enough to assist. I also had to wonder knowing what he knew about the man following me, did he know this Tophat man as well? Something about their behaviors mirrored each other but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it was the executive responsibilities of a major company mirrored aspects of the Devil, the greed, the amount of money being deposited on ideas whilst people died for far less outside the walls surrounding. 

I was let off with a slim amount of money to continue on and I wasn’t surprised to find in the next month, right as I spent my last dollar from the company, to find some grim news about my Uncle.

The news reached me as I was purchasing a newspaper, it was right on the headlines. “Local CEO dead in head on collision”, and underneath it read an article all about a man they called the Devil of the city. Supposedly the first Serial Killer to be recorded, he confessed to much of his misdoing before his execution on an Edison cylinder. He was also dubbed the Christmas Killer, and the Tophat man, he had a very widely remarked Mustache as well. The resemblance between him and the man who had been following me was uncanny, stories of how he threw away letters trying to be sent from children he murdered. The coldness of the man was signature as well, he was a perfect representation of what came to pass at the turn of the century and maybe why progression was such threat to him, was because he knew deep down he was a threat to progression. 

To this day I can’t look at a malfunctioning clock, or a misinterpreting computer and not think, 

Note on the text: I used Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City as published by Crown Publishers in 2003.

There is something slightly strange about the way in which everything and everyone lives together on this small planet of ours. The log cabin that is good for its “good” human inhabitants is also good for the “bad” termites that live in its walls. Good and evil, on this planet with limited space, live side by side. They have to. One of the more interesting aspects of this book is how well the city of Chicago stands in for the log cabin in the metaphor. Because while it was able to attract the best and most creative people of 1893, people who would help create “The World Fair of 1893″ (also called “The World’s Columbian Exposition”), it was also able to attract one of the worst: American serial killer H. H. Holmes. 

Before he was executed, H. H. Holmes famously said that he “was born with the devil in [him]. . . [and that he] could not help being a murderer [anymore] than a poet can help [having] the inspiration to sing” (109). There was something seedy about Chicago even amidst all the glitz and glamour. It wasn’t everyone’s first choice to host the World Fair, and even after it was chosen many people doubted that it would be a success. But somehow even those who were skeptical feel drawn to it, or at least to the challenge that it presented. Both the city and the Fair itself became the venue where artists and dreamers could come and share their hopes for the future with the world. It was at this Fair where America finally came up with a structure that they felt could rival the Eiffel Tower- the Ferris Wheel. The World’s Fair became a source of inspiration for people the world over. People like Nikola Tesla and Frank Hall, the man who invented the typewriter, were there debuting their new creations; writer L. Frank Baum and his illustrator modeled the land of Oz on what they saw there. One of the junior architects who helped design the venue later became an architect in his own right: Frank Lloyd Wright. Overall it can be said that “the fair had a powerful and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche” (373). However, while much of the impact it had was positive, not all of it was: 

That something magical had happened in that summer of the World’s Fair was beyond doubt, but darkness too had touched the fair. Scores of workers had been hurt or killed in [the process of] building [this] dream, their families consigned to poverty. Fire had killed fifteen more and an assassin had transformed the closing ceremony from what was supposed to have been the century’s greatest celebration into a vast funeral. . . . A murderer had moved among [all] the beautiful things [that everyone] had created (5-6).   

H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, built the “Murder Hotel”, as it came to be known, right in the city itself, within walking distance of the fair. He was both amazed by the level of ingenuity that was on display there, and driven by the desire to “outsmart” all the people who were there, including the extra number of police that were there to help protect the people at the Fair. Underneath all their noses he was able to build a hotel with a series trap doors and fake hallways that sat above a crematorium where he would drop his victims and listen to them as they either suffocated or burned to death. All in all he killed nine people, including three children, before he was caught, over the course of three years. For comparison, Jack the Ripper, the first “modern” serial killer only killed five women over the course of one year. Even Ed Gein and the Zodiac Killer, two of America’s most infamous serial killers, only killed two and seven people respectively. Overall, Holmes’ level of success was such that afterwards everyone was “amazed at the failure of the municipal police department and the local prosecuting officers not only to prevent those awful crimes, but even to procure any knowledge of them” (370). Keep in mind that, according to the Fair’s own records, 27.5 million people came through the turnstiles. This accounted for almost 43% of the people living in America at the time. So the fact that no one noticed, that he was able to get away with it for so long, is pretty impressive. It’s also worth pointing out that the only reason Holmes was ever caught was because he committed fraud against the companies that insured his hotel (he had claimed initially that it was a commercial venture). It was not until after various investigations into his fraudulent behavior were well underway that the evidence of his murders came to light.