Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  True enough as it went.

  “We ran some more, found a ladder up to a grate, got back in a subway tunnel, up, out and caught a cab.” I knew one of them was going to ask and added it before they could. “No, the cabbie wasn’t happy with the sewer and vomit stink, so I threw him out and stole the cab.” Which was what I’d done the day before, and not that unlikely with my general behavior. The rest was weak, but the only way we could’ve actually escaped would be if Lazarus let us go. Which, thinking about it, wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to me.

  “Or we got out because he let us. The nastier and meaner they are the more they like to play games. It wouldn’t be the first, hell, second or third time it’s happened. The more powerful they are, the bigger the asshole they are. It’s an unwritten rule. However it happened, I know we weren’t followed. It’s a sunny day. They wouldn’t have come out into full sunlight. The flashlights did some damage. Not much, but enough to know the sun would do a helluva lot more.”

  “It’s not sunny any longer.” Niko was back and going through the trunks we had for sparring equipment. He had two flashlights already, but regular ones. The one he dug out of the trunk was high-powered and big enough to use to beat Godzilla to death. Rain was beating against the window as I looked over.

  “Well, shit.” It was pithy and summed things up nicely.

  “The shadows, they were whispering, laughing?” Robin asked. I shrugged and held out a hand to make a so-so gesture with it. I’d thought they were, but at that point I thought we were dead, no way around it, too. I wasn’t committing on talking weasels in the face of that. But . . .

  “I think so.”

  “Hmm. I know of a few creatures that they could be. If nothing else, it narrows it down. As for following us, I have a guess. It would be a better one had my skull not been all but crushed and I hadn’t been weak from hunger thanks to poor hosts—”

  “Your food is in the hall, prick. The dark hall that is probably also full of hundreds of weasel monsters with millions of teeth,” Cal yelled as clothes came flying out of his room. He was searching under the bed then. “Have the fuck at it. Eat up. Tip ’em an arm or one of your feet if they brought extra fortune cookies.”

  Goodfellow folded his arms, as comfortable in his toga as he’d been in his late departed suit. “You are extremely lucky I find you tolerable now. That it takes you eight years to become so is not the best of news.”

  “Eight? Nah. I hit tolerable in five or six easy.” I didn’t pay attention to his huff while I pressed my ear to the door. Nothing. That was a positive note. No whispering or laughing or the crack of lightning. “How did they follow us? You were about to say before the Boy Wonder pissed you off.”

  “Five . . . you’d best be lying.” He scowled, but returned to the subject more appropriate to keeping our asses uneaten and unfried. “If his shadow weasels come aboveground around dusk, at night or during rainstorms, let us say, they would have all the shadows they needed to hide in. It’s possible they could talk to other shadows. Ordinary everyday shadows. Nothing paien or supernatural. Many of those type of ephemeral creatures we faced, the kind that can take the shape of shadow weasels, can use ordinary shadows. With all the shadows in the city come night, all passing information back and forth to one another, they could’ve found us here easily. Niko and Cal have been here for a few months now, yes? The shadows who live here know them.”

  “Shadows are alive?” Cal came out of his bedroom with a flashlight in one hand and two rusty batteries in the other. “Come on. We can’t afford cable. There goes my personal private party time. The highlight of my day.” He held out the batteries to Niko, who regarded them and his brother with the pleased expression of someone who had received a lemon juice enema. “We’re lucky to have a single bulb in our bathroom,” Cal groaned on. “No way it’s not crawling with Peeping Tom shadows.”

  Niko tossed the antique batteries over his shoulder to land in the trunk. “You must feel so used,” he commented, not with a lack of sympathy, but a perfect vacuum of it.

  “Check the kitchen for batteries,” he continued, “ones on which you have not spilled entire liters of Mountain Dew.”

  “What about the shadows, the normal ones, not the talking ones?” I pushed the puck for the story he hadn’t had a chance to finish. “I know that hasn’t come up any time down the road. I’m with Cal Junior on this one. Shadows perving on you in your own bathroom. That’s creepy as hell.” I caught the judgment Niko had tossed at Cal, but was now aiming in my direction.

  “Really, Nik?” I pushed my slowly drying hair behind my ears and lifted one eyebrow that was an identical mockery of his disapproving one. It had been one of my latest ways to tease him that didn’t cross the line from amusing him to earning a five-hour sparring marathon. It’d taken me months to get right—it was a challenge when you couldn’t stand to look in a mirror for years.

  “Admit it. Whether you’re getting laid on the regular or not, every guy is still going to want to Jack a little Jill once in a while. Are you going to try to tell me you never polish the katana on occasion?” I asked. “You think in twenty-eight years you haven’t forgotten to lock the bathroom or your bedroom door at least once? That you might be smacking and jacking it with your personal lubricant. Organic, I know. You left it out one day, blessed by Tibetan monks too. The body is a temple thing.”

  I slid a hand between Robin’s arm and chest to act as a crutch, holding him up as he started to glide down the wall toward the floor. He seemed content to go, but I kept him up anyway. “What was it?” I was trying to remember. Bs. Lots of Bs. “Butter . . . no. Buddha? Yes. That’s it. Buddha’s Butterful Bliss. And gluten-free; I almost accidentally mistook it for a pudding cup. I had a spoon halfway in it before I caught on. You should keep it in your bedside drawer. For my sake.”

  Niko’s eyebrow had frozen. It couldn’t decide to go down to join the other one or have the other one go up to join it. “But, for future reference, I’m sorry I didn’t knock,” I apologized. “I’d never have guessed you went all out nude for your extracurricular activities.”

  Down Goodfellow went again. My stitches were killing me and I let him go. His eyes were lifted up to Niko as if he were a messenger of God surrounded by a halo of light. “I am the most happy I have ever been,” he said, sounding as if he’d reached his tailor-made nirvana.

  “One more word that is not about killing monsters in the hall and I’ll kill the two of you instead.” Eyebrows under control, in a tight V of pure rage, Niko ordered, “Now everyone get a flashlight and a weapon.” Unspoken was “so that I can beat you to death with them.” I didn’t think he meant it. We all, Niko included, have bad moods and bad days.

  “We’re moving out in less than a minute,” he finished, swinging his flashlight with a contemplative look at the floor. Measuring the distance between me and him—maybe he did mean it.

  He switched his glance to Goodfellow. “Goodfellow, you may borrow one of my swords, which will be returned without a single fingerprint that indicates it has been fondled in any manner. You will also tell us about the shadows and if they can give away our location to the others and how long it takes? Hours, days, months?” he ordered. “Caliban will keep his mouth shut completely or I’ll use my new stitching skills, the remaining dental floss, and sew it shut myself. Cal, if you laugh even once, I will have Goodfellow remove his sheet and force you to observe what he is trying very hard not to conceal beneath it.

  “Now go.”

  I was a lion, but if he’d had a whip right then, I’d have hidden in the corner of my circus cage. Goodfellow kept his attention on Niko’s hands, wishing, I think, that he did have a whip. Cal was under the onslaught of more emotions than he’d experienced at one time. I knew at eighteen I hadn’t. But we did as we were told, despite that.

  We went.

  By the time I had a flashlight in one hand and
a gun in the other, and another pair of Cal’s boots, Goodfellow had picked out a sword. He’d gone in another direction in footwear, a pair of sandals to go with the toga theme, deadly serious that none of the Walmart, Goodwill, Salvation Army clothing in here was contaminating his body. In addition, he was halfway through the normal, ordinary, bathroom-lurking shadow explanation.

  “. . . so, no, they aren’t alive. Think of them as clay, less solid of course, but as impressionable a texture. The ones that appear in the same place every day, if the same people pass by, the same events happen, slowly that seeps into them. It can be read, not as a language, but like a picture book—images can be seen. Intense emotions can be felt. That is, if you’re a creature that is made of and lives in shadows. If they found us, that’s how.”

  “Fascinating as fuck,” Cal offered, face blank with boredom. “Can we kill something now?”

  “For once I agree with Tiny Tim,” I said, jacking a bullet in the chamber.

  We all did, as armed with weapons for Lazarus and lights for the weasels, we rushed the door. Niko and I both opened it together, keeping Cal behind us. He didn’t like it, but he was the target. We swung the lights up and down the hall, in every corner and the depth of other door jambs. There were no weasels. No Lazarus.

  There was, however, our Chinese food.

  And a deliveryman that no tip in the world could help.

  • • •

  He’d been hanged.

  Big deal, right? I’d seen a hundred worse ways to die. Inflicted a few myself. But this was different.

  He was hanging still, suspended on the wall, his feet dangling two feet above the sand-covered floor. It would’ve been less disturbing if there had been a rope holding him up. There wasn’t. The indention pressed deeply in the flesh of his neck and slanted at an upward angle added to his broken neck: He’d definitely been hanged, not strangled. He also had burn marks around his wrists and ankles, blackened and charred. Lazarus’s lightning, but not done here or we’d have heard it. The burns were wider than I’d have thought for lightning, three and a half to four inches, and in a perfectly circular band. His eyes were burnt too. There was no reason for that other than to torture the poor bastard. It wasn’t as if he’d lived long enough to be a witness, to tell us anything about Lazarus if he’d seen him.

  It wasn’t as if he’d lived to hear Lazarus or the weasels, whichever had put him here, leave. That hadn’t been an option, whether there had or hadn’t been a reason to kill him. It took one face-to-face encounter with Lazarus to come to that conclusion. He had a hard-on for death. He’d want to watch it come. Through his own eyes or through whatever functioned as the eyes of his shadows. We’d seen that Lazarus wasn’t separating and shaping the whole of himself into a pack of weasels. He was apart from them, a being independent. It didn’t mean he couldn’t mentally be inside of his nasty pets. It wouldn’t be that unusual for a paien, and that’s what he was now, with that amount of raw power to be able to do that.

  “How the hell is he just . . . hanging up there like that?” Cal backed away from the smell of burnt flesh. I knew the feeling and had backed away faster, ignoring the piles of food and sand I was stepping in and gagging as I went. “And that’s not our normal delivery guy. I mean, there’s Chinese food everywhere, but he’s not him.”

  “What gave it away? The thirty pound weight difference? The six inch height difference? The extra twenty years in age? Your eye for the smallest of minutiae approaches supernatural levels.”

  “No, Cyrano, you smartass,” Cal snorted. “Bruj has FUCK YOU, BAT-GWAI tattooed down his arm.”

  “White devil, I do appreciate an accurate tattoo,” Robin drawled. “Did he have it done with you specifically in mind?”

  Cal shrugged, but admitted without a grudging snarl or any sign of shame, “He said he did. He didn’t have it until he’d delivered here a few months. Told me no one was a shittier tipper than me.”

  “What did you tip,” Robin asked, “that caused him an annoyance with you of such profound levels that he’d mark his skin for life thanks to you and only you?”

  “Tip?” Cal snorted. “I don’t tip. No one tips me at work. I’m just paying it forward.”

  “He was clearly not a delivery person of any sort, ours or anyone else’s, not with what he’s wearing.” Niko was examining him at a range that would capture any and all details . . . and soak up the odor of barbecued meat with the effectiveness of a sponge. I took another step back. “He was a security guard.”

  He reached for a brass name tag and unpinned it from the uniform. “Zachary Adams, from that ship docked at Pier Seventeen as a museum. The one Colonel DePry had built, the largest pleasure yacht at the time. Suspiciously too big with too many men needed to sail it. Naming it The Nomad, he took one cruise around the harbor and then the ship was gone. Sold, he said, to some rich duke in England more willing to pay enough men to sail and maintain it. A lie and all were well aware of the fact. While slavery was illegal in New York then, other places and people were lining up to buy slave ships.”

  Another look was aimed at the burns and I turned my back on it. The body, the three of them. I’d listen and that would have to count as adequate for the job. “They are the size of shackles,” Niko confirmed. “There’s a faint tracery of burns trailing around his arms that are link-shaped. Chains. It’s why this ship is famous. One trip, its last as a slave ship, the prisoners rebelled, took over, forced the slavers to sail to the nearest port, and The Nomad ended up where it had started. There was a trial, not that one was needed, and the prisoners were freed, given the ship, and a crew to sail them home. They renamed her Never Wander, Never Roam, Ever Free, Ever Home. The South Street Seaport Museum had an exhibition quoting some people from the day saying that was a poem and a bad one at that, not the name of a ship. Considering very few of the freed slaves spoke more than a word or two of English, I don’t think they did that badly. Regardless, once they were home, they sent the ship back with the crew. They never wanted to see another ship to their dying day. The crew brought her back to New York, simply called her Ever and eventually the museum bought her.”

  “Sad story. Happy ending. Humanity at its worst and best. Now I’m getting the fuck out of here.” I couldn’t handle the seared stench any longer. “As an arrow pointing ‘I am here. Come and face me,’ it gets the job done. Lazarus wants us on the ship. Tonight, late, we go.” I was going as I spoke, flashlight showing the way, moving down the hall and halfway to gone. “We need flash bangs, other supplies, the kind you two don’t have yet. Haven’t needed.” I was at the door to the stairs and ready to head down. “My supplier doesn’t know me yet. She’d shoot me if I asked to buy a firecracker from her. We’ll have to hit up the Kin or see if Robin has contacts with the good stuff.”

  “Where are you going? Now, I mean. Where are you going?” Niko called after me as I started down the stairs.

  “Don’t know and, as long as it’s not here in this hall or your place”—because of course we’d left the door open behind us and the smell would be in there now—“don’t care.”

  And I didn’t.

  Didn’t fucking care at all.

  15

  Robin, toga and all, followed me while Niko and Cal packed up more weapons. He’d suggested we could stay at his place until he talked to several somewhat illegal people about several excessively illegal things. I hadn’t believed that ludicrous a statement came out of his mouth. “They know your place, the shadow included. Everyone in the city knows your place,” I snorted. “Orgy central. The weasels don’t have to know your face like they know Cal’s and mine. They need one glimpse they held on to from the sewers and every nonsupernatural shadow will point them straight to your penthouse.” I shook my head and limped on. “Nuns teaching Catholic school know and have been to your place.”

  “And most who visit lost their virginity there, I can assure you.”
/>   Maybe that’s why he had died in fire and flames, burned at a functional substitute for a stake.

  As it turned out, Goodfellow had no problem hailing a cab in a silk sheet toga when, fully dressed, I couldn’t get but a few to admit I existed and those few veered into the next lane over to get farther away from me. “What is it? Do I have 666 stamped on my forehead?” I demanded, getting in the backseat of the taxi with him. The driver, who hadn’t glanced once at Robin’s toga, raised his eyes to the rearview mirror for a look when he heard me bitching. The inside of the cab was instantaneously drowned in the cologne of an entire ocean of fear sweat. “I haven’t had this much of a problem until I came here,” I complained. Here being 2005.

  “I surmise, and this is but the wildest of assumptions based on no evidence whatsoever, that it’s your face. Keep in mind the wildest of assumptions and no evidence portions and take it with a grain, no, an entire shaker of salt.”

  “What the hell . . .” I gave up and slammed back against the seat, folding my arms. “It’s in mind. I’ve taken an amount of salt so damn large it would kill me if I had a heart condition. Now tell me.”

  Robin gave an address to the cabbie whose hands I could see shaking on the steering wheel. “One problem, the smallest you could imagine, infinitesimal really,” he offered with his widest car salesman smile. “Odor? Damp? Dead fish in the glove compartment? Ridiculous, hand to God, this car was never submerged in the Hudson.”