"Then one day I came back down here after work and you were gone—along with one of my flashlights. It scared the shit out of me. I didn't know where you could have gone, and I was afraid you wouldn't be able to find your way back here; I was afraid you'd get yourself lost down here in these tunnels, which is damn well easy to do. So I took another flashlight and some extra batteries and went looking for you in the tunnels. The first thing I saw, about twenty yards from here, was a big black X someone had marked on a wall with a piece of charred wood. I'd never seen that X before, so I figured you'd put it there. I kept walking in that direction, found another X. I finally found you about three quarters of a mile from here, at the junction of a maze of tunnels that are part of the third water system they're building. There you were, big as life, holding the flashlight in one hand and your bone in the other, just looking around. Hell, you weren't lost; you were exploring. You seemed happy enough to see me, but not exactly relieved. I was the one who was relieved, not only because you weren't lost, but because what you were doing seemed to indicate that you weren't retarded as a result of your injury—just mute. Hell, you led me back here; you knew exactly where you were.
"After that, on some days you'd come out with me to St. Thomas. Sometimes you'd be content to just sit on the steps with the others and listen, and other times you'd go wandering off—I don't know where you went to, because you never spoke; at least not to me. The first few times you wandered off, I was a little worried—but I always found you here waiting for me when I got back; you'd found your own way of getting down to this level without using the freight elevator, and I was leaving the door unlocked. Other days you'd stay here, and when I got back I knew you'd been exploring the tunnels again. But you always managed to find your way back to this transformer room at night. Quite frankly, I'd really gotten used to having you around. I knew that you had more than your share of wits about you, and that you could take care of yourself. As you can tell, I'm a pretty solitary fellow. But I did like having you around—even if it did mean a big raise in the budget for flashlight batteries.
"Then one evening you didn't come back. Even though I'd learned that you were well able to take care of yourself, I've got to admit that I was still upset. I stayed up most of the night waiting for you, but you didn't show up. The next day I started searching through the tunnels—every place I knew you'd been—looking for you. I followed the marks you'd already made, and I looked for new ones; I couldn't find any, and you weren't in any of the tunnels."
"Blaze marks," Bone said distantly. "They're called blaze marks."
"Aha," Zulu said, sitting up straighter. "You remember something?"
It was some time before Bone spoke. "Go ahead with your story, Zulu," he said at last. "Please."
Zulu grunted, then rose from the table. He placed the pots and dishes in a plastic bag, which he set down by the door—to be taken later to the tap to be washed. He produced a pipe from a foot locker, filled it with tobacco, lit it and puffed thoughtfully for a few moments as he studied Bone. The other man seemed lost, he thought . . . struggling so hard to remember.
"I didn't see you for a week, Bone-man," Zulu said softly, waving smoke away from his face with his hand, opening the iron door to let the smoke be wafted away into the darkness of the train and subway tunnels. "I have to tell you, I was very upset. I figured you'd suffered a relapse, and were lying sick or dead in the darkness. I figured you'd been run over by a train, beaten up, or whatever. I spent almost that entire week looking for you. But there was no trace of the bone-man. So there was nothing for me to do but go back to work. I was on my corner one Sunday morning, almost exactly a week later; I'd just finished a story. I looked around, and—son-of-a-bitch—there you were. It was as if nothing at all had happened. You were sitting on the third step, and you were wearing different clothes—Salvation Army, from the look of them. And you still had your bone with you. You'd been listening to me. When I looked over at you, you smiled and raised your bone to me.
"You sat there on the church steps all day listening to me, Bone-man, and in the evening you came back here with me. I made us something to eat, and then we talked—or I talked—for hours. It was just so damn good to see that you were all right. Then, after a while, you got up, came over and hugged me. And then you left. That was when I knew for certain that you had your own place somewhere.
"I saw you quite a few times after that; after all, even though you never talked, I knew we were friends. You'd stop by the church just about every day to listen to me and exchange a nod or a wave. Then you'd be off about your business—whatever that was." Zulu paused, smiled broadly. "It's good to see you, my friend. I'm sorry about your troubles."
"I owe you my life," Bone said quietly. "Twice."
The huge black man merely shrugged. "Is there anything in what I said that makes things come back to you, Bone-man?"
Bone closed his eyes, absorbing the warmth of his surroundings and his closeness to Zulu. "For a time earlier, this morning just before Lobo and his friends showed up, I felt I was very close to it; to remembering who I was, and where I'd come from." He paused, opened his eyes and quickly looked away as they misted with tears. He felt filled with emotion Zulu had told him a story of the stranger; now he knew much more about the man, and it was like meeting an old friend. And he knew now exactly what he had to do.
"Are you all right, Bone-man? You look kind of funny."
"I'm all right, Zulu."
"Did any of what I told you make sense?"
"Some. But I still don't remember anything. I've learned that I have to experience things, Zulu; that's what makes the circuits close. When I saw you from across the street, you looked familiar, but that's all. But when I was in the terminal, looking at that picture . . ."
"The Kodak exhibit?"
"Yeah. There was just this tremendously strong sense of identification with those mountains and the boy on the ledge. It felt like home."
"Those mountains are a long way from New York City, Bone-man."
"Yes. But I felt as if I'd been there, as if I belonged. Then, when you told me I'd been exploring the tunnels under here, I remembered what blaze marks were. So the mountains felt like home—but I also seemed to be at home here, underground. I seem to know how to get around. The Zodiac painted on the ceiling in Grand Central: I recognized it, and I knew it was wrong."
Zulu grunted. "Not many people know that. I know it, because I've read about it; but you recognized it."
"I'm at home out-of-doors, Zulu. It has to be. I can handle myself on mountains, and maybe in caves."
Zulu nodded, then tapped the ashes from his pipe into an aluminum saucer. "It sounds to me like you're getting warm. But it doesn't begin to explain why you were in New York City, or what you were doing at that construction site." He paused, looked up, added quietly, "And it doesn't explain why you stay."
"I stay because I have no place else to go. I know the place where you found me; that area is marked on a map a social worker gave me. The building is completed now, and there's nothing about it that feels familiar. Maybe I came up from somewhere under the ground. The problem is that wherever I may have been down there is now part of the foundation of the building. There may be no access."
"The Penn Central tunnels run down there, Bone-man, as well as the Hudson tubes. Man, you've got a real spiderweb of tunnels in that area. We can check it out, if you want, bul there's a lot of territory to cover."
Bone nodded curtly. "And there's no guarantee that's where I found the bone I carried, and that bone may be the key to open a lot of locks. I'll look—"
"We'll look, Bone-man. You're my friend. I want to help you."
"Thank you, Zulu. We'll look. But I have a strong suspicion that I have to do something in order for my memory to come back." He paused, looked down at his hands, remembered how the twisted fingers had held their grip on the side of the Chemical Bank Building—and how his instincts had led him to leap up there to escape the Wolfpack. He remembe
red how deeply the picture in Grand Central's concourse had stirred his emotions, and he now felt certain he knew how his hands had become gnarled. "Zulu, I need to climb," he continued quietly.
"Climb?"
"Yes," he said, remembering something Ali Hakim had said. Stop waiting for a mountain to appear to you; you must build it yourself. But not build it, he thought. He had to climb it. "I need . . . a mountain."
"There aren't too many of those in New York City," Zulu replied drily.
"Then a cliff; something high, and sheer."
Zulu pointed to Bone's stomach. "You aren't going to be climbing anything for a while, Bone-man; not with that slice in you. You do, it'll pop and you'll be squirting blood again."
"Then I'll do it when the wound heals. Can you find me something to climb, Zulu?"
The black street poet nodded. "I'll give it some thought—as long as you promise not to do anything too soon that could pop that wound open."
"I promise," Bone said, and smiled.
"It goes without saying that you'll be staying with me for a time, Bone-man."
"This could eventually get you into a lot of trouble with the police."
Now it was Zulu's turn to smile. "Don't you worry about it."
"What about those gang members? I killed Lobo."
"Lobo needed killing. I'll be the one all the witnesses will remember, not you. If the police want to ask me any questions, they know where to find me. I'll tell them I came across Lobo and his scumbag friends molesting some homeless people, and the gang members attacked me. The cops know there was bad blood between Lobo and me, and my guess is that they won't make too much of a hassle about what happened. In the meantime, let's you and me try to noodle out what we can do to help you jog your memory."
Bone leaned back in his chair, half closed his eyes. "There are two key areas, Zulu, like geographical bookends. There's the neighborhood around Penn Station and the post office where you found me on the sidewalk with my head bashed in, and there's Central Park, where I came out of whatever kind of trance I was in. There's quite a distance between those two places."
For sure.
"My waking up seems to have had something to do with the killing of the old woman whose name was Mary Kellogg." Bone paused. He had almost forgotten the locket around his neck. Now he touched it, brought it out from under his shirt. "I had her blood and the old man's who died with her on my sleeves and the cuffs of my pants, Zulu. And I was wearing this locket around my neck; it belonged to Mary Kellogg. For the longest time, even though the police finally released me, I wasn't sure myself that I hadn't killed her, and the others. And then I walked into Ali Hakim's office and found his corpse, and I knew I hadn't killed him. But the incident that cleared me in my own mind is the one killing that absolutely convicts me in the minds of the public and the police."
And, surely, in Anne's mind.
Zulu shrugged his massive shoulders, made a deprecating gesture with his hands. "You kill Mary? I could have told you you didn't do that. The two of you were friends."
"Friends?"
"That's what I just said. She gave you that locket."
"How do you know?"
"She told me—the same as she told me how you rescued her from Lobo and a few other gang members. It seems you beat the shit out of them with that bone of yours."
"Lobo said something in Grand Central . . ."
"That's right. Shit; I keep forgetting that you don't remember any of that."
Suddenly Bone tasted blood, and he realized that he had bitten his lip. "Tell me about the woman, Zulu."
"Mary was what I call a 'waster.' Gone. Human Resources people kept picking her up, getting court orders and putting her away in nursing homes. She kept walking away and coming back to St. Thomas Church. She slept there, at the top of the steps. She was probably schizophrenic. She told me she heard voices, and that the only place she felt safe was up there under a statue of Jesus. That's what she told me, and I imagine it's what she told you."
"I don't remember," Bone said tightly.
"Hell, she was a real chatterbox with you—and it made no difference to her at all that you never did anything but sit there and listen. There were two people Mary really liked—you and me. She liked a couple of the social workers well enough, but she said that you and I helped her clear her mind. She spent her nights up there under the statue, covered with newspapers or whatever she could find; I used to buy her sleeping bags, but she kept losing them or having them stolen, and finally she just said she didn't want to be bothered. During the day she'd usually wander around the city, doing whatever she did. But it was a nice day, she liked to sit on the steps and listen to me. When you stopped around, which was pretty often, she liked to sit with you. You'd sit there with your arm around her, and she'd lean her head on your shoulder and talk to you about all her troubles. Then she told me what had happened with Lobo. That crazy fucker and his gang had roughed her up a little, and for some reason Lobo took it into his head that he wanted her to give him a blow job. Lobo was just getting ready to shove his pecker in her mouth when you showed up. You must have been one righteous act to see. You had the advantage of surprise, and you just banged away at them with your bone. Later, there were rumors—which turned out to be true—that you'd knocked out Lobo's eye. It was right after you'd saved her from Lobo that she gave you the locket. You also helped her in other ways, taking her with you to soup kitchens, and just generally trying to watch out for her welfare. That's what she told me, Bone-man. So you didn't kill that poor old lady. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure she isn't the only one that you helped. There are a lot of wasters out there, you know—people who are totally out of it, but who, for one reason or another, won't accept help. But I think you helped them in little ways, however you could. That was another reason why I liked you so much, and why I never believed what they were saying about you in the newspapers."
Bone reached up and wiped tears from his eyes. Zulu's words had touched him deeply; like Zulu, he found that he too now liked the stranger very much. "I know I didn't kill those people, Zulu, but I have a strong feeling that all the beheading murders are somehow connected to me—to my life."
Zulu frowned slightly. "Why do you say that?"
Bone told him, drawing connections between the killings and his time on the streets, how the killings had stopped when he had been locked up, and how they had started again when he had been released. Finally he again told of finding Ali Hakim's body—with the head in the bag, along with his razor and his bone.
Zulu nodded thoughtfully. "Maybe you're right. But this Dr. Hakim definitely didn't fit into the pattern of the other killings."
"No; obviously, he wasn't homeless."
"And he wasn't a waster."
Bone glanced up sharply. "What do you mean?"
"What I said. Just the fact that Hakim wasn't homeless isn't the only thing that made him markedly different from the other victims—at least judging from what I read in the newspapers about the other killings. This is a very, very tough society we live in, Bone-man—in case you hadn't noticed. But not everybody who lives on the streets is a waster. Even those who refuse help sometimes make out all right—people like you, for example. You and I can take care of ourselves. But wasters can't take care of themselves. Awake and asleep, they're covered with their own filth. They get frostbite and gangrene in the winter, and they have to have limbs amputated. They eat out of garbage cans. When they do get rounded up, they take off at the first opportunity from whatever treatment facility they've been placed in. Mary Kellogg was a waster, and she probably survived in large part for as long as she did because of you and me. Now, these beheading murders sold a lot of newspapers for a year. Every victim I read about, with the single exception of Ali Hakim, was not only homeless, but appeared to be a waster."
"I hadn't realized that," Bone said distantly, knitting his brows in concentration. It was another thread, a connection—but he did not know where it led, what was connected to what.
"How could you?"
"I have to find the killer in order to clear myself, Zulu. But there's an even more important reason why I have to find him."
Zulu said softly, "Because if you don't, more people are going to die."
"Yes. I believe so. As long as I'm free, he has me to take the blame for the killings. I have to get my memory back quickly, Zulu. I have to climb."
"Not yet; you'll kill yourself. I told you I'd give it some thought. In the meantime, there are other things that we can do."
"Like what?"
Zulu shrugged. "We can go over and check out whatever's underground at the corner of Thirty-third and Ninth Avenue."
"The police are looking for me, Zulu. I can't walk on the streets."
"Who said anything about walking on the streets?"
(iii)
"This is the IRT we're walking now," Zulu said as, powerful flashlight in hand, he led Bone through the subway tunnel. "This will intersect with the Penn Central and Conrail tracks; when we reach them, we'll walk west. Anything look or feel familiar?"
"Yes," Bone replied simply. "I've been in places like this."
From the time they had left the junction terminal room that was Zulu's home and begun their bizarre journey in the perpetual darkness beneath New York City's streets, Bone had felt a familiarity with the underground world. The stranger had indeed explored these tunnels, just as Zulu had said, and so it was not surprising to Bone that these surroundings should be familiar. Also, although he could not remember, it would not surprise him to learn that the stranger, like Zulu, had lived somewhere in these tunnels, perhaps in a room similar to the one where Zulu lived.
But that did not address the question of why he had been underground in the first place, as he strongly felt he had, before his injury. There was still no clue to who the stranger really was.
There was always ample warning when a train was coming, and when they heard the approaching roar of sound they ducked into recesses in the walls and covered their ears as the trains rushed past. Occasionally, huge Norway rats as big as puppies scurried away from the beam of light. Bone and Zulu walked to the right, away from the electrified third rail and the safety trip switches that jutted out every quarter mile or so.
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