The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  She knows this can’t be true; can’t be the last time she had a minute to herself. She must have stopped to breathe since then. Getting ice cream with Dom, watching trash television on the couch—but that’s not the same thing, she sees. Taking time to rest between labors is not the same thing as taking time for yourself, any more than stopping to pee is.

  She takes out her phone, googles ceremonial masks of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Polynesia. Downloads dozens. Swears she’ll find the time to draw them. Soon.

  * * *

  MONDAY EVENING; full dark. Ronan opens the back door of the car and lights up a cigarette. Sits. Stands. Bare feet on cold dirt. Naked, and fearless. No one can see them out here. Private road, Dom assured him, no one ever comes out here. And we’d hear a car from far enough away we’d have plenty of time to make ourselves presentable. Ronan had asked, What about someone on foot? And Dom had just laughed.

  He’s still sprawled half-asleep across the back seat. Their bodies ache in the strangest places. Sex in such a cramped space has its challenges, but they’re both impressed with the flexibility and stamina they still retain twenty years later.

  “We should tell her,” Ronan says.

  After a long series of seconds, Dom says, “We should not.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable deceiving her.”

  “You see? You don’t feel comfortable. Try not be so selfish, okay? Think about her comfort. We have an understanding. She doesn’t care what I do. She just doesn’t want to know about it. Period.”

  “You really think she would be fine with it? If she found out?”

  “If you think she wouldn’t be fine with it,” Dom asked, “why do you want to tell her?”

  Ronan has no answer.

  Twigs snap. Something moves through the underbrush.

  “What was that?” Ronan asks, pointing into the woods.

  Dom sits up, takes out his flashlight, shines it into the dark between the trees. Doesn’t see anything. “Probably just a wild pig.”

  “I didn’t know we had those around here.”

  “We got everything around here,” Dom says. “Especially since the Great Hog Rampage a couple years back.”

  “Excuse me, the what?”

  “You didn’t hear about it? National news, baby. Back when the slaughterhouse was shutting down. They got lax with the security protocols, and somehow all the cages opened and two thousand pigs got free. Did a ton of damage, too. A thousand of them got killed by hunters in the weeks afterward—the state put a bounty on them—but the rest are still roaming free. Still doing a number on crops and livestock and pets and stuff.”

  “Wow,” Ronan says, and peers into the dark again. Wondering if that’s really what was watching them. And what it had seen.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  RONAN

  “What the hell have you done?”

  Katch caught me off guard, sitting in the dark on my pitch-black porch. I stood there, stunned, my postcoital brain too foggy to properly process information, until he sucked smoke from his clove cigarette and the red ember lit his face enough to recognize him.

  “Uh . . . nothing,” I said. My skin was still aflame from the joy of pressing against Dom’s, but I would carry that fire like a secret to my grave.

  “Think,” Katch said. “Does the name Tom Minniq mean anything to you?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Part of our plan, mine and Attalah’s. An imaginary—”

  “Look at this,” he said, and held out his cell phone. “Does that look imaginary to you?”

  On its screen, footage from a security cam. A man in an alley. Jug-handled ears; lean and hungry and leather-jacketed. A wisp of a hipster twink on his knees in front of him. The man standing turned to look at the camera, locking eyes with Katch and me, and smiled.

  No doubt about it, it was Tom Minniq. In the flesh. Somehow.

  A shiver climbed slow up my spine.

  “I mean, he’s probably like you—right? A ghost? Harmless—”

  With supernatural speed, Katch was up and out of his seat and across the porch, and my cheek was stinging from a slap I hadn’t even seen. “Does that feel harmless? Ghostlike?”

  “No,” I pouted. “But you and your fucking whale ghosts didn’t exactly give me an operating manual, Katch. How was I supposed to know what I could—”

  “Because you shouldn’t have been able to, Ronan. Something’s wrong with you, to be able to do what you’re doing.”

  I shut my eyes and wished I had elected to believe that all these impossible things were mere meth withdrawal symptoms, and got the fuck out of Hudson to go get treatment. “Something’s definitely wrong with me.”

  “They gave Attalah and me power, too, Ronan, but we’re not like you. We’re not broken inside. We don’t carry the same crippling pain” (blade) “still stuck inside us. Your hate—it’s special. It’s helped so much more anger blossom. All that hate, spreading through the city, it comes from you.”

  I thought of the YOU ARE HATED billboard. I remembered being down in Attalah’s dungeon, her eyes wide when I told her my plan: That’s fucked up. I could taste it on my tongue as clearly as I had then: the sweet drug-tang of hatred. Was that you—that plan? I wondered. Were you feeding on me, and feeding me? Taking my anger and magnifying it, filling me up with monstrous ideas?

  “They’re getting stronger every day, Ronan. But still, they’re losing. The balance has broken. Which means something way scarier than gentrification could take root.”

  “What could be worse than everyone I love losing their homes?”

  Katch sighed and stood. “Lots of places are under the sway of supernatural beings, Ronan. Some of them are a lot more savage than Hudson. Human sacrifice, mass murder, I don’t know, Children of the Corn–type shit. ‘The Lottery.’ The Wicker Man. I miss horror movies, dude.”

  “They don’t have horror movies on the other side?”

  His eyes glazed over briefly, and he grinned. “They have everything. I just . . . I don’t know. Time is weird there.” Katch shook his head. “Anyway. We don’t know what the fuck Tom Minniq is. Not a ghost. Nothing that was ever human. But something that takes on human form, from time to time. And you let it in.”

  Wind scoured the screened-in porch. “Is there something we can do?”

  Katch shook his head. “This was already a delicate operation before you fucked it up. The people we’re manipulating—”

  “Wait. You can control people?”

  “We can influence people,” Katch said. “But only people who are from here. Of here. We can whisper in their ears. Plant things in their dreams. Get them to do things. If it’s something they want to do, it’s no problem. If it’s something they don’t want to do, or would never do without our . . . guidance . . . it can get messy. The harder we have to push, the riskier it gets. Sometimes people . . . break.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s different for everyone. Suicide, violent rage, complete personality shift . . . depends on who they are and how badly they break. Some people it’s like a stroke—their brain stops being able to communicate with the rest of their body. That’s why we try very hard not to push people too far.”

  “Attalah’s mom had a stroke,” I said. “Did you push her too far?”

  Katch frowned. “She was on our side, so we thought there was no risk when we tried to make her destroy Pastor Thirza, to stop the Pequod Arms. But apparently . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Are you . . . pushing me?”

  Katch laughed and clapped me on the back. “Don’t think of it like that. Anyway, you’re far too important for us to risk snapping you.”

  ***

  STOPPING AT THE IRON HORSE TAVERN was not a wise decision. Also, it was one I had no memory of making. One minute I was walking away from Katch with my head on fire, and the next I was stuck on a bar stool trying to put it out.

  Why shouldn’t I drink? Why not single-malt scotch? I was all of a
sudden an obscenely wealthy man. And all I had to do was betray everything my father believed in. And unleash a hideous monster in the shape of a man. I waved my credit card like a sword that could slay the sea serpents encircling me.

  Men and women watched with awe, as I guzzled glass after glass of whiskey. As soon as I got up off the stool I could see from how the room spun that it was too late for me.

  Freight train tracks run right through upper Hudson, along Sixth Street, right below the park. Of course I know this. Everybody knows it. In the middle of the day a train rolls through town, bringing traffic to a halt for all of Hudson. This has probably been true since the nineteenth century.

  But I guess I forgot. Because coming out of the Iron Horse, I stepped into the street and stumbled on the rails.

  Which is why I’m lying here.

  But that’s cool. Sixth Street is super comfortable.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER IS ONE WEEK DEAD.

  The doorbell doesn’t stop ringing. Neighbors come with casseroles. I never thought I could get sick of Dad’s friend Shirl’s feta kalamata concoction, but here we are.

  It’s me who answers the door. Sixteen-Year-Old Me, who smiles and thanks them. Invites them inside. Makes coffee. Tells them Dad just went down for a nap and he’s been running himself ragged so I don’t want to wake him up but that he’s gonna be so, so happy to hear you stopped by, and sorry that he missed you.

  This nap of Dad’s has been going on for days. He hasn’t left his bedroom since the funeral, except for short trips across the hall to the bathroom. The butcher shop is only open because of the efforts of Marge and Kristof, the old Hungarian man who had been sort of a mentor to my dad and still helped out on weekends. Both stepped up in a major way, but they can’t do this for long. Kristof is funny and has a ton of amazing Old Country stories, but he’s slow as shit now and could barely hold up his end of the work when he had my father standing beside him to do 80 percent of it. Running a business involves making a lot of decision, which is neither of their strong suits. Marge is calling me for advice, so you know we’re fucked.

  The butcher shop was already in a bad place financially. At the funeral someone said, You know how stressful it can be, to run a failing business, like no further explanation was needed for why my mom did what she did—

  Why she killed herself—

  How she could walk three miles down Route 9G and then out onto the Rip Van Winkle Bridge Pedestrian walkway and then—

  Why she didn’t leave a note—

  I open the door to his bedroom, just a crack. The smell of him is overpowering, like cigarettes and body odor and spilled scotch and Stetson cologne distilled and intensified.

  And, underneath all that, faint and dying: her. Clean linen; Jean Naté After Bath Splash.

  “Dad?” I say to the darkness.

  Only silence answers.

  Of course he’s in there, I tell myself. He has to be. Where else could he have gone? But I can’t bring myself to flick the light switch.

  There’s a sound that might be breathing but could also be the crashing of distant waves. A restless sea.

  (dreamsea)

  “Goddammit, Dad.”

  Maybe later I’ll be grateful to him for all of this. Maybe the day will come where I’ll think, his breakdown kept me busy. Made me run all the errands. Smile in all the faces. Soak up all the hypocrisy from the people who hated my mother. Gave me something to do with my mind, so I didn’t have time to wonder. So I didn’t lock myself in my room and go fucking nuts like he did.

  Maybe. Maybe later. For now I hate him. For now I gather all my grief and loss and any underlying resentment I might have for her, for what she did, for how she left us, for how she left me, and heap it onto the bonfire of my anger at him.

  * * *

  STILL LYING in the middle of Sixth Street. My too-warm face feels good against the cold steel rail. How have no cars come, in all this time?

  A man stands behind me. Or anyway something in the shape of one. He’s been there for a while. He squats down—I smell the sea, I smell rot, like something that clawed its way up out of the muck and took on human form.

  “Tom,” I whisper.

  “You’re pathetic,” he says, his voice a thrilling, menacing, masculine rumble. Fear and desire harden me, and then—I go away again.

  * * *

  MIDNIGHT, and I’m floating on an ocean the temperature of blood.

  I always imagined death would be white light, but instead it’s black water.

  Naked; alone; knowing in my gut that there’s no land for a million miles in any direction. Laughing from a happiness deeper than anything I’ve ever felt before. I’m not afraid. I can tread water forever. All those swimming lessons at Oakdale really did the trick. Overhead the Milky Way arcs at a delirious angle, and the stars are splayed incorrectly across the sky.

  Somewhere, I know, I have work to do. Schemes and plans to pull off.

  I know all this, but the ache of it is so small it’s pleasant, like when your train leaves the station and you remember you forgot to wash the dishes, and you think, Oh well, I didn’t intentionally fail to do it, I am absolved of blame, nothing matters.

  Something massive moves beneath me. I feel it displacing the water, even though it’s far below my slowly moving feet. I’m not afraid of it. Emotion comes off it like a smell. I feel love. I feel belonging. I feel connected.

  A dark shape moves through the sky. Too fast and solid to be a cloud. A whale, I realize, without immediately also thinking That’s impossible, whales don’t fly, there’s no such thing as a sky whale because here (on the dreamsea) the boundaries of what’s possible are so much wider. It is the twin of the thing swimming beneath me.

  I could stay here. Be part of this. Forever.

  Except . . . There are so many people to punish. Everyone who hurt my mom, pushed her to do what she did. Everyone who is trying to destroy my town—

  I try to bat these thoughts away, to hold tight to the bliss of belonging. But being who we are is a habit. And routines like that are hard to break out of.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Attalah stares at her screen and feels suddenly sick.

  Time is running out. The polls look terrible. They’ve only got one weapon, and now is when they need to drop it.

  But she can’t.

  Deploying “Tom Minniq” got them dirt on 250 people. Nudes, screencaps of scandalous chats. In a voter pool this small, 250 people could make a big difference.

  The email is all prepared. The images are attached.

  If Jark wins, these get exposed. We need you to vote against him, yes, but we need you to do more than that. Do whatever you have to do to make sure everyone you care about votes against him, too. Call your friends and tell them lies about him. Your family. Coworkers. Bribe them if you have to. Because if he wins—or if you tell anyone else about this email—your whole life comes crashing down.

  She groans, seeing it on the screen. She can barely recall typing it.

  Of course she knows they’d never ever go through with releasing the blackmail material. But even as an empty threat, this is some real criminal shit. The kind of thing you go to jail for decades for. And all it’d take is for one of those people to call the cops, to start a massive investigation.

  She knows her neighbors. Plenty of them would roll over on it. Probably most of them. But at least one would fight back hard with everything they’ve got.

  Attalah calls Ronan, but Ronan doesn’t answer. She types an email, and then she deletes it. This conversation can’t leave any trace.

  * * *

  MONDAY MORNING, maybe the worst one of Zelda’s life. There had been a time when every Monday hurt worse than the one before, but those days are far behind her. Or so she’d hoped. Now it feels like six years’ worth of missed Monday headaches are hitting her at once.

  Also, she’s pretty sure she has cancer. Above her heart she can feel it, the sense of something beneath
the skin. Sharp like a blade broken off between her ribs. Nothing she can make out with her fingers, but nevertheless she knows it’s there.

  But there’s a pleasure in this morning pain, too—the weird galvanic kick she always got from hangovers. They hurt like hell, sure, but they also energized her. The tingling pride of all the bad things she’d done the night before. Her creative gears turning, imagining better bad things ahead. Her hair in a ponytail looped through the back of her baseball cap. Her makeup minimal. Ready for battle.

  So by the time her 2:00 P.M. appointment comes in—at 2:37—she’s feeling pretty perky.

  “Hi, Heather,” she says, pretending to look through paperwork.

  She’d seen three YOU ARE HATED buttons out in the world already, and gotten a little shiver of pleasure each time. The Chamber of Commerce had replaced the billboard already, sure, but between Staples and Snitko’s she had four more posters printed and ready to go. Friday night she’d meet Rome down there again, put another one up. Which would get replaced. And the following weekend they’d do it again, on a Thursday this time. With Rome helping keep the cops off their scent, they’d be able to keep it up until the YOU ARE HATED game moved on into other, more exciting arenas.

  Another shiver, remembering Rome. When was the last time she’d met a man so into performing oral sex? They’d spent all Sunday in bed, fucking and doing drugs and talking about all the fun they could have with an underground guerrilla war on the invaders who’d occupied the sovereign nation of Hudson. Attalah’s plans are good, sure, but pretty tame in the grand scheme of things. Rome’s are balls-to-the-wall crazy shit, and she’s down, and she’s been thinking up more than a few of her own. She’s not sure where they come from, these crazy concepts—like the one she’s about to whip out—but she welcomes them, in all their eerie detail.