The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  Four stories up, I stepped onto the roof. Wick stood at the far edge, looking down onto Warren Street.

  “Why are we up here?” I asked.

  “I like it here,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I come here a lot. You can basically run from roof to roof as much as you want, and no one else is ever up here to fuck with you.”

  I looked in both directions and saw that he was right. The roofs of the buildings on that block made a more or less unbroken pathway, a second sidewalk.

  “What’s going on?” I said, going to him. “You said your mom . . .”

  He turned and grabbed me, hugged me tight. He cried, and I let him. I smelled his shampoo. I wanted to put him in my pocket and keep him safe from every awful thing in the world.

  “Something’s wrong with her,” he said, finally, and sat down on the roof. I sat down beside him. We were facing west, watching where the light faded out of the sky. Behind us was a peaked set of windows, through which bright warm light spilled out of someone’s bedroom or studio. “I came home, and the whole church smelled like gasoline. And she was standing there in the center of the sanctuary, with a cigarette lighter in her hand. She’d doused the whole place.”

  “Shit,” I said. That was not at all what I’d been expecting to hear.

  “It’s like she . . . snapped.” Here he broke down again. I put an arm around him, said It’s okay several times, even though I knew he knew there was no way I could know that.

  “It sounds like a psychiatric breakdown of some kind,” I said, speaking from experience, remembering my own mom screaming about monsters. Remembering, too, Katch saying: The harder we have to push, the riskier it gets. Sometimes people . . . break. Was this on me, too? I’d let these monsters loose on our town, and now a whole lot of people were . . . breaking. “Has she had a history of mental illness?”

  “Well, she’s a drug addict,” he said, laughing sourly. “Painkillers. So maybe she’s in withdrawal or got a bad batch or something? But I think it’s more than that. I asked her what was up, and she said she received some very interesting information. And she finally realized how widespread the rot was. And I think—I’m afraid—what if she means me?”

  “You mean what if she knows you’re gay?”

  As soon as I said it, I was sorry. He’d never told me he was. Maybe I was way off base, or maybe he wasn’t ready to accept it and would react with defensive anger.

  Or run for the edge of the building and leap.

  Leap like my mom leapt off the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.

  But he didn’t say or do anything, not for a while, and when he did do something, it was a nod. “Yeah. What if someone told her that, and it caused her to lose her damn mind? She’s a pastor. The most moral person on State Street, for fuck’s sake. It might be enough to make her burn the damn building down. With me inside of it, for all I know. I don’t know. So I ran.”

  “Your mom loves you,” I said. “Whatever else she’s got going on—addiction, ignorance, hate—it might get in the way, but not forever. The love is what’s forever.”

  He shrugged. He wasn’t comforted. He knew I could very well be wrong.

  “Do you need a place to stay tonight?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I already talked to my friend Audrea. She said her mom said I could stay with them.”

  “Okay,” I said. When we were done here, I would call Dom. Have him swing by, see if Pastor Thirza was still contemplating arson, and if he could talk her out of it if so.

  “I should go,” he said, standing up, and I could see the pain still smeared across his face.

  “Are you sure?” My father’s forever medicine flashed in my mind, the only remedy he could offer when someone was in distress. “Are you hungry? When was the last time you ate? Let’s get a hot meal—maybe at Pizza Pit?”

  “Pizza Pit,” he said, smirking. “You know that shit’s been closed since I was like six.”

  And he turned and ran west along the rooftops. I pulled myself up—pausing for the pain in my kneecaps to die down—cursing my age and wondering what the fuck I’d been eating, all those times in the past couple weeks I thought I was at the Pizza Pit.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said a voice from the dark.

  I looked around, a slow careful circuit of the rooftops around me, and saw no one. It’s true that there was very little light up there, but there was some. Enough to know I was alone. And that when the voice said, “He’ll be safe,” and I turned back around, the short curly-headed man behind me hadn’t been there a moment before.

  “Hello again, Tom.”

  “Hey,” he said, gruff and caustic, snapping his fingers to light the match he’d held between them. He raised the little flame to the cigarette between his lips, and I could see his demon-handsome face. “How you been?”

  “Pretty good,” I said, caught between horror and amusement, with amusement winning out. The absurd hilarity of it. “A little heartbroken. My only child, and you never call, you never write.”

  “I been busy,” he said. Below one rolled-up sleeve, I could see the tattoo on his forearm, the same thing I saw on Katch’s: a crude infinity sign collapsing in on itself:

  “I guess you have,” I said.

  “I got your message. You wanted to talk?”

  “What are you up to, Tom? I’ve seen the messages you’ve been sending—really vicious stuff. Some of this stuff is getting out of hand.”

  He breathed out blue smoke. And then he laughed. “I knew this would happen. I knew you wouldn’t be able to handle it. What needs to happen.”

  “It’s not about what I can handle,” I said. “We have a plan. You’re jeopardizing it.”

  He laughed harder. Stepped closer. His smell was cigarettes and body odor and clove oil and dead flowers. Desire and revulsion made my elbows ache. “You’re so stupid. I remember being as stupid as you are now, but that was a long time ago.” Here his voice flanged, flattened, acquired an echo. A deeper one, just beneath his own, that came from the air around him instead of his body. “We know all about your plan, Ronan. What you’ve got up your sleeve for Jark. Ohrena Shaw, Rich Edgley—you really think that’ll be enough to stop them? All of them? I think you know that won’t be enough. But you don’t need to worry. We have a plan of our own. Harrow their souls, just like you wanted. And when we’re done with them, you’ll see—they’ll run screaming away from this town, every single fucking one of them. If they’re lucky enough to be able to. And we can have it back.”

  Something animal throbbed in his last few words. Something guttural.

  “You’re getting some funny ideas in your head,” Tom said.

  “How do you know what’s in my head?”

  “You think you can stop us. But I’m not a girl who fell down a well. You can’t just say a prayer over some bones and be done with it.”

  It took me a second to recover from that. “What the hell are you?”

  “You wanna see?” he asked, eyes wild and gleaming, and then Katch’s frigid wind was on me again.

  * * *

  NIGHT; A BEACH. Palm trees. Somewhere in Polynesia; tall-masted European ships anchored in the harbor. “Follow me,” Tom said, and I went after him into a long high-ceilinged building with a palm-frond roof, open on all sides. Long tables piled high with food: islanders on one side, white sailors on the other.

  “First contact,” Tom whispered. “No Europeans had ever visited this island before.”

  “That’s you,” I said, pointing to one jug-handle-eared European.

  “That’s not me,” he said. “Not yet.”

  More wind, and then it was almost dawn. Natives and Europeans alike lay sprawled about, over-feasted and asleep. The man who would become Tom wakes up, wanders stealthily through the incapacitated crowd. Searching for something to steal. Well fed, but still lean and hungry.

  We followed him out. Down the beach. Into home after home, until he comes to a structure built of blackened wood.

  “T
hey were warned not to venture into that building,” Tom says, one firm hand on the back of my neck, and even in this reverie I can smell him, the musk of the man and the something-else of the monster.

  The space inside was small; the sailor couldn’t even stand up straight. A couple dozen hideous masks filled one wall.

  “Those masks were reserved for the gods,” Tom said. “No human could ever touch them, let alone put one on.”

  The jug-handled sailor let his fingers graze the forbidden masks. Finally he selected one: a boar, with scythe tusks and fearsome eyes.

  “No,” I said, reaching out, as if I could stop something that happened maybe two centuries ago.

  The sailor put on the mask.

  “The god entered him,” Tom said. “Well, god is probably not the right word. But neither is demon. Imagine something in between.”

  The mask fell. The man looked the same. Until he smiled.

  “That,” Tom said. “That’s me.”

  The wind picked up again, whisking us through a sort of time-travel montage. Tom in the ship, poisoning water supplies. Tom in London and Macau and a hundred other ports, murdering drunken European sailors. On distant ships, cutting anchor when it lay harbored during a storm. A chain of violence down the decades.

  More wind, and we were back in Prison Alley—but ages ago. Three men had him pinned down in the dirt.

  “Just my luck I got caught in Hudson, trying to drug a particularly pretty sailor so I could have my way with him—how was I supposed to know he had a whole posse?”

  They beat Tom mercilessly, and even took to stabbing him dozens of times, but the boar-deity thing inside of him kept the body alive. Finally they chained him up and hacked him apart, threw him into the most-recently-dug ditch where whale entrails were rotting. In the morning, men came to fill in the pit where Tom would wait in the earth for a hundred and sixty years for me.

  * * *

  ONCE AGAIN WE were four stories over Warren Street, but back in the present.

  “I don’t care what the fuck kind of colonizer-pillager-plus-island-chaos monster you are,” I said. “I’m not going to let you hurt the people I care about.”

  “Let?” Tom laughed.

  “I’ll stop you if I have to.”

  “You?” he asked, his voice dilated back down again. “Stop me? How would you do that, Ronan? Someone so weak, against someone so strong? You love a lot of people in this town,” Tom said, with a prizefighter’s smile on his face. “We could break them all, as easy as thinking about it.”

  “I gave you life,” I said.

  His hand grazed my cheek. Rough, calloused fingers, triggering traitorous lust. He smiled, seeing my heart, my sick needs. And then he pulled his hand away and punched me in the mouth. Hard. Hard enough to knock me backward, drop to one knee. I yelped, a high, weak, ignominious sound. It had been a long time since I’d been punched in the face. Stubby Coffin was probably the last person to do so.

  “You didn’t give me anything,” Tom said, stepping closer, pressing his thumb against my chin. “All you did was let me out. And you can’t stop me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The nave of Grace Abounding Church smells so strongly it makes him wince. Bleach, and soap, and, yes, the faintest whiff of gasoline.

  “Hello?” Dom calls.

  No answer. He walks down the center aisle, which is still wet.

  “Pastor Thirza?”

  Maybe Wick misunderstood. Maybe she spilled some gasoline (but why had there been gasoline in the church in the first place?), and now she had cleaned it up. And, yeah, maybe she was acting weird. People did that sometimes, especially if they were addicted to painkillers. Or maybe Ronan had misunderstood what Wick said. Maybe this was all a big awful game of telephone.

  It wasn’t a game what the mayor’s son did down at the train station, sailor. Or what he did to his former best friend.

  Something is happening here. Something you should be way more scared of than you are.

  On top of terrified, Dom feels guilty. If she did have a psychotic break, or if she had frightened Wick into running away, he can’t shake the fear that it’s his fault. Confronting her, in retrospect, had not been smart. His entire pursuit of whatever weird imaginary thing he thinks had happened to Ossie—none of it was smart. And for what? He’s gotten no answers. Only more shit that doesn’t make sense. Right now he needs to be doing his job. Mayor’s son set himself on fire; borderline-terrorist attacks on antique shops; now Rick Edgley’s spent the whole damn day down at the station making crazy claims. Real problems are popping up all around him. No sense hunting for imaginary ones.

  He’d feel a lot better if Wick would answer his phone. But Wick won’t, no matter how many times he calls.

  * * *

  “HEY, LILLY,” Bergen says, in her face before she’s even hung her coat up.

  “What,” she says.

  “Did . . . anyone tell you about Jark?”

  “What about him?” she says, exasperated. Exhausted from a day of monitoring polling sites. “And who would have told me? You saw me walk in that door like thirty seconds ago.”

  “The mayor came by. They went into Jark’s office, but they were only in there for a minute and a half. And then they left together.”

  “So? You know the two of them are friends. They were probably going to get a drink together, before the potluck.”

  “Mayor looked scared as shit. And when Jark left with him, so did he.”

  “Cut the shit,” she snaps. “Whatever absurd story you and the other gossips in this office are imagining here, keep it to your damn selves.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “Did you vote?”

  “Go, Bergen,” she hisses, and Bergen slinks away.

  * * *

  “YOU GUYS HAVE the worst fucking coffee,” Mayor Coffin says, throwing the one-sip-short-of-full Styrofoam cup in the trash. “How do you drink shit that strong?”

  Chief Propst groans. “Had I known you’d be joining me, I would have sent out for some of that civet shit coffee they sell for thirty dollars a cup at that damn patisserie you like so much.”

  “You know this is ridiculous,” the mayor says, staring through the silvered glass at the interrogation room. Jark sits there, sporting the kind of fake earnestness most Silicon Valley CEOs practice for the congressional inquiry they pray never comes. Probably there’s someone who trains them on stuff like that.

  Mayor Coffin is on autopilot. He’s been mayor for so long, it’s effortless. Hugging people he hates, agreeing wholeheartedly with deranged proposals—dishonesty and dissembling are so essential to the game that he can stand here now and smile and nod and say actual sentences even though his son had just died in a horrific public suicide after driving a truck through the wall of his best friend’s home and stabbing him to death with a harpoon. He knows no one will mention it.

  “Man like him, he wouldn’t be so fucking stupid.”

  Chief Propst laughs. “It’s ridiculous, except we have the word of the victim that Rick assaulted her and told her to take Jark’s buyout and get the fuck out of her apartment, corroborated by the confession of the perpetrator that Jark paid him to threaten her into moving out. And we have a third-party witness who can confirm that she overheard Jark and Rick down at the Helsinki the other night, discussing threatening Ohrena.”

  “Still,” the mayor says. “You know something doesn’t add up.”

  “I know a couple of things. I know we have enough to arrest him right now. And probably the judge will set bail, which, no matter what it is, he’ll be able to pay it. And I know he can afford the kind of obscenely expensive lawyers—like, O.J.-level stuff—who will dance circles around anything the district attorney can do, and probably get him off. All that—it’s not my problem. Not my job.”

  “And you know something doesn’t add up. Look around you, Chief. A whole lot of people hate him right now. Who’s to say that Rick and Ohrena and whoever your goddamn witness is aren�
�t all collaborating on some kind of conspiracy?”

  “What do you want from me, Nate? You want me to let him go because he’s rich?”

  “Sorry,” the mayor says, going up to the glass. “You know that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just . . .”

  No need to end that sentence. They’re both just . . . a lot of things. Confused and scared, mostly.

  “How about this?” Mayor Coffin says. “It’s election night. If he spends it in jail, it’ll cast a cloud over his whole term. We need stability moving forward if we’re gonna get over all this . . . whatever the hell is going on. Let him go, celebrate with his people. Ask him a couple of softball questions now. Tell him we’re still in the early stages of an investigation. Thank him for his time. As a favor to me. The last one I ever call in.”

  Chief Propst puts his face in his hands. “He’ll know we arrested Rick. If he’s guilty, and he runs, I’m finished. The town is already out for newcomer blood, and it won’t take long for folks to figure out I decided not to make an arrest when I had everything I needed to do so.”

  “You know he won’t run. That’s an innocent man right there, I’m sure of it. And our next mayor. He wouldn’t throw everything away for some trumped-up—”

  A single angry laugh interrupts the mayor. “Is it so hard for you to believe that these people who are so used to getting what they want would break the law when there’s no other way to get it? I know you’ve drunk an awful lot of their Kool-Aid—and taken an awful lot of their money—but they’ve already hurt a ton of people here in Hudson, legally. So I don’t put it past them, hurting people illegally.”

  “These people,” the mayor says, stirred to anger, struggling to keep it under control. “You sound an awful lot like one of those YOU ARE HATED thugs right now, Earl.”

  “It is what it is, Nate.”

  “Look,” Mayor Coffin says, smiling, switching tactics. “Even if he is guilty, he could defeat this easily. And he knows it. And he has too much at stake in this town to run. And he’s too used to being in the public eye to spend the rest of his life in hiding.”