The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “. . . it killed them,” I said.

  “Your dad’s not dead.”

  “But it broke him all the same.”

  Dom nodded. “Good cookie dough. Not enough salt, though. You need that, to balance out the sweetness.”

  I disagreed—I’d added just the right amount of salt—but I sprinkled more in all the same.

  “You two,” he said. “You have to stop all this.”

  “Hand me the tinfoil,” I said, and then spread it out on the cookie sheet, and then sprayed it with Pam, and then started placing spoonfuls of cookie dough.

  “Don’t pretend like you didn’t hear me, Ronan.”

  “The thing is, though,” and I spooned out four more cookies while figuring out how to proceed, “I’m trying. And I don’t think we can stop this. It’s so much bigger than us, now. Half the stuff that’s happening, I have no fucking idea what it is or who is doing it or why.”

  “You have to try,” he said. “I talked to Attalah about it, and she told me to stop worrying, everything is going to be fine. But you—you know I’m right. Don’t you? This is out of control, and it’s getting ugly, and it’s going to get a lot uglier if you don’t do something.”

  I nodded. “I just . . . I don’t . . .”

  “You have to try.”

  I opened the oven door. Held my face close to the heat. Let it blast me. I took my time sliding the cookie sheet in.

  “If you don’t,” he said, coming closer, his voice dropping, “I’m going to tell her. About us.”

  “Why would you do that? Because before, when I wanted to tell her, you kept talking about her feelings this, your arrangement that . . .”

  “The two of you, you’re toxic together. I don’t pretend to know what’s going on here—and, yeah, I know that it’s not all under your control anymore—but I know for damn sure that it all started when the two of you sat down together and got to work.”

  “So you’re going to tell your wife we’re sleeping together . . . why? To break us up?”

  “Something like that. I know there would be consequences. I just . . .”

  “You’re not thinking straight, Dom. I don’t know if it’s Wick or what, but you need to take a minute and think about what you’re saying.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

  And then: Attalah wailed.

  “What the hell?” Dom said as we hurried back into the living room.

  She sat on the couch. On the television screen, the trailer for The Sixth Sense was on pause. Bruce Willis’s face frozen in the moment of final horrified comprehension. Attalah’s expression had been turned to stone in a corollary anguish. She held her tablet on her lap. It cast shifting light and shadow onto her face.

  “Someone sent me this on Facebook Messenger,” she croaked. “It’s apparently everywhere.”

  A voice on the video hissed, Shut the fuck up.

  “What is it?” Dom asked, sitting down beside her, and I watched his face crumple up into simultaneous fury and agony.

  Attalah turned it around, so I could see.

  I started to say, Don’t. I started to turn away. To shield my eyes with my arm—to do anything to avoid seeing what she had seen, being harrowed by what had harrowed her—but I wasn’t strong enough not to look.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Midnight, and someone is leaning on Jark’s doorbell. Hard.

  He’s awake. His diarrhea is not better, and he’s been unable to sleep for fear of fouling his bed. So he’s been sitting on his screened-in veranda, taking a break from celebratory emails and responses to the congratulations flowing in from locals and Silicon Valley colleagues and celebrities alike. Listening to the rain, reading books, hydrating, trying not to freak out. His phone has been shut off for hours. A common step, for times when stress threatens to overwhelm him. Something his guru recommended.

  The doorbell chimes, over and over.

  Passing the mammoth, he sees bright blue and red lights flashing outside. And the little mouse nibble of fear he felt earlier, when the mayor showed up at his office all smiling and apologetic to take him to the police station for some questions—is now a gaping shark bite splitting him down the middle. Intestines unfurl in the dark sea around him. Cold water floods his internal organs.

  They’ve come to arrest me. I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do about it but I know that’s why they’re here.

  Like any self-respecting billionaire, Jark has a go bag hidden in his house. Cash and passports; credit cards under other names, backed up by actual bank accounts. For six seconds he stands there, in the shadow of his skeleton, and debates making a break for it. Grabbing the bag, running out the back . . . into what? A freezing downpour; a tiny town where the whole police force is apparently right outside his door? Even if they didn’t have the place surrounded, even if they didn’t tackle him before he takes his third step across the backyard, he wouldn’t last fifteen minutes out there.

  But it’s a stupid instinct. He didn’t do anything wrong. Whatever it is, he can fight it. He can afford to win.

  He opens the front door, to find the outgoing mayor with his thumb on the doorbell, and a dozen cops standing behind him. Is this some weird hazing ritual, a good-natured passing of the baton?

  “Nate,” he says, smiling, but the mayor doesn’t smile back.

  The man looks like shit. Pale and wan and soaking wet. Probably he has diarrhea, too. Chief Propst looks angry, and the cops look even angrier.

  “Jark Trowse, you’re under arrest.” The chief’s voice is flat, emotionless. Cold.

  Jark turns to the mayor, looking for the friendly man he’s known for years now. “Nate, come on. What’s this all about?”

  “For the statutory rape of Jeremy Bentwick,” continues the chief. “And for filming the incident without the knowledge or the consent of the subject. And for sharing that recording on the internet, which constitutes distribution of child pornography.” He speaks slowly, like Jark might be dumb. Like he had been completely wrong about who he believed Jark was. Like they all were. Like he hates himself for it. “You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand?”

  Jark doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything.

  “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do. You. Understand.”

  Jark is wearing his pajamas. They put the cuffs on him.

  “You have the right to an attorney.”

  He knows he should at least ask if he can put on his jacket—a pair of shoes, even—but all of this is so far beyond the scope of what he thought life could ever hand him that he is completely unable to formulate a sentence. When they lead him out into the rain, he feels as cold and dead inside as Chief Propst’s voice.

  Part III

  Chapter Forty-Three

  RONAN

  We ate all the chocolate chip cookies. They didn’t help. We knew they wouldn’t, but we kept on eating.

  We slept. Sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. We were exhausted and sick and the world was too awful to stay awake in. Sprawled on the floor, on the couch, wherever we could fling ourselves.

  We tried not to think about it. To unsee what we’d seen on that video. To unhear what we’d heard.

  We made phone calls. Attalah called her boss and begged for a personal day. She got it, of course. Everyone in Hudson was just as sick at heart as we were. Worse, in lots of cases—apparently some ugly bug was going around. Dom had the day off, but he called some of his friends on the force to confirm that, yes, Jark had been arrested, and, no, there was no further evidence. Like a note in Wick’s handwriting that said Jark was to blame for his suicide.

  Not that anyone needed such a note. Everyone knew he was. The whole town tingled with rage.

  Astonishing, how fast he’d vanished from everyone’s social media feeds. All those dozens of election-day photos and congratulatory posts, all those sycophants both local and imported who couldn’t get enough o
f Jark—now they were scrubbing every trace of him.

  The one picture that remained, of course, was the one Jark posted late last night. The one Wick had shared, originally, of the two of them at his mom’s church. That photo had hundreds of comments on it. The kindest of them encouraged Jark to kill himself.

  Hudson’s new mayor was a monster. They’d chosen him as their leader. This was who and what they were. No wonder the whole town had an existential hangover.

  My own words played back to me: I want them broken. I want to harrow them down to their very souls.

  Wasn’t that what happened? Tom/Katch gave me what I asked for. And considering how many times I’ve read “The Monkey’s Paw,” I really should have done a better job of anticipating how getting what I wanted would harrow me even harder.

  To each other, we barely spoke. Dom was baffled. This video—this revelation—it did not jell with the world he wanted so badly to believe in. Not that he was naive. As a police officer, he’d come across far more heinous instances of interpersonal cruelty and violence. But he’d kept enough of his faith in humanity that each new atrocity was a shock to his system.

  I didn’t know Attalah nearly as well, in spite of all we’d done together lately, but I could tell by the set of her jaw and the way she stared out the window and into the future that her fury was already evolving into action. A plan.

  “I should go,” I said, hating saying it.

  “No, no,” they both said, each explaining how I was welcome to stay. I was loath to leave their side, but I’d intruded enough on their intimacy. I loved them both, and I loved what they were together. I felt icky, a parasite on their love. A barnacle on the hull of their invincible battleship.

  Twilight. The rain had stopped. Curtains were drawn; doors were locked tight. Everyone was alone with their outrage. Hudson was a hermit crab that had withdrawn into its shell.

  Walking south on Second Street, up the steep block that fell away to a ravine on either side, where the rain still fell from the trees and the air smelled like rot and wilderness, I heard a voice say: “Why so glum, glummy?”

  Katch sat on the guardrail, bone dry and smiling. He stood, and then stepped up to stand on the rail.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  I didn’t stop walking. “Yeah, that. A little thing like a monster abusing a boy we cared about, who killed himself as a result.”

  Walking on the guardrail, balancing somehow on a narrow band of metal, Katch hurried along beside me. “It wasn’t real, if that helps.”

  At this, I stopped.

  “What?”

  “The video. It never happened. No one hurt Wick. Not like that, anyway.”

  I stared at him. I wanted so badly for that to be true. Which was reason enough to be suspicious. “I don’t believe you.”

  “We’ve shown you things that weren’t real before.”

  And it was true. Tom Minniq had all kinds of incriminating but utterly false footage and photography, which he’d shared with people on Tinder and Grindr to stir them up. This thirty-second clip wouldn’t be such a big leap beyond that.

  “Why would you do something like that?” I asked, feeling tears blur my vision. “I’m not saying I believe you. But . . . why?”

  Katch laughed. His voice was louder than I’d heard it before. He stood up straighter. Whatever he was, in addition to being Katch, it was strong now. Unafraid.

  “Tom is effective. He has plans. A way to really turn the tide. Not that little shit you were working on. Framing one man for something he’d never be convicted of. This—this will completely change the conversation.”

  I turned and kept walking. We reached the top of the hill. The guardrail ended. Katch hopped down.

  “And Wick’s death? Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “You people are so silly,” Katch said. “So shortsighted. You think death is this big thing.”

  “Isn’t it? Isn’t it the biggest thing?”

  “It’s just another day.” He extended his arm and curled his hand in. Two lit cigarettes appeared there.

  “You’re getting cocky.”

  He nodded and offered me one. I took it. It tasted like cloves and wet pine and I suddenly felt very close to throwing up. Katch raised a hand and pointed two fingers at the sky. “Want to see me split the clouds?”

  “Stop trying to distract me. You did have something to do with him dying.”

  Katch shrugged, then closed his eyes, then flinched. “I can’t tell. Tom doesn’t want me to see what he’s up to.”

  “Tom’s dangerous,” I said. “You know this. Can you help me stop him?”

  Katch went paler than I’d have thought a ghost could get.

  “You’re scared of him, too.”

  Had Wick snapped? These monsters I’d let in—had they pushed him and broken him? Was that on me, too? We reached Warren Street. The holiday decorations were up. Strings of white lights spiraling around every tree. Doubled in the wet streets. Empty sidewalks. “So why’d you appear to me tonight?”

  “You’re having doubts. Aren’t you?”

  “You just killed a fucking kid!” I yelled, and prayed no one was sitting at one of the windows of the building we were walking by. What would they see beside me, I wondered, if they looked out right now? Katch, real as you or me? Or nothingness? When he spoke, would they hear only the wind? Faraway whale cries? “You possibly killed a kid,” I said, voice lower, “and you possibly created a video of him being sexually assaulted, and you definitely posted it up on the internet for his mother and the whole world to see! Of course I’m having doubts about working with someone—something—that would do any of those things.”

  Katch groaned. “Wick is better off, trust me. And to answer your question, the reason I appeared to you tonight is to warn you. Any doubts you’re having? Keep them to yourself. Don’t get in my way, Ronan. We can do a lot more tricks than I could when we first met.”

  Katch clapped his hands together. All up and down Warren Street, the white lights on the Christmas trees went out. Deep blue twilight remained, punctured by occasional lights from storefronts and high windows. One breath, two breaths. Three. He clapped his hands again, and the rest of the electricity died as well. Windows went dark; streetlights ebbed. In an adjacent building someone shouted What the fuuuuuuuuuck in the inimitable despair of the video gamer who’s had the plug pulled on her at the pivotal moment. Thunder boomed, a question or a command. The ground trembled in answer. Katch laughed, then snapped his fingers, and the city blazed back to light and life.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Zelda is double-high, climbing the steps to work Tuesday morning. There’s the actual high, of some good meth her little mystery man handed off, the kind that slides into your bloodstream slow and easy, raising the pulse without sending it through the roof, just enough to make you hyperaware and alert and aglow. She took some before her morning coffee and she’s hard into that sweet post-buzz phase where she’s the smartest person on the planet and pity the fools who try to start a conversation with her because they will be destroyed by some Wu-Tang level verbal assassin stuff.

  And then there’s the figurative high, the euphoria of conquest, of bliss, of You were right, Zelda, all the people who wouldn’t take her calls before but they’re sending text messages now, since they saw that sick fucking video, asking what they can do to help. Last night she got word that a very important package was delivered by the pharmacist over at Walgreens. Confronted with real monstrosity, Hudson is awake. And ready to fuck shit up.

  So she isn’t surprised to find Attalah sitting in her office when she arrives. She saw it in her eyes the other day, the curiosity, the hunger to know what she was up to, but her professionalism prevented her from stepping up her game. From seeing what Zelda saw: that the half-assed measures Attalah had taken weren’t going to be nearly enough. Now, though. Now she’s ready.

  “You gave Heather back her kids
,” Attalah says. Her dreads are coiled up in a wrap, which is what she does when she doesn’t have time to do them right. “Because she did something for you. Right?”

  Zelda is smart enough not to answer. High enough to know not to smile. Holy fuck, why isn’t everybody on meth all the time? It makes you so much better at absolutely everything. Politicians needed it. Lawyers. CEOs. Anybody whose job involved outthinking someone. She could outthink anyone right now.

  “It just clicked,” Attalah says. “She came by last week, even though she’d been in the week before. I figured maybe the situation had been such that you needed her to come in for something else, but, no. I checked her file. There’s nothing. Just a passed drug test, and a recommendation for reunification. What was it?”

  Zelda sits down behind her desk. There’s bliss in not answering right away. Like being close to orgasm but holding off, wanting to ride the ecstasy of the moment a little further.

  “It was the rotten meat,” Attalah says. “Through the window of the antique store. Wasn’t it?”

  Zelda grins. No reason to be cagey about it. Maybe Attalah’s recording all this but probably not. She’d know that whoever heard that recording would hear some things about her they wouldn’t like. “You’re smart, A. Brains like that, you could be a real help to what we’re doing.”

  “What you’re doing is what I started,” Attalah says, smiling, but a smile that’s clearly a cover for some other facial expression.

  You’re playing checkers and I’m playing chess, Zelda wants to scream, but instead she just smiles, too. “Well, you might have started it, but we’re the ones who are going to finish it. All that shit with the buttons and the billboards—that was cute for phase one. But we’re looking at phases five through fifty right about now. It’s cool, though, don’t get me wrong. We need lots of help. You down? To help?”