The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “I am,” Attalah says. “What can I do?” Her face is steely but also angry, and not at her—Zelda knows exactly what is happening. Her rage at the invaders has eclipsed everything else. She’s angry enough, now. Everyone is, since that video started circulating.

  “You got any idea where we can get a pig?” Zelda asks. “Or . . . just a bunch of pig’s blood?”

  * * *

  JOHN HA HAS only been interning at the Hudson Walgreens for a short while, so he’s not familiar with the protocol for reporting stolen medication. And pharmacy school up in Albany is so grueling. When he discovers there are three bottles of Rohypnol missing from the shelf, he tells his supervisor, and then he forgets it ever happened. He doesn’t notice how unshocked Mrs. Slauson is, by the news.

  * * *

  LILLY SCROLLS THROUGH her Instagram history until she finds it, and when she finds it she feels physically sick.

  First week on the job, five-years-ago Lilly a little slimmer and her hair a little longer—back before she’d bought her beloved rhinestone cat-eye glasses—sitting at her desk, whose signature heap of chaotic paperwork is still in its larval stage. Jark Trowse standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder. Both of them smiling to beat the band. A proud moment, back when it happened. She’d never gotten more likes and more comments on a photo, before or since. Everyone had been impressed. Even her dad, who resolutely refused to understand what it was that Penelope’s Quilt did, no matter how many times she explained it.

  You rock star

  Omg I can’t believe you know him

  First step: become friends with a billionaire; Next step: become a billionaire

  Reading through the comments, she can feel the thrill of power and success she felt back when she first saw them, and that thrill makes her even sicker.

  He was a monster, the whole time. I fell for it. We all fell for it.

  She deletes the photo, but deletion feels insufficient.

  I helped him. His whole greedy sick rapacious enterprise—I worked my ass off helping him build it.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she tells Bergen, who looks shocked to be the one working hard while she fucks off.

  The sweet river stink of Hudson usually makes her smile, fills her chest, buoys her up. Not today. Today it further unsettles her stomach.

  They’re so linked: the love she feels for Hudson, the love she feels for Jark. The pride in who she is, it’s so bound up in this place, this job. All of this is mine, she’d think, sometimes, this spooky weird lonely kingdom frozen in time by the river, this flashback to eighty years ago. While her friends wasted their lives on the hamster wheel of Brooklyn, still in the Matrix, she’d popped the red pill and awakened in the grit and back-alley mud of reality.

  But Hudson isn’t hers. And the city Jark wanted to make, the one she was helping him build—it wasn’t real. It wasn’t love or appreciation, like he said. It was conquest, invasion, exploitation, corruption. A car slows to a stop at the red light on Columbia and Fourth Street, and the driver turns to look at her.

  Lilly gets it, then. All in a flash: enlightenment beamed telepathically by the hate in a stranger’s eyes. She knows what this woman sees, when she sees her standing on the doorstep of Penelope’s Quilt. A hipster invader who works for the pedophile monster. A no-longer-twentysomething who still dresses like she’s trying to find herself. Lilly’s glasses have never felt so wrong on her face. She takes them off, puts them in her pocket, but can’t bring herself to turn and walk away from this stranger’s withering stare.

  * * *

  THE MAYOR PICKS UP, midway through the first ring. Anyone who owns any real estate in Hudson, Mayor Coffin always takes their calls. Those are his donors, after all. He knows where his bread is buttered. “Hi, Treenie,” he says, sounding like shit.

  “Nate,” she says, remembering his son just in time. “I’m so sorry for your loss. How are you doing?”

  “You know,” he says. “Getting through it.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Put me out of my misery.”

  Outside her office, people hurry by. Looking scared, looking angry. “Sorry, bud. You gotta be mayor for a little while longer. We really need one, right now. Do we even know what happens, if our newly elected mayor isn’t able to take office because he’s come down with a slight case of life in prison?”

  “Trust me, I’ve been familiarizing myself with the nuances of the Hudson City Charter more in the past twenty-four hours than in my whole time in office up to now. Common Council has to select someone to fill the seat until a special election can take place.”

  “Is that going to be you?”

  “God, I hope not. But, yeah, probably.” He sounds more human than he’s ever sounded before, and Treenie remembers: he didn’t only lose his son. He banked everything on Jark Trowse. Gave him tons of cushy deals over the years, then handpicked him as his successor. A politician leaving office thinks of little else than his legacy, and now his was going to be drinking the Kool-Aid of a perverted monster. Like that British politician whose name Treenie couldn’t recall, whose chumminess with the Third Reich became his only historical importance.

  “He fooled all of us, Nate. And we’ve all been fucked by what he did. Don’t take it personally.”

  “You know how many death threats have been called in to Penelope’s Quilt since yesterday? A fucking hundred. More, probably, in the time we’ve been talking. Any kid, and it would have been bad. But the pastor’s kid?” He clucks his tongue, like, Duh, Jark, pick better targets for your child sex needs. “At any rate. Is this strictly a condolence call, Treenie, or was there something I could help you with?”

  “People are saying the Pequod Arms is dead now,” she says, “but that’s not true. Not by a long shot. All the signatures are in place. Equipment secured, for the groundbreaking after the Winter Fest. But we’re vulnerable to a reconfiguration. Investors asking for terms to be reexamined. And we can’t let any of that happen. You know that, right, Nate?”

  “Of course. I want the project to happen as bad as anyone, obviously.”

  “Why did you take Jark to the police station on Tuesday afternoon?”

  The mayor sighs. “How did you know about that?”

  “It’s a small town. You thought something like that wouldn’t be noticed? Talked about? People are saying you knew about the tape, before it went public.”

  They’re not, but it wouldn’t take much to get them started.

  “Fuck, Treenie, you know I didn’t.”

  “So tell me what was up. Let’s make sure these vile rumors get nipped in the bud.”

  Mayor Coffin’s voice gets high, the way it does when he’s upset, which is often. “Ah, fuck, Treenie, are you fucking kidding me right now?”

  “Relax. Hardly anyone knows about your little trip to the police station, and then him walking out of there a free man. But something was up, even before all this broke.”

  “Stupid shit. Weird, but stupid. Ohrena Shaw said that Rick Edgley assaulted her, threatened to fuck her up worse if she didn’t move out of the apartment where she lived. In a building Jark Trowse owned. One that’s part of the Pequod Arms. Crazy, we thought, but when they went to talk to Rick? He confessed, and said he was acting on Jark’s orders. And a witness heard the two of them talking about it at Helsinki a couple of nights before.”

  Silence.

  “Who’s the witness?” Treenie says. “Because to be honest, it sounds like bullshit to me. Skilled bullshit, but bullshit all the same. Rick and Ohrena are both friends of Attalah Morrison’s. She could have—”

  “Chief wouldn’t tell me who the witness was, and to be honest, I didn’t want to know. I agree, I think it’s bullshit. At the time, I figured it would all fall apart in a day or two. Which I guess it has, since all this shit came out.”

  “Have the cops talked to Attalah?”

  “No, not to my knowledge—nor to any of the other hundred and fifty people Rick and Ohrena have as
friends in common.”

  “Don’t joke. Someone is behind all of this YOU ARE HATED shit. Maybe more than one person. Am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Mayor Coffin says, and she can hear the politician’s effortless evasiveness take charge. “The police are working on it. That’s all I know. I have to trust to the common decency of my fellow Hudsonians that this will all get sorted out.”

  “At least tell me that the chief is exploring the roots of this conspiracy. Not running around putting out fires while ignoring the woman with the metaphorical can of gasoline and the matches, like Hudson cops have always done.”

  “This town was already a powder keg,” the mayor says, not answering. “Jark might have just provided the spark. That rhymes, but I didn’t mean it to.”

  “I know, Nate. Don’t worry—no one who knows you would ever accuse you of having a poetic bone in your body.”

  “And I appreciate that.”

  “And I appreciate your time, Mayor. Do let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “Fucking harpoon me and put me out of my fucking misery.”

  Treenie hangs up. Night is taking back Warren Street. Rain makes the streets shine, like the river is rising to swallow them all.

  * * *

  HEATHER WAKES UP WET with (seawater) sweat, disoriented, confused. She looks for the starry sky and the gentle waves but finds only bare wide windows with amber light bleeding in from the street.

  It’s always this way, when she wakes up. Even after all these years away from it, she looks for the seascape that was painted on her childhood bedroom walls. Bright stars; calm waters.

  You’re not at home. You’re crashing with a friend on State Street—for now—but it’s like the fifth friend you’ve crashed with since getting evicted and you know how this goes, how there’s always a ticking clock, a matter of time before your welcome gets worn out and you gotta move on, and that’s another friend you can scratch off the list of your friends.

  This is not your city anymore. It hasn’t been, since your father lost the scrapyard to tax foreclosure.

  She takes out her phone, cycles through the photos of her girls. Soon she’ll have them back. Soon everything will be okay.

  * * *

  NO ONE SEES THEM. It’s an accomplishment, really. To visit so many places—to engage in so many tiny acts of vandalism—and to never be noticed. It feels eerie even to them.

  Ten teams of three, evenly distributed across the city. Each with a small map of five blocks, and a list of addresses. And a bucket of pig’s blood. One team member to do the thing, two more for standing lookout in both directions. A couple of times a late-night pedestrian or passing car requires them to shift into the “cover story stance”—three friends stumbling home drunk, and lost—but no one even looks closely enough to notice that it’s strange how they all wear black nondescript baggy clothes, let alone wonder why one of them is carrying a bucket and a paintbrush.

  Two hours is all it takes.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  RONAN

  Whatever had happened, there on the freezing cold porch, that allowed my father to speak—the next couple days went by without a sign of it showing itself again. And other than waiting for it, hoping for it, I did precious little. I stayed inside. I ate ice cream. I drank coffee. I wanted a drink. I wanted to get high.

  I wanted to not feel so sick all the time. So frightened, of what we’d unleashed. So furious with myself.

  We helped kill him.

  We started this thing, and we have to stop it.

  I could see it all so clearly, now. My own motivations most of all. I’d told myself—told Dom and Attalah—that I was trying to save people from getting thrown out of their homes—and that was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. It wasn’t even the main truth. The truth, the bloody blade-pierced heart of it, was that I felt like I’d been robbed of something I was entitled to. I was the Butcher Shop Prince, after all. My father was this town. It should have been mine, and instead it had been stolen.

  I was a small, greedy, sick, wounded, petulant child, and look what my smallness had done.

  I did research. Mythology, folklore. Ghosts, and how to kill them. Gods and how to appease them.

  I eavesdropped on panicky conversations, in the private Facebook groups of locals and transplants. I logged in to Grindr and Tinder and watched as Tom continued to arouse and enrage his hundreds of targets. And that was just the stuff I could see, the messages he sent as himself, which of course I could see because so far it hadn’t occurred to him to change the password. Nineteenth-century sailor ghosts are not remarkably good at the nuances of online security practices, apparently. But who was to say what else they were up to, Tom and Katch and their god whale ghost masters? What inflammatory messages they’d be sending under other aliases, or on other apps, or from the log-ins of actual humans?

  I looked at train tickets back to New York City. I drafted emails to my old clients, asking if they had any upcoming needs, and did not send them.

  I ignored Attalah. I even ignored Dom.

  By Thursday morning I was too creeped out, too confused, and, yes, afraid, and I decided to unplug. To go for a run. To buy overpriced pastries at one of the new bakeries I’d been avoiding. To go to the Hudson Library and find a couple dozen big books of photography, and hide in a corner and look at black-and-white brilliance.

  So it was a surprise when my phone buzzed in my pocket: an email arrived with a link to an article that had just come out:

  UPSTATE, A WAR OF WORDS BECOMES AN OUTRIGHT WAR—THE NEW YORK TIMES

  * * *

  Recent hostilities between long-term residents and newer arrivals in the sleepy hipster mecca of Hudson, New York, reached a new level of menace on Wednesday, when hundreds of transplants to the city awoke to find their front doors smeared with pig’s blood.

  “As far as we can tell, none of the doors of native Hudsonians were marked,” said Hudson Police Department Chief Earl Propst. “And as far as we can tell, every home where a more recent arrival was staying was marked with blood. Sometimes multiple marks on one door. One for every New Yorker who was there that night. Even Airbnbs that are owned by native Hudsonians, but where a non-local was staying. It’s terrifying, really, to think of how someone could have all that information.”

  In the fifteen years since new money started flowing to this depressed Rust Belt city, hit hard by economic decline like so many other industrial cities around the country, animosity between the new and the old has been set to a low simmer. But in the past two months this conflict was turned up to a rolling boil—most recently crystallizing around the revelation that famed billionaire Jark Trowse, one of the architects of the Hudson Renaissance and a candidate for mayor, had had sex with a minor, and recorded a video of it, and posted the video online . . . the day after he was elected. The boy, the son of one of Hudson’s best-loved religious leaders, committed suicide. This just days after the son of the outgoing mayor took his own life via a very public self-immolation at a crowded train station.

  And with the ominous biblical appearance of blood smeared on doors, many of the people who helped build the New Hudson are suddenly afraid that resentment will soon lead to violence.

  “What this says to me is, we know who you are, and we know where you are,” said Giulia Varese, the famed “East Coast Garden Queen” of the popular television series by that name. “And we want you to be afraid.” Until recently, Ms. Varese was one of Hudson’s biggest boosters. Now, she says, she’s already looking at properties across the river in the Catskills . . .

  * * *

  Mostly, I was exhilarated at the thought of all that blood on the doors. But I was also angry—that Attalah could have cut me out of something like this, that the proceedings were so far out of my hands—and afraid. Because what if it wasn’t Attalah? Or what if Katch’s whale ghost god monsters were influencing her now, and other people as well? What else might they h
ave up their whale sleeves?

  What other loved ones of mine will they snap?

  Dom was right. Somehow, I had to stop them. Even if it meant going up against Attalah. For days I’d been trying not to admit that to myself. The only thing scarier than the thought of what they’d do to me if I tried was the thought of what they’d do to everyone around me if I didn’t.

  I put the books back. I headed home. I needed a shower before I could go confront Attalah.

  I could feel it, now. Walking up Warren Street. The hate in the air. The fear. It thrummed like faraway thunder slowly unfurling, or a train whistle just far enough away to be audible only on a subconscious level. Everyone avoided eye contact, except for the people who held it for too long, and smiled like they were formulating unpleasant plans for you. I looked for the blood, but of course it had already been scrubbed clean.

  After Eighth Street, Warren gets weirdly quiet. For its last two blocks there are hardly any businesses, and the residences are stately old trophy homes not exactly popping with activity. I was relieved to be away from all that festering animosity—but I was also unsettled, to be away from watchful eyes. Strangers keep you safe, a junky told me once, pretty kid I was photographing down on the Bowery, for some awful clothing line that only hired “gritty-looking” nonprofessional models . . . and didn’t last more than five seasons. That’s why we sleep in public places like Penn Station, even though that comes with the risk of cops fucking with you. Because it’s worse other places, where no one can see. Friend of mine, his father was sleeping in an underpass when someone dumped gasoline on him and set him on fire.

  I took out my phone. What are phones for, if not to provide an illusory sense of safety? Of connection? An escape from the horrors of the real world, whether they’re mild boredom or the fear of imminent violence?

  We should meet, I texted Attalah. You around in about an hour?

  At the top of Warren Street, off to the right, there’s a Car Care Center. Cars in need of care cram their little strip of land and overflow onto the street around it. When I’d been younger and their business was better, it had been a point of conflict between my father and the guy who ran it. After my mom died, my dad didn’t give a shit how close those crummy cars got to our front lawn.