The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “I’ve got money,” I said. “Jark’s last check cleared, before they froze his assets. We could get adjoining suites at the fucking Waldorf-Astoria for a goddamn year. Or, you know, if you’d rather, you guys can stay there, and I can go back to my apartment and leave you alone. Whatever you want. But for the next couple of weeks, at least, if not months, I think—”

  “Stop,” Attalah said, and I heard an anger there I’d never heard before. By the look on Dom’s face, I doubted he’d heard it too many times himself. “Both of you, just stop. We’re not leaving. You can go if you want to, Ronan—I think it’d be best for all of us if you did. But we’re not.”

  My hand moved to my throat, as if she’d punched it. “Please, Attalah. You can’t mean—”

  “You’re goddamn right I mean it,” she said, and got out of the truck. Slammed the door. “You’ve done enough damage. I don’t know what kind of hurt feelings or lingering adolescent trauma motivated you to get involved here—and I am grateful to you for your help in getting this all started—but it’s bigger than you, and it’s bigger than me, and I’m not going to let your weakness or your selfishness or whatever—”

  “Hey,” Dom said, putting a hand on her arm. “Come on now. There’s no need to get personal. Ronan’s right. Things are happening that are scary as hell, and I’m actually actively frightened. I want us to go. To get the hell out. Before . . . I don’t know. Before things get really ugly.”

  She took hold of his hand and lifted it off of her arm. Pushed it back at him, like a gift refused. “You think I don’t know? Are you really that naive?”

  “I’m sure you know all about what’s coming,” Dom said. “Because I’m sure you’re involved. Okay? Of course I know that, Attalah. That’s the biggest reason why I want us to get the fuck out of here. I can’t lose y—”

  “No, Dom,” she said, and looked from him to me to him to me. “I’m not talking about any of that.”

  Dom physically flinched. He got it several milliseconds before I did. “Honey . . .”

  “You think I don’t know that you two are fucking?”

  Dom took a step back. Like now it was him she’d punched, with words.

  Sweet-smelling diesel billowed out of the muffler. In the cab of the truck, the radio was playing. Miss Jackson introduced “One Is the Loneliest Number.”

  “Attalah,” I said. “I am so, so sorry.”

  She opened the driver’s-side door and got inside. Dom looked at me. He was crying.

  I took a step back.

  They weren’t mine. I loved them more than anything, but they were theirs. I wasn’t worthy of what they had. There was no place for me. It’d been a mistake to believe there could be. A crime, to try to make one.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Attalah said.

  A train whistle sounded, far behind us. The southbound from Albany. The 5:34. I watched it come, a tiny light in the blue distance getting bigger. I watched it wail past us, a clanking metal whale swimming through the dark.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  For two weeks, Morse Saulpaugh has been saving up dead rats. Only the biggest and goriest corpses will do.

  In his job as an exterminator, he sees dozens of them every day. Finds them in traps, or dead of poison. Hudson has always had an astonishingly large rat problem, for a city its size. Morse has friends in the business down in Poughkeepsie, and they’re shocked by what he describes. His previous boss blamed bootlegger tunnels—old Hudson lore, allegedly connecting key buildings all over town, a secret rat kingdom. No one’s ever seen these tunnels, but still.

  So. Rat corpses. He’s got some good ones. And before dawn—dressed in black—he places them all up and down the 600 block of Union Street—the fanciest block of the most expensive street in Hudson. He puts rats in mailboxes. On car seats (and isn’t it amazing, how in this day and age so many people still leave their cars unlocked?). He walks right up onto porches and opens screen doors and wedges a body in place, so when they open their front doors to go to work in the morning a big dead stinky rat will roll over onto their feet.

  He couldn’t say for sure why he does it. Most of his business is with the new arrivals. He’s never had any particular ill will toward them, no more than the standard hate he harbors for all humanity in general. Something is just in the air. Something exciting, inspiring, invigorating.

  He hides his rats, and he parks his car, and he watches. Smokes cigarettes, lighting one off the other.

  Here’s the thing: no one does not scream. Even the boldest and bravest cry out in terror or shock at the sight of a big bloody possum-size rat. Down the block some fucking New Yorker fruitcake opens his car door, wails in fright, staggers backward, falls on his ass.

  Morse laughs, but the laugh collapses into a cough, and the cough fucking hurts. His emphysema has been getting so much worse lately. Something is pressing down on his lungs. Something big, and jagged. He can feel it with his fingers. Poking out between his ribs in six different places. He never heard of lung cancer being hard and pointy, but what the fuck else could it be?

  * * *

  ALMOST MIDNIGHT, by the time Treenie parks in the municipal lot. Her workday ran way long, running around trying to calm people down. The ones who want to sell, who she visited in person to try to talk them out of it, but also a ton of calls from panicky home owners already feeling the burn of fucking Attalah’s fucking noncooperation movement shit, who suddenly can’t find anyone to put heating oil in their boilers or figure out why their HVAC isn’t working. The last one stood her up; some guy she doesn’t even remember selling to, who hit her up on Facebook Messenger and then totally ghosted. So she’s exhausted and annoyed.

  Force of habit that she parks in the lot. This late at night there’d be plenty of on-street parking. But during the day there never is, so she always parks in the lot, which is why even now, so late at night, that’s where she goes. And regrets it, as soon as she hears her own car door slam behind her. The lot is empty. The spire of St. John’s Lutheran Evangelical looms up above her. Prison Alley is long and hungry-looking. And the narrow walkway that leads to Warren Street, passing between Mane Street Hair Salon and the Department of Motor Vehicles, has never been so dark. A lesser woman would get back in her car, drive around to park on the street. But Treenie could never admit that kind of weakness to herself. Instead, she puts her keys between her fingers and marches forward.

  During the day the walkway smells like fresh clean clothes. But now the laundromat is shut down for the day, and the only smell is distant wood smoke on the cold night air.

  Treenie walks fast. On her right, halfway there, is a little nook with a set of benches and a sycamore tree. In high school she used to party there sometimes. It was a safe, dark nook to get up to no good in. Now someone is sleeping there. That happens, sometimes, these past few years. It never did back when she was young. People with nowhere else to go at night.

  That’s how you know we’re a real city now, she thinks, and feels awful for it. We have homeless people.

  Two of them, by the look of it. Maybe three. Huddled together for warmth, and safety. Sympathy slows her down—probably she knows them, probably she went to school with them. It’s happened before. Heather Scutt was sleeping on that bench once. Poor sick Heather. Treenie went to visit her in the morning, with two cups of coffee. And took her down to Social Services to see if there was anything they could do for her.

  There wasn’t.

  “Treenie Lazzarra,” someone says, a deep voice, a woman’s, trying to sound like a male’s.

  She looks up, cursing herself for letting her attention waver. Three figures step off the Warren Street sidewalk and onto the walkway. Wearing black, with—what is that on their heads? Some big oblong ovals, which make them look like they have freakishly large craniums.

  Behind her, the people get up off the benches. There were indeed three of them. And they are also all dressed in black, and wearing shit on their heads. Except these ones are
close enough that she can see what they are: blue smiling whales. Clumsy and dented and very clearly homemade.

  Also, they’re holding harpoons. All six of them are. And she’s trapped between them.

  “Shit,” she says.

  Overhead, there are lights in second- and third-story windows. If she screamed, would anyone care? Would they call the cops? Or were they in on it? Was everyone part of the great big YOU ARE HATED conspiracy?

  “Your last appointment stood you up,” says another whale person.

  “That was you,” she says.

  They all laugh. They all come closer.

  “I’m not scared of you,” she says, and she’s surprised to find that she’s really not.

  “We don’t need you to be scared,” says the woman trying to sound like a man, who has stepped forward from the rest. She’s wearing red All-Stars, Treenie notices. It’s the only detail she can see on any of them. Already she’s preparing for the statement she’ll make to the police, when these fucking assholes finish trying to freak her out and run away like the cowards that they are. “We just need you to be dead. You fucking collaborator.”

  Another whale person—a man, and a chubby one, to judge by his body—hoists his harpoon. All six of them step forward, closing the distance between them all. She’s in harpoon-stabbing range for the chubby man now, and still she’s not afraid.

  “Are you a whale, or are you a whaler?” Treenie asks. “You’re mixing your metaphors. And you’re not gonna do shit. So why don’t you just run along home?”

  But then the man thrusts his harpoon forward and stabs her in the leg. The kind of cut that’s meant to scare, and wound, but not kill. And Treenie does feel fear, but only for a second.

  For Treenie is a true child of Hudson. She combines both Town & Country, just like the name of the oldest realty spot on Warren Street. Town in that she owns a pistol, carries it with her everywhere. And Country in that she used to go hunting with her father and her brothers, and she has pretty solid aim.

  The gun is in her pocket. She pulls it out, swift and steady and unhurried, thumbing off the safety. She shoots the chubby man in the head, and shoots twice more at the whalers behind him. One drops. The other runs. It’s the one in the red sneakers, and this upsets her more than being stabbed, the fact that this bitch got away.

  From behind her, someone throws a harpoon. She feels it hit her in the side, but her adrenaline is thumping now. That old cheerleader energy that let her power through practice sessions when she knew her knees were already on their way out.

  Treenie swings around. They’re already running. She shoots three shots. One yelps, hit, but keeps running. One falls to the ground, holding his stomach. Screaming. His whale mask rolls off when he hits the sidewalk. She recognizes him. Of course she does. Couple years older than her. His sister was in her high school class. Can’t remember her name, or his, and that’s a bad sign. Maybe it’s the animal frenzy that’s taken over her body, and maybe the wound in her side is more serious than she thought. She debates picking up one of the dropped harpoons and jamming it down his wide red screaming mouth, but decides it’ll be much better if the cops get to take a crack at him. Find out who his accomplices were. Who that bitch in the red shoes is. Death is too good for you, Treenie debates saying, liking the badass sound of it in her head, and then she passes out.

  * * *

  GUNSHOTS WAKE LILLY UP. They wake up half of Hudson, but most people roll over and go back to sleep. Lilly can’t. Because she has been having the most horrific nightmares of drifting on a midnight ocean (dreamsea) for hours now. Bright indifferent stars; calm waters.

  And also, because someone is in her apartment.

  In her room, in fact. It’s totally dark, with her blackout curtains on—lately it’s been harder and harder to sleep at all—but she can hear them. Scratching. Five fingers, clawing at the walls. Right next to her bed. If Lilly moved her leg the slightest bit to the left, she’d touch them.

  What the fuck

  What the fuck

  What the absolute fuck

  Maybe if I lie here and don’t say or do a thing they’ll leave

  But she knows better. She knows that won’t work, just like she knows this is not a dream. She knows all kinds of things, now. It’s Hudson, she thinks. Hudson has gotten inside of me and I am a part of it now, even if—or maybe because—it also wants to destroy me. And that person in the room is clawing away at the wallpaper and their fingernails are long and sharp and they are giving off a smell like the inside of a long-abandoned warehouse but also like rotting flowers and sour alcohol and they have come for me.

  “You’re awake,” comes a woman’s voice.

  As quietly as possible, Lilly reaches for her phone. Finds it. Squeezes the side to turn it on.

  Its light barely makes a difference. She can just make out the shape of a woman, tall and thin and skittish, and see what’s on the wall where she’s scratched away almost all of the wallpaper.

  A painting, of a night sea. Indifferent stars. Precisely what she’d been dreaming of.

  “This is my home,” the woman says. “This was my bedroom, when I was a little girl. These were my walls. I still come here when I dream.”

  “How did you get in here?” Lilly asks, her own voice startling her. She didn’t mean to be so loud. She’d underestimated the silence.

  “No door is closed to me,” she says, and turns away from the wall for the first time.

  Her eyes are wild. Her face is haggard. Lilly can see all that, even in such little light. She picks up Lilly’s cat-eye glasses from the bedside table and wrinkles her nose. Then she puts them on.

  “My father lost the house,” she whispers. “Couldn’t pay his mortgage anymore, when our business died. Forced to sell it. New guy kept us on for a while, but once my father died he jacked up the rent. Said he had to.” She laughs. “Sure. He had to kick us the hell out so he could rent it to little asshole rich kids like you.”

  Lilly hears sirens. Responding to the gunshots, most likely. Certainly not coming to rescue her. She is on her own. Alone with a crazy person with a chip on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Lilly says. “I’m really sorry that happened to you. But I’m not a rich kid. I’m just—”

  “If you can pay fifteen hundred dollars a month for an apartment I couldn’t pay five hundred for, you’re a damn sight richer than me, kid.”

  Lilly stops. Knows this is true.

  The woman takes off the glasses. Puts them back where she found them. Sits down on the bed beside her. Springs creak. Lilly draws her legs in, pulls herself up into a seated fetal position. Anything to get away from this woman. She can smell death wafting out of her pores, the fermented stink of an alcoholic who’s spent decades pickling herself.

  “Have you ever been evicted?” the woman asks.

  “No.” A whisper; a tiny one.

  “It hurts so bad. You can’t imagine. Before my father died, I couldn’t imagine how much that would hurt. I thought I was ready for it, but it split me open from the inside. Have you had a parent die?”

  Another tiny “no.”

  “It’s not the same, of course. Getting evicted. But it’s not that different.” She leans forward, puts her face near Lilly’s. “I wish I could make you feel it.” But her voice isn’t unkind.

  “What’s your name?” Lilly whispers. Police procedures ring in her head: humanize yourself to your hostage takers. “I’m Lilly.”

  “Heather,” she says. “Heather Scutt. My father used to own—”

  “Scutt’s Scrapyard,” Lilly says.

  “That’s right,” Heather says, pleased. “Everybody knew him.”

  “What do you want?” Lilly asks.

  “I want my room back,” Heather says. “I came here planning to take it.”

  Lilly thinks of the blood on the doors, the locks that don’t keep out marauders. They were fools to come here, all of them. Criminally arrogant, ignorant, to have believed they cou
ld claim it for themselves. This town was not just a jumble of streets, old homes, wood and stone and soil and shrubs. It was something more. Something (monstrous) alive. It would never belong to them. And it would destroy them all before it let them change it.

  “I want my home,” Heather says, and Lilly’s never heard a voice so full of hurt and fear. “But I can’t have that.”

  A train whistle wails. More sirens.

  “That’s the ambulance,” Heather says. “In school they used to teach us the difference between the different sirens. Did you know that when the fire alarms go off, the rhythm of the blasts tells you where in town the fire is happening? Used to be all the young men were in the volunteer fire corps, so when the alarm went off they could take off running in the right direction.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lilly says, wondering how that’s possible—one more thing that every Hudson local knew by heart, that she’d never even imagined. Hudson past and Hudson present, two separate planets, she thinks, wondering if it was possible to bridge that gulf. Again she thinks of the app or grad student thesis she dreams of one day making. The PastIsAPresent; PastIsPresent. Panicky brains make the strangest leaps.

  “All four ambulances,” Heather says, and Lilly swears she can hear fear in her voice. “Never heard that before. Something really bad must have happened.”

  “Do you want to turn on the radio?” Lilly says.

  “No,” Heather says, a little girl afraid in the dark. Just like her. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to know.”

  The sirens diminish slightly, heading downstreet.

  “Something really bad is coming,” Heather says. “Or it’s already here, and it’s just getting started. I’m so scared, Lilly.”

  “Me too, Heather.”

  Heather’s hand fumbles in the bedsheets. Lilly reaches out and grabs it. The fingers are freezing, dry and old. They clasp hands, hold tight.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  WINTER FEST WILL PROCEED, AGAINST OBJECTIONS—THE HUDSON GAZETTE [EXCERPT]