The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

Window wide open. Drift of snow on the sill. So cold in there I could see my breath.

  “Dad?” I whispered, waiting for my eyes to adjust, knowing he wasn’t there.

  His bed was made. The way he used to make it—folded corners, turned-down bedspread—not the simple spread sheet and flattened spread that Marge favored. I checked in the closet, and under the bed, but he wasn’t anywhere.

  I called Margie. It went to voice mail. I hung up.

  Beeps from the kitchen: the coffee was ready. I poured myself a mug—my father’s—and plopped myself down in his recliner. Sat there in despair for ninety seconds and then dialed her number again.

  Margie, please, I said in my message. Call me back? It’s Ronan. Whatever you did with my dad—I just, I need to know he’s okay. Okay? Just call me to tell me he’s okay.

  I was halfway through that pot of coffee when the doorbell rang. I leapt up, ran to it. Yanked it open, all eager idiot optimism, so that my right shoulder screeched in agony.

  “Hi, Ronan,” Attalah said.

  “What’s up?” I asked—suspicious, hopeful.

  “Can I come in?” she asked. “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Sure,” I said, stepping aside. “Did you want coffee? I just made some.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, her heavy body pressing against mine as she navigated the narrow space. “I’m sorry, Ronan. I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, Attalah,” I said, but I only had a split second for euphoria—Everything is okay! She forgives me! We can be a family again! I’ll never touch her husband again but the three of us will be best friends and we’ll go bowling and on photo shoots and to the diner and we’ll fight the power and be together forever here in our city, our home, our life—astonishing how many words a desperate human brain can manage in a split second—before I saw that she wasn’t sorry for what she’d said down at the waterfront. She was sorry for what she was doing now, pushing me hard against the door and clamping a wet handkerchief to my mouth. Tastes like bitter fruit, I thought, and then I didn’t think anything.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The night smells like cotton candy no one wanted. Carnival food stalls line the back of the boat launch parking lot, all of them looking lonely. Fried Oreos; bright red candy apples. All for the kids who hadn’t come. Somebody should probably have called these vendors up a couple of days ago, Lilly thinks, scaled it back. Paid them a kill fee and told them not to come. But what did it matter, really? More of Jark’s money pissed away. Who cares? And do carnies even have kill fees?

  The night is cold. Snow comes and goes. The Ferris wheel is still dark, looming ten stories high in the night beside her. Music blares through shitty speakers, old holiday hits, Black musicians exploited by white producers.

  Lilly accidentally makes eye contact with a woman working one of the food stalls. And so, out of pity, she buys a candy apple. Dark red coating, peanut-studded. She doesn’t intend to eat it. Still has some residual fear, from a prepubescent Coney Island trip where her mother told her Don’t eat those, they sit there for months and the coating is hard as glass and you’ll crack your teeth and the shards will cut your gums to ribbons.

  She takes a bite. The coating is soft, the flesh firm. It is delicious. For a moment she feels like she’s gotten away with something, and then she snaps back to the moment. She can’t let down her guard; can’t pretend like they’re out of the woods. Winter Fest only formally started five minutes before. So much could go wrong.

  * * *

  “HUDSON POLICE DEPARTMENT,” Rebecca says, caught off guard by the call. Almost an hour since the last one.

  She should be happy, to have had so few calls tonight. She’s been praying for a quiet night, throughout these past couple weeks of nonstop fuckery.

  Instead, she’s afraid.

  “Hey, Rebecca,” says a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Attalah. What’s happening?”

  “Not a whole lot.”

  Rebecca hears wind whistling in the background. “Surprised you’re not down at the Winter Fest,” she says. “You’re not scared, are you? You wouldn’t be the only one. Tons of my friends won’t go because they’re convinced some damn lunatic will start shooting people. Or, I don’t know, stabbing people with harpoons.”

  “What’s the word from the officers down that way?” Attalah asks. “I’m heading there shortly.”

  “All quiet on the western front.”

  “That’s good. Listen, Rebecca. I need you to do me a huge favor. It’s kind of an emergency.”

  “Of course,” Rebecca says. “Whatever I can do.”

  “I know this is going to breach six hundred different kinds of protocol, but you have to trust me that this is the best thing to do.”

  “Sure,” Rebecca says, eying the dispatch board uncertainly.

  “I need you to radio Dom for me. Okay?”

  “Why don’t you call him?” Rebecca says.

  “We kind of had a fight. He’s mad at me, and when he gets mad at me he stops taking my calls. And, honestly, every second counts right now. I need you to radio Dom and tell him to go to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Park his car on the Hudson side, without turning on the lights or sirens or anything. There’s a jumper, out on the pedestrian walkway.”

  “Why don’t we send an ambulance?” Rebecca asks. “If someone is experiencing a psychiatric emergency, we should send some trained professionals. Dom is a great detective, but he’s no therapist. And in a situation like—”

  “It’s someone he knows,” Attalah says. “Someone who trusts Dom, who would not trust a stranger. Even a trained mental health professional. Especially if they rolled up with flashing ambulance lights. So please, radio Dom and tell him to do this. And to hurry. And don’t tell him I told you to call, or he’ll think it’s some weird scheme of mine, and he won’t do it. You know Dom, when he’s faced with conflict he shuts down. That’s why he won’t take my calls, and that’s why he won’t go if he knows I told you to tell him. But trust me, Rebecca, this is life or death we’re talking about.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Chief Propst wants all hands on deck down there.”

  “I know the chief doesn’t want his officers ignoring valid emergency responses. That’s why you’re there, isn’t it? You have to trust me that that’s what this is.”

  Rebecca has always been a little bit afraid of Attalah. She can’t say why. Always assumed it was a tiny sliver of racism on her part, some vestigial fear of a strong Black woman, and so she’s always gone out of her way to ignore that fear. Which is what she does now, as she says, Yes, Attalah, I’ll do it, no, Attalah, I trust you, no need to thank me, talk to you soon.

  * * *

  HEATHER SHIVERS, alone in the dark at the top of the Ferris wheel. The pods are heated—this is an all-four-seasons kind of Ferris wheel, and whoever imagined that such a thing could exist?—but she has the windows open. She likes the wind. It keeps her present. Alert. Awake. Grounded. Even this high up.

  She’s alone, but not. Because there he is, all of a sudden, knocking on the door of her little pod. A man she met in a dream, who then turned up on Tinder.

  “Hey, girl,” he says, reaching in the open window to open the door when she doesn’t move.

  “Hi, Tom,” she whispers.

  He hands her a book of matches. “Are you ready?”

  Heather nods. She looks out at them: the lights of her city. So many. While she sits here in the dark.

  Tom’s hand is on her face. His smell is strong—marine, mammalian—but overpowered by the stink of hay. Hay is packed tight into the seat she sits on, the walls of the pod. Into all of them. Sheaves of hay soaked with gasoline are strapped to all the struts with duct tape.

  She takes his hand off her face. He grunts and then gets up. Opens the door. “Don’t get cold feet on me now, Heather. You can do it. You can set the fire that burns them all out. But a fire like that? It needs a very special sort of kindling.”

  * * * />
  “WAIT FOR IT,” Zelda says. “You know the signal.”

  The man beside her grunts and sends a group text with those words.

  Snow, intermittent up ’til now, begins to fall in earnest. The temperature’s dropping, and Zelda loves it. Whatever the hell drug that Tom guy gave her, it’s cranked up all her physical sensations and made her hyperaware. Not like meth does; not even like ecstasy. More like fear. But a fear that exhilarates.

  She’s parked on the sidewalk in front of Historical Materialism. Behind the wheel of one of ten bulldozers, evenly spaced around the city. When she sees the signal, she’ll rev the engine and drive the bulldozer straight through the plate-glass windows of the store. She’ll back up and drive through again if she has to. Whatever it takes to completely compromise the structural integrity of the building.

  Every dozer has two occupants. One to drive it, the second to step through the breach and place the gas canister and light the Molotov cocktail strapped to the side. For every dozer there are two lookout cars, one at either end of the block. They’ll lean on the horn if a cop on foot comes near, and if a cop car approaches they’ll move to intercept. Block the street. Buy the dozer teams some time. Sixteen minutes, she estimates, will be enough to completely destroy thirty businesses and homes. Twenty-eight minutes and every antique store on Warren Street will be gone. By that time she imagines the cops will be able to overcome the limited defenses they’ve put up and start shutting them down one by one, and the exponential destruction rate will slow down. But she might be wrong. The cops might not have the means to stop them at all. They might get to reduce every nonlocal business and million-dollar home to rubble.

  The bulldozer has a radio. Apparently even construction workers need some music sometimes. Zelda switches it on. Rides the tingle, the electric thrum of anticipation.

  “This song goes out to all the lovely people shivering in the cold down at the Hudson boat launch,” Miss Jackson says, her voice sweet and happy. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” comes on, Billie Holiday sounding like love and warmth herself.

  * * *

  “THIS SONG GOES OUT to all the lovely people shivering in the cold down at the Hudson boat launch,” says a man’s voice through the speakers, sounding sad and robotic. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” comes on, Dean Martin monotonous as cold and loneliness personified.

  She’s not sure why or when it started, but Lilly is afraid. The sugar buzz of the candy apple has worn off. Her teeth are chattering.

  The crowd has gotten a little bigger, and that’s a good thing. But then again, an awful lot of them are wearing clothes that are baggy and dark and nondescript.

  Probably she’s just being paranoid. This is Hudson, after all. Not exactly a fashion capital. Baggy and nondescript has always been pretty standard. Same as it would be in any town where Wal-Mart was the place most folks went for clothes.

  She prays it made a difference, her trip to UPLIFT Hudson. Her offer to Attalah. She’d accepted, hadn’t she? That had to count for something.

  But wouldn’t you? Lilly thinks. Wouldn’t you say yes and smile in the face of the naive little girl who came knocking? If only to buy yourself some time to . . . to . . .

  Well, Lilly can’t really think of what Attalah might be buying time for, what diabolical schemes might be moving forward behind the scenes even now.

  Whatever happens, we deserve it.

  She can’t get her night with Heather Scutt out of her head. How broken the woman was. How afraid. She’d never gotten it, before that moment. The depth of the violence of what they’d done in Hudson. Even with the best intentions.

  I stole her home. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

  At least it’s started to snow for real. Snow and thunderstorms still make her feel like a child again. Full of wonder and awe at what nature can do. She watches how it turns each streetlamp into a cone of drifting orange flakes.

  Pretty soon the mayor will get up there and make a speech. He’s running a little late already. Any minute now.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  RONAN

  The sea today has turned to blood. It billows in the water, turns the churning whitecaps pink.

  Blood-drenched men move all around me. Heaving, cutting, sawing, stripping. Flaying. Metal knives as long as swords. I stand on the deck, blinking in the bright harsh hot sun. A moment ago I was somewhere far away, very cold but not drenched in blood. My hands are deep red; my body is black with it.

  I sense it, off to the right. Lashed to starboard. I refuse to look, but its black bulk looms heavy in my mind. Rolling slowly, as the diabolical instruments slowly strip it of its blubber.

  This is where we came from, says a voice in my ear, part Katch and part whale cry, and then I’m not on the ocean anymore. I’m standing in Hudson, still covered in black dried blood. White snow is everywhere, except where bright red blood spatters it. Giant metal pots billow black smoke. Two whale carcasses loll in the shallow water. Men carry strips of blubber to the blackened pots. Barrels await. Blood seeps into the soil.

  This is what you are. What we are.

  “Why would you want to protect us?” I ask. “After we did all this to you?”

  Protect you, says the voice, and I think it laughs, but it’s hard to say with a whale cry. Maybe there’s some sadness in there, too. Some rage.

  Human words are such imprecise instruments, the voice continues. Like everything you make. Protection is only one piece of what we have built, here in Hudson. We are bound up together. All of us. The murderers and the murdered. The small and the large. We protect you, yes, for all time we protect you, and we fill you up with magic, but we punish you as well.

  Again the scene shifts: darkened bedrooms; sleeping shapes writhing inside of nightmares. They feed us on their dreams, but we feed them on our nightmares. We feed off of each other. Parasite-on-parasite symbiosis.

  A man stands there, leaning against the railing. He sees me looking and smiles. Waves. A woman is with him. She sees me, too. I have never seen a smile so huge.

  I gasp: “Mom?”

  * * *

  I SAID IT AGAIN, softer this time. But my mother wasn’t there.

  Neither was my father. Just a cold wind, its bite a welcome jolt, and the smell of water.

  My head still spun, emerging slowly from a short chemical slumber. I shut my eyes and the dizziness subsided slightly.

  “You’re awake,” came a garbled voice, from across a great distance. “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that before,” I said to Attalah. “Where are we? And why am I here?”

  “It’ll all be clear soon enough.”

  A sharp updraft struck my face. Snow, carried on a harsh wind. The kind of wind that whistles through the wide-open spaces where there are no trees or hills or buildings to impede it. The kind of wind that howls through the Hudson Valley in winter.

  All my dizziness ebbed away. I was awake. I was present. My hands were cuffed behind my back. My shoulder felt like a truck had hit it.

  I was kneeling on the pedestrian walkway of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Staring down into the same dizzying dark, the same twenty-story fall that swallowed up my mother.

  A train whistle wailed. Southbound—funny how I could tell the difference by how the sound Dopplered. The train I should have been on. I watched it from the bridge, a long narrow line of light moving through the dark, and remembered looking up at the bridge from the train on the night I arrived.

  I watched it abandon me. Everything felt so flimsy. Like a dream I knew I was about to wake up from.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Heather lights a match, then puts it out. She is so cold. But not in a hurry to set herself on fire just yet.

  This is not like the Ferris wheel at the Columbia County Fair every summer. This one is special. So much bigger. She can see so far. All the lights of her city, spread out in an orderly grid getting smaller as it moves away from her. Past that, even, to the darkening country
side beyond. The wide black rift of the river. The dark cloud-shapes in the sky, swimming against the wind. The lights of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to the south. Albany’s dull glow, beyond the horizon to the north. The snow falling faster now. Heather can see far enough to wonder: is there or isn’t there a place for me in this town?

  * * *

  MISS JACKSON FADES OUT. A cheer rises up from the tiny crowd. Everybody knows that when the music stops, the show begins.

  Rick Edgley shifts his weight from foot to foot. Uncertain; anxious; freezing cold. Snow is beginning to accumulate on his boots. His blue whale mask is in a plastic grocery store bag between them. He has his orders but doesn’t know much beyond them. Attalah told him what to do.

  He hasn’t felt so good since what went down with Ohrena. He let Attalah talk him into something he felt awful about. Sure, it might have helped save his town, and that made it a good thing, but it also showed him how he was maybe not such a good person, and didn’t that count for something, too? What did it matter if they saved their town, if they became monsters in the process? Was it better to be good and homeless or bad and housed?

  Plus, he was out on bond. Awaiting a trial date. Ohrena swore up and down she’d recant before it came to that, even if it meant the cops turned around and charged her with filing a false police report . . . but he was still in the position of having his fate in the hands of someone else, and that was never a position he wanted to be in. He remembers fights that went the distance, the agony of waiting for the judges’ decision, and this is like that, except, it could go on for months.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” shouts Mayor Coffin into the mic. Wallace Warsaw stands behind him, the next to speak. Two sellout sons of bitches. But also, men he’s known his whole life.

  “The Ferris wheel!” someone shouts. Rick’s muscles tense. The signal involves the Ferris wheel.

  Spotlights shift. Screams start.

  Jark Trowse is strapped to the center of the Ferris wheel. Drugged; asleep. Bleeding.

  That’s not the signal. What is Attalah up to here?