I looked at the white cameo standing out against her coral backdrop. Medusa. I’d put it in Margaret’s purse to get her canned from her job at my house forty-five years before. And she’d kept it, maybe to remind herself of something; not to be in the wrong place, not to trust Jews, who knew? I had no idea how Cvetko got it, maybe he poked around her apartment after she was dead. Anyway, he knew what it meant.
“You’re a poison pill, aren’t you?” I asked it. It didn’t say anything back, just turned and turned, this way, that way.
* * *
The walk back to Chloë’s place was one sad-bastard march of doom. I took back alleys and little streets, wending my way toward the anchorage under the Brooklyn Bridge, my head full of grief and shame. They got Cvetko. They got him and tried to use him to get me, but he outsmarted them and warned me, which meant, in a way, that I outsmarted them, too. But they got him. He was probably already finished, and, if not, he would be soon. Do not seek me in Manhattan meant don’t look for him. I looked at how he signed it, noticed he didn’t capitalize the sincerely after Yours. He was serving me as he would his own child. He couldn’t get out, but he bought my ticket out for me. Right under their noses. I could picture Manu reading it out loud for the others, laughing with them while Cvets hung from a pulley waiting for the little asshole queen to whisper Off with his head!
I was still crying when I got to Blond Jesus’s place.
He was pretty nocturnal. I expected to see his lamps blazing, but they were out. Could he have been off getting himself a beer? He liked beer okay, but he did that in the afternoons if at all. It hurts me to confess this, but I did bite him a couple of times, and he wasn’t what you’d call boozy; he didn’t see well enough at night to go too far, either, so his being out would have been weird.
I listened hard, trying to hear sawing or planing or hammering or any other carpenter stuff, but his little brick workshop was all quiet, all still. Too still. All I heard was the endless dragon-hiss of cars on the bridge above.
Why aren’t you working, George?
I stopped.
I looked at the entrance to the pipe that led down to Chloë’s place. If Cvetko and Old Boy had figured out I went there, maybe they had, too. Maybe they were waiting for me. My head told me I was being paranoid. But when I tried to move my feet toward the pipe, they wouldn’t go. What was down there, anyway? A bag of clothes? One last look at my girlfriend? This didn’t feel right, not by half. I walked away, backward, slow and quiet, still keeping an eye on the pipe. Now I turned and started off. Then I heard it. A little huff of disappointment and impatience. The sound a whiny kid makes when he’s told he has to do his homework before he gets to listen to the radio.
“Nff.”
My head snapped back and I looked at the pipe.
Peter’s little blond crown rose out of it.
His eyes shining like cat’s eyes.
* * *
I ran.
I’m a good runner, that’s my biggest strength. Unfortunately, they were damned good runners, too. They kept up with me, sometimes gained on me; I made myself go faster, regained what I had lost, but still I couldn’t pull away. It was anybody’s race—if I stumbled, I was theirs; if they lost sight of me for even thirty seconds, I was gone forever. My instinct for the last fifteen years had been to slip underground when threatened, but underground was where they wanted me, so I ran past the manhole covers and ignored the grates, drains, and dark stone mouths that used to mean sanctuary. I ran up 1st Street, made my way to St. Mark’s Place hoping to lose myself there, hoping there would be a crowd. There wasn’t, not much of one anyway, just a couple of punkish guys smoking outside a dive whose name I couldn’t see. They both watched me sprint by; I’m pretty sure my fangs were showing but I was too freaked-out even to close my mouth. I was halfway to 2nd Street when I let myself look behind me, and it must have been some instinct that made me turn my head just then, because here they came. Three of them, anyway. Oh shit, they’re trying to circle me, the other two are going to head me off at the intersection. Now I risked a glance forward. Sure enough, Manu and Duncan turned right onto St. Mark’s, boxing me in. I looked behind me again and saw that the three had slowed down, spreading out now so Camilla was in the middle of the street and one boy was on each sidewalk. Alfie was skipping. Fucking skipping.
I realized the only way out was up or down. Down sounded bad. Down sounded like getting penned in where nobody could see what they did to me, not that that mattered. Witnesses certainly hadn’t helped anything at Union Station.
Anyway, I jumped. I jumped straight up, grabbed the bottom of an iron balcony, and swung myself up like I was doing a sawhorse routine in the urban Olympics. I skittered up the side of the wall, broke through an apartment window, blundered through dark rooms while a woman screamed, knocked a hatstand full of hats out of my way, and went out the back window. Behind me, barely audible, I heard a child coo something comforting and the screaming stopped. I had no time to use the fire escape so I leapt again, back-down to save my legs, hit the hood of a cab, felt the skin over my spine split and a rib or two break, but I got lucky and the spine stayed whole; the cabbie jammed the brakes, so I spun off, found my footing, and sprinted toward 2nd again, blinking away the memory of the cabbie’s startled jellyfish face bluish behind the windshield. No Manu in front of me, he must have gone for the building, but Duncan came running, his mouth open like a kid running giddy down a hill in high summer or sledding through trees in the snow with a belly full of hot cocoa. He loved this. The hunt. I ran at him, took a swimmer’s eyeful behind me, saw Camilla pointing, the crazy-fast scramble of Alfie turning on the gas, but Peter was bent over, holding his stomach. He’s starving. So soon. I slammed into Duncan, grabbed him around the shoulders, went to chuck him out of my way, but he dug his little hands into my forearms. Someone said, “Stop that. You!” and I couldn’t look but knew by his voice it was a cop. I spun with the kid, tried to chuck him, but he held on, almost pulled me down to the ground. “I said stop!” I got an arm away from Duncan just as Alfie and the cop arrived. Duncan now wrapped both arms around my one arm, became deadweight. The cop grabbed my free wrist. I knew what I had to do. I jerked the cop closer; he was a sturdy guy with bushy eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair cut short. I remember his surprised eyes when he found he couldn’t stop me from bending him down to me. He smelled like English Leather aftershave and licorice, or booze that smelled like licorice. I saw Alfie’s drooling, hungry face loom up, saw his hand flick as he motioned Manu to go farther up the sidewalk and close off 2nd. Duncan now had his legs wrapped around my thigh as if he were climbing a jungle gym; he sank his teeth into my forearm, hooking them behind the bone. Just like they taught him. Christ it hurt. He wasn’t much good as a fighter, not on his own, but he made a hell of an anchor.
The cop’s head was in front of me; I had him by the nape now, I butted off his cap. “Sorry,” I said, and used my left tooth like a letter opener, cutting him from forehead to temple. He put his hands on my face, tried to push me away, but now Alfie was on him, unable to control himself as the curtain of blood washed down the man’s face. He licked him with the flat of his tongue, licked his face like a dog lapping up gravy. Duncan, unsure of what to do, let go of me and joined Alfie. I pulled the nightstick out of the cop’s belt and launched myself backward, nearly falling on my ass. Manu went to grab me, but I wasn’t about to let him. He was clearly used to getting help from his older, stronger playmates, but all three of them were too busy dragging the cop into the alley so they could poke fresh holes in him, peel him, get their strength back while less-hungry Duncan played monkey-see, monkey-do.
It was just me and Manu; he was stronger, but I was bigger and I was fighting for my life. Plus, I had a nightstick. I gave it to him, too; I beat him for all I was worth.
“Ah,” Manu said, and “Ow,” and, incredibly, “Please,” and I would have said, Did you go easy when Ch
inchilla said please, or Edgar, or Malachi? but I was too busy swinging like John Henry, breaking his arms, busting the teeth out of his face. “Hey!” somebody yelled at me from a window, “Hey,” and a beer bottle broke on the street near me. I broke the wooden nightstick on the ground now, made a jagged point, braced myself to drive it into Manu’s chest, but he took a step back from me, tried to protect his chest with his wrecked arms, like a praying mantis I had seen in a picture. A van was coming up the street, one headlight out. I moved toward Manu, knocked one of his arms out of my way, but before I could strike he leapt back into the path of the van, on purpose. It hit him with a sick noise, turned him end over end. The driver got out immediately, left his door swinging open. A bottle hit my head. Somebody said, “Get that kid,” and for a split second I thought they meant Manu, that they knew what a vicious little killer he was, but then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I punched somebody’s beery gut and he went Whooof! and I ran into the blackest alley I could find. I easily outran the citizens, windmilling my limbs, getting tired now, the Johnny Horton song about the British fleeing the battle of New Orleans looping in my head with an idiot’s voice, over and over again. I could outrun people all night long. But I knew that if the kids spotted me it was all over; they were freshly fed, mighty little engines banging away with all pistons. I, on the other hand, was running out of gas almost as fast as I was running out of luck.
* * *
That’s why I went down the cellar doors.
There they were, right on 2nd Street, under some kind of Russian or Ukrainian diner advertising FRESH-SQUEEZE O. JUICE. I popped the rusty, brown chain and opened the rusty, brown doors, shutting them behind me. I found myself crawling between cardboard boxes, cans of tomatoes, mesh sacks of potatoes, and more mesh sacks of small brown oranges. I hadn’t used my lungs in a while, so I sniffed. I picked up the floor’s bouquet of bleach undercut with recently swabbed-up rat shit. Just a hint of live rat, too. I followed that smell on my hands and knees, hoping to find a way out, even if it led back underground. I moved a dead mini-refrigerator aside and found a panel that didn’t match the rest of the wall. Hiding place or crawl space? Only one way to find out. At just that moment, I heard the cellar door swing open.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
I fumbled around at the edges of the panel.
“Hullo?” a British voice asked playfully.
I found purchase, pulled the panel out, smelled a wash of fresher rat shit, saw a hiding space, crawled in, replaced the panel, all as quietly as I could manage. I crawled toward the back of the space, saw the round, black mouth of a pipe.
“Jo-eeey?” Manu said. “Our game was not finished. You played rough and didn’t give me my turn.”
I reached into the pipe, felt stacks of paper. Figures, the one day in my life I found a jackpot and it was just in the way. I pulled out the rubber-banded bricks of hundreds and fifties as fast as I could.
A little hand knocked at the other side of the panel. Someone giggled.
I took off the shirt, the droopy-ass jeans. The panel came off. I jumped into the pipe, getting small. They’re smaller, I thought, I’m done, but still I slithered and grunted and made my way through. I was maybe ten feet in when the pipe opened up into a larger space. I poked my head through, got one arm in. That was when I felt the hand on my ankle.
“Whither runst thou?” Camilla whispered. “Becalm thee.”
I pulled with the arm that was through, but I couldn’t break her grip. She pulled, too, but couldn’t yank me free. This went on for I don’t know how long. It felt like an hour. I grunted, I yelled, I snorted. “Shhhh,” she said. She said something in French, I think. Behind her, Peter laughed.
We fell into a kind of truce where I didn’t pull forward and she didn’t pull back. Time wasn’t on her side, though, not with that appetite. She let go. I scrambled forward, into the larger space, and here she came after. Her arm came out first. I kicked at it, wrenched it, broke it, but more of her just kept coming out. I lay on my back and stamped with both feet like a donkey, but her second arm was out now and her first arm had already healed and she caught my foot and twisted. I pulled my foot away and yelled.
The horrible mouth in the pipe hissed again.
Shhhlshhhl
I crawled on my hands and knees now; I was in a sort of natural fissure or something in the rock. It was getting smaller. Becoming a dead end.
I heard her come out of the pipe and start crawling behind me.
I ran out of crawl space. It just ended in a sort of wedge. I backed into it, crying, trying to kick at her. She got on top of my legs, wrestled my arms down. She had gotten small around me, flowed into the space with me.
“Please don’t,” I said.
I saw one eye, shut as tight as a puppy’s, I saw her roll her football-shaped head, felt a tooth drag my skin. She was working her way toward my neck. I breathed in, puffed up, tried to fill the space and keep her out of it, but she slipped her arms around me, squeezed me down, pushed the air out of my lungs. Got a little farther. I tried with all my might to push her down, but couldn’t budge her. When I rested from this exertion, she wriggled a little farther up, and then we did it all again. This went on for five minutes, ten, till she had folded my arms all the way down, filled the space around my neck. I know this sounds weird, but I smelled how old she was, smelled time pouring out of her like a bag of moths. I heard the sucking sound of her forming and re-forming her mouth around her teeth, felt her cold lips probing my neck, trying to get the right angle.
There came a point when I realized it was hopeless and relaxed. Let her do it. You would have, too. A long time before I did. She fed in hungry, spastic gulps. I could hear my blood trickling out of her; she wasn’t even trying to hold it in. She couldn’t feed efficiently like this. But she could bleed me out. I caved in like a jellyfish. I couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. I don’t think I dreamed.
* * *
When I came to, I was sitting on a ledge in a bricked-up room I recognized only too well, except that it was brighter than normal. Chloë sat to my right, holding fresh flowers in one skeletal hand. The other hand was in mine, our fingers interlaced, our hands bound together with human hair.
Margaret’s hair.
More flowers, mostly red roses, had been laid around us in a circle. Teacups and plastic Slurpee cups full of what looked like red wine sat among a riot of mismatched candles, all burning. My mouth hung open. It hurt. I couldn’t move even my tongue, but I was pretty sure my fangs had been taken out. They wouldn’t grow back unless I got blood, but I wasn’t ever going to get blood again.
A fly flew into my mouth, back out again, landed on my eye.
I couldn’t blink. I wished for it to fly away and, in its own good time, it did.
The kids sat at the bottom of the room, as I had sat so many times communing with Chloë. They sat like a class on a field trip, arranged in a loose horseshoe.
“Are you happy, god of small places?” Peter asked.
“We know Joey isn’t happy, poor Joey, but god-inside-Joey, are you happy?” said Camilla.
“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” Alfie said, quite solemnly, and they all clapped three times hard.
CLAP!
CLAP!
CLAP!
Camilla raised her hands, palms open like a tiny priestess, and said, “Blessed be the tunnels and the staircases going down and the trains that bring us life. Blessed be the mothers and fathers diddling each other so babies might be born and grow and give us life. Blessed be the god of small places.”
CLAP!
CLAP!
CLAP!
“Blessed be Millie, who died the death in Wessex. Blessed be Sammy, who died the death in Manahatta.”
Duncan sobbed at this. Camilla walked over and pinched his cheek so hard she tore it a little, said, “No crying here
. Not here.”
“Sorry,” Duncan peeped. She took her place again.
“Blessed be the god of small places.”
CLAP!
CLAP!
CLAP!
Now they all rose at once. Alfie beat a drum and Manu played a little horn and they danced together, wildly, as kids dance, until they got bored with that.
“Now the kiss,” Camilla said. Each of them kissed the others chastely on the lips, little hands holding little cheeks. Then they each, in turn, came up to where we sat.
“Good-bye, Mary,” Camilla said. “Give the god to Joey now.”
“Still funny he calls her Chloë. Joey and Chloë! Ha ha ha!”
That was Manu.
“Not here,” Camilla said, shooting him a look that killed his laughter.
“Good-bye, Joey,” she said, and kissed my cheek tenderly, so tenderly.
They each did this in turn.
My mouth hung open.
Manu took out a Polaroid camera and took a picture of me. The flash blinded me for a moment, but I heard the sound of the camera spitting out my photograph, I heard the flap-flap-flap of Manu shaking it.
“It’s going to be a good one,” he said.
In my head I was screaming DON’T GO DON’T GO DON’T GO but go they did, slipping out of the hole left by the missing bricks in the wall opposite.
NO!
Then I heard a sound that would have made my heart beat if I had enough blood left in me for that. Scraping, but not just any scraping. The scraping of a trowel with wet mortar on bricks. I saw the trowel flashing, saw each brick settle into place. And then they were gone. They left the candles burning. It took about six hours for the last one to burn down. That’s a guess. Without blood, we don’t see in the dark so well anymore.
The Lesser Dead Page 28