Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “Do you want me to tell him you waste no part of the animal?” Poole asked. “He can’t hear me anyhow.”

  “He can hear you fine,” came the icy whisper.

  Then Poole understood. “It was the motto of the butcher shop, wasn’t it? Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop. I bet it was painted right under the name, WE WASTE NO PART OF THE ANIMAL.”

  The voices all stopped, the nonsense song and the cries of the dead children. For an instant Poole felt violence gather in the cold dead air about him, and his heart nearly froze. He heard the rustle of heavy clothing—Underhill must have moved toward the door. Koko was going to stab him again, he knew, and this time Koko would kill him and tear his face from his skull, as he had done with Victor Spitalny.

  “Do you think he killed your real mother?” Poole whispered. “Do you think he arranged to meet Rosita Orosco on the river-bank, and murdered her there? I do. I think that’s what he did.”

  A low voice whispered a wordless exhalation from far off to Poole’s left.

  “Conor?”

  “Yo.”

  “You knew it too, didn’t you?” Poole said. He felt like crying now, but not from fear. “Nobody told you, but you always knew it.” Poole felt his heart unfreeze. Before Koko killed all of them, or before the police ran in and shot them all, he had to say these things.

  “Ten days after you were born, Karl Dengler met Rosita Orosco on the riverbank. It was the middle of winter. He stabbed her, and then he undressed her body and left her there. Did he rape her body, after he killed her? Or just before he killed her? Then he came into your bedroom, when you were a little boy, and did to you what he had done to her. Night after night.”

  “What’s going on?” came Murphy’s distorted, amplified voice.

  “Night after night,” Poole repeated. “Tim knew it all in some way—without really knowing anything about what had actually happened, he felt it, he felt everything. Your whole life was about the stuff that Underhill knew just by looking at you.”

  “Underhill goes out first,” Koko whispered from behind Poole. A knife slid under Poole’s ear, and the children wailed and begged for life. “First Underhill. Then you. Then Linklater. I’ll come out last.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” Poole said. His voice was shaking, and he knew that Koko would not answer him—because he did not have to answer. “Underhill is coming out first!” he yelled.

  And a second later he heard Murphy’s voice come crackling to him from the other side of the great rushing river. Murphy did not know about the river that surrounded the no-place and cut it off from every human place.

  “Send him out,” Murphy called.

  Harry Beevers made a noise like a trapped animal, and creaked against his straps.

  If Underhill were alive, Poole thought, Dengler was sending him out because he wanted Poole to go on with his excellent story. Maggie Lah was on the other side of the river, and he would never see her again, for on this side of the river was the bleak little island of the dead.

  “Go, Underhill,” Poole said. “Get up those stairs.” His voice sounded stranger than ever.

  The door opened a crack and an amazed Poole saw Tim Underhill’s back slipping out onto the landing. The door slowly closed behind him. Slow footsteps went up the stairs.

  “Hallelujah,” Poole said. “Now who?”

  He heard only the creaking and moaning that sounded like the cries of faraway dead children.

  “It was whatever happened in the cave, wasn’t it?” he said. “God help Harry Beevers.”

  “Send the next man,” crackled Murphy’s voice.

  “Who’s next?” Poole asked.

  “It’s different in here now,” Conor whispered.

  As soon as Conor spoke, Poole felt the truth of what he had said. The sense of prowling movement no longer surrounded him: the cold air seemed very empty. Poole stood in a lightless basement room—there were no faraway children and there was no river. “Let’s go out together,” he said.

  “You first,” Conor said. “Right, Dengler?”

  Beevers protested with squeals and grunts.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Conor said. “Dengler, we’re going.”

  Poole began moving toward the dim outline of the door. It was as if he had to unlock his arms and legs. Every step made the wound in his side screech. He could feel the blood sliding out of his body, and the floor seemed to be covered with blood.

  Then Poole knew what had happened—Dengler had slit his own throat. That was why the voices had stopped. Dengler had killed himself, and his corpse was lying on the floor of his little cell in the dark.

  “Someone will be down very soon to help you, Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever listened to anything you ever said.”

  Creaks and moans.

  Poole attained the door. He pulled it toward him and a lesser degree of darkness enveloped him. He stepped out onto the landing. This had seemed like darkness when they had come down the stairs. He looked up toward the hazy nimbus at the top of the stairs and saw two uniformed policemen staring down at him. He thought of poor crazy Dengler, lying dead or dying back inside the room, and of Harry Beevers. He never wanted to see Harry Beevers again.

  “We’re coming,” he said, but his voice was feeble, not his.

  Michael pulled himself up the stairs. As soon as he was far enough up into the light to be able to see clearly, he looked at his side. He had to force himself to remain standing—an instant later he realized that there had been a deceptive amount of blood. Koko had meant to hurt him seriously, though not to kill him, but his heavy winter coat had lessened the degree of his injury. “Dengler killed himself,” he said.

  “Yep,” Conor said behind him.

  Poole looked over his shoulder and saw Conor coming up after him. Conor’s eyes were the size of dinner plates. Michael turned back around and kept going up the stairs.

  When he reached the top one of the officers asked him if he was all right.

  “I’m not too bad, but I’ll need that ambulance too.”

  Dalton poked his head into the entry and said, “Help that man out.”

  One of the officers put his arm around Poole’s shoulders and assisted him out into the courtyard. It seemed warmer out in the air, and the gritty brick courtyard seemed very beautiful to him. Maggie cried out, and he turned toward the sound, barely taking in Tim’s form slumped into his coat, his head bowed. Maggie and Ellen Woyzak stood in the far corner of the beautiful little courtyard, framed as formally as by a great photographer. Both women were beautiful too—overflowingly beautiful, in their different ways. Poole felt as though his death sentence had been commuted just as the blindfold had been tied around his head. Ellen’s face ignited as Conor came through the door behind him.

  “Get him to the ambulance,” Murphy growled, lowering the bullhorn. “Beevers and Dengler are still down there?”

  Poole nodded. With a little cry, Maggie jumped forward and threw her arms around his neck. She was speaking very quickly, and he could not make out the words—they seemed barely to be in English—but he did not have to know what she was saying to understand her. He kissed the side of her head.

  “What happened?” Maggie asked. “Where’s Dengler?”

  “I think he killed himself, I think he’s dead,” he said.

  “Get him in the ambulance,” Murphy said. “Put him in the hospital and stay there with him. Ryan, Peebles, get down there and see what’s left of the other two.”

  “Harry?” Maggie asked.

  Ellen Woyzak had put her arms around Conor, who stood as motionless as a statue.

  “Still alive.”

  The thick-necked young officer moved up to Poole with an expression of great stupid satisfaction on his face, and began to urge him toward the arch that led out onto Elizabeth Street. Poole glanced at Underhill, who was still slouched against the wall beside the policeman who must have led him away from the tenement. Underhill did not look right, different
ly from the way Conor did not look right. His hat was pulled down over his forehead, his neck was bent, his collar was turned up.

  “Tim?” Poole said.

  Underhill moved an inch or two away from the policeman beside him but did not look up at Poole.

  He was small, Poole finally saw. He was a little, a pocket-sized Underhill. Of course people did not shrink. A second before he realized what had happened, Poole saw the flash of teeth in an almost unearthly smile hidden in the folds of Underhill’s turned-up collar.

  His body froze. He wanted to yell, to scream. The wide black river cut him off, and the dead children wailed.

  “Michael?” Maggie asked.

  Michael pointed at the figure in Underhill’s hat and coat. “Koko!” he could finally shout. “Right there! He’s wearing—”

  In the hand of the grinning man in Underhill’s coat there had materialized a long knife, and while Poole shouted, the man sidled around the policeman beside him, clamped his hand on his arm, and shoved the knife deep into his back.

  Poole stopped shouting.

  Before anyone could move, the man had vanished through the arch out onto Elizabeth Street.

  The policeman he had stabbed sat down heavily on the bricks, his face stunned and empty. Murphy exploded into motion, sending four uniformed policemen after Dengler, then getting the wounded officer carried into the ambulance. He took a last, infuriated look around the courtyard and then ran out through the arch.

  “I can wait,” Michael said when one of the policemen tried to push him toward the arch and the ambulance bay. “I have to see Underhill.”

  The policeman looked at him in confusion.

  “For God’s sake, get him out of the basement,” Poole said.

  “Michael,” Maggie pleaded, “you have to get to the hospital. I’ll come with you.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Poole said. “I can’t go until I see what happened to Tim.”

  Tim was dead, though. Koko had silently murdered him and taken his coat and hat and left the basement room in disguise.

  “Oh, no,” Maggie said. She made to run for the tenement door, but first Poole took her arm, and then Dalton restrained her.

  Poole said, “Get down there, Dalton. Let go of my girlfriend and go downstairs and see if you can help Tim, or I’ll pound the living shit out of you.” His side flamed and pulsed. From out on the street came shouts and the sound of running footsteps.

  Dalton turned slowly toward the arch, then changed his mind and moved toward the tenement’s entrance. “Johnson, let’s see what’s taking them so long.” One of the policemen trotted after him. Poole heard them clattering down the steps. “I mean that sincerely,” he said. “I’ll pound … the living shit …”

  Ellen and Conor moved across the courtyard toward Poole and Maggie.

  “He got away, Mikey,” Conor said in a voice full of disbelief.

  “They’ll get him. He can’t be that good.”

  “I’m sorry, Mikey.”

  “You were great, Conor. You were better than the rest of us.”

  Conor shook his head. “Tim didn’t make any noise. I don’t—I think—”

  Poole nodded. He did not want to say it either.

  “He cut you bad?”

  “Not too bad,” Poole said. “But I think I’ll sit down.” He put his back against the tenement wall and slid down onto the bricks, with Maggie holding one elbow and Conor the other. When he got down he felt very hot so he tried to take off his coat, but that made his side scream again. He heard himself make a noise.

  Maggie knelt down beside him and took his hand.

  “Just a twinge. A little mild shock too.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “I’m okay, Maggie. Just a little hot.” He leaned forward, and she helped slide his coat off his shoulders. “Looks a lot worse than it is,” Poole said. “That cop was hurt bad, though.” He looked around for the policeman Koko had knifed. “Where is he?”

  “They took him away a long time ago.”

  “Could he walk?”

  “He was on a stretcher,” Maggie said. “Do you want to go to the ambulance now? There’s another one out there.”

  Then they both heard the heavy tramp of boots on the staircase.

  A moment later two of the officers carried Harry Beevers out of the tenement. He had a big white cloth taped to the side of his head, and he looked like the victim of a savage street fight. Unable to stand by himself, Beevers wobbled between two policemen. “Where’d he go?” Beevers asked in a crushed, painful voice. “Where is that asshole?”

  Poole assumed that he meant Koko, and almost smiled—he had a right to ask that question.

  But Beevers’ intense unhappy eyes found Poole, and instantly filled with bitterness. “Asshole,” Beevers said. “You fucked everything up! What do you think you were trying to do down there? Get everybody killed?” Unbelievably, he tried to fight free of the policemen and come toward Poole. “What makes you think you can blame everything on me? You fucked up, Poole! You fucked up bad! I almost had him, and you let him get away!”

  Poole stopped paying attention to Beevers’ ranting. In the entrance to the tenement appeared Dalton and a tall, burly black policeman holding Tim Underhill between them. Tim’s face was tinged with blue, and his teeth chattered. The side of his sweater had been cut open, and a large quantity of blood had stained his entire left side—like Michael, at first glance he looked as though someone had tried to cut him in half. “Well, Michael,” Tim said while they carried him through the door.

  “Well, Timothy,” Poole said. “Why didn’t you say something down there, when Dengler was pulling your clothes off?”

  “Set me down next to Poole,” Underhill said, and Dalton and the other policeman helped him across the courtyard and lowered him gently onto the bricks. Another policeman to whom Dalton had signaled came rushing in from the street with a blanket, which he wrapped around Underhill’s shoulders.

  “He tied something around my mouth,” said Underhill. “I think it was Beevers’ shirt. Was good old Harry wearing a shirt when he came out?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  Lieutenant Murphy burst in through the Elizabeth Street arch, and both men looked up at him. His face was still purple, but as much with exertion as rage—it was just one of those Irish faces, Poole saw. By the time Murphy was sixty, his face would be that color all the time. When the detective saw Poole and Underhill leaning against the tenement wall with their legs out before them, he closed his eyes and his mouth became a taut, lipless line. He said, “Do you suppose you could manage to get another ambulance for these two idiots? This isn’t a convalescent hospital.”

  “Dr. Poole wouldn’t leave until Mr. Underhill came out,” Dalton said, “and when Beevers got into the ambulance he threatened to sue everybody in sight unless they took him immediately. So—”

  Murphy looked at him.

  “Sir,” Dalton said, and went out through the arch.

  “Did you get him?” Poole asked.

  Murphy ignored the question and walked across the courtyard to lean into the tenement as if he thought that someone else might be down there. Then he looked down into the window well. “Bag that knife,” he said to one of the uniformed policemen.

  “Did you?”

  Murphy continued to ignore him.

  A few seconds later they heard the wailing of an approaching ambulance draw closer and closer until it came up alongside the tenement and turned off its siren.

  Dalton came back through the arch and asked them if they wanted stretchers.

  “No,” Poole said.

  “Don’t we?” Underhill asked. “Are stretchers effete these days?”

  “What happened to the policeman Dengler stabbed?” Poole asked. Dalton and the black officer were gently getting him up on his feet, and Maggie fussed around them, patting and touching.

  “He died on the way to the hospital,” Murphy said. “I just heard.”

>   “I’m sorry,” Poole said.

  “Why? You didn’t stab him, did you?” Murphy’s face was blazing again, and he strode across the bricks to stand before Poole. “We missed your friend Dengler.” His eyebrows nearly met at the boundary of a deep, angry-looking vertical crease in his forehead. “He dumped the hat and coat on the corner and took off down Mott Street like a rabbit. We think he ducked into a building somewhere. We’ll get him, Poole. Don’t worry about that. He’s not going to get very far.” Murphy turned away, clamping and unclamping his jaws. “I’ll see you and your buddy in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry that one of your men died, not because I had anything to do with it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Murphy said, turning away to precede them through the arch.

  “Some people just don’t understand sympathy,” Underhill said to Poole as they were being taken toward the waiting ambulance.

  5

  Both Poole and Underhill were stitched up in an emergency room by a baby-faced young resident who pronounced their wounds identical but “all glamour,” meaning that while they would leave good-sized scars, they represented no serious threat to life or health, facts that Poole had already ascertained for himself. After their wounds had been sutured, they were taken upstairs to a double room and told they would be spending the night by the officer who had ridden with them in the ambulance. This officer’s name was LeDonne, and he had a neat moustache and kindly eyes.

  “I’ll be right outside the door,” LeDonne added.

  “There’s no need for us to spend the night in the hospital,” Poole said.

  “The lieutenant would really prefer it this way,” said LeDonne, which Michael took as the officer’s polite way of telling them that they were under orders to spend at least one night in the hospital.

  Maggie Lah appeared with Conor Linklater and Ellen Woyzak three hours after their installation in the room, and all three visitors described how they had spent the previous hours with Lieutenant Murphy. The lieutenant had heard the story of how they had come to the building on Elizabeth Street enough times to conclude that they were innocent of all crimes except foolhardiness and finally had charged them with none.