The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Blindly, he did what he had always done, reaching inside himself until he found the door. He would put the voice there, with the others, the bad feelings. There was something about the door—he had dreamt about the door, what was it? He found the place in his head, frantically swept up the killing rage that filled him and, finally, opened the door to put the rage behind it, away with all the other horrors and terrors and furies.

  There was nothing there. From inside the swirling anger that filled him, Jit saw: the place behind the door that had always been dark with the emotions he had placed there was white empty. Where did it go? For a moment he stood still, around him the Park and the clear bright day, inside him the woman’s anger churning, and farther inside, a kernel of dry curiosity, wondering what had happened to the door in his head and the feelings he had hidden there. Then Jit got smart. He could not bear the anger: put it behind the door and slam the door shut on it and do not worry where the other things have gone to. If the things did not come back to trouble him, why should he care?

  His head hurt. Jit blinked in the sunlight and saw the blue grocer’s cart rattling in the breeze ten feet away, where he had shoved it. He should get back to his place before someone found him. He shoved the cart in front of him. He tried to eat another cookie, but his stomach hurt, clenched hard with the anger that had swept through him.

  What had he dreamed? He tried to remember again. The door burst open, swept open by the force of what he had put behind it.

  “Wha’ you do?” he said aloud to the door, as if it somehow had destroyed itself. “Wha’ happen?”

  No answer. It was too much to think about, the door spilling all those things out again, back into the city. Filling up people with all their old angers, with new angers. “Wha’ you do?” he asked again, accusing.

  The steely afternoon sun shone on him, on the grocery cart with its burden of good eating. There was nothing he could do if the door had burst its seams. All he could do was take his food home and put it away. And eat, his stomach reminded him. He could eat. “O-kay, Jitters, you gon’ eat,” he said aloud. The words whispered all around him in the air of the Park; he was not alone. “O-kay, Jitters!” he shouted, and the words rang in the trees. He started trotting with the cart pushed before him, singing tunelessly under his breath, thinking of what he would eat when he got back to his place.

  He had always known about the voices; he had to be taught about the door. Old Nogai had told him about it, and the wall, and the places in his head to find the feelings and put them. Old Nogai had lived in the Park for a while when Jit was small, and had talked to Jit with a funny singsong, all the time drinking from a bag and twisting pieces of paper into shapes. Jit had found Nogai one afternoon, twisting paper and talking to the pigeons that paraded arrogantly around the Wollman Rink fence. Ducks, he called them. In a high-pitched singsong he rebuked them for laziness, for disrespect. “Bad ducks! Whyou come bother an old man, ducks? Away!” For a while Nogai, as shy as Jit himself, had refused to talk to the little boy. Gradually a few words were spoken from the side of the mouth and the two had edged together. Old Nogai called Jit Duck as often as not, and Jit would giggle way up high.

  “Bad feelings all over this city,” Nogai had said. “Bad feelings, you find them, boy?”

  Jit had nodded solemnly, not at all understanding what the old man meant.

  “Sick feelings, make your gut hurt, you understand, boy?”

  This time Jit did understand, sort of. The things that washed through him, they made him hurt sometimes. Did they belong to the city?

  “Only one way for bad feelings, boy. You find the place somewhere and bury them deep quick.” Nogai threw a handful of pebbles at the uninterested pigeons. “Find a wall and throw them bad feelings over. You find a door and lock them safe away. You understand me, boy?”

  Jit had giggled high, shaking his head in imitation of the old man. Nogai wheeled around fiercely: “You understand, you duck? Bad feelings get all twisted up in you, make you old like me. You pitch them bad things ’hind the door, you understand?”

  “Understand?” Jit echoed. The old man’s mind was rich with a thousand confused, scented images: the searing taste of the liquor he drank, the baffling flurry of movement from the pigeons, even Jit’s narrow white face. Everything itched with the irritable need to be understood. Jit tasted old Nogai’s thoughts and wondered at them. “How?” he asked at last, less about the door Nogai spoke of, than about the old man’s thoughts as a whole.

  Nogai had told him. Then, and later, and again and again, over and over, the door, the wall, take the bad feelings and the bad thoughts and throw them away, hide them somewhere safe behind a door, get rid of them. “Or they eat you up, boy-duck, you hear me?”

  “Eat you up, boy-duck,” Jit echoed.

  For a while, until Nogai had disappeared (everyone Jit knew in the Park went away sooner or later), the old man led Jit through the shadowy dim places in his own head, looking for the wall, the doors. By the time Nogai had been swallowed up by the city, Jit knew the old man’s trick so well that it was automatic. And it worked: nothing had eaten him up. But now the bad things had found a way out of the locked room, had broken down the door, splintered the frame and twisted the hinges, spilled out into the city again.

  A squirrel chattered angrily as Jit passed. “Don’t care!” Jit called to the squirrel and the dying afternoon light. “Don’t care. Go way, duck!”

  The squirrel, more easily intimidated than Nogai’s pigeons, fled at once. Jit was pleased by the victory. He found the access tunnel he wanted and quickly unloaded the grocery cart, putting everything off to one side of the tunnel, thinking as he did of the food he would eat later, savoring the choices to be made. Something big had changed the city, but if that meant the food places would be wide open to him, Jit did not mind. Then Jit clambered up again and shoved the grocery cart down the path, watching it rock and sway and clatter downhill, away from Jit’s tunnel so that no one would know where he was.

  Then he slid down into the tunnel himself. Around him, the thin air had begun to take on the flavor of slowly waking voices. Jit pulled out a heavy blanket, piled his goods on it, and began to drag it slowly down the tunnel toward his home.

  4

  TIETJEN was only faintly surprised to wake with his hands bound. His head hurt ferociously. He struggled into a sitting position, trying to ignore the pounding ache that movement increased. Blinking in the dim wash of yellow light he made out the form of someone sitting above him.

  “You awake?”

  It was the older woman. Tietjen tried to remember what she had looked like in the light: white hair, a heart-shaped, tanned face; eyes blue or gray, very steady; spare, rather fine-boned features but not—he struggled to find the word—not patrician, exactly. It came to him at last: if Irene had aged thirty years—gracefully—she might have looked like this woman. There was something comforting in her presence, someone so abundantly normal-seeming sharing the nightmare with him.

  “Lie still for a little bit, if you can,” she was saying. “I don’t think you’d have come to so fast if you were concussed, but frankly I don’t know enough to tell.”

  “How long?” he asked thickly.

  “Only a few minutes. He tied your hands and dragged you over there, and left just a moment ago. He’s getting better,” she observed dispassionately. “He killed the older man when he hit him.”

  Tietjen became aware of a constant murmured litany of expletives and threats from the black girl. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. Two days, maybe. The poor man over there was here when he brought me in. The others came after.”

  “You’re very calm about it,” Tietjen said.

  “I’ve had nothing to do but achieve calm. If you can convince me that panic would help, I’ll gladly panic.” Her voice trembled slightly in the darkness. “I’d take just about any excuse. In the meantime, when you think you can move, we should see
about getting out of here.”

  Experimentally, Tietjen tried to shift onto his knees. It was not difficult: his feet were not bound, but each movement made his head hurt fiercely. “I can move,” he said at last. “But as for getting out—”

  She laughed briefly, a startlingly lovely sound. “Piece of cake, if you can move. I’ve been waiting for him to bring in one sound-minded person. If you can get your back round to me, I’ll see about untying your wrists, then you untie mine, and we leave.”

  “Just like that? What about the doors?”

  “Old secret about these doors: you need a cardpass or a key to get into the offices, but they’re meant to keep people out, not in. I used to do volunteer work at the museum,” she added, almost apologetically.

  Tietjen stared up at the woman’s silhouette, wishing he could see her face. “Why haven’t you left before this?” With some difficulty he braced himself against the wall and slid upward to his feet. She made room for him on the packing crate she sat on, and for a moment they concentrated on getting into a position where she could work on his bonds.

  “Needed someone who would be able to untie me after I untied him. And willing to,” she added. “That girl over there is so crazy for blood I was afraid she’d kill me and go after him. Sort of defeat my whole purpose. Acchh.” She stopped talking and concentrated on the knots at Tietjen’s wrists. “There,” she said at last. “Wriggle your hands a little. Can you get loose?”

  Tietjen shrugged his shoulders, flexed his wrists, and found that the bonds were loose enough for him to work his way out. “How’d you learn to do that?” he asked.

  “Untying years of Merit Badge practice; den mother, scout leader, all that stuff. Your turn.” She sounded a little less certain as she presented her bound hands to him. Tietjen realized that she was not as sure as she pretended that he would not leave her there. He bent in the yellow light to unknot the rope.

  “Okay, all done,” he said after a moment, and watched with satisfaction as the rope dropped away from her wrists and she flexed her arms, sighing with the pleasure of unrestricted movement. She turned to face him, flexing her fingers, and held out her hand. For a moment he thought there was some other knot he was supposed to untie.

  “I’m Barbara McGrath,” she said.

  Tietjen took her hand. It was very cold. “John Tietjen. Feels like you’re freezing.”

  She laughed again. “Rotten circulation. Being tied up does nothing good for it. Look, I’d really like to get out of here. What should we do about—” She waved a hand to indicate their companions. “We have to set them free, I think, but the dishwasher isn’t capable of taking care of himself, and that girl—”

  “If we set her free I think she’d go after …” Tietjen rolled his eyes upward. “I don’t think she’ll go for us unless we try to stop her. The younger man was with her?”

  “Yes. But even before that, I think she was a little crazy. These street kids—”

  Tietjen thought of the boy he had helped the night before. Years ago. “You know how to spring that door?”

  Barbara McGrath grinned. “No trick.” She went to the door, pushed a button to the side of the knob, turned the knob, pulled, and the door swung heavily open, carried by its own weight. “Stone walls do not a prison make.”

  “Nice. What shall we do with him?” Tietjen was untying the dishwasher’s bond. “Bring him along?”

  “He’ll slow us down,” she said thoughtfully. “But someone has to take care of him.”

  “I guess so.” Cautiously, Tietjen moved to where the black girl sat, huddled against the wall. The girl’s eyes followed his movement, her head turned almost 180 degrees to watch him as he bent to untie her. “I wouldn’t stand too near the door,” he murmured to McGrath. And the moment her hands were free enough to pull out of the rope the girl was across the room and out. She had no weapon but her hands; Tietjen doubted she would need any. He felt a shiver of guilt at what would happen to the curator if she found him, but, “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Right.” McGrath took the dishwasher’s hand and started to lead him out of the dim room. But the man refused to be pulled toward the hall. For a few moments she tried to talk to him, calmly, soothingly. When that did not work she let Tietjen try. The man pulled his hand from McGrath’s and backed away, settling against the wall as if that were all the safety he knew.

  “We can’t wait too long,” Tietjen murmured. “If she finishes with him she may remember us and come back. I don’t want to fight her.”

  “Or anyone, with that bump on your head. I know. Dammit, man, we’re trying to help you.” McGrath tried one more time, impatience barely hidden by brisk kindliness. The dishwasher stayed where he was, only his eyes tracking from one of them to the other. “Hell, we’d better go.”

  Tietjen was the first out into the hallway. “You know the quickest way out of here?” he asked. When she nodded, he stood back and let her lead him through the hallway, up a narrow flight of stairs to a metal door set at street level. The door moved reluctantly. When they pushed on it together it opened with a grating sound that rang down the hall behind them: shards of steel mesh from the security grating littered the ground around it. An automatic alarm blared for a moment, then was abruptly silent. Tietjen thought he heard a sound of laughter somewhere, and stifled the impulse to run: the curator surely had problems enough to distract him from their exit.

  Central Park stretched to their left, Fifth Avenue to the right. The air was cold and clean after the mustiness of the lower hallways. Tietjen breathed deeply, turned to look at his accomplice again. She was panting a little, grinning. She had had the presence of mind to grab a jacket—probably hers, since it fit—as they left the storeroom. She was dressed in a red turtleneck, navy blue sweater, darker red skirt, low-heeled boots. The jacket, which McGrath now began to fasten, was lined with synthetic fleece. Tietjen eyed her with a little envy: he had left his topcoat in the curator’s office, and was not about to return to look for it.

  “Well,” McGrath said. “Where to now?”

  There was something infectious about her matter-of-fact good humor. Tietjen found himself returning her grin. “I don’t know. You hungry?”

  “I’m always hungry. My family were embarrassed by me for years: I can always eat. I like food. And I’m rambling, aren’t I? Yes, I certainly am hungry.”

  “Let’s go find some food, then. I think a celebration is in order. You’re the first—” He searched for a word but found none that worked. “You’re the first person I’ve met in three days who was dealing with this, right in the middle of it. Who wasn’t crazy or trying to get out. Or trying to die.”

  “I’m not the dying sort. About crazy, Gordon might have had something to say. Tell you what: you find the food, I’ll pay. Least I can do for my hero. I just hope they take plastic.”

  Tietjen laughed. It felt wonderful. The sky was blue-gray in the wake of sunset. He felt guilty, laughing: so much death, so much devastation. It did not matter; the kidding around was as nourishing as food to him. “Well, as to who rescued whom …” He led them away from the still-disturbing vibration of Central Park, eastward.

  They found a delicatessen Tietjen remembered on Lexington. It was empty, the security grill across the door was torn but still in place. The sidewalk door into the basement of the place had been sprung by a quake and they pried the door open and crept in, up the stairs into the restaurant. The power had been off for several days and all the prepared food was spoiled; the kitchen area stank of sour milk and rancid meat. Downstairs in the basement there were candles, labeled FOR EMERGENCY. “I think this qualifies,” McGrath said dryly, and lit several while Tietjen closed and barricaded the delivery door against intruders. Then they investigated the industrial-size cans of fruit, soup, vegetables that were stacked in neat rows beyond the door.

  “Sit down,” McGrath said, making a mime of dusting off her hands in businesslike fashion. “The least I can do is make you din
ner.”

  “Definitely the best offer I’ve had all day.” He watched while the woman emptied a can of juice down a drain, efficiently cut chimney holes in the lid and a small opening in one side, then started a fire inside.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” Tietjen asked, admiring the neat stove.

  “Two girls in the Brownies, and a son who was the Cub-Boy-Eagle Scout to end all Cub-Boy—you get the idea. You learn a lot of things I used to regard as utterly useless. Look, can you see if there are any vegetables around here that don’t come from a can and haven’t gone bad?”

  Looking, Tietjen found bags of onions and potatoes, a few scrawny carrots. As he investigated the shelves he felt like a child at Christmas offered the run of a toy store. At last they sat down to a huge meal of stew, then soup, a dozen little packets of crackers, packaged pound cake with syrupy Royal Anne cherries.

  “God, I feel sick,” McGrath said contentedly. “That was wonderful. All I want now is a nice zinfandel and some Schubert in the background. Ummph.” She leaned back against a packing crate, one leg still tucked under her in half-lotus. “What I’ll settle for is something else again. Uff.” She shifted a little. “I could do with a walk, but I don’t think this is the night for a midnight stroll.”

  “Maybe not tonight.” Tietjen gave a quiet little snort.

  “What’s funny?”

  “My wife would have loved to hear that. It was a kind of running battle between us: she didn’t like it when I walked around town; she hated it when I took our kids out almost anywhere; she was sure I’d get them killed.” He trailed off, thinking again of the flames that he had seen licking from the windows of Irene’s apartment that morning. A quiet tremor shook him. He did not cry, just sat and shook for a moment.