Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  “And if a child goes missing?” asked Ransom.

  “She is feeding on him…or her.”

  “Ffff-feeding on a child?” asked Gabby.

  “If you wake up at night and see La Llorona, and you hear her song,” began Danielle, “you have to go with her, cause…just because…”

  “—cause it’s like being hypnotized,” added a young black girl.

  “You’re chosen, you gotta go,” Danielle grimly said.

  A stunted boy with a withered arm said, “Bloody Mary’s clothes’ll be blowing back, even in a room where there’s no wind.”

  “If you see her, you know she’s marked you for death,” explained Danielle.

  “But you’re not afraid to say her name,” said Alastair. “I thought if you said her name aloud, you brought her anger down on you? No?”

  “Robin’s a good leader, but he’s wrong about this,” she explained. “You show the demons any sign of fear…they even smell it, you’re dead. That’s how it really goes.”

  “What about the angel lady I heard about?” asked Alastair. “The Blue Lady of the Lake, is it? Tell me something about her.”

  All the children began jabbering at once, talking over one another, anxious to tell all they knew of this lady, one shouting, “She’s like my mum was!”

  “She’s kinda like my mum,” repeated one boy with a thick British accent. “Has aliases.”

  “But the Blue Lady’s secret name?” Jane wanted to understand their thinking. “Nobody knows it? So her power is limited? Can you tell me any of the Blue Lady’s aliases?”

  “One is Alia,” Audra blurted out, emboldened in her new role as emissary between Danielle and the strangers.

  “Another is Elisyan,” said one of the older boys.

  Danielle added, “That’s all we know.”

  Their secrets keep them safe, Alastair thought, and they keep their secrets safe…almost. So much symbolism.

  Alastair began questioning Danielle about her life. Her parents had emigrated from France and had kicked around New York for years and had relocated to Chicago on the hope of finding work as tailors. Instead, her father abandoned them. Her mother now worked in a sweatshop in the garment district, and Danielle pretty much lived on the streets, “Hating the hole mum pays rent on,” she finished.

  Alastair elicited additional information from Queen Danielle. Her mother had gone through three attempts to get clear of an addiction to heroin, and was trying to get her life back in order. Danielle was French on her mother’s side, Spanish on her father’s side, which accounted for her jet black hair and exotic features.

  Gabby asked, “So what is the Blue Lady’s most secret name?”

  The children erupted with answers again all at once: “That’s for you to find out.”

  “It’s useless if someone just tells you what it is.”

  “Even if they did know it.”

  “You gotta find out all on your own.”

  “Anyone says it out loud is turned into an angel for the war.”

  They began addressing one another now. They shared many beliefs with Robin’s band.

  Gabby cautiously asked, “Then if, say, for instance, that you and your friends are on a street corner when a carriage comes racing down on you and only one of you knows her secret true name and yells out this name, then only the one will live?”

  “No ma’am,” said Audra.

  “You don’t get it,” said Danielle. “You see her and she whispers her real heavenly name, then you gotta go with her.”

  The tallest boy in the group added, “You’re dead, yeah, but you got eternal life as one of hers and that’s Heaven, see?”

  “And it makes you superhuman,” said another.

  “So you can fight the Devil.”

  “Got it,” said Gabby, fighting back a frown.

  “It’s a spell that takes your soul up,” Audra further explained, “and it’s very loving. She says: ‘Hold on’ a lot, meaning, things’re going to get better for us.”

  A freight train rushing toward the center of commerce suddenly came up, its roar deafening, so close were they to the tracks. It shook the earth around them.

  A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nodded vigorously at this. “I’ve seen her. The Blue Lady,” he murmured.

  A rustle of whispered “me too”s rippled through the small circle of initiates.

  Alastair thought, They instinctively know to curry favor with Danielle; that to remain under her considerable protection, they need only agree with everything she says. “And where is Leather Apron in all this? Is he Zoroaster?”

  Danielle’s features turned suddenly stony, and she glared at Audra as if she’d like to strangle the younger girl. “Damn you, Audra! How much of your guts did you spill to these outsiders?”

  “We just want to understand,” pleaded Jane, “to see the connections, the patterns. How the killer is related to Bloody Mary, for instance?”

  “They are interconnected by mutual hatred and war,” Danielle finally explained.

  “What is Leather Apron to La Llorona?” pressed Jane. “We want to understand.”

  Again the initiates erupted with answers, ignoring Danielle’s undisguised disdain for the way things had gone, as the younger children exploded with responses.

  “They’re lovers.”

  “Dirty lovers, though!”

  “Evil…just evil.”

  “Evil, twisted lovers.”

  “Addicted to a hatred of children.”

  “They eat flesh when they make love.”

  “They make love when they eat kids.”

  Alastair lifted his blue gun from its shoulder holster. “This proves I am on the side of the Blue Lady,” he announced.

  All the children went wide-eyed at the blue burnished steel .38 Police Special. None had ever seen a blue gun before, despite the fact anyone with the money could purchase one from a Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog.

  The gun impressed even Danielle, who suggested it’d make a fine gift for her information, “As an offering, so to speak.”

  When Alastair flatly refused, saying, “It’s out of the question,” Danielle flew into a rage. “You wanna know about patterns, do you? It’s hatred fed by the flesh and bone of children, and you high-and-mighty types comin’ down slummin’ among us act as if you’re seeing things for the first time, but it’s only because it’s a senator’s daughter now! Ain’t it the truth?”

  Alastair was unsure what they might do with the confusing information they’d collected or how to ferret out truth from fiction, fabrication from whole cloth. Elements of the stories rang as true as sun and moon and stars, while other elements rang a wholly different bell—one alien to them all. Ransom summed it up in a single sentence. “And here I thought I’d heard it all, and I thought I knew what was going on in Chicago.”

  Meanwhile, Danielle loudly cautioned the other children, “And once you go into the system, they take your picture and your measurements, and your name and information, and it all goes into Zoroaster’s files, and so now you’re in their files, and it’s only a matter of time before they catch you! And if they don’t torture and skin you alive, they do worse! They steal your soul for all time.”

  This frightful idea had silenced all argument, and the band of children began to disappear before their eyes.

  “Déjà vu,” muttered Jane.

  Ransom didn’t know the French term, but he imagined it a swear word. Then he noticed the discarded doll that Gabby’d twice now gifted over to Audra. Up till now, Audra had kept the doll hidden beneath her fresh petticoats, also a gift from Gabby. Too late to warn her, Alastair realized how terribly attached Gabby had become to the girl. Gabby again tearfully lifted the doll dropped amid the rubble. The petticoats would likely follow as yet another possible sign of weakness at having accepted gifts from demons and of having gone over to Zoroaster.

  In the long and
sad carriage ride back to their own lives, Ransom attempted to rest his eyes and mind, shut down, while Jane and Gabby talked of their feelings of empty hopelessness that had nearly overwhelmed them as each had listened to the “religion” of the street children.

  Gabby had rushed after Audra, offering her a way out, to come live with her and her mother for a time, but Audra followed Queen Danielle and her “family” instead.

  “They are all suspicious of any sort of authority,” Alastair, eyes still closed, told Jane and Gabby. Still this did not lessen the heartbreaking moment for Gabby. Knowing Audra’s decision and action amounted to a performance for Danielle and the others, so that she might continue to belong with her street family, didn’t mitigate the pain. Ransom knew that Audra was a rare exception, belonging to two such street families. Even so, Gabby had been hurt by Audra’s last words, shouted loudly for all to hear: “They fooled me! They seemed nice, gave me donuts and presents, but they could still be working for demons!”

  As the cab passed into their part of the city, Gabby held the doll as she might an infant, cradled on her lap. Out one eye, Alastair watched her and Jane, sorry for their grief, sorry they’d had to go through this sort of thing, but he wondered what they’d expected. All the same, Alastair now tried another soothing word. “Look, Gabby, with these kids, myth and fear of authority has gotten all twisted and balled up, so that as far as establishing any sort of lasting bond of friendship with any of them…well, you can just forget-about-it.”

  “Isn’t that largely the problem, Alastair?” Jane took instant issue. “Everyone would like to forget about it, put it back on the children’s shoulders, as if they had a choice.”

  “They do have a choice. You just saw choice twice thrown in your face!”

  “Makes it so much easier then for us to ignore it, doesn’t it, In-spec-tor.”

  Alastair grimaced. He hated it when she used that tone when calling him Inspector sometimes adding Ran-som to drag it out.

  She was on a tear now. “And perhaps, then, Inspector Ran-som, perhaps if enough of us ignore the problem, it will by damn disappear. Just poof! Gone. Impossible situation.”

  “They’re just children,” added Gabby, sniffing back tears. “How…how can you be so…so callous, you a professed defender and servant of the people?”

  “Oh, dear God,” moaned Alastair. “OK, I see, now the problem is on me? Impossible is right,” continued Alastair in a clumsy attempt to minimize what they’d witnessed and now felt. “Impossible for people on the street, and especially children on the street, as nothing in their lives even remotely appears or feels like permanence—especially bonds.”

  Alastair knew from experience and reading police reports that a common rule among homeless parents was that everything a child owned must fit into a small brown grocery bag for fast packing. But during brief stays in shelters, children would meet and tell each other stories—often harrowing true stories. Somehow enough stories told and they became huge exaggerations woven into the fabric of a strange belief system that, while terrifyingly odd, resonated as real for these kids and, in many cases, had likely kept them alert to real dangers. This by way of embracing their fears, mistrust, and suspicions—an animal instinct that was the gift of nature.

  Jane must be thinking the same, as she said, “Actually there’s no calculating the lives these cautionary tales may’ve saved, aside from simply getting a child through the harshest of nights.”

  Ransom knew from his own heritage as the son of Celtic believers that folktales were usually an inheritance from family or homeland, and that the religions of others were considered cultural folklore by non-believers. But what of children enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey here amid the unforgiving streets of Chicago, where Christ himself would find no pity? No parent or adult in a uniform, or carrying an inspector’s shield, could possibly steel such a child against the outcast’s fate—the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the terror.

  So here in the silence reigning inside the moving carriage Jane said, “What these children do is remarkable.”

  “How so, Mother?” Gabby wiped at her eyes with a hanky.

  “Think of it. They snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, newspaper and dime novel accounts, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers and doomsayers—and like birds building a nest from scraps, they weave their own survival myths.”

  Gabby quietly agreed, as she’d been disturbed to her core. “Yes, and we just got a glimpse into their secret stories and guarded knowledge.”

  “Knowledge or ignorance?” asked Alastair.

  “For them this is knowledge and knowledge is survival,” countered Jane. “They graced us with information they do not commonly share with adults, not their parents for certain, nor the shelter people, or the priests.”

  Sniffling, Gabby added, “We were privileged, “thanks to Audra paving our way. They don’t share, for fear of being ridiculed—or beaten for blasphemy.”

  Jane sighed heavily. “Heartbreaking, their account of an exiled God unable or unwilling to respond to human pleas even as His angels wage war with Hell.”

  Alastair nodded. “Must be—to shelter children—a plausible explanation for having no safe place, no home.”

  The carriage bumped along streets in serious need of repair, the landscape of urban distress the other side of the window sash.

  “Their stories have the dual purpose of engaging them in something larger than themselves,” added Jane, “and in making their lives meaningful—the purpose of any religion. An astute phrenologist and student of the mind could do a lot with these children, but it would take an army of us.”

  “An astute folklorist could do even more,” countered Gabby.

  “How so?” asked Jane, holding back her tears.

  “A folklorist…could see traces of old legends in the new ones spawned by Chicago’s shelter children.”

  Alastair silently wondered what the hell a folklorist might be.

  “For example, Yemana, a Santería ocean goddess, resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate and robed in blue, though she is portrayed with white or tan skin in her worshippers’s shrines. And for how many generations have we heard of a disease-carrying Bloody Mary going about humanity?”

  “Every group has to have its revenants, spirits, and ghosts,” Jane said.

  “Yes, of course, Celtic tales of revenants,” began Alastair, chewing on an unlit pipe, “vampiric zombies digging their bloodless bodies from graves, returning souls, visitors from the land of the dead sent to console or warn, harm, or help? Trust me, they all arrived in America centuries ago with the first Native American.”

  Jane stared for a moment. “Mock all you like, but it makes perfect sense to these children. It’s all they have to hold onto. It perpetuates itself through their leaders.”

  “It’s still all a matter of shoveling outrageous bullshit.”

  “No it’s a pseudo-religion based on religious archetypes. And while you may disagree with their version of reality, Alastair, you have to remember our reality is an absolute three-hundred-sixty degrees from theirs.”

  “Theirs born of pain and experiences we can’t conceive of,” agreed Gabby.

  “True, born of a fear that is as deep a wound in the mind as any I have ever encountered,” Jane said, sighing. “So they make myths.”

  “Yes, so they make myths out of earlier myths that influence this…this shelter folklore,” muttered Ransom.

  “The frightful and bizarre stories of these homeless children are certainly unique and foreign to our ears, most assuredly,” Gabby continued, deeply moved. “But they also have a validity, and you’re right, Inspector. They resonate with the myths of African tribes, Asian tribes, Afghanistan tribes, hell…all the tribes.”

  Jane hugged her daughter to her. “It’s the certainty and detail that gets to me.”

  “What about the predator—Leather Apron—the one we’re after?” Alasta
ir asked Jane point-blank. “How does he figure into this war of angels?”

  “How do we know there is a connection, Alastair? What instinct are we drawing on? Ask yourself!”

  “Just an old-fashioned cop’s hunch, Jane. Nothing supernatural about it, nothing extraordinary…just a gut feeling.”

  “You and I acted on our belief system, given our experience, given our myths. Isn’t it the same as the popular mind immediately pointing a finger at the knacker and the butcher?”

  The carriage pulled up before the sign outside Jane’s place, the sign that read Dr. James Phineas Tewes.

  Staring at the sign as the ladies disembarked, Alastair replied, “I suppose we all create our own myths, just as Dr. Tewes has done.”

  “Phrenology may strike you as a myth or pseudoscience, Alastair, but Dr. Tewes is able to get people into his practice on that mythology, and once in his chair, he can diagnose a real medical problem.”

  “Too bad helping those homeless children can’t be as simple, heh?” As his carriage pulled away, Alastair waved mother and daughter off, going for Philo’s place on Kingsbury. He needed a safe place where he could just relax, listen to music, have a drink, and feel confident that he did not have to pay too close attention to reason or to entertain reality. This day had been filled, perhaps, with too much reality, despite the mythology.

  “That man can be so infuriating at times,” Jane said of Ransom as she got on the phone.

  “Who’re you calling, Mother?”

  “Shhh…it’s ringing.”

  Dr. Jane Francis put in a call to a very dear friend, the indefatigable Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House and the settlement movement in the city, a woman who’d devoted her life to helping overburdened women and children.

  Jane related what she and Gabby had just gone through. Jane Addams listened attentively and took in every word with an occasional yes, an uh-uh, uh-huh here, a groan there.

  “Can you give us any advice on how to help this girl, Audra?”

  By this time, Gabby hung on her mother’s every word, craning to hear Addams’s reply. It came immediately.