by Rick Yancey
“What is it?” asked Dobrogeanu. He had looked behind and discovered me frozen to the spot.
“We can’t just leave it here,” I said.
“If we take it, what will happen when its parents return for it? Leave it alone, Will.”
“We can take it to the priest,” I said. “He’ll know what to do with it.”
I could see its dark eyes in the gathering night, seeking mine.
The line between what we are and what we pursue is razor thin. We will remember our humanity.
My soul writhed. I felt as if I were being ground between two great stones.
Dobrogeanu was now at the end of the hall. “Will!” he called softly. “Leave it!”
Biting my lip, I stepped over the child. What could I do? Its suffering had nothing to do with me. It would have been in that cold, stinking hall whether or not I’d been there. So I stepped over it. I turned my back upon it and left it there.
The baby did not cry after me; in its eyes I had recognized the same dull listlessness I’d seen in the wilderness, the way Sergeant Hawk’s eyes had looked the night he’d disappeared, the vacant stare of hunger, the inexpressible ache of desire.
Dobrogeanu commenced banging on the door. The sound jumped and bounced between the close walls; it seemed very loud, as all sounds do in the near dark. We waited, but no one answered. He tried the knob next, and the door opened with a protesting screech.
“Hello?” the old monstrumologist called. “Je někdo doma?” He drew out his revolver.
The Nováková flat was typical of most dismal tenement roosts: walls of cracked and crumbling plaster; a ceiling pockmarked with water stains; a warped floor that groaned in protest with every step. The room was clean, though, and an effort had been made to brighten the dingy walls with cheap prints of bright sunlit landscapes. It was heartbreaking—almost cruel—those fields of daffodils and lilies mocking the squalor around them.
A table and bench ran the length of one wall. Large wicker baskets filled with cut tobacco leaf were lined end to end beneath the table. Here Anezka and her parents had hunched with cramping fingers, rolling cigars that would, by the great machinations of American commerce, end up in the mouths of men such as Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes.
There was only one other room, separated from the first by a ratty sheet, a closet-size sleeping space that was a disaster of wadded clothing and rumpled bedsheets. I spied a doll propped up against the far corner, its bright eyes glittering in the washed-out light filtering through the window behind us.
“Where have they gone?” I whispered.
“To look for her,” Dobrogeanu surmised, but it was as much a question as a statement.
“The rest of the building too?”
He shook his head and turned back. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a lamp that sat upon the table. I understood at once. After I lit the lamp, he said, “We’ll have to search the building. Knock on every door, top to bottom. . . . Either they have fled into this foul weather—and there is only one reason I can think of—or they huddle in terror inside their hovels. Only one way to find out, Will!”
We left the flat. I looked for the baby immediately, but it was gone. The significance of this was not lost on Dobrogeanu. “Someone is here, at least,” he said. He turned toward the fire escape and caught his breath. “Filthy coward!” he softly snarled.
Gravois, like the child in the hall, had vanished.
Dobrogeanu pushed open the fire escape door and stepped outside. He leaned over the rickety railing and squinted down to the courtyard below.
“Useless,” he muttered. “Completely useless!” He shook his head with frustration. “What to do,” he muttered. “What to do?”
From the stairway down the hall came a resounding crash. A moment later we heard the heavy thump-thump-thump of a large object tumbling down the wooden steps. Dobrogeanu yanked his gun from his pocket and hurried as fast as his old legs could carry him to the head of the stairs. I trailed a few steps behind, heartbeat thudding in my ears like a sympathetic echo of that unseen fall. Our light fought against the dark, failing to penetrate but a few feet in the deep gloom. Dobrogeanu laid a hand upon my shoulder.
“Stay here,” he whispered. He pulled the lamp from my hand and proceeded downward toward the third-floor landing. He turned the corner, gun thrust in front of him, his shadow hard-edged as if etched upon the boards, and then I lost sight of him. The glow of the lamp faded.
“Oh, no.” His disembodied voice floated up to me. “Oh, no.”
I followed the light down. Midway to the next landing I discovered Dobrogeanu sprawled on the stairs, his back pressed against the wall, and cradled in his arms the lifeless, broken body of Damien Gravois, his white shirtfront shining with fresh arterial blood, his sanguine face enshrouded by the same soiled swaddling clothes that had wrapped the baby in the hallway. His eyes had been pulled from their sockets; they dangled over his cheeks, still attached to the optic nerves.
“I found him,” Dobrogeanu said. It was an absurdly obvious observation.
He eased the body onto the stairs and pushed himself to his feet, using the wall behind him for support. I grabbed the lamp off the step.
“What do we do?” I whispered, though my voice seemed terribly loud.
“What we are trained to do,” he answered grimly, echoing Torrance. His gray eyes sparked with fire. He yelled down the stairs, “Chanler!” and then he took off, descending with the speed of a man half his age. I caught up to him on the first-floor landing, where he had paused, listening.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
I shook my head. I heard nothing but the sound of our ragged breath and the far-off drip-drip of a water pipe. And then I did hear it, the soft, plaintive crying of an infant. It seemed to be coming from everywhere—and nowhere.
“He has taken the child,” Dobrogeanu whispered. He peered down the stairs leading to the cellar. He wet his lips nervously. He seemed torn. “Down there, do you think?”
We had only minutes to decide. If we chose wrong—if he had taken it instead to the first floor and we chose the other path—the child was doomed. My companion, with his years of experience, seemed paralyzed by indecision.
“We’ll have to split up,” I said. He did not reply. “Sir, are you listening?”
“Yes, yes,” he muttered. “Here,” he pressed Gravois’s pearl-handled pistol into my hand. He nodded toward the blackness beneath us. “You keep the lamp, Will. I should have enough light up here.”
And so I went down, to the very bottom, alone.
The steps narrowed. The suppurating walls closed in. A stench rose up to meet me, the smell of raw sewage. A pipe had burst and never been repaired, transforming the tenement cellar into a cesspool. The smell nearly overpowered me. Midway down I gagged; my throat burned and my stomach rolled in protest. I heard nothing at all now, and that emboldened me, for it must have meant he was not down there, but I knew I had to look to be sure.
The water at the bottom was more than two feet deep and was covered in a greenish-yellow slime. Broken boards—the remnants of storage barrels—floated in the stagnant stinking pool. I saw the body of an enormous rat floating near my feet, the skin of its bloated corpse peeling off as it rotted; something had already devoured its eyes. I could see its yellow fangs glimmering in its mouth, which was yawning open in a silent howl.
I stopped on the last step, upon the banks of this foul underground pond, holding my light high, but it could not drive back all the darkness. The far end remained swallowed in stygian shadow. What was that bobbing just on the edge of the light? A piece of broken wood? An old bottle? The scum-covered surface undulated; the boards seesawed in the reeking black water. I heard nothing except the steady drip-drip of the leaking pipe.
I turned to leave—clearly nothing was down here—and a voice inside my head spoke up. It was the voice of my master:
Pay attention, Will Henry! What do you notice about the water?
And still the voice persisted: The water, Will Henry, the water.
I started back up the stairs. Should I call out for Dobrogeanu? Or had he already met the same fate as Gravois, and now it was my turn?
Will Henry, the water . . .
Shut up about the water! I shouted silently at the voice. I have to find Dr. Dobrogeanu. . . .
I froze about six feet above the pool. I turned back. The rat’s empty eye socket stared back at me.
“The water is moving,” I said to the dead rat. “Why would it be moving?”
The voice in my head fell silent. Finally I was using that indispensable appendage between my ears.
Hot tears stung my eyes, partly from the smell, but mostly from understanding. I knew why the water moved. And I knew why I’d heard no crying.
The lamp created a perfect sphere of light around me. I waded into the sewage, my feet slipping on the slimy brick bottom. I could feel the filthy water seep into my boots. The dead rat nudged my knee with its long nose as I passed.
It was not a bottle or an old board I had seen floating in the excremental soup. When I reached for it, my foot slipped and I fell with a soft cry, catching myself by dropping the gun and pushing against the bottom with my right hand. That allowed me to keep the lamp aloft in my left. Its light played along the upturned face that floated a foot away; that was all I could see—the baby’s face. The rest was hidden beneath the mustard yellow scum. I pushed myself up. Now I kneeled before it—coughing, gagging, sobbing. I didn’t care anymore if the beast heard me. All I could see was that face, smeared in jellylike feces, the blank eyes sightlessly staring into the abyss above.
I could not leave it there, not in this place. I reached out for it.
My knuckles brushed across the cheek. The face dipped down, bobbed up again. It turned leisurely like an unmoored boat.
I knew then. I had found him, but not all of him. I had found just his face.
“Oh, no,” I whimpered, as Dobrogeanu had, as the doctor had when in the wilderness he’d realized we were lost—the timeless refrain, the ageless response. “No.”
We can take it to the priest. He’ll know what to do with it.
With those words I had abandoned him in a cold and dirty hallway. I had stepped over him, thinking there was nothing I could do. I had stepped over him, telling myself that his suffering had nothing to do with me.
In the wasteland of the gray light, where the black buteos rode on updrafts above the ruins of the forest, a man had heaved his burden over his shoulder. This is mine! he had cried in the cold, dead air. Mine! He had not sent him there; it had not been the doctor’s choice that he go. But the doctor had claimed his friend after the fall. He had accepted his burden.
So overwhelmed was I by the enormity of my crime that I did not hear the beast. The water bubbled behind me, a board bumped against my back; I did not feel it. When the beast rose out of the filth and its shadow fell hard upon me, I did not see it. The sightless eyes of the child held me. The discarnate face gripped me.
Out of the corner of my eye, there was the blur of its arm rocketing around before the hard fist slammed into the side of my head. Something tore free in my mind, a violent upheaval like a volcano exploding. The lamp flew from my hand and shattered against the cellar wall with a loud pop before dropping into the sewage and sputtering out. I pitched forward, tumbling into the abyss.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“I Have Found Him”
My name was in the wind, and the wind was high above the snowbound city. There was no difference between the sound of my name and the sound of the wind. I was in the wind and the wind was in me, and beneath us were the crystalline haloes of golden light wrapped about the streetlamps, and the muffled plops of snow falling from eaves, and the dry rattles of the dead leaves clinging to the indifferent boughs.
It is beautiful here on the high wind. From here our suffering shrinks to insignificance; the wind drowns out the human cry. The city in snow glitters like a diamond, its streets laid out in mathematical precision, the rooftops identical blank canvases. There is perfection in the emptiness. They say God looks down upon us, like the buteos that soar above the blasted landscape of the gray land. There is God in the distance. Humanity’s stench cannot waft this high. Our betrayals, our jealousies, our fears, they rise no higher than the tops of our heads.
In a lightless cellar flooded with human waste, a starving infant is held under until it drowns, its tiny lungs filled with the effluvia of six hundred of its fellow human beings, and then its face is peeled off, as one takes off the skin of an apple, peeled off, and cast into Dante’s river. . . .
In the name of all that’s holy, tell me why God felt the need to make a hell. It seems so redundant.
I woke in the arms of the beast.
I smelled it first—the cloyingly sweet odor of putrefying flesh. Then the powerful arms locked around me, hugging me from behind, like Dobrogeanu had embraced Gravois on the tenement stairs. The floor upon which we sprawled was hard and cold; the air was musty and basement-damp. I had a sense of gaping space, like a subterranean cave deep in the belly of the earth.
Ambient light surrounded us; I could not discern its source. Then I thought, Its eyes. The light is coming from its eyes. I could hear my breath and I could hear its breath, and its breath was as foul as the grave. Its mouth must have been very close to my ear; I could hear every swipe of its tongue across its chapped and bleeding lips. When it spoke, thick spittle dripped from its swollen, blubbery tongue, landed on my exposed neck and soaked into my collar. The tongue fumbled clumsily the simplest words, as if the thinking part of its brain had atrophied from disuse.
“What is our name?”
“You’re . . . you’re Dr. Chanler.”
“What . . . is . . . our . . .name?”
My legs were jerking uncontrollably. In a moment my bladder would let go. My bowels would empty.
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know your name.”
“Gudsnuth neshk. . . . That’s a good boy.”
Something very cold and very sharp pressed into the soft flesh beneath my ear. I felt my skin split open and the heat of my blood as it welled over the lip of the wound.
“It won’t hurt much,” it blubbered. “Not very muh-uch. But the blood; there’ll be a lot of bluh-duh. . . . We have been inter-eshted in the eyes. . . .” It paused, hiccupping for breath. Talking taxed it. A starving animal has no energy to waste.
“You are study-aying to be a shy-ent-tish, Will. Do you want to purr-form a shy-ent-tish-ist experiment-ed? Here ish our idea. We will pull your eye-shh out and turn them round so you can look at yourself. We never see ourselves the way we truly are, do we, Will? The mirror lies to us.”
Its arm was like an iron bar across my chest. My eyes had adjusted to the light, and now I could see its spindly naked legs splayed on either side of mine. The skin was jet black, as black as charcoal, the skin peeling off in thin curling sheets.
“Hold out your hah-and.”
“Please.” I started to sob. “Please.”
I held out my hand. Its gift to me was small—it fit perfectly in my palm—around the size of a plum, the surface rubbery and slightly sticky.
“Thish one’s yours . . .”
My body convulsed with revulsion—it was the heart of the baby I’d left in the tenement hall. I flung it away with a strangled cry.
“Repul . . . repuh-puh . . . repushiv child. Wayshful.”
It pressed its drooling mouth against my ear. “What have we given?” Its arm tightened around my chest, constricting my lungs; I could not breathe. “What have we given?”
I couldn’t speak. I had no air with which to speak. I could no nothing but rock my head an inch from side to side.
“What . . . what ish . . .” It seemed to be having as much trouble breathing as I
. “What ish the greatesh love? What dush it look like?”
The arm relaxed a bit. I gulped air choked in the swill of the beast’s decay. My head lolled forward. The beast yanked it back by a fistful of my hair; its sharp, jagged nails cut into my scalp.
“Do you want to shee its faysh, Will? Then, look at ush. Look at ush.”
It dug its claw into my chin and rotated my face around until my neck popped. The proximity of its face skewed my perspective; there was a moment before my mind could absorb what I was seeing. I perceived it in fragmented strobelike images. The first image was of the huge eyes burning a sickly amber, then the slobbering mouth, the bloodstained chin. Most striking was the flatness of its features, as if all underlying bone had receded into its head. It was the lack of contours that kept me from recognizing it at first; so much of our looks are ordained by our bones.
But I had seen this face many times—by the gentle caresses of a fire’s glow, by the cool winter light of a November afternoon, by the shimmering brightness of a chandelier in a ballroom where she had danced with me, her emerald eyes—now smoldering fiendish orange—filled with promise, overflowing with abundance.
The beast had taken her face. On top of the steaming pile of human and animal wreckage, he had shaved it off and had somehow affixed it over the decimated remnants of his own.
“See ush, Will? Thish is the faysh of love.”
I whipped my head from its grasp; its nails tore open the soft flesh beneath my chin. I heard it sucking my blood from its fingers.
“You have promish, Will. Good, good apprentish. We think we’ll make you ours. Would you like to be our apprentish? Such a good start with that baby . . .”
Something was tugging on my shirtfront. I felt a button pop loose, then another, and then the cold of steel against my bare skin—or was it steel? Did the beast press a knife into the scar that had been made by its teeth in the wilderness, or was it its nails, grown as sharp as a hawk’s talon? I could not bring myself to look.
“Ish so indesh-sker-ibal,” it whimpered. “You wayshful lil’ shit, you threw it away, our gift. You don’t know. But ish delyshful. You bite it when ish still beating, and it pumpsh the blood, woosh, woosh, into your mouth. . . .”