The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  The outhouse was now gone, a crosshatch of rot heaped haphazardly around the base of the great trunk. But the tree itself seemed to swell with renewed vigor, bursting out of the ground, lurching left toward the vanished window, and surging through the iron grate, wrenching apart its black bars, which now hung seven feet in the air, jealously guarding an absence. Inside was outside was inside.

  It was pretty clear to me I wasn’t going to be sawing any part of that tree, which I now realized could help me acquire biceps powerful enough to win the attention of Dani Gardner, a ninth-grade girl I had my eye on. Not far above the window grate, that deformed limb emerged from the tree trunk and twined its way grotesquely toward the second floor of our house. One section of it was almost horizontal, forming a natural crossbar, and it was here that I intended to make myself the most fearsome thirteen-year-old in all of New York City.

  My plan was to do one-armed pull-ups, the way my annoyingly athletic best friend, Kyle, did. But I couldn’t reach the limb without something to stand on, so I went back to the toolshed, where I remembered seeing a plastic cooler stenciled with the words DECARLO FUNERAL HOME & CREMATORY. I knew Tony DeCarlo. He was a bluff, thick-necked friend of Dad’s who sometimes went to Mets games with us, one time even driving us out to Shea in a hearse. He and my father had a fond, ribbing sort of friendship. Dad always referred to Tony’s Mulberry Street funeral parlor as “the body shop,” and Tony liked to joke that the two of them got along so well because they were both in the antiques business. Kidding aside, though, my father got quite a few referrals from DeCarlo. Tony would give him an early heads-up whenever a widow or widower died so Dad could approach the grieving descendants to offer his services appraising and selling off the deceased’s vintage furniture and heirlooms.

  Why Dad had a cooler of DeCarlo’s I didn’t think to wonder. What mattered was that the cooler was just the right height to help me with my one-armed pull-ups. So I schlepped it across the yard to the spot beneath that horizontal limb, stepped onto it, and leapt up to grab the limb with both hands. I then let go with my left, hanging there helplessly for no more than a nanosecond before I slipped off and landed on the cooler, sending a bunch of weird wrapped lumps spilling from its innards.

  Man! I said to myself. What a vexatious cooler!

  But it was more than vexatious; it was revolting. The stench of putrefying meat wafted from those wrapped lumps, making me retch violently. I nudged them back into the cooler with my sneaker—sooo gross—slammed the cover shut again, and dragged it across the garden to the toolshed. I heaved it back where I’d found it and got the hell out of there.

  2

  THERE WERE DEMONS LIVING in the furnace, furious hammer-handed creatures who subsisted on rust flakes and kept our family warm with their anger. When their tantrums were at their worst, you could hear them hissing and banging clear up to the top floor of our brownstone. That’s what jolted me awake so rudely the next morning.

  As man of the house, I was personally responsible for the care and feeding of these furnace dwellers, that much my father had made clear. He’d led me down to our clammy basement the night he left us and jabbed a beefy index finger at the tube of rust-brown water clinging to the furnace’s flank.

  “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t ever let the water get below the horizontal line on that tube. Because if you do…”

  Here he filled his cheeks with air like a blowfish and made a dramatic gesture with his hands that seemed to mean, roughly, “Kaboom!”

  It was my job to turn the ancient blue knob and refill the tank with water every few days, but the clanging ruckus now echoing through the brownstone’s pipes up in my third-floor bedroom made me realize I hadn’t done it in weeks. On top of that, I’d overslept again.

  I shoved on my moccasins and hurried down the darkened stairs in my canary-yellow pajamas, past the familiar sleeping lump of my mother in her second-floor bedroom. I should’ve known better than to trust her about that promised omelet. But before I could even pause to contemplate the full, disappointing majesty of her torpor, I was nearly knocked over by Quigley, who came sprinting upstairs two steps at a time, wearing a Unique Clothing version of the flowered robe Liza Minnelli wore in Cabaret. This was one of those mornings when Quig had even given her left cheekbone a showbizzy makeup mole like Liza’s. But far more distressingly, she was clutching a quart of milk and what I happened to know was the last packet of Carnation Instant Breakfast.

  “Good luck finding any eats, slowpoke!” Quig crowed, poking me in the ribs for witty emphasis as she slipped past and ran up to her room.

  On the first-floor landing below, I caught a glimpse of what I was up against as a gray-faced man emerged from the half bathroom at the foot of the stairs, took one look at me, and shuffled quickly into the dining room in his tattered espadrilles. It was Monsieur Claude, the boarder who lived on the fourth floor, scratching his butt and yawning.

  Monsieur Claude was always scratching his butt and yawning. A bored Frenchman with scraggly shoulder-length hair and sunken pothole eyes, he was supposed to be some kind of utterly fascinating world traveler—“He’s got such a talent for living,” Mom said—but all I knew about him was that he always wore these droopy gray sweatpants that exposed the top of his butt crack, and his only talent I’d ever spotted was for exhaling Gauloise cigarette smoke and inhaling scrambled eggs at the same time.

  Monsieur Claude’s tendency to Hoover up every egg in sight instantly became my chief concern. Because as badly as the furnace demons needed my attention, the emptiness in my belly was even more pressing.

  Stepping into the light of the dining room, I could see at once what a struggle it was going to be to get my hands on any food. A vanquished Count Chocula box lay sideways on the big round table, beside which sat Mathis, the blubberous Associated Press news clerk who slept on the second floor in what used to be our living room. He was hunched fleshily over a bowl in the posture of a semidomesticated manatee.

  “Little Man!” he declared grandly when he saw me. “A very good morning to you!” And with that, he looked down again and quickened his pace, shoveling cereal puffs into his mouth so urgently that I was surprised the brown milk didn’t leave little spatters on the round lenses of his eyeglasses.

  I made my way tentatively through the dining room. In the kitchen behind Mathis, Monsieur Claude was already removing a pan from the stove and spooning a Matterhorn-size mountain of scrambled eggs onto one of my Hamburglar plates. He was singing a jaunty French song whose lyrics I imagined meant something like, “Starve! Starve! You late-sleeping, omelet-less little American fool, ha-HAA!”

  At his left hand, one last sweating white egg remained in the carton. But as I sidled into the kitchen to claim it, Mr. Price, who had been standing over by the fridge where I couldn’t see him, stepped forth in a shabby red velvet robe and plucked up the precious orb with his fingertips. In one deft move, he cracked it into a tall glass filled with some tomato-juice concoction, then seasoned this vile elixir with a few drops of dark sauce from a bottle wrapped in brown paper. His chin held high, he tipped the glass to his mouth and swallowed its contents with ostrichy gulps of his skinny, stubble-stippled throat. As the last of the drink disappeared, he gagged, recovered, then wiped his mouth on his velvet sleeve and sighed with relief.

  “Ahhhh,” he exclaimed brightly, turning to gaze at me with eyes so bloodshot they hurt to look at. “The very thing!”

  The brownstone’s pipes gave an exclamatory rattle, reminding me to get a move on, so I edged past Mr. Price without saying anything and peered into the fridge. It was pretty barren in there: skinny bottles of capers and horseradish, two desiccated lemons, an assortment of cheese rinds.

  But then something truly exciting caught my eye: resting atop the fridge for some reason, not far above my head, was a second egg carton, its top open a crack.

  A late-rising boy has to make his own luck, so without looking around at my competition, I lunged for the carton—a
nd immediately realized my blunder as a shower of tiny eggshell fragments spilled from inside it like jagged confetti, right into my face and all down my pajama front.

  “What on earth?” cried Mr. Price, hurrying over and raising a hesitant hand to help brush the fragments off me. “What are these things? What are they for?”

  “My mom collects them for her art,” I said, trying to pick a pointy shell bit from the corner of my eye with my pinky tip. It hurt like a bastard.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She smashes up different-colored eggshells and uses them to make mosaic landscapes and country scenes and stuff,” I said. “Usually she keeps her eggshells in Baggies, but I guess she ran out.”

  I wriggled away from Mr. Price’s help and headed out of the kitchen, snagging a rejected heel of Wonder bread from the counter as I went.

  —

  The basement door, set into the polished mahogany wall below the main staircase, was an olive-green eyesore, swollen with moisture and layers of old paint. It took me several tugs to loosen it from its frame. When the door finally opened, the basement exhaled mightily, and I stepped into a stale belch of moist heat.

  The metallic clanging was louder in here, more dangerous-feeling. Fumbling around in the dark, I found the dangling overhead bulb and yanked its shoelace, spilling an oily mayonnaise light down the narrow stairwell tunnel.

  With crabwise steps I crept down toward the source of the clamor, trying not to touch the filthy walls, whose sandplaster gapped and puckered, flowing into the lumpy ceiling. Though Mom had tried to make this slanted tunnel cheerier by painting it bumblebee yellow, the color only highlighted the thousands of tiny dust balls, one on each stucco barb.

  At the bottom of the stairs, where the light was weaker and the air all clammy thick, I stopped and squinted through the darkness at the big rusty box of the furnace.

  I didn’t really get how it worked. Boiling coils of cable burrowed in and out of the ceiling above it before surging into a metal panel on its side. A chipping pipe rose from its top, made an abrupt turn, and plunged into the wall. And inside its tank thrashed the furnace demons, thirsty and scared, rattling the brownstone with their parched rage.

  A funny thing happened then. The banging quieted as I drew close, changing to a kind of grinding supplication, as if the young rust creatures inside could feel I was there to care for them.

  “All right, fellas, hang in there,” I said, trying to sound sort of soothing. “Sorry I forgot about you. But I’m gonna give you a little something to drink here, some nice filthy rust water, just the way you like it.” I didn’t entirely believe there was anyone in the furnace to hear me, but it was more comforting than talking to myself.

  The blue knob turned easily, sending a gurgling torrent of water into the furnace’s innards. After about a minute, a little water sloshed up into the bottom of the empty glass tube, its level slowly rising until it passed that critical horizontal line.

  It looked like everything was going to be okay, no explosion or anything. I filled the tube just shy of the top and listened as the tank’s relieved inhabitants settled into their rusty bath and thanked me, muttering curse words of gratitude in their abrasive native tongue.

  Turning to hightail it out of the basement, I did my usual little head tilt to avoid looking at the locked door of Dad’s abandoned studio, which was only a few feet away on my left. Though I had years ago spirited away and hidden the antique skeleton key that could open any of our brownstone’s old-fashioned locks—I sometimes used it to collect change from our boarders’ trousers—I had never dared let myself into Dad’s studio. He had rarely allowed me inside it over the years, and from what I recalled, it was a forbidding chamber of table vises and wood scraps, its floor strewn with screws and obscure antique hardware that could impale your foot right through your moccasins. Who needed that?

  But today something felt different, as if a sharper, more intrusive quality of light was pushing its way through the frosted-glass transom above the door. Curious, I retrieved the skeleton key from inside the asbestos sleeve of a boiler pipe, and I unlocked the studio. It was a place of shadows, illuminated only by a murky blade of sunlight penetrating the room through the dirty little window at the top left of the back wall. For the first time in years, I stepped inside.

  The studio looked like it had been left in a hurry. There was an old take-out coffee cup on the back counter, glass Taster’s Choice jars full of eye hooks, even a couple of packets of gold leaf. Cautiously I ran my eyes along the back wall from right to left, across dirty outlines of vanished tools.

  And then, startled, I felt my throat close up like a fist. On the window ledge high up on the back wall, tilted in the soil of a dead houseplant and swathed in grimy light, was half of a woman’s face. Her forehead had been severed along the diagonal, across the shattered bridge of her nose, and her lone eye looked like it had given up.

  Horrified but fascinated, I climbed up on the back counter to get a closer look. The face appeared to be a woman’s death mask, or part of one. All of her features, from her eyebrow to her lips to her throat, were fashioned from the same unforgiving material, a hardened clay maybe, the blended color of melted scabs and orange rinds.

  Behind her, in the dirty window, I half saw my own smudgy reflection frowning. And then my reflection shouted.

  “GRIFFIN!” it boomed, scaring the living crap out of me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” It was Dad, out in the backyard on his hands and knees, peering at me with enraged green eyes through the curtain of filth on the window.

  I didn’t stick around to find out what would happen next. I was a speedy little guy when I wanted to be, and I was out of that studio and up the staircase in seconds, not thinking of much at all, not even where I might be headed, until my forehead plowed right into Dad’s lumpy belt buckle at the head of the stairs and I realized that I’d been running straight toward the thing I was running away from.

  As I brought my hand up to rub my forehead, Dad closed his big fingers around my wrist and lifted me up to his level on the landing. He wasn’t hurting me, not quite, but he sure wasn’t letting me go.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said. “I’m very upset about something.”

  I didn’t look up at him, only stared straight ahead at his chest, where sandy hair geysered from the top of his red flannel shirt. His odor crowded into my nostrils, a thick male smell of struggle.

  “What is it?” My voice sounded very far away.

  “Well, you’re a peculiar kid,” he said, “but you notice things, right? At least when you want to.”

  I nodded.

  “Someone tore down the ruin. I specifically forbade your mother to do that, and now someone’s gone and smashed the whole thing to pieces. Which one of her boarders did it?”

  I looked up at him carefully, shaking my head. He had a nasty, freshly scabbed scratch arcing across his unshaven cheek from his right earlobe to his upper lip. His hair was a tumult. He looked like he’d been in a fight or had been up all night. Or both.

  “You know what? Never mind, it doesn’t even matter who did it.” His eyes had a wild exhausted look, a fierce powerlessness that frightened me. “She’s the one who put them up to it, anyway.”

  Just like that he was done with me. He let go of my wrist and started upstairs toward where Mom lay sleeping, his big work boots thumping on the steps.

  “No, wait!” I called after him in a panicky voice that came out almost as a shriek. “Don’t go up there!”

  He stopped, his big hand gripping the newel post so hard the flesh of his knuckles turned pale. “Why not?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t I go upstairs in my own house?”

  I rubbed the sore spot on my wrist where he had gripped it.

  “It was my idea,” I said quietly. “I smashed up the outhouse. With your crowbar. I did it.”

  Dad craned his neck up the stairs toward Mom’s bedroom, then looked back down at me.

  “I
don’t believe you,” he said. But he ungripped the newel post—let go of his intention—and came back down the stairs. “Prove to me you did it.”

  I was getting a little jumpy. I extended my hands, palms up, in a desperate, I-got-nothing sort of way, until suddenly I saw the answer right there in my own flesh.

  “Here!” I said, thrusting my left hand at him. “Here.”

  He closed his thick hand around mine and looked closely at my left palm, where a long dark splinter from the outhouse had pierced the meaty part below my thumb. It hurt. The splinter was ringed with red, an infection I’d nurtured by trying to gnaw it free in bed the night before.

  Dad let my hand drop in disgust.

  “Well, what possessed you to go and do such a destructive thing?” he asked angrily. “You know how I feel about preserving antiques. And I own that antique you destroyed—it’s mine! How could you possibly think it was going to sit well with me if you just took it upon yourself to trash the goddamn thing?”

  “I don’t know. It was just such a wreck. I mean, it had been there for, like, forever.”

  “But that’s just the point!” he said. “The city had a rich, complex life long before you ever came along and started having your own personal little responses to it, Griffin. It’s bigger than you.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, you do but you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t treat a rare nineteenth-century structure like garbage.”

  You could see how frustrated he was to have to explain all this to me.

  “Look,” he said. “The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and around a historic building give it all kinds of layers of collective meaning—a patina of memory and grime and experience, really—that you can see, and even feel, if you open yourself to it.”

  I thought about all this a moment.

  “The lives people lived in an old building?” I asked. “That’s what gives the building meaning?”