Children of the Island

by Wright, T. M.

  God, he loved her! And missed her! And he so looked forward to the upcoming Saturday, when he could again take her on an "outing."

  Maybe he'd break through to her then. Maybe she'd break through to him.

  Chapter 24

  In the Bowery

  Whimsical Fatman was on his back; he had been mugged and he hurt, bad. His attackers, finding only sixty-five cents in his pockets, which had required several hours of panhandling to collect, had taken out their frustrations on him—and they hadn't pulled any punches. He knew his nose was broken (not for the first time), and he thought it was possible that one or two of his ribs had been cracked—his breathing was necessarily slow, and very painful.

  He thought wryly that the world was getting to be a really lousy place to live in. He tried to smile at that, but couldn't. Not from pain—though it would have stopped him anyway—but from a sudden and numbing realization: He, William Devine—Margaret and John Devine's darling little boy—was a bum!

  He lay very still, tried to control his breathing, tried to remember where he was.

  He remembered. He was in the old Elmwood Hotel, Room 402 (one of the few rooms in the long-abandoned building that still had a door and a door number attached). And he remembered that before the two creeps had appeared to take his sixty-five cents, Merlin O'Dwyer had been in the room with him ("That ain't my real name, but I like it. I don't really know what my real name is, Whimsy.").

  He moved his head so his gaze took in the entire room. Merlin was gone. Well, that was good, anyway; he'd gotten out, God bless him!

  Whimsy tried to smile again. It was the pain that stopped him this time.

  And, for a few, awful, fleeting moments he thought he would die here, in Room 402 of the old Elmwood Hotel. But then the pain subsided a bit and he was able to stand and move slowly to the door, his hand pressed hard to his rib cage.

  He stopped there, in the doorway. His brow furrowed. His peripheral vision had shown him someone standing in the open closet to his left. He turned his head to look. Merlin O'Dwyer uttered one sentence before dying: "Shit, you got it all over your pants there!" Then he toppled face forward to the floor, driving the front inch and a half of the knife in his belly straight through his back.

  Whimsy stared blankly at him. He thought that Merlin's killer must have been in a big hurry, otherwise he wouldn't have left that knife behind. It looked like a good one.

  William Devine—also known as Whimsical Fatman (Whimsy to his friends, and they numbered in the dozens)—rolled his late friend to his back, at the same time avoiding looking at the man's face, pulled the knife out, wiped it on Merlin's shirt sleeve, gave it a long once-over (it was indeed a good knife; he might get ten or fifteen dollars for it), stuck it in his pocket, and moved down the hall to the stairway, hand still pressed hard to his rib cage, his gait agonizingly slow, and blood trickling from his nose.

  Chapter 25

  One Mile Southeast of the House on the Island: Evening

  Jim Hart thought he could hear them, all around. He wasn't sure. There were more than two of them, he supposed. There were dozens, perhaps. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. He wasn't sure.

  He thought that the noises they made were very musical indeed. He thought he recognized certain melodies cast off here and there, as if in afterthought. He heard distantly, "Tie me kangaroo down sport/Tie me kangaroo down . . ." and he mentally finished it. And, "Old man river/He keeps on rollin' . . ." And, "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall/Ninety-nine bottles of beer/If one of those bottles should happen to fall . . ." Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.

  But it was not all song that he heard. He also heard low, guttural, orgasmic grunts, and a shrill, high-pitched whistling sound that was almost like a wheeze, and, from close by, the sounds of someone who was apparently very much out of breath, and below that, a man obviously in deep pain.

  He supposed that he had seen them, too—a hundred pairs of large, powder-blue eyes watching him through the early evening darkness as he made his way from the house to the boat, to shore, and then, after an hour's worth of looking, to the narrow path that would eventually lead him to the car.

  They kept their distance. They sang their songs and made their grunts. But they kept their distance. He wasn't sure why.

  It was possible, he decided, that they didn't like him very much. And if it was true, his thoughts continued, he couldn't really blame them. He was a murderer, after all.

  "Isn't that right?" he said, and heard it repeated from the darkness, again and again and again, until, like an echo, it faded away.

  And then he thought, They've always wanted to get at me. Because he couldn't remember not feeling their eyes on him, couldn't remember not hearing their disembodied voices throwing curses at him. They've always wanted to get at me! Sure. That was the business of the city dweller, wasn't it? And these were the very worst of them.

  He glanced about. He decided that they had taken the street signs down because they wanted him to become disoriented and out of touch.

  They wanted him to blunder about stupidly. So they could pretend not to notice (it was what the city dweller did best), and laugh deep inside themselves. He resolved that he would not give them that satisfaction.

  He knew where his damned apartment was, for Christ's sake!

  He didn't need the street signs.

  Only the streets.

  Because he knew this city, his city, at least as well as they did, if not better. He could get where he was going with his eyes closed, if it became necessary.

  It had all happened within the twinkling of an eye. The birthing.

  And now, en masse, the little ones were scurrying through the forest, snatching up what they could find and stuffing whatever it turned out to be—a moth, a spider, the occasional field mouse—hungrily into their mouths.

  Seth and Elena shadowed them from a distance. The education of the little ones had to begin immediately. There would be cold days ahead, and colder nights.

  And some of them would wither and die, it was true.

  And some would lag behind.

  But most would follow.

  And as they scurried along they turned their heads now and then and stared at the man moving slowly on the dark path.

  Seth stared, too. And Elena. Because the man puzzled and confused them (the same way that the sun would confuse them, even frighten them, if it came up one morning over the wrong horizon, or if the earth beneath their feet, the earth which was their mother, turned suddenly to granite).

  They stayed clear of the man; the little ones because at this point in their new lives, it was instinctual to stay away from something so very strange and disoriented; Seth and Elena because although the man might be a threat to them, and to the little ones, they weren't certain what kind of threat, or how to deal with it.

  Because when they reached out to him they found that he was not where they were, in these woods—he was in another place entirely.

  A place filled with people and cluttered with buildings, and feverish with passion and violence.

  Chapter 26

  In Manhattan

  Winifred Haritson's front door, the only entrance to her apartment from the building's interior, was made of steel. The surrounding walls were made of cement. The door's four locks—two dead bolts, a chain, and a simple latch—would hold. She had no doubt of it. It was the windows that worried her. For the last half hour she had been trying with every ounce of her strength to get them closed. One had rattled in its casing and dropped a couple inches, leaving it about an inch short of the lock, and the other hadn't moved at all.

  She pressed her face hard into one of the screens. There was a fire escape ten feet to the right, for apartment 436 (Mrs. Dyson's apartment, she remembered). The fire escape hadn't been used in twenty-five years. It had, she thought, probably long since rusted shut. But that gave her no comfort at all. Because they would figure out a way to use it. They were good at that kind of thing. They had done it befo
re, a thousand times. They found nothing impossible.

  She gave one of the windows another hard pull. It wouldn't budge. She heard herself curse. It surprised her. She couldn't remember cursing, not since shortly before leaving home nearly sixty years before ("Oh, Christ, Daddy, please don't do that!" In response he had merely grinned at her, a big, leering, malicious grin, and had continued beating her. She still bore scars from it).

  She moved quickly to the south wall of the apartment, put her ear to it, listened. She heard nothing. She rapped on the cement, softly at first, then much harder. She glanced at her knuckles; they were bleeding. "Mrs. Dyson!" she said, too softly. She hit the wall with the palm of her hand. "Mrs. Dyson!" she repeated, louder. Mrs. Dyson did not answer.

  She cursed again, went to the phone, lifted the receiver, listened. It was dead. She set it down.

  "Oh Lord, what am I going to do?" she blubbered. "What am I going to do?" She had no idea what she was going to do. She was as frightened and as tense at that moment as she had ever been.

  So, when she heard the loud, demanding, double knock on the steel door, her fear elevated geometrically, adrenaline pushed through her veins, her blood pressure dropped. And she fainted.

  The building where Winifred Haritson had chosen, out of necessity, to spend her declining years was three-quarters of a century old. It had been condemned several times by the New York City Bureau of Sanitation and the New York City Buildings Department, and had also been the scene of a dozen fires in as many years. Upon its construction it was christened The Mohawk, for undetermined reasons, but the name never stuck. Instead, the building's steady stream of transients (which had become a trickle shortly after Winifred's arrival) called it "The Stone," because its nondescript white cement walls and its plodding, unaesthetic massiveness made it look very much like a huge, rectangular white stone that someone had put windows in.

  As a place for people to live, it was a failure from the start. Its complex and labyrinthine heating system had been poorly designed and installed. With substandard parts and workmanship (thanks to payoffs from the heating contractor to certain corrupt city officials), it was constantly in need of repair, and never seemed to work properly. The wiring (thanks to the same kinds of payoffs to the same city officials) was equally substandard and inefficient.

  By decree of the city government, no one was supposed to be living in the building, but desperation makes people ingenious, and ways had been devised to reactivate the heating gas and the electricity, and even the telephones (though only as an intercom system within The Stone itself). For several years, the building had operated as a kind of sovereign entity inside Manhattan.

  Lou Willis was its superintendent and troubleshooter. If The Stone had indeed been a sovereign nation, he would have been its benevolent ruler. He saw to it that the elevators were kept running, because all but two of The Stone's dozen or so residents were very old; that the "riff-raff" was kept out; that the inspectors were paid off regularly; and that, in general, The Stone did not come toppling down on the people inside it (an unlikely prospect because, whatever else could be said about it, The Stone was structurally sound).

  Lou Willis, however, was no more. His body, still bound and gagged, languished at the bottom of the elevator shaft. He wore a look of great surprise on his face—probably because the five young men who had overpowered him had done it so quickly, or perhaps because they had decided with such suddenness to throw him down the elevator shaft, and then had carried it out with no hesitation whatsoever. These boys aren't fooling around! he thought, just before they threw him down the shaft. Lou was a realist.

  And so, a bloody coup had been staged.

  The Stone had a new ruler.

  "Hey Mama, you wanna come outa dere or maybe you want us to come in?!" The boy, age seventeen, listened for a moment. He heard nothing from inside Winifred Haritson's apartment. He scowled. "I said you want us maybe to come in dere?" he growled, in a tone that had never failed to elicit a response from anyone. He listened again. Winifred Haritson's apartment stayed quiet. "Mother-fuck!" he hissed, and turned to the boy, age sixteen, beside him. "Get the can opener!" he commanded. The boy turned and started for the elevator at once. He pressed the Down button, but it failed to light. "Hey," he complained, grinning nervously, "this ain't workin'." He pressed the button again, much harder, and again, slapping it. "It ain't workin'," he repeated, and nodded quickly at the elevator door.

  "'Course it ain't workin', dumb shit, 'cuz we threw that asshole down it," said the seventeen-year-old, "and he screwed up the fuckin' cables."

  The sixteen-year-old thought a moment. "Oh yeah," he whispered dimly, and remembered that they had used the stairs to get up here, to the fourth floor. "Yeah, I remember," and he turned and moved quickly, still nervous, to the stairway.

  "The can opener" was a device employed by police and firefighters to free people trapped in their cars after an accident. It had a vague resemblance to a huge pair of grass shears and was used when the larger, gasoline-powered units were not available.

  It was an ill-conceived device. It rarely worked properly; its long blades dulled too quickly; it required several men to operate it, one of whom had to force himself into painful contortions; and it was expensive. Consequently, the can openers weren't used very much, and sometimes were left, conveniently, at the scene of an accident. Which was where The Ravens—the particular street gang which had taken over Winifred Haritson's apartment building—had found one.

  Jim Hart had a rather tenuous connection with The Stone. He had passed it several thousand times on his way to work, and had thought, once or twice, That's damned ugly! He had gone on to wonder what bastard of an architect could possibly have designed it.

  Jim Hart would never see the building again.

  Georgie McPhail's connection with The Stone was somewhat less tenuous. He had burglarized it twice, very early in his young career. He had come away each time with far less than he'd hoped for, and it didn't take him long to figure out that the few people still living in The Stone didn't have even enough material goods for themselves, let alone for the hungry family of a young cat burglar.

  Joyce Dewitte had no idea The Stone even existed, although her great-grandfather, Simon Lucretius Dewitte, was the bastard of an architect who had designed it.

  Sam Campbell had no connection with it at all.

  Whimsical Fatman had spent one drunken night in The Stone several years after coming to New York, before going, permanently he supposed, to the Bowery. An unnerving experience in the building that night convinced him that it was haunted, and so he had hurriedly left the following morning.

  Fifteen years earlier; in a housing development near Penn Yann, New York:

  Norm Gellis groped blindly for the latch on Joe's collar while Joe whimpered pathetically at him. "It's okay, dog," Norm said. "We'll get you inside and put you down in the cellar and you'll be warm as toast. What' d you think—I was gonna leave you out here to freeze your poor nuts off?" Norm wished frantically that he'd put his gloves on. The task of finding the small latch on Joe's metal collars—a task made difficult, anyway, by the storm, and by Joe's nervous twitching—was made almost impossible by the fact that his fingers had become numb already, and so were next to useless. "Fucking shit!" Norm hissed. Finally, he found the latch; he twisted it hard to the left; it wouldn't give. "Goddammit!"

  Joe whimpered louder.

  "Shut up!" Norm commanded, and whacked the dog on the snout with his open left hand. The dog stopped whimpering abruptly.

  Norm twisted the latch again. It was frozen. "Chrissakes!" He took the tether in one hand and followed it to where it was attached to a post screwed into the ground twenty feet away. He put his hands on the post and winced at the burning coldness of the metal; he turned the post counterclockwise, aware—as it gave with agonizing slowness in the hardened soil—that the wind and cold were sapping his strength by the second. He thought about going back into the house for a breather, and to put
his gloves on, when he realized that Joe's tether had slackened. "Joe?" he said. He pulled the tether; it was broken; in panic, Norm realized, Joe had broken it.

  Chapter 27

  On Route 392, Twenty-five Miles East of the House on the Island

  John Marsh glanced in his rearview mirror. In the light from the dashboard he saw that he was smiling. It was no wonder why, he thought. He was a happy man—his search was nearly at an end, he was about to corner his prey, at last.

  That, he supposed, was probably a fantasy. Seth Freeman was not about to be "cornered" by anyone, especially by an old man with an old score to settle. Seth Freeman was a magician, a superman, and bringing him down would require divine intervention. And John Marsh did not expect, or believe in, divine intervention.

  But still he had no doubt that a confrontation would occur. And soon. He could feel it in his aged bones. He fancied that tracking the magician all these years had turned him into something of a magician himself. He liked the idea—Duel of the Magicians. Wouldn't that be something?

  He had thought it before and now he thought it again: It was probable, even likely, that senility was catching up with him; undoubtedly he was quite fortunate to have staved it off so long. It had claimed both his mother and father at relatively early ages (sixty-five and sixty-eight respectively) and his grandparents, too; so if it was flirting with him now, at age seventy-three, he really couldn't complain. Just so he could make a bargain with it. He would let it catch up with him—Hell, he'd welcome it—if it would only let him finish what he'd set out to do fifteen years before.

  "How's that sound?" he said to the German Shepherd sitting up in the pickup truck's passenger seat. He reached over and scratched the dog's ear. "You think I got another six months, Joe?" Joe inclined his massive gray head into the man's hand. "Oh," Marsh said, "you like that, huh?"