Streets of Shadows

by Tom Piccirilli

  Travel interested Carver, and he wished he’d done more of it during his forty-two years on the earth. He had never been on an airplane and had never ventured beyond the South, not to say that he had no desire to inhale the air in different places.

  Ashley had been vague about his target’s occupation. Usually, Carver cared only about the time, place, and possible complications, but this one was strange.

  In the refrigerator, he found only bottles of water, crammed together and filling every available inch. Nothing else.

  Frowning, he shut the door.

  He eased into the chair and passed the time sending text messages to Ashley. She said she couldn’t wait to see him after the job was done. He couldn’t wait to see her either, felt the familiar tingle in his spine when he thought about sliding into the sheets beside her.

  She reminded him to make it clean. He reminded her that he was a veteran and there was no need to worry.

  He’d waited an hour and the clock had ticked past eight-thirty when he heard a key in the front door. He slipped on his latex gloves.

  He had his switchblade ready, too.

  The door creaked open. Carver had disabled the ceiling fixture light, so when his target flipped the switch, the apartment remained dark. The only light in the unit came from the bulb above the oven range.

  Carver heard the guy mutter. He tried the switch a couple more times before giving up.

  By then, Carver had flanked him. As the man shuffled to the kitchen area with a backpack, Carver came up behind him. He slapped his hand across the man’s mouth.

  Carver was known for his big hands. At twelve, he’d been able to palm a basketball. The hands were inherited from his father, or so he’d heard from his grandma before she died and he became a ward of the state. His dad had played college football in Alabama, had been able to pluck out of the air anything tossed in his direction. That was before a taste for heroin had exiled him from the game and his life.

  With his other hand, Carver drove the switchblade deep into the man’s carotid artery.

  The man let out a garbled yelp. His backpack hit the floor. He thrashed, and Carver lost hold of him. But he wasn’t concerned. His man would bleed out.

  The poor sucker sagged to the tile, his breaths coming in gasps. In the weak light, Carver finally got a look at him: an average looking dude in his twenties, the kind of guy who might have bagged your groceries at the supermarket, a face that would elicit only a shrug from strangers when his photo was flashed on the news.

  Carver wiped off the blade with a towel he’d found in the bathroom.

  Squirming on the floor, the man mumbled something. Carver thought he said, “You’re it.”

  The next thing Carver knew, the guy flicked his fingers at him. Carver felt wetness spatter his lips and cheeks, and involuntarily, he tasted the substance. The coppery tang was unmistakable: blood.

  Carver kicked the man in the ribs. The guy grinned at him through a rictus of pain. Carver realized that he was laughing with what little life he had remaining.

  Sick bastard.

  He left the dying man and went to the bathroom. He checked in the mirror. Several drops of blood spotted his dark-skinned face.

  He splashed handfuls of cold water across his skin. Better, but he swore he could feel that bit of blood he had tasted making its way down his throat, leaving a burning trail in its wake like a jalapeño pepper. Probably only his imagination, but the entire incident revolted him.

  When he returned to the front room, the man was dead.

  He checked the guy’s backpack, discovered nothing of interest: only MARTA schedules and brochures for blood donation centers in metro Atlanta. Carver took nothing and got out of there.

  * * *

  Later that night, Carver visited Ashley.

  Ashley lived in Cabbagetown, on the east side of Atlanta, across the street from Oakland cemetery. She rented a one-bedroom loft on the seventh floor of one of the old cotton mill buildings that had been converted into apartments. He respected how some people found creative ways to put old things to new uses.

  When he knocked on the door, it bounced open. How many times had he warned her about locking up?

  All of the electric lights had been shut off, but burning candles were spaced throughout the apartment, giving it the appearance of a chapel prepared for some secret rite. The cool air carried the fragrance of a spicy incense that tickled his nostrils.

  He found Ashley in the bedroom. She sat in the center of the mattress, legs crossed Indian style, eyes closed. She wore only lace panties and a bra. Ear buds trailed from her ears to her iPhone.

  She looked so tranquil that he stood in the doorway and watched her, drinking in every detail of her finely sculpted body. Candlelight gave a luxurious patina to her bronzed skin. She might have been a statue of an Indonesian deity.

  He knew he wasn’t a handsome man. Rough living had given a hardness to his face that tended to keep most women at a distance. The women he had been with had been like him, scarred by a life lived in the margins.

  But Ashley was different. Not only was she beautiful, she was innocent, naïve even.

  He had met her at a bar three weeks ago, a place he frequented that served cheap Budweiser and good burgers. She had been sitting at the counter nursing a glass of ice water, and she had the air of a challenge about her that kept men away like a force field. He had sat two stools away from her, intending only to enjoy the view of a lovely woman.

  She had sent him a drink and invited him to come home with her that night.

  A week after they had met, she’d asked him about killing a man. Perhaps she wasn’t as naïve as she appeared.

  “You should be against the law, girl,” he said.

  She removed her ear buds and opened her eyes. Her irises were as deep as the ocean. Carver had pegged her age at early thirties, based on the suppleness of her skin, but sometimes when she looked at him, she seemed to have the wizened soul of an elder.

  “Was your work clean?” she asked. She had a soft Spanish accent.

  “Of course it was.”

  He stripped down to his boxers and eased onto the bed. He placed his hand on her thigh, ran his fingers across her pliant skin.

  She clasped his hand. “You wore gloves?”

  “Relax. I’m a veteran. Nothing will be traced back to us.”

  “No blood touched you?”

  “Not a drop,” he said, wondering if she would detect his lie. He kissed her shoulder. “You forget to close the door again. The city isn’t safe, baby. You need to take precautions.”

  “You’re my precaution.”

  “But I’m not always here. I know the streets, I was raised on them. There are wolves out there, hunting.”

  “There are things worse than wolves,” she said.

  He didn’t know what she meant, but he couldn’t argue with it.

  “It’s all good,” he said.

  “How did it feel, to do it?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t know the man. It was only a job I said I’d do for you.”

  She kissed him and pulled him on top of her, her legs circling his waist, her heels digging into his back. She loved for him to be on top, she said, to feel him thrusting into her and shuddering. She never made a sound, would only look up at him with a smile that urged him to go deeper.

  Later, lying on sweat-soaked sheets, coasting along the edge of sleep, Carver found himself wondering why he had agreed to kill a man for no promised payment. In his entire life he’d never done such a thing.

  But he had never met a woman like Ashley, either.

  * * *

  Sometime that night, Carver bolted out of sleep. He was slathered in sweat, and his stomach ached as if he’d consumed a toxic meal.

  The only candle still burning in the room revealed that Ashley’s side of the bed was empty. The woman was an insomniac, sleeping in snatches of time or not at all. Probably she was on the balcony smoking a cigarette.

  He
shuffled down the short hallway. With every step, nausea sloshed through his gut. He stumbled into the washroom, not bothering to switch on the light, and reached the toilet bowl just in time to vomit a dark stream into the water.

  He was hunched over the toilet for several minutes. It felt as if his guts were being turned inside out, but the pain eased as he expelled the contents of his digestive tract.

  He didn’t understand it. Usually, he had a stomach like a black hole. And he’d eaten nothing unusual before doing the job at the apartment, had only a sandwich from a fast food joint.

  He flipped on the light and looked into the toilet bowl.

  The water was black, and it had a tarry consistency. Carver put his hand to his mouth. Some of the substance speckled his lips; his fingers came away sticky. And his mouth held a sour, gritty taste.

  He felt someone watching him. He turned and saw Ashley in the doorway, clad in a green silk robe molded to her curves.

  “You sick?” she asked.

  Looking away, he flipped down the toilet lid.

  “No,” he said.

  “You look pale, if a dark-skinned man could look pale.”

  “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” He grabbed a wad of tissue and blotted it against his mouth. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Alone again, he examined his face in the mirror. As Ashley had noted, some of the color had drained out of his skin. The last time he’d looked like that, he had been battling a severe flu.

  He turned on the faucet and washed out his mouth, and rinsed his face, too.

  Back in the bedroom, Ashley was listening to music on her iPhone, but he felt her watching him as he burrowed back into the bed.

  * * *

  The next morning, he woke up late for work.

  “Shit.” The stomach upset that had awakened him earlier had passed, but his vision was weird: objects were blurred at the edges, as if viewed through an unfocused lens.

  A shower and a glass of water helped clarify things.

  Ashley was gone already, had left without waking him. She did that sometimes, vanished with no explanation of where she’d gone, but she always would come back, and he was always welcome in her bed.

  He hadn’t spent the night in his own place, a room at a friend’s house in Decatur, since the night he’d met Ashley, had returned only to pack some clothes and other necessities. His friend would be expecting rent soon, and Carver planned to pay it, but he was going to need a job to manage rent. Showing up an hour late wasn’t going to help.

  He worked at a small but busy auto garage south of downtown. He didn’t have any formal training as a mechanic, but he was good with his hands and had spent much of his life tearing things apart and putting them back together. The owner of the shop, Will, had hired Carver on the recommendation of a mutual friend. Carver had never disappointed. Until then.

  “You’re never late, man,” Will said. Bald with a thick goatee, he reminded Carver of the famed middleweight boxer, Marvin Hagler. “You alright?”

  “Had a rough night,” Carver said. “Sorry about being late. It won’t happen again.”

  “You’ve got bay three. We’re behind already.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Carver was standing underneath a Dodge balanced on the hydraulic lift, performing an oil change, when he happened to glance across the garage and saw a pair of shapely brown-skinned legs . . . followed by a long, reptilian tail.

  He blinked.

  Did I just see that?

  The walker disappeared around the corner of the garage door, near the lobby. Carver wiped his eyes with the handkerchief he kept in his pocket.

  I imagined that. It couldn’t have been real.

  But he was hurrying from underneath the vehicle and heading across the service bays, to the window on the garage’s far wall that offered a view of the customer lobby. As he walked, he felt his right eyelid twitching, a new sensation.

  He looked through the window and spotted the owner of the legs: an attractive woman in a pink sundress. She waited in line for service, smiling faintly, as if she were aware of the attention she elicited and found it amusing.

  But Carver saw the tail, too.

  Coated in greenish scales, thick as a rope, perhaps six feet long, it slithered to and fro around her slender ankles. A fearsome-looking barbed sting glistened at the tip.

  I’ve got to be losing my damn mind.

  “Checking out the view?” Will said, coming to stand beside him at the glass. “Ain’t nothing like the ladies of the ATL, man.”

  Carver stared at him. “You don’t . . . you don’t see it?”

  “See what?” Will frowned. “You know her?”

  The woman stepped to the counter. The attendant running check-in, a guy named Ben, came from around the counter to speak to her. As Carver watched, the woman smiled at Ben—and her tail slithered between Ben’s legs and probed right up his ass.

  Nausea quivered through Carver. But Ben seemed oblivious to the violation. He was laughing at something the woman said, while her tail was plugged deep in his butt. Segments of her tail throbbed rhythmically, as if it were pumping in some sort of venom . . . or sucking something out of him.

  “Carver?” Will asked. “Yo, back to earth, home boy.”

  But Carver was watching the woman. As she was speaking to Ben, her tail rammed up his ass, he saw a forked tongue poke from between her lips and sample the air.

  He turned away from the window, trembling. Will gripped his shoulder.

  “Man, you all right?” he asked.

  “Just need a break. Be back in ten.”

  He holed up in the staff restroom at the back of the garage. Gripping the edges of the sink, he drew deep breaths and stared at his face in the mirror.

  That was when he noticed the portal.

  * * *

  The mirror should have reflected the brick wall behind Carver. Instead of the wall, however, he saw a black doorway, large enough for a man of his size to pass through without bending over.

  He spun to look behind him. He saw only the wall that he expected to see.

  But when he turned to look in the mirror again, he saw the portal.

  He closed his eyes. He wasn’t a religious man, though in his youth, every Sunday, his grandma had used to dress him in a suit that had once been his father’s, and drag him to her Baptist church and force him to sit through three-hour sermons.

  But he whispered a prayer: “Please, God. Help me. I’m going nuts, I think.”

  He felt his right eyelid twitching. He opened his eyes.

  The portal was still there, reflected in the soap-spotted glass.

  Could it have been real? Why not? The Bible, he remembered, was full of miraculous stories: God’s voice speaking from a burning bush, the Red Sea parting, the man swallowed by a whale, Lazarus waking from the dead. Why not portals in mirrors and strange people with lizard tails and snake tongues?

  What purpose did the doorway serve, anyway?

  He stepped to the wall. Slowly, he touched it. He felt only brick.

  He couldn’t step through the doorway; he could only see it. But someone had to be using it—why else would it have existed?

  He thought of the pretty woman in the lobby. A cold wave of understanding swept over him.

  He hurried out of the restroom.

  * * *

  “Ben’s gone,” Will said, when Carver rushed into the lobby. Will was behind the counter working in Ben’s place. “He left to drop off a customer at work.”

  “The woman in the pink dress?” Carver asked.

  Will winked. “Can you blame a brother? I ain’t mad at him.”

  Muttering under his breath, Carver stepped out into the late-morning sunshine. The auto shop was located on a busy intersection crammed with fast food joints, gas stations, hair supply stores, pawn shops.

  Carver didn’t know what to do next—until he spotted the man standing at the bus stop across the street.

  Appearing
to be in his early forties, he was tall and slender and handsome, dressed in a charcoal suit and carrying a leather briefcase, as if on his way to a corporate job. The impression was ruined by the purple-black tail that flopped around his legs.

  Carver’s eyelid twitched. He’s another one of them.

  Carver crossed the intersection. A MARTA bus groaned on its way to the stop. Carver quickened his pace.

  He got in line behind the man, keeping his distance from the questing tail.

  As the man ascended the steps to board the bus, his tail darted toward the bus driver’s face. The driver was a black man who looked to be a hundred years old.

  The tail plunged right into his mouth, sting and all.

  Carver nearly choked.

  “I don’t have any money,” the man said. “But I need this ride. Will you help a brother out?”

  The driver waved him on board. Smiling, the man took a seat a few rows down the aisle.

  Carver paid the fare and sat on a seat across the aisle from the alien. The bus grumbled down the road. Carver wrung his hands, heart thudding.

  Now what?

  Carver cleared his throat. “I know what you are.”

  The man turned, eyebrows arched. His strange tongue flickered.

  “Ah, you’ve been marked, I can smell it.” He chuckled. “Whose little morsel are you?”

  “Huh? I’m no one’s morsel.”

  He smirked. “You have no idea, little morsel.”

  “What the hell are you?” Carver asked.

  The man’s tail swept off the floor and danced inches away from Carver’s face, sting glistening. Carver shuddered. He thought about his switchblade, but wondered if it would be any use in severing a tail that would have otherwise been invisible if he hadn’t acquired his special gift of perception.

  “You’ll get off at the next stop if you know what’s good for you,” the alien said.