He tried and failed to remember the last time he’d been outdoors, or tasted fresh air, or even the last time he’d seen daylight. It was much more dangerous to venture outside the building now that the neighborhood residents had taken to stoning anyone who tried to go into the street. Anyone who left went by cover of night.
Even the police had stopped raiding the place. It cost them too many men to venture here, and though they only came in groups of thirty, forty, or more, now, they always left with fewer than they arrived.
There were children here, he realized, who’d never in their life been exposed to the open sky.
A pang in his gut heralded the awakening of a terrible hunger, but he had no food and no prospects of finding any.
The door to the front room creaked open, and he stepped inside.
A black man sat behind an overturned crate, shuffling cards for two other men. A few coins lay on the old wood. The card players glared at Cam as he entered. The dealer sneered.
“What you want? What business you got in here?”
“The window,” Cam said. “Just came to use the window, s’all.”
His voice sounded strange, his speech rhythm unfamiliar. Now, after hearing it aloud, he noticed his thoughts changing as well. The idea of killing the three men for their money flashed through his mind, and he rejected it only because the odds were against him. He resisted the violent images swirling in his brain and forced himself to look out the window.
Twilight draped the city. The lay of the streets seemed vaguely familiar, and he recognized a few scattered shapes. The name came of its own accord, and his lips mouthed the words: Five Points. The neighborhood had been called that more than a century ago. He spotted a woman walking toward a store across the dirt-paved street, and he shuddered at the first terrible impulse his now alien thoughts produced. He ignored it, searching for the landmark, the meeting of streets, the five corners where more murders had been committed than any other place in the city. Decades before Cam had lived, this had been the source of evil in New York City, a pit where robbers and killers dwelled, prostitutes thrived, and human refuse wasted away out of sight of civilized eyes. And this building, he realized, must be the infamous Old Brewery, the five-story, nearly windowless tenement that had served as home and hiding place to the blackest souls in Manhattan.
“You jack covey,” one of the card players said. “You cheating, lying sam!”
“Who are you to call anyone a cheater? You lost fair and square with the Devil books, now hand over your balsam before I cut it out of you!” said the dealer.
Cam watched them face-off, each man fondling an unseen weapon beneath his jersey. The third man threw open the door and fled into the hallway. Cam wanted to follow, but the two opponents blocked his path.
“What are you gaping at, crusher?” one said.
Acting on gut feeling Cam leapt forward pushing one of the men down and smashing his elbow into the other’s jaw. He dashed into the hallway, running as hard as his empty, cramping stomach and weary body allowed. His belly grumbled as he passed the rotting odor again and his mouth began to salivate, and he realized in repulsion what foul meat waited on the other side. This time he feared he really would vomit, though there was nothing inside him to bring up.
He ran blindly through a dim maze of filthy corridors and squalid rooms where the detritus of mankind lived like insects. He was desperate for an exit but could find none. Still he pressed on, fleeing the voices of pain and misery, the smells of sickness and disease, the sight of open wounds and warped lust. He raced down narrow hallways clogged with people camped along the walls and passed through rooms where groups huddled around the dead argued over their ruined belongings.
A woman glared at him, bare hate and craving mingled in her expression, but he saw only her withered eye and the terrible red disfigurement running from forehead to chin, the twin of the scar that marked Maia’s face.
Every turn he thought might take him closer to the outside world only led him deeper into the bowels of the building, until he collapsed against a door and gasped for breath. The card players caught up with him there, and though he knocked and pounded on the locked door behind him, his pleas for help went ignored. He turned to confront his assailants, ready to fight, but they were already upon him, stealing his blood with their knives, taking the only thing he still possessed: his life.
The pain sharpened.
Cam lay stunned on the hard surface while he caught his breath. A faint, red light filtered through his eyelids, and he opened them to see the passage to the men’s room directly overhead, the boards still in place where Hidalgo had left them. He had lost his flashlight, but in the dim fluorescence trickling down he examined the dirt around him, where he saw tracks and marks suggesting he had been dragged here from wherever he had fallen. The bones and bodies were gone, the trap door shut and lost again to blackness, and the rustling of the unseen shape silenced.
“Bennie?” Cam called out, but no reply came.
It would be foolish to venture back into the cellar with no light and no idea of where he was going or how he had made it back where he started. He wobbled to his feet and thrust upward, knocking loose the floorboards and pushing back the linoleum. The brightness dazzled him, but he welcomed the illumination and dragged himself out of the pit and onto the sticky floor above him. The bathroom was empty and Marty’s remains had been removed. It was still a ruin, but Cam could tell a period of time had passed by the tackiness of the spilled blood.
I’ve lost my mind, he thought. No. It’s real somehow. Bennie and I both saw the same vision when we touched the first skull. And something took him away, I’m certain. But how could I feel my own death twice?
Cam righted himself and readied to fight his way to the street.
Then the lights went out again.
Cam reached to his holster, but he had lost his gun somewhere below. He went for the reserve pistol at his lower back, felt the cold grip, and tore it loose. Someone nearby breathed heavily, taking in long, deep lungfuls of air.
“Who’s there?” said Cam.
“Jes’ me, crusher,” a voice said.
A flashlight clicked on, poised like the torch of a camp fire storyteller beneath the face of Bennie Hidalgo. Cam barely recognized him for the shadows across his features and the animalistic sneer that distorted his expression.
“Crap, Bennie, you scared the hell out of me,” Cam said.
The face of Hidalgo shook with laughter. “Who said I’m Bennie?”
“What are you talking about? Where did you go down there?”
“Bennie goes where we take him. Bennie does what we want,” said the voice. It was a voice from another time, another land, and it was coarse and brutal in tone. “And the addle covey cops to it a great deal, ya know. He’s part of us, and he’s not scared no more. Don’t think he’s capable of feeling fear or much else when ya get right down to them bare bones. His old ogles have seen too much.”
“Bennie, listen to me. There was something in the needle when they stabbed you. You’re flying on something, but you’re still you, okay? Concentrate on being you. I want to talk to Bennie Hidalgo, not whoever you think you are.”
“It ain’t the laudanum ruin, crusher. Not a drop of them fine poisons in this body. In most of the others, yes, most assuredly, and it makes ‘em quite receptive. So easy to dangle someone when they’ve stripped away the trappings of their very own persons and buried them in deep, dark places inside themselves,” said the thing inside Hidalgo. “Your cull threw wide his soul when he faced the slithering ones down there in the emptiness. No addle covey like him can stare us down. Now, he’s ours. And, you—no easy nut to crack, I’ll grant ya—but you’re next, and you’re going to be most useful to us.”
“If you’re not Bennie, who are you?”
“Jes’ a hackum who’s been out of the game far too long,” the thing said. “I want my life back, and I’m bringing my culls along to see we all ‘ave a good time a
gain. Been penned up too long in that damnable other place, cut off from all but the most meager contact with the folks here in this city that used to be ours. It’s been enough, though, to get what we want. A little bit here, a little bit there, and a dame at the end of a knife. We’re coming back, now, crusher, and we’re bringing our happy ways with us.”
Cam doubled over and rammed forward. He caught Hidalgo in the mid-section, lifted him up, and sprawled him backward. The flashlight spun free, and Cam smashed it with his foot, plunging them into the dark to cover his escape. Moving by memory he raced to the doorway and pushed it down. The hall lights had gone dead, too, but he crashed his way to the staircase, grabbed the banister, and ascended. From the narrow back corridor he could see the entire bar was dark, now, lit only by the oddly faint flickering of a street lamp through the little front window. The room was a twisted geometry of shadows—vague shapes assembled in implausible arrangements as if nothing were truly solid and everything was changing around him as he walked through it.
He found few familiar landmarks. The jukebox had become a throbbing hulk of some unknown substance and the back booth had taken on the aspect of a befouled church pew. His foot came down on something soft and yielding. He examined it, feeling the familiar contours of a nose, lips, a face, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he picked out the bodies littering the floor, scattered as if every one of them had shut down and fallen where they stood. They formed an eerie, poly-limbed tangle, and Cam guessed they only slept because he could hear their breathing. Maia and her friends rested there, and Dubby the bartender, and the paramedics, as well, all of them succumbed to the bizarre influences of whatever unnatural will now possessed his partner. Cam found his way among the sleepers, careful not to rouse them, and lifted himself by one foot on the edge of a chair to peer out the window to the street.
He expected half a dozen police cruisers arrayed behind barricades with cops milling around them, the ambulance, maybe a SWAT truck. He wanted to be blinded by the flashing glare of high-powered police lights and hear the crackle of radios over the heavy rain. Instead there was nothing but the street, and it was not the same street it had been when he’d entered Mission Bar.
The street lamp flickered because it was a gaslight. The electric glow of storefront neon was nowhere in sight. Rain poured down with syrupy weight, cascading upon buildings that Cam believed no longer existed, low-rising tenements and dingy shops lining cobblestone streets, long ago replaced by taller, bolder structures of steel, concrete, and blacktop. Nothing moved on the shadow-draped block, and the night thickened like rising floodwaters. A tiny weed-grown park stood opposite Cam’s vantage, fenced in by uninviting spikes of ugly black metal and occupied only by a cracked bench of wood. The scene resembled something that once, like the lungs of a corpse, had been filled with life, but that should never be filled again.
He spun around the instant he heard the low, snorting shuffle behind him, but the thing already had a grip on him. Moving too fast for him to see, it lifted him into the air and propelled his body against the bar, which had become alarmingly solid and certain.
Cam faded.
A man entered the long hall. Another followed, both dressed in police uniforms and twirling their nightsticks with calculated arrogance. Three more came after them, a breakaway party from the larger expedition scouring the building. Cam watched from a doorway. The crowd spread apart for the cops, allowing them deeper into the corridor that had become only another filthy chamber overrun by the inhabitants of the building. They called it Murderer’s Alley.
“All right, you scabs,” the first cop shouted. “A tot’s missing from the neighborhood, and we know you’ve buzzed her. You can’t hide her in here for long.”
“Best to give her up,” said another cop. “Or we’ll have to beat it out of every one of ya.”
He slapped his club against his open palm. None of the officers noticed the crowd inching between them and the exit.
A woman stepped forward, cradling something bundled in rags. “Here, crushers. I took the child, and I can’t live with the awful guilt.”
She presented the bundle but the cops didn’t take it. A low snicker chased through the crowd. It spawned a flash of awareness on the brawny officers’ faces as they grasped the nature of their situation. One of them, still hopeful of recovering the missing child, accepted the rag bundle and its contents. He unwrapped the upper folds of the cloth and looked in.
“Dear Lord preserve us,” he said and thrust the bundle back at the woman.
She laughed and let it fall to the floor, rolling over and unraveling, until the soiled materials gave up their burden: the twisted and desiccated corpse of an infant. It had turned brown and thick like bark, preserved in some unfathomable way by the rank, lightless depths and soot of the slum.
A toothless fat man pushed through the crowd and stood over the tiny remains.
“Hey, that’s me boy, Little Otto,” he said. “Otto, lad, where’ve you been playing? Yer mother’s worried sick and there won’t be any sawney for you tonight, ye little scamp.”
Laughter burst from the crowd, and the fat man shook with his chuckling. One of the cops hunched over and vomited. The dirty throng closed around them and blotted them out of Cam’s view.
Still, he could hear their screams.
Cam rubbed tears from his face, managing only to smear the wetness across his cheeks. Depression wrapped him like a cold sheet, and the part of him that wanted to give into it was shrieking in his brain. He beat it down, but he thought he might be losing the fight.
I can’t leave Silje all alone, he told himself.
The thing inside Hidalgo had stretched Cam’s body out on the bar and now stood beside him. Cam raised his revolver in a shaking hand, tried to sight it, but even at point blank range the barrel wavered too much, and the sight of his partner blurred and shimmered like a mirage. He was tired. He feared another vision would send him forever past the point of reason. They were utterly real, as if temporal walls were being rent apart and his mind and body thrust wholly into the past. There was nothing for him to do but accept everything he saw, no matter how insane it seemed. Hidalgo was possessed, strange demons roamed the chambers beneath the bar, and time and reality shifted like smoke all around him.
Red and white light flashed into the barroom. The sleeping figures had awakened. Several worked at tearing apart the furniture in search of makeshift weapons. Three stood by the front door and windows, two with handguns, and the third, Dubby, with a rifle. Some of them stood ranged throughout the room like statues, their eyes open and their skin heavy and pale, their bodies immobile.
Cam said, “What do you want?”
“How could a crusher like you understand?” said the voice in Hidalgo’s throat. “You ‘aven’t been to Hell. You ‘aven’t heard the shapes slithering in the darkness, singing their secrets to those bold enough to listen. You’ll never know their promises, boy. They ‘ave all the secrets of the beyond tucked away in their foul minds. Nothin’ is what ya think, crusher, but everything can be had for the right price. So, we’re coming back, and what once was will be again.”
“Impossible,” Cam said.
“Fer better or ill, boyo, the world’ll be reformed and our law’ll walk the streets of this city again, now and for all the days until the end of the Earth. And you’ll not stop it, do-gooder.”
“You’re from the Old Brewery, aren’t you? All of you, from Five Points,” Cam said, wiping his sleeve across his mouth.
The thing that wasn’t Hidalgo smiled. “What do ya know about it? What do ya care? Ya haven’t got much longer to live, anyway, ya know, once you’ve done your duty.”
“More than a thousand of you dwelled there pressed into every last little space, murdering each other, stealing from each other at every opportunity. That’s what I know,” Cam said, his mind dredging up everything he remembered of what his father used to tell him about the city’s old neighborhoods. “People called it the d
arkest hole in the city and smart cops wouldn’t go near it. You sold children like meat, kept women like slaves. Disease in every corner. People starving. They say a murder was committed there at least once every day for fifteen years. When they finally razed the building in the 1850s, they found bones hidden in the walls and beneath the floorboards, enough to fill a thousand sacks. They buried them where they could in nearby cemeteries, in vacant lots. And then they built a mission here to try and wash the evil away.”
“One murder a day? Do they say that?” the voice inside Hidalgo said. “Ah, well, crusher, they underestimate us, as they always did, but at least they remember us.”
“Not many,” Cam said. “Historians, maybe, and old men who cherish the past. The people living here now don’t know who you are and wouldn’t care if they did. They were halfway around the world in your time. They’ve made this place theirs. You don’t belong here anymore.”
The thing scowled. “If they knew who I was, they’d all bloody tremble in their beds at night. The bones of our prey dwell beneath countless patches of ground in this city and they’ll rise up to serve us! D’ya understand, crusher? Death and corruption feed this city, and we’re going to gorge it until it vomits up all the world’s treasures for us and us alone. We’ve got the power, now, enough to erase the years and level all the monstrosities that have stamped out the world we knew. The slithering ones promised it in return for the lives we’ve fed them, a few at first and then a touch more strength to bring in more, building power with each covey and moll we deliver, letting us spread our will farther and farther, drawing the hopeless and the savage here where death and darkness have always reigned. We will be freed tonight, restored to the living world.”
He went to the door and peered through the opening. When he turned Cam noticed the blood dribbling from a round black hole in Hidalgo’s shoulder, an exit wound.
“You’ve been shot,” he said.
“Them crushers out there ain’t like the ones I knew,” the thing said. “They wouldn’t listen ta me, but you’re one of them. You’ll know how to talk to ‘em. You’ll tell ‘em what to do and they’ll do it, and if they don’t a lot of people will die.”
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