Vinny snorted. “Anybody with any sense could see the place hasn’t been lived in for--”
“Why now?” Gina’s soft voice laid over Vinny’s. “Why after all these years?”
Kate didn’t answer. She looked out the window. The sickness was still in her, but maybe she was getting used to it. Resigned, anyway. After a moment or two, she said simply, “I guess maybe it was time.”
**
Kate tossed the room key onto the bureau and snapped on the light. The room was no different from another other hotel room; pictures bolted to the walls, striped bedspread with matching drapes, carpeting the color of pigeons. She slid her arms out of her coat and shook the moisture from her hair.
The letter was still in her coat pocket.
She’d have to read it sometime, but like going to the old house on Shurtliff Street, she just wasn’t ready. Bo had something to tell her. Something important. Something that said she was right.
I’m not sure I can face that. I’m not sure I can at all.
She saw Bo again, the Ouija on her knees, her face pale and drawn.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Bo had asked, her voice hollow.”Do you think we can still call him back?”
Kate hadn’t answered right away and when she did speak, Bo had stared at her. “If he came back…” the board on Bo’s knees moved ever so slightly, as if the thing it could call was listening. “If we call him back, I don’t think we’ll be strong enough to make him leave. It’s getting harder every time to make him go away. Can’t you feel it?”
Bo nodded. “But could we do it?” she whispered, “if we wanted to?”
“Yes,” Kate answered.”But we won’t. We won’t ever call him again.”
But she knew that was lie. Even back then.
Bo would call him back.
It had taken years for her to put that spring behind her. Years to forget the images that came whenever she closed her eyes. Over active imagination, her mother had said. Not a living nightmare, just too much pretend.
But now, in the space of one day, she was back in the nightmare…and the nightmare was real.
Chapter 7
Vinny
Mrs. Dobens was asleep.
Vinny knew because the porch was empty. Mrs. Dobens suffered terrible from insomnia and she spent most nights sitting in her parlor, her chair drawn up close to the front window where she could see the full length of Essex Street. When she heard the knocking of Vinny’s engine round the corner from Congress Ave, she’d open the front door and hobble out to the porch. By the time Vinny had the old Chevy parked, Mrs. Dobens would be lowering herself into the aluminum chair next to the brick column.
“Good even,” she’d call to him, the Polish accent making the double o in good hard and fast. Gut instead of good. Vinny would hear the hopeful expectation and she’d say, “Have you got a minute for tea?”
Most nights, Vinny didn’t. Most nights, he was dog tired, eyes burning, muscles quivering from exhaustion, his brain on overdrive. But he’d walk up to Mrs. Dobens porch anyway and stand just a few feet below her, resting his forearms on the railing, chatting as the jets roared overhead, red lights flashing among the stars.
There was something almost magical about the city in the middle of the night. The streets looked clean, glittering in the moonlight, the quiet so soft it felt like a flannel blanket had been thrown over the whole of Chelsea. It was like he and Mrs. Dobens were the only two people left in the world, and it was…peaceful. Vinny would stand on the first step of her porch, leaning against the brick post, chatting about nothing at all as his mind quieted.
When Vinny turned the corner onto Essex after dinner at the restaurant, his headlights hit the Dobens’ house then arced away. His eyes automatically went to the old lady’s front door, expecting to see it opening just a crack and then the old woman’s cane coming out first like a dog at the end of its leash.
The door stayed closed.
She’s asleep, Vinny thought again. Good for her.
Only it didn’t feel good for him. He wanted to talk to her tonight. Hell, if he was being honest, he needed to talk to her. Mrs. Dobens, he’d say to her, let me ask you something. If you haven’t seen a friend – a close friend, a friend from the old days – in a long time and all of a sudden that friend is back and you find you ain’t got much to say to her, what would you do? And he’d listen while the old lady told him, and then he’d ask, What if you had something important you had to ask that friend. Something real important-
Real important? she’d ask, her voice soft and gentle like one of those shampoo commercials, What is this real important thing you have to ask your friend from the old days?
Of course, he wouldn’t be able to tell her.
Hell, he couldn’t even tell Gina, let alone Mrs. Dobens.
Vinny sat behind the wheel, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. His eyes stayed on the window, but the light stayed off.
C’mon, Mrs. Dobens. Tonight, of all nights, I’d like that cup of tea.
Still no light. Vinny sighed and opened the door, climbed out slowly, eyes still on the window.
Nothing.
Vinny turned away from Mrs. Dobens’ apartment and crossed the street to his own. He took the steps to his second-floor street front slowly, his head beginning to pound. He knew he wouldn’t sleep.
When Cathy left him, he’d found peace in a bottle and then the ultimate in self-pity in a drinking binge that began when he opened his eyes and ended each night passed out cold on the couch, the bottle close to his hand so that when he woke up, he could swig the last of the booze before dragging himself to his feet. The binge lasted days, during which he didn’t bother to leave home, didn’t bother to call work, eat, change his clothes. His world had changed, suddenly and drastically. He woke and understood in that instant before his hand reached for the almost empty bottle that dropping into Vodka wasn’t helping him any. He stopped drinking on the third day of the jag—
(on the third day, He rose again, according to the scriptures)
and hadn’t touched booze since.
Well, the hard stuff, anyway.
A brain that wouldn’t shut down at night was a by-product of sobriety. As soon as he laid down, he’d start thinking, a million different unconnected thoughts, random things that seemed vital and important in the dark, but tomorrow morning, those same problems wouldn’t matter a tinker’s damn.
But if Mrs. Dobens had been awake—
His thought broke off. He turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The apartment was deathly quiet. It smelled musty and unused, no traces of Cathy’s scent left. He threw his keys on the table next to the front door, hung his coat on the hook, slipped off his shoes and walked in stocking feet to the kitchen. He left the lights off as he got a beer, popped the top and wandered into the living room, peering out the curtains to look at Mrs. Dobens’ house across the way. He sighed and sat in the easy chair, the leather cracking a little.
Well, Mrs. D., I got a lot to talk about, so I guess maybe I’ll just dig right in, okay?
Okay, she answered in his mind, You go right on and tell me.
Only he didn’t tell her right away. He took a swig of his beer and watched the street and his mind started to wander. When he stopped drinking, he’d gone to Mrs. Dobens and apologized. I’ve been an ass, he said.
Don’t swear, Vincent. It is not nice.
I’ve been a real…his voice faltered while he searched for an appropriate word. A real idiot. Walking around in the middle of the night, I know I was probably loud-
Crying, she told him. You have been weeping.
He stopped, ashamed. Cryin? He repeated.
Yes, you have been walking the streets, weeping, crying to God. Asking why this has happened to you? Why did your wife leave you for that man? Why did you spend so many years in prison? Why are you alone?
Vinny rubbed a hand over his lips. So you heard all that, huh? he’d asked, feeling the heat cre
ep up his face. So the whole damn block knows my sorry ass business?
No, Mrs. Dobens told him, not the whole block. Just me. And Vincent, I understand.
He hung his head, looking down at the boards of her porch.
Well, he told her, you’ve been good to me and I’ve been a monster-
And then she grabbed his arm and squeezed so tight it made his eyes water. “No,” her voice shook, her eyes blazed. “If it is one thing I have learned, Vincent, is that we are all monsters. There is a monster in every man.
“Okay Missu-“
“No. It is not okay. You listen to me, hard.”
She led him into her parlor, an old fashioned room with doilies on the armrests of overstuffed chairs and lace runners on the tables. He’d sat in a flowered arm chair, the scent of dried roses and cinnamon almost over whelming as she placed a cup of tea in front of him.
“I was in a camp,” she told him. At first, he thought she meant a camp like in the country, a log cabin, maybe, with a fireplace and animal heads hanging on the walls, but as soon as he looked at her face, he knew that wasn’t what she meant. “Auschwitz.”
The word dropped between them like a rock. Vinny looked at the white-haired old lady, her round, pink cheeks, blue eyes behind thick glasses, her hands folded together into her lap and he forgot about feeling uncomfortable and out of place.
“You?”
She nodded, her head moving up and down just once. “From 1943 until the camp was liberated.” Her eyes held his. “I was eight in 1943, Vincent. Too young to understand the war and what it means, but old enough to learn what it takes to survive. I was not good in that camp, Vincent, because to be good and noble meant to die. And I did not want to die. The SS officers, I did whatever they told me to do and I lived.”
Vinny rubbed a hand over his chin. There was a faint scratching sound; flesh against stubble. “Was your family with you?
Again, the up-down nod. “Yes. I had two sisters, one brother, my parents, uncles, aunts. We could have filled a whole barracks, if we had been allowed. Most of my family did not reach the barracks. The men were shot before we reached the camp. We heard the guns fire even through the walls of the cars. The rattle of bullets, it is not like you imagine, not like a sound on television, but it is a sound you instantly know. Here.” She touched her left breast, her eyes never leaving Vinny’s. “Even though we could not see it, we knew what it was. And then the train began to move again. We reached the camp in four days. We were ordered out, so tired and weak by then, Vincent, that many could not stand. The SS officers were on the platform, German Shepherd dogs on leashes by their sides, and they divided us into groups. I remember the way the Camp Commandant looked at me, his eyes so cold they did not possess any human spirit at all, and he gestured his head to the right and another soldier screamed, ‘move, move’ to me and I ran as fast as I could to the women standing on the right side of the platform. My mother, my aunts, my two sisters, they were sent to the left.”
She stopped speaking and Vinny swallowed. Her voice, when she started talking again, was so soft Vinny had to strain to hear her. “I saw the smoke rising from the crematorium. I did not know at the time I would never see them again, I suppose I thought we were going to different barracks, that is all. It wasn’t until I was ordered into block DD, my head shaved, my clothes taken away, my skin burning from the lice chemicals, that I learned left meant they had been sent to the gas chambers and were dead. But that is not what I have to tell you.” She leaned forward, her hands clasped together so tightly Vinny could see her fingers turning white. “What I learned, Vincent, is this: the will to live overtakes the will to be good.”
Her blue eyes filled with tears and her chin trembled. “We will turn pain away from ourselves and give it to another to stay alive, Vincent. There is a monster inside of us, Vincent. It is in our souls. No one knows what he or she will do when faced with life in hell. No one knows if the monster will be set free, or kept hidden. A monster in every man.”
“I know,” Vinny said. “I wouldn’t hurt someone else just to save my sorry ass.”
She put her hand on his arm. “Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d be the one in a thousand. But maybe, Vincent, maybe you would.”
Her words came back to him more than once, hadn’t they?
A monster in every man.
He’d seen the monster, the one that lived in a man. Vinny rested his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. Maybe if he stayed here and just rested… but as soon as his lids lowered, his brain whirled up. He didn’t want to think about Mrs. Dobens anymore. He didn’t want to think about Bo. He forced himself to think about business. The invoices would have to be mailed first thing in the morning. They should have gone out last week, but Lacy had forgotten – again. He might have to fire her and that would be lousy, really lousy, because Lacy was Jimmy Steck’s kid and Jimmy was a friend from the old days. He’d been friends with Jimmy in the first grade, drawn to the kid by something more basic than toy trucks and kick the can.
Jimmy came to school with black eyes and split lips, too. It takes one to know one, Vinny thought drowsily.
A monster in every man…
Yeah, that’s true all right, Mrs. D. I saw the monster in my old man and I know that Jimmy saw the same monster in his.
The monster who came home from work in dark blue work clothes, the cloth darker under the arms because his father was a big man who sweated a lot. A big man with hands like hams and ears that were close to his head. A big man who expected to say something once, and Jesus help you if you didn’t hear it right the first time.
“How many times did I tell you to clean your room?”
Vinny stood in front of him, hands itching to go to his backside to protect it. “Twice,” he whispered, unsure how many time his father had told him to clean his room because it didn’t matter, anyway. His father had come home after slaving all friggin day and did anyone appreciate it? Anyone at all?? When his father was home from work, it meant one thing: the beatings were about to commence.
“Twice,” his father’s eyes were small and narrow. “Twice.” He grunted as sweat beaded on his forehead and Vinny tensed, waiting for that huge hand to fly out of nowhere and cuff him, please let it be the hand instead of the belt… but the hand was straying toward the buckle and that meant, that meant-
--Vinny’s eyes snapped open and he jerked his head forward as if to clear it.
“A monster in every man,” he mumbled thickly. His heart was thudding in his chest and Vinny took another swig of beer. “Jesus, Mrs. D.,” he said in the dark. “Why couldn’t you be awake tonight, huh? I don’t want to be thinking about that old bastard now. I wanted to tell you about Kate coming home and Bo.”
Bo? she answered in his mind, what do you have to tell me about Bo?
She got into trouble, Mrs. D., she got back into it again and this time, I guess maybe because she was older or whatever, she was able to call it on her own. She didn’t need Katie anymore-
Vincent, you are not making sense. What do you mean, Bo was able to call it? Call what?
There was only one answer for that, wasn’t there?
“The monster,” he said aloud. “Bo was able to call the monster and it wasn’t the everyman one, Mrs. D., it was worse than that. It’s a devil.”
He heard her laughter in his brain, a light chuckle that made her sound more like a school girl than a woman old enough to be his great grandmother.
Oh Vincent! There are no devils. There is no hell underground. There are monsters in every man, and there is terror on earth. Devils do not exist, except in the heart of men.
If you can believe in heaven, Mrs. D, and in God, why can’t I believe in Hell? Why can’t I believe in devils? There are demons. Real demons. I know because I saw--
Saw what? she asked, the laughter gone now. What did you see?
But he couldn’t answer her.
Vinny sighed, suddenly aware of how tired he was. Bone weary.
He got to his feet and wandered to the bedroom, trying desperately to clear his mind as he went.
Chapter 8
Lucien
About the time Vinny was driving over the line into Chelsea, Lydia Dobens heard the sound. She thought it was a cat. She kept a bowl of food on the back porch, alongside a small saucer of milk. She couldn’t keep cats in the apartment, but there were no rules that said she couldn’t feed them on her porch. She rose to her feet slowly, thinking it was the tiger tom out there, the one with the long scar on his face.
“Tough Tom,” she said as she reached for her cane. Tough Tom hadn’t been around in a few days. He was due for a visit. She stopped in the kitchen, opened a cupboard door and took out a box of cat treats. Maybe she could coax Tom in for a few minutes. There were no rules that said she couldn’t hold cats on her lap for an hour or so; she just couldn’t let them spend the night.
The sound from the porch again, glass against wood, the saucer being pushed along the rough boards. Tom wasn’t a polite eater. Maybe that’s how she knew it was him out there, because the other kitties didn’t make quite so much racket. They didn’t move the saucer with their noses, they didn’t fight their food before they ate it.
The back door, opening onto the porch, was at the end of the kitchen, just to the left of the pantry. There was a light on in the pantry. Mrs. Dobens stopped long enough to snap it off. Odd, she didn’t remember turning it on.
She reached for the knob to the porch and hesitated.
Maybe it wasn’t a cat.
Maybe it was a burglar.
Mrs. Ozens, down the block, had been robbed a month before. She’d heard a sound, Lydia remembered now, a sound she’d gotten up to investigate and the crook had hit her on the head. Mrs. Ozens thought he hit her with a gun.
“Why would he hit you with a gun?”Schmolick, the grocer had asked when Mrs. Ozens told the story. “If he had a gun, why didn’t he just shoot you?” Schmolick looked over at Lydia. He shrugged, spread his arms wide. “Me, I would have shot you.”
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