“Not at first. I just did the job, took the money, and Ronnie came and picked them up one day. About two months later.”
“And then?” I prompted. “What happened next?”
“About a year later, Ronnie dropped by again. She’d dyed her hair, which I thought was strange, and was wearing sunglasses in the store and a big hat. That made me nervous.”
Ridiculous spy disguises. Friends of Silvina unused to some new focus? From the feds? From criminal organizations?
“What did she want this time?”
“She wanted me to sell the taxidermy I’d made. For her. I said no.”
“Because you knew it was dangerous?”
“Yeah. I thought for sure they’d tried to sell it already and something had gone wrong. I didn’t want any part of that.”
“Do you know what she needed the money for?”
I could hear the shrug over the line. “The way Ronnie talked about it, maybe they’d been in the middle of some project where the money dried up. She asked me if I knew anyone who could unload them. At a discount. I didn’t volunteer anyone.”
I chewed on that, asked, “Has anyone else been nosing around since I was there?”
“A couple strange phone calls. A guy outside I figured was watching the place. I’m leaving soon. Closing the shop for a while.” Or the shop was closing him.
“I’ve got a gun now.” Just blurted it out. Cursed the drink, but who knows where the impulse came from.
“Smart. That’s how you’ve lasted longer than…”
“Longer than you thought.”
He laughed. “Yeah. The person who walked into my store wasn’t going to last long. That I know.”
I didn’t want the grudging respect. Should’ve recoiled from that camaraderie. But instead I leaned into it.
“Where are you going to go?”
“Wouldn’t tell you.”
But I sort of knew. Upstate he had some land and a cabin where he used to hunt every summer. I cared. I didn’t care. What was the pang I felt? The pathetic sense that I could talk to Fusk about things I couldn’t tell my husband. And now Fusk was fading. Fusk was going to disappear. A sense of desperation came over me.
“Fusk?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think Silvina was a good person?”
As if he were some kind of final arbiter. As if his answer would settle it for me.
Fusk put me out of his misery. He hung up. I never talked to him again.
[62]
A vault of night. An enormity and weight to it. Beyond the trains and the cars and the traffic lights and drones. Stars were all airplanes and the streaks like lights were really lives, far above. Unless they were satellites. I just knew they weren’t stars. Something mysterious beneath or beyond the artificial. I was in a strange mood, almost an altered state.
The warehouse had a shallow, M-shaped roof with a tin-like texture, only thicker, and off-white walls lit only by a blurry yellow light out front. Woods to either side cocooning, enveloping. Nearest building was a gas station at a crossroads a quarter mile south. You could hear the highway, but distant. In theory, this was an incorporated part of the county, but not really. Enough little roads around and sudden elevations that it would be easy to double back and make sure you weren’t being followed. So I did. Then eased into a dirt parking space. A fallen tree nearby made me think no one had been here in a while. Or taken care of the place in a while, at least.
Another text came in as I took bolt cutters to the lock, put my shoulder to the jammed door to make it give, hollow out a space for the likes of me. I dropped the bolt cutters, read the glowing words.
Any satisfaction I’d felt at leaving Hellbender blind left me.
>>Jill, you need to tell me where you are.
I couldn’t move. Felt like I was suffocating, realized I was holding my breath.
Jill. Only one person had gotten “Jill” as my name the past three years. The man who had stood me up at the conference. The one who had given me a false hotel room number.
So that was Hellbender. Not Langer but some third party.
Tracking me all the way to New York. Wanted a look. A guy brazen enough to dress in a clown wig wouldn’t mind getting close. A guy who’d done that so I wouldn’t recognize him from the store clerk’s description.
Jack. Not Langer. And he wanted me to know it. To make me answer.
I began to text him back, but a car had slowed on the street beyond. Something European and expensive, like a Jetta. So I pushed the bolt cutters inside with my feet, pulled the door shut until it was only open a crack, and watched.
They cut their lights, rolling to a quiet stop next to my car. Three men got out, hard to see in the crappy lighting.
But one of them I thought I recognized, even though the haircut was different. Something about his affect raised the hairs on my arm.
Langer. Not on my phone after all, but there in the flesh. He had a sharp, intense look to him. He didn’t waste much motion. I hated him at a glance. Feared him, too. A kind of bulkiness built into Langer’s pals that I read as heavily armed.
I retreated into the warehouse. It smelled moldy and like rust. The corridor or antechamber was narrow and long, with a weird fake stone veneer to the floor. I guessed the wings filled out into storage rooms only accessible from farther in. Like a corridor you’d lead cattle down, then isolate them through a U to either side. I put a door between us, then another. I could hear Langer and his men, faint, at the front door, being cautious. Maybe there was a back way out.
I felt foolish. Raw and inexperienced.
Too late.
Through a small window in the next door, I could see that the main space lay beyond. A dim-lit vagueness suggesting height.
“Jill.” Langer. The man on the hill.
All the weight of that came crashing down on me, and it was like I woke up. Finally and forever woke up.
I called the house.
My husband answered on the fifth ring.
“Where the hell are you? It’s the middle of the night, and you just—”
“Listen to me,” I whispered, as calmly as I could.
“What is going on?”
“There’s no time. Get out of the house. Take whatever you can gather in the next half hour. Get out and go up in the mountains or some property a friend is selling that’s remote. Don’t tell anyone. Someplace secure. And stay there. Just for a while.”
“Are you crazy? That’s just—”
I said his name. I said his name, and then I said, “The man in the woods was watching us because of me. Both of you are in danger. I’m sorry. There’s no time. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”
I hung up on him before he could reply. I never called. I always texted. No better way to make him understand the severity.
Then I texted Hellbender the warehouse address. I didn’t trust him, but how could things get worse? Maybe the more people at this party the better.
Langer was through the first two doors. I’d just closed the third, wedged something that wouldn’t hold long against it, and plunged through into the warehouse, phone held like a flashlight.
A sense of bulk, of heft, through the window, but it had been indistinct. What I could see, in the arc of white light from the phone, was the outline of a monster. A creature made of many, many parts. A great, heaping pile that ended only at the ceiling thirty feet above me and that spilled out to the sides so far that there was no way to get around it.
Dead bodies. Skins. The dead. Fur, feathers, scales. Dull glass eyes staring back at me. A confusion and chaos that made me take a step back, nauseated. The mold smell had intensified, and the chemical stench, and the underlying scent of the real: the traces of what they had been alive.
It made me sick. I didn’t understand it.
I was facing a midden of taxidermy and cured and uncured skins. A great mound of snuffed-out lives, some common, but most rare and precious. A wall, or wave, and wit
h my pathetic light I could only reveal parts of it. Was glad of that.
Behind me I could hear Langer close. But where could I hide? Nowhere. There were troughs and lanes through the damage, but indistinct, porous, like a trail overtaken by tall weeds with trees looming over top. Still a mountain of dead animals. Lemurs and monitor lizards. Tigers tigers tigers—so many tigers I stifled a cry. Some sights make the brain rebel, make a soul want to hide from itself.
But a survival instinct took over. A terror beyond thought that was instinct. I had no choice. The gun in my hand wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stand and fight. I had to plunge forward, hide in the morass.
So that’s what I did.
[63]
I had never seen so many animals together in one place. I had never seen so many species. Even dead. Even dismembered or mutilated or destroyed in subtle and unsubtle ways. I had never known so much life, even dead. It almost killed me, all the incoming. All the death around me. Half extinguished any need to survive. Yet: I kept moving.
[64]
By the time the door opened and Langer and his friends entered the warehouse, I was hidden deep, cringing and shivering from the touch of so much unfamiliar texture. The smothered flat glossy feathers and furs against my arms and legs and face. The dead bright eyes I couldn’t see in the gloom. The dull-sharp beaks rasping against me. Hooves and paws from the wrong directions, against my back. I was trying to adapt to the vastness of it as I heard Langer’s voice talking to his men, so maybe he wouldn’t realize I was here.
I couldn’t process the smells, the dry and the moist of them, how there was a brackish scent of the sea and marsh. A hint of forest. Of how where they came from clung to them.
But the claustrophobia broke me down the most. I couldn’t sit still in the middle of all of that. It felt like I was going to drown and suffocate at the same time. That I was in some kind of hell that pressed against my skin so I couldn’t tell where my body ended and some other body began. I was drenched slick with my own sweat, and moving slick, trembling, trying not to retch.
Telling myself that if I could only tunnel through it quickly, I would be okay. That it was better to be fast in this horrible place. That the faster I got to the end and, hopefully, a door out, the less likely I would lose my mind. That Langer had yet to wade through the same hell. All while it rose and kept rising around me and above and over me and I was already going mad.
The rough heads of crocodiles on the floor tripping me up. The coarse bodies of lions arresting my fall. I was nothing but an animal myself, scrabbling for air, for freedom. Nothing left in me but this impulse, this idea, of a door that might not exist. I couldn’t stand it, not the touch of another skin, another fur. I couldn’t.
But Langer heard me. I knew it from the uptick of excitement in his voice.
Then came whistling and burrowing through sharp, whizzing objects that cut through faces around me, shredded through flanks and through eyes and through stomachs and paws. A stitching and ricochet and almost it sounded like an odd rain. But it was bullets. Langer wasn’t bothering to follow me. Wasn’t bothering to ask me to come out. To come up for air. No, he was just shooting. Me, blind and burrowing through hell, as the bullets sank and lolled and spit past. Came at me from odd angles, clipped or bounced off tired antlers or tusks. The stench of glue. The sense of being hidden and exposed.
I had no way to fire back, could barely keep Shovel Pig from being wrenched from my grasp by a hundred hands, paws, forearms, snouts. And as big as I was, a sudden fear: that as I burrowed and the mound collapsed around me, it would bury me. So that I scrabbled faster, and in that moment didn’t know what to fear more: the mound or the bullets.
A weird ping and an insect smashed into my thigh. A hornet or bee that made me cry out in pain as the blood flowed. Except it wasn’t an insect—and then there was another that grazed my left arm, and I cried out again and became so panicked that there was nothing to me but fear and want and need, and you would not have known me from the folk around me, as if I had been destined for that place.
A wildebeest and a bear—there near the center of the mound, with some other monumental stag or antelope to create a space to breathe and a shield for bullets. Which continued to reverberate, to hum, to quiver and my only defense to lie against the comforting flank of the bear, to let the bear be my defense.
Until even that quieted, and I tried to slow my breathing so that I wouldn’t be heard. Wished fervent that Langer would believe I was dead.
Except, as wary as he was of entering the mound, he was also careful about accepting silence. As I lay there, bleeding, I heard a great whoosh and growing crackle. It sounded like part of the ceiling had fallen in, but in a couple minutes I realized the true source: flames.
The mound was ablaze, from some accelerant. I was going to burn to death. Langer’s cursing made me think the fire had surprised him, too.
“Come out,” he shouted as the fire spread. “Come out, and I won’t kill you.”
His partners laughed. I knew it wasn’t true anyway. I just wouldn’t burn to death. Caught like a rat.
The heat increased, and I was sweating and coughing from the fumes set free from the skins and taxidermy. I could see an orange haze ahead of me where there had been darkness. A wall of orange intensifying to red. I began to cough worse, but I wasn’t going to come out. I pulled out my phone, but I couldn’t see right anymore, to know what number I was dialing, and something intense about the phone light made them start shooting again.
Except this time they seemed to be shooting not into the animals but behind them, back at the third door. I thought I could hear the lilting chatter of some other kind of gun.
A crack, another crack. Like the world was breaking open. A looming presence that made me gasp.
But from behind me.
I rose up to face this new threat and something smashed against my skull and I fell into darkness.
[65]
“Breathe. Draw breath. Take another. Isolate the shackling sound, the impatient light. Find a way to remove it. Another breath. Another chance to make it to the beautiful darkness. The bliss of silent places.”
I was trapped in the pages of Silvina’s journal, which had opened up and become an ocean of paper flooded with black water. It sucked me in and down until I came to the bottom and drifted there with all the dead animals. I saw their eyes now, or what had replaced their eyes. These glass stares, so false, and yet somehow real, too. I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t need to breathe. I had gills or it just didn’t matter anymore. The monkeys and the crossbills and the wallabies and the lizards and the box turtles and the frogs, so many frogs glowing iridescent way down there beneath the surface, in the bog. I could see an indistinct shape above and reeds radiating out and the faintest hint of moonlight.
I gasped and took on water. I waved my arms to swim and embraced the animals around me until their eyes were alive and quick with thought again. I did not care that they were rotting, that I was rotting. That we were all down below in some purgatory worse yet better than the warehouse. Had I brought them here? Had I led them here?
“Total Nature,” Humboldt had written. Which meant no separation. No looking away. No way out but down.
I realized I was beneath Unitopia, looking up. That I was drowning underneath Silvina’s creation, as surely as if Ronnie had put me there. Because she had.
[66]
I woke with a headache that kept trying to smash my skull in half. Staring up at ripped-apart foxes on a dim-lit mantel.
Silvina’s old apartment.
I tried to move, but couldn’t.
The man who had followed me up the hill flickered and drifted into view, and my axes aligned and I was right-side up again. Bound to a chair—an old plastic lawn chair brought in from the balcony. My hands had been lashed to its arms with police-grade plastic restraints. I had to keep shifting my weight because the frame wasn’t going to stop my ass from smashing through the seat soon.
/> Two men stood behind “Hill Man.” I didn’t recognize them.
But I panicked at the way they were looking down at me and I thrashed, lunged, fell over in the chair, tore the seat, twisted an arm, my shoulder against the floor. A strangely numb shoulder. Throbbing. I’d been drugged.
Dust swirled up and I saw, close, drag marks on the floor I hadn’t noticed before.
Still the men said nothing, just watched me.
I stopped struggling. The restraints wouldn’t come off. The chair had collapsed around me in a way that felt like I’d trapped myself worse.
Something bounced off the side of my head, skidded past me toward the mantel. The fox kit’s head. Staring back at me. Hillman had thrown it.
“No point,” Hillman said as I tried to prop myself on an elbow and look up at him. Had to shudder back down. I could feel an icy cold burning in my shoulder, in my leg. Bits of molten coal hidden under the ice. I could see but not feel the bandage on my leg.
“You gave me something,” I slurred.
“Painkiller. Hold you for now. Could’ve let you die. Remember that.”
“This is kidnapping.”
“We saved your life,” Hillman said. “Langer would’ve let you burn alive and walked away laughing.”
“Who set the fire?” I asked.
Hillman didn’t answer, had found a stool or something from the bathroom, was perched on it, looming over me. Some satisfaction in how he sported a black eye, purpling bruises.
“You set the fire, didn’t you?” Or Hellbender. “And Langer? Is he dead?” Like if I knew the answers, everything would be fine.
Hillman ignored me.
Up close, Hillman’s face was more thoughtful than I remembered it. Creased brow, quick, green eyes, and some thought to the sophistication of a suit I hadn’t ripped apart yet. He smelled of a subtle aftershave.
Hillman took out a long cardboard box. A coffin for a large doll?
“Boss said to tell you there was another clue, but he found it first. No one cares about these clues anyway. It’s like something a kid would do. He says.”
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