But the joke, as Todd well knew, was that Dad was not a rich man at all. He just knew the right people and had an awful lot of leverage. In truth, he was in debt about as deep as that aqueduct shaft he was digging downtown. If something ever went wrong and the banks called in all the loans, the next sound you would hear would be the Matthias’s lives being sucked into a black hole.
But still Todd bragged—because to him it didn’t matter whether or not you were rich as long as everyone thought you were.
Lindsay moved through the party, wandering around the connected living rooms of the twin town houses, doing her best to feel at home. She did enjoy people-watching—and there were certainly some interesting people to watch. Some had multicolored hair, and others had hair flat and black, dyed to match their nails and lipstick. Some girls dressed in Madison Avenue fashions, while others looked postapocalyptic. Lindsay seemed to be the only one present who wasn’t trying to make some glaring fashion statement, and that, oddly, made her different and exotic enough to earn her more than her share of dances. She had to admit she was flattered, and she was more than happy to dance in full view of the malnourished and overaccessorized girls who watched in frustration from the sidelines.
There were some boys who even vied for her attention off the dance floor—but once they started to talk, any interest on Lindsay’s part dissolved. One boy, for instance, was only interested in conversation as long as it was about himself. Another had a nervous tic and a strange preoccupation with horses, and a third did nothing but press Lindsay for deep personal information about Todd.
It was right around the time that Todd was entertaining some friends with impersonations that Lindsay decided to make her exit—but something she heard stopped her.
“I’m meeting the water needs of this city for the new millennium,” Todd said in an annoyingly accurate imitation of their father. “Five hundred years from now, they’ll still be drinking water that came through my aqueduct!”
Todd had one finger extended Heavenward in pontification posture, and the other hand swatted his nose the way Dad did when his allergies bothered him. Even the ones who didn’t know Dad laughed, and it made Lindsay furious.
“You’re not funny, Todd,” she shouted, abruptly ending the laughter and gaining enough attention to quiet down the room.
“You’re the only one who thinks so, Pseudo-sis.” He laughed again, hoping to get his friends to chuckle at his nickname for her, but no one did.
“Dad works hard, and his work is important to him. You have no right to make fun of it.”
Todd only shrugged it off. “It’s just a stupid tunnel.”
There was a tense silence between them that could have gotten worse, but everyone’s attention shifted when a girl across the room confused some leftover plumber’s putty with clam dip and spread herself a Ritz cracker nasty. She began to gag in no uncertain terms, and since it was dangerously close to the punch bowl, everyone came running. The commotion afforded Lindsay a moment to slip away, up to her room.
As she climbed the stairs, leaving behind Todd and his self-absorbed friends, a cold current of air flowed past her down the stairs. Perhaps it was that breeze that made her neck hairs bristle and her steps hesitate. Something wasn’t quite right, and it made her uneasy.
When she arrived at her door, she was annoyed to discover that the sanctity of her bedroom had been violated. There, sitting on her bed, was a couple who had decided this was a nice little make-out spot.
“The kissing booth is closed,” Lindsay announced. “Make your lip-sandwiches elsewhere.”
The couple quickly departed, leaving behind a cloying stench of cologne that could set off the smoke detectors. Honestly, what had she done to deserve this? Lindsay went to her door and began pumping it open and closed to fan away the stench—and that’s when she noticed the cold breeze again, coming, as it always did, from the hole in the hallway, the gap between the two buildings. As usual, the thin veil of plastic that was supposed to cover the hole had fallen down to reveal that strange looking-glass image of the building next door. She began to feel uneasy again, and this time she knew why. She had felt that same cold breeze in the middle of the night when she saw—or thought she saw—a face peering out at her from the gap. The memory had been so dreamlike, she wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, and in the morning things seemed so normal in the light of day that she chose not to think about it. Until now.
On the ground, the piece of black plastic that was supposed to cover the jagged brick hole fluttered and crackled with the air that flowed through the gap from the sky above. But it wasn’t just air coming from above, was it?
Lindsay quickly retrieved the pocket flashlight in the bathroom junk drawer, then she made her way to the gap. First she put her hand into the space between the buildings, palm down. The back of her hand was chilled by cold air dropping from above...but her palm became warm, heated by air rising from below. But from where?
She turned on the flashlight and peered down. She saw the new masonry that connected the twin living rooms on the first floor, but directly beneath her there was nothing. The brickwork seemed to descend to the basement foundation, and beneath that was darkness. A sudden shuffling sound behind her made her flinch, and she lost the flash-light. It tumbled into the hole, its light spinning wildly into oblivion. She spun around, but there was no one behind her. She listened again, but could hear nothing beyond the ghostly echoes of the chattering partyers one flight down.
What if there were rats down there? What if they were climbing their way into the house through that gap?
It’s just your imagination, Lindsay told herself. Although her imagination had always served her well in times of need, it also had its neurotic little moments, making nonexistent mountains out of imaginary molehills.
She tried to shake off the shivers, telling herself that she had no reason to be concerned...until she noticed the dusty footprints on the hardwood floor. There were only three of them. The first and dustiest was right by the hole in the wall, the second was less pronounced, and the third was barely visible at all.
Well, so what? There are a dozen logical explanations, shouted her rational mind. Maybe it was from one of the workers remodeling the home...or maybe from a partygoer who jumped from one building to the other, over the gap. Or maybe it was some deranged serial killer—after all, Rikers Island was just a hop, skip, and a jump over the East River. They kept the worst criminals there. What if one of them tunneled their way out, and—
“Stop it, Lindsay,” she said aloud, hoping that the sound of her own voice might snap some sense into her. And in fact it did. She took a deep breath, and then another, then she took the black plastic tarp off the floor and hung it back on the hooks above the hole—if not sealing it, at least hiding it from view.
She returned to her room, determined to watch the ball come down in Times Square on her TV rather than share the moment with Todd. With her door closed, the small television became the only light in the room, casting shifting blue shadows in every corner, and she took to rebraiding her hair. She carefully unwound the heavy rope of her single French braid, then pulled her thick blond locks over one another, stretching them across her knuckles tighter and tighter. She was not satisfied until she could feel the familiar pull of the braid against her scalp so tight it was almost painful—every strand tightly woven and bound, in perfect control.
As she finished the braid, she noticed a strange smell in the air. It was masked by that sickly-sweet cologne stench still lingering in the room, but as that perfumy odor faded, Lindsay began to catch something beneath it. Something earthy—but not unpleasant. Something clean and crisp, like the smell of the ground in the first moments of a rainstorm. It hit her all at once that there was someone else in the room with her, and this time there was nothing imaginary about it.
She gasped and leaped across the room just as she heard the closet door creak open. The television cast its harsh glow on a figure lunging for her. Sh
e screamed, eluding his grasp, and snapped on the light.
This was not one of Todd’s guests.
Not even the strangest of Todd’s friends wore clothes of this nature, and Lindsay immediately flashed to all of those warnings from her mother before she had skipped off to Africa. She had cautioned Lindsay about the many dangers of New York, as if Lindsay were the one heading into a perilous jungle, and not her.
“Don’t!” insisted the boy as he moved toward her again. “Don’t scream!” He clasped his hand around her mouth to quiet her, but she was ready for him. She had trained and prepared for this moment for years. She grabbed his wrist, turning his own momentum into a weapon against him, tugged down on it just so, and he flipped over, landing hard on his back with a thud and a groan. Then, as he tried to scramble to his feet, Lindsay thrust her hand into the various toiletries on her dresser. She knocked over several bottles before closing her hands around a cold black little canister. She spun on her strange, earthen-smelling assailant as he rose from the floor and quickly emptied the can of pepper spray into the boy’s wide-pupiled eyes.
There are few things in the world that can have the last word as well as a nice blast of pepper spray. Talon, who was the recipient of the angry, acidic burst, had not known that such excruciating pain could exist—and if there had been any doubt in his mind about what an evil place the Topside was, those doubts were now gone. A moment before, he had been trying to calm the screaming girl; now he was the one screaming, his eyes, mouth, and nose filled with this spray of flame. The pain went so deep, he felt his legs moving involuntarily, sending him in a blind stumbling fit around the room. Finally his legs gave out, and he sprawled in a bruising slam against the hardwood floor—almost as bruising as the slam to the floor the girl had given him. As Talon gripped his face in blind agony, he was certain that he would die at the hands of the Topsiders.
It was all a bit embarrassing for Lindsay. Certainly there was that first moment of triumph as she depressed that little aerosol knob—but as she watched him bounce around the room like a pinball going for bonus points, her sense of empathy kicked in. Clearly this person was not right in the head—one need only look at the way he was dressed: sewn shreds of fabric, a vest made of old paper clips or something of that sort. But it wasn’t only his clothes. There was some strangeness in his eyes—or what she had seen of his eyes before temporarily blinding them. He wasn’t quite... normal. At least not normal in the way that Lindsay had come to understand it.
Now, after bouncing off the TV, the wall, and the bedpost, he lay on his hands and knees coughing and groaning, completely helpless at her feet, and suddenly Lindsay felt a bit foolish standing there, as if she had used a cannon to kill a fly.
Todd burst into the room not a second later, with a few spectators behind him.
“What’s going on up here? Who is that? What’s he screaming about?”
Lindsay did her best to explain the situation in twenty-five words or less, and Todd, for the first time in his life, complimented her. “Good for you, Lindsay,” he said. But somehow a compliment from Todd didn’t make her feel any better about this unpleasant state of affairs.
As Todd wedged his foot beneath the wailing boy’s ribs, flipping him over onto his back like a turtle, Lindsay began to feel even more sorry for him. She was warned about this in self-defense class. Never feel sorry for an attacker, because it makes you a victim twice. Remember—sympathy kills. But in spite of her karate classes and her no-mercy front, she was, after all, the same girl who had been known to liberate Roach Motels as a child. As she watched the disgust and hatred bloom on Todd’s face, she was thankful for her own streak of humanity.
“He’s a street freak,” Todd announced with a dismissive snarl. “Call the cops to haul him away.”
A kid behind him pulled out a cell phone, and New York City’s finest were paged to the scene.
“Just kill me,” moaned the boy. “Just kill me now.”
“Ah, shut up,” said Todd, who then hurried off to retrieve his bicycle chain—a tempered steel thing that seemed thick enough to lock down the space shuttle. Then he hauled the fallen boy to his feet.
By now the boy’s gasps and wails had become groans and grimaces, and his pain had subsided enough for him to struggle as Todd and four others chained him to one of the thick mahogany bedposts at the foot of Lindsay’s bed. “That’ll hold him until the trash police arrive,” Todd said.
Meanwhile, downstairs came the telltale countdown, and a cheer that echoed throughout Manhattan as the clock struck midnight. Todd took a long, angry look at the boy, who now looked like someone about to be burned at the stake. His eyes, red and teary, strained to flutter open. Then Todd suddenly hauled off and belted him across the face, hard enough to make the entire bed frame shake. “That’s for making me miss New Year’s.”
“You didn’t have to do that, Todd,” Lindsay said. But he ignored her, sauntering off to wash his fist so as not to catch some street-freak disease.
Todd’s friends, who had no intention of missing the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” even though none of them knew the words, deserted back to the party, leaving Lindsay alone to stand guard. Outside, fireworks lit up the city from the Battery to the Cloisters, and with each explosion, her blinded prisoner flinched.
“It’s only fireworks,” she told him, keeping a good six feet away from him.
He turned in her direction, straining to open his eyes, but still they would only crack into the tiniest of slits. “You people are cruel and crazy and stupid,” he said, his voice raspy and worn from all the screaming he had done. “Just like they say.”
Lindsay didn’t like the sound of that, mainly because she wasn’t sure what he meant by “you people,” but, having a background that was two parts Irish, one part Greek, and one part Polish, she found all of her ancestry equally offended.
“Y’know you don’t have to live like you do....There are places you could go that can...take care of you....”
He stiffened at the suggestion. “How do you know how I live? You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that you broke into my house.”
“I didn’t break in—your wall was open.”
Lindsay glanced into the hallway. Todd had gone downstairs to rejoin his friends. She said nothing for a while, waiting to see what her prisoner would do next. As the sound of fireworks faded, he seemed uncomfortable in the silence. “You people have stupid names,” he said. “Todd. Lindsay.”
“Thanks a lot, I suppose yours is better?”
“My name is Talon,” he said with an odd pride in his voice that made Lindsay laugh.
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
Talon bristled at her laughter, and squirmed against his bonds. “My name found me when I was two weeks old,” he said. “When a bat clawed at my cheek.” He turned his face to show the faint shadow of a scar beneath his right eye. “See?”
Lindsay took a step closer to see it, fiddling with her braid, which now draped across her shoulder. She wondered if her name would mean more to her if there was a reason for it.
On the dresser was a little spray bottle of water Lindsay used to get knots out of her hair. Now she grabbed it and ventured closer to Talon. “This might sting, but only a little.”
She sprayed some water into his eyes. He winced and then blinked, the water running down his face like tears.
“One more time.” She hit both of his eyes with the water again, and this time when they cleared, they stayed open for the most part, although they were red and veiny from the pepper spray. He sighed with relief—as if he had really thought he would be blind forever. Lindsay wondered how ignorant one had to be not to know about pepper spray— especially a street person, who was probably threatened by it every day.
He studied her with his bloodshot eyes.
“Why do you wear your hair like that?” he asked. “It looks like a gator’s tail—you might as well dye it green.”
Lindsay opened he
r mouth to poke fun at his mane of untamed curls, oddly shaven around the ears, but there was something about it that she liked. So instead she glanced toward his feet, where something else caught her attention.
“Well, at least I’m not dumb enough to wear a watch on my ankle.”
“We wear our watches low,” he said as if speaking to a imbecile, “to remind us that time is of low importance.”
She looked at the scratched Rolex, and his pant cuffs, which seemed intentionally frayed. She could find many things about him to mock, but she stopped herself because she didn’t want to bicker. She wanted answers. “Why have you been spying on me? Why were you after me?”
He regarded her, his face cold and unreadable. “I have no interest in you.”
Lindsay found herself far more disappointed than she wanted to be. “Why not?”
“Because my mother still recognizes me.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“No,” he said coolly, “you wouldn’t.”
Clearly this long-haired, odd-clothed, unusual-smelling intruder was trying to trick her in some way—using double-speak to confuse her, catch her off guard. It made her wish she could simply go downstairs until the police arrived to cart him off to the Bronx, or wherever it was they dumped weird-looking transients. But she couldn’t tear herself away like that. Besides, this conversation was far more engaging than anything going on downstairs.
“There’s a piece of paper in my front pocket,” Talon said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Lindsay’s curiosity wrestled with caution, and in the end she stepped up to him, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the paper, reading it. “These are all antibiotics...”
“Do you have any?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Are they for you?”
Talon shook his head. “They’re for my little sister. She has a fever, and a bad cough that’s getting worse.”
“Why don’t you just go to a hospital?”
“It isn’t allowed.”
Downsiders Page 5