A City Dreaming (35 page)

“I told you this was horseshit,” M said, though you might have noted a touch of relief in his voice.

M was at The Lady late in the afternoon, not doing very much of anything with the capable assistance of Flemel, when Stockdale entered in the sort of fervor that suggested their languor was at an end. He slapped a copy of the
Daily News
down on the counter. Most of the front was taken up with the nip slip of a modest celebrity. The part that was not read in large print
TODDLER MISSING
, and below that in smaller print
LAURAINE THOMPSON UNSEEN SINCE THURSDAY
.

“I don't really see the big deal,” M said. “She was wearing pasties.”

“There's a vacant building at the corner of Willow and Pierpoint,” Stockdale said, ordering a few fingers of whiskey, “and I'm pretty sure it ate a kid.”

“Sounds like a job for the Buildings Department.”

“No. It doesn't sound like that at all.”

“What makes you think it's this house?”

“I've had my eye on it for a while. Something's always been wrong with it, but lately it's been getting worse.”

“The city always gets nasty this time of year. It'll ease up two weeks before Thanksgiving, once everyone stops watching
Saw II
and starts on
It's a Wonderful Life.
”

“And next October? What then?”

“Have you called the Red Queen? Brooklyn Heights is her area.”

“No, I didn't. I don't call her every time I take a piss either.”

“I try to keep her informed of any particularly noteworthy bowel movements.”

“Does it ever occur to you, M, that this is sort of what we're around for?”

“I can honestly tell you that nothing like that ever occurs to me.”

“The body of a child doesn't mean much to you either?”

“I didn't kill her.”

“We're just about straddling the line between curmudgeonly cute and outright prickish,” Stockdale said. “But you can do whatever you want. I'm finishing this drink and going over to take a look.” He downed what was left in one go, then stood and put on his hat.

“Fine, fine,” M said, waving for the bill.

Up till then, no one had said anything to Flemel, but he drank his beer anyway, stood as if to accompany them.

M looked him up and down, then shrugged. “All right, junior,” M said, “let's see if I've learned you anything useful.”

Flemel bit down around his smile, swallowed the flutter of excitement rising up from his stomach, pulled on his coat, and followed the two of them to the subway.

Half an hour later they were standing at the intersection of Willow and Pierpoint, and M said, “I really think we ought to call Abilene.”

In a row of million-dollar brownstones a few blocks from the Hudson, it stuck out like a rotted tooth in a friendly grin. The windows were boarded up, and grass overran the small front plot. The brick was crumbling and ivied, but apart from that it was unmarked, the neighborhood artists, what few remained in so gentrified a part of the city, unwilling to approach, even with a virgin canvas as lure. Looking at it, Flemel remembered the time his father had accidentally backed over the family dog—the miserable squeak, the pink that came out of the poor beast, how it suffered for long moments as his dad, guilt struck and useless, ran about frantically trying to find a way to salve or end its misery.

“We're not calling Abilene,” Stockdale said.

“Something is very wrong here,” M said. “You feeling that tightness in your fists right now? That little itch toward violence? I can't be the only one.”

“You aren't.”

“It's twisting our minds around it.”

“Don't think you're up for it?” Stockdale said nastily.

“I prefer to keep the deck stacked in my favor whenever possible,” M said, speaking in the slow way he did when trying not to get angry. “And Abilene is two aces up each sleeve.”

Stockdale took a long breath and shook his head free. “This is my neighborhood, M,” he said, calmer now, though not much. “If you can't look after your own, then what the hell good are you?”

“An admirable expression of civic pride, but in fairness, I only moved back to the city a year ago.” But then his shoulders slumped and he said, “Flemel, go home.”

“Fuck you, go home. I came all the way out here.”

“I'll repay you the $2.75 if we ever see each other again. Skedaddle.”

“You said I could come.”

“That was before I saw the place. You aren't ready for this. For that matter, I'm not ready, either, but somebody's got to keep Stockdale out of trouble.”

But Flemel had not gotten this far by listening to M. “I'm coming in, with you or after you.”

“I get lucky a lot,” M said, sticking a finger into his apprentice's chest. “Not everyone gets lucky like I do. And my luck doesn't always extend to the person standing next to me, do you understand?”

“I got my own luck.”

M watched him a while, then shrugged. “Let's see what color it runs,” he said, then started up the stoop. There was a
CONDEMNED
sticker plastered across the door. It was a busy neighborhood in early autumn, a fine time to be walking about near the water, but no one was. The block was empty. Stockdale put a boot against the rotted wood, and the door swung open.

“Now remember,” M said, “nothing that you see in here is real.”

“Except that some of it might be,” Stockdale added.

“Yes, some of it might be. So be careful.”

“Be careful.”

Crossing the threshold, Flemel found himself fully erect, erect and recalling a particularly vile bit of internet pornography he had watched recently, something degrading and immoral and secretly exciting, something
that Flemel wished he hadn't seen but couldn't forget. Inside was a long hallway that smelled of rotting wood and dead flesh and something worse than both of these. A tongue-colored plush carpet ran along the corridor into an inky blackness beyond.

“Keep moving,” Stockdale told Flemel. “Don't let yourself get focused on anything too long. And for the love of Christ, don't lose sight of us.” He rubbed his hands together until they each glowed bright as a halogen bulb, then stretched one into the darkness and followed it forward.

They came to a door and opened it. Inside a tall, naked woman was seated at a vanity mirror, straightening her blonde hair with a bone comb. Turning to greet them, she revealed an incision running between her navel and the bottom of her throat, the skin peeled back and pinned against itself, like a butterfly behind glass. Her organs had been removed, there was only the stiff white of her spine. “It's better this way,” she explained. “It's so nice not to feel things. You'll see.” She turned back to her mirror. “You'll see.”

The door at the other end of the room opened easily enough, and beyond it a circular staircase extended down beyond the boundaries of the vertical horizon. Flemel was not sure how long the descent lasted. It seemed a while. It seemed a long while.

At the bottom was a corridor, whitewashed and sterile, and then a room, dark and mildewed, and inside an old man, gray and withered. He sat on a three-legged stool and held the headless corpse of a child in his hands. His teeth were stained red. “I'm one of the nice ones,” he said sorrowfully.

Out the door and down another flight of stairs, step after step after step, each one falling a moment slower than the one before.

“Enjoying yourself so far?” M asked Flemel with a sneer. “It's not all elves and fairies.”

“I'm still moving, ain't I?”

“For now,” M said. “For now.”

The next room was the size of a football field, unfinished wood and broken windows stretching far out into the distance. Below them sat row after row of gurneys, a corpse or near corpse on every one. Sisters in white shifts moved silently down the thoroughfares, ministering to men long dying. Above starched collars were red-flecked canine muzzles and chattering
mandibles, mosquitoed proboscises, the maw of a shark, duplicated rows of razored teeth. The matron mother wore a black frock with a broken cross embroidered on it. “We've room for more,” she said through a baboon's leer. Behind her, a novice with the face of a star-nosed mole shoved fleshy mouth tendrils into the wounded leg of one of her charges, the screaming and the slurping nearly drowning out her superior. “We've always, always room for more.”

Flemel tried not to see anything, walking between the rows of the wounded, war-ravaged and poxed, shattered legs and spines, viscera everywhere, an endless choral interlude of screaming. One of them grabbed at his shirt as he passed, revealing himself as the brother Flemel had last seen five years earlier in a funeral suit that hid his wrist scars, and Flemel forgot himself and began to scream.

The hand on his shoulder was M's. Above M's left wrist Flemel saw a lit candle. “You have to keep going,” he said, if not desperately then too close to desperate for Flemel's liking. “If we stop, we're dead, and worse than dead.”

Flemel nodded and broke the grip of the thing that was not, that could not be, his dearest Frederick, and followed M and Stockdale forward, reaching the end of the room finally and passing into a stairwell. They descended farther and farther. The back of Flemel's throat felt like hot asphalt, though if he had to rank them, thirst would have been far down on his list of concerns.

The wallpaper in the next room was bright and cheery. A pile of toys lay in one corner—well-stuffed teddy bears and painted rocking horses, half-finished puzzles and alphabet blocks. Waiting patiently was a mad wall of tissue, an incomprehensible puddle of skin and eyes and hair and little sprinkles of outdated children's clothing that Flemel only belatedly managed to recognize as conjoined octoplets, or decoplets, or perhaps some higher sort of oplet. Trying to count Flemel grew dizzy. Two of them, attached to each other at the neck and to the rest of their brood from waist to ankle and shoulder to tailbone, respectively, held a sign scrawled awkwardly in crayon reading
SACRED JUSTICE MOVED OUR ARCHITECT
!

“Welcome!” one of the children said.

“Welcome!” said a twin on the other end of the line, and then they were all chittering salutations.

There was no visible means of egress, though after a moment Stockdale identified a part of the wall that had rotted through and began to worry at the weakened wood with his knife.

“What happened in this place?” Flemel had not realized that he had voiced the question aloud until it was answered by one of the smiling girls stuck in the middle of the meat.

“Nothing much, nothing in particular,” she said. “A wife killed one of her children in the upstairs bathroom, back when it was a tenement slum, started squeezing and couldn't stop. Several rapes, dozens of assaults, endless thefts, infinite acts of petty cruelty.”

A hand at the other end opened to reveal a baby's head grown into the palm. “No worse than any other house on the block. It's bones atop bones atop bones.”

A towheaded boy from the very end of the line, one ankle plunging downward into the amoeba of flesh, informed them, “It's all like this. We could have manifested anywhere. It's all like this.”

“How many floors are there?” Flemel asked.

“Hell is a circle,” a girl in pigtails responded, holding a porcelain doll in one flipperlike appendage. “Once you're in, you never leave.”

The blow brought Flemel back to his senses, or something near them, M pulling back his hand in readiness to deliver another. “Don't fucking talk to them. They're lying to you, they're just telling lies.”

“No sirs, not lies,” came a response from somewhere within the swelling flesh. “It would be easier if it was a lie, but you know in your heart it isn't!”

Stockdale had broken through the planking and moved swiftly into the darkness yawning beyond it, so quickly that M had to hurry Flemel onward, the plaintive cries of the children echoing against his back. “We'll see you again! And again and again and again . . .”

M yelled for Stockdale to slow down from the top of the staircase, and he turned back with a snarl but waited for them to catch up. The walk seemed as long as ever. Flemel's ears rang from the terrible clamor of the house's indigestion.

The door at the bottom led to a small, shabby-seeming office—that of a claim's adjustor, or a minor government functionary, or a less-than-successful
seller of time-shares. “Come in, come in,” said a fat man sitting behind a business desk. His head was the size of a basketball, sweat dribbling down past the tufts of his ear hair and over a thick neck. His lips were swelled pink, his eyes friendly little dots, like holes cut into a Venetian mask. “And how can I personalize your misery this afternoon? Any dietary restrictions you'd like us to be aware of? Religious traditions we might blaspheme? Survive a war, famine, plague, or earthquake? Let me ask you something,” he said, licking a thick finger with a rose-colored tongue and opening a file. “Any familial trauma in your background? Daddy in the doorway, a bottle of gin in one hand and a strap in another? Uncle beneath the bed sheets, a special secret, just him and his special boy? Because I've got some fantastically disturbing scenes prepared for the survivor of child abuse. No? Don't worry, don't worry,” he said, smiling teeth the size of dominoes, “we'll find something for you. We always do!”

“You only exist if we both agree on it,” M said, though he was sweating. The room they had come in seemed to have only the one door, and M began searching for a hidden exit, fidgeting about with the bookcase and various paraphernalia.

“I'm afraid I'm extremely real,” the man said. “It's all real. All of your nightmares, everything that your parents ever told you were pretend so that you'd sleep better. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, man-eating plants, and the creature from the black lagoon. Corpses that gnaw and babies that weep, lovers raped, friends mistreated, siblings tortured, things that crawl and scrape and claw. They're all down here, waiting to meet you.”