Caraliza (32 page)

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Authors: Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick

BOOK: Caraliza
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It contained nothing but a dozen or so plates. Each one wrapped in a silk cloth, tied with a silk ribbon, the ribbon holding a handwritten message. Hebrew. Evan guessed what they might be, as he lifted the first few a bit out of the box. Soon, the cloth wanted to stretch, his was lifting a broken plate; he heard the broken edges scraping one another. Each parcel of silk cloth from that one on, contained broken glass, gently wrapped, and lovingly placed. The Hebrew messages under the ribbons. Prayers. Evan was certain.

 

“
Too bad they are broken, but you can’t expect much, the way they were stored,” the officer said to him as she fingered one of the undamaged plates in the wrappings. “What have you heard in there?” she asked him, and he could tell she still trembled. It took a lot to make a police officer in New York City tremble.
“
Enough to make me wonder why I go back in,” he said without looking back at her again. “It is a very troubled place, and we are only learning what some of those troubles might be.”
“
You have a stupid way of saying this place is a freak show,” she tossed her head backward at the great window behind them. “You could make a lot of money with spooky shit like those ghosts in there. Someone kept screaming we should leave the keys,” When Evan did look back at her; he noticed she was very surprised that he laughed at what she said.
“
You Evan Bryant?” he was suddenly asked, another officer walked across the street to where he was sitting on the curb. “Do you want to see what we’ve found?”
“
Will it scare me?”
“
If you can go in this place behind you, after the crap they say goes on in there? Nah, what we found over here is just bodies.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

 

 

While Evan was scaring the life out of a police officer under the great window, the homicide investigative unit was opening the rusted metal grate covering the stair across the street. It had been sealed very shortly after the murders in the Reisman Portraits, immediately after the police investigated the place for nearly two days straight. Nothing had been found, and the building owner, having recently been in the basement apartment, could not lease the space again, it was simply too vile a hole for decent people to occupy. The previous tenant had not been decent, by any description, but the building’s owner considered himself to be such, even a pious, Godly man. The owner was Menashe Reisman.

 

His seal on the horrible stair would last until Evan Bryant told the police they might have a body to discover behind the Reisman Portraits, and as foul luck would have it, he was right. The police were determined, his luck would not run out, and they reopened the case; not of the Kogen and Jane Doe disappearances, as it had been officially filed, but the case of a missing street urchin his fellows call Benny. Of that much, and nothing else, were the police certain in 1919, Benny Doe. And the basement had been searched, with Menashe Reisman’s permission and blessing. Yousep never knew that, but he worked across the street every day, and an unknown Dutch girl lived in the same basement as the suspect in the disappearance. The place was searched repeatedly, nothing ever found. Nothing had ever been found. Evan repeated those words and his tongue dried to the roof of his mouth.
Nothing had ever been found.
Caraliza had been there, since 1917. Evan read it from her own hand. 1917, and Yousep was translating her speech in 1919. How had the police not found her, as they thoroughly searched the building? Nothing had ever been found. Repeatedly.
Where was Caraliza during those searches?

 

Evan and his young officer friend walked across the street to the stair, after he put the newly discovered chest back in the shop. It was not pleasant - the darkness he remembered under the grate. Decades of rain and debris from the overflowing street accumulated to nearly a foot deep at the door; a tin-clad, heavy, wooden door. It was so rotted now, the police simply pushed it aside. The sewer runoff spread into half the space at the end of the set of slimy steps. The door opened into a short hall, with only a closet at the end. To the right of the closet was the toilet, and the seeping pipes, which were mere feet from the main sewer line under the street. The toilet was useless, and the sewer backed up on occasion in the years since the sealing of the stair.
To the left of the closet lay the kitchen, or, space once in use as a kitchen; there sat a decrepit gas stove, rusted to pieces in place against the wall. It had a single encrusted window, which once tried to give light to a tin basin sink, and looked out to a window well just below the sidewalk. A small brick curbing lay around this poor window well, to keep water out, but it ceased to do so, even when the tenant was sometimes living there. The kitchen turned to a small side room, only slightly larger; no furnishings of any kind were in that room.
If there had been lights, they were never more than gas lamps. The walls were concrete. The only wood in the place being the joists of the first floor apartments, ten feet above, and the wooden planks lying on the concrete floor. The planks were not secured as flooring, just set in place and hammered if need be. Walking the floor barefoot would have been uncomfortable.
Another short hall to the right, and to the left, before the side room stepped directly across - into a mean bedroom, half the size of the kitchen. A decayed bed sat and looked directly at the stove in the kitchen.

 

Evan stood looking at the fallen pile of bed, under the smoldering gaze of the police department light stands, and he smelled the dust and decay, heating up for the first time in decades. It was the smell of unused cellar, damp, dirt filled, but he imagined it was very much worse when it rained and moisture might seep in, to awaken smells that loved water, and bloomed to choke one’s breath away. There was no hint of color - but a tiny breath of blue tin, in the mass of rust and decay.
Evan refused to think the name of the girl who had been forced to live in this place; He did not want her spirit to know he was there. If she had murder in her, this memory would fan it to rage. He backed out of the vile room and stood in the short hallway he just crossed.
If it had been used as more than a hall in a previous generation, it could not have that use now; to the right was brick, old and sturdy as the concrete walls. It had never been offended or ever painted; nothing was hidden there. But to the left another door, solid, wood and tin. And this door held to its hinges. It stood open.

 

An officer directed Evan through this door to the left, down the short hallway. He found himself in a well, between the tenement buildings, at another set of steps down. It had been an air sump; an open hole nearly ten feet across. A well for the sewer, which then flowed directly to the river and would put rainwater back into the ocean from the city - when it worked. As older systems were replaced and modern pipes laid, stopgap measures would be taken in places, to help with water pressure problems. This well had been one. What had been a small courtyard, was now an alley, with a ten-foot brick wall, built to keep anyone out of the well. The apartment under the building was never an apartment in fact.
The basement had merely been storage space, and access out to the courtyard from the street. When it had been sealed to use as an apartment? Likely when the well was constructed to let air escape the sewers running under the courtyard. Those tunnels ran between the buildings down to the next street, which was slightly lower. When the well was built, and the courtyard was walled at the end, the basement opened through the pitiful doorway and out directly to the well pit.
Built like a chimney flue, it had no visible means to get down to the sewer pipes, but an opening was there, and water would often come up until the pressure eased; the design worked properly its entire lifetime, nearly thirty years. Water from the storm sewers never came up high enough to come into the basement. The well would sometimes be a swirl of mad water, rushing through the tunnel some ten feet below, but it never breached the lip of the well, and there was grass in the bricks now.

 

The well wore a larger metal grate over it; a person could stand on the grate over the center of the well. Evan stood there, and a question, growing in his mind, found its answer; the police had not disturbed a single plank in the apartment. They were above the well, upon the grate (and they were all wondering if it were strong enough for six or eight of them to stand where they were) but they were at the brick wall, which sealed the courtyard from the well. They were tearing that wall to pieces on one end.
Evan looked upward at a building, which rose five stories over the basement, and just opposite, an eight-story monster. Not a single window overlooked the well. An elephant could have been hidden there, and the city would never know. The police just discovered - the dead could be hidden there, and they were; three dead.
Evan lost his senses, and was helped inside.

 

The brick wall had been a single structure for a great while after it was built. But it had been cunningly overbuilt, as a double brick wall. The very odd thing was - it wasn’t sealed on the one end. It was possible to get between the inner and the outer walls. But that fact was hidden by the odd placement of the opening, at the very far end of the wall. Evan had to be shown photographs, taken before the hammers fell against the brick. Standing at the door, it was impossible to see the opening. A trick of perception.
A photographers trick in fact. A slight of the eye of the beholder. Now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-never-will.
Only one thing protected this opening from search in 1919, when the police stormed the place every morning for a week, and then again every morning for two days about a month later; the well had no grate then. The grate had been installed later, by the building owner, who had access to the well - Menashe Reisman.
He sealed the well, when he had the basement sealed. He believed he was preventing an accident. The workmen, who sealed the well, cared nothing about the double brick wall, except they threw their lunch trash between the walls the few days they worked there.

 

The trash was still there when the wall was knocked down, and the bodies pulled out. Each smaller than an adult, each wrapped tightly in roofing felt. Each covered first with tar; roofing tar. In fact, old roofing tar was all over the steps leading down, under the grate, into the heart of the well. The dead had been prepared right there.
The police had not walked near the opening between the brick walls in 1919, because they only had a two-foot curb around the very lip of the well. They never sent anyone along the lip to the other side, to see if the wall had been beautifully build to appear to touch the other building, as it obviously was connected on the side near the door. Each time they stepped to the lip of the well, they assumed any victim would have been tossed into the hole. They had no imagination at all. And bodies were being stashed between the bricks, after they were covered with the tar.
Caraliza was hidden there alive, with one body at least, while the place was searched, and Evan knew when he saw it, she had been hidden there after she died. Evan Bryant had been invited into hell; the door stood opened for him.

 

The thing at the top of the stair across the street laughed, but the building was empty, no one was afraid inside the Reisman Portraits. They were not unaffected across the street, however. The police department was stunned. Nothing like it had ever been found. A fiend built a crypt, and he filled it at his pleasure. Men and women, with years on the force, wept, as they brought the dead out into the kitchen area; they could not be taken to the street, there was now a crowd, and the press was there. Seventy-five year old murders are news. It was certainly news to this neighborhood.
It was news to the Reismans as well. Shelly was screaming at the television in her parent’s home, held tightly, as she raged in her father’s arms.
Evan could not walk. He was on the floor, in the side room in the basement. He did not look at the wrapped dead, as they were carried passed in front of him, and he would not look at them again, as he finally was taken by a very caring officer, up to the street, where he could breathe again. Evan was not allowing visitors at the present time; he was trying to see anything with his eyes that did not smile death back at him. He ended up putting his hands there, to shut out anything that looked like the hole he had just been inside.
Shelly saw him on the news report, filthy from the dust under the great window, his head in his hands, as he sat frozen on the curb. Horrors and tragedy - and two news crews fought over the best view of his reaction; he was their hero, he had seen hell. Did he have a comment? Shelly had a billion dollars of free publicity for her private ghost exhibit. Front page the next day, guaranteed. See we told you; the Reismans were foul people, see what they did to this neighborhood….

 

Sareta arrived to take Evan home, to Shelly’s parents’ house. There would be no one walking in the Reisman Portraits for more than a month after this. Why he brought Papa’s chest, she was not certain, but he told her in a weak voice, it was found under the window; she didn’t know this box. There was stuff under the window, which needed to be seen. But no one would. Not until the city forgot about the discovery across the street, and that was going to take some time. Evan could not wait to have Shelly hold him again. He needed to pass out for a while, and she was very soft for that.

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