The Diviners (22 page)

“What’s the catch?”

“Ah. That would be telling, wouldn’t it? Life is a game of chance for men of daring, Thomas. You must be willing to risk in order to be rewarded. What say you?”

Tommy thought it over. In his brief life, he’d found that most bargains weren’t bargains at all. And the thought of walking through those pale dead pig bodies to get to the stick at the far end seemed daunting. Then he remembered that he was there because his so-called friends had locked him in for laughs. He would not show up without that hundred dollars to rub in their faces.

“Okay, mister. I’ll do it.”

The man smiled his discomfiting smile. “A man of daring after all. May I see your hands?”

Tommy frowned. “What for?”

“A man in my position must take precautions. Hands, please.”

Tommy held out his hands, turning them palms up, then palms down. The stranger’s eyes gleamed.

“You may put them down now.” The man reached into his pocket and produced a leather pouch, shaking what looked like dust into his palm. He blew it into Tommy’s face.

“Wha-what’d you do that for?” Tommy sputtered, wiping at his nose and mouth.

“Upping the ante,” the stranger said, holding the hundred-dollar bill between his second and third fingers like an offering. “Game of chance. Men of daring.”

Tommy snatched the bill from the man’s fingers and stuffed it into his own pocket. The man’s eyes seemed to burn with a strange fire, and Tommy looked away quickly. He focused instead on the walking stick at the far end of the warehouse. He took a deep
breath and entered the long, dark tunnel between the butchered pigs. All those dangling dead bodies, the eyes fixed and staring, the mouths open in a final silent scream, made him feel a little sick and woozy, and he struggled to keep his own eyes on the silver tip, which seemed a million miles away. Tommy chanted to himself quietly,
King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets.

“That’s it, Thomas. Keep walking. You’re doing very well. Soon you’ll put all those doubts to rest.”

Tommy kept moving. A hundred bucks was a world of money. When he showed up at Paddy’s in new clothes, his hair freshly oiled and green in his pocket, he’d show the others who was really the chump. Nobody’d be locking him in a warehouse again.

The stranger sang an unnerving song:
“Naughty John, Naughty John, does his work with his apron on….”

The song made Tommy break out in a cold sweat and he took the last few steps at a clip till he reached the stick. It had been shoved into the ground like a sword. Beside it was a pamphlet for something called
The Good
something or other—the last word started with
C
, but Tommy had always had a hard time reading; the letters got mixed up in his head. Tommy gripped the stick with both hands and tugged, but it would not yank free, and the stranger’s song was starting to work on his nerves. It seemed to come from everywhere, and under the melody he could swear he heard, very faintly, terrible growls and hisses, like voices released from the very depths of hell. He had the money in his pocket. He could run. But something told him he’d better see this through. Tommy positioned himself over the stick, wiped his hands on his filthy trousers, and tried again. It wouldn’t budge. He made a third attempt, pulling so hard that he fell backward into the wood shavings. It was wet where he fell, and a drop of something hit his cheek, followed by another. Tommy wiped at his face. His hand
came away smeared with blood. Still on his back, he looked up to see a German shepherd dangling on the hook above him, the kill so fresh the animal still twitched. Its belly had been slit open and its insides pulled out.

Tommy scrambled quickly to his feet. The stranger’s laughter startled him. He was suddenly right there in front of Tommy, who backed into one of the pigs and sent it swinging against the others. With shaking hands, Tommy patted the dead pig into stillness, as if he could bring order to this nightmarish turn of events. The stranger was
right there
.
How is that possible? How could he have gotten all the way over here?

“I… I can’t get it out,” Tommy whispered. He was not aware that he was backing up.

“Shame. Maybe he could help you?” the stranger said, nodding gently toward the dead dog. Then he frowned playfully. “No. I suppose not.” He drew the stick from the ground without effort.

Tommy felt his head swim. He wasn’t seeing so clearly anymore. The pigs’ legs jerked like marionettes. They were
moving
, writhing on their hooks and squealing till Tommy, too, was screaming. The man’s eyes burned with a terrible fire and he seemed to be even bigger than before.

“Game of chance, my boy. You’ve already rolled your dice.”

“Paddy! Liam!” Tommy screamed. “Johnny! I’m in here!”

“Your friends have deserted you.”

Tommy cut his eyes in the direction of the barred door at the other end of the warehouse, which was now slightly ajar. How far was it from here to there? Two hundred yards? Three hundred?

“Ah, one last game, I see,” the stranger said, as if reading Tommy’s thoughts. “Go on, then, Thomas. Place your bets. Roll the dice.” His voice echoed in the cavernous slaughterhouse. “Run!”

Tommy was off. His knees moved like pistons, his elbows
jabbing back against the dead air. The door bounced in his vision as his legs gobbled ground. It was known that he was the fastest boy on Tenth Avenue. He’d outrun cops, priests, gangs, and his own mother, who was quick with a belt when he made her angry, which was most of the time. A hanging chain clanged into him and he batted it away, feeling the sting as it hit his wrist, but he did not slow down. Far behind him, he could hear the stranger’s voice ringing out above the clang of the slaughterhouse chains. “ ‘And the sixth offering was an offering of obedience….’ ”

Tommy could see the door. It was maybe sixty yards away, and still there was no sign of the stranger. A frantic chorus pounded in Tommy’s head as he cleared the last carcass:
King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets!
Fifty yards. Forty. Beautiful moonlight peeked through the crack where the door was slightly open. Tommy didn’t stop to ask himself how it had been opened. All he could think about was pushing through it to freedom, racing for the shortcut to Thirty-ninth Street.

Thirty yards. Twenty…

Tommy no longer saw the door. One minute it had been within reach, and now it was gone. Instead, the stranger stood before him. It took Tommy a moment to slow down, for his brain to signal to his legs that there was trouble ahead—a cliff’s edge in the shape of a man with burning eyes. He had run in the wrong direction. How was that possible? How had he gotten so turned around? Nothing looked right to him anymore. Tommy turned the other way and saw hideous shadows crawling along the walls and ceiling of the slaughterhouse, as if devouring it whole, the stranger walking just ahead of the movement like a carnival barker leading a parade of darkness.

How?
Tommy thought. He dashed left, fighting through the smothering pigs only to find himself facing a brick wall that surely
hadn’t been there a minute ago. He went right, and there was another wall. When he faced forward again, the stranger was once more before him, standing in a patch of terrible moonlight. He was stripped to the waist, and Tommy stared at the glowing skin, the tattoos like brands, crawling across the man’s flesh and underneath it as well, as if his skin were a false one and the thing underneath was waiting to come out.

“You lose, Thomas.”

Devilish growls filled the warehouse. The darkness swirled behind the stranger, blotting out the walls and any hope of escape.

“ ‘I am he, the Great Beast, the Dragon of Old. And all will look upon me and tremble….’ ”

The stranger kept talking, but Tommy was beyond hearing. He kept his eyes on the moving dark and the unspeakable things inside it, on the changing form of the stranger who loomed above him.

“P-please…” he croaked.

The stranger only smiled.

“Such perfect hands,” he said as the darkness descended.

Evie sat in the tub, two fat cucumber slices placed over her swollen eyes, and sang in contempt of her throbbing head. “
We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too….
I had Manhattan, all right,” Evie mumbled. “And it… had… me.” She slipped under the water and let it carry her until a fierce pounding made her surface.

“I’m
bathing
,” she yelled.

“Will you be long?” Jericho answered.

Evie let a prune-ish toe play at the hot-water tap. “Hard to say.”

“I need the… the, ah…”

“Oh, applesauce,” Evie said on a sigh. “Okay, okay. I don’t want you to die of peritonitis like Valentino. Just a minute.” Evie rinsed the cucumber slices under the tap and popped them into her mouth. She pulled the plug and let the water swirl down the drain while she slipped on her robe and opened the door with a flourish. “All yours,” she said as Jericho pushed past her.

In the kitchen, Evie squeezed an orange into a glass, fished out
the seeds, and gulped down the precious juice along with two aspirin. “Oh, sweet Mary.”

A moment later, Jericho emerged from the bathroom, scowling.

“What’s eating you?”

“Nothing.”

He sat on the couch and quietly laced up a shoe, but his disapproval hung in the room like the lingering scent of Evie’s perfumed bath salts. Evie didn’t mind yelling, but she hated feeling judged. It got under her skin and made her feel small and ugly and unfixable. She sang cheerily in rebuke of both Jericho and her throbbing skull.
“You’re the berries, my bowl of cream, a dream come true, dear…”

“I was only wondering if this is going to be your usual routine,” Jericho said at last.

“Usual routine. Hmm, well, I might add a trained monkey. Everyone loves those.”

“Is that all this is to you? One big party?”

Evie was angry now. At least she wasn’t afraid to get out and live. Jericho didn’t seem to know life beyond the pages of a musty old book, and he didn’t seem interested in knowing anything beyond that, either.

“It’s better than spending every night
brooding
like Byron’s long-lost brother. Don’t make that injured face—you
are
a brooder! And what good does it do you? You’re eighteen, not eighty, kiddo. Live a little.”

Jericho got up from the couch. “Live a little? Live a little!” He let out a bitter
ha!
“If you only knew…” He stopped suddenly, and Evie could see him force an almost mechanical calm to descend. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand. I have to get to the museum.” He grabbed his dog-eared copy of Nietzsche and slammed the door behind him.

Evie sat on Mabel’s bed. The aspirin hadn’t helped much, but like a true modern girl, she wasn’t about to lie in bed all day, unlike poor Mabel, who had succumbed to a terrible hangover. She lay curled in her bed, clutching a bowl in case she felt the need to vomit.

“Hot off the presses, today’s headlines: The love of your life does not approve of my wanton flapper ways,” Evie said in a voice of affected mystery. “Really, Mabesie. You might want to reconsider—he
is
a bit of a killjoy.”

“My stomach doesn’t approve of our wanton ways, either,” Mabel said miserably. She hadn’t lifted her head from her pillow. “I am never drinking again.”

“That’s what they all say, Pie Face.”

Mabel moaned. “I mean it. I feel dreadful. I am ending my association with liquor.” She raised her right hand. “You may be the notary public to this announcement.”

“Noted. Public’d.”

Mabel dropped her hand, her face screwed into an expression of fresh misery. Evie jumped off the bed.

“What is it? Are you about to blow?”

Mabel reached under her bed and pulled out what was left of Evie’s headache band. It was bent in the middle, where someone had obviously stepped on it. Several of the rhinestones were missing, and the peacock feathers drooped like spent chorus girls. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh…” Evie swallowed down a curse word. Mabel’s mouth twitched and Evie could tell she was on the verge of a legendary weep. She tossed the headache band aside as if it were rubbish. “That old thing? I was tired of it, anyway. You’ve done me a favor, old girl, putting it out of its misery like that.”