The Light at the End (29 page)

What
do
I think?
he asked himself.
Does this stand a chance of working out? Can we actually kill a thing that’s already dead, using pointy sticks and crosses, fercrissake?

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I really don’t know.”

The answer seemed to satisfy her. She turned away again, silently puffing on her cigarette, while the distance crept back into her eyes. Leaving Allan, once again, alone in the room.

It was ten minutes after eight.

Rudy, too, was waiting for the stars to come out.

He crouched, unseen, under a darkened workman’s staircase on the low end of the Lexington Avenue line. His eyes were drowsy, thoroughly mad, and more redly luminous than the lit tip of the cigarette that he lazily dragged to his lips.

He had been waiting all day for the sun to go down.

Ever since the early morning… so early that it still deigned to be called the night, for dawn was far away… ever since he awakened from that terrible trance, with his rectum still throbbing memories from his pilloried violation, Rudy had been trembling on the near side of sleep. Several hits of speed, taken at regular intervals, had allowed him to maintain that uneasy state.

But it was the sleep of the dead that he deprived himself of. And the sleep of the dead is more demanding than the sleep of the living.

He twitched suddenly, the effects of the amphetamine that coursed through his almost bloodless veins. He didn’t know how or why the blood left his system… it didn’t seem to be coming out through his pores, and he had neither urinated nor defecated in eight solid days… but somehow it did, leaving him starving for more. And today, with no sleep to buffer the region between satiation and ensuing hunger, had been the most difficult of all.

Because he had been trapped down here in the tunnels, with the slowly mounting emptiness alive inside his body. Because he had been helpless to do anything about it, pinned down by the sun and the busyness of daytime Manhattan. Never had he felt so restricted in the tunnels, so much like a prisoner wandering nightmare catacombs that offered no protection and no release. It made him crave surrender to the deeper darkness of sleep.

But he was afraid to sleep.

He was afraid to dream.

And so the nightmares had come to him awake, twisted fragments of imagining that skittered past him on spider-thin legs. Shadows, lurching out at him from nowhere. The ghostly echoes of ancient machinery, the timeless cries of men in pain. Strange flashes of light that yanked him away from the arms of slumber, like angels summoning him up to a place where he could never dwell. And wisps of laughter, terrible and familiar, that made the white flesh crawl over his bones.

Death without rest is a horrible thing. Rudy knew that now. An intimate knowledge. The Age of the Three-Day Creative Marathon was past. The Age of the Endless Party as well: that surreal succession of barely glimpsed days that flipped past him like cards in a shuffling deck. Both of them, gone, as he grappled with the knowledge that he was in a strange place, where all the rules had been changed, and the path to Hell was the only road before him.

Most self-respecting vampires wouldn’t touch speed with a ten-foot pole. They knew how badly they needed to forget, if only for a few hours. To forget how much worse it could so easily become.

Rudy’s eyelids fluttered shut, pale membranes over the red luminescence. Now, with the sun’s final surrender to the skyline, with the coming of the darkness that gave him life, he surrendered himself to death’s whirlpool embrace. He let it suck him under, lapping over his head in dark whispering waves, lulling him as he settled into succoring folds, its replenishing depths.

As the seconds. Turned to minutes.

Into hours.

The clock on the wall said 10:45.

And everybody was going insane.

“What do you
mean
, you still haven’t heard anything?” Joseph screamed into the phone. “We’ve been out here for almost three fucking hours!”

“I know that, boss. I know that,” Allan wearily replied. “I’ve been answering the phone for almost three fucking hours, and the only real thing that’s happened is a vehicle run from Bankert and Company. Which means that not only do I have to listen to you guys scream at me I also have to put up with Vince.”

“God,” Joseph said, chuckling ruefully, the steam going out of him slightly. “You poor guy.”

“Vince has got to be the biggest asshole in the world,” Allan continued, gratefully playing on the change in subject, “Tell you what. After we’re done with Rudy, lets take care of Vince, all right?” They laughed. “Bet you ten to one he decomposes on the spot…”

The phone rang on another line. “Hang on a second. Allan said, about to put Joseph on hold.

“I’ll get it,” Josalyn said. She had gradually snapped out of it over the past several hours, the catatonia giving way to a deep depression. Allan wasn’t sure that it was an improvement, but at least she was functional now.

“Josalyn’s got it,” he said into the phone. “So we were saying…”

“Somethin’ better happen soon.” The tiny trace of levity had vanished once again from Joseph’s voice. “There’s starting to be some mutiny in the ranks. I can handle Stevie Baby: he gives me any more guff about going home, I’m gonna knock his block off. But what can I say to Tommy, man? He’s gettin’ really tired of hanging around. If something doesn’t happen, he’s gonna take off, and I’ll be left alone with the dipshit.”

“I have Zeke on the line,” Josalyn interrupted. “He says he wants to go home.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Allan muttered. He told Joseph to hang on for a second, then turned to Josalyn and said, “Ask him if he can hang out for another fifteen minutes. Just another fifteen minutes is all I ask.” Josalyn nodded glumly and turned back to her phone.

“Tell me about it,” he said, returning his attention to Joseph. “Armond’s having the same problem with his people. And now all the messengers want to go home, too.”

“Great.”

“They’ve been doing a real good job for us,” Allan emphasized. “Dean, Jimi, and Navajo have this really great routine worked out with their bikes. They’ll rendezvous at one corner, mess around for a couple minutes, then fan out over a thirty-block radius and meet again on another corner a little further uptown. They’ve been calling every ten minutes since nine o’clock.” He paused to empty his pipe. “And Zeke and Art Dodger have been busting it out, too. So it’s not like they’re not trying. It’s just that…”

“He’s nowhere,” Joseph finished the sentence. “The sonofabitch has vanished from the face of the earth.”

“Sorta looks that way, doesn’t it?”

Joseph grunted a response.

“Would almost be nice if it were true,” Allan continued.

“Balls. It’d be nice if he’d never been
born
.” They laughed unpleasantly. “But I don’t want him to get away that easily. I won’t be happy ‘til I nail him to the wall.” Joseph’s voice dropped down conspiratorially, and he added, “You know, I really hope that nobody else gets him. I really do. I understand why we need so many people… it’s too big an area for me to cover all alone, and all that… but if anybody else gets him before I have a chance, I’m gonna feel like I got ripped off. You know? Like somebody else got the prize that should have gone to me.”

“Whoa, Joseph,” Allan breathed. “The important thing is to
get
him, not…”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Joseph sighed heavily into the receiver. “It’s stupid, but I can’t help it. I want his hide. He’s mine. He’s been mine ever since I saw that poor girl come out of the subway; and now, after what happened last night…” He let it trail off.

“I got you, boss. I’ll do my best. We’ll just have to see what happens, that’s all.”

“Yeah. Well.” Allan heard the sound of a match being lit on the other end of the line. “If something doesn’t happen pretty soon, I’m goin’ down into the tunnels to look for him. Fuck this sitting around.”

“Give it another half hour before you do anything. Okay?”

“All right.”

Joseph hung up. Allan sat there, staring at the receiver for a minute.
This is turning into a disaster
, he thought.
A first-rate bomb. We’re gonna sit around all night, waiting for something to happen, and then pick up tomorrow’s paper and find out that the Subway Psycho has moved to Queens
. It was a discouraging thought; but everything about tonight had been discouraging, so far. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find out that Rudy had rented a U-Haul and moved to Boston, where the subways were cleaner.

But not nearly as funky
, he thought, reaching for his pouch of Captain Black…

When the door behind him opened.

Allan whirled, an inarticulate shout on his lips, the pipe flying out of his hand and striking the wall. Josalyn. too, whipped around suddenly with terror in her eyes. Both of them were all too aware that the remaining weapons were halfway across the room.
How did he find us?
Allan’s mind was shrieking…

“Hello?” Jerome piped in meekly, poking his head in through the doorway.

“
Jesus Christ!
” Allan yelled. He and Josalyn both slumped back heavily in their chairs, exchanging wide-eyed glances of relief. “You just scared the
hell
out of us!”

“Perhaps I should have knocked first,” Jerome suggested, grinning mischievously. “May I come in?”

“Who
is
he?” Josalyn wanted to know. The cigarette between her fingers did the jitterbug with wild abandon.

“Some guy who works here,” Allan informed her, still shaking like crazy himself.

“Some
guy
!” Jerome harrumphed. He turned to address Josalyn, Allan having sunken beneath his contempt. “I’ll have you know that I’m the single most important person in the company’s history…”

The phone rang. All of them stared at it for a moment, as if it were an alien thing. Then Allan said to Josalyn, “Could you get that, please?” She obliged him, and he turned back to Jerome.

“I was worried about you,” Jerome said, anticipating the question. “I’ve been worried about you all day. Finally, I just couldn’t take it any more. So when I walked by the office, and saw that you were still here…” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Dean says the guys want to go home now,” Josalyn cut in. “What should I tell him?”

“This is just like work!” Jerome exclaimed. “Everybody wants to go home!”

“Ask him if they can hang out for just ten more minutes,” Allan said.

“This
is
just like work!” Jerome re-emphasized.

“Shut up, Mary,” Allan said, doing his best Tony impersonation.

“Now don’t start,” Jerome warned.

“They’ll call back in ten,” Josalyn said, hanging up the phone.

“Good men,” Allan declared. “Aces, every one of ‘em.”

“So…” Jerome let the word drag out. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Well…” Allan let the word drag out twice as long.

“You could bring me a couple six-packs of beer if you wanted. I’m dying of thirst. Josalyn?”

“I’ll have some beer,” she said. “My nerves are going crazy. And I’m almost out of cigarettes.”

“What do I look like?” Jerome demanded, “An errand boy?”

“No, you look like the fairy princess of my dreams. Now, if you can make the beer materialize with a wave of your magic wand…”

“You can wave my magic wand, if you want to,” Jerome interrupted, coyly.

“Oh, God,” Josalyn moaned, grinning for the first time tonight. It pleased Allan to see it.

“Just go get the goddamn beer before I stuff you back in your lamp,” Allan grumbled.

“
You
can stuff me any old time you…”

“JUST
GO!
” Allan roared, and Jerome promptly tiptoed out the door.

“And don’t forget my cigarettes!” Josalyn hollered after him. He peeked back in. “Salem Light 100’s!”

Jerome disappeared, the door closing behind him. Allan and Josalyn looked at each other for a moment, then broke up laughing. “See what I have to put up with around here?” he said.

“I like him,” she mused aloud. “He’s funny.”

“Yeah, but he’s slow. By the time he gets back here, hot as it is, we’ll be able to fry eggs on the beer cans.” They laughed some more, fully aware of how badly they’d needed to. Privately, both of them thanked Jerome for coming in and breaking the ice. It had been a long, slow, nerve-wracking night.

Very soon, they would wish that it had stayed that way.

The time was eleven o’clock.

At ten minutes after eleven, Doug Hasken finally freed himself from the endless spew of dogma that had detained him for the past four hours. It had been a singularly unpleasant experience… more so than he had expected… and it left him feeling more confused than when he went in.

If that’s possible
, he mused bitterly.
I was pretty messed up to begin with
.

He tarried for a moment longer in front of the Community Church of Greenwich Village. Through the storefront window, he could still see them: their lips in constant motion, prattling on and on about what marvelous sheep they were. It made him queasy, looking at them. It made him queasy to think about being identified with them in any way, shape, or form.

But I will be
, he was quite sure.
I always will be. As soon as people find out that I believe in Jesus Christ, they’ll lump me with every dumb Bible thumper who ever walked the Earth. They always have, and they always will.

Goddamn it.

As if to punish him for using the Lord’s name in vain, a design gracing the sign above the door called itself to his attention. It was such a typically tacky little piece of Christian fluff that he’d never really looked at it before. But he saw it now. And it weirded him out.

It looked like this:

“Godspo Hasken,” he read aloud, then laughed uncomfortably. “I suppose I’ll have to change my first name to Godspo now. Right, Lord?” He looked up into the silent, brooding sky for an answer. He didn’t get it. He was not surprised.

Doug Hasken turned away from the Community Church of Greenwich Village, and all the madness surrounding it, roller-skating east on Bleecker Street toward the center of the Village. On his left, he watched a butcher shop whip past him, the meat hooks in the window speaking bluntly about their part in the endless slaughter. Just beyond it, at 257 Bleecker, a large sign confidently asserted: YOUR TRUE CHARACTER IS REVEALED THROUGH ASTROLOGY.

“Jesus,” he moaned. It was more an invocation than a profanity, though it contained elements of each.

Doug paused at the center of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue, watching a pair of stranded punks dance in the middle of Father Demo Square while cars whizzed by them from every side.
Who’s crazier?
he found himself wondering.
Those nuts out there, or the ones I just left behind? One group denies everything but its own senses. The other group denies its own senses to believe in a book. So who’s crazier?

It occurred to him strongly, and not for the first time, that the entire spinning universe was mad. It was not a thought that he was comfortable with, no matter how often it struck him. He pushed away from the curb, then, leaving both the corner and the question behind him.

Doug crossed Sixth with the traffic and wheeled rapidly down Bleecker. There was a bit of gridlock at MacDougal Street. It allowed him to pass the line of honking metallic insects with pathetic ease. “Get a pair of skates!” he yelled at one particularly grumpy man in the tie-up. The man responded in kind, suggesting to Doug that getting hit by a truck would be far too gentle a fate for a “cocksuckah like you.” Doug waved bye-bye and left him in a very small cloud of dust.

On the other side of MacDougal, Bleecker was absolutely free of traffic. Doug took advantage of it, whipping down the middle of the street at full speed. He could do twenty miles an hour on his skates with no problem. He pushed it a little and wondered precisely how fast he was going. All he knew was that Sullivan Street was coming up on him with a speed many people would find alarming.

And that nothing, in Heaven or Earth, made him feel as good as the simple act of pushing himself to do more, go faster, be better.

Nothing
, he thought, and then Sullivan Street was upon him.

He brought himself to a rapid halt, angling his right foot against the street and drawing a tight-yet-casual 360-degree turn. The effect was jarring and exhilarating all at once. He grinned, sighed, and pounded his chest with his fists like Tarzan before dutifully looking both ways.
Of course, nobody’s coming
, he thought.
The day I don’t look is the day I get nailed
.

The cars were coming up behind him on Bleecker now. He moved over to the sidewalk as he crossed Sullivan on the right-hand side. Skating among pedestrians was the slowest way to go, because most of them seemed to be the descendants of slugs. Even in New York City, where the average strolling speed looks like cross-country racing to the rest of the country, he always felt like he was surrounded by extras from
Night of the Living Dead
.

Which was an interesting thought for him to be having. Because, just as a trio of extremely fat tourists forced him to stop completely for a moment, he happened to glance across the street at a small, sleazy dive called Mills Tavern. The front door had just opened, allowing a discordant jangle of poorly performed rock music to tumble out into the street.

Something else was coming into the street.

Rudy.

Doug fell back against the wall, no longer interested in passing the tubby tourists. He recognized the face from the photocopy. Even in the shadow of the open doorway, eyes hidden by a pair of wraparound shades, there could be no mistaking it.

You forgot about Allan completely. You moron. You promised him that you’d call.
All of those thoughts and more ran through a secondary channel in his mind. He heard them the way you can’t help but overhear snatches of conversation from an adjacent dining room table. They were overwhelmed by his gut reaction, the sheer force with which it made itself clear.

That’s the most evil-looking man I’ve ever seen
, his gut informed him. And he knew, without a doubt, that it was true.

Doug watched in terrified fascination as Rudy emerged fully onto the sidewalk. He had a girl with him, Doug saw… a trollop, to be precise… who seemed to be having a hard time maintaining her balance. Rudy dragged her along behind him, grinning nastily as they moved back toward Sullivan Street.

At the corner, they paused, and he whispered something in her ear. Her head bobbed up and down like a cheesy dog-shaped dashboard ornament, and her shrill, drunken laughter rang in Doug’s ears. It shot pain through his head, like biting down on tinfoil, though he had felt wonderful just moments before.

Why can’t she see it?
his mind screamed at him.
Why can’t she feel how bad he is? What the hell is WRONG with her?
Once again, he looked up toward the heavens for guidance.

And was answered by the distant sound of thunder.

By this time, Rudy and the girl were crossing onto his side of Bleecker, moving downtown on Sullivan. He ducked into a doorway, mortally afraid of being seen; and he remembered Allan’s insistence that the messengers stay out of the man’s way. Suddenly, the urgency that Allan had shown made all the sense in the world.

I’ve got to call him
, he realized.
I’ve got to call him now. Something terrible is going to happen if somebody doesn’t get here right away. That girl is going to
… He didn’t even want to think about it.

Doug peeked his head out of the doorway and looked down to the corner. They were gone. He wheeled back onto the sidewalk and moved quickly to the corner, peeking once again toward Houston Street.

Midway down the block, he could see them. She was still laughing and staggering; the man was practically holding her up as they moved rapidly toward SoHo, on the south side of Houston. Doug quickly skated across Sullivan and up to an unoccupied pay phone, digging in his pocket for a dime. A quarter availed more quickly; he singled it out, brought it up to the coin slot, put the receiver to his ear, and…

The phone was dead.

“Damn,” he growled to himself, slamming down the receiver. There was another phone, right next to him, but it was occupied by a bony, white-skinned woman with bloodshot eyes and great dark smears of runny mascara down either cheek. Judging from the beret on her jet-black rectangular hairdo, she was an artiste of some sort. Judging from the way she twitched and shuffled around on her feet, she was either having a nervous breakdown or eating cold turkey.

He noticed all these things, but he didn’t stop to think about them. The dark man and the girl were at the corner of Houston now, getting ready to cross. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman on the phone. He tapped her on the shoulder, and she whipped her head around to smite him with dagger eyes.

“I have an emergency…” he heard himself weakly saying.

“YOU DON’T THINK THIS IS AN EMERGENCY?” she shrieked in his ear, shrill as a buzz saw down the length of his spine. “YOU DON’T THINK THAT MY WHOLE LIFE IS FALLING APART?”

Again, he heard himself mumbling apologies with an eerie sense of detachment as he backed away from her. A very un-Christianlike part of his mind was saying
I don’t really care about your stupid problems, lady. Somebody is going to die because of your stupid problems.
But those thoughts would remain unspoken. The woman would only understand that she was being attacked, and he didn’t have time for an argument. Especially not when…

They had disappeared.

“Oh, no.” He stared down the block at the empty intersection for a long cold moment.
Could they really have crossed that quickly?
he asked himself. He didn’t believe it, but the fact remained: they had disappeared, somehow, into the night.

He abandoned all caution now, blasting down Sullivan in reckless pursuit. Around him, the streets and sidewalks were empty. There was nothing to detain him as he pulled out all the stops, whipping down the cracked and potholed pavement that led to Houston and beyond.

He slowed at the intersection, letting the last few cars zip through the yellow light, taking a minute to scan the length of Houston. Nothing. If they had turned in either direction, he would have been able to see them; he was positive of it. Across the four-lane expanse of Houston, Sullivan Street receded into darkness, yawning before him like the mouth of a tunnel.

“That’s where you are,” he whispered aloud. “That’s where you’re hiding. I know it.”

Doug took a last moment to look for a phone on any of the four corners. No such luck. He stifled the impulse to use vulgarity and moved across Houston with the light. At that point, his caution returned to him, and he slid up onto the right-hand sidewalk, deliberately slowing himself down.

He passed in front of Saint Anthony’s Rectory, glancing across the street at the illuminated storefront of an all-night Laundromat. There were a few women inside, their laundry bags proportionate to their own body sizes: a fat lady with an enormous load, a scrawny old gal with a satchel so thin it looked like an understuffed sausage. The dark man and the girl weren’t among them, not surprisingly.

Every other doorway on the block was lost in shadow.

The businesses were closed; the homes were locked and shuttered for the night. Doug paused for a moment, gauging the neighborhood, trying to spot the hole through which they had to have slipped. Then he rolled forward, very slowly, up to the edge of the rectory grounds.

From somewhere behind him, a moan.

Doug whirled. His eyes flashed on a human form that loomed above him, arms outstretched. Reflex knocked him back a foot and dragged a startled gasp from his lips. The shape remained poised, as if biding its time. His paralysis snapped, just as his mind fully registered the nature of the thing before him.

A very small statue of the Virgin Mary faced him, arms outstretched, head bent in supplication to the Lord. Doug stared at this symbol of mystical innocence for a long time, chiding himself.
You sure got a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, all of a sudden, getting scared half to death by the mother of Jesus.

He took two short rolling steps backwards, still looking at the statue, not paying attention as the blackened stairwell to the rectory basement opened up to the left of his feet. He was only just turning to glance at it when the hand whipped out from the darkness and wrapped around his ankles.

Everything happened in the space of five seconds. He saw the girl, leaning against the wall with her blouse undone, her breasts exposed, the hips thrust outward, her ear pressed to the wall as if listening in on a neighbor’s squabble. He saw the black cascade of blood that slithered down from her neck, tracing the contours of her bare shoulders and chest with wet skeletal fingers that grew before his eyes. He saw her mouth open as another moan escaped her: a weak, piteous, dying sound.

He didn’t see the hand that was locked around his ankle, but he heard the sound of snapping plastic, felt the viselike pressure increase, screamed as a single claw burrowed into the muscle of his calf and sliced through the skin.

He yanked away desperately, the fingers sliding on the plastic shinguards, losing their grip. The imbedded thumbnail sliced a bloody four-inch arc around the side of his leg before ripping free as well. Doug staggered backwards, out of control. His arms flailed as his skates carried him off the edge of the curb, sent him stumbling into the street.

The Checker cab was moving down Sullivan Street, doing a cool 35 mph. At a distance of roughly five feet, the driver had virtually no reaction time. When the dark shape suddenly appeared in the center of his headlights, all could do was slam on his brakes and shut his eyes.

The cab clipped Doug with its left front fender, sent him spinning crazily into a parked VW van. He slammed against the side, bounced, hit it again, and grabbed onto the sideview mirror before his skates slipped out from under him. He hung there, his legs splayed out behind him, his right hip curiously numb but unbroken.

“ASSHOLE!” the cabbie screamed at him, punching the accelerator. The Checker lay a squealing patch of rubber in its wake as it thundered down the street and away.

Slowly, Doug began to upright himself, sliding his feet forward to line up with the sideview mirror that he still clutched desperately in his hands. He was dazed, the numbness spreading through his entire body now, dulling his senses and muddying his thoughts. He achieved an awkward balance, steadying himself with difficulty. Only then did he look back in the direction of the horror.

The dark man was coming.

Like a corpse rising out of its grave, Rudy climbed to the top of the stairs. Every step made him appear to grow larger, more terrible. The cloud-smothered light of the moon played across his white features, twinkling on the dark wet slick around his chin, the merciless black slash of his wraparound shades.

Doug was frozen in place. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He watched in helpless terror as Rudy stepped onto the sidewalk, gaining his full height, and moved to the edge of the curb.

“I
see
you!” the dark man called in a terrible, sing-songy voice. “Allee-Allee-
outs
-in-free!”

Then Rudy smiled. And his hand came up. And he slowly removed his glasses.

Doug’s knees gave out as the red eyes bored into his own. His mind went totally blank for a second. His skates slid out from under him.

He hit the ground hard, landing flat on his ass. Awareness flooded back into him: sharp pain, sudden terror. His eyes snapped back into focus as his mind clicked on; he saw that the dark man was laughing hysterically, and a voice in his head said
get out of here NOW!