The Stone War (32 page)

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Authors: Madeleine E. Robins

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: The Stone War
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Tietjen paused to wipe his forehead on his T-shirt, which he had stuffed into his back pocket like a rag once the heat got bad. So he was watching as Sandy Hochman leaned around Greg, dug her hands into a bucket of nails, pulled out a handful—
—and screamed, opening her hand to drop the nails, then shaking it as if something dreadful clung there, then cradling the hand in her arm and bowing over it, keening.
Greg turned away just long enough to yell for Tietjen, who had already started over to the fence. The boy was trying to tug Sandy out of her curl, to see what had happened to her hand. She kept rocking and saying, “Hot, hot, hot.”
“See if there’s anything in that bucket,” Tietjen said, thinking perhaps something had crawled into the bucket and bitten Sandy. Beth Voe, who had been putting up the fencing, dropped to her knees beside Sandy and, arm around her shoulder, coaxed the older woman to lean into her side, relax against her, let someone examine her hand.
He expected to see a welt or a bite, maybe even the marks of a snakebite. Instead, there were the stigmata of branding, as if the handful of nails Sandy had grabbed had turned suddenly white hot. As Tietjen looked, the burns began to blister. One of the men picked Sandy up and began to carry her off toward the Store.
“What the hell happened,” Tietjen asked Greg as Beth moved out of earshot.
“I don’t know,” the kid said desperately. “Sandy picked up some nails, and like, she was just about to start work again when she started screaming, like. Saying they were burning her.”
“Was the bucket hot?” Tietjen asked. The boy shook his head. “Was there any way the bucket could have gotten hot?” he asked.
Again, Greg shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. I thought maybe it was a hornet or something, but you saw what happened to her hand, sir.” The word made Tietjen uncomfortably aware that he was supposed to supply the answers.
“Where are the nails she dropped?” Tietjen asked.
Mostly they were scattered, flung down when Sandy felt the pain. But they found a clump of nails, welded together into a bristling lump. Melted. Tietjen and Greg and Lo-yi stared at the clump of nails. How much heat would it take to melt No. 10 flathead nails that way? And why did the bucket and the nails still in it show no sign of heat? They were as cool to the touch as the bucket itself.
“Close-up time, bring your tools!” Lo-yi called to the people who were still there. As he gathered up the hoe he had been using—and Sandy Hochman’s hammer and rule—Tietjen felt the others watching him. Resentfully, he thought.
“It’s beginning again, dammit.” He said it to himself. Something weird was happening. Things that shouldn’t happen, the sorts of things that he thought had died with Gable on the floor of Grand Central, were happening. The people of the Store thought everything was normal again. What the hell was this weirdness to break that deal?
When he got back to the Store Barbara was waiting.
“I’ve treated the hand best I could, and given her antibiotics to keep off infection.” It seemed to Tietjen that she, too, looked at him as if he had failed to keep the injury from happening. “What
happened?”
He told her. As he was telling her, Barbara’s mouth straightened into a hard line.
“It’s after us again,” she muttered angrily.
“What?”
She turned back to him. “Come on, John. Haven’t you
known
there was something behind all the things that have happened since the disaster? Some kind of intelligence? We can’t get out of Manhattan; no one’s come in to help us; all this weird stuff keeps happening, the monsters, and the lions the day we went to Grand Central—”
“The lions were on our side,” he protested. Tietjen didn’t want to have this argument, certainly not with Barbara. Because if he admitted that something was directing Sandy’s accident and Bobby’s, and the rash of ill luck that had beset the Store in the last few weeks, he would have to believe that it must be the city itself doing it, and he couldn’t believe that. Nothing else, he thought, had that kind of power, and after so many losses he could not bear to believe that the city itself could turn against him. Rather than acknowledge the power or the blind faithlessness with which it seemed to operate, he would refuse to believe there was any logic to the things that had been happening.
“What do you think, it’s like the Wicked Witch of the West sending out her weirdness troops to get us? Come on, Barbara … This isn’t personal, it’s chaos, that stuff I talked about months ago. I think it’s chaos, and it’s left little pockets of weirdness here and there, that we keep stumbling over. Okay?” He needed to convince her, and was relieved when she seemed to
be
convinced. Her shoulders relaxed, and her face lost the stricken look.
“Sandy will be all right,” she said at last. “Her hand will. But she’s sort of shut down, right now. She won’t even see Missy.” Tietjen didn’t know what to say to her. “Give her time, I guess,” Barbara answered herself after a long silence. “I’ve got kitchen duty with Elena tonight. See you later, John.”
After Sandy’s accident the spate of injuries seemed to have run its course, but unaccountable accidents and things breaking, or running down, or going haywire, still seemed to haunt the Store. The batteries that supplied power for the lights and the few electric appliances the Store used—a refrigerator in the kitchen and one in Barbara’s infirmary—all died one morning, and the backups proved useless. A layer of cement poured over the broken slate floor in the basement of the building next door refused to harden and cure: after six days it remained as soupy as the day it was poured. Every single piece of lumber cut to measure for the new gate to the Store was found to be off in length or width by exactly half an inch, either too much or too little. The ax heads came loose from the handles—one flew across the alley and narrowly missed one of the kids playing handball there. Lo-yi almost fertilized the new garden with rat poison, and insisted later that the label on the bag had read Fertilizer.
But no one was hurt. Just a pocket of bad luck, Tietjen told himself. They’d been so lucky, really.
In the midst of all this it was a relief to go out with the salvage parties. Tietjen joined one that went as far down as Houston Street, where he saw for himself the drowned spires of lower Manhattan. Little Italy and Chinatown and all but the roofs of SoHo were under water; the ground seemed to dip down sharply just after Houston, making a new shoreline. The upper stories of the Puck Building still rose out of the lapping green water. Lulled by the soft slap of the water on the cobblestones at his feet, Tietjen imagined swimming from rooftop to rooftop, diving down through the windows to wander from room to room in the old tenement flats, seeing the lives there undisturbed, pictures in place, furniture ordered and waiting. In fact, when he tried swimming out to a rooftop and then down, into an apartment, it was too dark to make much out; even when he came back with a flashlight, he saw only barnacles clinging to the furniture, and a pair of bloated bodies bobbing along the ceiling, placidly nibbled at by fish. He turned and kicked back up to the surface and did not try again.
Drying in the sun, safe on the shore looking south, he could see the glittering uppermost floors of buildings which had been skyscrapers. The Customs House was under water, he thought sadly. The Stock Exchange. Old City Hall. Beautiful old buildings, all of them, lost underwater while their characterless cousins of the last fifty years survived.
On the trip they found some salvage, picked up a couple of people who cautiously came along “to see what you got up there,” and as always on salvage trips, burned bodies they found. What did it say about him, Tietjen wondered, that he had become expert at locating dead bodies by smell? Now, nearly six months since the disaster, the smells were usually subtler, less horrible than in the first weeks, and the bodies more desiccated and less like something human. Still, it was agreed among everyone at the Store that one of their jobs was to dispose of the dead, and any salvage group might stop several times to say a word over dead bodies, then burn them. On this trip they stopped four times. The next day, after a night spent camping in the shattered atrium of a handsome new condo building in Chelsea, the party headed back to the Store. It was late afternoon when they got there; crews were still out, having rested during the fiercest part of the day’s heat. Lo-yi was in the garden with half a dozen helpers; the grapestake fence, painted white, shone in the late sun. A woman was sitting on a windowsill washing the window, one of Sandy’s crew. Near the roof a makeshift scaffold rocked slightly as three people moved back and forth. Repointing the brick near the roofline, he thought; Gellis and Ketch and Jimmy Weeks, one of Bobby’s recruits.
He stood for a moment, drinking in the sight of home and its activity. Barbara was probably in the infirmary, Elena in the kitchen or the basement room that had been turned into a classroom. The woman—no, there were two, in different fifth-floor windows—washing windows made him nervous. Leaning out too far, trusting to the sills to hold; were they secured in any way? Had Barbara permitted this?
He did not see the fall begin. A blur of motion caught his eye; then he heard the screams. For a moment long enough to see that the window washers were still in their windows, looking down, horror-stricken, he did not realize who had fallen or from where.
Near the roof, the scaffold dangled in two useless pieces, snapped in half. Gellis swung from one half, his leg tangled in one of the ropes, holding on with both hands, screaming for help. Jimmy Weeks stood dumbly at the roof’s edge for a moment before he began to pull on the rope, trying to raise Gellis up. Ketch had fallen.
Tietjen ran with everyone else, the people in the garden, his own raiding party. He pushed his way through the crowd to where Li lay, broken and somehow still alive. She’d taken the impact feet first; her legs were shattered, bits of bone splintered through the skin. Maybe her back was broken too, he thought. Her eyes were open and she recognized him.
“Ahh, shit,” she wept. “Ahh, shit, John.”
He was afraid to gather her up in an embrace that might have comforted her, afraid of hurting her further. Instead he lay beside her, stroked her hair from her forehead, murmuring “Shhh, shhhh,” as he might have to a sick child.
“Damn, I can’t even feel my feet,” she said. “I must be pretty fucked up.” She smiled and winced and smiled again, pure bravado.
“Shhh, Li. Don’t talk. We’re going to bring you inside and get you all fixed up—” he began. But it was useless, she knew too much. The look Ketch gave him made it possible for him to go on. Internal injuries, dozens of fractures, probably. Even a hospital might not be able to fix her; what the hell could he and Barbara do?
“Miz McGrath’s gonna be deeply pissed,” Li said, echoing his thoughts. “Damn, I kinda wish it hurt a little. This is sort of scary, you know?” Her voice was filled with liquid trills, as if she were drowning from the inside out. It took Tietjen a moment to realize that maybe she was.
“Lie still,” he said, sick. As he said it he had a flash of Li in his bed, moving beneath him, her dark eyes looking up at him as they did now, asking for something from him. How simple had it been to give her pleasure? It was impossible to help her now.
Her breathing became more liquid. The only other thing she said was “
You
know, John.” Then she worked at breathing for a little while longer. Someone had brought a blanket to cover her legs and fend off chill in the relentless afternoon heat; she smiled gratefully but said nothing.
Powerless, horrified, Tietjen lay there stroking her hair and murmuring stupid, comforting noises, past the time when Ketch’s liquid breathing had stopped.
“John.” It was Barbara, just behind him. “John, get up now and let us take care of her.”
Numbly he stood up and let someone take him away. Gellis, rescued from the scaffolding, came forward to explain, but Tietjen waved him away; what the hell did it matter?
“It just melted out from under us,” he heard Gellis saying. “Solid as a fucking rock, then gone.” Tietjen heard the horror in the other man’s voice, and remembered that perhaps he had loved Li too.
“Not your fault,” he mumbled, then turned away and blindly made his way into the Store, upstairs to his own room where he could be alone. He did not think of leading, of the Store, of what anyone would think.
He sat on the edge of the bed he and Ketch had shared and sent a thought, a prayer out, not really believing anything would answer. “What the hell do you want from me?”
Of course there was no answer. The silence rang like laughter in his head.
TIETJEN
went up to his room that night after dinner and the quick memorial service that Lo-yi and Barbara had staged. He lay on his bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. He was unable to stop the slow replay of Ketch’s fall from the scaffolding and the way she had slipped away from him, sliding into death. In memory he traced the tear that had rolled from the inside corner of her eye, down the side of her nose, moistening her lips, cutting through the powdering of grime. He could still feel her broken weight imprinted on the muscles of his arms.
Even in the dark, sounds, voices mostly, filtered in from the hallway, up from the alleyway. Every now and then Tietjen heard footsteps near his doorway, voices speaking low. The second time it happened he realized that McGrath had stationed herself outside his door, turning the well-wishers away. Taking care of everything as usual. Taking care of him. Thank you, Barbara. Now and then Tietjen thought he should go out to the hallway and tell her he was all right, she could go to her own room and get some sleep. But it was comforting to have her there, so much so that he could not make himself send her away.
The apartment was still and hot. He moved slightly to unstick the sheets from his back and legs. Tietjen did not want to sleep and dream of Ketch. Remembering was bad enough. When he closed his eyes he listened for sounds he had not heard in months; the rattle of cars and buses on the avenue, the faint sizzle of the streetlamp outside his window. All he heard was Barbara outside his door, murmuring that he shouldn’t be disturbed tonight.
When he drifted to sleep at last, he did not dream of Ketch but of his sons. He knew at once it was not a true dream, as the ones about Irene, and his mother, and about the boys during the disaster had been. In this dream he was walking through the zoo in Central Park, the way he remembered it from his boyhood, bright, safe, well maintained. The zoo was empty of people. Tietjen wandered around, spent some time watching the polar bears and the penguins, before he moved on to the next exhibit. It was an old-fashioned iron cage; on the other side of the bars Chris and Davy stood, staring blankly past Tietjen. He called their names but they didn’t respond, just held on to the bars of their cage and ignored him. When he reached for them through the bars the boys shied away. Tietjen looked around him for someone to help, but there was no one. He climbed over the guardrail and reached again into the cage. The boys looked at him anxiously for a moment; it was only when they turned and ran that Tietjen realized the cage had no back wall and that his sons had run away into the Park, into the city, where he would never find them. He was left clutching the bars, watching the boys as they ran, watching long after they had vanished into the green of the Park, trapped behind the bars and unable to run himself.
In the morning he rose and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast at the same time as always. He felt people watching him, but no one said anything. It irritated him, being watched that way. He felt as if they were waiting for him to go crazy. They should know by now, Tietjen thought. After everything they’d been through they should know he wouldn’t blow up.
Barbara came and sat down beside him. She smiled matter-of-factly, but Tietjen suspected that she was watching him too. They ate in silence for a few minutes, as long as Tietjen could bear it. Finally he put down his fork and turned to her.
“
What?
” he asked.
A corner of Barbara’s mouth turned up. “Nothing particular. How are you doing?”
“I’m not rabid. I wish people would stop looking at me as if I were a bomb about to go off.”
Barbara kept her eyes on her plate, where she was tracing patterns in her grits with the tines of her fork. “I don’t think ‘bomb’ is what people are thinking, John. Give us some credit—we’re concerned about you.”
Sullenly, Tietjen looked down at his own plate. “I’m okay, all right? You don’t have to watch me. I’m not going to start screaming or anything.”
“Why not? Aside from the therapeutic benefits, it’d let people around you know that you’re human.”
“Human!” He felt like his head would explode. “I’m just the same as always. I got some sleep, I’m eating something … like a normal person.”
“John.” She put her hand on his forearm firmly. His mother used to hold him just that way, keeping him still until he could think things through. “It’s
not
like always. Ketch died yesterday, in your arms. Did you think no one knew that the two of you were involved? Do you think no one cares about your grief? Everyone is watching you—and Marty Gellis—and no one expects you to act like everything’s all right. Lighten up, okay? People need to worry a little.”
Tietjen looked at the hand on his arm, losing himself for a moment in tracing the veins on the back of it, noting Barbara’s long fingers, the dull jade of the ring she wore. In the green of the stone he remembered his dream, his sons running from him while he stood behind bars watching, always watching. Lighten up. “Okay,” he said at last.
He wasn’t sure what he was promising when he said it, and he suspected that Barbara knew that. Still, she released his arm. After a moment they began to talk about the water tanks on the buildings across the street.
Tietjen moved through the haze of sympathy that surrounded him for a few days, working hard to accept graciously the smiles and pats, the questions and murmured condolences. The first time he and Marty Gellis ate dinner at the same table there was an awkward hush; Tietjen thought the people watching them were waiting to see if their bereavements consumed each other or struck sparks. After a few minutes Tietjen asked Gellis a question, Gellis answered, they spoke for a few minutes between mouthsful. The electricity in the air dissipated quickly then: no sparks at all.
Tietjen worked until he could only stagger upstairs to sleep. When he was working and around other people, he didn’t think too much or too long about Ketch’s death, or Irene’s or Chris’s and Davy’s, or about Bobby’s fractured arm and leg. Once he opened a door to such thoughts, every passing notion or memory led back to death or disaster. When he was overwhelmed this way the only thing Tietjen could do was blink and breathe hard and hope the thoughts would go away. If he looked into the tarry blackness too long, he was afraid he would never escape.
Despite his exhaustion there were still some nights he could not sleep. It was not just missing Ketch; she’d been gone from his room and his bed for a while before her death. But Tietjen was lonely. It seemed to him that the more established the community he had founded became, the further away from it he grew. What was it that was drawing him away? The darkness he knew was still out there, that no one wanted to hear about. Was he the only one who saw the blackness? Was he the only one there who knew that the city was not done with them? When the loneliness got bad Tietjen would climb upstairs to look out at the city, but more and more that was not a hiding place either.
One evening McGrath found him sitting on the stair between the sixth and seventh floors, slumped back so the risers cut into his shoulder blades. The stairwell was bathed in moonlight, which threw Art Deco shadows against the walls; Barbara’s hair and skin took on the silvery blue of the light and made her look carved out of marble or silver. She sat down on a lower stair and for a little while they were quiet and the loneliness in Tietjen subsided a bit.
Finally, Barbara murmured, “Why is moonlight supposed to be romantic? It always looks creepy to me.”
Tietjen smiled. “Me too. Makes you look like the ice lady.”
“I’m not,” Barbara said, too quickly and too coldly. Then she leaned back again and said more easily, “You look wrung out.”
“In the moonlight?”
She shook her head. “For a while now you’ve been looking bad, John. It’s not just Ketch’s death; you’ve been in trouble for weeks now. What’s going on?”
He wanted to say, and believe, that it was nothing. “I don’t know. It’s nerves, my imagination, something like that. Only a feeling …” It sounded so insubstantial Tietjen did not want to go on.
“Feelings count,” Barbara prodded dryly. “I’ll trade you a feeling. Sometimes I get a sense that I’m being watched.” She threw the words out with an elaborate casualness which was not at all casual. “No, not watched. Like someone was eavesdropping.” She laughed. “It’s a little weird.”
It was Tietjen’s turn to shake his head. “Not that weird, Barbara. I feel that way sometimes, too. And worse.”
“Worse?” She leaned back farther and tilted her head toward him so that her hair drooped over one eye. There was some old film actress, Tietjen remembered; from the black-and-white era, someone famous for the hair that fell in her eyes. Barbara looked unaccountably seductive in that pose; it made him uncomfortable. He shook his head and concentrated on trying to make his thoughts clear.
“I’ve been having dreams for weeks—since right after we fought the monsters at Grand Central. Dreams about Irene and the kids and my mother, about how each of them died. What’s weird is that I know they’re true.”
Barbara turned. “How horrible.” Her face was right side up now, the hair out of her eye. She looked herself, and worried. “But how can you know they’re real, John?”
“The same way we knew that Grand Central was where we’d find Gable and his people. That kind of knowing. Irene was trampled to death in a stairwell at Macy’s. The boys were in the babysitting room in their building and a fire broke out, and they hid in the bathroom and—just passed out, waiting for Mommy and Daddy to come save them.” Tietjen couldn’t control his voice, which was shaking and wet. “My mother—how the hell would it know about my mother, she died six years ago. Cancer. She was so brave, we all thought she was so brave … and in the end she died hating us. God, the way she hated everyone who was living, the nurses, the doctors. Me. Especially me. And she kept smiling and smiling until there was nothing left of her but the drugs, and the drugs told us everything she’d hidden from us.”
The shaking in his voice got too bad for him to continue. Tietjen hung his head and waited for it to stop. Without words, Barbara moved from the step she had been sitting on and sat next to him, gathering him into her arms as unself-consciously as if he had been five years old. “Shhh,” she murmured. “How horrible, shhh. It’s okay, it’s okay.” Sweet, meaningless sounds that gave him time to recover. She rocked him, with his head against her shoulder, stroking the hair away from his forehead. Tietjen listened to the strong beat of her heart under his cheek.
“It’s not just the dreams,” he said at last. “Whatever is watching us
hates.
I don’t know if it’s me or the Store or—I can’t help feeling that all the shit that’s been happening, Bobby’s leg breaking and Sandy’s hand, and Ketch—”
Barbara pushed him away from her. “Don’t say they’re your fault, John. The Store doesn’t need that kind of self-aggrandizing guilt crapping up the works, do you hear?” She looked stern, not angry, but there had been real force in her hands as she held him away from her.
Tietjen sighed. “It’s just, they all feel related. Like whatever killed Ketch sent my dreams.”
“Look.” Barbara settled next to him again, her hand loose around his arm. “Maybe what happened to Ketch was bad luck. Maybe what happened to Bobby and Sandy was back luck or some freak of nature we don’t know anything about. Maybe all the shit we’ve been through in the last six, seven months has loosened up a lot of repressed guilt in you, and that’s why the bad dreams. Maybe we only think we’re being listened to because this is a big city and we’re not used to it being so quiet. Maybe, huh?”
For a few moments her words hung in the air of the stairwell, shimmering in the moonlight. At last Tietjen sighed and put his arm around Barbara, leaning his head against the top of her head. Her curling white hair tickled at his chin and nose, but he didn’t move. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “Barbara, of all the things that have happened in the city since I got back, finding you was definitely the best.” He kissed the top of her head quickly, then released her and stood up. “It’s going to be another hot day tomorrow. We should try to sleep.”
Barbara nodded, but did not rise. “You go ahead down. I’ll follow in a couple. I want to enjoy the moonlight.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. You afraid I’m going to run into trouble between here and the second floor?”
Tietjen smiled. “You’re too tough for trouble. I’ll see you in the morning.” He turned and went down the stairs, feeling her eyes on him as he went, a comfortable sense of being watched.
Through the Old Woman’s eyes, Jit watched the Man go downstairs. The woman was filled with an excitement Jit did not understand, something about the cuddling and the words that had been spoken. What Jit understood from the words was that the Man had begun to acknowledge Jit’s power. The Old Woman had tried to turn Tee-jin away from it, but the Man knew.
Jit lay under a tree near the old zoo on the east side of the Park. He was curled up on a pile of blankets, a circle of candles burning around him. He liked the Man’s pain, he wanted more of it. When he left the Old Woman he began to surf the currents of the night, collecting dreams, searching out hopes and fears, looking for new ways to hurt the Man. There was a dark rainbow of feeling in the night air, but in the end he came back to the Old Woman. Tee-jin liked her. If he hurt her that would hurt the Man. But she had given Jit the coat; he did not want to kill her. And there was something about her dreams—she dreamt often of the Man, and when she woke she was always uneasy. Afraid the Man would find out.

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