Beautiful City of the Dead (10 page)

"You think this one is about going to heaven? 'Your souls from hence be called away.'" I read aloud.

"Maybe."

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe heaven or maybe right here on earth. Didn't you ever know anyone who heard a call? It's mostly people who go to church. But not always."

"So you did? You heard a call?" I asked.

He pointed to his Strat in its half-opened case. The finish was beautiful amber red. The strings shone like silver veins. "Sure. I heard it loud and clear. The monster riff, the Ghost Metal noise. Spirits screaming through the amps."

When he talked this way, I felt myself falling, like I was out in the ocean and forgot how to swim. I was going down, down, down. Soon enough the waves would close over my head and I'd be lost forever.

I read girl magazines sometimes, though I didn't want anyone to know it. Makeup tips, dating, weight loss, workout routines. I tried to find somebody in those slick pages who was like me. I tried to find something I might care about, and then maybe I'd be a tiny bit normal. It embarrassed me, actually. Why should I care? I had Scorpio Bone. I had Relly and my Ibanez and my notebook full of weird old sayings. Why should I care about such trivial stuff as boyfriends and new fashions?

But I even thought of writing to an advice column.

"I have this problem. I'm the only girl in a band. And we're gods too. We have secret powers. Water and fire and air and earth. And there's these old creepy guys who want to destroy us. Only I'm not sure why. My main problem is knowing if the lead guitarist loves me or if he just likes the way I play bass. He also bursts into flames sometimes. So what should I do? Play it cool like I don't care, or be myself and let him know what I feel? Any advice would be a big help. Thanks."

Yeah, they print a lot of letters like that. Right in with the four-page spreads on new mascara shades, there's usually an article about teenage heavy metal gods and the evil forces they face.

O
UR NEXT HOT DATE
was on the Broad Street bridge. This is where you can get the best view of the Genesee. I know our river isn't the Nile or the Amazon, but for me it has a power. Especially seen from the bridge. The gorge walls are cold raw stone. Old brick buildings crowd along the upper banks. The water is gray and fierce and forever.

Looking across the river, Relly pointed out to me the great statue of Hermes that jutted against the winter sky. The ancient copper god was way up there, on top of a stone spire, reaching heavenward, running due north like the river itself. "Over twenty feet tall," Relly said. It had been there, off and on, for over a hundred years. First, looming above some factory in the way-olden days. In the early '50s it got taken down when they did urban renewal. Later on, it was retrieved from its storage place and lifted back up to stand guard over the city, the river, the bridge.

Relly knew all about it. He did research at the library,
which was just across the river, in plain sight of Hermes. He'd spent time in the local-history room, digging through old files of newspaper clippings. "They keep calling him Mercury in the paper," Relly said. "But the real name is Hermes."

"They brought him back in November of 1974. Think about it. Zeppelin was ruling the universe then. Black Sabbath, too, Judas Priest and Blue Oyster Cult, all the old metal gods. They brought him down from the sky and fastened him there at the top of that tower. He weighs seven hundred pounds. That's heavy metal."

Beneath us flowed the river, full of clotted ice and logs stripped bare of their bark, wreckage from a hundred miles upstream. "X marks the spot," Relly said. "This was where the canal once went. Did you know that? The Erie Canal ran right here. It flowed over an aqueduct, east-west canal crossing the north-south river. And who should be reigning, watching, standing above that place but Hermes himself."

Yeah, it was all pseudomystical crot from the pit of Relly's brain. I mean, the facts were right. But what he made out of them was his typical bizarro story.

"This is the place," he said. Calm, matter of fact. "Right here. This is your place, Zee. Where the canal crosses the river. And Hermes reigns above." His voice changed, like he was reading from some old book of spells. "Where the
ghost of water crosses the north-flowing stream and the Winged God stands supreme."

I ignored the mystical stuff, at least for a little while. "The canal went right here?" I asked.

"Yeah. They just added another layer to the aqueduct when they turned it into a bridge. If you look from the Court Street bridge"—which was the next one upriver—"you can see it's different. Layers of stone, different layers of time."

We looked toward the library, which was built on the edge of the river. Water poured out from underneath, into the gorge. Eleven arched spillways. "The river goes right below. There's places in the basement of the library where you can lift up these manhole covers and there's the river, black and secret."

Water, water, water. Lost canals over rivers that ran under buildings. Hidden streams. Falls and rapids.

"This is the place, Zee. Here's where it will all come to an end."

A
N OLD HOMELESS GUY
was heading toward us, looking over the edge of the bridge as he shambled along. He had about a dozen grocery bags all bulging and ripped. His shoes were patched with duct tape. He was hunched over. And he smelled bad. Even from a distance, I caught a whiff.

"Maybe we should get going," I said.

"Crot Almighty," Relly hissed. "It's happening already."

"What?"

Then I saw who the old guy was: Scratch.

He turned his big saggy left eye toward me. And he grinned.

"I didn't think," Relly said, "it would be so soon." He was afraid. That was obvious. He turned and looked behind, as if expecting Knacke and Frankengoon to be coming at us.

But it was just Scratch that day.

He came up close but didn't seem to notice Relly at
first. He talked to me, just me. His voice was familiar, gritty and hoarse. "I thought you'd be here." He looked over the edge of the bridge, into the churning gray flood. "You found your element. You know who you are now, right? Where water crosses water."

"Let's go," I hissed, clutching at Relly's coat sleeve.

"What's your hurry?" Scratch said. "You found the place.
Your
place."

Now it was Relly who clutched at me. "Don't listen to him. Don't pay any—"

"I'm just here to make an offer," Scratch said. "If you got something better, sonny boy, I'm sure she'll take you up on it." He smiled with his filthy, rotting teeth.

"You're water, Zee. And we need water. Mr. Franken is air. Mr. Knacke is fire. As you can see, I'm earth. We've lost our water. She's gone. Gone for good. Gone, gone, gone. We need you, Zee. And we have a thousand times more to offer than your little teenage pip-squeak friends."

He dropped his bags and stood up straight. He opened up his ratty old bum's coat and thumped his fist on his heart. Puffs of black dust rose up, making a filthy halo around his head. "Our power is ancient. Deep. And forever. Your little kiddy friends will dry up and blow away like leaves. We'll still be here. We are eternal. You can be part of that. Zee."

On the other side of the bridge, people were walking.
Cars passed. A short distance away, a businessman was feeding quarters into his parking meter. And there they were, a fire god and an earth god fighting over the water.

A ripple of blue flame ran down Relly's left arm and burst off his fingers. Scratch caught it and snuffed it out as you might catch a bit of fluff floating in the air. He sneered at Relly. "That's all you've got, kid? Little tricks like that?"

Relly spat a wad of blue flame. It hit Scratch in the chest and died. Scratch laughed and I swear I could smell graveyard dirt on his breath.

I thought they were going to go at it just as they had when Scratch was inside Smoking Man. Two guys fighting. Young versus old. Fiery fists and living human dirt.

"Stop it!" I snarled at them both. "No more. Understand?"

"Fine, fine," Scratch said. "I'm just here to pass along the offer. Join us, Zee. Dump these pimple-faced losers and join up with us. You'll never regret it. Four and no more, as it was before." He smiled his rotted smile. "And shall be forever."

With that, he gave me a wink, like we'd already made some secret deal. He turned and shuffled back the way he'd come. We watched him for a long while. Across the bridge, down the street, and then lost in the crowd.

P
RACTICE THAT NIGHT WAS
strange. We sounded good, maybe better than ever. Still, Relly's attic felt like a tomb. It was colder than it ever had been. The sounds of Scorpio Bone banged around in the high reaches of the roof like a swarm of bats. The bare light bulbs hanging down flickered, almost dying a few times. And the amps cut in and out too, as though our power was being stolen, enemy hands grabbing at the wires far away.

We did a new song. It had no words yet, just three chords and a jagged Orion Hedd kind of riff. I kept thinking,
Here's our power, here's something they'll never have. Why would I join up with disgusting old men when I can make this awesome, fearsome noise?

We kept going over and over the song, till Jerod complained. "Maybe you guys can do this after I go? How 'bout something where I actually sing?"

We agreed. And when he drove home to Pittsford in his Acura, we came back to the tune.

"So what are we going to call it?" Relly asked. He looked to me for the words now. I had taken over that job in the band.

"How about a person's name? Like this was their theme song?" I asked.

I collected names too, not just gravestone poetry. I mean, spending my whole life explaining about "Zee," the olden-day names from the graveyard made me feel almost normal.

There were the Greek and Roman names in Mount Hope: Socrates Good, Electra Wheeler, Parthenon Bradford, Livi Lee, and Julius Jones.

There were a few of the old Puritan names too. These were much stranger. Fearing Swift, Resolved Stevens, Pardon Davies, Thankful Pratt, Return Wilson. "How about 'Silence Loud?'" I said. That was my favorite. After seeing her stone, I kept thinking what it would be like to go around my whole life with a name like that.

"Silence Loud. Perfect," Relly said.

"Silence Loud," Butt repeated, slamming the kick drum and setting us off again.

"T
HIS IS HOW IT WORKS
. There's not just us, I mean Scorpio Bone. There's other tetrads. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Four and no more. All the world o'er. From then and always, till the end of days."

Tetrads
was the word for us. For Knacke's Krew. And I guess for other groups of four, hidden away in plain sight everywhere.

"Led Zeppelin. Totally. No question about it," Relly said. "The Fantastic Four, of course. Black Sabbath and Slayer. And I think there were four Gospels in the Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Right? There's other people out there like us. They need each other. Earth, Wind, Air, and Fire. They need the full tetrad to be complete. You know what I mean?"

"Sort of." We were walking across the Platt Street bridge. It was closed off to cars years ago. Now only people can go across, and look down into the deepest part of the river gorge. This late in the year, there wasn't much water coming down
the high Ms. Still, it was a pretty amazing place. Round and deep, with crumbling rock walls, it was bigger than a stadium. And it was right in the middle of the city, a vast secret hole.

"Some people say that when you fall in love, it's like finding a piece of yourself you never knew was missing. Well this is way better." Relly was holding my hand. We looked down into the gorge together. "We're not like regular people. It takes four for us."

"Four and no more," I murmured.

"That's right. We found our four and we're going straight to the top. That's why Knacke is so obsessed with you. He needs a fourth to make his tetrad complete again."

"So what happened to her?"

Relly shrugged.

"It was a her, right? A girl?"

"My mom says it's a guy thing to obsess about fire. You know how little boys are so nuts about candles and matches? A four-year-old kid will do anything so he can play with a campfire, right? Get a burning stick going and wave it around. My mom says you don't learn that. You're born with it."

"I get that. I read that almost all pyros are guys. But what about Knacke's lost fourth? Was that a girl?"

"Yeah."

We were leaning over the guardrail, looking into the abyss. The logical part of my brain said we were safe. They made these fences strong enough and high enough to keep
people from going over. But another part of me was screaming like a siren, telling me I would die if I didn't get away from there fast.

Relly dropped a stone and we watched it fall—the whole way down. When it hit the water, the splash was too small to see.

"My mom says it's normal to think about doing it. Not healthy, just normal. Everyone thinks about jumping in some time."

This made me even more afraid. Had he been reading my mind?

"What are you talking about?" I said.

"There's some impulse—that's what she calls it—an impulse to do it—to throw yourself in. 'We all want to return to our element.' That's what she says."

"So what happened to her?"

"My mom?"

"No, whoever it was that used to be Knacke's fourth."

"We all go back to our element. Some sooner. Some later."

We watched the silvery chain of the high falls a long time. The water came and fell and ran away. But it never ran out. It never stopped.

"Maybe that's what Knacke is so afraid of now. Why he's acting so weird. Maybe he thinks he's got to burn up—go back to his element—now that the tetrad is missing a piece."

"Yeah, maybe." I took a dime out of my pocket and
tossed it over the fence like I was standing at the biggest wishing well in the world. The dime turned, over and over, as it fell. It flickered like a tiny silver spark all the way to the bottom.