Will moved his bag from one hand to the other. It felt heavy, a constant drag on his arm. Heavy, heavier. He looked back to the building. No one came out.
And no one went in.
She took another step forward, her legs coltish and lean. “Whaddya say?”
Then he saw her look down at his bag. Good, he thought. She’s not a total idiot. She’s dimly aware that there might be something bad going on out here, that there’s —
“What’s in there?” She grinned. Nervous. “Homework?”
He nodded, thinking that he must look like any other forty-year-old guy with an attaché, looking for a cheap thrill, trying to chase away those midlife blues.
There’s only one cure for them.
Only one .
.
.
She licked her lips. “We can have a nice party,” she purred. More steps. And Will found himself backing up, against the wall. Another quick turn to check the building. A van blocked his view, then it passed, slowing, another potential customer checking out the action as the girl worked hard to sell herself to Will.
I should just tell her to get lost, Will thought. Take a hike.
Tell her I’m a cop.
I’m shopping for something else tonight.
But he saw her eyes, still clear, still not completely fogged up by whatever hellish life she was leading.
Will walked closer to her. His bag swung on his arm.
“Look, don’t you know what’s been happening out here?”
The girl squinted her eyes as if struggling to make sense of what he was saying. “Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you know what could happen to you?”
She grinned.
“All I know, honey, is that my man” — she turned, and pointed toward Madison —”is right down there, right there, watching over me.” She smiled. “I’m protected.”
Will nodded.
“Protected,” he mumbled.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m —”
He turned back to the building.
Maybe James was wrong. Maybe we have this thing screwed up somehow. He looked at his watch: 12:15.
Unless .
.
. unless I’m late.
Like the White Rabbit, tumbling down a hole to the best little tea party in hell.
He turned back to the hooker, someone’s little girl, all grown-up. Launching her career.
Making a name for herself in the Big Apple.
She was gone. He didn’t see her, and he couldn’t hear her.
She’s a ghost. A phantom hooker. Down the street were half a dozen dark cars. Maybe one of them had her pimp, watching over her trade. Maybe not.
Maybe she simply gave up.
A cop car came down the block. Slowly. Cautiously.
His paranoia snapped back into place. I’ve got to get out of here, Will thought. He tried to decide on which way to walk. The understaffed, under-the-gun cops might decide to pull him over for questions. And then look inside his bag.
Is this your gun, sir? And this bottle, would you mind telling us what this is, sir? And here, in the bottom of the bag, could you tell us — ?
Will turned and walked down Park Avenue. Damn! he thought. I won’t be able to see the black building. I won’t see him come out, see him melt into the streets .
.
.
He kept walking, looking over his shoulder, searching for the peaceful blue and white colors of the cop car that terrified him.
He passed an electronic teller. Ready to spit out money for those post-midnight moments when you’re a bit tapped out.
Will looked back again. He saw the nose of the patrol car at the corner of 30th Street. Go straight, he ordered. Keep on going, Officers. He took more steps. Another look. The car edged closer to the corner until Will was sure that the two cops must have a clear view of him.
Shit!
He kept walking.
He listened to his steps. Counted his breaths.
One. Two. Three.
He turned around.
Thinking:
The light must have changed by now. But the patrol car was still there, and he cursed himself for looking again, alerting them.
I’m here, he was saying. I’m here and I’m nervous.
Looking pretty suspicious, don’t you think?
Now he picked up his pace. Twenty-ninth Street was just ahead. He walked into a breeze. A steady gust blew from the Battery, up through Chinatown and SoHo, and all the way to Harlem. An Atlantic breeze slicing through the stone canals of the city.
He was nearly at the next corner.
Nearly there, and he had to risk another look back. Just to make sure that the patrol car had really continued across Park Avenue, trolling other waters, out of the way.
The cops should be his allies. But not tonight. Not here.
He looked.
Just as the patrol car took the damn corner, slowly, tentatively, a big cat spotting an undersized gazelle.
No, he thought, got to get away. He walked briskly to the corner.
.
. he reached 29th Street, moving further away from where he needed to be.
Near the black building.
If I ‘m not too late .
.
. if it isn’t already too late.
He took the corner, and he was swallowed by the darkness .
.
.
Will kept on going down the gloomy block. Past closed restaurants, and than an import shop, and a hotel with no lights anywhere. Was it closed forever, or merely sealed up to keep the streetwalkers and their johns at bay?
He was alone on the block.
All by his lonesome.
It’s past midnight.
Do you know where you are?
He didn’t want to walk this way. The breeze had been cut off, and now he smelled the street, the sidewalk. The stench of years of garbage and food and spit and oil and droppings from hundreds of air conditioners groaning to keep the horrible city heat away. Now silent, braced for winter.
He sniffed.
His bag swung from his arm.
He turned.
Will watched the patrol car fly down Park Avenue, picking up speed. They weren’t interested in me after all, Will thought. I’m just jittery. Paranoid.
Maybe crazy.
It was a possibility.
Three times 3 times 3. The number danced in his head.
He stopped.
I have to go back, he thought. I have to go back to the black building and wait for him .
.
.
If I haven’t screwed up, if it isn’t all screwed up …
He stood there.
And then he heard a sound .
.
.
It was a voice, soft, plaintive, calling out from some stone steps leading to a basement, to a small restaurant.
But Will just stood there a second.
He licked his lips.
Probably just a wino rolling around in his perpetual lost weekend, fighting off hordes of imaginary — and perhaps real — vermin.
But he listened to the sound.
It was a woman’s voice, raspy, full, as if —
He walked closer to the side of the building to the steps leading down.
He leaned over the edge of the railing.
And he saw the entrance to the closed restaurant. L’ Auberge Savoie.
He saw the girl. The confident hooker he had seen only minutes ago .
.
. only minutes ago .
.
.
Lying at the bottom of the stone steps, all crumpled up, one leg bent back at a sick angle, her head tilted backward. The red of her lips had spread, and now her chin, and her neck, were filled with red blotches.
Not lipstick.
She had her hand crossed in front of her midriff. Her cute, sexy midriff.
As if she were holding something there.
“Help .
.
. me .
.
.” she wheezed. All of a sudden she was a hundred years old.
“Please.”
She moved her head a bit, so that her eyes could see him. Will nodded, and moved to the steps, hurrying now, wondering why he had hesitated.
Knowing that he was too late. He’s out.
Out
here
, in the streets. Anywhere, everywhere.
And now I may never find him.
He squeezed close to the girl.
She extended a hand to him, reached out to him.
Which she shouldn’t have done. Because now her insides were all open.
She had been neatly filleted. The skin of her flat stomach had been cut with a cross, up and down.
Another bit of irony? Will thought.
Then peeled back until everything inside just hung there, exposed.
James had told him he might see this.
“You might see the Ordeal,” he had said. “Don’t let the signs, the works, get to you.”
But it got to him. It got to him
good
. Will froze, unable to take her hand.
Even in the sallow pit by the restaurant door, her viscera glistened with a slimy life that was at once horrible and de-pressing.
“No,” he whispered. “Put your hand back. Put it on top of your —”
Will smelled something. The blood, of course. And her perfume. Yes — but there was something else, wasn’t there?
Sure, there was another smell.
“If you get that,” James said, “if you’re lucky enough to smell something, anything, of the emanations, then move!”
Right, thought Will. Move.
Do what the man says.
Get up and get out of here.
“Please,” the girl said.
Will thought he saw her try to speak. She opened her mouth. Her tongue moved. But the smells — they were definitely there — suddenly overwhelming.
There was no breeze down here, nowhere for the vapors to escape.
He sucked them in.
There was a squishy sound from the girl’s innards. A coiling and an uncoiling.
A pit of snakes.
Will reached out for the wall.
I’ve got to get up. Get up, turn around, get out of here.
‘‘I’ll get you help,” he lied.
But the girl’s eyes flashed.
You can’t lie to the liar.
Never works. Never has. Never will.
Her other hand came off her midsection, exposing the perfect symmetry of the dissection performed on her. The girl’s bloody hand closed on his.
“I said — I need some fucking help,” she screamed, a hissing belch of disgusting air flowing over him. He thought he’d faint. He gasped, choking on it, coughing and dragging phlegm up from his throat.
Then there was the sound.
As if he only heard it yesterday.
Chatter, chatter, the nasty, busy little sound of teeth. Clicking away, thunderous, echoing off the cement walls of their intimate alcove.
A bloody bubble popped from the girl’s midsection, and another, and another .
.
. louder, mixing with the clicking sounds, a regular party.
He tried to jerk his hand away.
Her grip was strong. The only way that hand is coming off is if I hack it away.
Another great bubble popped from the girl’s viscera. And then a shape squirmed out, a weird offspring released by the grotesque cesarean section.
Will started yammering, “No, no, no!”
Losing it. All gone, he thought. All gone.
I fucked up.
His bag, his stupid dumb bag, was next to him, sitting there, while this —
Head. A bulbous Uncle Fester head squirmed out, and then Will saw two eyes, dripping the girl’s blood. They blinked open. They looked at Will.
The smell was beyond anything Will had ever sensed.
His stomach spasmed and clenched — fist-like, fighting to expel anything inside it.
But James had told him to eat nothing.
Nothing. No food. No liquid.
And so Will just felt the sick tightness in his midsection and around his chest.
Arms now dug out of the girl’s midsection, two, three, maybe more, crawling out. It was hard to tell. Then a gigantic membranous tissue, a panel, wing, a flap of some kind, jutted out of the thing’s back.
Will jerked away, yelling at the thing.