Forests of the Heart (36 page)

He had to laugh at himself. Twelve hours ago he would have had a hard time believing in ghosts, or even precognitive hunches, but now here he was considering a whole shadowy otherworld peopled with creatures from folklore and legend, mean-tempered Gentry, doomed Summer Kings and all. Still, with all those stories … was it really such a huge leap of faith to accept that maybe they’d grown up around some kernel of truth? Mythic barnacles attaching themselves to the bones of somewhat plausible events until they took on their current legendary status.

Well, yes, he thought. It was. But here he was, allowing the possibility all the same. Or at least beginning to accept that these Gentry were more than ordinary. Still, you’d think if you were a magical being you’d do more with your life than these losers apparently did. Drink Guinness, listen to music, rough up somebody every now and again, trash an apartment, piss on your handiwork. Mind you, for some people, that might be considered living large. Unfortunately, the world did take all kinds.

He began to make good progress, carrying on a conversation with himself in his head, for lack of anything else to listen to. Drudge work like this always went better with good music—some Motown would definitely go down well right about now—but Miki’s system was a bust, literally, and he hadn’t thought to bring a boombox, or even his Walkman, along with him. He supposed he could try singing himself, but even he hated the sound of his own voice, raised in song. He was okay singing
along
with a recording, if you cranked the sound way up, and he could certainly be enthusiastic, but talented he wasn’t.

Whenever one arm got sore, he used the other. Look at me, he thought. The amazing ambidextrous cleaning man. He was even getting used to the awful reek—or maybe his efforts were actually beginning to make a dent in the stench.

“Toilets of the Gentry,” he muttered to himself as he dumped a pail of fouled water into the toilet and filled it up again. “Coming soon to a theater near you. Experience the horrors of faerie piss in widescreen, stink-o-vision. If you dare.”

He added a generous ration of cleanser to the hot water and got back to his task, amusing himself by casting the movie in his head. A blond Christina Ricci to play Miki, he decided. Did Ricci have a brother with the same witchy eyes who could be Donal?
Buffy’s
Joss Whedon to write the screenplay, definitely. Or maybe Kevin Williamson. Either way they’d all sound smarter and a little more hip than they really were. At least he would. Who to play himself? He’d pick someone like Brad Pitt, but with his luck he’d get Pee-Wee Herman.

He was so caught up with the work and the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy running through his head that he didn’t realize someone else had come into the apartment until he heard the harsh, heavily accented voice speak to him from the kitchen doorway.

“You just don’t learn, do you?”

A twinge of phantom pain grabbed his side as Hunter looked up to see one of the hard men standing there. He had long enough to register that the newcomer wasn’t even wet—had he been hiding in the apartment all this time?— before the man started forward.

Hunter surprised himself. He should have been scared. He was scared. He was almost wetting himself. But more than that he was angry. For the second time that night, the first response that came to mind was violence.

He half-rose at the hard man’s approach, bringing up the pail of hot water and cleanser as he did. The hard man was so sure of himself that Hunter’s response took him by surprise. Hunter had a good momentum going by the time the pail sped by the hands, raised in defense too late. The pail struck the man in the head, showering dirty, ammonia-sharp water all over the kitchen. His eyes went wide with shock, and he stumbled back.

Hunter hit him again with the pail, only half-full now, and the hard man went down, cracking his head on the side of the counter as he fell.

“Oh, fuck,” Hunter said.

He stared down at the still body splayed out on the linoleum and had trouble swallowing. Blood leaked from a gash on the side of the man’s head. Ordinary red blood, turning pink where it ran into a puddle of water.

“Wh—why couldn’t you just leave me alone?” he said.

The hard man made no response. Was he dead?

Hunter swallowed, his throat feeling thicker than ever. He was scared and his pulse was hammering, but the worst of it was, it had felt good to strike back as he had. He was horrified to see the slack figure sprawled on the floor at his feet, unconscious, maybe even dead, and he’d put the man there. But an immense satisfaction rose up in him all the same, swamping the already confused mess of emotion running through him.

He’d never done anything like this before.

The pail dropped from his hand and went clattering across the linoleum. He gave the doorway a quick glance. Were there more of them out there? He cocked his head to listen, but heard nothing, only the rattle of the ice storm outside. His gaze crawled back to the man on the floor, half-expecting from Miki’s stories for the body to dissolve into dust or go up in smoke or something. But it simply lay there, still, unmoving.

Nervously, he gave the man’s leg a push with the end of his boot.

Still no response. Hunter wasn’t even sure if the man was breathing.

Self-defense, he thought. If I killed him, it was in self-defense.

If he’s dead …

His stomach lurched at the thought.

That was bad enough. But what if he wasn’t? What was going to happen when he came around? Or when his buddies found out what had happened to him?

Hunter backed away until he was brought up short by the kitchen counter.

Whatever way you looked at it, he was screwed. If this was just a man, then he was going to have to do a lot of explaining to the police. He was going to have to live with the fact that he’d killed a man. And if the hard man
was
some kind of supernatural creature, then basically, Hunter was a dead man, too, because he had no illusions as to what the Gentry would do to him when they caught up with him. If they’d sucker punch him simply for dancing with Ellie…

He stared at the body, trying to see if it was breathing, not sure which he hoped for more—that the hard man was, or wasn’t dead. After that one contact, boot against limp leg, he didn’t have the courage to go any closer again. Too many horror movies and thrillers were running through his mind, images of the seemingly dead body suddenly sitting up and grabbing him as he bent near, the way the dead did in all those movies.

Face up to it, he told himself. Call 911 and let the cops deal with it.

But then he heard Donal’s voice in his head, what he’d said back in The Harp the other night when Hunter had asked him if he’d called the police when the Gentry had beaten him up.

That would have just made for more trouble. Men like that, they don’t forget a wrong. Jaysus, I’ve seen enough of them back home. The pubs are full of them, brooding over their pints, remembering every hurt, imagined or real, that was ever done to them.

And then Miki:
Back home, a feud is as real today as it was a hundred years ago. It doesn’t matter that all the original participants are long dead and gone. The descendants will continue with the hostilities until there’s no one left, on one side or the other.

In the end, he simply grabbed his coat and fled, still wearing the handkerchief over his face and the pair of bright yellow rubber gloves he’d put on when all that was ahead of him was to clean out Miki’s fouled apartment. He ran, or tried to run, skidding and sliding on the ice-slicked pavement, soaked to the skin in minutes, both by the sleet and the falls he took that sprawled him into puddles of icy slush.

Ellie couldn’t remember a night as foul as this one. There just didn’t seem to be any end to the constant rain. It was so deceptive, falling as water, hardening immediately into ice upon contact. The weight on the trees had to be unbelievable. Everywhere she looked, tree boughs were sagging, snapping off. They drove by cedar hedges that were bent almost in two, lilacs that had simply collapsed under the ice. The hardwoods were standing up better, but even they were getting a battered, war-torn look as they lost their smaller limbs. On the side streets, the ice-slicked pavement was carpeted with fallen branches and Ellie counted at least three cars and a couple of porches with boughs lying across their roofs. But so far the power lines were up. For how long, it was impossible to say, if the freezing rain continued. From the way the lines sagged, she wasn’t sure if they’d snap under the weight of the ice, or if a tree would take them down.

Tommy had the heater going full-blast in the van, but considering how inefficient it was at the best of times, they had to get out every few blocks to scrape off the latest build-up of ice. Angel had sprung for new tires for the van at the beginning of the winter, but they weren’t studded like the ones Tommy had put on his truck and didn’t help much for either traction or quick stops. All they could do was inch along the streets at a slow crawl. But at least they were moving. Everywhere they went, they saw abandoned vehicles, few of them properly parked. Most rested at odd angles to the sides of the streets, many up on curbs.

The city still had power, but according to the radio, hydro lines were going down in the outlying regions, blacking out whole communities. And this was only day one. The weather forecasts predicted that the ice storm was just settling in and might be with them for the better part of a week. Ellie couldn’t imagine what the city would be like after another few hours of this, never mind a week.

As it was, she and Tommy pretty much had the streets to themselves. Regular citizens had completely deserted the city by the end of the work day. With everything closed up, there was nothing to keep them downtown. The van drove past block after block of darkened marquees and signage, all of them shut. The clubs. Restaurants. Cineplexes. Concert halls. Restaurants. Theaters.

And it wasn’t simply the legal trade and its customers. With their johns driven away by the weather, the Palm Street hookers had either called it a night or taken their business inside. The homeless—runaways, derelicts, bag ladies and all—had managed to find someplace to go as well, though the shelters weren’t overcrowded. Where had they gone? Holed up in Tombs squats, Ellie supposed. Abandoned tenements and old factories that would at least keep the sleet from them. Some of them had probably made their way down into Old Town, that part of the city that had dropped underground during the big quake and was now claimed by the skells and other unwanted. You couldn’t have gotten her to go down there on a dare.

Most people were going to be able to make do for one day. But what were they going to do if the storm dragged on throughout the week as predicted?

Wait until we start getting power blackouts, she thought.

Out in the country, most people had the option to heat with wood. Here, few had what might soon be considered a basic necessity rather than a luxury. The community centers would become makeshift shelters for all those good upstanding citizens who never thought they’d have to rely on the kindness of strangers to survive. Tommy had seen it happen before, out by the rez, and predicted it could easily happen here. Every winter, he told Ellie, there’d be at least one major storm that shut down this or that small town. Hazard. Champion. Even Tyler, the county seat.

But nothing like this. He’d never heard of anything like this.

With their regular clientele absent, Ellie and Tommy found themselves doling out hot coffee to the increasing number of rescue crews that were out on the streets tonight. Police. City workers. Ambulance drivers. Hydro repairmen. The pair were warned more than once to get off the streets for their own safety, but not even the police were prepared to enforce their advice as they munched on sandwiches and drank coffee provided from the back of the Angel Outreach van. With most of the all-night convenience stores and restaurants closed for business, there was nowhere else for them to go.

It was so eerie. Ellie had never seen the streets so quiet.

“How’re we doing for supplies?” she asked Tommy after she got back inside from yet another bout of scraping down the windshield.

He shrugged. “Maybe one urn of coffee left and half the sandwiches, but the doughnuts and cookies are all gone. We should probably get back to Grasso Street and stock up while we can.”

He pulled away from the curb, the rear of the van fishtailing, though he’d barely touched the gas pedal with his foot.

“And maybe switch over to my truck while we’re at it,” he added.

“I wonder if this is what your Aunt Sunday was talking about,” Ellie said.

Tommy shot her a puzzled look.

“You know, the dangerous times I’m supposed to protect you from.”

“What? Poor driving conditions?”

“The storm’s a little more serious than that.”

“It is,” he said, keeping his gaze on the street. “She was talking about something else.”

Ellie waited a moment, but he didn’t elaborate.

“So what was it?” she asked.

“Things you don’t want to know about.” He gave her a quick smile. “All that mysterious stuff that drives you crazy when Jilly talks about it.”

“Try me,” she said.

“Come on, Ellie.”

“No, seriously. After the weird day I’ve had, it’ll probably make sense.”

Now Tommy looked concerned. “What happened to you? It’s that house, isn’t it? I’ve never trusted the place. It just feels all wrong up there.”

“Now you tell me.”

He shrugged. “And you were going to listen?”

“Probably not,” she admitted. “But I’m listening now.”

“First tell me what you were talking about.”

Ellie sighed. Did she really want to get into this? She still remembered Tommy’s parting shot this morning.

My family lives in another world from this one.

Meaning, he’d explained, the world of spirits. And Tommy was right. It wasn’t something she’d ever felt comfortable talking about with any seriousness. There were enough wonderful and strange things in the real world to capture her attention without needing to venture into some New Age fairyland. As if.