F
eels good to roam the streets with Riley again. It’s a certainty that travels with us, that I have his back and he has mine, and if some mess should go down, we will go down with it, cursing and stabbing all the way to Hell. Also, it’s nice out. A warm wind blows my overcoat as we slip through Bed-Stuy, pass the colossal Marcy Projects with their ill hospital lighting and scattered characters stoop sitting through the graveyard shift. We pass the hustle and bustle of Fulton Street, still alive with crackheads, drunks, and occasional hipsters even at this late hour, and reach Atlantic Avenue. I realize we’re retracing the steps I took with Sarco not long ago, and so instead of taking Franklin, we cut over to Washington and then Underhill, which drops us onto the parkway within sight of the brightly lit plaza.
Civil War soldiers glare out at the darkness from their frozen battle positions at the top of the arch. Traffic speeds around the rotunda where Flatbush Avenue smashes into Prospect Park and then divvies off into about six other streets. The Brooklyn Public Library looks on solemnly, a vast square structure with ornately carved front pieces and an elegant open-air entrance. The arch itself is a dazzling,
European-type structure, pale against the night sky with dark statues of horses, angels, and warriors bursting like lichen on either side and along the top.
“What you looking for, man?” Riley wants to know.
I stand beside one of the huge legs of the thing. My eyes are closed, and all my sensory satellites are fully charged. I shush Riley and hear him shrug and scoff and then stroll around to the other side. A memory, a smell . . . anything to trigger my mind to what happened here, to the last scrap of life before my death. But all I hear is the late-night wind, the passing traffic, the soft buzzing of streetlights.
And then there’s something else. Something dead. Of course, the surge of spirit activity writhing around in the park fizzes along in an endless drone, but this isn’t that. This is . . . much closer. Much larger. Much older. And still vague, somehow.
“Riley,” I whisper-shout. “You feel that?”
“What?” he says; then he shuts up. “No. Yes! What the ever-loving fuck?”
“Shh!”
It’s growing, coming closer. It’s fuller in the air around us, a sensation more than anything else, a heaviness, a presence. And it’s peaking. Riley’s beside me, and we’re looking at each other with our what-the-fuck faces. “Did you know there was something here?” I whisper. I don’t even know why I’m whispering; it just seems appropriate.
He shakes his head. “I don’t really fuck around in the plaza unless they send me here.”
And then it’s on us, all around us, arrived. A humongous pale face blanches the darkness between the two pillars. It’s looking down at us, or pointing down at us, I should say, because the eyes are closed. That huge mouth is twisted into an unmistakable frown, and canyons stretch from either side of the nose past the edges of its lips.
The mouth opens and I crouch a little, thinking it might swoop down and gnaw on my head. “Dreams of tales untold,” the ghost mutters.
“Excuse me?”
“The dreams, the dreams of tales untold, the weak empty-handed can defeat the bold.”
“That a little poem you wrote?” Riley asks.
Those great big eyes squint open the tiniest sliver. “Just a thought.”
“Who are you?” I say.
The ghost doesn’t answer, just hangs there above us, flickering slightly.
“Yo!” Riley shouts, and the eyelids open all the way to reveal cloudy, cataracted pupils tainted by a labyrinth of squiggly veins. “What’s your name, ghost?”
He seems to consider this for a moment, sighing deeply. I’m about to get really annoyed because I can’t stand it when people ignore me, when the ghost says, “Pasternak.”
Riley makes a face. “Pasternak? The fuck kinda . . .”
“How long you been here?” I ask.
Pasternak squints into the night. “How long have you been here?”
Riley looks at me. “This guy’s really irritating me, Carlos.”
“Me too.”
Riley turns back to Pasternak and points at me. “You ever see this dude before?”
Pasternak swivels his giant murky eyes toward me for the first time and I shudder. A moment passes, during which Riley probably considers just slicing the fool and being done with it, and then the head nods slightly and Pasternak says, “Mm-hmm.”
My heart jiggles. “When have you seen me? What happened?” I have to physically restrain myself from vomiting all my swirling questions out into the night.
Pasternak looks back at Riley, frowns, and then closes his eyes again.
The fuck,
I want to yell. But I don’t. I hold back. Because I want to know, and I don’t think bullying it out of him will do any good.
“The fuck?” Riley yells. “He asked you a question.”
“Hm?”
Riley throws his arms up. “I can’t with this dude. I just can’t. We want to know about what happened here, three years ago, to my friend. I was here. I found him. He was dead. It was raining. Do you remember? Anything?”
“So many days, so many nights. Rain, water, ocean, water, life . . . water. Dreams and daydreams. Nightmares.” His eyes still closed, Pasternak seems to suck his face inward for a moment, suddenly becoming all sharp lines and creases, and then relaxes again.
I’m almost at breaking point. “Enough poetry! Tell us what happened, man.”
“There were seven of you, but only five survived.”
“That night? Here?”
“There were seven of you, and none survived. And then”—melodramatic pause in which Riley and I both consider many acts of violence—“there were five.”
I had thought the ghost was frowning before, but turns out that was just his face, because now the edges of his mouth slide even further down, the lines etch deeper, and his eyebrows raise toward each other. “There were seven of you, and none survived,” he says again. “And then there were five.”
“Who? Who were the five?” I say. “Who was here?”
The eyes open wide again, suddenly terrified. Little spasms run along the side of Pasternak’s face like lightning against the night sky. “Sarcofastas!” the ghost wails.
His eyes roll back in his head, and when he speaks again, it’s in Sarco’s voice.
“I release you, my children, into this rain-soaked night. You are free, for now. But one day I will again come calling. You will fear me, but you will be drawn to me too. I have given you life and you are indebted to me. It may be in a year or ten. I will call upon you, and together we will alter the course of the world.
“Now scatter.”
Pasternak blinks. His eyes are watery and dart around. He glares at me for a good ten seconds, and then the darkness envelops him and he’s gone.
The night seems very dark. Even those bright plaza lights only barely hold off the endless black sky. And inside, I’m empty once again. On the edge of knowledge and then lost. “Let’s go,” I say. “He’s not coming back.”
Riley looks around warily. “The fuck was all that about?”
“My rebirth, apparently. But let’s get out of here. I don’t like any of this.”
We’re about to walk away when something snaps into place. “Gah! Of course!” I yell, stopping short.
“What?”
I walk quickly around to the front of the arch and stare up at it. “The oil-covered dead man with the mustache!”
“The fuck you talking about?”
“Sasha! Her last memory. She said she saw a man, frozen as if in death, with a mustache and his body all slick like he was covered in oil.” I point to one of the statues reaching out from the edge of the pillared leg.
Riley raises his eyebrows. “I’ll be damned.”
“We died together,” I say.
“How
sweet.”
M
ama Esther looks smaller than I’ve ever seen her, like the whole traumatic experience deflated her. She’s backed into a shadowy corner of the library, surrounded by stacks of old books and half-empty coffee cups. A sad cello solo wails out of the old speaker box.
“Ahh, boys,” she mutters when we come upstairs. “Boys, boys, boys.”
“You all right, Mama Esther?”
She gazes up at me, her lids half closed. Dark moons circle beneath her eyes and she’s trembling. “I wish I could say I was. Take a seat. You want a book? Looking for anything in particular?”
“No, Mama,” Riley says. “We just came to see how you were doing.”
“Ah.” She waves us off with a huge, flickering hand. “Mama Esther’ll be all right.”
I take a step toward her and the old ghost’s warmth embraces me. “Mama Esther.”
“You lost her, huh?”
I nod and twist my mouth up to one side of my face. I imagine this is what it must be like being a little kid, confessing to your mom that you’ve done something stupid.
Mama Esther shakes her head. “I can’t help you, Carlos.”
“Can’t or . . . ?”
“No.” It’s not even sharp, how she says it, just sad. “I don’t know. She betrayed you to Sarco, no? Well, if she’s not all the way dead or gone to ground, she will be soon.” She ignores my flinch. “Sarco will be looking for her too. You know he needs a halfie.”
“Sasha wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t what? You don’t know a damn thing about what that woman would do. Did you think she’d stab you? When a necromancer as powerful as Sarco is in play, folks will do all kinds of shit you’d never expect to stay alive. All bets are off. She’ll let you know how to find her when she’s ready to be found
.
”
I open my mouth to explain the real reason Sasha betrayed me, but Mama Esther cuts me off. “I understood something about the ngks when all that mess went down. Those threads they use—it’s like they have a physical manifestation of a hive mind, yes? That’s how they’re able to materialize so fast around each other. One has a thought or notion, a tinge of fear or rage, the rest of ’em have it too. Instantly.”
Riley and I shudder. I’m sure the memory of Dro succumbing to that sudden onslaught burns through both of us.
Mama Esther pays us no mind. “It’s the same spiritual technology the Council uses to get in touch with you, same fibrous interconnected threads, but the ones the ngks use are about eighty times more powerful and they can construct and manipulate their web like it’s a living part of them. When they want something heavy done, they fortify that web. The Council’s is just weak and stagnant, like the rest of the Council’s shit.”
She peers down to see if either of us will take the bait.
We don’t. Mama Esther exhales loudly. “The ngks’ thread-web is powerful enough to rip that hole Sarco wants between the living world and the Underworld, but it needs a puncture point, like a thread needs a needle, yes?”
“The house ghost,” Riley mutters.
“And a halfie is the final ingredient,” Mama Esther says. “A doorman to manage the chaos, shape it into whatever sick fantasy Sarco has schemed up. Without all the ingredients, the whole plan collapses. You know he’ll be back for me too. And there ain’t that many house ghosts around these days . . .”
“We got guys all around the place,” I say. “Twenty-four seven.”
“He’ll be back though. He’ll wait till the city thrashes amid the collective energy of a thousand revelers and then he’ll unleash his foul designs again, Carlos. You’ll see.”
The pronouncement sends a shiver through me. “I don’t think he’d walk right into so many soulcatchers’ waiting arms,” I say. It sounds forced though. “Plus, I gave him a few scratches to think about while we were tangling downstairs.”
The old house ghost shakes her head, eyes closed. “’Course he’ll be back. If you didn’t think so, you wouldn’t have them boys out there waiting for him.”
“We’re gonna do whatever we can to stop him, Mama Esther,” Riley says, straining his voice toward sincerity. It’s not hard to see we’re both in over our heads.
Mama Esther makes a sad attempt at a smile. “I know you will, boys. I know.”
* * *
It’s daybreak when I walk out of the diner on Vanderbilt. I head south, past the plaza with all its shadowed memories,
through the still-gray park to Flatbush. I find a comfortable stoop out of sight and perch there, sipping the dregs of my to-go coffee, and ponder.
Sasha appears after the sun has fully risen and pushed long shadows across Ocean Avenue. The air smells fresh, the promise of a warm day ahead. I tail her to the Q train; keep one car back and hidden within a crowd of morning commuters. We switch twice and then rumble out of a tunnel and up over the Brooklyn skyline. We’re at a stop near the shipyards when she steps onto the platform and then disappears down some stairs. I slip out just as the doors are closing, earn some scowls from a group of old Russian women, and follow Sasha to the street level.
There are so many words inside of me. They bristle and burn in my throat, beg to be let out. Usually, when I’m trailing someone, it’s to send them back to Hell. If the mark swings around suddenly, I just skip to endgame and that’s that. But this . . . I step out of the station just as Sasha crosses the dirty street beneath the tracks. If she turns around, I don’t know what I would do. There’s no script. Probably, all these words would tumble out, these stupid, useless words I’ve been carrying everywhere like a bouquet of delicate, beautiful, stupid, useless flowers.
If she turns I may crumble.
A car screeches its brakes and swerves around me, but Sasha doesn’t look back. I’m almost disappointed. She shoots a glance to one side, eyes squinted, and then turns down an alleyway. I wait a beat, then lean my back against the corner and peek out. Halfway down the block, Sasha talks to a bearded man in a fedora. His skin is ashen, a deathly pale that lets me know he’s one of us. The Survivors, they call themselves. She hands him a package. I duck back out of sight.
I need to know more about this man, but Mama Esther’s
right: Sasha’s bound to vanish at any given moment, especially if she’s exchanging strange packages with strange men in some strange backwater Brooklyn alley. I hole up behind a concrete pillar beneath the tracks and wait.
And wait.
And check back around the corner. The street is empty. I curse. Walk halfway down it, curse again. Storm back out. And wait.
The sky grows
dark.