T
he old floorboards creak under my boots. Every step feels like a chore. All I want is for that buzzing to cease and that creepy little panting laughter to never trouble me again. I can’t even tell you why it’s so disturbing. Some otherworldly ngk magic, surely, that cuts right to the core of a man; my very soul is irritated.
It gets worse when I round the corner. The big old room, gray in the late-afternoon shadows, is completely empty except for a tiny figure in the corner. I don’t want to get any closer, but I know I have to if I’m going to end this plague of hideousness. The buzzing, the grunting, the chuckle—it’s all coming from this sinister little thing, this ngk. It only reaches up to just above my ankle. Pale, greenish skin stretches in wrinkly folds across its bony little body. That face—an alarming grin reaches from one side of its head to the other. The frail lips are parted slightly, and its wormy tongue reaches out between tiny, uneven teeth. And, perhaps most unnerving of all, the ngk is riding what appears to be an exercise bike of some kind. It just cycles and cycles and cycles and pants and chuckles and grunts, not even registering that a tall half-dead Puerto Rican has entered the room.
It irks me that the ngk doesn’t look up. I want to scream at it, but what good would it do? Riley and Dro float up beside me, and I don’t have to look at them to know they’re experiencing the same shriveling discomfort that I am. They’re both diminished, their iridescence reduced to a feeble, blinking glow.
“The fuck?” I say. The words feel like they’re ricocheting through an echo chamber in my head.
“The ngk,” Dro announces unnecessarily.
“Esther must be miserable with this thing nearby,” I say. Each time I open my mouth is a new dimension of hangover. I decide to save nonurgent conversation till the ngk is safely disposed of. “How ’bout I just cut its head off and then we leave?”
“Can’t,” Riley says.
“Why not?”
“You can’t kill an ngk,” Dro informs me through gritted ghost teeth.
“Why . . . the fuck . . . not?”
Dro shakes his head. “No one knows.”
That’s not good enough. My hand’s on my blade and it’s taking all I got not to free it from its cane covering and make a quick end to this feverish little bastard. I just want it to stop. “What are we doing here, then?”
“I needed you guys to see it,” Riley says, more somber than usual. “I don’t have an answer for how to get rid of it, but Esther’s saved all our asses in one way or another, and we owe it to her.” The thought of Riley needing his ass saved startles me; I’ve never even seen him ruffled.
Then a horrible shrieking sound blasts through everything else. I cover my ears, but it’s useless. The shit’s tearing me up from the inside out.
“What the hell?”
“That’s the ngk call,” Dro says. We’re all backing quickly toward the door. “It’s lethal as fuck.”
In seconds we’re out on the street, panting.
“All right,” Riley says. “I wanna check in with Mama Esther.”
* * *
The feeling follows us down the block, even lingers as a dull whisper while we trudge up the creaking steps at Mama Esther’s. Then we enter the library, the only room in the entire house with any furniture, and everything’s all right again. There aren’t even shelves, just stacks and stacks of books from floor to ceiling. You’d think it’d be a chaotic mess, all packed in there like that, but somehow there’s a harmony to it; the books seem almost suspended in midair. They’re everywhere, and the room is wide and tall enough that it doesn’t feel cluttered. If I don’t clean my little spot in more than a week, it starts to close in on me, so how Esther keeps this utterly full room spacious is beyond me. Some ghost shit, I suppose. Either way, it’s oddly comforting.
Esther’s floating in her usual spot right in the center of the room. That’s where her head is anyway. Beneath that great girthy smile, her wide body stretches out into invisibility in a way that lets you know she’s got the whole house tucked within those fat ghostly folds. “Boys.” She nods at us; the warmth of that smile is a sunbath after the grimness of the ngk.
* * *
Mama Esther was the second face I saw after I woke up.
Once he figured out I was gonna make it, Riley chuckled and went on his way, promising to be back later. Next
thing I knew, this large smile was looming over me like the moon. Esther. Scared the shit out of me at first. I thought I was dead anyway, so one more grinning shroud just added to the confusion. She didn’t speak that night, just let me know by her presence that I was safe, that I wasn’t alone, and it was true. Even when she was back up in her library, which was most of the time, the very walls radiated her smile, kept me from sinking back into the abyss of despair that death had shrouded me in.
Today, though, I can tell the ngk is getting to her. The smile’s still shining with all that loving ferocity, but her old face seems creased; her glow is dampened like Riley’s and Dro’s. It makes me hate that little cycling minifreak even more. We trade pleasantries and banter, and then Riley gets all serious-looking.
“Do you know where it came from?”
Esther shakes her head. “The motherfucker just showed up one day. I could feel it like an itch, then a dull, pulsing ache, and finally, this festering disaster has taken over that whole building.” Esther looking like she’s about to break down is one of the worst things I can think of. I look away.
“Ah, I’m all right, Carlos. Don’t worry about me. You know a stupid ngk isn’t going to fuck up Mama Esther’s day.”
I look back at her and nod, trying to dig up a smile. “We’ll get rid of it for you, Mama. Don’t worry.”
“I know you will, Carlos. I know you will.”
Even if it kills me again, I think, cringing as we return downstairs.
* * *
“Where you going?” Riley wants to know.
To hunt down that hipster kid and his frat boy fan club and see ’bout this fine lady. “I dunno,” I say. “A nap?”
“Well, hang on, Carlos. We gotta chitchat on this a second. Damn.” The ngk left us all a little irritable, and Riley has the unfortunate ability to know me very, very well. I can’t even lie to the dude in any kind of satisfying way. Dro is looking at me with eyebrows raised, and he has a point. It’s not really a time to be running off. I walk back to the two hovering shades, and we settle into an easy saunter down Franklin Avenue.
It gets dark so damn quickly these days. Night just drops out the sky with almost no warning, and suddenly the whole city is just those ugly streetlights and deli signs and flashes from passing cars. I see my breath congeal into a little cloud in front of my face and then dissipate. “So we can’t kill it,” I say. “What can we do?”
“This is the thing,” Riley says. “There’s not much precedence for getting rid of ngks. They pretty much just show up and either become an infestation, the opening act to utter disaster, or it’s just one, and it does whatever sick little magic it has to do, then goes about its business. Maybe it’s a spy and whatever it found out was unsatisfactory; maybe it’s just a loner. Nobody knows.”
“Therein lies the problem,” Dro points out.
“Indeed,” says Riley.
“So what? We wait?” I say, trying not to let my impatience out. “Hope it’s just a one-off and disappears?”
Riley scowls. “That’s not the Riley Washington way.”
“So you have an answer?”
“I didn’t say that either. All I’m saying is, just because nobody’s ever figured out how to deal with an ngk in the past doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And I plan to do it. Or at least make life very unpleasant for the little guy.”
“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard for you,” I say encouragingly.
“Har-har. I gonna need both y’all’s help. Dro, research.
Everything. Follow all leads in every which way possible. Interview experts, pore over texts and scrolls and whatever other bullshit you gotta do. You need to be my brainiac numero uno on all things ngk. Dig?”
Dro nods. You can tell he’s excited about this. The dude loves nothing more than to hole up in some barely there biblioteca and disappear for hours, nerding out on an extreme obscurity. And now he’s been given a mission. He’s in Dro heaven.
“And Carlos.”
“Hm?”
“There’s gonna be some living people angles of this, I surmise, that I’ll need your help with. See all these FOR RENT signs?”
I hadn’t noticed it, but he’s right: an inordinate amount of apartments seem to be available in the couple blocks we’ve walked.
“Could be coincidence,” Riley continues, “or could be something to do with the ngk. Or ngks.” We all frown at that. “Tomorrow I want you to hit up the botánica, see if Baba Eddie got any info for us, and then go real estate hunting.”
L
ittle David the hipster lives in Clinton Hill with two beckys named Amanda. One of them has a . . . python. Or something. Hipness has taken this once-downtrodden neighborhood by storm; it became so suddenly swank that folks still walk around looking whiplashed from the sudden influx of wealthy whites.
David leaves to get a pack of American Spirits at the grocery spot. He walks with a quiet urgency, whips his head around before crossing even the smaller streets. He’s got on those same ’nad-constricting jeans. He looks terrified and he keeps dabbing a wad of tissue against his eyes and nose. The terror that Trevor and I put him through a few weeks back still hangs there like an old jacket he can’t take off. I wonder, briefly, if he’ll ever recover.
When he leaves the bodega, I’m circling behind him, cutting a wide enough berth to stay clear of his periphery. Really though, it’s all a little extra. He’s so caught up in his dark thoughts, this doesn’t even count as hunting. I’m just walking behind someone. His mind is so cluttered with boring roommate drama that it’s spilling out in waves. One of the Amandas fell in love with him, but he loved the other one; then they all switched, some frenzy
of postadolescent musical sex chairs that I’d rather not know the details of, but there they are, suspended in the air around his head like a stupid halo.
I ignore all that, try to keep focused, slide my cane into the front door of his apartment just before it slams and wait for his footsteps to disappear up the stairwell.
* * *
I’m a patient man. I don’t know a damn thing about my life before I died, but I suspect this ability to sit still for hours is a new quality. Maybe it’s because I get a little flush of pride every time I manage to do it, like a part of my old antsy self is echoing forward to approve of how calm I’ve become. Either way, it comes in handy at times like this. I don’t want the Amandas to be awake when I make my move. It’s too complicated, too much explaining, especially considering I’m not even on a real Council mission and can’t resort to their usual cleanup tactics. Tonight I’m a free agent, so I find an out-of-the-way spot at the top of the stairwell, just before the roof entrance, and settle in, taking occasional sips of my bodega coffee.
Night turns into late night. The sounds from the street slow from steady stream to occasional passerby. Inside the apartment, where the heat is cranked up way too high, the three roommates have finished cooking an organic, tasteless meal and are settling in for the night. Some cranky folk music gargles up the stairwell at me, accompanied by the starchy smell of gluten-free pasta.
I wait.
The CD ends. Footsteps plod from one end of the apartment to the other, then back again. Some casual words are exchanged. I slide into a meditative trance and let another hour slip past. Then I put away the last sip of cold
coffee and head down the stairwell, on fire with that calm confidence wrought from sitting still for hours on end.
Inside the toasty warm apartment, the sounds of three slumbering souls intermingle with the clanking of old pipes and wall heaters. My feet barely touch the ground—that’s how smooth I am right now. I lurch silently down the hall, slide David’s bedroom door open without making one goddamn sound, and then stand there in the darkness. This is the tricky part: if David wakes up screaming, the Amandas will surely be here in a flash. If I play it too low-key, the boy’ll just be unpredictable, so I opt for the sudden menace that will gradually lead into the tell-me-everything-and-we-can-forget-all-this-happened.
I put the edge of my cane a half inch away from David’s neck. His chest rises and falls in quiet snores. He’s dreaming of one of the Amandas, but she’s not naked or anything. It’s one of those emotional dreams. She keeps bringing him his slippers and yelling at him. I touch his neck gently with my cane, and when he opens his eyes and gasps, I say, real calm and slow: “Don’t say a single motherfucking word or I’ll cut your fucking head off.”
Five minutes later, we’re on the roof. He’s shivering, still in his pajamas, and I’m doing the grim and menacing routine, even though he’s already so flustered it’s pretty much unnecessary.
“I’m sorry, mister. I’m really, really sorry,” he blubbers. “We won’t be f-fucking around with the Underworld anymore. I p-promise.”
“I’m not interested in your promises, David.” He shudders when I say his name. “Tell me how you linked with the inbetweener.”
“Who, Trevor? He came to me. At the—at the—at the bike store I work at. And he said to bring some people.
So I took it to Brad. And his buddies. Trevor came to me though. I didn’t find him.”
“Did he tell you how to reach him ever? An address, a phone number? Anything?”
“No!” David’s teeth are chattering. A gust of wind blows past, and I feel a little twinge of sympathy for the kid. “He just kept coming by the bike shop and talking to me, and so we went for beers one night at the Red Edge in the Slope. And we got wasted, and he started talking about the Underworld, and at first, you know, I just thought he was freakin’. I thought he was crazy, you know? The Underworld. But I was drunk, too, and I just kept nodding and yessing him and he kept going and somewhere in there I realized he was dead-ass serious. He wasn’t fucking with me at all. And, I mean . . . the Underworld. Jesus. I just . . . so I, you know, I was interested. I wanted to know. I wanted to see it. I mean, death! That’s, like, that’s the final fucking frontier, man. Death.”
“Go on.”
He wipes his eyes with the tissue and snorts a booger back into his nose. “So then I got Brad and a few of the other guys in on it, and pretty much the same thing happened: we all went out for drinks, you know, got shitfaced, and they were all incredulous at first and it was like, no! But then, you know, the night progressed, and Trevor kept talking and talking and making sense in that freaky way . . .” David’s story comes to a crashing halt. “Trevor’s dead, isn’t he? Dead, dead. You killed him.”
Why this information is hitting home right now is anyone’s guess, but I don’t like the sudden manic look in David’s eyes. “He was already dead,” I say. “Mostly.”
“I don’t understand any of this!” David yells. “This is fucked up.”
“You ever see anyone else with him?”
“Look, I’m sorry! Okay? I’m sorry I broke whatever cardinal rule of life and death or whatever the fuck it is that we trampled on. I didn’t fucking mean to! I swear. And I will not tell anyone. Not a single person.” This is clearly a lie. It doesn’t take magic powers to figure out that at least one of the Amandas has been blubbered to already. And, depending on how slow the reality show pendulum swings, the other one’ll probably be enlightened to it in another week or so. If I were on the job, I’d give a damn, but I’m not, so I don’t. Let the kids have their little campfire fairy tales. I’m here for information.
“David, I’m not going to kill you, but if you don’t stop rambling and tell me what I want to know, I will hurt you.” This snaps him back into the present tense nicely. “Now: did you ever see Trevor with anyone else? A girl, perhaps?” I didn’t want to take it there, but when I say it, he immediately squints his face up and nods.
“There was a girl. Well, I noticed her. She didn’t say anything, but every time I met with Trevor at the Red Edge, she was there, always at the same table in the corner, always drinking a glass of red wine. And it struck me, you know, because I never saw her there before, and she was, you know . . .”
“Hot?”
“Yeah, definitely. And also . . .” He waves around looking for the word.
“Black?”
“African-American, yeah.”
“Did you just correct me, David?”
“No! I mean—”
“Anything else about her?”
He has to think about how to answer this for a second.
“I always had the feeling she was like somehow with Trevor or something. Cuz I go to that spot pretty frequently . . . well, I did, and I’d never seen her before.”
“Anyone else?”
“Uh-uh, not that I saw. I mean, I could be wrong. You know . . . I don’t really know. I just . . . yeah.”
I’m about to send him back downstairs when he gets this real concerned look over his face. “The other thing is . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been, um . . . off, ever since.”
“How so?”
“Well, I feel like shit, and . . . I’m bleeding.”
“Bleeding?”
He shows me the wad of tissue. It’s bright red.
“From where?”
“Everywhere. My eyes, nose. Ears sometimes.”
“That’s not good. You seen a doctor?”
David shakes his head. “Nah, I’m gonna wait it out, see what happens.”
“Probably not the best move, considering you’re bleeding from your eyeballs.”
He shrugs. “Yeah, well, thanks for your concern. Can I go back downstairs now?”
* * *
I picked up a habit at Mama Esther’s once I’d slipped far enough from death’s icy claws to see clearly again. Every night I’d lope up the stairwell to that massive attic library of hers, retrieve some random, ancient hardcover, and then go back to my room and read it till I passed out. At first I was all the way lost, all the time. Gradually, pieces began fitting together, shards of history, warfare, science, magic all clicked into place. Reading any book from that library
became like following a single endless story with infinite tentacles. Through all the tumultuousness of healing, reopening wounds, sliding back and forth between the edge of death and helplessness, I found peace in that unending story. It was a place I knew I could always return to. Solace.
So I carried on the tradition when I got my own place. I have a modest couple of shelves—nothing that could shake a stick at Mama Esther’s collection, but it does the job. Tonight I’m on Herodotus’s
Histories
, a copy that Esther perma-lent me when I left, but it’s not holding my attention at all. Instead, disparate scraps of the day catapult back and forth across my mind. The ngk, the fucking ngk. I can still taste that filthy dread in my mouth. The fact that it’s in Brooklyn, so close to Mama Esther’s library—the only truly sacred place I know—makes things all the worse.
And then there’s Sasha. I retrieve her crumpled photo, feeling somewhat stalkerish, and check to see if that certain oomph is still there.
Yes.
With a vengeance. Something lurches in my gut. It’s like fear but . . . yummier. How can a single moment, captured on a tattered scrap of paper, cause such havoc on my insides? I’m stoic, steady-handed. I’ve died, dammit.
This is unacceptable.
I’m wide-awake and irritated. I toss the picture off to the side, grumble for ten seconds, and then collapse into a dreamless, unpleasant
sleep.