Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“As I live and breathe,” she says in her worst Tennessee Williams drawl. “Will you just look at what the cat dragged in,” and he smiles nervously back at her.
“Are you busy?” he asks. “I know I should have called first, but I—”
“Are you kidding me?” and she steps over the threshold and throws both her arms tight around his neck, washing him in her private aroma of cloves and tea rose, vanilla and the stuff she uses to dye her hair the color of ripe cherries. Her hands are warm and damp.
“If you’re busy, I can come back some other time. I really should’ve called first,” Deacon says again.
“Phooey. I was just doing dishes,” she says. “So you practically saved my life.” And then she takes him by the hand and drags him out of the hallway and into her small and cluttered apartment. The smells of Indian cooking and cigarette smoke are immediately replaced by sandalwood incense and a slightly stronger, more pervasive version of the Sadie smell, something he’d probably find cloying if it weren’t so nostalgic. She points him at a threadbare sofa upholstered in corduroy the color of mustard, and “Sit your fanny down,” Sadie Jasper says. “I’ll be right back. Want some coffee?”
“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Milk, no sugar, right?”
“Yeah,” Deacon says.
“Coming right up,” and she disappears through a curtain of amber plastic beads.
Deacon steps past the magazine-littered coffee table, sits down on the sofa, and its shot springs groan and creak loudly beneath him. He glances around the room, at the plaster walls decorated with an incongruous mix of horror movie posters and Pre-Raphaelite prints, Dario Argento and John Carpenter rubbing shoulders with Rossetti and Waterhouse. The floor is stacked with books and videotapes because there’s no room left on any of the shelves. A moth-eaten, taxidermied raccoon stands sentry on top of the television set, surrounded by a circle of votive candles and a couple of bird skulls. Almost everything exactly the way it was the last time he was in Sadie’s apartment, and he tries to remember how long ago that was.
“Does Mrs. Silvey know you’re here?” Sadie calls from the kitchen, and “No,” he shouts back at her.
The curtain parts again, Sadie carrying two steaming, mismatched coffee mugs, and then the beaded strands swing and clack noisily together behind her.
“I’d just made a fresh pot,” she says. “The milk’s skim. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Er, no,” Deacon says, taking the mug she holds out to him. “That’s fine.”
She sits down at the other end of the creaky yellow sofa and blows on her coffee. “Would it piss her off if she found out?” she asks, and it takes Deacon a second or two to realize what she’s asking. He shrugs and stares at his milky coffee; it smells like chicory, and he hates the taste of chicory.
“These days I never know what’s gonna piss Chance off,” he says. “But yeah, I think it probably would.”
“Does she think I’m a bad influence?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m flattered,” Sadie says and sips tentatively at her coffee.
“She’s just afraid I’ll start drinking again. I can’t say that I blame her. I’m a bastard when I’m drunk.”
Sadie nods her head and dips a pinkie finger into her coffee.
“Hell, I’m a bastard period, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Sadie says and licks a drop of coffee off her fingertip. “When’s the kid due?”
“Almost any minute now,” he says and sets his mug down on a magazine cover.
“That’s gotta be a total mind-fuck, Deke. I mean, I can’t even begin to comprehend how someone copes with that sort of responsibility.”
“Join the club,” Deacon says, wishing he hadn’t left the apartment without his cigarettes. He considers bumming one or two off Sadie, but she probably doesn’t have anything but Djarum cloves, and he’d rather smoke a dirty old mop.
“Do you know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl? They can tell you that now, can’t they?”
“If you want to know, but Chance wants to wait until it’s born and find out the old-fashioned way.”
“Have you guys decided on names already?”
Deacon picks up his coffee cup again, chicory or no chicory, and takes a swallow before he answers.
“Joe, if it’s a boy, after Chance’s grandfather.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“If it’s a girl, either Emma Jean or Elizabeth. Chance hasn’t made up her mind yet.”
Sadie shakes her head. “If
I
ever had a daughter,” she says, “I’d name her Hermione, after that girl in the Harry Potter books.”
“I’m sure she’d just love you for that,” Deacon replies and drinks more of the coffee, trying to ignore the peppery aftertaste.
“It’s no worse than
Chance.
Why didn’t her parents just name her Opportunity and get it the hell over with?”
“You might just have a point there, Miss Jasper.”
Sadie laughs out loud and leans back against the sofa, pressing herself into the tattered cushions; she props her feet up on the table, and Deacon can see that there are small holes worn in the toes of both her pink socks.
“I’ve really fucking missed this, Deke. I mean, I’ve really missed you. There isn’t anyone else I can talk to the way we used to talk.”
“Yeah,” he says and sets his cup down again. “I guess that’s why I’m here. There’s something I need to talk about, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who wouldn’t think I was crazy.”
“What do you—?” she starts, but the phone in the kitchen rings, and “Shit,” Sadie hisses. “Just a minute, okay? I’ll be right back, I swear. It’s probably just my mother.” And then she leaves Deacon alone on the mustard-colored sofa and vanishes into the kitchen again. He sighs and stares across the room at the stuffed raccoon, which seems to be watching him intently from the top of the television with its dark glass eyes.
“Yeah, well fuck you, too,” he mutters at the raccoon and finishes his coffee.
Deacon was drunk the night he met Sadie Jasper for the first time, back in the day, years ago now, but just a few months after he’d finally left Atlanta. The boozy good-old days, and he worked every other night at a Southside coin-op laundry and then at a produce warehouse in the mornings, sleeping away the afternoons and staying drunk as much as possible, as much as he could afford. A steamy August evening, and she’d talked him into going to an abandoned warehouse with her to see a ghost. Nothing half as simple as that, but that’s what they would say whenever it came up later—“Remember the night we saw the ghost in the Harris building?”
Sadie had heard people talking, rumors that Deacon had once worked for the police, that he could find dead people and missing bodies and even murderers just by visiting crime scenes, by touching an article of clothing or a corpse.
“So you’re Deacon Silvey,” she said and smiled, a triumphant, pleased-with-herself sort of smile. “The psychic criminologist,” and Deacon shook his head.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “I’m just a drunk who sees things sometimes.”
“That’s not so unusual,” Sadie said.
“That’s what I keep telling people, but no one ever seems to listen.”
But he followed her to the old Harris Transfer and Warehouse Building on Twenty-third Street, walking a few steps behind her, sipping from his quart bottle of McCall’s, the cheap gin so none of it would ever matter, not now or in the morning, and what could this little goth girl have to show him, anyway? Just a game, and maybe if he played along, maybe if he looked at her spooky place, oohed and aahed whenever oohs and aahs were called for, maybe he wouldn’t have to sleep alone for a night or two.
“I used to know a girl,” Sadie said. “Back when I still lived with my parents down in Mobile. She was a clairvoyant, too, but it finally drove her crazy. She was always in and out of psych wards.”
“I’m not clairvoyant,” Deacon said. “I get impressions, that’s all. What I did for the cops, I helped them find lost things.”
“Lost things,” Sadie said thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it.”
“A good word for what?” he asked and glared up at the building, late-nineteenth-century brick, rusted iron bars over broken windows, and those jagged holes either swallowing the streetlight or spitting it back out because it was blacker than midnight under a coffin in there, black like the first second before the universe was born, and Deacon was beginning to wonder if he’d underestimated Sadie Jasper.
“You’ll see,” she said, and this time when Sadie smiled it made him think of a very hungry animal or the Grinch that stole Christmas. Deacon took another long pull off the bottle of gin and wiped his mouth.
They didn’t go in through the front door, of course, the locked and boarded-up front door set inside its marble arch and
HARRIS
chiseled deep into the pediment. Instead, she led him down the narrow alley to a spot where the iron burglar bars had been pried loose and there were three or four plastic milk crates stacked conveniently under the window. Sadie scrambled up the makeshift steps and slipped inside, slipped smooth over the shattered glass like a raw oyster over sharp teeth, like she’d done this a hundred times before, and for all he knew she had. Deacon looked apprehensively up at the building again, had another swallow of McCall’s, and then checked for cops before he followed her.
However dark it had seemed from the outside, it was twice that dark inside, and the broken glass under Deacon’s boots made a sound like walking on cornflakes.
“Better hold up a sec,” Sadie said, and suddenly there was light, the weak and narrow beam from a silver flashlight in her hand; white light across the concrete floor to show glittering chips and shards of window, a few scraps of cardboard and what looked like a filthy sweater lying in one corner. Nothing else, just that wide and dust-drowned room, and then Sadie motioned towards a doorway with the beam of light.
“The stairs are right over there,” she said and started walking towards the doorway. Deacon stayed close, not wanting to get too far away from the flashlight. The air in the warehouse smelled like mildew and dust, a rank, closed away from the world odor that made his nose itch and his eyes water.
“Oh, you’ll want to watch out for that spot over there,” Sadie said, and the beam swung suddenly to her left and down and Deacon could see the gaping hole in the floor, big enough to drop a pickup truck through, that hole, big enough and black enough that maybe it was where all the dark inside the building was coming from, spilling up from the basement or subbasement, perhaps, and then her flashlight swept right again, and he didn’t have to look at the hole anymore. Now there was a flight of concrete stairs instead, ascending into the nothing past the reach of Sadie’s flashlight.
“It’s all the way at the top,” she said.
“What’s all the way at the top, Sadie? What’s waiting for us up there?”
“It’s easier if I just show you, if you see it for yourself,” and then she started up the stairs, taking them two at a time and carrying the light away with her, leaving him alone next to the hole. Deacon glanced forlornly back towards the broken window and then hurried to catch her. They climbed up and up and up the spiral stairwell, like Alice tumbling backwards and nothing to mark their progress past each floor but a small landing or closed door or a place where a door should be, nothing to mark the time but the dull echo of their feet against the cement. Sadie was always three or four steps ahead of him, and finally he yelled at her to slow the fuck down.
“But we’re almost there,” she called back and kept going.
And then there were no more stairs left to climb, a final landing and a single small window, but at least it wasn’t quite so dark at the top as it had been at the bottom. Deacon leaned against the wall, wheezing, trying to catch his breath. His sides hurt and his legs ached; he stared out through the flyblown glass at the streets and rooftops below, a couple of cars, and it all seemed a thousand miles away, or only a film of the world, and if he broke this window, there would be nothing on the other side at all.
“Over here,” Sadie whispered, and the closeness of her voice did nothing about the hard, lonely feeling settling over him. “This hallway here,” and she jabbed the flashlight at the darkness like a knife as he turned away from the window.
“The first time I saw it, I was tripping,” she said, “so I didn’t think it was real. But I started dreaming about it and had to come back to see. To be sure.”
Deacon stepped slowly away from the window, three slow steps and he was through the doorway and standing beside Sadie. “There,” she said and switched the flashlight off. “All the way at the other end of the hall.” For a long moment Deacon couldn’t see anything at all, a darting purple-orange afterimage from the flashlight and nothing much else while his pupils swelled, making room for light that wasn’t there.
“Do you feel it yet, Deacon?” she asked, and he started to say that he didn’t feel a goddamn thing, but would she please turn the flashlight back on. And then he
did
feel something, cold air flowing thick and heavy around them, open icebox air to fog their breath and send a prickling rash of goose bumps down his arms. And it wasn’t
just
cold, it was indifference, the freezing temperature of an apathy so absolute, so perfect; Deacon took a step backwards, one hand up to cover his mouth, but it was already too late, and the gin and his supper came up and splattered loudly on the floor at their feet.