Pockets of Darkness (27 page)

Thirty Six

Bridget and Otter had to walk a few miles to the Red Hook Grain Terminal.

“I needed to get out,” Otter said. “That cave, pit, hole, whatever you want to call it. Felt like a coffin.”

She didn’t say anything. Bridget had said plenty earlier, demanding he stay in Adiella’s pit until this matter was resolved. He decided otherwise and promised to sneak out if she didn’t take him along. So rather than risk that and risk him running afoul of something human or otherwise, she’d grudgingly agreed he could come with her … after demanding that Ijul protect him.

“Three days down in there, Mom. Really, it felt like I was in a coffin, you know. I need a hot bath. I just feel so friggin’ dirty. I’m going to All is Well when you’re done doing whatever you’re doing here.” All is Well was a men’s spa in the Flatiron District. Bridget knew Tavio used to go there and no doubt had introduced Otter to the place.

Otter had no trouble keeping up, despite the fast pace Bridget managed. One thousand five hundred and seventy-six steps, the lower third taken two at a time, in the Empire State Building run. Maybe next time she’d invite Otter to participate in the Run Up.

But “next time” was going to be a while off, she suspected. As much as she loved New York—and never in her adult life had been out of the city—she was starting to question staying here. Her brownstone gone, her antique store and the warehouse. She had plenty of investments so that she could rebuild. But should she?

Should she start over somewhere else?

“This is a creepy place we’re going to.” Otter pointed ahead. His breath was puffy against the frigid air, like he was smoking an invisible cigarette. Bridget thought his face appeared hard and had lost the boyish charm she’d noted only a handful of days ago during his birthday dinner. His eyes were marbles, the sparkle gone.

Fifteen, not fifty,
she thought. Losing his father, seeing a demon burn down the brownstone. How much had all that aged him? Certainly there were things he’d never un-see and would disturb his dreams for all the decades of his life.

“Maybe we should’ve taken a cab.… provided a driver would’ve risked coming here. The place looks haunted.”

Bridget had to admit that it did look eerie. And if it had been just her, she would’ve taken a cab from the last subway stop. But with Otter along the fare would have exceeded the twenty bucks she’d left herself. And the banks weren’t open yet to replenish her funds.

“Looks like it would make a great set for some horror movie, Mom.”

It is the set for horror,
Bridget mused. The Red Hook Grain Terminal was where Ijul directed her. The demon said Yaqrun was living somewhere amid the concrete silos. Her demon could apparently sense where others of his kind were.

“Place hasn’t been used for half a century.” Bridget finally said something. A heavy layer of frost covered everything, but the black mold on the concrete was still visible beneath. “When the barge canal was dug, rerouting the Erie Canal, they built this place. The Red Hook waterfront used to be a busy place, Otter.”

She’d first discovered the place in her youth in the company of the Westies boys she ran with. There were fifty-four silos, and once upon a time grain was mechanically hoisted into them from the bellies of ships that had pulled up. It was considered an engineering miracle in its day, but it had too-fast become obsolete as the grain trade in New York declined. It had become cheaper to unload grain in Philadelphia and Baltimore. So the jobs vanished, the docks decayed, and the area’s residents took up living in “Red Hook Houses,” ugly public housing projects. The place became thick with crack cocaine, and despite the gentrification in the area—all the specialty shops and wine bars that were moving in—drugs were still around.

Bridget hadn’t been back since she explored the place with the Westies boys. Even they had been intimidated by the criminal element that clung to the abandoned terminal’s fringes and they’d never ventured there after the sun went down. There were scattered news reports in the past few years that the owner of the industrial park was looking to build the property farther out into the bay by laying in a landfill made of sludge and concrete.

Cradling her box with the fired bowls nested inside, Bridget nudged Otter toward the closest silo. “See there?” She kept her voice down and nodded toward an ash-gray van. “Security.” It must have pulled up recently, as there was no trace of frost or snow on it.

“Who’d want to protect this dump?” Otter worried his foot against a piece of cardboard frozen to the ground.

“They’re probably not protecting this place so much as trying to prevent people from getting in and hurting themselves.”

Otter chuckled, and then dropped his voice. “Oh, I get it. Urban explorers, huh? The urban explorers ought to go check out Grandma’s little cave in—”

A piercing “ahhhhhhooooooo” sliced through the air. Bridget thought it might have been a boat horn. But it came again and ended with the loud clanking of metal on metal, coming from a nearby silo.

“Yaqrun,” Ijul said. “I told Bridget I smelled Yaqrun in this direction. Yaqrun cries a kill.”

“Wonderful,” Bridget said.

“What’s wonderful? This place is—”

Bridget’s scowl stopped Otter from saying anything else.

“Bridget, once more I ask you not to do this horrid thing. Do you not realize that with Yaqrun at our side, you and I can defeat an army? With the powerful Yaqrun, we can—”

She scowled at her demon too, but that did not shut it up. The thing continued to prattle on about conquering New York City and then the land and the sea beyond. The ooze that ran down its sides this morning was thin and sluggish, and frost covered its warty hide. She wondered if it felt cold or heat.

“I still think this isn’t the best idea, Otter, you coming along.” But she hadn’t stopped him, and she hadn’t given him the slip when she could have. She really was considering teaching him the art of demon-snaring. But she hadn’t even practiced it yet herself, only lived it vividly by watching Hilimaz.

“Better idea than staying down in that hole with Michael and—”

“Then c’mon, and watch yourself. I’ll be too busy to watch out after you.” She cut a look to the demon.

“Protect Otter,” it said.

Everything inside that wasn’t concrete was rusted. Evidence of urban explorers was on the walls—spray painted initials, gang symbols, a caricature of a big-nosed woman who was perhaps a singer or other celebrity. A door had been painted turquoise; it looked recently done, with IOII stenciled in bright white on it. All the details were easy to see as light came in through broken windows. Not a pane of glass was intact. An attempt had been made to cover some of the windows; dingy plastic hung over a few in tatters, flapping like agitated ghosts. Through a gap in the plastic, Bridget saw part of a building a hundred feet away that had collapsed into the canal.

“So … this demon you’re hunting,” Otter said. “It’s in here?”

“Apparently,” Bridget returned. “And they’re actually called Aldî-nîfaeti. I think I’m going to teach you a little Sumerian when we’ve some quiet time. A pretty language; you’ll probably catch on quick.”

“Cimmerian?”

“Su-merian. Conan the Barbarian is not involved.”

A rust-covered ladder with high steps led up. Her demon squatted at the base.

“Yaqrun is above,” Ijul said.

“Yeah, I figured.” There was no trace of the demon down here, though charred spots on the concrete floor indicated that maybe it had consumed someone here, maybe a vagrant, a blanket and an empty peaches can against a wall suggested someone had stayed here. Maybe Yaqrun had torched a security guard.

She took a step up, looked down. “Ijul, protect Otter, remember. Always protect Otter.”

Otter opened his mouth to say something, but apparently thought better of it.

Bridget climbed higher. “You coming?”

“You talking to me? Or you talking to your invisible demonic buddy?”

“Yes,” Bridget said. “Let’s get this over with.”

She guessed it was about ninety feet up to the top level. And with every other rung she climbed she said “Yaqrun.” Saying its name would hold it in place. That, and its arrogance and lack of fear. Hilimaz said Aldî-nîfaeti feared only the gods—
some
of the gods—and that for the most part they were unaware Enlil had learned how to capture them and passed that knowledge to his chosen people.

“Yaqrun,” she said.

“Please do not do this thing, Bridget,” Ijul grumbled.

“What did I tell you,” she shot back.

“To protect Otter. To not feast on human hearts.”

She should have worn gloves. Bridget cradled the box to her with one hand and kept her other hand on the railing. Not that she needed help in climbing, but she worried that the steps were so rusted one might give way and she wanted something to cling to. She hadn’t given a thought to what would happen to her if she plummeted dozens of feet and hit the concrete below; her concern was for the bowls she’d crafted and inscribed.

The higher she went, the colder the railing became. It wasn’t her imagination. It was bone-numbing cold of the sort that no matter how many blankets you piled on or how close to a fire you sat you could not feel any warmth.

Some Aldî-nîfaeti exude cold, Hilimaz had told her one summer day, particularly if they are happy. “I do not know why,” the old potter said, “only that they do it. Some say hell is cold, and my husband’s mother—who spoke directly to Enlil, who had been banished there for a time—claimed that hell freezes your eyes open and your throat shut. That Aldî-nîfaeti would be pleased if the world became so cold like unto hell, like their home.”

“Yaqrun,” Bridget said again. “Yaqrun. Yaqrun. Yaqrun.”

“Please do not do this thing. With Yaqrun we can claim this city.”

“Yaqrun.” Bridget stepped off the ladder and opened the box, reached inside and gingerly withdrew the top bowl. She sat the box down at her feet away from the stairwell. Running her fingers around the letters she’d carved, she took a look around and shivered from more than the cold.

Bringing Otter had been a very bad idea.

Light streamed in through broken windows and the dust and ash particles in the air were suspended like snowflakes that refused to fall. She counted at least a dozen piles of ashes with charred bones and bits of the dead owners’ possessions. Here a blackened boot, there a gun, a still-smoldering blanket, a polished white human skull that looked incongruous with all the other dark matter, the singed carcasses of a few rats, syringes, a ball cap with the brim burned off. There was a bite to the air, an acridness that clings to burned-out buildings mixed with the touch of roasted flesh. Bridget heard Otter gag; she’d gotten so used to foul-smelling things that she could handle it.

“You don’t have to come all the way up,” she told him. “In fact, you might want to go back down. This was a bad idea, Otter. I’m sorry I said okay.”

He ignored her and clambered up the rest of the way. “Holy shit! Those were people.”

Vagrants, urban explorers, security guards, maybe people on the docks the Aldî-nîfaeti had found and brought up here to devour leisurely. Remembering how the museum guards died, Bridget knew all of these had suffered horribly.

Their deaths—whoever they were—rested squarely on her. She’d let the damn demon out of the bowl. She’d not considered the repercussions.

“Yaqrun.”

The top floor was one big circular room with rusted steel girders holding up a cement roof and rusted steel braces on the side wearing the graffiti of gangers and lovers. Sarah & Pedro were inside a lavender heart. Jander & Joe inside another. Posters for bands called The Happy Problem, Streets of Laredo, and Sister Sparrow were affixed above a table made of boards and plastic milk crates—the only objects not incinerated by the demonic occupant.

“Yaqrun. Yaqrun. Yaqrun.”

“Bridget, please do not—”

A glare cut her demon off. It squatted next to Otter, breath puffing away like noxious little clouds through a slit in its bulbous lips and through gills in its thick neck. She’d not noticed the gills before.

“Yaqrun, I call the slayer of farmers, burner of children, destroyer of—”

“Civilizations. Yaqrun the mighty, the supreme, the pillager.” The Aldî-nîfaeti had somehow merged with the concrete, but now pulled itself out. It had grown since Bridget last saw it at her brownstone, and its appearance had changed.

“Oh my God!” Otter shouted. “Holy fuck!”

“Get out of here, Otter. I said this was a bad idea.” She heard him clamber back down the stairs, clumsy in his haste.

“Protect Otter,” Ijul said as it lumbered after the boy, breath still puffing away in the cold.

The first time she’d seen the tentacle monstrosity, she likened its height to an NBA center. Now it was easily a dozen feet tall, and the octopus-like appendages at its base were swollen, twitching against the marble floor, steam rising from their ends. Its cylindrical body that rose like a column was no longer smooth. It had the appearance of blackened tree bark, and the whorls looked like carved faces. Each face was different, one a young man, one an old woman, one a stern-faced person of indeterminate sex, another had a long nose and prominent cheekbones. Maybe they were the faces of the Aldî-nîfaeti’s victims. One near the base of its body had a mouth open as if caught in a scream. Its two mannish arms had thickened and lengthened, and the lobster-shaped claws they ended in glowed red like hot coals. Its simian head had more detail to it … or maybe the improved light allowed her to see it better.

The face was truly hideous, eyes limned with rivulets of lava, nose upturned and showing the flicker of flames in its wide nostrils. The cheeks were overly exaggerated and the skin cracked across them, embers burning in the crevices. What initially had looked like crabgrass going on top of its head now appeared as the talons of large birds, and they flexed and quivered as she watched in horror. It opened its mouth and a frigid blast of air rushed out. Despite its penchant for burning, it radiated a cold more intense than the winter outside. The cold of hell maybe, Bridget mused, as she stepped to the wall, recited the spell and placed the bowl down against it.