Premonitions (16 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re not gonna find
a doctor down here,” Drew said. “Even the guys working the homeless clinic won’t come down here.”

Karyn couldn’t argue with that. Tenement buildings loomed over the street, most of their lower windows covered in sheets of graffiti-tagged plywood, and the potholes in the road yawned like bomb craters. The idle, the unemployed, and the unemployable stood around everywhere, smoked cigarettes on every stoop.

“Nope,” Karyn said.

“But you’re not looking for a doctor, are you?”

A ball rolled out into the street, and a couple of kids ran after it without even checking for traffic. Drew braked with a jolt. “Are you?” he asked again.

“Not exactly.”

“Shit. What are you hooked on?” The kids gave him the finger and cleared out, but he didn’t move the car forward.

“You want to get going,” Karyn said. “You stay still long enough here, somebody’ll start stealing parts off your car with you in it.”

“Very funny,” he said, but he pressed the gas. The car rolled forward at a cautious twenty miles per hour. Drew took his gaze from the road long enough to look at her. She didn’t look back. “I get it—the screaming, the shakes. My sister tried to get off the horse cold turkey once, and it didn’t look too different.”

“I’m not a junkie.”

“Well, it isn’t your fucking
doctor
that lives down here in the DMZ,” Drew said, the note of anger hard and surprising in his voice.

“Depends what you mean by ‘doctor.’”

“There’s a clinic I know—methadone. I think you can get state help for the fees.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me right.
I’m not a junkie.
”

Again, Drew stopped the car. This time, he turned to face Karyn. “Then what
are
we doing here? Tell me we’re not here to meet your connection.”

“What’s it to you?”

“That horse my sister was trying to get off? What do you think pulled her into that stupid fucking cult? Nothing cleans a person up like getting religion.” Karyn heard his teeth grind together. Then he spoke again, quietly. “I followed her right in. I’m trying to help, for God’s sake, not deliver you to the butcher.”

“It’s not like that,” Karyn said. “Really.”

“Then what’s it like?”

For one crazy moment, she thought about explaining.
But when has that ever ended well?
Instead, she grabbed the door handle. “It’s all right. I’ll walk from here.” She pushed the door open.

“Whoa!” Drew’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. “Are you insane? Skinny white girl down here alone? They’ll
eat
you before the end of the block.”

“Nobody’s going to eat me,” she said, though she could see things moving in an alley off the other side of the road, and she wondered if that was really true. She didn’t get out of the car.

“Come on. Close the door, and I’ll get you out of here.”

She sat back, but she didn’t close the door. She measured Drew with a long, searching look, and finally decided—
What the hell?

“OK,” she said, “I’ll be straight with you. I do need to meet my hookup.”

Drew opened his mouth, so she continued before he
could stick his foot in it. “But it’s not heroin. Really. I’ve got a . . . condition.”

“A condition.”

“Yeah. I can keep it under control, but I need a very special, very expensive kind of medicine.”

“The kind you won’t find in the pharmacy,” Drew said.

“That’s true, but it’s not what you’re thinking. There’s nothing illegal or dangerous about it. It’s just rare and expensive.”

“And peddled out of a crack house.”

Karyn shrugged. “If you like.” She closed the door. “Can we go?”

Drew didn’t answer, but he took his foot off the brake, and the car started rolling. “What condition?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Drew nodded and guided the car around a chasm in the pavement. Karyn saw lines of tension on his face, tightness around the eyes and lips.

“Turn right ahead.”

Drew steered the car onto a side street that was, if possible, in even worse repair than the street they’d been on. If Karyn hadn’t spent so much time down here, it would have been hard for her to believe this was America, not some bombed-out Eastern European relic of World War Two. Here the idlers were gone for the most part. Only the most desperate of squatters lived in the condemned buildings in this part of town—and the odd person who was so determined to have solitude in the middle of this city that they were willing to live somewhere nobody else would come.

She felt a surprising surge of warmth toward this stranger who’d picked her up and helped her when everything else had turned to shit, and, without really thinking about it, she said, “I hallucinate the future.”

“Huh?”

“That’s my condition. I hallucinate the future.”

She imagined she could see Drew’s skin crawling, a wave of goose bumps traveling up his body. Almost everybody had one of two reactions to her “condition”—
outright disbelief, which wasn’t so bad, or a bad case of the creeps. Sometimes it passed.

“That’s an odd way to put it,” Drew said.

“It’s the truth. I don’t
see
the future, not in any way that makes sense. I get images overlaid on top of images, all smashed in with the regular world. I can’t tell any of it apart, except that most of the hallucinations don’t make any sense. Even the stuff that does usually needs a lot of interpretation.”

Drew grinned. “How come you don’t make a killing at the stock market?”

“It’s that interpretation bit,” Karyn said. “It’s a bear. Plus, it’s not like I get to know what I want to know about—I just get what I’m given.”

“And the medication? Is that for real?”

“Oh, yeah.” She watched a stray cat batting at a piece of litter before answering. “My condition gets . . . pretty bad if I don’t keep it suppressed.”

“The screaming and running into traffic.”

“The future’s an ugly place.”
So’s the past.
“Pull over here.”

Drew made a face. “Why the hell would somebody dealing in crazy expensive ‘medication’ live in a crack house?”

“You think my condition’s bad, wait till you meet Adelaide.”

Drew grimaced as he guided the car over to the side of the road. “Great.” He parked two feet away from the curb, but Karyn didn’t feel like now was a good time to criticize his parking skills.

“This won’t take long,” she told him. “You can wait here, if you want.”

He looked up and down the street. Nothing moved but the stray cat they’d passed earlier. “There’s nobody here. At all. The whole street.”

“Adelaide likes her privacy.”

“It gives me the creeps. I’m staying with you.”

“Up to you.”

Karyn got out. Drew turned off the car and followed, his footfalls loud in the empty street.

At the front door of the apartment building, Karyn hesitated. She always met Adelaide here, but she’d never gotten comfortable with it, and it looked like the door had taken a close-range shotgun blast since her last visit. There was a hole clean through it, shreds of veneer surrounding the hole like long teeth. Adelaide wouldn’t bother to fix it, Karyn knew. A working front door was the least of her concerns, if she even noticed at all.

Karyn pushed open the door. It swung inward with the slightest touch, hitting the wall and hanging askew on one hinge. A rank, wet smell—mildew and rot and stagnant standing water—belched from the inside of the building.

Drew coughed and covered his mouth. “Ugh. Is she, uh, dangerous?”

Karyn stopped at the threshold. “Very. Whatever you do, don’t look directly at her. You’ll turn to stone.”

“You’re joking,” Drew said, his eyes wide.

“Yes, actually.” Karyn smiled. “Just be polite, and don’t talk unless she asks you something. It’ll be fine.”

She went inside, wrinkling her nose at the smell and shaking her head in astonishment at the ruin. No matter how many times she came here, it was impossible to get used to. Nobody had lived in this building for years, obviously—other than Adelaide. The sheetrock had rotted and fallen off the walls in most places, landing in moldering piles and leaving the skeletal framework of the building exposed and rusting. Grime streaked the floor. Holes gaped in the ceiling like infected wounds.

Karyn made her way down the hall and turned at the end. She pulled open another door, this one heavy and metal.

“The stairwell?” Drew asked, his voice high and anxious. “You sure these stairs will support us?”

“Don’t worry. We’re not going up.”

“That’s not better.”

She was inclined to agree, but she said nothing as she headed down the stairs. Her calf complained at each step, and her hip joined in as well, angry from her encounter with the car outside the diner. They loosened up
as she moved, but she still had the impression she was more hobbling than walking.

The stench worsened during her descent, and it soon became obvious why. Brackish black water covered the floor, coming halfway up the bottom step. Oily rainbows swam on the surface amid floating black lumps and rotting detritus.

Karyn reached the bottom and stepped right in. The water filled her shoe. Her stomach made a noise of complaint.

Ahead of her was a doorway, and beyond that was darkness, lit only by shafts of sickly light coming through the dingy panes of the basement windows.

“Oh, nasty. It’s
warm
,” Drew said as he stepped into the water behind her.

“Shh.”

“You’re not going to lure me down here and kill me, are you?” he asked in a whisper.

“Nah. I only do bag ladies.”

A pause. Drew’s shadow on the bright patch of water ahead of her stopped moving.

“Joking,” she said.

“I must be nuts,” he said, but he started moving again.

Something pale shifted, flashed in the water ahead of her, and was gone.
Was that actually there?
she wondered. The water wasn’t deep enough to harbor much of anything beyond a few frogs and the odd billion or so mosquito larvae, or at least she didn’t think so. But if it wasn’t really there, what was the message? What was it trying to tell her?

There’s a game with no end. Keep walking.
Warm water sloshed around her ankles as she moved forward. She could see a room ahead, sun filtering down through the filthy windows and offering a little light, but she knew Adelaide wouldn’t be there.

She turned to the right and kept moving. After a dozen steps, only the vaguest of light and dark shapes suggested walls and openings. Karyn held her hands out in front of her to avoid running into anything.

A hand dropped onto her shoulder, and she whirled around.

“Don’t want to get separated,” Drew said softly.

“No.” She’d been here dozens of times over the years, but she still felt glad of Drew’s presence. She usually hadn’t come alone before, either.

That thought triggered an unwelcome swarm of associations.
Not now.

Her right hand hit a wall, slid across a slimy surface. She stepped left and through a doorway, wincing as damp spiderwebs trailed over her skin. Not for the first time, she thought she’d scream if a spider ran across her face. This time, that didn’t happen.

Behind her, Drew ran into the doorframe and swore.

Ahead and somewhat to the right, a faint flickering lit up the dank basement. It was slight, an orange wash over indistinct humps and walls, but the darkness had been so complete before that it seemed almost as good as huge floodlights. Karyn wasn’t sure she wanted to see her surroundings any more clearly than this, anyway.

She walked to where a section of the ceiling had fallen in, leaving a space barely high enough for her to get through without crawling. The light came from beyond. She crouched and shuffled through.

On the other side, a pile of rubble pushed its way up out of the water, providing dry if rocky ground for a space about the size of a big living room. A handful of candles on makeshift stands—a sheared-off girder, an upended cinder block, a stack of swollen and rotting paperbacks—illuminated the room.

In the far corner, a mass of rags undulated.

Karyn stepped out of the water and onto the little island of rubble.

“Go away,” a voice said. It shook and cracked, surely coming from a throat at least a thousand years old.

“It’s me. Karyn.”

“Adelaide knows. But her head hurts so bad. It’s full of lizards today, spiders and lizards. Come back tomorrow.”

Drew leaned toward Karyn. “She talks about herself in third person?”

“Shh.” Karyn took another step forward. The rags shifted. “I need your help.”

“Always. You always need Adelaide’s help. What do you ever do for her? What do you ever give Adelaide, to ease her conscience for helping you kill your gift?”

“Twenty thousand dollars, last time.”

“Twen—” Drew began, and Karyn elbowed him.

“Gone now. Adelaide used it, used it all. Adelaide gave it to the spiders. The spiders and rats. What will you give her this time?”

Karyn crossed her arms, huddling into herself. “I—I don’t have anything this time. I just need help.” The words sounded pathetic, and she hated them.

The mound of rags erupted, fragments flying everywhere—only they weren’t rags, and they weren’t fragments. They were rats, hundreds of them, from lean gray gutter rats to sleek fat albino pets, red eyes shining in the candlelight, and everything in between. They ran in all directions.

Karyn heard the splash as Drew stepped backward into the water.

From the center of the pile of rats, a woman stood. She wore a simple shift, surprisingly white in this dank underworld, and her thin arms poked out like sticks. Her ancient voice must have been a lie or the result of damage—Karyn had never figured out which—for her skin was unlined, her eyes clear, and her body moved with a fluid grace.

Karyn had a couple of inches on her, but she shrank back anyway as Adelaide approached.

“Nothing?” The voice was jarring coming from a woman who surely couldn’t be thirty yet. “You have nothing for Adelaide? You come
here
with
nothing
?”