Resurrection House (23 page)

He struggled in his small space.

His lungs strained to draw breath against the crush of the crowd.

Near the door two men with knives lunged at each other, snarling obscenities. Those around them cried out and searched for somewhere to flee, but in such close quarters the contest lasted only a moment before one combatant thrust his blade through the other’s throat. The murdered man died on his feet, propped upright by the mob as his lifeblood gushed from his neck and his eyes went blank. The killer rifled his victim’s pockets and raised two copper coins in triumph; the money had been all the dead man had in the world.

The crowd cheered the trophy.

“Congratulations, Handy! That bingo-boy’s been standing on me foot all day,” one man said, drawing a wave of laughter.

Cam pushed toward the door, unwilling to stay a moment longer. Everything closed around him, and his head spun in the hot and choking air, but the others wouldn’t let him pass. They surged against him and refused to give way. They thrust their legs in his path and clawed at him. He felt a bowler hat he hadn’t even known he was wearing lifted from his head. His jacket went next, torn apart at the seams.

The red-faced killer by the door watched him.

“And where do ya think you’re going, covey?” he said in a harsh, gutter accent. “Out to fetch the crushers? Now, boyo, don’t ya know ya belong to us?”

The crowd set upon him, shredding his remaining clothes, scraping at his skin, groping to pull him apart limb by limb.

Their fists beat his skull.

An unseen blade slashed his leg.

He raised his arms defensively, but he was already falling…his vision darkening….

Cam inhaled a sharp breath as if taking his first ever and glanced at the skull wobbling on the ground where Hidalgo had knocked it from his hands.

“Dammit, Cam! What the hell did you do that for?” Hidalgo said. “What happened to you? What did you see?” Bennie’s tone suggested the weight of his sanity might ride on Cam’s response.

“I don’t know what I saw,” said Cam.

“Were there people? From a long time ago?”

Cam nodded. They had shared the same horrible vision. The darkness had lifted and something had transported them to another place and time.

“Who were they?” Hidalgo whispered.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand this. But we need a way out of here. Now.”

“No argument, there.”

The two men resumed searching for an exit, but they went only a short distance before stumbling across a bundle of thick, transparent plastic gleaming in the light. It protruded from the ground, half-buried. Cam grabbed a fold of it and pulled it tight so they could see through it. A woman’s body was inside.

“Dead at least a few days,” said Hidalgo.

Casting his light around, Cam picked out another plastic-wrapped bundle nearby. Another woman, harder to identify for being dead longer, but dressed in clothing like that of the first corpse, which suggested both women might have been patrons of the Mission Bar. Beyond the pale of the flashlights, dark shapes signaled more corpses dumped in the occluding blackness.

“Shit,” Hidalgo said. “We’re crawling around somebody’s private graveyard. You think they knew about this? Those girls upstairs or the bartender, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Maybe Marty was about to add another victim down here when somebody took him out. Maybe they’re all involved.” Cam thought for a moment, realizing how long they’d been underground, how far they’d crawled from their starting point. “Why haven’t they come down here after us? They should’ve been right behind us.”

“Maybe they’re afraid of what’s down here,” said Hidalgo.

A metallic glint caught their eyes and they crawled toward it. A wide, bronze ring lay covered in the dust.

“It’s a trap door,” Hidalgo said.

His light bobbed as he bent to open it. The square silhouette lifted and stood up like a stone marker, and for a moment Cam lost sight of his partner behind it.

“Oh, no,” Hidalgo said. “Oh, fuck me, no, there are hundreds—”

A harsh wind blasted by, buffeting Cam to the floor, pinning him. He fought against it, trying to close the short distance between him and Hidalgo, and then his partner’s light blinked out.

“Bennie?” Cam called.

Cam eased toward the open door, his light and his automatic in front of him. He inched forward and peered over the lip of the entry. The passage exposed a deeper chamber, where dozens of sparse, toothy grins leered up from a mound of discarded skulls and bones. Hundreds of them, some of them smashed and broken, others heartbreakingly small, laid piled one atop another on a steep ramp angling toward deeper recesses that promised an endless parade of the smiling dead.

There was no sign of Hidalgo.

Cam swiveled, searching for his partner. He put a hand down for support, felt an unexpected smoothness beneath his fingers, and then a fresh current raced through him. He felt himself falling sideways before the cellar went away.

Screaming pierced his ears, the cries of a baby, hungry and wailing to be fed. The shrill sound was nearly unbearable. He tried to sleep through it, but couldn’t. He sat up and left the squalid room where he’d lain beside twenty other men and women, all dressed in soiled rags like his own.

He entered the hallway and headed toward the front of the building and the small room with the window that looked out onto the street.

He couldn’t say if it was day or night. Prone figures littered the hall floor. Some appeared to not be breathing.

He passed an open doorway and peered inside where a diseased woman lay on her back on a cot, drawing a naked man down to her withering body. Two malnourished children sat in the corner. The woman waved irritably at them to turn away, then coughed, bringing a spot of blood to her lips.

From further down the corridor drifted a stench so awful it forced Cam to clasp a hand over his mouth and nose as he passed. He struggled against the bile rising in his stomach. Voices rumbled on the other side of a door, and he couldn’t imagine how anyone could stay inside the room, trapped with the source of that horrific odor.

He tried and failed to remember the last time he’d been outdoors, or tasted fresh air, or even the last time he’d seen daylight. It was much more dangerous to venture outside the building now that the neighborhood residents had taken to stoning anyone who tried to go into the street. Anyone who left went by cover of night.

Even the police had stopped raiding the place. It cost them too many men to venture here, and though they only came in groups of thirty, forty, or more, now, they always left with fewer than they arrived.

There were children here, he realized, who’d never in their life been exposed to the open sky.

A pang in his gut heralded the awakening of a terrible hunger, but he had no food and no prospects of finding any.

The door to the front room creaked open, and he stepped inside.

A black man sat behind an overturned crate, shuffling cards for two other men. A few coins lay on the old wood. The card players glared at Cam as he entered. The dealer sneered.

“What you want? What business you got in here?”

“The window,” Cam said. “Just came to use the window, s’all.”

His voice sounded strange, his speech rhythm unfamiliar. Now, after hearing it aloud, he noticed his thoughts changing as well. The idea of killing the three men for their money flashed through his mind, and he rejected it only because the odds were against him. He resisted the violent images swirling in his brain and forced himself to look out the window.

Twilight draped the city. The lay of the streets seemed vaguely familiar, and he recognized a few scattered shapes. The name came of its own accord, and his lips mouthed the words: Five Points. The neighborhood had been called that more than a century ago. He spotted a woman walking toward a store across the dirt-paved street, and he shuddered at the first terrible impulse his now alien thoughts produced. He ignored it, searching for the landmark, the meeting of streets, the five corners where more murders had been committed than any other place in the city. Decades before Cam had lived, this had been the source of evil in New York City, a pit where robbers and killers dwelled, prostitutes thrived, and human refuse wasted away out of sight of civilized eyes. And this building, he realized, must be the infamous Old Brewery, the five-story, nearly windowless tenement that had served as home and hiding place to the blackest souls in Manhattan.

“You jack covey,” one of the card players said. “You cheating, lying sam!”

“Who are you to call anyone a cheater? You lost fair and square with the Devil books, now hand over your balsam before I cut it out of you!” said the dealer.

Cam watched them face-off, each man fondling an unseen weapon beneath his jersey. The third man threw open the door and fled into the hallway. Cam wanted to follow, but the two opponents blocked his path.

“What are you gaping at, crusher?” one said.

Acting on gut feeling Cam leapt forward pushing one of the men down and smashing his elbow into the other’s jaw. He dashed into the hallway, running as hard as his empty, cramping stomach and weary body allowed. His belly grumbled as he passed the rotting odor again and his mouth began to salivate, and he realized in repulsion what foul meat waited on the other side. This time he feared he really would vomit, though there was nothing inside him to bring up.

He ran blindly through a dim maze of filthy corridors and squalid rooms where the detritus of mankind lived like insects. He was desperate for an exit but could find none. Still he pressed on, fleeing the voices of pain and misery, the smells of sickness and disease, the sight of open wounds and warped lust. He raced down narrow hallways clogged with people camped along the walls and passed through rooms where groups huddled around the dead argued over their ruined belongings.

A woman glared at him, bare hate and craving mingled in her expression, but he saw only her withered eye and the terrible red disfigurement running from forehead to chin, the twin of the scar that marked Maia’s face.

Every turn he thought might take him closer to the outside world only led him deeper into the bowels of the building, until he collapsed against a door and gasped for breath. The card players caught up with him there, and though he knocked and pounded on the locked door behind him, his pleas for help went ignored. He turned to confront his assailants, ready to fight, but they were already upon him, stealing his blood with their knives, taking the only thing he still possessed: his life.

The pain sharpened.

Cam lay stunned on the hard surface while he caught his breath. A faint, red light filtered through his eyelids, and he opened them to see the passage to the men’s room directly overhead, the boards still in place where Hidalgo had left them. He had lost his flashlight, but in the dim fluorescence trickling down he examined the dirt around him, where he saw tracks and marks suggesting he had been dragged here from wherever he had fallen. The bones and bodies were gone, the trap door shut and lost again to blackness, and the rustling of the unseen shape silenced.

“Bennie?” Cam called out, but no reply came.

It would be foolish to venture back into the cellar with no light and no idea of where he was going or how he had made it back where he started. He wobbled to his feet and thrust upward, knocking loose the floorboards and pushing back the linoleum. The brightness dazzled him, but he welcomed the illumination and dragged himself out of the pit and onto the sticky floor above him. The bathroom was empty and Marty’s remains had been removed. It was still a ruin, but Cam could tell a period of time had passed by the tackiness of the spilled blood.

I’ve lost my mind
, he thought.
No. It’s real somehow. Bennie and I both saw the same vision when we touched the first skull. And something took him away, I’m certain. But how could I feel my own death twice?

Cam righted himself and readied to fight his way to the street.

Then the lights went out again.

Cam reached to his holster, but he had lost his gun somewhere below. He went for the reserve pistol at his lower back, felt the cold grip, and tore it loose. Someone nearby breathed heavily, taking in long, deep lungfuls of air.

“Who’s there?” said Cam.

“Jes’ me, crusher,” a voice said.

A flashlight clicked on, poised like the torch of a camp fire storyteller beneath the face of Bennie Hidalgo. Cam barely recognized him for the shadows across his features and the animalistic sneer that distorted his expression.

“Crap, Bennie, you scared the hell out of me,” Cam said.

The face of Hidalgo shook with laughter. “Who said I’m Bennie?”

“What are you talking about? Where did you go down there?”

“Bennie goes where we take him. Bennie does what we want,” said the voice. It was a voice from another time, another land, and it was coarse and brutal in tone. “And the addle covey cops to it a great deal, ya know. He’s part of us, and he’s not scared no more. Don’t think he’s capable of feeling fear or much else when ya get right down to them bare bones. His old ogles have seen too much.”

“Bennie, listen to me. There was something in the needle when they stabbed you. You’re flying on something, but you’re still you, okay? Concentrate on being you. I want to talk to Bennie Hidalgo, not whoever you think you are.”