Resurrection House (24 page)

“It ain’t the laudanum ruin, crusher. Not a drop of them fine poisons in this body. In most of the others, yes, most assuredly, and it makes ‘em quite receptive. So easy to dangle someone when they’ve stripped away the trappings of their very own persons and buried them in deep, dark places inside themselves,” said the thing inside Hidalgo. “Your cull threw wide his soul when he faced the slithering ones down there in the emptiness. No addle covey like him can stare us down. Now, he’s ours. And, you—no easy nut to crack, I’ll grant ya—but you’re next, and you’re going to be most useful to us.”

“If you’re not Bennie, who are you?”

“Jes’ a hackum who’s been out of the game far too long,” the thing said. “I want my life back, and I’m bringing my culls along to see we all ‘ave a good time again. Been penned up too long in that damnable other place, cut off from all but the most meager contact with the folks here in this city that used to be ours. It’s been enough, though, to get what we want. A little bit here, a little bit there, and a dame at the end of a knife. We’re coming back, now, crusher, and we’re bringing our happy ways with us.”

Cam doubled over and rammed forward. He caught Hidalgo in the mid-section, lifted him up, and sprawled him backward. The flashlight spun free, and Cam smashed it with his foot, plunging them into the dark to cover his escape. Moving by memory he raced to the doorway and pushed it down. The hall lights had gone dead, too, but he crashed his way to the staircase, grabbed the banister, and ascended. From the narrow back corridor he could see the entire bar was dark, now, lit only by the oddly faint flickering of a street lamp through the little front window. The room was a twisted geometry of shadows—vague shapes assembled in implausible arrangements as if nothing were truly solid and everything was changing around him as he walked through it.

He found few familiar landmarks. The jukebox had become a throbbing hulk of some unknown substance and the back booth had taken on the aspect of a befouled church pew. His foot came down on something soft and yielding. He examined it, feeling the familiar contours of a nose, lips, a face, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he picked out the bodies littering the floor, scattered as if every one of them had shut down and fallen where they stood. They formed an eerie, poly-limbed tangle, and Cam guessed they only slept because he could hear their breathing. Maia and her friends rested there, and Dubby the bartender, and the paramedics, as well, all of them succumbed to the bizarre influences of whatever unnatural will now possessed his partner. Cam found his way among the sleepers, careful not to rouse them, and lifted himself by one foot on the edge of a chair to peer out the window to the street.

He expected half a dozen police cruisers arrayed behind barricades with cops milling around them, the ambulance, maybe a SWAT truck. He wanted to be blinded by the flashing glare of high-powered police lights and hear the crackle of radios over the heavy rain. Instead there was nothing but the street, and it was not the same street it had been when he’d entered Mission Bar.

The street lamp flickered because it was a gaslight. The electric glow of storefront neon was nowhere in sight. Rain poured down with syrupy weight, cascading upon buildings that Cam believed no longer existed, low-rising tenements and dingy shops lining cobblestone streets, long ago replaced by taller, bolder structures of steel, concrete, and blacktop. Nothing moved on the shadow-draped block, and the night thickened like rising floodwaters. A tiny weed-grown park stood opposite Cam’s vantage, fenced in by uninviting spikes of ugly black metal and occupied only by a cracked bench of wood. The scene resembled something that once, like the lungs of a corpse, had been filled with life, but that should never be filled again.

He spun around the instant he heard the low, snorting shuffle behind him, but the thing already had a grip on him. Moving too fast for him to see, it lifted him into the air and propelled his body against the bar, which had become alarmingly solid and certain.

Cam faded.

A man entered the long hall. Another followed, both dressed in police uniforms and twirling their nightsticks with calculated arrogance. Three more came after them, a breakaway party from the larger expedition scouring the building. Cam watched from a doorway. The crowd spread apart for the cops, allowing them deeper into the corridor that had become only another filthy chamber overrun by the inhabitants of the building. They called it Murderer’s Alley.

“All right, you scabs,” the first cop shouted. “A tot’s missing from the neighborhood, and we know you’ve buzzed her. You can’t hide her in here for long.”

“Best to give her up,” said another cop. “Or we’ll have to beat it out of every one of ya.”

He slapped his club against his open palm. None of the officers noticed the crowd inching between them and the exit.

A woman stepped forward, cradling something bundled in rags. “Here, crushers. I took the child, and I can’t live with the awful guilt.”

She presented the bundle but the cops didn’t take it. A low snicker chased through the crowd. It spawned a flash of awareness on the brawny officers’ faces as they grasped the nature of their situation. One of them, still hopeful of recovering the missing child, accepted the rag bundle and its contents. He unwrapped the upper folds of the cloth and looked in.

“Dear Lord preserve us,” he said and thrust the bundle back at the woman.

She laughed and let it fall to the floor, rolling over and unraveling, until the soiled materials gave up their burden: the twisted and desiccated corpse of an infant. It had turned brown and thick like bark, preserved in some unfathomable way by the rank, lightless depths and soot of the slum.

A toothless fat man pushed through the crowd and stood over the tiny remains.

“Hey, that’s me boy, Little Otto,” he said. “Otto, lad, where’ve you been playing? Yer mother’s worried sick and there won’t be any sawney for you tonight, ye little scamp.”

Laughter burst from the crowd, and the fat man shook with his chuckling. One of the cops hunched over and vomited. The dirty throng closed around them and blotted them out of Cam’s view.

Still, he could hear their screams.

Cam rubbed tears from his face, managing only to smear the wetness across his cheeks. Depression wrapped him like a cold sheet, and the part of him that wanted to give into it was shrieking in his brain. He beat it down, but he thought he might be losing the fight.

I can’t leave Silje all alone
, he told himself.

The thing inside Hidalgo had stretched Cam’s body out on the bar and now stood beside him. Cam raised his revolver in a shaking hand, tried to sight it, but even at point blank range the barrel wavered too much, and the sight of his partner blurred and shimmered like a mirage. He was tired. He feared another vision would send him forever past the point of reason. They were utterly real, as if temporal walls were being rent apart and his mind and body thrust wholly into the past. There was nothing for him to do but accept everything he saw, no matter how insane it seemed. Hidalgo was possessed, strange demons roamed the chambers beneath the bar, and time and reality shifted like smoke all around him.

Red and white light flashed into the barroom. The sleeping figures had awakened. Several worked at tearing apart the furniture in search of makeshift weapons. Three stood by the front door and windows, two with handguns, and the third, Dubby, with a rifle. Some of them stood ranged throughout the room like statues, their eyes open and their skin heavy and pale, their bodies immobile.

Cam said, “What do you want?”

“How could a crusher like you understand?” said the voice in Hidalgo’s throat. “You ‘aven’t been to Hell. You ‘aven’t heard the shapes slithering in the darkness, singing their secrets to those bold enough to listen. You’ll never know their promises, boy. They ‘ave all the secrets of the beyond tucked away in their foul minds. Nothin’ is what ya think, crusher, but everything can be had for the right price. So, we’re coming back, and what once was will be again.”

“Impossible,” Cam said.

“Fer better or ill, boyo, the world’ll be reformed and our law’ll walk the streets of this city again, now and for all the days until the end of the Earth. And you’ll not stop it, do-gooder.”

“You’re from the Old Brewery, aren’t you? All of you, from Five Points,” Cam said, wiping his sleeve across his mouth.

The thing that wasn’t Hidalgo smiled. “What do ya know about it? What do ya care? Ya haven’t got much longer to live, anyway, ya know, once you’ve done your
duty
.”

“More than a thousand of you dwelled there pressed into every last little space, murdering each other, stealing from each other at every opportunity. That’s what I know,” Cam said, his mind dredging up everything he remembered of what his father used to tell him about the city’s old neighborhoods. “People called it the darkest hole in the city and smart cops wouldn’t go near it. You sold children like meat, kept women like slaves. Disease in every corner. People starving. They say a murder was committed there at least once every day for fifteen years. When they finally razed the building in the 1850s, they found bones hidden in the walls and beneath the floorboards, enough to fill a thousand sacks. They buried them where they could in nearby cemeteries, in vacant lots. And then they built a mission here to try and wash the evil away.”

“One murder a day? Do they say that?” the voice inside Hidalgo said. “Ah, well, crusher, they underestimate us, as they always did, but at least they remember us.”

“Not many,” Cam said. “Historians, maybe, and old men who cherish the past. The people living here now don’t know who you are and wouldn’t care if they did. They were halfway around the world in your time. They’ve made this place theirs. You don’t belong here anymore.”

The thing scowled. “If they knew who I was, they’d all bloody tremble in their beds at night. The bones of our prey dwell beneath countless patches of ground in this city and they’ll rise up to serve us! D’ya understand, crusher? Death and corruption feed this city, and we’re going to gorge it until it vomits up all the world’s treasures for us and us alone. We’ve got the power, now, enough to erase the years and level all the monstrosities that have stamped out the world we knew. The slithering ones promised it in return for the lives we’ve fed them, a few at first and then a touch more strength to bring in more, building power with each covey and moll we deliver, letting us spread our will farther and farther, drawing the hopeless and the savage here where death and darkness have always reigned. We will be freed tonight, restored to the living world.”

He went to the door and peered through the opening. When he turned Cam noticed the blood dribbling from a round black hole in Hidalgo’s shoulder, an exit wound.

“You’ve been shot,” he said.

“Them crushers out there ain’t like the ones I knew,” the thing said. “They wouldn’t listen ta me, but you’re one of them. You’ll know how to talk to ‘em. You’ll tell ‘em what to do and they’ll do it, and if they don’t a lot of people will die.”

Hidalgo seized Cam by the collar of his raincoat and hauled him to the front door. Cam looked out where police and emergency units filled the street. Barricades closed the block at both ends, and uniformed men waited, crouched behind their vehicles. The rain had subsided and the night sky lightened a shade toward the deep indigo of pre-dawn. Everything had been restored as Cam remembered it. Electric lights blared in the windows of the buildings across the way. A figure passed in silhouette, the shape of a cop in a uniform, a rifle clutched in hand.

Snipers
, Cam thought.

“Tell ‘em to leave us,” the Hidalgo-thing said. “Tell ‘em to go far away and let us out, and no one else’ll be hurt tonight.”

“They won’t listen to me if I tell them that,” said Cam.

“Then make up something they will listen to!” The thing grabbed the radio from Cam’s uniform and placed it in his hand. “It’s their funeral if they don’t and everyone’s in here as well.”

“No,” said Cam.

“Don’t test me, crusher. I’ve killed my fair share of coveys, and I’ll add you with pleasure. Now, tell ‘em to back off so we can leave this shithole!”

Cam held up the radio, hit the button and listened to the suddenly live, but empty air. The interference that had cut him off earlier had vanished. But instead of speaking, he threw the radio the length of the bar where it smashed to pieces against the jukebox.

Enraged, the thing inhabiting Hidalgo hurled Cam against the nearest wall and then pounced on him. Cam felt some of his ribs snap. The thing spun him onto his back and yanked him up until their faces were inches apart.

“Listen to me, ya prick cop!” the Hidalgo-thing belted. “Ya don’t know what you’re in for. There are forces you little meat dolls have not even guessed at, forces whose needs are served by death and who want the way opened for them into this world, and they do Goddamned not like to be kept waiting!”

The thing dragged Cam back to the door, shoved Hidalgo’s radio into his hand. “Tell ‘em to back off!” it said.

Cam held the radio to his mouth and pressed the button. “This is Officer Broome.”

A voice replied, “Broome? This is Captain D’Amato. What’s your situation? Over.”

Before the transmission ended, Cam heard a voice from the background, faint but audible, say “Shit, he’s still alive?”

Cam waited, gathered his thoughts, recalling the rest of the story of Five Points his father had told him. He pinpointed the thing that had been nagging him: the obvious sense of urgency that drove the force inhabiting Hidalgo. He reached into the overlapping experience of the visions for understanding, and it came.