Part 16 (2/2)

The paper she found in the scattered debris of the boiler room was really a sprawling flier for the 1993 Coney Island Oktoberfest. He turned the aged flier to its blank-faced side on the slate she'd propped against his knees. He looked at it, its desolate whiteness, tried to picture Byron's map there, its simple, exact artwork. Simple, so simple, yet one wrong stroke would skew the whole d.a.m.ned thing out of focus. He took a pen from his breast pocket, put it to the paper, stopped.

”I can't do this,” he repeated. ”I can't f.u.c.king draw apples anymore.”

”You must,” Teresa told him, standing in her medieval gown, her black eyes watching him with a determination that was G.o.dlike in its absolute purity.

”I'm a hack, Teresa,” he whispered the awful truth.

”You are a gifted artist. A Bauhaus in your violent soul.”

”I don't believe you.”

”Try.” Her eyes narrowed, saying other things the nature of which he wished he could pretend did not exist.

Do it, her eyes said, do it or you will not walk out of here alive, slayer.

Alek thought of the straight razor, hidden away here somewhere in her loft. He lifted the pen and put it to the paper once more. His hand trembled, the pen almost too much weight for it to bear as dozens of lifeless Bosch jobs flitted through his mind. Dank. Useless. Hopeless...

”Then was then,” she uttered softly as she took her seat beside the bed. ”Now is now...”

Now, this thing now, his magnum opus, his greatest work, the one that would hang in no gallery on no wall, would gain no coverage, no criticism, would be seen by no one. The work that might save their lives if not their souls. This then. Well, all right.

He caught his breath, put his pen to paper and began to draw. ”Talk to me,” he muttered, ”tell me things to keep me sane.”

”Such as...?”

”Anything. Anything at all.”

She was silent a moment. Her eyes glowed white in the dark, and then blinked out. And then she said, ”I arrived in this city almost thirty years ago, but it might as well be yesterday, or tomorrow. I had never been away from the convent until then, but survival has a way of educating you in the ways of the world, doesn't it? Paris was dead by then, of course, and so I had no protection. I soon found as well that I had nothing to offer the city but my eternal youth and body, both of which were greedily accepted. I slept in Grand Central Station my first day in town and sold myself the following night in order to get up enough money to afford a room at a flophouse.

”I didn't think much about what I was doing, just did it and took their life and their money, used to lending out my body for a few sweaty moments in Rome, and returning to it later, when the beast was satiated. The priests had trained me well for the life I was to lead. The only difference between the a.s.sembly line of eager men who wanted me and the priests at the Vatican was that if I left them alive I never had to see the men again.

”And they paid me. Well, most of the time they paid me.

”Sometimes they refused to pay, shaking the money under my nose before stuffing it back in their pockets, daring me to do something about it. Sometimes they grew ugly and slapped me around or tried to strangle me. I never knew who was going to turn psycho on me, but one thing was for certain--they all paid for their offense. One old grandfathery gentleman put a straight razor to my throat and told me he was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper and he was going to disembowel me. He wasn't quick enough. Paris had given me a knife of iron as a wedding present and taught me how to use it.”

She hesitated. ”They always seemed to grow ugly when they were done. Up until then they were usually polite. I saw the pattern emerge. It was always the polite ones who turned on you, as if they were punis.h.i.+ng you for their own weakness, making you feel worthless only to feel their own worth again, trying to make you powerless to convince themselves that they weren't powerless against their own s.e.xuality.

”I worked freelance for decades before meeting Rapper and his girls. He's a kind man for a pimp, understanding but firm, and he knows how to keep his girls in order with just the right combination of intimacy and intimidation. In all the time I have spent in his stable, I have never known a girl to cheat him.

But whether it is fear or love or some alchemical combination of the two responsible for such loyalty, I cannot say. I have come to think of Rapper as the Bishop I didn't dare disobey at the Vatican. He f.u.c.ks me the same as the Bishop did, but only occasionally, and without the hostility and brutality the churchmen always brought to my bed. He makes me feel protected, something I haven't felt since Paris...”

She stopped speaking. She was watching him with tears in her eyes.

Alek let his pen drop and tried to pretend he didn't hear the violence downstairs rattling the bones of the old building. ”You use him--them--for your Bloodletting,” he whispered. ”You're letting them take it, aren't you?”

Her eyes blinked closed and a woman wailed plaintively, the sound rebounding against the walls of the brownstone like a gunshot. ”The city takes my years and I take its jaded life; I think it a fair trade until the day when I finish Paris's work.”

”I'm sorry,” he whispered only. Nothing else seemed appropriate. He studied his work, felt the throbbing pressure of tears. For whom? For himself? For Teresa and her plight? For his own Phyrric victory? He didn't know; he only knew the map was too good for this foolish whelp to have created. He knew only that wherever she was, Akisha looked down on the work with approval.

He lay back against the wall and rested his eyes as she came forward to take the map from him. She studied it for many moments, but he did not look at her witch-white face, looked instead at the idiot walls around him and s.h.i.+vered violently. The air here was ancient and oppressive. Moist airlessness falling in around him from all sides like the carefully set stones of a royal sepulcher. Another cry echoed up from below, a whimper like a beaten child makes, and he was choking, dying inside, dry-drowning. He made a wretched, animalistic noise in his throat.

She touched his face and the contact stopped his shudders. ”Leave now,” she commanded. ”The man in you needs to see the sun.”

He hesitated, a ridiculous paranoia eating away at his heart. What if he left and something tragic happened?

He had absolutely no luck in protecting his women, he knew that.

She sensed it. ”I'm safe; go above.”

He rose obediently. It was truly amazing, the new strength he felt in his legs. He saw the way out in her mind and felt her will usher him through the mildewy labyrinth of rooms and down the stairs to the sh.e.l.led-out lobby of some abandoned Eastside project.

The world had changed while he'd slept. Where once it had only seemed weary and obsolete, now it was full of monsters. The vendors looked like terrifying mannequins with their arms continuously reaching; padding dogs on leashes smiled at him with their enormous werewolf teeth, old Czech men grunted and swept the snow from their stoops, reminding him of wax duplicates of Bela Lugosi he'd seen in museums.

Monsters. Monsters everywhere.

Like the one he had made an alliance with.

Like the one that had slain Akisha.

He swallowed. Akisha was dead. Still dead. Dead for a whelp that had not visited her except as Death in over twenty years. And all because Amadeus had made their conflict an open forum. All because of me, he thought.

He trooped up the avenue, breathing in the salt of his tears and the sweet decay of the city. He had some vague notion in his mind of spending his meager remaining bankroll on some decent piece of steel at the Gun & p.a.w.n shop up avenue, but when the heels of his hands struck the door of a tavern on the avenue called Tookey's he realized that this was his true destination all along.

He'd never been in a tavern this far south, but he found Tookey's to be homey, carpeted, leathered, almost a cafe but for the group of uptown escorts cl.u.s.tered around a small round table near the door, drinking cheap espresso and gossiping on their off-time.

The ladies looked up at his approach, two blondes and a dark brunette, all bleached and battleworn, cigarettes clenched in beartrap grimaces, cold dresses, heatless skin. Veterans, yet not a one could be said to be more than twenty-two. He moved on past.

The barkeep was elfish and middle-aged, with hairy, long-fingered hands that drummed and jittered to the rhythm of the Alice Cooper song on the jukebox. ”How you doin', buddy?”

Terrible.

”Fine,” Alek answered immediately. ”Long Island Ice Tea?”

The elf nodded and went to work, whistling along with Cooper's obsession with those poisonous kisses he was so in love with.

Alek turned his back on the man and his mad, merry whistling. Through the streaky cafe window he watched the sun rest between the Twin Towers on its downward path. He counted the cash in his wallet, hating himself for doing this now, hating Akisha more for dying and pus.h.i.+ng him off the wagon.

The sun went red on his face with its leaving.

Hating Amadeus the most, he decided, his web, his nightmare. Burning with hatred for the subhuman creature with his empty eyes and hollow heart-- The ladies at the table rose and helped each other into their coats.

Poisoned with hatred for the un-thing that had taken every last thing of any real value from him-- The ladies paid for their drin k s and headed for the door, and he suddenly stopped hating and he suddenly stopped breathing at the sight of the tall brunette looking his way and flipping her ragged long hair over the collar of her red leather jacket. She smiled at him and toyed with the gold ring on the chain around her neck, turning it so it flashed the burning red light of the fading sun in his eyes.

Alek shut them a moment. Moments later, he blinked them open and saw she was leaving. Forgetting the drink, forgetting everything, he rolled the money in his fist and approached her, grabbed her by the arm and turned her around.

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