Chapter Thirty-Seven

RONAN

The whole town buzzed with word of what the mayor’s son did. You could smell the excitement in the air—and also the actual stink of burning flesh. Gawkers thronged the train station, took pictures of the blackened spot on the ground.

Attalah filed a second motion to postpone the election, but we knew it was futile. We made phone calls, got people to commit to sign affidavits maintaining that they had stayed home from fear, calling on the board of elections to decertify the election and call for a second one, but we didn’t have much hope for that, either.

Fear did not, in fact, hurt voter turnout. Nor did the end of the Coffin mayoralty or the superstar candidate give a boost. The Columbia County Board of Elections would later report a total number of votes that was statistically equivalent to the last three mayoral elections.

Attalah voted at St. Mary’s Academy.

Dom voted at the Hudson Central Fire Station, on North Seventh Street, on his lunch break.

I didn’t vote. I wasn’t registered in Hudson. I wasn’t registered anywhere.

* * *

I WATCHED THE POLLING SITES. Tried to place each voter who walked in and out—old Hudson? New Hudson? Sometimes it was harder to tell than I’d ever have admitted.

I walked Warren Street. Every antique store I entered, the staff was on me immediately. Smiling, Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with, but nervous, and never letting me out of their sight, just as they hovered near anyone else who entered. I took great pleasure in each new entrance.

I scoured every shop for weapons. Some ancient object invested with supernatural power. Something that could kill Tom and set my city free from the madness that was swallowing it whole.

“Everybody’s on high alert today,” I said to one chubby boy who backed off slightly when he saw how my clothes said Hipster instead of Hudsonian.

“Yeah,” he said. “With what happened at Historical Materialism—and that horrible tragedy down at the train station—to say nothing of what’s been going on all over town . . .”

“Going on?” I asked, all innocence.

“There’s been a lot of anger stirred up, among the locals. A few of them have been . . . acting out. And there are these YOU ARE HATED buttons.”

“Hated, wow,” I said, smiling flirtatiously, fingering telephones. “Such a strong word. Why do they hate you?”

“Who knows?” he said. I had seen him on Grindr. He’d told Tom Minniq some of his deepest, sickest secrets. “Most of them are homophobic, and they say we’re all a bunch of immoral gays and liberals.”

“Is that it, though?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” His smile was suspicious.

“I mean, is that why they hate you? Or is it because you’ve stolen all their stuff and transformed their town into something they don’t recognize or feel welcome in?”

Dangerous stuff, playing devil’s advocate this openly. All I really came for was a weapon. Something old, something magic.

Also, a month before, there had been harpoons on the wall of every antique shop. Now, when I needed one, there were none.

“Change happens,” he said. “What can you do?”

His innocence was unfeigned, his stance unassailable. He felt entitled to this place.

“This space we’re standing in, it used to be a bakery. I’d buy apple turnovers for fifty cents, on Saturday mornings on my way to work at my father’s butcher shop two blocks down. And now it sells doorknobs and glasses that cost hundreds of dollars. And now you’re working here, all by yourself, in a place that used to employ ten people at a time. So you don’t think people have a good reason to hate?”

“I understand their anger,” he said. “But it’s not like I did anything to anyone. I need a job and a place to live as much as they do.”

Realization hit me, wet and rough upside the head. How hard our brains work, to keep the sense of self intact. How they will filter out anything that threatens to shine a light on how we are horrible. I could practically hear the unspoken mantra playing out in his head—the same one playing in mine. I am a good person. I do my best, and sometimes I fail, but I would never willingly hurt someone. If harm is caused by my actions, like if I buy the cheaper bag of rice at the grocery store and keep peasant workers enslaved, the blame belongs to the systems I am a helpless pawn of. If someone hates me, it’s because something is wrong with them.

It’d take a lot more than a billboard to break all that.

I picked up a phone receiver; heavy black Bakelite. I held it to my ear. No dial tone, of course. No Tom. I debated buying one, leaving it unplugged, waiting for him to call. Then I debated smacking Smug Antique Shop Boy in the face with it as hard as I could. Neither course of action made any sense. But neither did anything else lately.

“You coming to Winter Fest?” he asked, sounding apologetic, like he had broken the Customer Service Prime Directive by not agreeing with everything I said. “Big deal. Party in the streets.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, and swam deeper into the store. Past flags with fewer than fifty stars, and framed photographs of generals and well-dressed families. Newspapers and Life magazines from the day we landed on the moon, the night when Sputnik hit the sky, the time we dropped atomic bombs on crowded cities. Antique stores were like little museums, where the past was for purchase. Where anyone with a ton of money could pick up a piece of history and walk out with it. Put it on their mantel. Proclaim their ownership of it. So poor people could watch through the windows with hungry eyes.

Excuse me, sir, you wouldn’t happen to have a whale-blood-rusted ghost-killing harpoon for sale here, would you?

My cell phone rang.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Ronan?” The voice was fragile, cracking. Wind laughed at it in the background.

“Wick? Are you okay?”

“It’s my mom,” he said, and I could hear how he’d been crying. “She’s . . . I don’t even know. But I’m scared.”

She found out, I thought. That Wick is gay. She found out and she did or said something awful. “I’ll come get you. Okay? Where are you?”

“Outside. Prison Alley, between Fifth and Sixth.”

“I’m on Warren,” I said. “By Third. Stay there, okay? I’ll be right there.”

I hurried out of the store, avoiding eye contact with Shop Boy. At the bottom of Warren Street, blood orange sunset clouds were climbing over the Catskill Mountains. The day had gotten ten degrees colder since I’d started hate-shopping. On the radio, Miss Jackson had said it might snow tonight. I walked east up Warren, turned north onto Fourth, and then headed up the alley.

“Here,” a voice called, and I looked up to see Wick standing two stories up on a set of back stairs. He wasn’t wearing enough layers.

“Uh . . . is that your house?”

“No,” he said, climbing higher. “You coming?”

I looked up the alley and down it. Genteel scheming was one thing; trespassing was a different sort of crime altogether. “Come on!” he called, annoyed at my hesitation.

Fuck it. You’re damned already. And if it’s the criminal justice system you’re afraid of, you should have thought of that before you started manipulating and framing people.

Four stories up, I stepped onto the roof. Wick stood at the far edge, looking down onto Warren Street.

“Why are we up here?” I asked.

“I like it here,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I come here a lot. You can basically run from roof to roof as much as you want, and no one else is ever up here to fuck with you.”

I looked in both directions and saw that he was right. The roofs of the buildings on that block made a more or less unbroken pathway, a second sidewalk.

“What’s going on?” I said, going to him. “You said your mom . . .”

He turned and grabbed me, hugged me tight. He cried, and I let him. I smelled his shampoo. I wanted to put him in my pocket and keep him safe from every awful thing in the world.

“Something’s wrong with her,” he said, finally, and sat down on the roof. I sat down beside him. We were facing west, watching where the light faded out of the sky. Behind us was a peaked set of windows, through which bright warm light spilled out of someone’s bedroom or studio. “I came home, and the whole church smelled like gasoline. And she was standing there in the center of the sanctuary, with a cigarette lighter in her hand. She’d doused the whole place.”

“Shit,” I said. That was not at all what I’d been expecting to hear.

“It’s like she . . . snapped.” Here he broke down again. I put an arm around him, said It’s okay several times, even though I knew he knew there was no way I could know that.

“It sounds like a psychiatric breakdown of some kind,” I said, speaking from experience, remembering my own mom screaming about monsters. Remembering, too, Katch saying: The harder we have to push, the riskier it gets. Sometimes people . . . break. Was this on me, too? I’d let these monsters loose on our town, and now a whole lot of people were . . . breaking. “Has she had a history of mental illness?”

“Well, she’s a drug addict,” he said, laughing sourly. “Painkillers. So maybe she’s in withdrawal or got a bad batch or something? But I think it’s more than that. I asked her what was up, and she said she received some very interesting information. And she finally realized how widespread the rot was. And I think—I’m afraid—what if she means me?”

“You mean what if she knows you’re gay?”

As soon as I said it, I was sorry. He’d never told me he was. Maybe I was way off base, or maybe he wasn’t ready to accept it and would react with defensive anger.

Or run for the edge of the building and leap.

Leap like my mom leapt off the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.

But he didn’t say or do anything, not for a while, and when he did do something, it was a nod. “Yeah. What if someone told her that, and it caused her to lose her damn mind? She’s a pastor. The most moral person on State Street, for fuck’s sake. It might be enough to make her burn the damn building down. With me inside of it, for all I know. I don’t know. So I ran.”

“Your mom loves you,” I said. “Whatever else she’s got going on—addiction, ignorance, hate—it might get in the way, but not forever. The love is what’s forever.”

He shrugged. He wasn’t comforted. He knew I could very well be wrong.

“Do you need a place to stay tonight?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I already talked to my friend Audrea. She said her mom said I could stay with them.”

“Okay,” I said. When we were done here, I would call Dom. Have him swing by, see if Pastor Thirza was still contemplating arson, and if he could talk her out of it if so.

“I should go,” he said, standing up, and I could see the pain still smeared across his face.

“Are you sure?” My father’s forever medicine flashed in my mind, the only remedy he could offer when someone was in distress. “Are you hungry? When was the last time you ate? Let’s get a hot meal—maybe at Pizza Pit?”

“Pizza Pit,” he said, smirking. “You know that shit’s been closed since I was like six.”

And he turned and ran west along the rooftops. I pulled myself up—pausing for the pain in my kneecaps to die down—cursing my age and wondering what the fuck I’d been eating, all those times in the past couple weeks I thought I was at the Pizza Pit.

“Don’t worry about him,” said a voice from the dark.

I looked around, a slow careful circuit of the rooftops around me, and saw no one. It’s true that there was very little light up there, but there was some. Enough to know I was alone. And that when the voice said, “He’ll be safe,” and I turned back around, the short curly-headed man behind me hadn’t been there a moment before.

“Hello again, Tom.”

“Hey,” he said, gruff and caustic, snapping his fingers to light the match he’d held between them. He raised the little flame to the cigarette between his lips, and I could see his demon-handsome face. “How you been?”

“Pretty good,” I said, caught between horror and amusement, with amusement winning out. The absurd hilarity of it. “A little heartbroken. My only child, and you never call, you never write.”

“I been busy,” he said. Below one rolled-up sleeve, I could see the tattoo on his forearm, the same thing I saw on Katch’s: a crude infinity sign collapsing in on itself:

“I guess you have,” I said.

“I got your message. You wanted to talk?”

“What are you up to, Tom? I’ve seen the messages you’ve been sending—really vicious stuff. Some of this stuff is getting out of hand.”

He breathed out blue smoke. And then he laughed. “I knew this would happen. I knew you wouldn’t be able to handle it. What needs to happen.”

“It’s not about what I can handle,” I said. “We have a plan. You’re jeopardizing it.”

He laughed harder. Stepped closer. His smell was cigarettes and body odor and clove oil and dead flowers. Desire and revulsion made my elbows ache. “You’re so stupid. I remember being as stupid as you are now, but that was a long time ago.” Here his voice flanged, flattened, acquired an echo. A deeper one, just beneath his own, that came from the air around him instead of his body. “We know all about your plan, Ronan. What you’ve got up your sleeve for Jark. Ohrena Shaw, Rich Edgley—you really think that’ll be enough to stop them? All of them? I think you know that won’t be enough. But you don’t need to worry. We have a plan of our own. Harrow their souls, just like you wanted. And when we’re done with them, you’ll see—they’ll run screaming away from this town, every single fucking one of them. If they’re lucky enough to be able to. And we can have it back.”

Something animal throbbed in his last few words. Something guttural.

“You’re getting some funny ideas in your head,” Tom said.

“How do you know what’s in my head?”

“You think you can stop us. But I’m not a girl who fell down a well. You can’t just say a prayer over some bones and be done with it.”

It took me a second to recover from that. “What the hell are you?”

“You wanna see?” he asked, eyes wild and gleaming, and then Katch’s frigid wind was on me again.

* * *

NIGHT; A BEACH. Palm trees. Somewhere in Polynesia; tall-masted European ships anchored in the harbor. “Follow me,” Tom said, and I went after him into a long high-ceilinged building with a palm-frond roof, open on all sides. Long tables piled high with food: islanders on one side, white sailors on the other.

“First contact,” Tom whispered. “No Europeans had ever visited this island before.”

“That’s you,” I said, pointing to one jug-handle-eared European.

“That’s not me,” he said. “Not yet.”

More wind, and then it was almost dawn. Natives and Europeans alike lay sprawled about, over-feasted and asleep. The man who would become Tom wakes up, wanders stealthily through the incapacitated crowd. Searching for something to steal. Well fed, but still lean and hungry.

We followed him out. Down the beach. Into home after home, until he comes to a structure built of blackened wood.

“They were warned not to venture into that building,” Tom says, one firm hand on the back of my neck, and even in this reverie I can smell him, the musk of the man and the something-else of the monster.

The space inside was small; the sailor couldn’t even stand up straight. A couple dozen hideous masks filled one wall.

“Those masks were reserved for the gods,” Tom said. “No human could ever touch them, let alone put one on.”

The jug-handled sailor let his fingers graze the forbidden masks. Finally he selected one: a boar, with scythe tusks and fearsome eyes.

“No,” I said, reaching out, as if I could stop something that happened maybe two centuries ago.

The sailor put on the mask.

“The god entered him,” Tom said. “Well, god is probably not the right word. But neither is demon. Imagine something in between.”

The mask fell. The man looked the same. Until he smiled.

“That,” Tom said. “That’s me.”

The wind picked up again, whisking us through a sort of time-travel montage. Tom in the ship, poisoning water supplies. Tom in London and Macau and a hundred other ports, murdering drunken European sailors. On distant ships, cutting anchor when it lay harbored during a storm. A chain of violence down the decades.

More wind, and we were back in Prison Alley—but ages ago. Three men had him pinned down in the dirt.

“Just my luck I got caught in Hudson, trying to drug a particularly pretty sailor so I could have my way with him—how was I supposed to know he had a whole posse?”

They beat Tom mercilessly, and even took to stabbing him dozens of times, but the boar-deity thing inside of him kept the body alive. Finally they chained him up and hacked him apart, threw him into the most-recently-dug ditch where whale entrails were rotting. In the morning, men came to fill in the pit where Tom would wait in the earth for a hundred and sixty years for me.

* * *

ONCE AGAIN WE were four stories over Warren Street, but back in the present.

“I don’t care what the fuck kind of colonizer-pillager-plus-island-chaos monster you are,” I said. “I’m not going to let you hurt the people I care about.”

“Let?” Tom laughed.

“I’ll stop you if I have to.”

“You?” he asked, his voice dilated back down again. “Stop me? How would you do that, Ronan? Someone so weak, against someone so strong? You love a lot of people in this town,” Tom said, with a prizefighter’s smile on his face. “We could break them all, as easy as thinking about it.”

“I gave you life,” I said.

His hand grazed my cheek. Rough, calloused fingers, triggering traitorous lust. He smiled, seeing my heart, my sick needs. And then he pulled his hand away and punched me in the mouth. Hard. Hard enough to knock me backward, drop to one knee. I yelped, a high, weak, ignominious sound. It had been a long time since I’d been punched in the face. Stubby Coffin was probably the last person to do so.

“You didn’t give me anything,” Tom said, stepping closer, pressing his thumb against my chin. “All you did was let me out. And you can’t stop me.”