Chapter 11

 

Goodwell swallowed blood in slick mouthfuls as Commissioner Snow dumped him back in his cell. It filled his throat, blocked his lungs. He managed a deep, gurgling breath, worked his cuffed hands under his feet and pinched his nostrils. Was he supposed to tip his head forward or back? Never could remember.

Commissioner Snow regarded him through the cellblock bars, brows pinched, eyes hidden behind those huge black glasses. Then, wordless, he stomped away.

In the next cell over, Chan looked Goodwell up and down. “You look like shit.”

He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, probing for loose teeth. That woman probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds but she’d slapped him like a welterweight champion. Too much power behind that swing for his liking. It made him wonder who was driving her. “Still think they’re playing by the rules?”

Chan turned away. “This isn’t right.”

“Been telling you that since day fucking one.” The blood was starting to clot. He snorted a lump out on to the floor of his cell and wiped his lips. The back of his hand was painted red all the way to the knuckles.

Footsteps echoed outside the cellblock doors. Assholes were just waiting to bust in and punch his teeth down his throat, he figured. First sign that he was communing with the Queen, they’d break his legs, cut out his tongue.

Better to wait. He’d been too stoic the first time. Maybe string them along. Offer them... what? What did he have? Could he lie about where the Queen was hiding? Get Snow to take him outside, where his voice could echo off the bowl of the sky. The Queen would hear him, send servants to break him free...

“Goodwell.”

Chan was sitting on the very end of her bunk, hands resting in her lap. The pretty nail polish she’d showed off the day before was chipped to hell and there was mud dried into every crease of her slacks. Her eyesockets were dark, bruised, like she was five minutes away from collapsing.

“She isn’t listening,” he said. “My boss. The Queen.”

“She’s real, isn’t she?”

“I never lied to you about her.” When he grit his teeth a jag of pain shot through his jaw. Not just a broken tooth, then. Why hadn’t the Queen answered already? Had she cut him loose? Maybe she was occupied, shoring up defences, building an army...

Detective Chan was saying something. “What?”

“I said, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” Her voice was a whisper that barely carried between their cells. “I wanted... things to be normal.”

“So you called the cops on me.”

“You would’ve done the same.”

He didn’t want to reply to that. Didn’t want to admit the truth.

Hell yes, he’d have done the same.

Nothing left but the awkward silence. He sat with his head down, not wanting to meet Detective Chan’s gaze. Momentary panic as the cellblock door creaked open and two officers peered in, staring at Goodwell like he was some exotic animal being witnessed in the wild for the first time. His hands tensed into fists in his lap. Then relief washed down his spine as they took the other prisoners away, first the woman with her soiled shirt and foul mouth, then one of her friends, a man with slicked-back hair and wingtip shoes.

They didn’t argue as they left. Maybe they had court hearings, or their families had posted bail. But each made sure to glare at Goodwell and whisper, “Fucker. Fucking kid-killer.”

He made sure to shoot each of them a bloody smile as they left.

 

* * *

 

“The final question,” Mister Gull said, “is where to set the trap.”

Kimberly sat opposite him on the soft chaise lounge, watching his hands. He cupped his polished zippo lighter in his right palm, twirled it between his fingers, and it was gone, only to reappear in his left. Too quick to be sleight of hand, she’d decided. Maybe he had two? Or maybe she was slowing down, exhaustion finally catching up with her.

“Ms Archer?”

“Kim,” she mumbled. “Please. Just Kim.” She knuckled her eyes, trying to stave off sleep. “Okay. The trap. It needs to be isolated.”

“Very isolated. Can’t have anybody walking in on us. We have no idea whether this will work or how long it will take.”

“I thought you were the expert?”

“Only a dabbler.” Gull’s smile was apologetic. “So, isolated and contained. A roof, four walls. Can’t have anything washing away the circle.”

“Secure?”

“If possible.”

“And why do you think I’d know a place like that?”

“You live here,” Gull said. “Even though you don’t. The memories are there, I know they are. All my favourite places have my scent on them. The Queen will smell a trap, but you, you’re still fresh. A newborn, all innocent and unstained. You know the lonely streets I haven’t been.”

She closed her eyes, tried to recall the streets of Rustwood. She’d only lived there a matter of weeks, but there was another life lying underneath those memories. Suburban panic. Peter losing his job. The day they’d abandoned South Versailles on the edge of town, a district collapsing under the weight of unemployment and cheap heroin, and moved into one-one-eight Rosewater.

South Versailles. Of course there’d be somewhere abandoned there, somewhere left to ruin. Even...

Her gut tightened. The nut-house. “Do you know the old Shunt?”

Gull cocked his head, eyes narrowing to slits. “The Shunt Memorial Hospital?”

“The asylum, yeah. It closed before I was a little girl... I mean, closed before I even got to Rustwood. Abandoned. Nobody goes in. Too many ghost stories.”

Mister Gull nodded, slowly at first and then faster and faster, accelerating to an unheard beat. “Of course. There’s poetry in it. The Queens like their metaphors. One of them will come, for sure. Oh, yes.” He jumped to his feet, and for a moment it seemed Gull was close enough to read the stitching on the collar of his woollen coat and yet so far away he was only a blur on the cusp on an endless horizon.

Kimberly blinked, and he was within reach again. “How’re you doing that?”

“Doing what, Ms Archer?” Gull was already moving to the door, snatching umbrellas out of the wrought-iron stand. “No time to waste. Or do you want to wait for the monsters to come to us?”

 

The rain was a bare patter on her brow. She snapped her umbrella open - black with a polished walnut handle, light and strong - and hid her face as a police cruiser passed, idling through the evening streets. The cop behind the wheel didn’t look up.

“Don’t worry,” Gull said. “They aren’t after us. They don’t know our sins. Not yet.”

“Never thought of myself as a sinner.”

Gull opened his own umbrella, the thin light passing through the fabric and casting a rainbow halo across his cheeks. “Morality is defined by authority, and the beasts below are the greatest authority in this place. Considering what we’re planning, I’d say we’re already damned.”

The streetlights winked off Gull’s umbrella as they walked through the darkening streets. It dazzled Kimberly when it twirled. “We couldn’t’ve taken the car?”

“We could, but I wanted the smell of the town on us. The rain masks, you understand. We’ll have the stink of the Queens on our boots. They won’t suspect until it’s far too late.”

It didn’t make sense to Kimberly, but what did? Better to keep her head down and her fists tight. “I was meaning to ask. Is that umbrella an, um-”

“A freedom umbrella?” Gull shot Kimberly a knowing wink.

“I didn’t know you were. Um.”

“Few do. Few should. What’s it matter?”

What did it matter? Nothing. She’d had friends like that before, although they’d become quiet since ‘83. Drawing into themselves, mourning in isolation.

She missed their laughter, the way they hugged her close, even though she couldn’t recall their names or where she’d met them. A distant city, the name stolen away. Streets all swept with white, the rough cast of department store brick beneath her fingers. Someone holding her hand, his own fingers bulky in mittens, tugging her close...

She shook the feeling away. “You sure this is a good idea? I mean, the asylum... people talked about that place.”

“In this town, everywhere has a bad story attached. You learn not to look too closely.”

The sports bag swung from Gull’s shoulder as he marched, taking long, deliberate strides toward the sunset. They worked through the quiet streets, sheltering beneath their umbrellas as knife-winds tore through the valleys of housing commissions and rotting apartment complexes. This was the end of Rustwood where the poor were packed in neat concrete boxes, where textile workers from the Montgomery Plant drank away their weekends, where the weeds were littered with needles.

Kim knew the way. She didn’t understand how, but she knew, and before the rain had soaked through to her socks, they stood before the nuthouse. Gull folded his umbrella. Rain ran from the ends of his grey moustache. “No better place. There’s fear here, folded into the brick. That’s power, Ms Archer.”

She shivered as she took in the building before her: a four-story gothic monstrosity ringed by a iron fence topped with spikes. Red brick, lead-lined windows with tall arches, thick grey creepers veining the walls. The roof arrowed towards the clouds, shedding shingles like old skin. The front doors - ten foot tall, paint peeling, the door-knocker cast in the shape of a tight fist - were licked with spiderwebs.

The gates were closed with a fat steel padlock. Beside the gates, a sign hung from a single wooden post, rotten through with rain and moss: Shunt Memorial Hospital for the Mentally Infirm. Just as intimidating as she remembered, even though she’d never visited, not once. Only in the lies. Just looking at the place sent cold fingers scurrying up her forearms. Were those shadows slipping away behind the windows on the upper floor, or just a hush of cloud blocking the evening light? “Can’t climb that fence, not with those spikes.”

Gull licked the tip of one finger and, too quickly for Kimberly to follow, drew something on the face of the padlock.

A low snick of steel. The lock fell open.

“After you, my dear.”

 

* * *

 

Fitch was rolling through a fuzzy morphine haze when the nurse finished stitching his slashed leg back together and tightened the bandages. The pain was a warm tickle that swelled and faded in time with his heartbeat. When he closed his eyes he could almost forget the cuffs jangling on his wrists, securing him to the hospital bed. The cops looming at the door, signing forms, grunting into their radios.

Whenever they looked away he found himself reaching for his pockets. Stretching out, mumbling, begging for his friend to wrap warm tendrils around his fingers, to shake his hand, to make everything alright.

But the chittering thing wasn’t there. He’d left it behind. Dumped it on the cold alley gravel. His only friend, shivering and mewling under a dumpster.

“I’m so sorry.” Tears beaded on his cheeks but he couldn’t wipe them away. “Oh God, I’m sorry.”

The nurse wheeled his gurney down the hall, towards the waiting police van. It was getting hard to breathe, like an invisible weight had settled on his chest. Guilt, yes, guilt he deserved a hundred times over. The chittering thing had been a warm presence by his side, in his hand, for as long as he could remember. The times before the creature had come to him were a blur, but every moment with his little friend in his jacket pocket was sharp, crystal.

Now the world was fading again. It wasn’t just the painkillers - he could feel the walls slipping away, the air thin in his lungs.

The van doors slammed closed. He was alone, pulling against his chains in the dark. “I’m sorry! I had to! I had-”

Nobody answered.

It seemed forever before the the van jerked to a stop. The cops that dragged him out didn’t care that his leg was lacerated, that the stitches were threatening to pop open. He was so deep in the morphine undertow he could barely put one foot in front of the other. When he slowed, they shoved him forward or jerked his cuffed hands up high behind his back.

The cops didn’t laugh when he cried out in pain. Didn’t threaten him when he tripped. They might as well have been mannequins as they hustled him into the cell-block and locked the door behind him.

Fitch collapsed on the cell’s single, piss-stained cot and waited for the walls to stop flexing. He pressed his forehead against the cool brick like it could soothe the fever pounding in his skull. After all he’d been through, the things he’d seen and burned... here he was. A nine-by-nine cell to call his own. His world reduced to a yellowed mattress and a cracked porcelain toilet with no paper.

And he was alone.

He whispered a final apology into his cupped hands and lay back on the cot, stretching his injured leg out before him. They had him on breaking and entering, but Fitch knew how Rustwood worked. Wouldn’t be a trial. The beast would find him before long, and he’d simply... vanish. Cease. Another unmarked grave, if they even left him a grave. Maybe that thing in the rainslicker would come back, bend low over him, reach into his guts and pull him inside out. Maybe they’d tie his hands and leave him in the mines, waiting desperately in the darkness for the beast’s children to sink their tiny teeth into his wrists. Maybe...

Thinking never did a man any good. Fitch rubbed his eyes and took in the length of the cell block. Lots of cages, but only two other occupants - one man, one woman, both in mud-stained business shirts and slacks. The man was sitting on the edge of his cot, nursing his jaw. Blood caked across his chin and nose. Flip-flops and business slacks? Fitch had never been one for high fashion, but even he wouldn’t stoop so low.

The man glanced up, meeting Fitch’s eyes. For a moment he was frozen, mouth hanging open. He gnawed the end of one ragged nail. Then:

“I know you.”