Da knew lots of people through his driving. Union bosses, Tammany Hall bigwigs, police chiefs and so-called businessmen—they’d all ridden in the back of Jolly Jim Mackenna’s Packard at some time or other. Big-bellied men with loud ties and even louder voices, mostly, who’d occasionally turn up at the family apartment, pat Harry’s head, pronounce her a sweet kid, and maybe squeeze some moist candies into her hand.
Coming home from school one autumn afternoon when she was about twelve, she’d pushed through the front door, which was always left off its latch, kicked off her shoes, and headed into the parlour to sink into her current book—in those pre-enlightened days, it would probably have been Alexander Dumas or Robert Louis Stevenson—to find that someone was already occupying her favourite chair. Had to be another of Da’s visitors, but this one looked and felt different. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a grey linen suit, and possessed a dry, studied elegance.
“Oh…” The visitor turned slowly. “You must be Harriet.”
“People call me Harry.” She clutched her book to her chest.
“Of course. Harry.” The visitor seemed to give a shaded smile, although it was hard to make out much of his face. “I seem to have arrived a little early, so I thought I’d wait in here.”
For a moment, Harry was almost alarmed. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of your father’s.” The visitor’s voice had a light, persuasive lilt, and an accent she couldn’t put her finger on. Then he tipped his hat a little further, and leaned forward, and glanced around the crowded room with its many cabinets and reproduction paintings of religious scenes, as if Mary and Jesus might be listening, then beckoned her under the shade of its brim. “Your father tells me you enjoy reading. So I brought you this.”
The book the visitor held out didn’t look particularly promising. A cheap pulp print of something called Looking Backward by someone named Edward Bellamy, which sounded like another of those stupid, gaudy “scientification” adventures that her brother Mickey liked to read. But as she reached to take it, the visitor kept hold for a moment. “It’s the kind of book a lot of people don’t approve of, so it’ll have to be our secret. Okay?”
Then, seemingly in the same instant, the visitor faded, and—at least in her memory—never returned. But the sense of a shared secret—To Harry written on the title page, with a scrawled signature beneath which she’d often tried, and always failed, to decipher—remained as she read:
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old…
And of how a man named Julian West had grown up amid the starvation and inhumanity of nineteenth-century Boston before being catapulted more than a century forward into an age where life actually made sense. For all its lack of any real story, and some pretty tedious pages of debate about how money and production worked in the future, reading Looking Backward felt to Harry like a glimpse of the spires and towers of a fairer, better world.
Voices, bangs, clatters, squeaks, and hummings came and went. Someone whistling. Then the slop of a bucket. Her head ached. Her throat burned. The left side of her neck throbbed. Her hands and arms hurt. She coughed. Winced. Remembered the jolting ambulance, leaning faces asking her name. A long slide of pain, then doctors, nurses, and the same question. The bite of a needle. Then this.
“Miss?”
She opened her eyes, expecting another nurse. But this visitor to her small, white cubicle was a cop.
“Feel up to a chat?” He raked over a chair. Produced a notebook. Harry had heard that cops looking young was a sign of advancing age. Lately, one way or another, she must have put on quite a few years. “If that’s all right? I mean, the docs said it would be okay.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at all.” The cop looked offended. He had button-blue eyes and a tentative moustache. “There are just one or two things we need to iron out.”
“There was a… fire?”
“Bang on.” The cop flashed a smile. “At a house opposite the Third Avenue El on the Bowery. And now you’re in Bellevue Hospital, and lucky, if I may say so, to be here. It started maybe with an oil lamp or a candle, seeing as the place didn’t stretch to modern lighting. That’s the Fire Department’s take on things, anyways. I’m Officer Donohoe of the Thirteenth Precinct, by the way. And you are…?” His pencil quivered over the notebook.
“You don’t know?”
“Matter of fact, Miss, we were rather hoping that was something you’d help us with.”
She closed her eyes. Let darkness flood back in. Stood to reason the cops would be curious. But, if they’d matched her with the description of the green-eyed arsonist, she’d already be under arrest. Thank God she’d dressed in Charity’s fancy hand-me-downs, and had dyed her hair. But this young cop wasn’t as dumb as he wanted her to think.
“In that case, Miss, maybe you can tell me a bit about what happened instead.”
“I was… There were flames. Smoke. Then I was out in the street.”
“That’s it?” The cop tapped his pencil. “You’re telling me, Miss, that you don’t know why you were in the house, or what happened there, or even who you are?”
“I’m… I’m just not sure…” It wasn’t hard to appear confused.
“No idea at all?”
“I think I remember coming to this city. Perhaps on a ship. This is New York?”
The cop chuckled. “Was last time I checked. So you’re not from here, maybe not from the US?”
“Does that make any sense?”
“I guess we’ll just have to see. As I’m sure the docs here have explained, you got pretty badly beat up and burned. That, and you got a nasty gash on the left side of your shoulder and throat, maybe from some falling glass. Fire crew found you covered in blood and soot. Still no idea about who you are?”
“My name might begin with S… I don’t know.”
“I’m going to run someone else’s name by you now, Miss. Just tell me if it rings a bell. So here goes… Doctor Karl Haupmann.”
She took a long, slow blink. Swallowed back the dark, foul taste that rose in her throat.
“Any luck? Shall I say it again?”
She shook her head.
“Okay.” The cop closed the notebook. “It’s just that he’s the guy who owned the house. What’s left of it, anyway. And, seeing as you didn’t seem to live there, and then there’s this fire, and you can’t remember what happened, or who you are…” The cop shrugged. “One way or another, you can understand the Police Department’s concern.”
“Yes… Of course… I’m sorry—I’m getting tired.”
“Sure.” The cop stood up. “We’ll get there in the end. Meanwhile, you should rest.”
Trying to turn her head, she felt the pull of the dressing around her neck. “This man?”
“Yes, Miss?”
“What’s happened to him?”
“Oh…? You mean Haupmann? He actually worked right here at Bellevue Hospital, can you believe, cataloguing and collecting bodies for the city morgue. Weird thing is, they ended up taking what was left of him here last night in his own van.” The cop gave another smile. “Now, ain’t that kinda sad?”
She tried to take stock. Her hands and arms were wrapped in yellow acriflavine-leaking bandages, as were her neck and most of her upper left torso, which alternately itched and ached, and she still felt woozy, and could sense the vague pulse of other, lesser injuries, and hear the kettle-like wheeze of her lungs.
A nurse came by with a bedpan, and Harry submitted to relieving herself like an invalid, although some of the aches and fuzziness already seemed to have lessened. Even her breathing grew easier through the long afternoon, but she still acted drowsy when the doctor shone a light in her eyes and listened to her chest. She smelled pipe smoke on his breath as he frowned, re-shook his thermometer, and asked her how she felt.
The day settled. The whistling cleaner slopped by again with the mop. She declined a beaker of pink medicine, but ate her meal of watery stew and lumpy semolina with surprising greed. Then, as night fell and the ward fell quiet, she sat at the side of the bed and tried putting some weight on her legs. Gingerly at first, then with greater confidence, she stood up. The drowsiness had vanished along with most of the aches, and her breathing seemed fine. There was still an occasional sharp tug from the wound at her neck, but it was more like a cramp than a genuine pain. She was wearing nothing but a tie-up hospital gown, and there was no sign of her clothes, but the staff plainly thought she was far more badly injured than she was. There wouldn’t be a better time to escape, and if she were caught wandering, they’d put it down to her evident confusion.
She padded warily past the other cubicles along the corridor, catching glimpses of people with their bodies wrapped in bandages, or hidden beneath tents, or hung in harnesses. Maybe the women who’d been so badly burned in that fire at Bayton and Stritcher’s sweatshop had ended up here. Whatever had happened, they were no better off for anything Harry Mackenna had tried to do for them. And maybe this was where Corpseman had stolen the corpse he’d laid in the store’s cooling ruins, as well.
Chatter and cigarette smoke at the nurses’ station by the ward’s exit, but there was another door marked Staff Only at the ward’s far end. In a cupboard beside it, next to a mop and bucket, she found a cleaner’s smock, and a pair of old shoes. She pulled them on, then slipped through the doorway and down the stairs beyond, which, frustratingly, ended at the floor below. Peering through another doorway, she saw a quiet corridor lined with offices.
The atmosphere was very different away from the bustle of the wards, and there was an unpleasant yet strangely familiar smell. More doors. More offices. Then she came to a pair of wider, rubberised doors of the sort sometimes used for restaurant kitchens, although she sensed another purpose here. She wanted to flee this place, but couldn’t. Bloody Corpseman; she owed him at least this much.
The morgue was large and reeked of cherries, formaldehyde, and decay. White tiles. Sinks and hosepipes. Bright racks of sharp steel. One entire wall was filled with grey doors that looked like, but clearly weren’t, ovens. Wheeled gurneys stood beneath low-hung lights, some with bodies lying on them in positions of strange repose. One had opened ribs. Another was piled in disparate lumps. A third, the paled body of a thin, middle-aged woman in twinset tweed, still leaked river water in grey, slow drips. And this gurney was covered in a brownish-stained sheet, and gave off a peculiarly horrible smell. It was like bad cooking, burned cloth, and singed hair, and Harry knew what she would have to face even before she pulled back the sheet.
She tried to steel herself. Tried to tell herself that Corpseman’s suffering had ended. But it didn’t look that way. The jaw was stretched in an endless scream, the back was arched, the blackened hands still seemed to fighting back the flames, and the left side of the torso seemed boiled away. Seared patches of clothing, buttons, and lumps of plaster were embedded in the crisped flesh, and something heavy, perhaps a burning beam, had fallen across the legs, leaving nothing but splinters and fatty pulp.
Somehow, the tinted glasses had remained intact. She prised them off what was left of his face, wiped them, and pushed them into a pocket of the cleaner’s smock. Then she turned and fled.
“John…?”
But the slide of mail behind the side door told her it was weeks since he’d been here at Unison Books. As did the sour, damp, neglected smell in the store, where the long shelves, bent-backed with the words of many wise and clever men—and even a few women—leaned murmuringly toward her. Money still in the cash register, a surprising amount, and up the side stairs, past the office on the middle floor with its dusty T-squares and dried-up blueprints stacked in a corner, the typewriter he used with almost Corpseman-like punctiliousness sat slack-jawed on its broad desk beside a jar of the psoriasis cream he applied to his hands and face.
Up in her attic room, she shucked off the cleaner’s smock, shoes, and hospital gown. The bandages around her hands and arms were already coming loose, so she continued to unravel them, carefully at first, expecting the dressing to stick, but the skin underneath seemed almost entirely undamaged. Clearly, the medics back at the hospital had greatly overestimated the extent of her burns.
She turned her attention to the larger dressing that covered her left shoulder and neck. The pain of the wound, and the sharp crash of whatever had fallen between her and Corpseman, was still an unpleasant memory, but all she could feel now was a faint, tingling itch. She prised off the gauze, then positioned herself before the small cracked mirror she used when cutting her hair. It clearly was, or had been, a nasty wound. But now there was just a wheal of silvery scar tissue along the side of her throat. She touched it wonderingly. It felt smooth and cold.
The moon was fading as it edged toward the rooftops beyond the mossy skylight, and she realised she hadn’t yet turned on a single light in the entire store. Now, there didn’t seem much point. She curled up in the blankets of her old bed beneath the familiar beams, and fell instantly asleep.
The sun was hot against her eyes, the pigeons were cooing, and that goddamn dog was already barking next door. She pulled on some old clothes and went downstairs to use the toilet. Inspecting the results for signs, auguries, and finding none, she pulled the corroded rubber ball.
Just as it did every summer, the smell from the stormdrain down in the basement where she worked her trusty Goldring Jobber printing press was getting worse. She picked up the post from the mat by the side door with its strung key behind the letterbox which she’d used to let herself in. Copies of The New Masses, various bills, get-rich-quick flyers for penny shares, and someone in Tucson, Arizona, was seeking a good, unfoxed copy of Engels’s pamphlet Natural Science in a World of Ghosts, although Harry had never rated it as one of the great man’s better works.
Running the tap in the cramped kitchenette to fill the coffee pot, a sudden salty, sour taste rose from her throat. She gagged. Splashed water into her mouth. Staring down into the sink, she remembered the flare of that gun, and Corpseman’s embrace, and felt a deep, cold, almost orgasmic shiver run through her. The green-eyed killer. Clearly, she wasn’t as healed as she’d hoped.
She walked the three blocks west to John’s rooming house, and climbed the halfmoon steps of the pipe-veined brownstone with an odd sense of trespass. He’d always been embarrassed by the undeserved privilege he somehow felt living here gave him, although, entering the subdivided hovel with its smells of cooking grease and vomit, Harry was more grateful than ever that he’d let her stay rent-free in the attic at Unison Books.
The door to his room wasn’t even locked, and inside, and just as at the store, there was no sign of present occupancy. The place was cramped and bare, with peeling wallpaper, and a window so close to the wall outside that it merely added to the sense of seeped-in darkness. There were no clothes.
She headed back out, keeping to the shaded side of the street like any sensible New Yorker as the sun climbed toward noon. The trees in Washington Square Park were dulled with dust, and the fountains were green and sluggish, but the statues seemed alive, the famous arch blazed, and everything about this familiar spot felt strange and new to her.
She found a dime for the cripple newsvendor, and was amazed at the lizard-like grain of his skin as he handed her a copy of the Morning Journal. Settled in the shade on a metal bench, she shifted thought what the paper had to offer.
The Graff Zeppelin was heading off on a round-the-world flight, Trotsky had been refused asylum in the US, Pius XI was the first pontiff in sixty years to step outside the walls of the Vatican, and the Yankees were scoring well, but surrendering far too many runs, and were still only third in the league. Meanwhile, there had been a serious house fire in the Bowery in which one person, said to be a city employee, had died, a woman named Iris Tildsley had thrown herself off the Macombs Dam Bridge, and a little-known ex-actress named Daisy Thompson had been reported missing, and part of her knew she should recognise that name, but it and everything else seemed to belong to a different life.
The sky beat down, the buildings encircling the park bled upwards, knickerbockered kids from some nearby nursery school performed callisthenics out on the lawns to the shouted prompts of their matron, and the newsprint in her hands blurred to a strew of symbols. Yet some part of her was still reading theatre reviews and adverts for Charity’s Mint Parasols. Here was the forecast for the weather, as if this summer’s heat would ever let up, and this, inset in a small box, was the symbol indicating that the moon was in its last quarter.
Sunlight broke through the boughs of the ash tree above her, and she noticed a reddening where the light settled on her skin in hard, almost painful flashes. Noticed, too, how the knickerbockered kids, or perhaps it was some other ones, stared oddly at her as they trooped back toward their classroom.
The day drifted, the sun wheeled, and the sour taste in her mouth returned. Starting awake from some kind of reverie where the air grew brittle with the whites and blacks of winter, she thought she saw blood on her hands until she realised it was only the stains of the newsprint.
Finally, with long twilight stretching across the pathways, and conscious that she hadn’t drunk or eaten anything all day, she wavered back toward Unison Books. Just as she pushed the side door open, the phone on the store counter started ringing.
“Is t-that you, Harry?”
“Of course it’s me! Where are you, John? I was worried something had happened to you when I got back here last night.”
“My a-aunt d-died. You know—the one I told you about in Ph-Ph-Philadelphia? So, after hanging around at Sch-Schultz’s, or there at the st-store, and w-with nothing new in any of the p-p-papers, I c-came up here to show my respects… But you’re all right? You s-sound, well, d-different… And there’s that w-w-weird stuff you said about d-doing someone a favour to help f-find someone else.”
“If I told you what’s happened, John, you’d never believe me.”
“But you’re ok-k-ay?”
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
“S-Sure—I’m s-sorry.” There was an echo to his voice, which seemed to be making his stammering worse. She could picture him in some ornate room, all rugs and marble, trying not to be overhead by the servants. “My aunt has l-left me all her m-m-money, Harry. Which means we don’t have to s-s-s-struggle and m-make c-c-c-compromises any l-longer. We can s-spread the w-word. Hire m-meeting rooms and m-m-m-make the I-d-d… the Interim W-Workers’ Agency, into a p-proper organisation with p-p-proper publications and a d-decent office. Not that what you’ve d-done down in the basement with that old printing press hasn’t been b-b-brilliant, Harry, but th-this is our ch-ch-chance to m-make a real d-difference. We could set up a whole ch-chain of Unison B-B-Bookstores if we w-want, just s-soon as all the m-m-m-m-monies are r-released and the estate s-s-s-s-s-settlement’s c-c-c-c-c-concluded.”
“Jesus, John. And you say I sound different.”
“What I m-mean, Harry, is that we can do whatever we want.”
“When are you planning to get back to New York? Is there”—a strange, giddy wave came over her, and the pencil she reached for clattered from the counter—“a number I can get you on?”
“S-Soon, I hope. But probably best if I r-r-r-ring you. You’re staying back at the s-store now?”
“I think so.” At least, until Officer Donohoe found her.
“That’s g-good. And it’s just so g-g-g-g-g-g… fantastic to know you’re ok-k-k-ay, and to hear your voice again, Harry.”
“Thanks.”
Another bout of the shivers passed through her as she put down the receiver, and remembered again the name of Daisy Thompson, who’d confronted her in that alley, and was now also missing, lost, disappeared.
She crawled upstairs into the sanctuary of the attic, but even clamped up in all her blankets, it suddenly felt almost cold enough for snow. She could even feel the stuff settling around her in a vast white desert, across which she knew she must crawl. Behind the bloodied drag of her limbs lay the scattered buildings of a half-finished town she almost recognised. And ahead, ahead, lay something far brighter and better—a ridge of icy trees which, she saw with a gasp of understanding, weren’t trees at all but the clarion belfries of a great, shining city.
She opened her eyes to the blare of morning, and somehow persuaded her limbs to drag her downstairs, where everything was brighter still, and rummaged in the cobwebs under the sink for a half-bottle of Asprinol, which she drank down in one gulp. She would have stayed curled up there on the grit floor, but the heat from the window was far too strong. Instead of climbing back to the attic, she crawled on into the basement, and curled up in the cool and dark.
This old building had housed many kinds of business over the years, and their remains had accumulated down here. A single high, barred window let a shadow-flurry from the street, shining faintly over rusted chains and shoe lasts, dried-up barrels of cooking oil, and a dusty collection of rubber enemas, brass catheters, and ceramic bedpans. In the middle, squatting by the reeking stormdrain, was her trusty printing press, her Goldring Jobber, which must have been down here for years before she’d nursed it back to health with clean oils and fresh inks.
She was sick. She was ill. But that wasn’t it, that wasn’t it at all, and part of her longed to make the rest of her understand what this was really about. Sibylla and Harry, and Harry and Sibylla again, and somehow Corpseman as well, at least before he was dissolved by flame and the last two bullets from that Navy Colt, and Daisy Thompson who’d pulled that scarf from her head, and then the odd dreams that wouldn’t let up.
That goddamn dog from next door was barking again, and the whole shimmering city roared, and from somewhere she found the strength to stuff some old IWA flyers to block the blaze of the light from the basement grille. She was Harry, yes, Harry Mackenna, and a phone was ringing somewhere very far off. Then she was in a café which looked nothing like Schultz’s, where a square-jawed, goodish-looking man who she somehow knew was called Morgan was leaning forward in his old-fashioned clothes, and saying, Well, old boy, you sure as hell saw off that old duffer Heely.
She told herself that this was exactly how fever worked. The mind, the body, overheated—so why did she still feel so incredibly cold? The phone upstairs had finally stopped ringing, and it was amazing how far she could see in this torrid dark. Not just the detritus of some failed family hardware and apothecary business, but vast piles of tea chests, stacked rolls of carpet, and all sorts of possessions—statues, even, frozen in marble mid-gesture—all under the grey eye of some vast, cathedral-sized roof. And her faithful printing press was crouched like some many-elbowed metal bat or bird at the centre of everything, until it cawed, unfolded its wings, and took flight into the inky air.
Then she was back in that cat-infested alley, and Daisy Thompson was swaying toward her with a lipsmack of gum.
“Say, honey, ain’t you that broad I told all the papers about? Although you sure as hell look a whole lot different now. Ain’t the cops caught up with you yet?”
“I guess you could say I’m still on the run.”
“Ain’t we all runnin’, one way or another? But it’s hard, you know,” Daisy continued, as her cats purred and twined their tails about her, “to keep all my girls fed. But you do what you can, an’ I ain’t some two-bit whore. I’m a successful actress and dancer, you know, just like it said in all them papers, with many roles to my credit… I was Tansy Trott in Where’s My Dog? An’ I was Lady Eustacia Vice in All the Way Down. A performance, by the way, that none other than the deputy theatre critic of the New York Herald described as promising…” She gave a belch. Wiped dark blood from her lips. “Most of what’s gone on recently seems like a drunkard’s dream,” she added in a voice that was no longer her own.
Something had changed about the way the dim spill of city light caught on Daisy Thompson’s face, and Harry saw how the skin had sloughed from her skull and that, beneath the jaunty feather cloche hat she was wearing, she’d lost most of her hair. Only her eyes still had any kind of life to them, sunken and reddened though they were.
“What happened, Daisy?”
“Happened…? That’s rich! Nothing ever happens in this business unless you know someone who knows someone else. An’, believe me, I’ve known ’em all. But you’re always looking, ain’t you? Even though you’ve been told at a hundred auditions that your face is too old and your tits are too saggy and you ain’t even got no agent, and where’s my friggin’ blow job, you’re still hopin’ that this’ll be the one.”
Daisy’s ruined lips bubbled. She was swaying, grinning, hugging herself with scarecrow arms.
“Came to me, they did, right down there in this alley, an’ I knew straight away I’d been waitin’ for ’em all my life. An’ now I’m with the others, in this place, in this fabulous house, although it was much more than a house, where there’s nothing but voices an’ mirrors, an’ the lovely, lovely dark. For this is where everything ends, and it all began.”
“Where is it? This place?”
“Oh, it’s just around the corner, or maybe up the next block. You could probably see it from here if you knew where to look, or who to ask. Corpseman should know. After all, he’s been searching for it for long enough. Can’t you hear us, honey?”
“Hear what?”
“All our voices, silly!”
Then she threw back her head, and her throat was a blackened yawn.
Harry awoke with a clear realisation of who and where she was. It was pleasantly dark down here in the basement of Unison Books, and she knew in her bones that a clear, moonless night was settling across New York.
She got up, still half-expecting to waver or fall. But she didn’t, and the rank, damp air felt good against her skin, as did the grit floor between her toes. Upstairs, rummaging around the kitchenette in the dim hope of finding something to eat, she suddenly stopped and tilted her head at a new sound. Someone was banging to be let in. Had to be John Burton, back from Philly and so flush with his aunt’s m-money that he’d forgotten about the key hung by the letterbox. But, heading down, she realised that the sound came from the door to the store.
“Oh?!” A little man was standing out on the steps. He looked about as surprised as she felt. “I was just going past, and sort of wondered if you were still open. I mean, you’re clearly not. So I’m sorry—I’ll…”
Already, he was backing off. He seemed nervous, and smelled slightly drunk. His sort came here sometimes, and often at odd hours, perhaps misled by the store’s name, or its rundown air, into thinking it stocked books about a different kind of unison.
“It’s all right. You should come in.”
“Really?” He peered up at her.
“Absolutely.”
“If you’s sure…” The smell he gave off beneath the booze was pleasantly warm and coaly, and his nails were bitten, and his chin and cheeks were dotted with ripe patches of acne and blood.
“Is there a particular volume or periodical…?” In the faint light that came from the streetlamps outside, she gestured at the rows of books. “Or perhaps you could tell me what area of political history or theory you’re especially interested in.”
The little man licked his lips. He was staring more at her than the books, and Harry realised that she was wearing nothing but the frayed pyjamas she must have pulled at some time during her fever, from which several buttons had come loose.
“But that isn’t it, is it?” she said.
His breathing was a little faster now. “Isn’t what?”
“Isn’t what you want.”
His scarred Adam’s apple jumped, and she caught the biscuity smell which was spreading at his armpits. “I don’t understand.”
“But you do.” Harry was aware that her voice had slowed, that her mouth felt swollen and flooded. Almost a kind of arousal, although surely this sour little man wasn’t remotely attractive to her. But somehow he was. Now he was backing off, but she knew, delicately and decisively, how all of this would go. A brief frenzy. Then, as resistance melted and the flesh broke, the blood would always begin to flow. For what else were they for, these lumbering, lusting, leaking, creatures, other than the brief perfection of their deaths?
She reached out to grasp him, but his eyes widened and, with surprising speed and agility, he ducked her embrace and turned and fled the shop. She followed him out at an easy lope, but stopped at the junction of Brand Street. For here there was traffic, light, and noise, and passers-by were looking at her oddly even as she slipped back into the shadows.
A chance wasted. Lost. Gone. A flood of hopeless, righteous anger gripped her, for this was not how these exchanges should ever go. And, still, the gnawing hurt of her hunger roared. She scented the air, which teemed with the aromas of cigarettes, street tar, wet paint, dying lilac, and old coffee grounds. And life, life everywhere. And flesh. And blood. Daisy Thompson was right, for this was where everything ended and began. Yet closer still, and tearingly annoying, came the bark of a dog.
She vaulted the wall into the yard in one easy leap. The creature was some kind of cross, with broad shoulders, short legs, one dead eye, and a blunted muzzle. It snarled at her as it strained on a chain leash, giving an impressive show of teeth. Then, as she slipped quietly forward, its ears flattened and it tried to back away, and the snarls became pleading yips as she grabbed it by the slack flesh around its shoulders and began to suckle on the warm bag of blood.
Down in the sewer-reeking basement, she threw aside shelves, scattered barrels and tore apart heavy paper rolls. Then, momentarily, she was in some vast, glass-roofed storehouse, which was also filled with all kinds of odd objects, and she was dragging chains behind her like that dog whose blood and rage still clotted her thoughts. Things rolled around her. Oilcans and compositors’ manuals. Garden hoes and patent cloches. Cooking pots and chamber pots. A whole landslide of lost lives.
Karl, is that you? She saw Corpseman’s scarred hands when she looked down at her own. Saw the spinning calculations of the pages of his notebooks. Decade after decade. Moon after moon after moon. She needed the warm bite of heroin, or the glooming sweetness of morphine, even the burning pain of cyanide—one craving to consume another—before whatever was still left of her was also destroyed. That, or any other kind of poison, in a crisis this deep, would somehow have to do. Blood-seeker, soul-feeder, shape-changer, lycanthrope, vampire, succubus, and loup garou. Or stand up straight, soldier, and salute the fucking flag.
Her vision caught on a faraway gleam of bottles. Her precious inks, the very lifeblood of the coming revolution, which she’d horded and eked out. Ultramarine. Warm Scarlet. Dark Ochre. Cyprus Green. Deep Crimson. They all seemed equally beautiful to her, their pigments made viscous and vivid with pyridine, methanol, antimony, and lead—but these words now had a different echo, and she chose Midnight Black for no other reason than its high arsenic content. Then she searched for a syringe amid the rubbery viper’s den of old enema tubes in the basement’s far back, discarding cracked cylinders, broken plungers and snapped needles with sudden, bitter expertise before she finally found one that worked.
A reassuringly familiar smell of ink, vinegary-sweet and oily dark, rose up to her as she unscrewed the cap. Days down here when she’d once turned phrases, composed type, tried to reshape the world… Even the syringe merely worked like a fountain pen to draw up the fluid if you thought of it in that way. Then, for a bad moment, she was looking down into the open bottle’s well, and something that wasn’t her, or even Corpseman, or anything living—a black-eyed predator—was staring up.
She bared her arm, raised a vein with a practised slap, and the ink burned like the night itself as she drove it deep into her blood.