Frail (27 page)

“I hurt no one.” It had been on the other side of the car but now it was next to me, there in the street, close enough to reach out an arm and take me away. “I take away hurt. I’m the one the tortured and tormented scream for, everywhere, the one they beg to help them. And I do. Because it’s what I am.” It slipped broad, thick-knuckled hands into its cardigan pockets. “I’m the stopping point of pain, Amy—and you’ve stumbled right into my backyard.”

“I won’t go with you,” I said, and my fingers curled into a fist like I could actually fight it off, like I had any chance at all. “I won’t go.”

“You don’t have to.” That strong, unwavering timbre, the line of swaying-branch grace in her high-held shoulders and back: just like the real person, just like she was up until the end. “There’s the ones I have to take with me, by force—but then there’s the ones who invite me in. Like your friend, Billy. Beating a grown man to death because he was in a bad mood.” A smile, curling its tendrils up around her cheeks, like no smile I ever saw on the real woman’s face. “Like that fellow you saw shoot his family in the street. That Don you’re so afraid of, your dear pal Phoebe’s killer, your Lisa, your new rapist friends, so many people you’d never guess . . . and you.” The smile faded, dissolved, like the whorl of some elaborate sand painting brushed away by an invisible hand. “And now you.”

This is how rabbits feel when the fox or cat or sadistic child’s on them, the hot shaking
inside
every limb that won’t translate to movement, lungs and throat alike tamping down so you can’t gather air to scream. Those phone calls. Playing with me, all this time, while I walked straight into the trap. “Are you my dog? Are you my black dog, that—”

“I’m nobody’s dog,” it said softly. “I don’t come when I’m called. I do the calling. But you came running to me of your own accord, Amy. All on your own. That makes you one of my special ones. Long as you live—” Another twist of a smile. “—however long that is, you’ll never be rid of me. Ever.”

Sweat pooled under my arms and trickled, tickling, down my sides, my bladder tightened and twitched. I’d pissed myself with fear, before. I knew the feeling.

“Show me my mother,” I said.

It
laughed
. It stood there and laughed and fury forced my windpipe open, gave me air enough to yell. “Show me my mother! If you can look like anyone, anyone who’s dead? Be
her
! I want her back! Give her back to me!”

It shook its furzy gray halo-head, a mocking imitation of real regret, and my eyes were leaking and my hatred, for myself, it was bottomless.
“Give her back!”

Nothing.

“Then give me—” I tried to say “Stephen” but the word, it got choked off by snot and saltwater. The angel, demon, whatever it was, it watched me, hands in its sweater pockets, immovable and indifferent.

“I’m not punishing you, you know,” it said. “It’s just things are . . . complicated with your mother, that little girl Natalie, that wretched boy they’re cutting open right now. More complicated than plain old life and death—but! You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.” A dancing, derisive little smile. “I sent you guides, harbingers, they brought you to my backyard—but the rest, you’re on your own.”

The smile got broader and wider and ripped open that guise of a human face, splitting it like a tomato rotting on the vine. From beneath the mask something came spilling out that was like midnight darkness and blinding sunrise all at once, endless night, endless light, and it swallowed the moon and the hidden sun and all the sky and I was in the throbbing, suffocating heart of it, a womb where all humanity were infants crushed and drowned. I choked, gasped with fear and the certainty of my horrible punishment, nothing but this sensation and this void for all the rest of eternity—

And then it was plain soft nighttime again and I was in an empty street in a deserted lakeshore city where everyone was dead, dying, unnaturally resurrected. The Angel of Death’s backyard, and only now did I feel what that meant, did I start to understand this mausoleum emptiness was all human life now, everywhere forever. And I did what I always do. I turned, and I ran.

“Now, that’s a good girl!” it shouted. “You go, and you find her!”

Laughing, taunting, its voice coming from everywhere at once. Dozens of bits of voices strung together as one, echoes of a thousand dead people kaleidoscoping together into one gathered cry. I kept going. Colfax Street. Benedict. Oak.

“If you find her?” it said. No farther away than if I’d stood still, everywhere at once, inside my head and part of me for the whole rest of my life. “If you find that Stephen? Be good to them! Be good to all of them, just like you were to me!”

The street went quiet, and I stood all alone.

SEVENTEEN

I
threw up from fear and exhaustion, crouching next to another parked car pitted all over with winter rust, and it was a horrible relief like I was heaving out the last ragged remains of that . . . something, that vast blinding-white darkness, that had tried to swallow me up. Nothing to be done, absolutely nothing. I bent down, back groaning like an old woman’s in protest, double-knotted my laces so they wouldn’t slip loose.

“Oak Street,” I said aloud, just to try to ground myself. I was at the corner of Oak and Harvey, another unknown part of town; I went through a backyard, a series of backyards, found a thin twist of trees and I was back where we had all started out hours, lifetimes ago, in the woods. What am I doing? Where am I going? I don’t know. Maybe that’s my punishment. I’ll never know.

I should’ve taken one of their guns with me, those men who tried to grab me. All that ammunition. What would I do with it? What was in charge now had nothing to fear from bullets—

It saved me, from those boys. That thing, that death angel. It came back as that poor girl whose name I never knew and it killed them all, swept them aside, because of me. Because I belonged to it now. That thought made me cry again. I dodged a bullet. And fell into a furnace.

The trees were getting thicker now, closer together, sticky furbelows of grayish-white fungi and green oatmeal-clumps of moss smeared over every trunk. The sight of it made my skin twitch in revulsion and I wanted to tear them all off, the wads of leaf and rot, make the bark and all the woods clean and smooth. The sky, filtering in, had gone from black to gray.

I broke my own rule, when I demanded her back. I told the universe my mother was dead. I lied. You little fucking liar. I tribunaled myself, right there in the woods as I walked, and it was plain and clear I required execution. Of course I did. It was why I’d become a fugitive, my last day in Lepingville.

But not yet. Not now. I was going to find out everything, everything I could, before I died.

That boy they’re cutting open.
The lab. Stephen was scared of the lab, of nothing but the lab. Naomi’s Scissor Men, who were all real. He wouldn’t talk about anything past, he wouldn’t—

The trees opened up on me and I stumbled in surprise, grabbing at a branch slippery with green muck for balance. Right up ahead was a little lavender-painted house that must’ve been a restaurant, tables in the front yard and on a wooden balcony; on the wide, paved street fronting it was a clapboard church, a couple of shops with their smashed front-window glass still a powdery sheen on the sidewalk. A tiny movie theater, last showing some arty documentary I’d just vaguely heard of. I could go live in there, close the doors and settle in relaxed beneath the empty screen and wait for the inevitable, but beyond the theater and shops and the PRAIRIE BEACH: SAFETY IN THE SANDS SINCE 1905 merchants’ billboard was a long, sinuous line where the ground should’ve been, blue-black against the steel sky: Lake Michigan, the end point of Lake Street. Naturally. Where there was the lake, there was the lab. Where there was the lab, there was—

There’s no point in expecting anything. None. My mother is—gone, whatever else became of her. Stephen is dead. Natalie is dead. Soon I’ll be. That creature didn’t save me just to save me, I was sure of it, there was something he wanted me to do and he’d given me directions, instructions.
You’ve stumbled into my backyard.
Of course, he’d be at the lab. Nobody of any importance, around these parts, ever was anywhere else.

I walked in fits and starts down the middle of the street, toward that soft thick blue crayon line. All alone. Maybe Johnny Angel cleared the whole area for me, sweep of the hand. When you got to the end of Lake Street, the road veered off to the left and became a narrow, winding thing leading you straight to the source, the lab and all the associated buildings: My mother, she’d told me about it once. She’d seen pictures. Keep walking. There’s no point in crying anymore. The only question is, how much more can I find out before the Angel of Death, the Fall-Dead Thing, comes back? There’s nothing I can do with that knowledge but it’s the one thing I can offer, the devotion of trying. You can’t just let yourself die, knowing you didn’t even try to accomplish anything. Work first.

I hope my mother was wrong and there is a heaven, after all, one that looks like the movies. Movie theaters. But it hardly matters. Either way, I won’t be there.

I knotted my laces one more time and walked toward the blue, no looking back.

BOOK THREE

UNDERWORLD

EIGHTEEN

T
here’s rules, for going into the places where dead people are. I learned them years ago, when they were all supposedly just stories. Don’t eat or drink anything they offer, not so much as a pomegranate seed. The ferryman wants payment, to take you across the Styx. There’s a dog at the gate, three-headed, who wants food. Something sweet, sticky, made with honey.

I still had them in my pocket, bent and flattened, those Tootsie Rolls Stephen gave me. They’d do.

The road to the lab was short but it swung and bent in this easy way that made me think of graceful things, happy things, like a tipsy person staggering home from a wonderful party left, right, the wide loops of their feet drawing the lines of the pathway. Nothing bad could ever lie at the end of that sand-white gravel road, crushed lake stones with the same sharp grit as ground glass. I stood on it, and closed my eyes tight.

I was about to make a bet, that I wasn’t actually alone. I hadn’t been, even when I thought I was, ever since Lepingville.

I let out a low, soft whistle. A warm blast of wind rustled the trees and sent my hair streaming over my face, bringing scents of full-blooming lilac and the last dying magnolias; then I heard it, the snap of twigs and soft crunch of gravel as something came out of the trees, trotted steadily toward me and paused at my feet. It made a little snuffling sound, not quite a bark.

A big fellow, coming up past my waist, bigger than he’d looked when he’d been tracking me from town to city to beach shore. Large as he was, he wasn’t threatening me, no bristling or bared teeth. I could turn my back on him right now. Send him back to his real master.

“Good boy,” I said.

He just stared back. His pale yellow eyes looked dull and colorless, windowpanes smeared with dusty grime so the light couldn’t filter in, but there was intelligence there, alertness, that wary poised canine calm. His breath was a sharp wet odor of dog slobber and gamey meat and an unmistakable, faint waft of decay. I reached down to pet him, my fingers shaking. He wagged his tail.

His fur was there and yet not quite there beneath my hand, like touching the froth of soap lather in the bathtub just as the bubbles were all melting away. So fleshly solid and still a chimera beneath the skin, a hollow wineskin carapace holding a ghost, and I wasn’t his master but he was still mine. He’d saved me, him and that poor dead dog from Leyton, making my kidnappers drop me, chasing me by fits and starts onto the path toward the lab. My good boy.

My guardian? In earnest? Let’s find out. He sat there looking up at me, waiting. Play today?

“Lab,” I said. When I started walking he followed, trotting with soft crunches behind. The road bent more sharply, a little statue of Jacques Marquette lurking in the brush to greet us; the sand dunes arched up and up toward the hillside, toward the tuftlike clusters of beach grass with a few lone, scrubby trees up near the top. Something in me wanted to run down that long easy sandslope toward the deep blue line of the water, keep going until I finally found the place where lake and sky meet and become one great consuming sea, but I had work to do.

A little white building up ahead, surely not the lab, all Greek columns and an empty, open-air second floor: GARY AQUATO-RIUM, said the sign. Skeletons down in the sand, below and beyond the little white building; you could see the bones sticking up like listing, half-buried signposts. Bones, those are nothing. Everyone’s seen so much worse.

The road twisted off to the left, the ground rising again and trees all around me, and then gave way to a long swath of grass, a choppy green lake-wave of clover and dandelions crawling up to a tall, sprawling structure of sandy pink brick. Not exactly a castle, even with the towers and sharp-angled rooftops: too small, like a short little man trying to puff himself up with pride but having to stand on tiptoe to do it. Several of the windows were covered in cardboard, nailed-up wood. No sign of life.

How do you go inside a place, knowing you’ll never come back out? Even dumb animals, I’d heard, cows and pigs, they sense what’s coming when they get herded from the transport truck to the intake tunnel and they try to run, to buck and kick but there’s nowhere to go. I had the sky, anyway, I had as close as anyone around here gets to the sea. Not so dumb animals, actually—pigs are smarter than dogs, and this dog, here, he’d always been smarter than me. He just waited, watching me dither in silence. He had all the time in the world.

“All right, boy,” I said. My voice was cracked and shaking. “Let’s go.”

The air felt heavy and ponderous, as if something kept passing through it and vanishing and leaving only a weight of sadness behind: the undertow of a greater, vaster, wholly invisible lake, pulling everything in its radius down to drown. That imaginary point where the line of water and sky finally met, I had found it. It was called death. This was a house of death. I could feel it, the dragging smothering-wet weight of it, in my skin and my stomach and every time I drew breath.