FSF, January-February 2010 (35 page)

Chris looked up from the canvas bag he was holding open on his lap while he riffled its contents. Whatever was in the bag clinked and rattled; the strong odor of grease filled the car. “Really?” he said. “You don't know how to get to Henry Johnson?"

"I'm not good with street names. I'm more of a visual person."

"Up ahead on the left—look familiar?"

"Actually, no."

"Well, that's where we're going."

"Well okay."

I turned off Western, passed over what I realized was a short bridge across a deep gully. “What's our destination?"

"A place called the Kennel. Heard of it?"

I hadn't.

"It's...you'll see when we get there."

We drove past shops whose shutters were down for the night, short brick buildings whose best days belonged to another century. Brownstones rode a steep side street. A man wearing a long winter coat and garbage bags taped to his feet pushed a shopping cart with an old television set canted in it along the sidewalk.

"How far is it?"

"I don't know the exact distance. It should take us about fifteen minutes."

"Enough time for you to tell me how you know Kaitlyn's at the Kennel."

"Not really. Not if you want the full story."

"I'll settle for the CliffsNotes. Did you take her there?"

"No,” he said, as if the suggestion were wildly inappropriate.

"Then how did she find out about it?"

"She didn't—she was brought there."

"Brought? As in, kidnapped?"

Chris nodded.

"How do you know this?"

"Because of the Keeper—the man you saw at the club."

"The scary guy with the weird eyes."

"You noticed his eyes."

"Same as the dog's."

"Yes."

"I don't—how do you know this guy, the what? The Keeper?"

"Ahead, there,” Chris said, pointing, “keep to the left."

I did. The cluster of tall buildings that rose over Albany's downtown, the city's effort to imitate its larger sibling at the other end of the Hudson, were behind us, replaced by more modest structures, warehouses guarded by sagging fences, narrow two- and three-story brick buildings, a chrome-infused diner struggling to pretend the fifties were alive and well. As I drove through these precincts, I had the sense I was seeing the city as it really was, the secret face I had intuited after a year under its gaze. I said, “How do you know him?"

"He....” Chris grimaced. “I found out about him."

"What? Is he some kind of, I don't know, a criminal?"

"Not exactly. He's—he's someone who doesn't like to be known."

"Someone...all right, how did you find out about him?"

"Left. My accident—did I ever tell you about my accident? I didn't, did I?"

"Kaitlyn filled me in."

"She doesn't know the whole story. Nobody does. I didn't take a corner too fast: one of the
Ghûl
ran in front of me."

"The what? ‘Hule'?"

"
Ghûl
. What you saw in that lot the other night."

"Is that the breed?"

Chris laughed. “Yes, that's the breed, all right. It was up toward Saratoga, on Route Nine. I was heading home from band practice. It was late, and it was a new moon, so it was especially dark. The next thing I knew, there was this animal in the road. My first thought was,
It's a wolf
. Then I thought,
That's ridiculous: there are no wolves around here. It must be a coyote
. But I had already seen this wasn't a coyote, either. Whatever it was, it looked awful, so thin it must be starving. I leaned to the left, to veer around it, and it moved in front of me. I tried to tilt the bike the other way, overcompensated, and put it down, hard."

In the distance, the enormous statue of Nipper, the RCA mascot, that crowned one of the buildings closer to the river cocked its head attentively.

"The accident itself, I don't remember. That's a blank. What I do remember is coming to in all kinds of pain and feeling something tugging on my sleeve. My sleeve—I'm sure you heard I wasn't wearing a helmet. I couldn't really see out of my left eye, but with my right, I saw the animal I'd tried to avoid with my right arm in its mouth. My legs were tangled up with the bike, which was a good thing, because this creature was trying to drag me off the road. If it hadn't been for the added weight, it would have succeeded. This wasn't any Lassie rescue, either: the look on its face—it was ravenous. It was going to kill and eat me, and not necessarily in that order.

"Every time the animal yanked my arm, bones ground together throughout my body. White lights burst in front of my eyes. I cried out, although my jaw was broken, which made it more of a moan. I tried to use my left arm to hit the creature, but I'd dislocated that shoulder. Its eyes—those same reversed eyes you looked into—regarded me the way you or I would a slice of prime rib. I've never been in as much pain as I was lying there; I've also never been as frightened as I was with that animal's teeth beginning to tear through the sleeve of my leather jacket and into the skin beneath. The worst of it was, the creature made absolutely no sound, no growl, nothing."

We passed beneath the Thruway, momentarily surrounded by the whine of tires on pavement.

"Talk about dumb luck, or Divine Providence: just as my legs are starting to ease out from the bike, an eighteen-wheeler rounds the corner. How the driver didn't roll right over me and the animal gripping my arm, I chalk up to his caffeine-enhanced reflexes. I thought that, if I were going to die, at least it wouldn't be as something's dinner. As it was, the truck's front bumper slowed to a stop right over my head. Had it been any other vehicle, my would-be consumer might have stood its ground. The truck, though, was too much for it, and it disappeared.

"When the doctors and cops—not to mention my mother—finally got around to asking me to relate the accident in as much detail as I could, none of them could credit a creature that wasn't a coyote, that wasn't a wolf, which caused my crash and then tried to drag me away. I'd suffered severe head trauma, been comatose for five days—that must be where the story had come from. The wounds on my forearm were another result of the accident. Apparently, no one bothered to ask the truck driver what he'd seen.

"For a long time after that night, I wasn't in such great shape. Between the seizures and the different medications for the seizures, I spent weeks at a time in a kind of fog. Some of the meds made me want to sleep; some ruined my concentration; one made everything incredibly funny. But no matter what state I was in, no matter how strange or distant my surroundings seemed, I knew that that animal—that what it had done, what it had tried to do to me—was real."

To the left, the beige box of Albany Memorial Hospital slid by. I said, “Okay, I get that there's a connection between the thing that caused your accident and the one I ran into the other night. And I'm guessing this Keeper guy is involved, too. Maybe you could hurry up and get to the point?"

"I'm trying. Did you know that State Street used to be the site of one of the largest cemeteries in Albany?"

"No."

"Till almost the middle of the nineteenth century, when the bodies were relocated and the workers found the first tunnels."

"Tunnels?"

"Left again up here. Not too much farther."

To either side of us, trees jostled the shoulder. They opened briefly on the left to a lawn running up to shabby redbrick apartments, then closed ranks again.

"So why are these tunnels so important?"

"That concrete slab in the basement, the one that's locked down? What if I told you that opens on a tunnel?"

"I'd still want to know what this has to do with where Kaitlyn is."

"Because she—when we—all right.” He took a deep breath. “Even before my doctor found the right combination of anti-seizure meds, I was doing research. I probably know the name of every librarian between Albany and Saratoga. I've talked to anyone who knows anything about local history. I've spent weeks in the archives of the State Museum, the Albany Institute, and three private collections. I've filled four boxes’ worth of notebooks."

"And?"

"I've recognized connections no one's noticed before. There's an entire—you could call it a secret history, or shadow history, of this entire region, stretching back—you wouldn't believe me if I told you how far. I learned things...."

"What things?"

"It doesn't matter. What does is that, somehow, they found out about me."

"The Keeper and his friends."

"At first, I was sure they were coming for me. I put my affairs in order, had a long conversation with my mom that scared her half to death. Then, when they didn't arrive, I started to think that I might be safe, even that I might have been mistaken about them knowing about me."

"But you weren't. Not only were they aware of you, they were watching you, following you. They saw you with Kaitlyn. They figured...."

"Yeah."

My heart was pounding in my ears. A torrent of obscenities and reproaches threatened to pour out of my mouth. I choked them down, said, “Shouldn't we go to the cops? If you've gathered as much material on this Keeper as you say you have—"

"It's not like that. The cops wouldn't—if they did believe me, it wouldn't help Kaitlyn."

"I can't see why not. If this guy's holding Kaitlyn, a bunch of cops outside his front door should make him reconsider."

We had arrived at a T-junction. “Left or right?"

"Straight."

"Straight?” I squinted across the road in front of us, to a pair of brick columns that flanked the entrance to a narrow road. A plaque on the column to the right read albany rural cemetery. I turned to Chris. “What the fuck?"

He withdrew his right hand from the bag on his lap, his fingers curled around the grip of a large automatic handgun whose muzzle he swung toward me. “Once this truck passes, we're going over there.” He nodded at the brick columns.

The anger that had been foaming in my chest fell away to a trickle. I turned my gaze to the broad road in front of me, watched a moving van labor up it. The gun weighted the corner of my vision. I wanted to speak, to demand of Chris what the fuck he thought he was doing, but my tongue was dead in my mouth. Besides, I knew what he was doing. Once the van was out of sight, Chris waved the gun and I drove across into the cemetery.

Even in the dark, where I could only see what little my headlights brought to view, I was aware that the place was big, much bigger than any graveyard I'd been in back home. On both sides of the road, monuments raised themselves like the ruins of some lost civilization obsessed with its end. A quartet of Doric columns supporting a single beam gave way to a copper-green angel with arms and wings outstretched, which yielded to a gray Roman temple in miniature, which was replaced by a marble woman clutching a marble cross. Between the larger memorials, an assortment of headstones stood as if marking the routes of old streets. A few puddles spread amongst them. Tall trees, their branches bare with the season, loomed beside the road.

As we made our way farther into the cemetery, Chris resumed talking. But the gun drew his words into the black circle of its mouth, allowing only random snippets to escape. At some point, he said, “Old Francis was the one who finally put it all together for me. He'd found an Annex to the Kennel during a day-job digging graves. A pair of them came for him that night, and if there hadn't been a couple of decent-sized rocks to hand, they would have had him. But he'd played the Minor Leagues years before, and his right arm remembered how to throw. Even so, he hopped a freight going west and stayed out there for a long time.” At another point, he said, “You have no idea. When the first hunters crossed the land bridge to America, the
Ghûl
trailed them.” At still another moment, he said, “Something they do to the meat.” That Chris had not dismounted his hobby-horse was clear.

All I could think about was what was going to happen to me once he told me to stop the car. He wouldn't shoot me in it—that would leave too much evidence. Better to walk me someplace else, dispose of me, and ditch the car over in Troy. He didn't want to leave me out in the open, though. Maybe an open grave, shovel in enough dirt to conceal the body? Too dicey: a strong rain could expose his handiwork. One of the mausoleums we passed? Much more likely, especially if you knew the family no longer used it. When he said, “All right: we're here,” in front of an elaborate marble porch set into a low hill, I felt an odd surge of satisfaction.

I had the idea this might be my time to act, but Chris had me turn off the engine, leaving on the headlights, and hand him the keys. He exited the car and circled around the front to my side, the automatic pointed at me throughout. Standing far enough away that I couldn't slam my door against him, he urged me out of the car. I wanted—at least, I contemplated refusing him, declaring that if he were going to shoot me, he would have to do it here, I wasn't going to make this any easier for him. I could hear myself defiant, but his shouted, “Now!” brought me out in front of him without a word.

"Over there,” he said, pointing the gun at the mausoleum. “It should be open."

That sentence, everything it implied, revived my voice. “Is this where you took Kaitlyn?” I said as I walked toward the door.

"What?"

"I've been trying to figure out how you did it. Did you meet her at the club and whisk her out here? What—did you have a cab waiting? A rental? I can't quite work out the timing of it. Maybe you brought her somewhere else, first? Some place to hold her until you could take her here?"

"You haven't heard a single thing I've been saying, have you?"

"Were you afraid I'd discover it was you? Or was this always your plan, kill the girl you couldn't have and the guy she wouldn't leave?"

"You asshole,” Chris said. “I'm doing this for Kaitlyn."

That Kaitlyn might be unharmed, might be in league with Chris, was a possibility I had excluded the second it had occurred to me as I drove into the cemetery, and that I had kept from consideration as we'd wound deeper into its grounds. There would be no reason for her to resort to such an extreme measure; if she wanted to be with Chris, she could be with him. She already had. All the same, his statement was a punch in the gut; my words quavered as I said, “Sure—you tell yourself that."