FSF, January-February 2010 (36 page)

"Shut up."

"Or what—you'll shoot me?"

"Just open the door."

The mausoleum's entrance was a tall stone rectangle set back between a quartet of pillars that supported a foreshortened portico. On the front of the portico, the name UPTON was bordered by dogs capering on their hind legs. Behind me, there was a click, and a wide circle of light centered on the door. There was no latch that I could see. I put out my right hand and pushed the cold stone. The door swung in easily, spilling the beam of Chris's flashlight inside. The heavy odor of soil packed with clay rode the yellow light out to us. I glanced over my shoulder, but Chris had been reduced to a blinding glare. His voice said, “Go in."

Inside, the mausoleum was considerably smaller than the grandiosity of its exterior would have led you to expect. A pair of stone vaults occupied most of the floor, only a narrow aisle between them. The flashlight roamed over the vaults; according to the lids, Beloved Husband and Father Howard rested to my left, while Devoted Wife and Mother Caitlin took her repose on the right. (The woman's name registered immediately.) Under each name, a relief showed a nude woman reclining on her left side, curled around by a brood of young dogs, a pair of which nursed at her breasts. Beyond the stone cases, the mausoleum was a wall of black. The air seemed slightly warmer than it was outside.

With a clatter, the light tilted up to the ceiling. Chris said, “I put the flashlight on the end of the vault to your left. I want you to take two steps backward—slowly—reach out, and pick it up.” I nodded. “And if you try to blind me with the light, I'll shoot."

When I was holding the bulky flashlight, I directed its beam at the back of the mausoleum. A rounded doorway opened in the center of a wall on which the head of an enormous dog had been painted in colors dulled by dust and time. Eyes whose white pupils and black sclerae were the size of serving plates glared down at us. The dog's mouth was wide, the door positioned at the top of its throat. A click, and a second light joined mine. “In there,” Chris said.

"I was wondering where you were going to do it."

"Shut up."

I stepped through the doorway into a wide, dark space. I swept the light around, saw packed dirt above, below, to either side, darkness ahead. There was easily enough room for me and Chris and a few more besides, though the gray sides appeared to close in in the distance. The air was warmer still, the earth smell cloying. Chris's light traced the contours of the walls, their arch into the ceiling. It appeared we were at one end of a sizable tunnel. “All right,” Chris said.

"Where's Kaitlyn?"

"Shut up."

"Aren't you going to let me see her?"

"Shut up."

"Oh, I get it. This is supposed to be the icing on the cake, isn't it? You bring me to the place you killed my girlfriend, but you shoot me without allowing me to see her.” I turned into the glare of Chris's flashlight, which jerked up to my eyes. I didn't care. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I said, “Jesus Christ: what kind of a sick fuck are you?"

Chris stepped forward, his arm extended, and pressed the automatic against my chest. My eyes dazzled, I couldn't see so much as feel the solid steel pushing against my sternum. The odor of soil and clay was interrupted by that of grease and metal, of the eight inches of gun ready to bridge me out of this life. Between clenched teeth, Chris said, “You really are a stupid shit."

"Fuck you."

The pressure on my chest eased, and I thought,
This is it. He's going to shoot me in the head
. My mouth filled with the taste of, not so much regret as sour pique that this was the manner in which my life had reached its conclusion, beneath the surface of the city of my disappointment, murdered by the broken psychotic who'd spoiled my relationship and fractured what should have been the start of my new life.
It's only a moment
, I thought,
then you'll be with Kaitlyn
. But I didn't believe that. I would be dead, part of the blackness, and that was the most I had to look forward to.

"Here you are."

Not for an instant did I mistake this voice for Chris's. It wasn't only that it was behind me—the instrument itself was unlike any I'd heard, rich and cold, as if the lower depths of the tunnel in whose mouth we stood had been given speech. Ignoring Chris, I spun, my light revealing him, the white man with the shaggy black hair and seamed face who'd held me with his strange eyes in QE2, the man Chris had dubbed the Keeper. He'd exchanged his black leather jacket for a black trenchcoat in whose pockets his hands rested. Chris's flashlight found that long face, deepened the shadows in its creases. The man did not blink.

Chris said, “You know why I've come."

"Yes?"

"I'm here to offer a trade."

"What do you offer?"

"Him."

"What?” I looked over my shoulder. Chris still held the automatic pointed at me.

"Shut up."

"You're going to trade me for Kaitlyn?"

"Shut up."

"So whatever this guy and his friends—you think—this is your solution?"

"Shut up."

"Jesus! You're even worse than I thought."

"This'll be the best thing you've ever done,” Chris said. “I've lived with you long enough to know. It's the best thing you could ever do for her."

I opened my mouth to answer, but the Keeper coughed, and our attentions returned to him. He said, “For?"

"The woman you took six days past."

"A woman?"

"Damn you!” Chris shouted. “You know who I'm talking about, so can we cut the coy routine? In the names of Circë, Cybele, and Atys, in the name of Diana, Mother of Hounds, I offer this man's life for that of the woman you took and hold."

"Let us ask the Hounds,” the man said. From the darkness behind him, a trio of the same creatures I'd crossed a vacant lot to help on a rainy night emerged into the glow of our flashlights and slunk toward me. Big as that thing had been, these were bigger, the first and largest as tall at the shoulder as my chin, its companions level with my heart. Each was as skeletally thin as that first one, each patched with the same pale fur. At the sight of them, my mind tilted, all my mental furniture sliding to one side. Everything Chris had said in the past hour tumbled together. Inclining their heads in my direction, the Hounds walked lazily around me, silent except for the scrape of their claws on the tunnel floor. Their white skin slid against their bones, and I thought that I had never seen creatures so frail and so deadly. The leader kept its considerable jaws closed, but its companions left theirs open, one exposing its fangs in a kind of sneer, the other licking its lips with a liver-colored tongue. Their combined reek, dirt underscored with decay, as if they'd been rolling in the remains of the cemetery's more recent residents, threatened to gag me. I concentrated on breathing through my mouth and remaining calm, on not being afraid, or not that afraid, on not noticing the stains on the things’ teeth, on not wondering whether they'd go for my throat or my arms first, on not permitting the panic that was desperate to send me screaming from this place as fast as my legs would carry me from crossing the boundary from emotion to action. The trio completed their circuit of me and returned to the Keeper, assuming positions around him.

"The Hounds are unimpressed."

I could have fainted with relief.

"What do you mean?” Chris said. “In what way is this not a fair trade?"

"The Hounds have their reasons."

"This is bullshit!"

"Do you offer anything else?"

"What I've offered is enough."

The man shrugged, turning away.

"Wait!” Chris said. “There are boxes—in my room, there are four boxes full of the information I've collected about you. Return the woman, and they're yours, all of them."

The man hesitated, as if weighing Chris's proposal. Then, “No,” he said, and began to walk back down the tunnel, the things accompanying him.

"Wait!” Chris said. “Stop!"

The man ignored him. Already, he and his companions were at the edge of the flashlights’ reach.

"Me!” Chris shouted. “Goddamn you, I offer myself! Is that acceptable to the Hounds?"

The four figures halted. The Keeper said, “Freely made?"

"Yes,” Chris said. “A life for a life."

"A life for a life.” The man's face, as he revolved toward us, was ghastly with pleasure. “Acceptable."

"What a surprise."

"Leave the light—and the weapon."

Chris's flashlight clicked off. The clatter of it hitting the floor was followed by the thud of the automatic. His shoes scuffed the floor and he was stepping past me. He stopped and looked at me, his eyes wild with what lay ahead. He said, “Aren't you going to stop me? Aren't you going to insist you be the one they take for Kaitlyn?"

"No."

He almost smiled. “You never deserved her."

I had no answer for that.

When he was even with them, the Hounds surrounded him. From the tense of their postures, the curl of their lips from their teeth, I half-expected them to savage him right there. The straightening of Chris's posture said he was anticipating something similar. The Keeper bent his head toward Chris. “It's what you really wanted,” he said, nodding at the blackness. One of the smaller things nudged him forward with its head, and the four of them faded down into the dark. For a time, the shuffle of Chris's feet, the scrape of the things’ claws, told their progress, then those sounds faded to silence.

His gaze directed after Chris, the Keeper said, “Leave. What's left of him won't be too happy to learn the life he's bartered for was yours."

I didn't argue, didn't ask,
What about Kaitlyn
? I obeyed the man's command and fled that place without another word. In my headlong rush through the mausoleum proper, I ran my left hip into the corner of Howard Upton's vault so hard I gasped and stumbled against his wife's, but although the pain threatened to steal my breath, the image of what might be stepping into the mausoleum after me propelled me forward, out the still-open entrance.

My car was where we'd left it, its headlights undimmed. I fumbled for my wallet and the spare key I kept in the pocket behind my license. As I lowered myself into the driver's seat, my hip screaming in protest, I kept checking the door to the mausoleum, which remained ajar and in which I continued to think I saw shadowy forms about to emerge. The car started immediately, and in my haste to escape the way I'd come, I backed into a tall tombstone that cracked at the base and toppled backward. I didn't care; I shifted into first and sped out of the cemetery, stealing glances in the rearview mirror all the way to my apartment.

Despite the bruise on my hip, the increased pain and difficulty moving that sent me to the emergency room the next day with a story about colliding with a doorstep, to learn after an X-ray that I had chipped the bone, I half expected Chris to walk in the front door as usual the following night. It wasn't that I doubted what had happened—I was in too much discomfort—it was more that I couldn't believe its finality. Not until another week had passed, and the landlord appeared wanting to know where Chris and his rent were (to which I replied that I hadn't seen him for days), did the fact of his...I didn't have the word for it: his sacrifice? his abduction? his departure? Call it what you would, only when I was standing at the open door to his room, which was Spartan as a monk's cell, watching the landlord riffle through Chris's desk, did the permanence of his fate settle on me.

The week after that brought a concerned call from Kaitlyn's parents, asking if I'd seen their daughter (to which I replied that I hadn't had any contact with her for weeks). This began a chain of events whose next link was her father driving to Albany to ask a number of people, including me, the last time they'd seen Kaitlyn. Within a couple of days, the police were involved. They interviewed me twice, the first time in a reasonably friendly way, when I was no more than the concerned boyfriend, the second time in a more confrontational and extended session, occasioned by the detective's putting together my disclosure that Kaitlyn and Chris had been briefly involved with the fact that both of those people had gone missing in reasonably close proximity to one another. There wasn't any substantial evidence against me, but I had no doubt Detective Calasso was certain I knew more than I was saying. Kaitlyn's mother shared his suspicion, and during a long phone call before Christmas attempted to convince me to tell her what I knew. I insisted that, sorry as I was to have to say it, I didn't know what had happened to Kaitlyn. I supposed this was literally true.

Not that I hadn't dwelled on the matter each and every day since I'd awakened fully dressed on my futon, my hip pounding, a trail of muddy footprints showing my path from the front door to the refrigerator, the top of which served as a nominal liquor cabinet, to my room, where the bottle of Johnny Walker Black that had plunged me into unconsciousness leaned against my pillows. That Kaitlyn should be at the far end of that dark tunnel, surrounded by those things, the Hounds, the
Ghûl
, was unbelievable, impossible. Yet a second stop at her apartment failed to reveal any change from my previous visit. I sat on the edge of her bed, the lights out, my head fuzzy from the painkiller I'd taken for my hip, and struggled to invent alternative scenarios to the one Chris had narrated. Kaitlyn had met another guy—she was in the midst of an extended fling, a romantic adventure that had carried her out of Albany to Cancún, or Bermuda. She'd suffered a breakdown and had herself committed. She'd undergone a spiritual awakening and joined a convent. But try as I did to embrace them, each invention sounded more unreal than the last, no more than another opiate-facilitated fantasy.

I weighed going after her myself, returning to the mausoleum suitably armed and equipped and braving the tunnel to retrieve her. I even went so far as to browse a gun store on Route 9, only to discover that the weapons I judged necessary if I were to stand any kind of chance—a shotgun, a minimum of three pistols, boxes of ammunition for each—cost vastly more than my bookstore salary would allow. Trying to buy guns on the street was not a realistic option: I had no idea where to go, how to open any such transaction. On a couple of occasions, I found myself driving north through the city, retracing the path Chris and I had followed to the cemetery. When I realized what I was doing, I turned onto the nearest side street and headed back toward my apartment. Some nights, I unlocked the deadbolts on the basement door and descended the stairs to stand staring down at the cement circle sunk in the floor. The chains securing the bar across it looked rusted right through; with a little effort, I ought to be able to break them, heave the cover up, and...I made sure to lock the basement door behind me.