Helltown (4 page)

Jeff clenched the steering wheel tighter. Mandy could be a real pain in the ass sometimes. He wondered why he put up with her. He was a securities trader clearing a hundred grand a year, for Christ’s sake. He could have any woman he wanted. Didn’t she realize that?

He needed someone smarter, someone more on his level, someone, well, like Jenny. She wasn’t only a long-legged blonde bombshell; she was a medical school student to boot. He visualized the two of them on paper: Wall Street Trader and Cardiovascular Surgeon. It was certainly more impressive than Wall Street Trader and Makeup Artist. And was that all Mandy was going to aspire to in life? Really, how much difference was there between a makeup artist and a carny face painter? He chuckled to himself, considered mentioning this comparison out loud, but decided not to sink to her childish level.

Jeff focused on the road ahead. The occluding fog was as thick as pea soup, as his grandmother had been fond of saying, and he needed to pay attention. Last thing he wanted was to run into a deer or a bear. The 1987 BMW M5 was less than a month old, in pristine condition, and he would like to keep it that way. Did he need the car? No. He took cabs to work every day and rarely left the city. Same went for the prewar Tribeca co-op he’d been renting since last July. It was far too big for just him, he rarely set foot in the two spare bedrooms, but they were good to have to show off when people came over. Success, he had learned, was more than earning a six-figure salary. It was cultivating an image that people envied and respected.

 And Mandy wasn’t jiving with that image, was she? They’d been together for four years now, and she was still as clueless to business and politics and world events as when he’d met her. What was it she’d said to Congressman Franzen the other week while he’d been discussing with Jeff the recent armistice reached in the Iran-Iraq war? Why don’t they call it the Middle
West
? Good God, she was becoming an embarrassment.

Jeff’s thoughts turned to Jenny again. He visualized her wearing a white doctor’s coat, a stethoscope around her neck, and nothing else. What a fantasy that would be! Of course, that’s all it was: a fantasy. Steve was his good friend. He wasn’t about to hijack his girlfriend, even though he was sure he could if he wanted to. No, there were plenty of other smart, successful women out there.

Through the mist, a bridge appeared ahead of them.

“Hell yeah!” Jeff cried out. “There she is!” He crunched onto the gravel shoulder just before the bridge and killed the engine.

“What’s going on?” Steve asked, looking up from the map and removing his glasses.

“Crybaby bridge!” Jeff announced.

“Are you for real?” Steve said.

“Crybaby bridge?” Mandy said, poking her head up between the seats once more. “Why have I heard of that?”

“It’s an urban legend,” Steve told her. “A baby gets thrown off a bridge, it dies, you can hear its ghost crying in the middle of the night. Crybaby bridges are all over the country.”

“Yeah, but this one’s different,” Jeff said.

Steve looked at him. “How so?”

He grinned wickedly. “’Cause this crybaby’s genuinely haunted.”

Steve undid his seatbelt, stuffed the map back into the glove compartment, and got out of the car. The night air was cool and fresh and damp, the way it is after a storm. It accentuated the raw scent of pine and hemlock. Fog swirled around his legs, sinuous, amorphous, reminding him of the dry ice used in horror movies to turn a mundane graveyard into a hellish nightmare crammed full of the shuffling dead. He titled his head, looking up. Directly above the bridge the canopy had receded to reveal a patch of black sky framing a full moon.

Steve howled. It was a mournful, lupine sound, the effect of which turned out to be surprisingly eerie and realistic.

“Nice one, Wolfman!” Jeff said, tossing his head back and joining in gleefully.

“Boys will be boys,” Jenny said, sighing with put-upon melodrama.

Mandy said, “You know they’re going to be trying to scare us all night?”

“Let them,” Jenny said. “I can handle a werewolf, or vampire. I have a black belt in judo.”

Steve’s lungs faltered. His howl cracked. He looked at Jenny and said, “You have a black belt in judo?”

“I trained with Chinese Buddhist monks.”

“Nice try. Judo’s Japanese.”

“What do Chinese monks practice?” Mandy asked.

“Kung fu,” Steve said.

“Well, maybe the Chinese monks Jenny trained with also practiced judo too.”

Jeff’s wolf howl sputtered into chuckles. He began shaking his head.

“What?” Mandy said, planting her fists on her hips.

“No comment,” he said, shooting Steve a this-is-what-I-deal-with-everyday look.

“Hey,” Mandy said. “Shouldn’t we put our Halloween costumes on?”

Everyone agreed and went to the BMW’s trunk. Steve scrounged through his backpack for the white navy cap he’d brought, found it at the bottom of the bag, and tugged it on over his head.

He heard a zipper unzip behind him. He started to turn around only to be told by Mandy to stop peeking.

“Peeking at what?” he said.

“I’m changing,” Mandy said.

“Right there?”

“Hey, bro, stop perving on my girl,” Jeff said, eyeing Steve up and down: the white navy cap, the red pullover, the pale trousers. “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

“Gilligan,” Steve said.

Jeff guffawed and turned his attention to Jenny, who was slipping on a pair of cat ears to go with her black eye mask and bowtie. “Come on, help me out,” he said to her. “A dog? Wait, a mouse? Hold on—someone who is completely fucking unoriginal?”

“What are you?” Steve asked him.

Jeff shrugged out of his pastel blue blazer and yellow necktie—he had come straight from work to pick Steve and Jenny up out front NYU’s Greenberg Hall—and exchanged them for a black leather jacket. He held his arms out in a ta-da type of way.

“No idea,” Steve said.

“Michael Knight! You know, from that
Knight Rider
show.” He whistled. “Sexy mama!”

Steve turned to find Mandy adjusting her boobs inside a skintight orange bodysuit with a plunging neckline. Accentuating this were shiny orange boots, yellow tights, and a feisty yellow wig with black highlights. In the center of her chest was the ThunderCats logo: a black silhouette of a cat’s head on a red background.

“Cheetara,” she said, smiling hopefully.

Noah, Austin, and Cherry were approaching from Noah’s green Jeep Wrangler, appearing and disappearing in the swiftly morphing clouds of mist. Austin, carrying an open bottle of beer, was in the lead. He’d shaved the sides of his head and styled the middle strip of hair into a Mohawk a year or so ago. With his satellite ears and angular face, however, he looked more like Stripe from
Gremlins
rather than a punk rocker. A flock of crows, tattooed in black ink, encircled his torso, originating at his navel and ending on the left side of his neck, below his ear. Now only a couple of the birds were visible, seeming to fly up out of the head hole cut into the cardboard box he wore. Condoms were taped all over box, some taken out of the packages and filled with a gluey substance that surely couldn’t be semen.

“You get one guess each,” Austin told them, tipping the beer to his lips.

“A homeless bum,” Steve said.

“A total jackass,” Jeff said.

“Homework,” Mandy said.

Austin frowned at her. “Homework?”

“That box is a desk, right?”

“Right—I dressed up as homework.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Jeff said.

“A one-night stand, mate!”

Steve and Jeff broke into fits. After a moment Mandy laughed hesitantly. Then she said “Oh!” and laughed harder.

“Gnarly, hey?” Austin said, smiling proudly. “So, how the fuck is everyone?”

“Not as good as you apparently,” Jeff said.

“This is my first beer. Right, Cher?”

“I’ve lost count,” Cherry said. She was perhaps five feet on tip toes, though her teased hair gave her a couple more inches. Jeff called her Mighty Mouse, which always ticked her off. She’d grown up in the Philippines, but moved to the States to work as a registered nurse a few years ago. She had nutmeg skin, sleepy sloe Asian eyes, a cute freckled nose, and the kind of sultry lips that would look good sucking a lollipop on the cover of
Vogue
magazine, or blowing an air-kiss to a sailor shipping off.

Noah joined Steve and took a swig from a bottle of red wine. He was the polar opposite of Austin: wavy dark hair, unassuming good looks, mellow, disciplined. Even more, he was an up-and-coming sculptor. His first exhibit a couple months back had been well-received by critics, and he’d sold a few pieces to boot.

“You a boxer?” Steve said to him, referring to the black shoe polish he’d smeared around his left eye. He’d also drawn a large P in black marker on the chest of his white long-sleeved shirt.

“A black-eyed pea, dude.” Noah nodded at Austin and Cherry, who had gravitated toward Jeff and the others, and said, “Those two are a nightmare together.” He was speaking quietly so only Steve could hear.

“Fun drive?” Steve said.

“How about I drive you and Jenny back. Jeff can deal with them in his car. We almost crashed into an eighteen-wheeler when Austin was getting into that stupid box.” He took another swig of wine, glanced about at the trees and vegetation deadened by the mist, and said, “So what’s the deal? Why’d we pulled over here?”

Steve shrugged. “First stop on the haunted Ohio tour.”

“Can’t believe we agreed to this.”

“Hey, you never know—we might actually see a ghost.”

“Yeah, and Austin will get through the night without spewing.”

“I’d put my money on seeing a ghost.”

“He’s already had four or five beers in the car.”

“Maybe he’ll puke
on
a ghost. That’d be something.”

Jeff released Austin from a headlock, kicked him in the ass, and hooted with laughter when Austin whimpered. Then Jeff clapped his hands loudly, to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, listen up, ladies and dicks,” he said, immediately commanding attention the way he could. “This bridge—it’s called Crybaby Bridge, and it’s the real deal.”

“Why do I feel like I’m being sold blue chip stock?” Jenny said.

“Snake oil,” Mandy said.

“I’m being one hundred percent legit,” Jeff said. “Hundreds of people have verified that this bridge is haunted.
Verified
, pussies. And if you want to—”

“How’d they verify it?” Steve asked.

“With those spectrometers the Ghostbusters use,” Noah said.

Jeff darkened. “Will you two twits listen up?” He dangled his car keys in the air. “This is my spare set. I left the other set in the ignition.”

“Why would you do that?” Mandy asked.

“’Cause the legend goes, you leave your keys in the ignition, lock the car, and take off for a bit—”

“How long?” Mandy asked.

“I don’t know. Ten minutes.”

“And go where?”

“Down the bank to the river, I guess. Fuck, Mandy, who gives a shit? We just have to be out of sight of the car. Then we wait ten minutes. When we come back, the car should be running.”

“You’re serious?” Steve said.

“As a snake.” Jeff stuffed the spare keys in his pocket and started down the bank to the river.

Steve glanced at Noah, who shrugged.

“As a snake,” Noah said, and followed.

CHAPTER 2

“It’s Halloween, everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

Halloween
(1978)

Thick colonies of blood-red chokecherries and bracken fern and other shrubbery overran the bank, so Steve couldn’t see where he stepped. He lost his footing twice on the uncertain terrain, but didn’t fall. He called back to the others to be careful. A second later Austin stampeded past him, his arms pin-wheeling. Steve was certain his momentum was going to propel him onto his face. However, he crashed into Jeff’s back—on purpose, it seemed—which brought him to an abrupt halt, his beer sloshing everywhere.

“Thanks, mate,” Austin said jocularly, slapping Jeff on the shoulder and sucking on the foaming mouth of the bottle. Lately he’d been adopting a British accent when he was drunk because he got off on saying words like “lad” and “mate” and “geezer.”

Jeff scowled. “I’m giving you the bill for the dry cleaning.”

“Fancy rich chap like you can pony up a couple bucks.”

Steve stumbled down the last few feet and stopped beside Jeff, who had produced a mickey of vodka from the inside pocket of his now beer-stained jacket. Jenny appeared next, emerging from the fog like a wraith. She was moving slowly, cautious of where she stepped. Her leather pants clung to her long legs, the black elastic top to her small breasts, outlining the triangular cups of her bra. She frowned at the vegetation as she passed through it and said, “I hope there wasn’t any poison ivy in there. I got it once as a kid. It bubbles between your fingers.”

Steve said, “That’ll make gross anatomy interesting.”