The Lucifer Messiah (16 page)

“I understand completely. Your concern for your friend is much appreciated, but I can assure you that I know nothing of his current location. Of course, if anything were to come up, I would keep your words in mind.”

Flanagan nodded.

“Now detective,” Calabrese continued. “I really must excuse myself. There are other matters which demand my attention, and I have put them off far too long already.”

Flanagan let himself out, more suspicious now than he had been when he'd entered.

Once he was gone, Calabrese re-bolted the door. Gathering his robe around him, he slowly climbed the stairs to his loft. He opened the door to find Victor Huang just as he had left him, naked, tied to a chair, and bleeding from the stubs where six of his fingers had been recently severed.

Calabrese closed the door behind him. There was a sound like a raven shrieking, and a growl.

Then a man screamed.

T
HEY HAD COME TO MEET IN THE WORST PART OF
town. Both had made certain no one had followed them, but neither one was really positive. Every shadow could hold a danger, but when she saw him again, Charybdis didn't care.

“My love,” she said, falling into his arms.

They were inside the doors of an abandoned tenement, the glass broken out of the windows. An alley cat whined nearby.

“You know I love you. I have never been able to refuse you Charybdis, but this time I almost did. It's too dangerous, we can't see each other until this is finished,” Scylla said.

“Until our disgrace is absolved?” she answered.

“We're closer than we have been in so long, why risk it now?” Scylla asked.

Charybdis straightened up, and arched her back as she held him. She was serious, urgent.

“Because now is the only time. We must discuss what I proposed last night.”

Scylla knew exactly what Charybdis was talking about. In years past they had often spoken that way. With few words.

“Haven't you given it any thought?” she asked. “I'm afraid that is all I have thought about since our last meeting,” the rat-man answered.

“Then I need your answer,” she said, prodding him.

Scylla shook his head.

“I don't have one. Not yet.”

“We're running out of time. If we're to act, we have to do it soon.”

He still seemed unconvinced.

“Why should we do anything? Why risk losing what we have waited for all these many years? Especially now, when we're so close,” he said.

“Close to what?” she replied.

“To this,” he said, reaching in closer to gently touch his lips against hers. “Forever. Haven't we waited long enough?”

Charybdis rolled her tongue over her lower lip. She hadn't felt that sensation in ages. She wanted it again. But she held off.

“Too many years have gone by, wasted years. That is why we must do this, so that we never waste so much precious time again,” she said.

Scylla stayed close. He could still taste the cigarettes on her breath.

“Charybdis, this is all that I want. All that I have ever wanted was to be with you. Isn't that what you want too? Or have the years changed you so?” he answered, wrap
ping his arms around her waist.

She lowered her head from his gaze.

“I have changed, yes. But not in that way. I have learned. Learned from Argus that there are things to value more than obedience.”

“Such as?”

“If we do nothing, the Morrigan will likely prevail. We will be together again, as we both wish,” she said, turning back to look in his eyes.

“You speak as though that is a trifle. We will regain our lost honor, our rightful place that has so long been denied us.”

“We will be servants once more. Slaves, really.” Scylla breathed heavily. He knew she was right, but he could think of no viable alternative.

“What other choice is there?” he asked.

“Freedom,” she replied, plainly.

“Freedom?”

“That will last forever. You and I, free, forever. But you must be willing to do this with me. I can't do it alone,” Charybdis said.

Scylla sighed. He scratched the fuzz on his pointed chin. Then, finally, he nodded.

“Together,” he said. “As long as we're together.”

S
EAN WAS OUT AND ABOUT TOWN.
I
T FELT GOOD.
H
E
didn't remember a lot from the past days, just a few glimpses really. But it didn't matter all that much. He wasn't about to let a few ill-timed bullets and some unfortunate blood loss spoil his plans.

No, he had come back to the old neighborhood for a reason, and it wasn't to play games with fat gangsters and odd-looking hangers-on.

His dented felt fedora slung low over his eyes, he passed anonymously through crowds of chattering, busy strangers, along sidewalks where he had once known everyone and now knew no one. He drank in the chaotic, throbbing energy of the street, listening in on a thousand simultaneous conversations and arguments and hints of music, ambling past storefronts that had changed hands many times since his days in the Kitchen, but hadn't really changed much at all.

Chestnuts were still roasting on corner vender-stands. He savored the deep burning aroma. No place else had
that smell. There were street peddlers in Vienna, and Paris and Budapest, and a dozen other cities he'd been to, but for some reason, their stuff never smelled quite the same as the mélange of warm scents that was so imprinted on him from childhood.

Only in New York.

Italian fruit stands still sold oranges and apples and vegetables he couldn't pronounce. Even in the November cold, the vendors in their yellow slickers hawked their wares only a few feet removed from the stifling crush of exhaust fumes spewing out of the endless rush of taxis and buses.

Irish pubs were still Irish pubs too. Even if the pseudo-Gaelic names had mostly changed, shamrocks and beer taps and refuges from the wife and kids were the same everywhere, no matter what uncial-stenciled logo hung over the door.

Church bells gonged somewhere in the distance, muted some by the general noise of the street. They reminded him of one more thing that he had given up when he left the old West Side.

Some things were different, though.

It was brighter than he remembered; whole sections of the neighborhood were no longer strangled by leviathan daytime shadows. The elevated trains that had once rumbled so loudly above the tenements were mostly gone. Now almost everything was underground. Tubes, like in London. Finally it seemed that someone had let the sun shine down on Hell's Kitchen.

There were more ethnic folks around too. Puerto
Ricans, and Dominicans and others he didn't recognize on sight. Used to be mostly just Irish and Italians, he remembered, block-by-block, building-by-building even. They had experienced enough problems getting along in his day. How all the new people fit in, he couldn't even begin to guess.

It was along the piers where he lamented the changes the most. The spot where he had spent so many sweltering summer afternoons diving into the river with Vince and Maggie was now occupied by a ventilation tower for the new Lincoln Tunnel. Nothing really was sacred, after all.

Even though he had left the place in sorrow, anger more accurately, all he could remember were the good times. As he took in the sights, sounds, and smells of his long-lost home, all he could recall was the happiness. Friends. Loves. Good times, times that now seemed so very far away.

Nostalgia didn't last forever, though. Especially not when a rail-thin blond girl wearing a raincoat on a sunny day was following close behind, watching him pass through every crowded corner and turn.

Sean didn't recognize her, but that didn't matter. She was on him, darting a little too elegantly between the pushcarts and the yammering crowds; trying a little too hard to blend in, as if she knew she hadn't been invited to the party.

He wasn't about to lead her on.

Careful to keep her at a distance, he turned into a narrow side street and pushed past a fire escape ladder that had been lowered to the sidewalk. Then, slipping around a pair of men who were arguing over a flat tire on a mint
green Studebaker in what he thought was Spanish, he ducked through a torn-out section in a chain link fence that fixed the rough edges of a gravel parking lot.

He caught a quick look through the fence and the shouting men with their disabled car. She hadn't made the turn around the far corner yet, and was out of sight for a moment. The truncated lot was of the minimum size for a parking area, with about twenty-odd cars wedged in tightly between three brick-face, four-story apartment houses that stood where the grungy tenements used to wallow. Though it was no better than half-full, and by the rickety shape of most of the autos settled there, more like a junkyard than an actual lot, it was suitably claustrophobic.

Sean ducked behind a pair of Oldsmobiles parked nose-to-nose, one with the front windshield cracked on the passenger side, the other with at least a year's worth of grime clinging to the windows.

Arachne came around the corner just a second later.

She scanned the area, the empty booth, the sorry collection of junk heaps scattered around the gravel lot. No sign of Sean. But there was a noise, a yelp. It was coming from behind the two Oldsmobiles.

She neared slowly, carefully, ready for something, but not sure what. Around the bumper she came, but she ended up smiling, rather than fighting.

Two Cocker Spaniels were wrapped up in a heap of abandoned clothing. From the squeals the dogs were making as they writhed, one on top of the other, she guessed that they were humping. In broad daylight, of all things;
right out in the open. She shook her head, and turned back toward the side street.

She only got a few feet, however, before she heard an altogether different kind of sound skitter up in her wake. But she couldn't turn fast enough. A large hand closed over her mouth even as she tried to whirl. Another one twisted her arm one scream and a foot-and-a-half too far in the wrong direction.

Arachne tried to struggle through the sharp surge of pain the arm-bar fired through her entire left side, but she found herself quickly thrown down against the gravel. The dogs were gone. She turned her head and found, without much surprise, Sean Mulcahy on top of her. His hands were hairy, almost furry, but she didn't have the time to consider details.

“Now, my beautiful little creature. What's your name?” he seethed, teeth clenched.

“I work for Argus. I'm no threat to you,” she replied, her arm released but his hands now clenched like a vice grip around her throat. The canine hand-hair on his fingers and knuckles was receding into his pale skin, withering away with the strangest display of human alopecia she'd ever seen.

“That's not what I asked you. One more chance, honey, and then I'll have to live without ever knowing,” he answered.

She tried to swallow, and tried to nod. Sean kept his hold firm on her, just enough to leave her room to breathe, a little.

“Arachne. My name is Arachne,” she gasped.

“Spider-girl, eh?”

“Yes, Lucifer.”

His already petulant expression turned furious.

“That's not my name.”

She grimaced, choking as she fought to take a breath, but his grip on her neck finally relented.

“What's your real name?” he asked.

Arachne was puzzled.

“Answer me. Your parents didn't name you Arachne, did they? What's your real name?”

She was a long moment in wondering, but not from any intended delay. The thought had not honestly crossed her mind for the better part of six decades.

“It is, it was, Celine. Celine Lafleur,” she answered, finally able to catch her breath and her memory.

“French, huh? Explains the accent. Okay, Arach-ne. What the hell do you think you're doing around here? Don't you people know better by now?”

She answered dutifully, like a POW offering the standard name, rank, and serial number.

“Argus commanded me to seek you, and I have done so.”

Sean shook his head.

“Right. I forgot how loyal you folks are. What does that old bastard want?”

“He wishes to speak with you. The season dawns, and our feast approaches. We both know that agents of the Keeper still prowl these streets, seeking to harm you. Argus wishes to form an alliance. He wishes to help you.”

“I'll bet,” Sean replied as he got off her and picked up his hat and coat from the spot on the ground where the dogs had been fucking.

The New York City subway system had been built in stages, haltingly at the start, and only later with any success. Attempts had been made as early as the mid-nineteenth century to tunnel beneath the skyline, burgeoning upward even at that early date. Those first digs had ended in failure, however, leaving abandoned, half-collapsed underground passages hidden beneath the Gotham towers.