CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Doctor Nine sat in the back of his car, eating an orange. He used a single black fingernail to slice through the skin, but he did not peel the fruit. Instead, he cut a wound in it, bent his mouth to it, and then squeezed so that juice ran cold and sweet over his lips and chin.
Only after it was sucked dry did he eat the orange. Bitter skin and all.
It was an experiment. The orange was real, and it took great effort to touch it. Easier, though, than it had been when he had tried it yesterday. Not as easy as it would be tomorrow.
Beside him, the nurse lay back, her thighs spread, rubbing at her naked crotch with furious fingers and laughing as she came. Her thighs and the seat were soaked, and the windows of the car were fogged.
CHAPTER FORTY
Bug began barking. Short, sharp sounds that knocked her back into wakefulness one jolt at a time. Rain rubbed her eyes and then looked into the small fuzzy face. Into liquid brown eyes. Bug was wagging her tail, needing to be paid attention to.
“Come here, you little monster,” she said and pulled the dog to her, enduring licks all over her face. They lay there for a while, doing nothing but sharing warmth. Sometimes that was enough.
Then Rain got up, dressed, and took Bug out for a long walk, trying to exercise the night away and reclaim at least the physical feeling of normalcy. Bug had to sniff everything and left tiny drops of pee here and there, which Rain assumed was the canine version of text messaging with her friends. It was early, though, and the streets were mostly empty. A few of the neighborhood tough guys were out on their usual corners, and they nodded to her. One of them, a guy she used to buy rock from, tapped his pocket and raised an eyebrow, but Rain shook her head. They had that same conversation a dozen times a month. He always responded with the same knowing smile, as if he was saying, “Give it time, girl. You’ll be back.”
She hoped he was wrong about that, but she wasn’t certain.
Back home, she gave Bug some treats, told her to behave, put some music on for company, then went downstairs alone and walked over to Joplin’s building. A threadbare crow balanced uneasily on the telephone line, its beady black eyes fixed on her. She didn’t like the way it followed her every move. Maybe the rain would chase it away. The sky looked ready to burst. Again. Lately the weather report was the same. Rain, rain, and more rain, with occasional lightning. And rain.
“I ought to change my name to Sunny and Dry,” she told the bird. It fluttered its wings and dropped a big splat of white poop onto the ground near her feet. “Yeah, well, there’s that.”
She called Joplin, got voice mail, disconnected. Then she texted him to say she was downstairs and asked if she could come up. No answer.
Rain waited for about a minute before making up her mind.
“Might as well,” she told the crow. It opened its beak as if it were going to caw again, but this time there was no sound. Rain shrugged, climbed the steps, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. The door did give a haunted house creak, but the foyer was unusually cold and smelled strongly of Pine-Sol. There were two dead roaches on the floor below the mailbox. Big black ones, sprawled on their backs. The names on the mailboxes were unfamiliar to her. Diaz, Conseco, Smith, Smith, Alensky, Hoto, Joplin of course, and others. She fished around in her head to try to come up with any first names she may have heard that might match those names. Was there an Esteban here? An Anita? Maybe a Stanley. Had Joplin ever mentioned any of them by name? She didn’t think so. She debated going back to her apartment to write a note that she could tape to the wall here, but frankly didn’t know what she wanted to say or if anyone would respond.
Then there was the thump-thump of feet on the stairs, and there was Joplin, jogging down to the foyer. He blinked in surprise and then smiled a big, warm, happy smile and came toward her, arms wide. He gathered her up, and she clung to him. Then she shoved him back and jabbed his chest with a stiff finger.
“I’ve been calling and calling you,” she said. “Don’t you ever listen to your messages?”
“Oh, yeah, geez, I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot to bring my charger when I went to my sister’s place. Got home half an hour ago. I was heading out to get some paint.” His sister, Lanie, lived in the Village. She managed an office and didn’t do much to hide the fact that she didn’t like Rain very much.
“Christ,” complained Rain, “I really needed to talk to you.”
He studied her, frowning with concern. Scot Joplin was thin, black-haired, and bearded but not in a hipster way. He had very pale brown eyes and a full, sensuous mouth. He wore a University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt over jeans and ancient Chuck Taylors.
“Why?” he asked quickly. “What’s wrong?”
“I came over because of what happened last night. The kid…?”
“You heard about that? That was seriously messed up.”
“I was here last night.”
Concern clouded his face. “Here? Why? Did you know that kid?”
“No,” she said and explained about coming back from the diner with Yo-Yo.
Joplin looked puzzled. “Maybe I’m sleep deprived, Rain, but am I missing something? If you didn’t know the kid, why come over here now?”
“Why not come over? Somebody died practically next door. It’s scary. Why’s that hard to understand?”
Joplin thought about it, shrugged. “Okay. Sure. I guess I can see that. Freaked me out, too. I mean … why would a kid that young do something like that?”
“Something like what?”
He gave her a quizzical look. “I thought you said you and Yo-Yo were here last night.”
“We got here when the EMTs were taking the body out. I don’t know what actually happened.”
Joplin pointed up the stairs. “Third-floor landing. Up there where the super’s working on the ceiling and has everything torn out with the pipes exposed. Kid goes up there, wraps a plastic shower curtain around the big cold water pipe, climbs up on the workman’s ladder, and jumps.”
“He hung himself?”
“Yeah. How freaky is that?” Joplin scratched his bearded chin. “I heard the cops talking about it. They said he did it wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Tied the knot too tight. The one cop said that when they hung people in the old days, they had a little slack in the noose so that there was a jerk on impact that broke the neck and made it quick. Tie it too tight, though, and you just hang there and choke to death.”
Rain went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. She couldn’t see anything, but she shivered anyway. “That’s horrible.”
Joplin said, “The cop said that the kid must have been hanging there for half an hour before he choked out. Said he must have had second thoughts or panicked by reflex or whatever, but there are all these marks on the wall from him kicking and scratching. It’s nasty as shit. They’ll have to paint it all out once they finish doing the pipes and ceiling. Glad I don’t live on three.” He paused and glanced up the stairs, too, then cut her a sideways look. “Which makes me sound like a heartless prick.”
Rain said nothing.
He winced. “It’s pretty sad. Little kid and all, I mean. I meant that stuff like this really turns dials on me. My cousin, Jimmy, committed suicide. He’d been busted for stealing cars in Des Moines, and his lawyer said he was probably going to do a year or two in jail. He was claustrophobic, and the thought of being locked in a cell drove him nuts. Even the two days he spent in county lockup before his folks bailed him out made him go nuts. Screaming and hitting himself. They took him to a psych ward for evaluation, and he spent a whole night in four-point restraints and a week under observation. He was climbing the walls by the time he got home, and then after what the lawyer said, he must have lost it. He went to this skyscraper, 801 Grand, tallest building in Des Moines, climbed twenty-six flights of stairs because he couldn’t deal with elevators, broke into someone’s office after hours, and jumped out of the window.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, God,” murmured Rain.
Joplin shivered. “We were always pretty tight, Jimmy and me. Close cousins, you dig? I was thirteen when he, you know, did it. I can’t get inside the head of someone who would do that to themselves. I had nightmares for years. Still have them every once in a while. Dreams of stepping out of a window, of falling, of seeing the ground rushing up at me and then trying to take it all back, trying to fly or something so that I wouldn’t hit the ground. That’s what I used to think about with Jimmy. I kept imagining what he was thinking as he fell. I mean, I can understand being so trapped and feeling no hope at all and wanting to end it, but actually doing it? No. That’s nuts. That’s way scary. I think maybe he felt that, too, on the way down. Witnesses said they heard him screaming.”
Rain stepped close and gave Joplin a hug. He resisted at first, stiff as a board, but then hugged her back. They stood like that together for a long moment. Then Rain detached herself and glanced up the stairs.
“The boy from last night, does his family know why he did it?”
Joplin shrugged. “That’s just it—no one knows who he is. Didn’t live here.”
“What did he look like?” asked Rain.
Joplin gave her a strange look. “You mean when he was hanging there? That’s a creepy question.”
“What? No, I mean in general. Was he white, black…?”
“Oh. White kid, about twelve, I guess. Brown hair. That’s all I know. I didn’t see him, but that’s what people said.” Joplin put a foot on the bottom step. “Why? You think you might know something about him?”
Rain almost said no, because of course she couldn’t know anything about this unknown boy. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe. I saw a kid yesterday.”
“In the building?”
She realized that the boy she’d seen outside had been the one watching the EMTs bring the dead kid out of the building. He was not the dead boy. And yet somehow they were the same in her mind. Like the younger boy on the train. All the same, impossible as that was. Even so, she nodded. “Around.”
Joplin fished a crumpled business card from his back jeans pocket. “Here. This was under my door with a note saying to call if I knew anything. Guess they gave them out to everyone.”
Rain held it close and squinted at it. Detective Anna-Maria Martini.
“Maybe I’ll call.” She changed the subject. “How’d it go in the city?”
“Good, I think. I have six canvases up at this café in the Village, and they said the owner wanted to talk to me, so I’m hoping it means he wants more stuff now, but I want to talk to them about putting more up. I borrowed a few bucks from Lanie to get more supplies. She knows the owner, so … here’s hoping.”
“That’s great,” said Rain with feigned enthusiasm. “Which café?”
“The Human Bean, on Avenue B?”
“Oh,” she said, “yeah, sure.” She’d gone into the Human Bean once, but it seemed pricey and affected, with people sitting in clusters of old mismatched armchairs and sofas, heads bent together in earnest conversations, probably about things that didn’t matter to Rain. Politics and stuff.
“Started a new canvas the second I got home,” said Joplin. “It’s going to be a little different than the other pieces. Less representational, more suggestive but not straight impressionism or abstract. Somewhere in between. Taking a few creative risks.”
“Can I see it?”
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours. If you want to come over, I can make something. I have pasta and some spicy sausage, and I can pick up a bottle of…”
His voice trailed off and he looked embarrassed.
“I can drink wine,” Rain said. “We’ve had wine together, remember?”
“Yeah. That was a long time ago, and I thought maybe it was, I don’t know, not allowed.”
“Wine’s allowed. Alcohol is not my drug of choice.”
He tried not to wince, failed, looked even more embarrassed. “Look, I need to go get my stuff. Yes or no on dinner?”
“Yes. And yes to wine, too. Something very red and very Italian.”
“Cool,” he said, looking relieved. They went outside together. Her apartment was to the left; the art supply store was eight blocks to the right. Joplin started to go, stopped, looked into her eyes for a moment. “Hey, are you okay?”
She actually laughed. “I had a weird day. Tell you about it over dinner.”
“So … it’s not what happened to the kid.”
“Nothing to do with that,” she lied.
He kissed her and left, and she watched him go. Joplin was sometimes distracted, occasionally flaky, often too much in his own head, and wasn’t really her boyfriend. But he was pretty, he was kind, and he could kiss. Even his quick kisses were warm and deep and very nice. It was like some of the things he painted—filled with layers of unexpected depth and more genuine humanity than was evident from his semidetached social skills.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Rain stood outside and looked up at the cloudy Brooklyn sky.
There was a lot of wind up there, tearing the edges off the clouds and whipping them around. The afternoon sun was only a rumor behind the masses of iron gray, smoky purple, and deep black. She saw that there were more of the ugly crows sitting on the telephone wires and rooftop edges.
Rain didn’t like those birds. She’d always liked crows, but not them, and not the ones she’d been seeing around lately. They looked strange, dirty, feathers were dusty and dry and …
Dead.
The word was whispered inside her mind by a voice that did not belong to her parasite or anyone else she knew. It was the voice of a little boy. Simple, soft, talking the way kids do when they’re explaining something from one of their storybooks.
They’re his nightbirds. They always watch you. They want to steal your time.
She almost spoke a name. Her son’s name. She almost asked the voice in her head if it was Dylan who spoke to her, but she didn’t, fearing a trap. What if Doctor Nine was somehow listening to her thoughts? It was a confusing contradiction; she could think her son’s name, but she couldn’t use it when speaking to any of her inner voices. Sometimes she heard Doctor Nine speaking to her from the shadows of her mind. If he could do that, then how could she be sure he could not read her thoughts? Weren’t they both the same thing, somehow? Or were there rules that she didn’t know? If being insane even had rules. And if being insane was what this was.
Shhhh, whispered the boy.
Rain blinked and realized with a jolt that she’d been standing there with her eyes closed. Not looking at the birds at all. Just standing. Asleep or …
She glanced up at the crows and saw that there were six of them now, but she hadn’t seen the new ones arrive. She glanced around and saw that a car that had been parked near her was gone and a beat-up Jeep was parked in its place, and yet she’d not heard or seen a thing.
Did I actually fall asleep just now? she asked herself. It was an absurd question, and a scary one. The birds cawed as if laughing at her.
“They’re his nightbirds,” she murmured, repeating what the boy had whispered to her. “They want to steal my time.”
Only afterward did she realize that she had changed it from “your time” to “my time.” Accepting it, taking ownership of it. She listened for more, but the boy’s voice was as silent as if it had never spoken.
The crows on either side of the street cawed at her. A warning?
She almost shouted “Fuck you!” at them, but didn’t. Instead, she turned toward the door to the brownstone. It still stood ajar. She had a powerful and—she admitted to herself—irrational need to see where the boy had died.
Rain went in.
The hall was empty, and as she passed the row of mailboxes, Rain brushed her fingers against the nameplate for JOPLIN. Then she climbed the steps. Each single step creaked in its own key. Shrill or sneaky, painful or plaintive. The first-floor landing was only half-lit, with two of the six overhead fluor
escents gone dark and smoky. The disinfectant smell was stronger up here, but she could smell pot smoke and patchouli incense. There was a bundle of last week’s New York Daily News tied with string and stained with coffee and urine. There were lots of greasy footprints and wheel tracks on the runner that led to the second flight of stairs, so Rain followed the path left by police and EMTs. She winced with each floorboard squeak, mentally rehearsing what she would say if someone appeared to ask why she was there.
As she neared the top of the stairs, Rain wondered why she was doing this. The kid who died here could not possibly be the one she’d seen standing in the crowd with Doctor Nine. How could he be? It was impossible. As she thought this, though, the conversation with Sticks came back to her with chilling clarity. Christ, we’re sitting here having a conversation about monsters and neither of us is joking.
If monsters were real, then how was anything impossible? Or, along a parallel track, if she was insane, then how was anything too outrageous to accept?
Because there are always rules, whispered the same voice she’d heard outside. The boy.
“Please, please, please,” Rain begged as if she were speaking to an actual person. “Tell me if this is you.”
The boy’s voice fell silent again. It had sounded different, much farther away, though she did not understand at all how that was possible.
The old building seemed to exhale a weary breath as she stepped onto the third-floor landing. It was colder up here, and none of the fluorescents worked. The white metal frames for them had been removed and stacked against one wall, the tubes still in place, and a pair of sickly yellow droplights hung from the exposed pipes. Boxes of new pipe, sheets of drywall, and a bundle of wooden laths were set against one wall, and a rickety wooden stepladder stood beneath the ceiling. All this work had been done since the last time she’d been to Joplin’s flat, which was up on four.
The runner carpet was badly stained with dark, fresh blotches. Blood, she thought, and maybe shit, too; and her perverse memory provided her with the ugly information that the muscles of corpses went slack before rigor set in, during which things like the sphincter relaxed. Rather than disgusting her, the thought of the little boy hanging there with crap running down inside his pant legs was heartbreaking. It robbed the kid of even the pretense of dignity.