Patty sipped her beer. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but she went white as a ghost. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Claimed she didn’t know the kid at all, but…” He spread his hands. “On the way home, I almost got her to open up, but she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. Tell you one thing, Pats, she’s one terrified young woman. She has some grit and she has some skills at hiding it, but … well, you know me. I know what fear looks like.”
Patty sighed and nodded. They touched glasses and finished the beers. Monk opened two more.
“And you think the stuff in the vial will give you an answer?” asked Patty after her first sip.
“Shit if I know. I got no ‘in’ to her. Depending on what I get from Doc Silverman and Morty, maybe I’ll have somewhere to start.”
Patty leaned back against her table and drank from the bottle as she studied him. She wore a thin tank top that was dark with sweat. Her nipples were visible through the material, and a pulse throbbed in her throat. She blew across the top of her bottle, making a high, sweet, flute sound. Her eyes saw more of him than anyone else ever did, Monk knew. He sat there and endured her appraisal.
“One of these days, you’re going to get killed doing this kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
Patty shook her head. “I’ll call Morty.”
INTERLUDE ELEVEN
THE MONSTERS AND THE BOY
“Where’s my mom?”
The boy asked the question a lot.
He already had the answer about where his dad was. The nurse had made him watch war movies and replayed the scenes where soldiers died. Never easy deaths. Bad ones. Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge, We Were Soldiers, The Hurt Locker. Dozens of others. Soldiers being shot as they stormed a beach. Soldiers being shot as they huddled in a big landing craft, dying with nowhere to run or hide. Soldiers being blown apart by gunfire, cannon fire, land mines. Soldiers dying alone in remote jungles. Soldiers crawling through burning deserts, dragging shattered limbs. Soldiers trying to stuff their intestines back into the ruins of their stomachs.
Every time a soldier died on the screen, the nurse said the same thing. “Your dad.”
Your dad.
Your dad.
Dead in a thousand ways. Always dead. Forever dead.
After a while when the boy watched those videos, he did not see the faces of the actors playing those doomed soldiers. He saw a kind-faced young man who looked like an older version of him. The same eyes, the same hair, the same face shape. Dying. Dad dying.
After a while, the boy stopped asking.
There were new movies after that. Sometimes only clips of scenes cut from a hundred films and TV shows. People—male and female—tying rubber bands around their arms and sticking themselves with needles. People smoking funny little cigarettes or huffing paper bags or dragging on glass pipes. People sniffing powder up their noses. People sticking needles under their toenails or between their toes. People taking little pills or eating mushrooms or eating strange candy.
The first time he saw the images, he was happy because the people looked so happy. Their eyes drifted shut, and they smiled peaceful smiles.
That changed quickly, though.
The nurse began adding scenes of these same people looking sick, emaciated, wasted, dirty, dying. Dead.
As the weeks passed, the videos stopped being about people in general and she showed him only scenes with women. Young women. Taking their drugs, getting high. That was part of it. The nurse also showed him some of the things they did to be able to afford their drugs.
He was seven when she showed him the first of those videos. It was how he learned about sex.
It was how he learned about his mother.
That knife never seemed to lose its edge.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Joplin fell asleep, but Rain only pretended to doze. When he was deep, she slipped out of bed, got dressed, and left.
On the way out, though, she paused to look at his latest canvas. It was a big piece, six feet across and five high. She stood staring at it for several long minutes.
His work was almost always moody, except when he was doing something on commission. When left to wander his own artistic paths, Joplin tended toward vaguely representational pieces in which realistic and recognizable human or animal subjects were contrasted by impressionistic backgrounds, with colors left to suggest mood and meaning.
Not this time. The current piece had no direct realism anywhere in it. Blocks of color, large and small, collided in a very abstract series of lines that suggested—however vaguely—a city street at night. Harsh lines of blended colors seemed to be cars moving at high speeds while rectangular shadows leaned drunkenly away as if the speed of the cars was warping the buildings. That was what dominated most of the painting, but there was something else, and that’s what drew Rain’s attention. Joplin had dabbed some pure white in the upper left, but he’d begun to smear and blend the edges. At first, Rain thought that the darker colors were polluting the white, but then she seemed to catch the meaning he was going for. The grays and blacks and blues and purples that surrounded the white were not closing in it, but rather it was like a light shining through all that darkness. If that was what he meant, then it was much more hopeful of a painting than it first appeared.
Hopeful, but not sentimental, she decided, because the white—the light, as she now thought of it—was so far away and there was so much darkness between the eye viewing the painting and that purity.
“It’s like the Fire Zone,” she murmured and then cut a quick look to see if she’d awakened Joplin. He slept on, though, his chest rising and falling, one arm stretched out as if to hold her.
He’s beautiful, she thought, and something warm and secret and small seemed to ignite deep inside her. Something that wasn’t passion, though the memory of that was still there. No, this was something else, and Rain recoiled from it because it was too close to something she’d felt only once and long ago.
She backed away from the canvas and forced herself to turn away from Joplin.
You’re not allowed, whispered her parasite. Doctor Nine will know, and he’ll come and punish you both.
She almost cried aloud.
Instead, she snuck away like a thief.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The man in the apartment on the third floor of Joplin’s building was Asian, but he wasn’t old. Not nearly as old as he looked. He looked eighty, but he was barely fifty. He felt a thousand years old.
His name was Yukio Hoto. Japanese by birth, though he had spent most of his life studying and teaching at Ki Gompa monastery in the Spiti Valley of Tibet. Hoto had devoted his life to Buddha’s gentle teachings and to sharing the essence of that knowledge. Not proselytizing but sharing, encouraging, guiding. It had made him happy for a long time; it had fulfilled him and made him joyful, even after moving to the cynical streets of New York here in America.
The last ten years, though, had aged him. He looked like a man made of dust. Grief and guilt can do that to a person. His youth had been leeched out of him along with his hope.
I have failed, he thought, as he always did. I am the enemy of hope.
The other monks of his order tried to convince him otherwise, but he saw the growing alarm in their eyes. The fear. The despair.
I am the enemy of hope. I have failed.
He crept to the railing and peered over to see the young woman go down the last few steps and along the foyer toward the door. Tears burned in his eyes, but they felt cold and bitter.
That poor girl.
He remembered her from long ago, but he had no idea she had a friend in this building. He knew the artist upstairs had some kind of girlfriend, but Hoto rarely paid attention to the comings and goings here. He sat in his room and prayed for forgiveness and waited for the clock of his life to run out. How could he even begin to imagine that the child’s mother lived nearby? Or that she ever came into this building.
&nbs
p; A voice whispered to him. It came from nowhere in particular, but it filled the hall.
He’s almost strong enough now, it said. He’s almost able to come all the way through. And he is sooooooo grateful for all your service.
Hoto cried out and sagged back, crushed, stabbed through the heart at the memory of her sweet, sad face.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the empty foyer. It was not in reply to the words. He hoped that Buddha heard him. He prayed that it was so.
Then a terrible thought occurred to him, and he turned and looked up at the naked pipes above the ladder. His lips parted in a silent “oh” and then slowly widened into an equally silent scream as awareness struck him like fists, like bullets, driving him back against the wall, a hand now clamped over his mouth.
INTERLUDE TWELVE
THE MONSTERS AND THE BOY
They built together in the dark.
Doctor Nine taught the boy how to make clocks. Very special clocks. With numbers on the front, a small crystal vial inside, and a keyhole in the back. The boy had seen clocks like that many times, when the doctor and the nurse took him to places where people were sad or hurt or dying.
“Why do it that way?” asked the boy. “Why a key?”
“Ah,” said Doctor Nine, “that’s the secret. That’s what makes this all so much fun.”
The doctor held up his own clock, the pocket watch one with all the hands. He turned it over to show that there was a keyhole in the back.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
It was full dark when Rain got home.
Bug scolded her with sharp barks and yelps, but wagged her tail and accepted hugs and kisses. They went out together for a walk around the block, past the abandoned homes and burned-down stores and the drug dealers and the pain. Rain stopped by a Korean market that had closed a few weeks ago. The windows were boarded up, and someone had painted the same message Rain had seen on the wooden barrier near where the brownstone had burned down.
The Shadow People Are Coming!
The first time she’d seen that message, Rain had dismissed it as nothing. A rave notice or one of those needlessly obscure ads for a band that was about to drop a new CD. Not now, though. It occurred to her that the words meant something. Hadn’t the guard at the morgue been reading a book about the Shadow People? She was sure of it.
On impulse, she opened the Google app on her phone and typed in Shadow People. A bunch of posts on different websites came up, including a Wikipedia page for Shadow Person that talked about how some people believed in living shadows. Apparently there were beliefs all around the world and back through history of creatures that either lived in the shadows or were some kind of living shadow. Depending on the source of the belief, these Shadow People could be ghosts, gods, demons, or supernatural entities who had no other designation and fell into their own category. There were links to podcasts about it, including the radio show Coast to Coast AM that Straight Bob listened to. All conspiracy theory stuff. On the other hand, there actually was a band called Shadow People, an ultra-dark heavy metal band out of Saginaw, Michigan. And a movie from back in 2013 about people watching haunted videos that somehow summoned evil beings.
Bug whined and tugged at her leash, but Rain was caught up in her reading. She found several websites that cited studies done in the 1960s and ’70s about people in a sleep study who claimed to have encountered “shadow intruders.” Some of the articles were weighted down with clinical explanations of perception distortions caused by sleep paralysis, narcolepsy, drug use, or sleep deprivation. Rain had to smile at that, however sourly, because she had suffered from all of that at one time or another.
Bug barked at her.
“Okay, okay,” said Rain, reluctantly pocketing her phone. “Let’s go.”
The little dog did her best to pull Rain down the street and away from the sign. Rain did not notice the Cadillac parked on the other side of the street. Old, black, beautiful in an ugly way, with smoked windows. She had not seen it when she’d glanced across the street during the walk, because it was not always there to be seen.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Back home, they climbed the stairs, and Rain locked them in.
Bug went scampering over to the bed, dug her way under the covers, and did not make a sound. Rain took a very long shower in water so hot it nearly made her scream. If she could have stood it hotter, she would have dialed it up; but no amount of water could boil off the day. Her only regret was that she also smelled of Joplin’s cologne and of their mingled body oils. She closed her eyes and thought about the feel of his strong hands moving over her last night, in the shower and in bed. He had a gentle, knowing touch, and they had made love enough times for him to be familiar with the landscape of her body. He knew the things that made her tremble and he knew the things she did not like. Joplin knew how to kiss, to bite, to caress. Rain felt heat blooming deep inside her, and she wished she had stayed with the artist. For more of him. For more of his warmth.
Optimism was not the emotional muscle that got the best workout from her, but she was starting to wonder if maybe it was time to stop barking at people when they called Joplin her boyfriend. Sure, he was weird and moody and sometimes got lost in his own head while he was working on a new canvas—but so what? She was weird and moody all the time. Joplin was a beautiful man, and he was a good man. He knew a lot about her past and her damage, and he never backed off, never flinched away.
She let the water rain down on her as she thought about him. And about the future.
Then the old, ugly voice in her head began whispering to her. Telling her that Joplin did not know everything, did he? He knew she’d been an addict, but he didn’t know everything Rain had done to ensure her next fix, and the next, and the next.
“Shut up,” pleaded Rain, pounding the side of her fist against the wall.
Tell him everything, taunted the parasite. Tell him about the train, the glasses, the boy. Tell him about Doctor Nine. See what happens. Go on, see what happens.
She beat the wall until her fist ached.
After a while—a long while—the parasite fell silent.
“Goddamn you,” said Rain, though that might have been directed anywhere. The parasite, Doctor Nine, the world, the truth. Anywhere.
She turned the water off, dried off, and dressed in the warmest clothes she had. Thick woolen tights and an oversized sweatshirt. Ugly clothes, but safe ones. Familiar ones. She put on thick socks and climbed into bed. Only when she was snugged under blankets did she realize that her ringer had been off all day. She checked her messages and found a slew of them. From Yo-Yo and from both Bobs. Eight from bill collectors, but she deleted those. One from her mother telling her that her mail was being forwarded. Cold and plain like that, no sending love or asking her to call back.
“Thanks, Mom,” said Rain bitterly. Even so, she sent a thank-you text. Good thing text messages lack inflection, and she never added emojis when texting with her mother.
The messages from her friends were nearly identical. They were all skipping tonight’s meeting and were heading straight to the Diner. That was good, because Rain was not in a mood to share with a roomful of people, many of whom were strangers.
She thought about this as she stared across the short, cold stretch of floor that separated her bedroom-cum–living room from the door to the bathroom and the door to the world. Her tiny place. Her prison cell.
“God, I wish I had some rock,” she told the air around her. It was not the first time she’d said that. She said it in meetings sometimes, mostly to connect with the common hunger they all shared. She said it now because she wanted it so bad her brain hurt. She needed it to open a door in the floor that she could drop through and be out of her fucking life. Crack was the only thing that could blunt the edges and make the moment feel safe. Feel beautiful. She often thought about filling the tub, smoking a pipe, and then cutting her wrists so that the smoke would lift her up and carry her away into the big black without a whimper. br />
She could almost smell it now, sitting there in the gloom of a rainy evening. Outside, the storm bullied the twilight and made her building shudder. Inside, there was the memory of smoke, of bliss. Of escape.
Inside her mind, a voice murmured a single word from far, far away.
Mommy.
“It’s not you, Dylan,” she said bitterly. “It can’t be you.”
No answer.
Bug wormed her way out from under the covers and looked at her with doggie concern in her big eyes. When Rain didn’t immediately pet her, Bug came and snuggled in against her hip and tried to lift Rain’s hand with the point of a wet nose. Rain ran her fingers along the dog’s neck.
“This is me falling apart,” Rain told her in a voice that was far too reasonable. “That’s all it is, baby. This is your mom finally losing it. There are no monsters. No Shadow People. There is no Fire Zone. There’s no D-D-Doc…”
She stumbled to a stop, unable to say the name.
“He’s not real,” announced Rain.
Why not smoke a pipe? Just one. Why not? Her mind posed the questions as a possibility.
“Maybe,” Rain said, putting it out there, nailing it to the moment. Allowing it to be a possibility and accepted the cold comfort it offered. It helped. It really helped, and for once Rain wasn’t afraid of it.