“It brought you to me, so you might live. Let’s go. Quickly now.”
Hoods up, glass crunching and clinking underfoot, we hurried along the promenade, past the smoking remnants of the burnt hat. When we passed the toy store, where the window was broken, the items in the display were arranged as before, except that the marionette was missing. I almost stopped to confirm its disappearance. But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain, and right then my heart insisted I should keep moving and not look back, and never ask where the marionette had gone because my question might be answered.
By the time we heard the sirens, we were two blocks from the mall, in a cobbled backstreet as dark as a deer path in the woods under a half-moon. A sudden wind broomed away the stillness of the night as the man whom I would eventually call Father hooked the disc of iron, lifted it, and set it aside. Piping across the hole where the iron had been, the wind played an oboe note, and I went down into that sound and into a world that I could never have imagined, where I would make a better life for myself.
Three years would pass before I mentioned the marionette to my father, on the night when he warned me about the music box that was surely more than it appeared to be.
26
WITH SOME EFFORT, I REASONED MYSELF INTO waiting to return to Gwyneth’s place until the agreed-upon time. After all, I had known her for less than a day. Although our relationship had developed with almost miraculous ease, if I showed up unannounced at first dark, two hours before expected, regardless of my excuse, I would seem to be disrespecting her wishes. Worse, a girl so afflicted with social phobia that she couldn’t bear to be touched would find my eagerness off-putting.
I understood—or thought I did—why she had felt comfortable with me even though she recoiled from most, if not all, of humanity. The extreme repugnance with which people responded to the sight of me, the fact that I was an abomination to them, allowed Gwyneth to think of me as such an outsider to the human race that her phobia hardly applied in my case. At the same time, because I lived in solitude and she in deep seclusion, our emotional lives must have been to some extent similar, and that shared experience in part formed the basis of her affinity for me.
I hoped that she would eventually feel as tenderly toward me as perhaps she had once felt toward her father. I expected no more, and no more was possible between one who could not be seen and one who could not be touched. After six years of solitude, a friend was the most extravagant gift I could be given, the most for which I hoped.
To reduce the risk that the girl would accidentally be exposed to the shock of my face, to allow us a little more light during our time together, and as a precaution against being recognized for what I am in the streets during these busy evening hours, I wore a ski mask in addition to the hood. There were holes only for my eyes and a loose slash at the mouth. I could breathe easily through the knitting, and I was confident that this cold December evening would justify a mask even to the most suspicious observer.
As I passed beneath the city, on my way to her building near Riverside Commons, I decided that because of Gwyneth’s condition, I would be unwise to mention those things we of the hidden see that no one else does. She had her mysteries, too, which she acknowledged but kept pocketed. In the interest of not being so exotic that I became entirely alien to her, I would pay out my secrets as slowly as she paid out hers.
This time, I avoided Power Station 6 beneath the park, because more people worked the swing shift than those on the graveyard crew. To facilitate the pumping out of transit-system tunnels in a flood, there are work shafts connecting them to the storm-drain system at key points. From one iron rung to the next, I descended one of these, a thirty-foot-long pipe, five feet in diameter, not far from the Commons. As I neared the bottom, a fast train shuttled past in the darkness below me, which meant that I would have at least three minutes until the next one shrieked through. I needed to go only a hundred yards in the subway tunnel, being careful to avoid the electrified third rail, before coming to an emergency-exit door that opened inward to a switchback of wide stairs leading to the surface.
Some such exits terminated in public places, often stations on the line, and were therefore useless to me. This one, however, had once led to the ground floor of the Fifty-seventh Street Armory, which had been torn down nine years earlier during one of the city’s periodic redevelopment frenzies. While the architect’s plans were finalized for the ambitious affordable-housing project that was intended for the site, a temporary stairhead shack had been constructed to receive the emergency stairs from the subway. In hard times, the city had yet to find the funding, and the shack still stood, the door always unlocked from the inside.
I needed to cross one secondary street, follow a short block of alleyway, cross a well-traveled avenue, and navigate a narrow service passage between two grand old houses to arrive behind Gwyneth’s place. Only the midblock dash across the avenue gave me pause, for there were streetlamps and the headlights of oncoming traffic. But masked, hooded, jacketed, and gloved as I was, I elicited nothing more than one angry motorist’s horn.
At the back of her building, lights glowed warmly in apartments on the first and third floors. Ascending the fire escape, I was much relieved to find the draperies fully closed at the second-floor window through which I had watched the Fog be received into the silk-robed man.
At the top landing, the lower sash of the double-hung window had been left open, the bedroom dark beyond. The door on the farther side of the room stood open to the hallway where prismatic light from the cut-crystal ceiling fixture left spear and arrowhead patterns on the wall, with here and there a bright shard of color broken out of the spectrum—blue, indigo, and red.
When I crossed the windowsill and stepped into the room, I knew at once that something must be wrong.
27
THREE YEARS WITH FATHER, ELEVEN YEARS OLD, learning every day that the city was a kind of forest through which our kind could move as secretly as foxes through ferny woods …
At two o’clock one morning, with the key that Father had been given by the man who feared him, yet did not hate him—of whom, more later—he let us into the food bank operated by St. Sebastian’s Church. When the facility was closed, its windows were covered by roll-down burglary-proof shutters made of interlocking steel slats, which allowed us to turn on a few lights for easier shopping, with little risk of arousing the suspicion of any police patrol that might pass by.
The building served two functions, food bank and thrift shop, and an interior archway connected the former with the latter. Father had been given permission to clothe himself—and now me—from the secondhand garments in the thrift-shop stock. Before selecting canned and packaged foods, we meant to find new pants and sweaters for me, because I was a fast-growing boy.
The thrift shop offered more than clothing: some used furniture, shelves of well-read books, other shelves of CDs and DVDs, used toys, and costume jewelry. Dishes. Decorative items.
That night I discovered a music box that enchanted me. It was made of wood, intricately painted and lacquered, but what charmed me in particular were four tiny dancers on the top. Three inches tall, beautifully carved and painted, with exquisite details, they included a princess wearing a long gown and tiara, and a prince in formalwear and crown. In spite of its fine craftsmanship, the piece was comical, because the prince and the princess did not embrace each other but instead took two fanciful characters as their dancing partners. The prince had his right arm around a goggle-eyed frog, and with his left hand he held the webbed right hand of that grinning amphibian, as if about to waltz. The pretty princess stood in a similar pose, but she was in the embrace of a creature who had the head, chest, and arms of a man but the legs, hooves, ears, and horns of a goat; he looked especially silly because he wore a cocked wreath of green leaves on his head.
After I wound the box with its key and pushed the switch, the two unlikely couples began to dance to the music, turning ar
ound in circles as they also moved along figure-eight tracks. I laughed, but Father watched without even a smile, solemn as he seldom was.
“She dances with the Greek god Pan,” he said, “and the prince with something worse.”
“They’re funny.”
“Not to me.”
“You don’t think they’re funny?”
“That’s not a waltz,” Father said.
“It’s not?”
“They changed it into a waltz.”
“What was it before?”
The dancers went around, around.
Father said, “They changed it to mock it.”
Inside the box, the pegs on the turning cylinder plucked the tuned-steel teeth on the song plate. In spite of being mechanical, the music had at first struck me as sparkling, effervescent. Now it had an undeniably disturbing quality, the steel teeth biting off the notes as if music were a violent and hateful art. As the tempo increased, the royal couple and their partners turned more rapidly, until they seemed not to be dancing anymore but whirling about in a mad frenzy.
Father switched off the music and the four figurines. He plucked out the small steel key that wound the mechanism, and put it in a pocket of his pants.
I said, “Are you taking that? Why?”
“So it can’t be played.”
“But, sir, then it can’t be sold.”
“All the better.”
“But isn’t that like stealing?”
“I’ll give the key to our friend.”
“What friend?”
“The one who lets us come here.”
“Is he our friend?”
“No. But he’s not our enemy.”
“Why will you give him the key?”
“So he can decide about the music box.”
“Decide what?”
“What to do with it.”
“The store needs money. Won’t he decide to sell it?”
“I hope not,” Father said.
“What do you hope he’ll do with the box?”
“Smash it. Come on, let’s find you those pants and sweaters.”
We chose a pair of dark khakis, blue jeans, and a couple of sweaters for me. Father rolled them and stuffed them in a gunnysack that he had brought for that purpose.
In the food bank, following his instructions, after he filled my backpack with light packages of dry pasta and crackers, and after I had filled his with canned goods and blocks of cheese, he said, “You want to know about the music box.”
“I just wonder why smash it.”
“You know those things we both see that others don’t.”
“You mean the Fogs and the Clears.”
“Call them whatever. I told you don’t look at them directly if you feel they’re looking at you.”
“I remember.”
“And I told you it isn’t wise to spend a lot of time thinking about them.”
“But you didn’t say why it isn’t wise.”
“You’ve got to figure that out in your own good time. What you need to know right now is that the Fogs, as you call them, sometimes hide in things like that box.”
“They hide in music boxes?”
“Not just music boxes,” Father said. “In all kinds of man-made things, in anything they want.”
“Only man-made?”
“I think only. Maybe it has to do with who made the thing, the character of the person. If the object was made by someone consumed by anger or envy, or lust, or whatever, then the Fog feels drawn to that thing, feels comfortable inside it.”
“Why do they hide in things?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know that hide is the right word. They go into things like that maybe to dream. To sort of hibernate. I don’t know. They’re dreaming away for weeks, months, years, decades, but time doesn’t mean anything to them, so it doesn’t matter.”
“One of them is dreaming in the music box?”
“Dreaming and waiting. Yes, I feel it. One day you’ll learn to feel it, too.”
“What is it waiting for?”
“Someone to see the box and take it home, to take the Fog home.”
“What happens when someone takes it home?”
“Ruination,” Father said. “Now we’ve talked too much about this already. If it’s dreaming, talking too much about it can wake it up.”
We went into the night again, where the man-made city bustled and slept, laughed and wept, danced and dreamed, and waited.
When we were safely below the streets, walking in the path of countless floods long past and floods to come, whispery echoes of our voices spiraling along the curved concrete, I told him about the marionette that, three years earlier, had disappeared from the shop window. He said that this was the very thing he meant when he told me about the music box, and I said but no one took the puppet home, and he said maybe one of the delinquents with butane torches scooped it up as they ran away or maybe, since it had legs, the marionette went somewhere on its own. He said we shouldn’t talk any more about it, that if it had been sleeping three years somewhere in the city, we didn’t want to talk it awake.
28
ONE THING WRONG WITH THE DARKNESS IN THE bedroom was the smell of it, which had been fresh and clean before. Now a spice cologne faintly seasoned the air. The Goth girl had not used or needed fragrances, and this was the very scent that I had first smelled the previous night at the library.
Another thing wrong was the intensity of the quiet, no clink or clatter of dinner preparations from the kitchen, no footsteps, no word of greeting though I had arrived precisely on the hour. Even the city had gone strangely mute, with no traffic noise or distant music or voices admitted by the open window.
I stood perfectly still, letting the darkness wind its silence around me, as breathless as if mummified in strips of gravecloth, waiting for a sound from her or from the man who had invaded her apartment. I felt alone. As an expert on solitude, I didn’t doubt my perception.
Afraid that my flashlight might reveal her body slashed and broken, I hesitated to switch it on, but then of course I did. The mattress had been pulled off the box springs, as if he thought that something might have been hidden between them. The nightstand drawer hung open, as did the door to the walk-in closet. The closet had been searched. The clothes and shoes had been thrown to the floor.
If I had met her only to lose her, this might be the equivalent of the death by fire that I had long expected. Loss can be an incandescent terror equal to any flames.
I hurried to her office across the hall. The drawers of the desk had been turned out, the contents scattered. Her computer was on, and I imagined that he might have tried to search hers as she had searched his.
In the living room, books had been swept from the shelves and tumbled in a pile as if for burning.
Shattered plates and glassware carpeted the kitchen. I startled when the wall phone rang, and then I clattered through the brittle debris to pluck the handset from the cradle.
Because I had never answered a phone before in all my twenty-six years, I didn’t think to say hello.
Gwyneth said, “Addison?”
“Yes. Me. It’s me. I’m glad it’s you, you’re okay.”
“I knew you’d be there. You wouldn’t stand me up.”
“He’s wrecked the apartment.”
“At five o’clock, I was at the window, waiting for the storm. I always like to see the first of it.”
“What storm?”
“Snow. It was supposed to be snowing by five, but it still isn’t. I saw him park at the curb and get out of his car. He didn’t know about that address or any of the other seven. Someone ratted me out.”
Remembering the name of the one man whom her father trusted to be her guardian, I said, “Teague Hanlon?”
“If it’s him, I’m finished sooner than later. But it isn’t him. There’s another possibility. Anyway, when I saw Telford get out of that car, I knew if he had the address he also had a key. So I went out the b
edroom window, down the fire escape. Addison, will you help me?”
“Yes. Of course. What can I do? Anything you need.”
“Let’s be careful,” she said. “In case someone’s listening. I’m gonna ask a couple questions. Just answer yes or no. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Remember the fish?”
“No.”
“Last night. The fish that weren’t there.”
“No. Yes! All right,” I said, remembering the pond in Riverside Commons, where the koi had been moved inside for the winter.
“Can you meet me there in an hour?”
“Yes. Or sooner.”
“An hour. Look for a Land Rover.”
“What’s a Land Rover?”
“Like a truck. An SUV.”
“You drive?”
“I won’t be pushing it. Just don’t be frightened off by it.”
“Don’t you be frightened, either. I’m wearing a ski mask now.” Belatedly explaining why I hadn’t spoken when I’d picked up the receiver, I added, “This is the first time I’ve ever used a phone.”
“It can’t be.”
“But it is. I don’t know anyone to call.”
“How do you like it?”
“The phone? It’s okay. But I’d rather we were in the same room.”
“Fifty-eight minutes now.”
“I’ll be there,” I promised.
She hung up, and after maybe half a minute, so did I.
29
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I GOT MY WATCH FROM A dead man. Father assured me that it wasn’t stealing, but I never really thought it was in the first place. Before he finished dying, the man wanted to give the Rolex to Father; and under the circumstances it would have been a great unkindness not to accept it.
On a night in November, we were abroad with little fear of being unmasked and savaged, because pounding cold rain roared down like a judgment. The people of the city were proud of being tough. They said of themselves that they were case-hardened negotiators, brutal competitors, sharp with fools, stripped of illusions by the realities of the streets and therefore not softened by sentimentalism, never looking for a fight but ever ready for one. I can’t say whether any significant portion of the population actually possessed all of these qualities or any of them. What I do know is that the city was a comfort machine designed to provide amenities and conveniences, and regardless of how flinty and indurate its people might have been with outsiders and even with one another, they retreated at once from Nature when she turned furious. They took refuge in warm cozy rooms replete with so many forms of entertainment that the wet and windy world beyond their walls could be forgotten for hours at a time.