All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(22)

Then I was somewhere else. I stood in a cramped hallway. A weak orange light came from the stairwell. That light, the color of a stone-hard, unripe peach, traced the shape of a man sleeping on his side, his face turned toward the wall. Mold climbed the chipped plaster, and when I—or, better said, when DeHaven Knight—took a step forward, the carpet squished underfoot. Lightly, DeHaven Knight kicked the sleeping man’s heel. He grumbled, his arm flopped over his eyes, and the carpet squelched as he wriggled closer to the rotting wall.

An instant of suffocating exhilaration swept over DeHaven Knight. His chest tightened, and his throat, and the hollows of his cheeks. It was the feeling of something enormous closing around him, a hand, the hand of God, and the fingers closing tighter and tighter, and his mind spun with the excitement of it. A moment later, the pressure and the tightness vanished, and DeHaven Knight took a deep breath and was calm.

The way I understood that calm, the way DeHaven Knight understood that calm, was a picture: a view of a city block, New York, the sky and the sidewalk and the third building on the left all the same color, and ice an inch thick across everything, ice so thick and clear and perfect that it held the sunlight, that it held a triangle of waxed paper that had once wrapped a hot dog, that it held the whole city, the whole goddamn city, and everything quiet and slick and clean and perfect.

Then I was back in the moldy hallway, back with water seeping out of the carpet and puddling around DeHaven Knight’s shoes as he knelt, and his hand slipped inside his shirt and found the wire with the cork handles he’d made at home. And DeHaven Knight’s fingers, which weren’t so old and weren’t so gnarled, not in this memory, didn’t shake at all, not at all, as he slipped the wire over the sleeping man’s head. At the last instant, the sleeping man woke. He tried to slip free of the garrote, and he bellowed and flailed his arms, but he was drunk and still mostly asleep. His single shout cut off into a wheeze, and the wheeze changed into a gargle, and DeHaven Knight’s hands tightened on the cork handles, aching from the pressure. A line of blood appeared now where the wire cut into livid flesh. As the sleeping man choked and struggled, as DeHaven Knight planted a knee in the small of his back and tightened his grip, all of it played out through the crystal clarity of that ice on a New York city block, all of it played out with light streaming from the edges, the way the morning light had cut and sharpened the ice’s edges.

“This is what you get, you dirty bagga,” DeHaven Knight whispered, and the words were his mother’s. The words went back to a time before DeHaven Knight could even understand, before he could read or write or spell the word vagabond, and they came with the image of his mother on the porch, a broom slanted defensively across her breasts, and with a sense of terrible danger and the knowledge that they were dirty and dangerous. Not like birds, not like the pretty, painted porcelain birds, and not like the real ones either, not like the cardinal who sang outside his window. Even the jay, that big old nasty jay, was pretty compared to the bagga. DeHaven Knight pulled the garrote tighter, aware of his own clothes, of the patches on the trouser knees, of the smell of three days without a wash, of the worn cuffs and the missing buttons. That awareness made DeHaven Knighty angry, righteously angry, and he couldn’t wait any longer. The garrote had sliced deep into the man’s neck, and blood pumped steadily from the smooth cut, but DeHaven Knight wanted more. He wrapped dirty hands and untrimmed nails in the dying man’s hair and slammed his face into the blackened plaster. “This is what you get, you dirty—you dirty—dirty—this is what you—”

With a snap, the memory ended. Once again, I found myself flying and falling, rocketing between souls like they were New York and Paris. I came back to myself with a jarring crash so hard that my teeth clicked. Only a moment seemed to have passed, and before I could think about the memory, or what had happened to me when I touched DeHaven Knight, I realized he was still speaking.

“Preen for me. Preen and pluck those tail feathers like you done last night.” He leaned closer, as close as he could get, so that one bloodshot eye filled the gap between the bars and the cement wall. “DeHaven Knight never gets tired of watching, not the jay-birds, not the hawks, not old Hatcher going for his wild rides when he ’spects everyone’s well in bed and he’s all alone with those pretty things in his office.” His voice took on a plaintive tone. “Gimme a smoke. I done what you want and then you gone and got it back. I done what you said, and you promised.”

“Get off me,” I said, trying again to free myself. The thought of those hands, of what they had done, made me want to run. I could still feel the slick greasiness of the sleeping man’s hair, I could feel the shock as his head hit the wall.

“Gotta whole pack for you, that’s whatcha you said. Whatcha want, whatcha staring at, gotta whole pack for you old raggedy-ass mother-fucker, that’s whatcha said. Gotta whole pack if you do one thing, not far, won’t take long even for your raggedy-ass to get to the line and back. Stupid son of a bitch, you said, but I done it. I got rid of it, that’s all you cared about it, and you gone and fetched it back. I done it, what you said, I done it. Maybe not just the way you said. Maybe not priss-perfect, just like you want. But I knew you was going to cheat me out of them smokes. I waited. I waited and I watched, and you thought you could disappear. You thought DeHaven Knight didn’t watch, you thought he didn’t see every—” Spittle flecked his lips now, and he swallowed convulsively. I could almost hear him thinking the word bagga, but his mouth twisted, and instead he said, “—every goddamn one of you. And I followed you, didn’t I follow you. I shoulda taught you what dirty—” Again, he performed that convulsive swallowing, and again he seemed to fight the word bagga, and his eye widened into an enormous bloodshot ring. “—didn’t I teach you what dirty kids, dirty, dirty, dirty kids, kids on the street, didn’t I teach you what happens, dirty, dirty, dirty—” He cut off with a click of his tongue, like the sound of a recording that had reached its end, and that Broadway smile flickered and stuttered to life like an old fluorescent tube. “Now gimme my goddamn smokes.” He punctuated the words, yanking on my jacket with each one. “Gimme my goddamn smokes.”