Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(29)

So too was Lorna Weeks.

The women who’d sell themselves down by the boxcars . . . they weren’t there by preference, and there weren’t too many of them. It was a last stop of sorts; I could see that when I watched from the shadows. These were the lowest men, and lower still were the women who scavenged there among them. They traded in favors more than cash, and sometimes alcohol or cigarettes. They were sick, or addicted to something they could no longer afford. They were not women with options.

It is true, I pitied them. I pity anyone without options.

It is also true that I found them revolting. Not only the whores, but likewise the filthy men who watched them from the corners with their narrowed, bloodshot eyes. Some may have been merely unlucky, and fallen to a place where, like the women, they’d exhausted all other paths. Since I could not tell from looking who might be virtuous and who might be a criminal, I tried to give them each the benefit of a doubt even as I veered far away from any contact. Still, their odors settled and wafted between the lines—the reek of unwashed bodies and smoke, of illicit gin and rotten food. I felt the fog of it work into my hair and sink into my skin. The virtuous and the criminal all smelled alike to me.

But I had a task.

An unpleasant one, made all the more unpleasant by the surroundings. I tried to take comfort in knowing that Miss Weeks would be an easy capture, and her disappearance would be unlikely to make the news; and for that matter, I was nearly doing her a favor by removing her from this miserable life to which she clung, if barely. But try as I might to wring some good feeling from my excuses, I failed on every front.

I watched for her from behind the station house, a good vantage point for the comings and goings of the folks and creatures who wandered in and out of the rail yard property.

There was very little light. Only a few gas fixtures, and most of those were behind me, or at the edges of the fenced-off zones. Here and there, tiny fires were lit but closely guarded, and they were no help to me. Everything was black, so very black . . . that I looked up in case I might spot the moon or some useful glint of stars, but there was nothing at all up there. It might as well have been a well-washed blackboard.

I thought of this comparison, and when I checked the sky a second time I could almost see my own handwriting inscribed upon it—my own sums, tallies, and figures with tiny notes of script slotted throughout. I watched the numbers wink in and out like the stars should have done, and it unnerved me.

I closed my eyes and shook it all away.

Except that when I opened my eyes again, the sky was still abnormally flat, and I felt like it was pressing down low, a smothering pillow held down upon my face. My scrawling script was gone, but the sense of menace remained.

I wished to shake that away, too, but it wouldn’t leave and I couldn’t leave—not yet. Not until I’d found and killed and disposed of Lorna Weeks.

I didn’t know what she looked like, but that didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered in the last four or five killings, either; I could find them whether or not I had any description. This was one of the new skills I’d learned . . . or no, not a skill. More like a power, I should say.

No amount of practice could teach a man to spy a coal black aura, the tendrils of something reaching through from someplace else, eager to claim a prize it felt it must be owed.

I theorized that these smokelike edges, these grasping hands that weren’t hands—and had no fingers—had appeared and grown stronger around my recent victims because the thing on the other side was growing aggravated with me. I was stealing its spoils, if that’s what these people are. Its sacrifices, or its prey . . . I don’t know. It wants them, and it feels that it deserves them, and I won’t let it have them.

Or else this is all conjecture.

Or else . . . I’ve begun to hear God speaking after all, and this is what He says, and we Christians have misunderstood a great many things about Our Father, Who Art in Heaven. I hope we have not misunderstood. I hope it is something else I’m hearing, and I hope it is no god. I would sooner die than serve it, whatever it is. I would sooner kill.

I spotted her when she came down past the station house, pausing beside an open boxcar. She asked a quiet question of someone inside, but I didn’t hear it. She nodded, then turned and limped away. Was she injured, or simply slowed by the coiling tendrils of living shadow that tangled between her feet like an eager cat? I could see them, these things even blacker than this cool, flat night down in the rail yards; I watched them tie themselves around her ankles, crawling up her shins, throttling her thighs beneath the old cotton dress she wore with a shawl to top it off. I saw them better than I saw any details of her appearance—her hair’s style or color, her age, the shape of her body.

I saw only that she moved with a measure of difficulty, and that she would be easy to catch.

She vanished into a block of cars parked on the lines. I wasn’t worried. She left a trail, not a scent exactly—not like the stink of old boots and stale beer—but more like a humming noise, but not a noise at all. This residue was a physical thing, and I could touch it.

I crouched down in her wake and, yes, there it was: a rivulet of chilly air, fluttering where her feet had passed. I dipped my fingers into it, ran them through it. When I withdrew them, they were cold and a little bit wet.

Wherever the other thing lives, this is what it feels like there. Or maybe it’s not a home, exactly. It could be, this creature, this god, this interloper . . . it waits in some intermediary spot between earth and heaven. Or no, not heaven.