Hang Wire Page 9

  Malcolm stepped closer, his bare feet disappearing to the ankle in the glowing ashes. The fire cracked again and Malcolm bent down, sifting the brilliant embers with his hands. There was no heat, but a tingle, pins and needles, and his mouth was filled with the taste of rotting lemons.

  Malcolm stood and turned with his back to the fire, facing the darkness. His eyes adjusted, resolving the moving figures of Stonefire as they danced and stamped and chanted. He held his arms out, and as one the dance troupe fell silent and still.

  “Here,” Malcolm said, and when he spoke the fire cracked again. He lowered his arms, and turned and pointed to where he had cleared a small patch in the ashes.

  “We dig. Belenus commands it,” he said, and he dropped to his knees. He began scratching at the blackened Earth.

  The members of his clan ran forward, converging on Malcolm, almost smothering him, as twenty pairs of hands scrambled in the embers, digging below the fire.

  Lotta took a step backwards and regretted everything. She regretted not taking the advice of her friends and of her boss. She regretted the shortcut; she regretted not paying attention. What she would do now for the sight of the strip club boys and their loose jeans, grinding their crotches as they tailed her down the street, calling obscenities and wolf whistles. On the other side of the street there would be people, cars, even at such a late hour.

  On Gretsch Street there was just Lotta and the man in front of her. He was a black silhouette, nothing more than an oblong shadow with arms, standing under the fire escape. His shape was strange, elongated, like he was wearing a tall hat.

  Lotta turned. She knew it might be a mistake, but she couldn’t run backward. Fifth Avenue was just ahead. Lotta tensed herself to run and drew a breath to scream for her life.

  There was a sharp sound, like someone retracting the extendable flex of a vacuum cleaner, and Lotta was pushed forward onto the pavement as something very heavy hit the back of her neck. She instinctively reached out to break her fall and exhaled heavily as the wind was knocked from her lungs, but as she tried to whoop a fresh breath in she found her airway closed tight. A second later the weight on her neck shifted and she was jerked backward a few feet. Her hands flew to her throat as something tightened around it with mechanical strength, crushing her windpipe, pushing her larynx against her spine. Exquisite agony exploded beneath her jaw, and her fingertips scrambled over and around thick, hard metal. She could feel the weave of individual cable fibers and the cold of the metal against her skin. At the back of her neck her fingers found the cable was looped through an eye, a metal ring, smooth in comparison with the wire itself, with a thick rivet or bolt fixing it in place.

  The cable was tugged again, sliding tighter on the loop. The index finger of Lotta’s right hand, somehow inside the noose, was caught and cut through to the bone as the metal loop was tightened and tightened. She tried to scream, but there was no air and her throat was nothing but hellish fire. She could feel her eyes bulge like water balloons, and the night disintegrated into purple spots in front of her.

  Another jerk, and Lotta’s last thought was that she was flying, her feet leaving the ground as she was carried into the air by her neck, her trapped right arm strung uselessly behind her head.

  She swung from the fire escape on the steel cable. She was dead already but her legs kicked violently for a few seconds, throwing her left shoe off. Then the kicking stopped, and the alley was quiet and she was alone once more.

  The night is cold and damp, the fog rolling in from the bay in a great opaque cloud, obscuring everything in its path and coating the city in a thin sheen of water slick with grease and oil.

  Dangerous conditions for an acrobat, but even as Highwire slips for the third time as he leaps from one building to the next, he understands the problem and corrects for it, and when he lands on the next roof it is with silent, mathematical precision. He rises into a crouch and pauses, balanced forward on fingertips, and when he closes his eyes, he can sense it all: the fine fizz of the fog against this face, the sandpaper texture of the tar paper under his fingertips, the slight changes in the gentle breeze four stories from the street.

  Two other things as well. Something large, nearby, breathing slowly like a sleeping dragon. It comes from all around, but seems to emanate from the ground, the streets, like there’s a slow-moving river deep beneath the city. Highwire isn’t sure whether he can hear it or feel it, but he can sense something is there.

  The other: a vibration ahead, rhythmic, a slowly changing, slowing pattern. One object in contact with another, the two touching, separating, touching; a weight, swinging, pulling on something metal that creaks and shakes in microscopic ways. The first sound – the sensation – seems to be pulsing in time with the swinging too, like whatever it is beneath the city can feel it, is drawn to it.

  Like Highwire. It’s not just sounds and sensations that brought him here. He knows he is close. The killer is near. So very near. And perhaps, if he is quick…

  Highwire skips forward on all fours, toward the edge of the building, and jumps.

  The embers were heaped into two great piles on either side of the hole, like a parting of the seas frozen in blazing white and red. Now the digging had slowed, become more organized, the fire – through Malcolm – having selected the youngest, the strongest, for the last stage. As the others watched, a handful of men covered in black ash continued to dig with their bare hands as they knelt in the embers. A couple of younger dancers, a teenage girl and her older brother, spun around, kicking up ash and chanting, as a third member pounded a gentle rhythm on a leather-skinned drum.

  The burned ground was dry and soft, pliable like cake. Malcolm stood over the workers, arms folded.

  “Malcolm!”

  The leader bent down as the diggers stopped. The one who had called his name looked out of the pit at his master, who smiled and nodded. Then two of the diggers reached down into the dirt.

  The earth relinquished the body without any resistance as the diggers dragged the woman up and over the lip of the hole. She was naked and glistening, a slick, gelatinous envelope covering her whole body. Within seconds she was covered in black ash and dust.

  Malcolm stood over her as she lay, face-down. As he watched, she coughed and rolled over unaided. She blinked the dirt from her eyes, and when she looked at Malcolm, she smiled.

  Malcolm reached down. The woman took his hand, and he helped her up. Standing, she flexed her legs, her arms, looking down at her own body like it was new and strange.

  Malcolm nodded. “Welcome, Lotta,” he said. “Welcome to life.”

  Too late. Highwire looks down into the narrow street and there she is, hanging by the neck from the old fire escape, her body twisting on a steel cable in the gentle breeze, her legs periodically knocking against the end of the fire escape’s ladder. The fog is thinner here but when the police find her she’ll be wet through, which won’t make their task any easier.

  Highwire is too late for her, too late for all of them. But he is close to the killer. He can sense him near. He jumps to the ground, clearing three stories and hitting the street in total silence. There is blood here, lots of it. The victim has been nearly decapitated by the steel cable drawn into a noose. That in itself would require considerable strength.

  Nearby a light in a building is on and there is movement. Out in the city, cars are approaching, fast. The police are coming already; someone has seen or heard something.

  Movement in the window again. Someone pointing, down at the street. At him. Highwire ducks into the shadows and the person moves out of sight, but it is too late. He wants to go examine the body, to find clues, something that will lead him to the Hang Wire Killer who is so very, very close. But he can’t. At the opposite end of the street two police cars have arrived already, their sirens silent but their lights flashing. Highwire slides along the wall in the shadows, then scales the brick and flips himself back onto the rooftop. He ducks down until he is out of sight of the stree
t below.

  And then… the killer is gone. Highwire can’t sense him, not anymore. He can feel the city moving around him, people and cars and motorcycles. Dogs and cats and rats. He lays the palm of his hand on the roof and if he concentrates he can feel the Earth turn and…

  Something moving. Something far away or deep below, breathing, the heartbeat of a monster.

  But he can’t sense the killer. Nothing. Gone. It is impossible, but it is so.

  Highwire spins on the balls of his feet and runs and jumps, crossing the buildings, crossing the city, without pause or sound.

  He only hopes that next time he will be faster.

  — INTERLUDE —

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  1911

  Joel kept his pearl-handled gun held high as he pressed his back into the wall. With the other hand he felt inside the fob pocket of his waistcoat, his fingers scissoring around the gold coin within.

  The house was dark but the windows had no curtains, allowing a grayish glow of gaslight in from Hospital Street on the northeast side and Royal Street on the northwest. The house was empty, nothing but bare boards of a wood so dark as to be black in the dim and shaded light. The walls were empty too, just a tableau of faded squares where portraits and landscapes had once hung and been admired.

  Joel stood on the stair landing, gun in the air, coin in his pocket, stovepipe hat fallen somewhere on a floor below. He looked up as the boards over his head creaked with slow footsteps. Despite the neighborhood, despite the reputation this particular quarter of New Orleans was developing, the city was quiet. And so was the house, slumbering in the night.

  The creaking from the floor above stopped and Joel held his breath, imagining he was the only person in the whole city.

  Even if that were the case, he knew his quarry was one of many. New Orleans was famous for shades and things that moved and bumped when they shouldn’t. The LaLaurie Mansion in which he now stood, gun raised, coin burning cold in his pocket, was perhaps the most notorious and haunted spot of all. A fire in 1834 that started in the building’s not insubstantial kitchens was said by some to have been a suicide attempt by the slave cook, an old woman who feared what her mistress, Madame LaLaurie, did in the top room of the house.

  The creaking began again. Joel glanced at the stairwell, an architectural splendor in carved wood. The room over his head, by his reckoning, was the room. The room of horrors. The room into which people were led by Madame LaLaurie and didn’t come back out of again.

  Joel stepped lightly across the bare floor, the boards silent beneath his carefully placed boots. The stairs were a different matter, the wood warped badly, each and every footfall sounding no matter what as Joel crept upwards.

  Madame LaLaurie – slave owner, murderer, the first serial killer New Orleans would play host to – had long gone. But Joel knew that the evil that now seeped the house, the horror that lingered in the very bones of the place, drew its power from a more recent arrival, an object which had perhaps been hidden here deliberately, whoever had brought it drawn to the house like iron to a magnet. Like Joel had been, dragged by the coin, by the light that shines, by the gravity of the stars.

  Joel was near. The object hidden would be his soon and then he would move on, guided to the next piece, and the next, and the next.

  A bang from above, and a scraping, like furniture being moved across the floor. Furniture that wasn’t there, in the empty house on French Street.

  The sounds did not stop. Joel listened a moment; then he pulled the hammer of his revolver back and took the stairs two at a time.

  The second landing was clear and darker than the rest of the house, the window at the end not quite at the right angle for the streetlight to shine in. There were three doors, all closed. The sliding sound came from the one nearest. Another sound too, breath, whistling, like a breeze through a cracked porch door on a fall night in the west, long, long ago.

  Joel smiled and reached for the doorknob. He brought the gun to bear, his gray-white eye trained down the barrel.

  In one swift movement he opened the door and took two broad strides inside, his back to the paneling and his gun panning left, right, left.

  The room was devoid of life but it wasn’t empty. There was a chair in the center, draped in a dusty white cloth. There was more dust on the floor, the boards caked in the stuff. Joel glanced down, and saw his boots had kicked it up as he’d stepped inside, the wood shiny beneath his feet. A series of curved streaks cut through it where the chair had been moved maybe a yard.

  More footsteps. Slowly, on the landing, behind Joel, the floor creaking like a cut tree about to fall. Joel spun around, both hands now around the grip of his gun.

  A shadow moved on the landing, as though someone were hurrying past the doorway. Joel tracked the motion with his gun and fired once, twice, the bullets finding nothing but air before punching holes the size of dinner plates in the wall by the stairs, the dry wood and plaster exploding in great clouds. The shadow moved again, rounding the top of the stairs and gliding down, now silent, the footsteps gone. Joel fired again and the pommel at the top of the bannister exploded, the fresh pale wood beneath the dark veneer like raw flesh in the night.

  Joel wasted no time. He raced down the stairs, the shadow just ahead. On the first landing he thought he’d gained on it – enough to send a fourth bullet through the Hospital Street window. The sound of the shattering glass was appalling, a greater shock than even the report of the gun. Joel continued his chase, his boots sliding on the shattered fragments that salted the bare boards of the landing.

  First floor. The entrance hall of the mansion was grand and cold, and empty like the rest of the house. On the floor near the front door sat his stovepipe hat.

  Joel came to a stop at the base of the stairs and waited. The hall was silent and after a few seconds Joel shook his head. He was running out of time now. Someone would have heard the shots, and he wouldn’t be alone in the house for long.

  There was no time for this. He was here for a reason.

  Joel took the coin from his pocket. He closed his fist around it so tight he could feel the edges bite into his palm, and he closed his eyes.

  He was close, he knew he was. The coin was cold, as cold as the ocean was deep.

  Then the coin moved in his grip. The prize was somewhere near…

  The silence was broken by a tiny creak from Joel’s left. He turned his head toward the sound, his eyes still closed. Footsteps sounded far above him. A moment later the sliding sound of the chair being moved. The haunting, a recording of a terrible act from long ago, looping for another performance.

  Joel opened his eyes. He turned on his heel. There, in the paneling on the side of the stairwell, a thin vertical black space, a crack, a gap. Joel brushed the edge of his jacket to one side and holstered his gun. In his other hand the coin felt like a burning coal. He stepped back, scooped his hat from the floor, and pulled it onto his head. Then he stepped back to the paneled side of the stairwell, and he pushed.

  The crack widened: a door, the paneling hinged to conceal the entrance. Beyond, caught in the gray light from the windows, was a narrow set of stone stairs leading down.

  Joel smiled and pocketed the coin. The cellar. Of course. The piece was hidden in the cellar and the cellar itself had been hidden, years before, by Madame LaLaurie.

  Joel rattled down the stairs and the paneled door swung shut behind him.

  — IX —

  SAN FRANCISCO

  TODAY

  Sun streamed in through the windows, bright and hot where it hit the bed. Ted raised himself up on an elbow and with one eye firmly closed against the glare squinted at the bedside clock.

  Two. PM, given the brightness of the day outside. Ted felt like he could sleep forever. Maybe he had, and when he looked out the window he’d see the ruins of San Francisco deep in a swampy jungle ruled by super-intelligent tigers.

  The possibility seemed less likely as he dragged himself up and
to the kitchen.

  Making the coffee was a struggle and seemed to take a thousand years, but Ted made it, and then made for the couch. He considered going back to bed; it was an option, certainly, but despite the protests of his body he thought he should stay up, try to shake off whatever it was he’d come down with. Couldn’t be the explosion at the restaurant. He fingered the back of his head, then the rest of his scalp. No sore points, or bumps. He felt fine. Just… as energetic as the dead. The bang had done something to his ears too, maybe damaged a drum. It sounded like someone was whispering behind him, and not for the first time Ted found himself checking over his shoulder.

  Ridiculous.

  Ted fumbled for the TV remote. As he did, he noticed his laptop was open on the dining table, the screen glowing.

  That damn laptop. It had been nothing but trouble since he’d gotten it. Ted stood, walked over, cursing himself for being so cheap when it came to electronics. The laptop was his livelihood, after all. He really should invest in a–

  You are the master of every situation.

  Ted frowned. The word processor was open, again, and while the message was the same as it had been before, instead of being repeated in a single column running down the page, it was rendered in a large block font, a single statement, centered on the page.

  Ted rubbed his eyes, then pulled his hand away from his face. His fingers felt sticky. He peered at them, unable to focus, his other hand automatically raising the coffee mug to his lips.

  His hand froze. The coffee mug was plain white, but was now covered in streaks and splotches, something sticky, something that had once been liquid but had dried overnight into a tacky dark something.