The Damned (26 page)

Red Eyes had to have seen us come in here.

The pipe organ next to the altar has been smashed, all but a few of the keys removed so that what's left looks like a boxer's gumline. But most of the pipes are still there. The gaps between showing a shadowed space behind them. Maybe big enough for a man to fit into.

Climbing onto the pile of the organ's ruins I'm able to pull myself up to the platform holding the pipes. That's the easy part. Getting to my feet without falling is harder.

The tiger enters the church just as I squeeze against the wall and slip behind the pipes. It pads along the aisle, its head lowering to sniff the floor. When it looks up again it gazes at where I stand.

There's a full moment of the two of us held like this. Measuring, listening. Then it starts forward again.

I'm sorry, Eddie.

The monster stops directly below me, where the organist would have sat. My feet a couple ladder rungs above the top of its head.

I wish I could have gone farther. But I tried. I did.

With a movement so sudden there isn't the time to gasp, the tiger leaps backward onto the altar. Its roar shaking islands of plaster off the ceiling.

Almost instantly, the magician jumps out of the darkened vestibule where he'd been concealed. He attempts to pitch himself past
the creature and run for the door. As if in anticipation of this very action, the tiger raises one of its great paws and plows it into the man's side, knocking him into the pews below. The top hat tumbling to the floor.

The magician cries as the monster takes its time pulling him apart. A human wailing not for himself but for something left behind, the last of what he remembers of being alive.

And when its teeth find me, it will be my turn to do the same.

I
stay where I am through the night. So does the tiger.

Lying next to the magician's bones and licking its glistening fur, grooming itself clean of blood. It paces the walls for a time after that, stretching, testing the air for something it detected earlier but now seems to have lost.

I have no choice but to watch it. Crushed behind the organ pipes, fighting to stay awake as the light dims, darkening the monster into a lustrous, moving body of oil. The red eyes burning.

It doesn't feel like sleep, but that must be what it is.

Outside, through the smashed stained glass windows, the dawn is stalled. I wait for it to build, to show how this day might be different from the last, but it only brightens enough to coat the world in gray sand.

The tiger is gone. Or is it? There are corners of the church I can't see, places where it may have curled up in the night. It's a hunter. It has time.

And it's after me.

I know because I've seen it before. When I was here last time and Ash took me down to the house on Alfred Street. She couldn't go inside, though she wanted me to. And when I ran I was stopped by a creature I couldn't properly see because of the baseball stadium's lights. But the eyes shone clear. Lit from within by fire.

I climb out from behind the organ pipes. Step through the door into the monochrome morning. The fog gauzy, metallic. Woodward almost empty except for a handful of distant human stragglers, pacing the sidewalk blocks.

Starting south again, I wonder if it would be smart to travel by way of the smaller, residential streets, then dismiss the idea. Woodward is the way downtown my father took, the way Ash went on her last birthday, the line that runs through the heart of Detroit. The devil you know.

The walking is slowed by the rough shape of the sidewalk, so I keep mostly to the street. The doors of the businesses along Ferndale's commercial strip are either closed or open or missing altogether, but nobody appears to go in or out. The few others out here occasionally stop to look in but eventually turn around to pace the same block they've just made their way down. For some, hell is window-shopping.

After an immeasurable time (the Omega still reading noon, or midnight) I make my way across the lanes of 8 Mile and into the city of Detroit. Just as in the living world, the downgrade is immediate. Fields on either side of Woodward. The remains of cinder-block sheds where the end-of-the-road businesses, the tow truck and demolition and self-storage lots once operated. A greater number of dead.

A number that doubles when I reach the quarter-mile stretch with Woodlawn Cemetery on the right and the concrete space of the State Fairgrounds on the left. As for the latter, parts of the midway still stand. An unmoving Ferris wheel. Rows of game stands, most with the roofs ripped off. A tilted Tilt-A-Whirl.

Some walk around the attractions, stopping to look at the rides
or the Crown and Anchor wheel as if expecting them to start moving all on their own. One couple strolls hand in hand, looking lost. They never seem to notice the other. They never let go.

The trees on the cemetery side offer the promise of fresher air, as well as a place to rest that's out of the long view of Woodward. It's what has me joining the other shufflers, trying not to meet their eyes.

They try to meet mine, though.

I can feel their stares, varying in intensity, from puzzled to hateful. So far on my journey none have come close enough to touch me, which has me hoping this is a rule of the After.

There's a decorative boulder a couple hundred yards in and I sit, lean my back against the stone. It isn't comfortable. Not that it stops me from falling asleep.

Something hits my shoulder and I open my eyes. Three people stand over me who weren't there when I closed them.

A woman and two men. One curly-haired man in his twenties, the other shirtless and elaborately tattooed, maybe twenty years older. The woman, dark-skinned and with hair bleached yellow, could be anywhere between the two in age.

“The fuck,” the younger man says.

“The
fuck
,” the older man says in agreement. Then he kicks me in the face.

Mom was right. You can die when you're dead. You can also lose a tooth and spit it into your hand with a fire bell ringing in your head.

It's clear that if I don't get to my feet—if I don't do it
now
—they'll all start in and won't stop. The looks on their faces tell me. The light returning to their eyes, the nostrils stretched into circles. A strangely girlish, tittering laugh from the woman. That old excitement that comes with seeing that something interesting is about to happen.

I make a good decision by accident. Instead of trying to rise right away, I turn my back to them. A turtling move that allows me to use the boulder as a kind of ladder, my fingers finding ledges in the surface to lift against. At one point I grab a stone from the ground,
clutch it in my fist. A weapon I forget about as soon as I pick it up. All this while their kicks find my back instead of my face.

Once I'm up I put one of my own feet to the rock and push back. Use my backpedaling weight to cut through their circle.

“You see 'at? Muthafuckin
see
'at?” the older man says.

A quick look around. If I'm going to run—and I
am
, I'm going to run until they tackle me and boot me into jam—which way to go?

No one direction looks better than any other. It's because the activity of the last moments has attracted something of a crowd. A gathering of shufflers closing around the boulder, their expressions all doing the same thing. The turn from vacancy to seething rage.

And with it, faster steps. Their anger returning the full use of their limbs.

My legs were never sufficiently muscled for their length. The result being slow starts. But if I have the room, if the knees don't crap out, I can build to a gallop. Not unlike the zebra as it ran up to the turnstiles.

This is how I must look to those who now pursue me. Ungainly, panicked. An animal to pity for a second or two before starting after it.

The chase is quiet. No whoops, no
Get him!
or shouted orders. Just the pounding of all our feet on the hard earth. A herd on the move through the tombstones.

I'm going the wrong way.

This comes to me too late to be of any use. If the ones after me are fixed to Woodlawn Cemetery, if they aren't roamers, I should have tried to make it back to Woodward to see if the boundary held them back. Instead, I'm running deeper into the grounds.

What makes it worse is that now I'm lost. The snaking lanes that once let cars park close to visit loved ones' graves—loved ones who now flail after me—all lead back upon themselves. Every time I think one will take me to the main gate, it feeds into another circle with a named crypt in the center.

DODGE

HUDSON

COUZENS

I'm turning the corner on the last of these when I see a man standing outside a smaller crypt down a slope. Not starting after me, but raising his arm. Beckoning.

I
go to him.

Keep my head lowered so the ones behind me might not see me on the way down. Rushing inside the smaller crypt at the bottom of the slope. Leaning against the cold stone wall as the man pulls closed the wood from a crate bottom he's fashioned as a door.

A few bands of silty light find their way through the slats, but it's almost as dark in here in the middle of the day as the church was at night. The man here with me but I can't see him. Can't hear him, either. Only the pounding steps of the dead outside. Some at a distance, guessing wrong as to which way I went. Others passing close.

And then they're gone. All but the one standing in the dark.

“Should've known I'd see you again,” his voice says. “Nobody looking for her could come to a happy end, could they?”

He takes a step out of the corner. Younger than when I found him in the house on Arndt Street. The way he looked in his drama teaching days, when he was Henchman #3. When he was Dean.

“Do you know where she is?”

Malvo weighs this question in his mouth. “You're still looking for her?”

“Have you seen her?”

“Wait,” he says, silencing me with a raised hand. “You came here to
find
her! See? I tried to
tell
you.
That
is the kind of thing that bitch can make a man do.”

“I'm not doing this for her.”

“Really? If money meant anything here I'd bet all I had that you're wrong.”

He paces from one side of the darkness to the other, kicking stones against the walls.

“Why'd you help me?” I ask him, hoping he'll stop making noise. He doesn't.

“A familiar face. Plus I know what it's like. I'm new, too.”

“They're after you?”

“Not as much as at first,” he says. Arranges his features into a look of thoughtfulness. “Death is predictable. What happens
once
you're dead isn't.”

“Why do they hate us in the first place?”

“It's like prison. The new ones get the worst treatment because they still smell like the outside. It's like you're rubbing their faces in it just by being here. Reminding them of life, when the only good part about being inside is that, once you get into the rhythm, it can help you forget.”

Malvo sounds friendly. But the way he slows his pacing and faces me isn't.

“Why are you here? The cemetery,” I say. “Why is this your place?”

“I'm not sure. I think it's because the Fairgrounds are across the street. That's where I'd
like
to go, but the ones here won't let me. Because they know.”

“Know what?”

“That the midway is where a lot of the kids end up. The girls.”

“Why do the ones here care about that?”

“Like I said, it's like prison,” he says, and shrugs. His voice sharpening with the loss of patience. “Full of the worst motherfuckers in
the world but there's still laws. And people like me? We're the rock bottom. Worse than the random killers or torturers or Ponzi schemers. We're
shit
.”

Malvo pouts. A show of self-pity he glances up to see if I've noticed. If I'm on his side.

“You've found your place,” I say. “Not the Fairgrounds. Here.”

“Oh?”

“The worst of your life was the years you were sent away, and that's what this is. The penitentiary. Your identity exposed, not getting what you want most. You're meant to be here.”

The pout is gone now. His hands drifting out from his sides as if to block any move I might make for the door.

“Let me ask again,” I say. “Do you know where Ash is?”

“Why would I know that? You just said I'm stuck here.”

“She might have visited. She's not like you or the others out there. She can move around wherever she wants.”

Except the house
, I think, but don't say.
She couldn't go into the place where you set the fire.

Malvo's expression changes just like the ones who tried to hunt me down, like every other face I've seen.

“Why would I tell you?” he says. Not acting anymore, not charming Dean. He's Bob. Swallowing the taste of hatred in his mouth. “Why would I give a flying fuck?”

“To do something good after all the pain you've caused.”

“Listen to you!
Pain
?” He laughs at this. “It's like I used to tell my girlfriends.
It doesn't hurt if it's a secret
.”

“It's not a secret that you killed my sister.”

“I didn't kill her.”

“Bullshit. You hung yourself.”

“She
told
me to do that.”

“You did everything she told you to?”

“Didn't you?”

Malvo is very close now. I make a move, a turn of the shoulders, and he slides the couple inches over to match it.

“Isn't that why you're here?” he says. “Because she wanted you to come?”