The Long Way Down (3 page)

I knew she couldn’t really hurt me, that this was nothing but the memory of Stacy’s pain given form and life, but my mouth still went dry. I tried to remember the words of an old Louisiana folk-charm, one I’d used before to put an apparition to rest.

Stacy wrenched her mouth open, her jaw quaking, and rivulets of water poured down her chin, spattering on the concrete floor. Then she screamed and taught me how little I really knew about ghosts.

Her shriek felt like a pair of razorblades slashing across my eardrums, borne on a wind of raw anguish. I staggered back, reeling under a blast of horror given focus and form. Fingers of despair and betrayal clawed at my mind, trying to infect me with her pain, to consume me with it.

I answered on instinct. I passed my free hand over the deck, the jack of diamonds leaping to my fingertips, and I flung it at her. The card caught the Stacy-thing in the shoulder and flew through her, pulsing with a flash of violent purple light. The apparition flailed, its cry cut short, and I reached out to catch the jack as it whirled its way back to my hand.

Like I told Eric, I knew some good card tricks. Not good enough for this, though. I felt like a boxer who expected to go a few rounds with a welterweight only to find himself staring down Mike Tyson. I needed to figure out what the hell this thing was and come up with a plan to take it down before it hurt someone, none of which I could do while it was trying to kill me.

I drew another card, tracing the seal of Saturn across its face with my thumb and flipping it into the air. It hung there as if dangling from an invisible thread, a tiny cardboard barrier between me and the Stacy-thing. The apparition reared back, unleashing another scream, but it didn’t touch me. All I saw was the card vibrating in the air, absorbing the lethal torrent.

The card ignited.

Running, I had almost made it to the mouth of the tunnel when a third scream hit me from behind. My hands seized up and sent cards scattering around my feet, useless and inert. My stomach constricted. I dropped to one knee, doubling over, vomiting up a torrent of brackish water as fuzzy black spots flooded my vision. I was drowning in reverse, my air cut off by the flood, my hands scrabbling at the tunnel floor in desperation. Half blind with blood roaring in my ears, I closed my fingers around a fallen card and filled it with the last spark of my power, flinging it into the air.

The torrent stopped. Hacking up spurts of water, I forced myself to my feet. The new shield-card was already vibrating, its power fragmenting by the second. Stumbling to the tunnel wall, I tugged a leather pouch from my hip pocket and tore it open, nearly dropping it from my trembling fingers. I poured out a thin trail of powder, jagged but unbroken, from one side of the tunnel to the other and finished just as the card burst into flames.

The apparition loomed from the darkness and froze. It wavered in the air, radiating confusion, then slipped back into the shadows.

I hunched over, bracing my hands against my knees until I could breathe again. The flashlight beam traced the powder line, letting me touch it up with the remainder of the pouch’s contents, just to be safe. The powder was Mama Margaux’s personal recipe. I knew it was mostly red brick dust and purified salt, but she guarded the rest of the mixture’s contents like it was Colonel Sanders’ eleven herbs and spices. All I knew was that anything not made of flesh and bone was instinctively repulsed by the stuff; as long as the line stayed unbroken, the Stacy-thing would keep her distance from the tunnel mouth.

I staggered back up the tunnel, soaked and aching, my throat sore and my stomach in knots. Eric’s laughter greeted me as I reached his lean-to.

“You didn’t wanna go back there, man. Told you so.”

“That tunnel,” I gasped, “what’s on the other side? Where does it lead?”

“Nowhere fast. Junction goes off to a culvert about two blocks east, but it’s sealed with a grate and padlocked. Nobody goes in or out from there.”

I nodded. “Good. I’ll be back. Until then, stay the hell out of there. Don’t let anybody else go back there either.”

“Don’t gotta tell me twice. Told you, I’ve been down here seven years. Learned that the best thing to do when you see weird shit is to stay far away from it.”

I could still hear him snickering as I walked away. Tourists.

I emerged from the tunnel into a warm Vegas night, the starless black sky lit with an electric glow. A blazing shaft of light from the Strip fired upward in the distance, slicing the air like a neon stiletto. I drove home, stripped off my sodden clothes, and jumped into the shower, cranking the water just a hair shy of scalding as I scrubbed my skin raw.

Stacy was murdered, no doubt in my mind, and her body dumped just ahead of a thunderstorm the weatherman predicted a week ago. It would have been a perfect cover-up, if the storm hadn’t been a little late or the coroner hadn’t been thorough. Who would want to kill a porn star, and why were a couple of cops involved? Corruption was one thing, maybe a little graft or looking the other way on a petty rap, but dumping corpses was an entirely different level of bad news.

The more pressing problem on my mind was trying to figure out what the hell Stacy had become. The thing in the sewers was no harmless spook show, and I’d never encountered anything like it. I needed a little help to work this out. Fortunately, I knew just where to get it.

Four

E
very big city has its own refuge for the occult underground, a place for our crowd to mingle and swap vices away from prying eyes. There’s Dashwood Abbey in New York, the Salon Rouge in New Orleans, and the Bast Club in Chicago. In Las Vegas, we had the Tiger’s Garden. There were no dues or secret handshake, and membership was based on one simple test: the Garden had to
want
to let you in.

Scrubbed and changed, a fresh deck of cards in my pocket, I made my way to Fremont Street. The pedestrian mall shone under a canopy of dazzling lights. Cameras flashed and drunken tourists milled between open-air bars advertising dollar margaritas, while street musicians and blaring speakers clashed to create a whirling cacophony. Snatches of song faded into one another, drowned out by the din of conversation and distant engine sounds. A street performer with his face painted silver caught my eye as he juggled pins strapped with LED strips, smearing the air with swirls of color. Just off to my side, a skinny street rat doing the meth-head bop moved in on me with his eyes locked on my hip pocket. I gave him a look that could cut glass, and he found someone else to be interested in.

The air smelled like cheap cigars and spilled beer. I took a deep breath, letting the music and the commotion move me, falling into step with the churning crowd. I became one with the traffic, one with the street itself, giving in to the chaos.

A heartbeat later I stood in a narrow vestibule on a worn rubber welcome mat, the crowds and the flashing lights ripping away like tearing a bandage from a wound. Door chimes jingled softly behind me. I couldn’t remember how I got there.

That’s the Tiger’s Garden for you. If you look for it, you’ll never find it. You could map out every inch of the street, every nook, cranny, and doorway, and it simply wouldn’t be there. Clear your mind and go with the flow, though, and if you belong here—and if the Garden wants you—you’ll find your way inside.

I walked across the shabby, cigarette-burned, orange carpet, past the coat-rack and the decor that went out of style in the seventies. A few windows lined the sea-foam green walls, covered over with heavy wooden lattices. Nobody had ever seen those windows open, and nobody wanted to tempt fate by having a peek. I inhaled, savoring the smell of fresh Indian cooking, the air teeming with spices and secrets.

“Look,” a grizzled voice explained from around the corner, “I’m not saying the Loa aren’t objectively real—”

“That is exactly what you said,” a disgruntled Mama Margaux snapped. “Own your words, boy.”

I knew exactly what I’d see before I rounded the bend. Margaux, holding court in a florid tent dress and nursing a rum punch, squaring off with Corman at their usual corner table. Corman was in his late sixties and built like a retired prizefighter. He wore a rumpled tux with the bow tie undone and draped around his neck. Bentley sat next to him, silver haired and dressed in a funeral suit, reed thin to Corman’s stocky. Between the three of them, there were enough empty glasses on the table for a couple nights of heavy drinking.

Corman snorted and waved his whiskey glass at Margaux. “‘Boy?’ My hair was turning white back when your father was still swinging a machete for Papa Doc.”

“You take that back! You take that back
right now
.”

Bentley looked at me helplessly, having unwisely chosen to sit between them. I cleared my throat and walked over, pulling up a chair from a nearby table. The four of us had the Garden all to ourselves for the moment, not that it was ever the kind of place with a waiting list.

“Mama Margaux.” I dropped into my chair. “You know Corman’s a ceremonialist, you have to make allowances for professional language. Corman, you know we don’t alk-tay about apa-Pay ock-Day at the table. Bentley, I see you got a haircut. It looks very nice.”

My distraction managed to stop their bickering. Unfortunately, it also turned their guns on me. Three voices with varying degrees of irritation simultaneously demanded to know where I’d been and why I wasn’t answering phone calls. I held up my open palms, trying to get a word in edgewise.

“That floozy walked out on ‘im,” Mama Margaux explained on my behalf, though I wouldn’t have used quite those words.

“Oh, dear. Roxy? She was a sweet girl,” Bentley said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, she was.” I looked over my shoulder and stared right into the buttons of a white chef’s jacket. Amar, the Garden’s one and only employee, had slipped up behind me without making a sound. He balanced a brass-rimmed tray on one palm, deftly serving another round of drinks, including the rum and coke I was just about to ask for.

“Thanks Amar.” I blinked at the glass. “Could we get an—”

“An order of naan,” he said with a nod of his turbaned brow. “Of course.” He flitted off to the kitchen.

We’re not sure whether Amar just works for the Garden or if he’s the owner, and he’s notoriously tight-lipped on any subject other than the menu. Still, you can’t beat the service.

“Sweet’s overrated,” Corman said, and Bentley shot him a look. Gruffness aside, he must have been doing something right. Bentley and Corman had been together for forty years, and they still acted like newlyweds when they thought nobody was looking.

I tossed back a swig from my glass and savored the spreading warmth in my chest. Perfectly mixed, as always.”I don’t want to talk about Roxy,” I said. It wasn’t the truth, but two weeks of heartache and a phone that didn’t ring had drilled one hard truth into my thick head: she wasn’t coming back. “I got a job. Let’s talk about that instead.”

“Daniel?” Bentley arched a wispy eyebrow and cradled his glass of gin. I didn’t need an interpreter to read the concern in his tone. Bentley and Corman were the closest things I had to real fathers. I didn’t talk about the people who raised me; the cigarette burns on my back said enough.

“A legit job. Mostly legit.”

I sketched out the broad strokes, then went into detail once I got to the part about meeting the thing that used to be Stacy Pankow down in the storm drains.

“The ancestors can whip up a fuss,” Mama Margaux mused, “but I’ve never seen anything like that. You sure it was the girl, not somethin’ else pretending to be her? Anything could be festering down there in the dark.”

I shrugged. “I thought of that, but what’s the point? Why would anything capable of doing that kind of damage decide to pose as a random ghost and lurk around in a totally abandoned tunnel?”

“The missing body parts.” Bentley leaned forward. “That detail demands consideration. Apparitions mirror their creators at the time of death, but the papers didn’t say that her actual body was mutilated.”

“No, and neither did the guy living down there, who saw her body get dumped. I think he would have mentioned that.”

“I heard a story once,” Corman said, his expression grave. “Back when I was a professional seer, in the sixties. Supposedly happened to a friend of a friend.” Corman looked spooked, and that wasn’t something I saw often. Bentley lightly touched his wrist, nodding for him to speak.

“Story goes, this guy crossed the wrong people, so they set up a little surprise for him. Like me, astral projection was his specialty. Going into a trance and sending his soul out to snoop around. Well, one night, a couple of disembodied sorcerers were waiting, and they laid some Tibetan whammy on him. Ripped his soul to pieces. Guy died on the spot, cardiac arrest.

“That was that, until a month later. His wife found the ghost of his arm in their bed. Just his arm, and it damn near choked the life out of her. His head showed up in my pal’s closet. Watching him in the night, through a tiny crack, with this insane hatred in his eyes. Then it just vanished into thin air. Next morning, he finds the family dog gutted on the floor, and all the food in the house had rotted overnight.”