“Saw ya lookin’,” he said, gesturing around him. I realized he meant the paint. “Black widows. Tunnels are full of the bastards. I seen webs with forty, fifty of ’em, just nestled there, waiting. One bite, you swell up like a water balloon. The roaches are bad, but those widows, man, they’re mean.”
I fought the urge to slap at my arms and legs, already imagining them crawling with shiny spiders. Instead, I took a step forward and offered him my hand.
“I’m Daniel. You been down here long?”
He took it with a firm grip and a nod. “Eric. Been here…man, six years? Seven? Better than the streets, once you get used to it. Nobody hassles me down here.”
“Good to meet you, Eric. I was wondering about somebody else who might have been crashing down here. You ever see this girl?”
I fished the ragged newspaper article from my pocket and showed it to him. They’d run it with a high school prom picture of Stacy smiling like a girl with a future made of diamonds. Eric frowned.
“Shit, man, that was the cops that did that.” He shook his head.
“That did what? Came and fished her body out?”
“No,” he said, “the cops brought her down here.”
I suddenly remembered the bad feeling I got sitting across the table from Jud. The roller coaster ratcheted up another notch toward the inevitable plunge.
“It was a couple nights before the last rain,” he said. “A couple of ’em came down with that poor kid in a body bag. Dumped her about a hundred yards up Tunnel C, near the water intake.”
“How do you know they were cops?” I asked.
“Me and a few of the other guys down here, we pressed ’em, wanting to know what they thought they were doing. One of the cops, he flashes a badge in our face. The guy was a detective, no joke. Told us to get the fuck back, and then he shows us the gun in his waistband. We got back.”
“You sure it was real?” I desperately wanted him to be wrong. “You can buy badges—”
Eric shook his head, giving me a sad smile. “I used to be on the job, before I got a bad habit and ended up down here. I know badges. They were real cops. Skinny guy with a face like a hatchet, and a bodybuilder with a blond perm. Hatchet-face was the one who liked waving his gun around.”
“Did you tell anybody?”
“Man, who am I gonna tell?” He scuffed his gym shoe on the dank concrete. “You think anyone wants to hear anything we have to say? They’d just say I killed her, or maybe those cops’d shut me up for good. I felt bad, but I’d rather feel bad than feel dead.”
I nodded. “They didn’t leave anything behind, did they? I mean, besides the girl.”
“Nah, and if they had, it woulda been picked clean five seconds after they left. Hell, me and my buddy Amos took turns standing guard over the kid’s body until the rain came, just to make sure nobody messed with her. It ain’t right, you know? It just ain’t right. You can have a look down Tunnel C if you feel like it, but I wouldn’t if I were you.”
“Why’s that? Black widows?”
A nervous look crossed Eric’s face, his gaze darting toward the darkness at my back. He shook his head and lowered his voice.
“Nah, man. That kid? She’s still down here. And she ain’t happy about it.”
3.
I couldn’t guess which habit had sent Eric’s life into a tailspin. In Vegas, you can pick your poison: booze, gambling, sex, meth. It’s all here and waiting for you, twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t come across like a junkie, though, and the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me he wasn’t sharing some alcoholic fever dream.
“No such thing as ghosts,” I said, keeping my voice light.
He curled his chapped lips into a grin. “You know. You know what’s up. Don’t pretend you don’t. You got that look.”
“Maybe I do. Anybody else see this maybe-ghost?”
“My buddy Amos,” he said. “He don’t live down there no more. He went topside, said getting beaten up on the streets was better than one more night in Tunnel C. Couple of other guys took off a couple of days later, haven’t seen ’em since.”
“But not you? Aren’t you scared?”
Eric waved his hand. “She stays over there, I stay out here. We don’t bother each other none. Besides, when she gets close, you know it. There’s a smell. Gives you time to run.”
“What kind of smell?”
“You’ll know it when it hits you. Seriously, man, you don’t want to go down there.”
I dipped into my pocket, palming a five-dollar bill while pretending to adjust my flashlight with my other hand. I unfolded the cash with a spread of my fingers and offered it to him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m a magician.”
Eric snickered and took the bill with a nod. “You could do a card trick for her, but I don’t think it’ll help.”
“You’d be surprised. I have some really good card tricks.”
Eric watched me go. As I continued down the tunnel, the glow from his lamp fading at my back, a sense of cool confidence washed over me. Black widows were one thing, but ghosts? Ghosts I could deal with.
Your typical ghost is just a psychic imprint. They’re the aftermath of trauma, despair, an emotion so strong that it doesn’t die with the person experiencing it. Scary, but about as dangerous as a filmstrip. If Stacy’s murder created an after-impression, I might be able to learn something from it. If nothing else, I could at least banish it and do Eric and his buddies a favor. They had enough ghosts of their own to wrestle with.
Scraps of detritus cluttered the tunnel floor. My flashlight beam flickered across a broken hockey stick, a few plastic bags, a grocery cart lying on its side with one wheel slowly turning in a half-felt draft. I looked back to the middle of the tunnel and froze.
A black plastic sphere sat in the center of the floor, looking less abandoned than carefully placed there, like a prop in a canceled play. I crouched down to pick it up, finally recognizing it as one of those old Magic 8 Ball toys. Taken by a whim, I gave it a shake.
“Is anyone down here?” I asked and then flipped it over. Through a scratched plastic window, I was greeted with the words “Answer hazy, ask again later.” I chuckled and moved to put it back down.
Then the ball jerked in my hand, and the answer flipped to “Yes.”
The sphere tumbled from my fingers, cracked against the concrete, and bounced into the dark. I slipped a deck of cards from my pocket and gave them a slow, overhand shuffle as I walked deeper into the tunnel. The sinuous riffling of the pasteboard in my hands helped me concentrate.
“All right,” I said to the shadows, “we can do it that way.”
The underground air had felt damp and cool, like a day in late autumn. Now winter gusted in. A chilling breeze rubbed up against my spine and turned my breath to frost just before the smell hit me. The stench of raw sewage swelled up like someone had opened a cesspool right under my feet. My stomach lurched, and I struggled to breathe as I flipped over the top card of my deck. Queen of spades. I shuffled it back in.
The flashlight beam flickered across a recessed alcove in the tunnel wall. Stringy blond hair, a naked shoulder, bloodless lips. With a whispering rasp, Stacy came out to greet me.
Not all of her, though.
Jud Pankow’s murdered granddaughter hovered in the beam of my flashlight, a shambling twitch in her step, staring at me with mad eyes the color of silver dollars. One of her arms was missing. And half a leg. And an oval chunk of her stomach that looked like it had been scooped out with a precision saw. There was no blood, no gore, not even the hint of a wound. Her body just stopped here and there, like pieces of her had been edited out of existence.
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.
4.
Every 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 wa
ved 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.
The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels Page 224
