by Greg Bear
Again, however, he was reluctant to leave the mansion and Miss Parkhurst. Something beyond Belle’s waning magic was at work here; he wanted to listen to her and to experience more of that fascinated horror. He wanted to watch her again, absorb her smooth, ancient beauty. In a way, she needed him as much as Momma did. Miss Parkhurst outraged everything in him that was lawful and orderly, but he finally had to admit, as he thought of going back to Momma, that he enjoyed the outrage.
He clutched the gold opener and ran from his room to the parlor. She waited for him there in a red velvet chair, hands gripping two lions at the end of the armrests. The lions’ wooden faces grinned beneath her caresses. “I got to go,” he said. “Momma’s sick for missing me.”
She nodded. “I’m not holding you,” she said.
He stared at her. “I wish I could help,” he said.
She smiled hopefully, pitifully. “Then promise you’ll come back.”
Oliver wavered. How long would Momma need him?
What if he gave his promise and returned and Miss Parkhurst was already dead?
“I promise.”
“Don’t be too long,” she said.
The limousine waited for him in the garage, white and beautiful, languid and sleek and fast all at once. This time, no chauffeur waited for him. The door opened by itself and he climbed in; the door closed behind him, and he leaned back stiffly on the leather seats, gold opener in hand. “Take me home,” he said. The glass partition and the windows all around darkened to an opaque, smoky gold. He felt a sensation of smooth motion. What would it be like to have this kind of power all the time?
But the power wasn’t hers to give.
Oliver arrived before the apartment building in a blizzard of swirling snow. Snow packed up over the curbs and coated the sidewalks a foot deep; Sleepside was heavy with winter. Oliver stepped from the limousine and climbed the icy steps, the cold hardly touching him even in his light clothing. He was surrounded by Miss Parkhurst’s magic.
Denver was frying a pan of navy beans in the kitchen when Oliver burst through the door. Denver stared at him, face slack, too surprised to speak.
“Where’s Momma?” Oliver asked.
Yolanda heard his voice from the living room and screamed.
Reggie met him in the hallway, arms open wide, smiling broadly. “Goddamn, little brother! You got away?”
“Where’s Momma?”
“She’s in her room. She’s feeling low.”
“She’s sick,” Oliver said, pushing past his brother. Yolanda stood before Momma’s door as if to keep Oliver out. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and looked scared.
“Let me by, Yolanda,” Oliver said. He pointed the opener at her, and then pulled back, fearful of what might happen.
“You made Momma si-ick,” Yolanda squeaked, but she stepped aside. Oliver pushed through the door to Momma’s room. She sat up in bed, face drawn and thin, but her eyes danced with joy. “My boy!” She sighed. “My beautiful boy.”
Oliver sat beside her and they hugged fiercely. “Please don’t leave me again,” Momma said, voice muffled by his shoulder. Oliver set the opener on her flimsy nightstand and cried against her neck.
The day after Oliver’s return, Denver stood lank-legged by the window, hands in frayed pants pockets, staring at the snow with heavy-lidded eyes. “It’s too cold to go anywhere now,” he mused.
Reggie sat in their father’s chair, face screwed in thought. “I listened to what he told Momma,” he said. “That whore sent our little brother back here in a limo. A big white limo. See it out there?”
Denver peered down at the street. A white limousine waited at the curb, not even dusted by snow. A tiny vanishing curl of white rose from its tailpipe. “It’s still there,” he said.
“Did you see what he had when he came in?” Reggie asked. Denver shook his head. “A gold box. She must have given that to him. I bet whoever has that gold box can visit Miss Belle Parkhurst. Want to bet?”
Denver grinned.
“Wouldn’t be too cold if we had that limo, would it?” Reggie asked.
Oliver brought his momma chicken soup and a carefully trimmed orange. He plumped her pillow for her, shushing her, telling her not to talk until she had eaten. She smiled and let him minister to her. When she had eaten, she lay back and closed her eyes, tears pooling in their hollows before slipping down her cheeks. “I was so afraid for you,” she said. “At first, I didn’t see her. Just her voice, inviting me in over the security buzzer, letting me sit and rest my feet. She seemed nice. I didn’t know what she would do. But I knew where I was … was that bad of me, to stay there, knowing?”
“You were tired, Momma,” Oliver said. “Besides, Miss Parkhurst isn’t that bad.”
Momma looked at him dubiously. “I saw her piano. There was a shelf next to it with the most beautiful sheet music, even big books filled with music. Oh, Oliver, I’ve never taken anything in my life …” She cried freely now, sapping what little strength the lunch had given her.
“Don’t you worry, Momma. She used you. She wanted me to come.” As an afterthought, he added, not sure why he lied, “Or Yolanda.”
Momma absorbed that while her eyes examined his face in tiny, caressing glances. “You won’t go back,” she said, “will you?”
Oliver looked down at the sheets folded under her arms. “I promised. She’ll die if I don’t,” he said.
“That woman is a liar,” Momma stated unequivocally. “If she wants you, she’ll do anything to get you.”
“I don’t think she’s lying, Momma.”
She looked away from him, a feverish anger flushing her cheeks. “Why did you promise her?”
“She’s not that bad, Momma,” he said again. He had thought that coming home would clear his mind, but Miss Parkhurst’s face, her plea, stayed with him as if she were only a room away. The mansion seemed just a fading dream, unimportant; but Belle Parkhurst stuck. “She needs help. She wants to change.”
Momma puffed out her cheeks and blew through her lips like a horse. She had often done that to his father, never before to him. “She’ll always be a whore,” she said.
Oliver’s eyes narrowed. He saw a spitefulness and bitterness in Momma he hadn’t noticed before. Not that spite was unwarranted; Miss Parkhurst had treated Momma roughly. Yet …
Denver stood in the doorway. “Reggie and I got to talk to Momma,” he said. “About you.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Alone.” Reggie stood grinning behind his brother. Oliver took the tray of dishes and sidled past them, going into the kitchen. He washed the last few days’ plates methodically, letting the lukewarm water slide over his hands, eyes focused on the faucet’s dull gleam.
He had almost lost track of time when he heard the front door slam. Jerking his head up, he wiped the last plate and put it away, then went to Momma’s room. She looked back at him guiltily. Something was wrong. He searched the room with his eyes, but nothing was out of place. Nothing that was normally present …
The opener.
His brothers had taken the gold opener.
“Momma!” he said.
“They’re going to pay her a visit,” she said, the bitterness plain now. “They don’t like their momma mistreated.”
It was getting dark and the snow was thick. He had hoped to return this evening. If Miss Parkhurst hadn’t lied, she would be very weak by now, and perhaps tomorrow, she would be dead. His lungs seemed to shrink, and he had a hard time taking a breath.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “She might kill them, Momma!”
But that wasn’t what worried him. He put on his heavy coat, then his father’s old cracked rubber boots with the snow tread soles. Yolanda came out of the room she shared with the babies. She didn’t ask any questions, just watched him dress for the cold, her eyes dull.
“They got that gold box,” she said as he flipped the last metal clasp on the boots. “Probably worth a lot.”
Oliver hesitated in the hallway, then grabbed Yolanda’s shoulders and shook her vigorously. “You take care of Momma, you hear?”
She shut her jaw with a clack and shoved free. Oliver was out the door before she could speak.
Day’s last light filled the sky with a deep peachy glow tinged with cold gray. Snow fell golden above the buildings and smudgy brown within their shadow. The wind mournfully swirled around him, sending gust-fingers through his coat as if searching for any warmth that might be stolen. For a nauseating moment, all his resolve was sucked away by a vacuous pit of misery.
The streets were empty; he wondered what night this was, and then remembered it was the twenty-third of December, but too cold for whatever stray shoppers Sleepside might send out. Why go? To save two worthless idiots? Not that so much, although that would have been enough, since their loss would hurt Momma, and they were his brothers; not that so much as his promise. And something else.
He was afraid for Belle Parkhurst.
He buttoned his coat collar and leaned into the wind. He hadn’t put on a hat. The heat flew from his scalp, and in a few moments he felt drained and exhausted. But he made it to the subway entrance and staggered down the steps, into the warmer heart of the city, where it was always sixty-four degrees.
Locked behind thick glass in her metal booth, wrinkled eyes weary with night’s wisdom, the fluorescent-pale clerk took his money, then dropped tokens into the steel tray with separate, distinct chinks. Oliver glanced at her face and saw Belle’s printed there instead. This middle-aged woman did not spread her legs for money, but had sold her youth and life away sitting in this cavern. Whose emptiness was more profound?
“Be careful,” she warned vacantly through the speaker grill. “Night Metro coming any minute now.”
He dropped a cat’s-head token into the turnstile and pushed through, then stood shivering on the platform, waiting for the Sunside train. It seemed to take forever to arrive, and when it did, he was not particularly relieved. The bull-headed operator’s eyes winked green in their deep pits as the train slid to a halt. The doors opened with an oiled groan, and Oliver stepped aboard, into the hard, cold glare of the train’s interior. At first, he thought the car was empty. He did not sit, however. The hair on his neck and arm bristled. Hand gripping a steel handle, he leaned into the train’s acceleration and took a deep, half-hiccup breath.
Oliver first consciously noticed the other passengers as faces gleaming in silhouette against the dim lights of passing stations. The riders sat almost invisible, crowding the car; they stood beside him, less real than a chill breeze, and watched him through glassy eyes, bearing no ill will for the moment, perhaps not yet aware that he was alive and they were not. They showed no overt signs of their wounds, their sins, but how they had come to be here was obvious to Oliver’s animal instincts.
This train carried holiday suicides: men, women, teenagers, even a few children, delicate as expensive crystal in a shop window. Maybe the bull-headed operator collected them, culling them and caging them as they stumbled randomly onto his train. Maybe he commanded them, used them …
Oliver tried to sink into his coat. He felt guilty, being alive and healthy, enveloped in strong emotions; the others were so flimsy, with so little hold on this reality. He muttered a prayer, then stopped as they all turned toward him at once, showing glassy disapproval at his reverse blasphemy. Silently, he prayed again, but even that seemed to irritate his fellow passengers, and they squeaked among themselves in voices that only a dog or a bat could hear.
The stations passed one by one, mosaic symbols and names flashing in dim puddles of light. When the Sunside station approached and the train slowed, Oliver moved quickly to the door. It opened with a sigh. The other passengers sighed as well; they could not leave. Their hands reached for him, but he stepped onto the platform, turned—and backed up against the dark uniform of the bull-headed operator. The air around the operator stank of grease and electricity and something sweeter, perhaps blood. He stood a bad foot and a half taller than Oliver, and in one outstretched, black-nailed, leathery hand he held his long silver shears, points spread wide, briefly suggesting Belle Parkhurst’s horizontal position among the old men.
“You’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” the operator warned in a voice deeper than the train motors. “Down here, I can cut your cord.” He closed the shears with a slick, singing whisper.
“I’m going to Miss Parkhurst’s,” Oliver said, voice quavering.
“Who?” the operator asked.
“I’m leaving now,” Oliver said, backing away. The operator followed, hunching over him. The shears sang open, angled toward Oliver’s eyes. At a wave of the operator’s other clawed hand, the crystalline, raindrop dead within the train passed through the train’s open door and glided around them. Gluey waves of cold shivered the air.
“You’re a bold little bastard,” the operator said, voice descending below any human scale—and yet still audible. The voice shivered Oliver’s bones, and the white tile walls vibrated as well. “All I have to do is cut your cord, right in front of your face”—he snicked the shears inches from Oliver’s nose—“and you’ll never find your way home.”
The operator backed him up against a cold, moist barrier of suicides. Oliver’s fear could not shut out curiosity. Was the bull’s head real, or was there a man under the horns and hide and bone? The eyes in their sunken orbits now glowed ice-blue. The scissors arced again before Oliver’s face again, even closer; mere hairs from his nose.
“You’re mine,” the operator rumbled, and the blades closed on something tough and invisible. Oliver’s head exploded with pain. He flailed back through the dead, dragging the operator after him by the pinch of the shears on that something unseen and very important.
Roaring, the operator applied both hands to the shears’ grips. Oliver felt as if his head were being ripped off. Suddenly he kicked out with all his strength between the operator’s black-uniformed legs. His foot hit flesh and bone as unyielding as rock and his agony doubled. But the shears hung for a moment in air before Oliver’s face, and the operator slowly curled over. He moaned—and his fingers loosened.
Oliver grabbed the shears, spread the blades, and released whatever cord stretched between himself and his past, his home. Then he pushed through the swarming dead. The scissors reflected long gleams over their astonished, watery faces. Suddenly, seeing a chance to escape, they spread out along the platform, some ascending the station’s stairs, some fleeing to both ends of the platform.
Oliver ran through them up the steps—
And stood on a warm evening sidewalk. He was back in Sunside. From the station’s entrance wafted a sour breath of oil and blood, and a faint chill of fading hands as the dead evaporated in the balmy night air.
A quiet crowd of well-dressed onlookers had gathered at the front entrance to Miss Parkhurst’s mansion. They stood vigil, waiting for something, pinched faces shiny with a sweat of envy and greed. Oliver did not see the limousine. His brothers must have arrived by now; they were inside, then.
Catching his breath as he ran, he slid around the corner of the old brownstone, found a tight alley, and looked for the entrance to the underground garage. On the south side, he found the ramp and descended to slam his hands against the corrugated metal door. Echoes replied.
“It’s me!” he shouted. “Let me in!”
A middle-aged man regarded him dispassionately from the higher ground of the sidewalk. “What do you want in there, young man?” he asked.
Oliver glared back over his shoulder. “None of your business,” he said.
“Maybe it is, if you want in,” the man said. “There’s a way any man can get into that house. It never refuses gold.”
Oliver pulled back from t
he door a moment, stunned.
The man shrugged and walked on.
Oliver still held the operator’s shears. They weren’t gold, they were silver, but they had to be worth something. “Let me in!” he said. Then, upping the ante, he dug in his pocket and produced the last cat’s head token. “I’ll pay!”
The door grumbled up. The garage’s lights were off, but in the soft yellow glow of the streetlights, he saw an eagle’s claw thrust out from the brick wall just inside the door’s frame, supporting a golden cup. Token in one hand, shears in another, Oliver considered. To pay Belle’s mansion now was no honorable deed; he dropped the token into the cup, but kept the shears.
A faint crack of light gleamed under the stairwell door. Around the door, the bones of ancient city dwellers glowed in the compacted stone, teeth and knuckles bright as fireflies. Oliver tried the door; it was locked. Inserting the point of the shears between door and catchplate, he pried and twisted until the lock was sprung.
The quiet parlor beyond was illuminated by a few guttering candles clutched in drooping, tarnished eagle’s claws. The air was thick with the blunt smells of stale cigars and old, stubbed-out cigarettes. Oliver stopped, closing his eyes and listening.
There was one room he had never seen in the time he had spent in Belle Parkhurst’s house. She had never even shown him the door, but he knew it had to exist—and that was where she would be, alive or dead.
Where his brothers were, he couldn’t tell, and for the moment he didn’t care. He doubted they were in any mortal danger. Belle’s power was as weak as the scattered candles.
Oliver crept along the dark halls, holding the shears before him as a warning to whatever might try to stop him. He climbed two more flights of stairs, and on the third floor found an uncarpeted hallway, walls bare, that he had not seen before. The dry floorboards creaked beneath his shoes. The air was cool and still. He could smell a ghost of Belle’s rose perfume. At the end of the hall was a plain panel door with a tarnished brass knob, also unlocked. He sucked in a breath for courage and opened it.
