The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  So I didn’t think anything of it, walking between a bunch of broken-down cars on one side and a tall raggedy hedge on the other. Both had always been there.

  “Hey,” came someone’s bark, so close I flinched.

  Five people stepped out from between parked cars. Three men and two women, if I had to guess. And I did have to guess, because they wore black baggy nondescript clothes . . . and whales on their heads. Blue smiling papier-mâché sperm whales, oversize and cartoonish, except where some of them had been smeared with what I hoped was red paint and worried was not.

  Also, they carried harpoons. And all you had to do was look at them to know they weren’t papier-mâché, weren’t fake. As close as these whale-headed marauders were standing, they could all five have run me through without taking a single step forward.

  “Can I help you fine folks?” I said, one hand on my phone in my pocket.

  They stepped forward. Made a circle around me. And I didn’t budge. Didn’t try to run or eyeball which one was weakest and surprise them with a kick to the balls and make a break for it. There was no fight in me. No flight.

  One of them raised his harpoon. Pointed it at my face, mere inches from my eyes. I could smell the vanilla-petroleum tang of WD-40 on it.

  So at least now I knew what it was like, for all those whales murdered for their blubber across the long decades of the whale oil trade. To be staring down the barrel of a bunch of cruel sharp metal blades perfectly engineered to cleave the blubber and pierce the inner organs.

  I knew them. I had to. I went to school with them, probably. My father had given them slices of bologna when they were wide-eyed happy children who came to the butcher shop with their parents. Whatever they had come to do, I couldn’t stop them.

  “Do it if you’re gonna do it,” I said, and shut my eyes. I wouldn’t beg. Not because I was proud or unafraid, but because right about then death didn’t seem so bad. As a matter of fact, it sounded fantastic. An easy out from the stress and sadness I’d been suffering from since approximately forever . . . to say nothing of the hate I’d helped unleash. A just and fitting punishment, the kind that wiped slates clean in Hollywood movies.

  A whistling noise jolted my eyes open—the blade whipped back. Somebody laughed. If they’d come to deliver a message, other than stark intimidation, they left without delivering it.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  When Lilly gets a text from Bergen, she is almost surprised that it makes her happy. Like, she’s been missing him. Somehow.

  Is it true you’re going to see Jark today?

  I am, she types. He’s asked most of the department heads to come visit him. Now it’s my turn.

  They’ve all been working from home, since Jark’s arrest. With all the death threats aimed at Penelope’s Quilt, and the delivery of a big box with BOMB written all over it—although it turned out to just have rotten meat inside it—the board said it was better for everyone to stay in their homes where (hopefully) no one knows who they are.

  Bergen types: You need to tell him to watch out. I had a dream. But not a dream. Where something awful happens to him. Happened. Will happen.

  Lilly: A dream

  Bergen: But not a dream. Tell him to watch out. What he thinks are dreams might not be. And vice versa. Tell him that?

  Sure thing, she writes, wishing to cut short this session.

  Oh good, she thinks. It’s not that I missed Bergen. It’s that I missed the thrill of hating him.

  Lilly gets back into bed. She has work to do. So much work. Instead she takes a nap. Almost immediately she is floating beneath a sky full of stars, on a sea that stretches as far as the night.

  * * *

  THE POSTS GO UP AT 3:00 P.M. Hundreds of photographs, across multiple social media networks.

  Disgusting stuff. Everything anyone ever shared with Tom Minniq on a sex app. All of the actual photographs, and countless fakes. Inflammatory images, expertly constructed for maximum rage. Cheating spouses in the throes of passion. Naughty nudes of the most proper people. Locals and newcomers alike.

  Most come down within an hour or so, flagged as inappropriate by humans or by bots, but the damage is almost always already done. The people who needed to see them already saw. Lots of them downloaded copies. Plenty get mysteriously emailed as well, for the folks who aren’t on social media.

  * * *

  THREE-THIRTY, and Lilly sits down across from Jark.

  He isn’t at the Hudson Jail. Security concerns prompted Chief Propst to move him to an undisclosed location. Fears of riots, assassination attempts. Even most of the other cops don’t know where he is. The chief knows better than to assume anyone on the force would respect the law more than their own anger. So Lilly had to get the address from Jark’s lawyer, which is how she is here—at the Hudson Library, which before being a library had been a mental institution and before that a foundlings’ home, and both of those establishments had been in need of a cell in the basement for their most recalcitrant occupants. The library had used it for storage, but it had been easy enough to clear out the stuff and return it to its former function.

  “Hey, Jark,” she says, after two cops check her against a list and run her ID and lead her down to a low-ceilinged room. Smelling like mold and (seawater?) rotting books. Lit by a single standing lamp, whose cord trails out the door to an extension cord. A testament to the slipshod nature of the HPD’s ability to handle this situation: the cord is an obvious suicide risk, but it was either that or let him sit in the dark.

  “Hi, Lilly,” he says, his voice low, his posture poor, the circles beneath his eyes immense. His cheeks are ragged with stubble. She’s never seen them other than clean-shaven. “How’s everybody doing?”

  “We’re pretty well fucked,” she says. “I guess you know all that.”

  He nods. “Word is, the board is going to vote to remove me. And they’ve hired big-deal image consultants to consider a rebranding. Renaming. Whatever. They always said Penelope’s Quilt was too complicated, we should just cut all that shit out and be a faster, better Etsy, and now they’ll finally get to dumb it down the way they always wanted. What I meant was, how is everyone’s morale?”

  “That’s the question I was answering.”

  Jark nods.

  Disgust and anger war inside of her—but even here, even now, she is afraid of him. Years of working for him, and the big-boss billionaire is still in her head, even if he’s not in the flesh. Even if now she knows what a monster he is.

  “I’ve asked the board to allocate five million dollars to your department, under your control, to finance the completion of several projects that would open us up to potential lawsuits if we abandoned them. That part’s not true, not entirely, but they don’t need to know that.”

  At this, her jaw drops.

  “They’ve said yes. It’s already been set up. You’ll be able to spend it however you want, although all of your expenditures will be tracked and subject to review by my lawyer. I’m going to beat this. It’s bullshit, and I’ll beat it in court. But that may take a while. In the meantime, I need the project to move forward. Bribe whoever you have to. Winter Fest has to go off without a hitch.”

  Can’t he see it’s finished? That it’s all over for the Pequod Arms? How can he seriously think he’ll beat this?

  The best she can do is ask, “Why do you care so much about stupid Winter Fest?”

  “Because it’s a distraction. Keep all our enemies focused on that—meanwhile I got ten bulldozers lined up to start construction the next morning at multiple sites. Once the ground is broken, phase five will be a cinch.”

  Of course she nods. Smiles. Thinks: You got our enemies focused on the Winter Fest, all right. So focused that we might all end up dead. Thinks: We’re screwed, but I gotta do what I can do before the money all gets locked up . . . and before the blood starts flowing in the streets.

  And with five million dollars, maybe, just maybe, somehow, I can repair some of the damage that
’s been done. And stop the blood from flowing in the first place.

  Five minutes later, she is walking back to her car. She doesn’t notice the blue van parked down the block, where someone sits watching for her, just like she didn’t notice them when they followed her to this facility.

  * * *

  FOUR-FOURTEEN, and Officer Van Vleck gets fired. For sending dick pics to Rebecca, who works dispatch down at the police station. Which he swears he did not do, but he can’t deny that’s him in the pictures. Yes, he took them, yes he had them in a locked album on his online dating profile, so somebody must have hacked his phone—remotely, he hasn’t had it out of his sight for days—and no, he doesn’t know whether such a thing is possible, because he doesn’t know anything about hacking, but it must be possible, because it happened.

  He cries, and Chief Propst changes his dismissal to indefinite suspension without pay, pending an investigation—which is really just a deferral of the firing, to get him out of his office.

  Four-thirty, and Bergen’s mother deletes the email her son sent her, with the video attachment, the one she only saw three seconds of—proud of herself, at first, because she only recently mastered the occult art of downloading and viewing attachments—and then, horrified—because someone had filmed her son performing oral sex on him. A mistake on Bergen’s part, surely. He meant to send it to someone else. This is just how kids are, these days. She saw something about it on a talk show. With their cell phones and their social media, making sex tapes as routinely and cheerfully as her generation went to the roller rink. She will never speak of this to anyone, least of all her son.

  Four-fifty-seven and Lettie creates a brand-new email address, HudsonNeedsToKnowTheTruthAboutPastorRoss@gmail. First name Concerned; last name Jehovah’s Witness. She attaches the fifteen obscene photographs that arrived via WhatsApp from the pastor, along with a sixteenth—a screencap of the text message that accompanied them, Why don’t you get your ass over here and help me out with all this. She copies and pastes five hundred email addresses from the “To” field of the last church newsletter. Pastor Ross never did get the whole concept of a BCC.

  Five-twenty, and sixteen-year-old Kenny Paddock comes home from football practice, walks in his front door, catches an aluminum baseball bat to the stomach. His fourteen-year-old brother Donnie swung it, and he swings it again, hitting Kenny in the side, screaming. Kicking. Because who else but his big brother could have filmed him masturbating, and logged in to Facebook as Donnie and posted it to his own page?

  Later, at the hospital, Donnie wants to ask the doctor to take a look at his ribs—see if she can figure out what this weird jagged thing beneath his skin is, lodged between two ribs, and why it hurts so bad—but decides to stay quiet about it. He’s already in enough trouble when his father finds out what he did to Kenny. If it turns out he’s got something wrong with him, the kind of something that costs money to fix, it’ll be so much worse for him.

  * * *

  NINE-FIFTEEN P.M., and Eddie Roraback wakes up with the worst headache he’s ever had in his life. The owner of Town & Country Realty just got over a nasty case of explosive diarrhea picked up at the election night party, so he assumes it’s some lingering consequence of that. Dehydration—even though he’s been trying his hardest to drink lots of water—but why is his mouth so dry?—and why was he asleep at his kitchen table?—and why the hell can’t he remember anything that happened that day, not since going to breakfast at the fancy restaurant that used to be the Columbia Diner, where he and most of the realtors in Hudson met to try to figure out what the fuck to do to survive the present storm—but he doesn’t remember what they decided, doesn’t remember much at all—

  And why is there . . . is that hair? . . . all over his kitchen table. Dirty blond, short and thin. Like his own.

  In dawning horror, he raises his hands to feel his head—where all his hair has been shaved off. Wind licks the side of his face, from the broken window of his back door.

  Someone drugged me. Then they broke into my home while I was unconscious, and cut off all my hair. But who would do such a thing, and why?

  There’s a printout, a black-and-white photo of three miserable women in a public square, weeping as all their hair is cut off. Surrounded by jeering, laughing neighbors. A headline explains: Resistance Fighters Shave the Heads of French Women Who Collaborated with German Occupiers during World War Two. There’s also a button: YOU ARE HATED.

  Later he’ll call his colleagues, learn that the same thing happened to four of them. One of them will drive up to Albany Medical—because Columbia-Greene couldn’t get a goddamn pregnancy test right—and in two days they’ll get the results, traces of Rohypnol in their system—they’d been roofied—and they’ll call the cops. By then the cops will be too busy.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  RONAN

  Rain was falling when I left the house, and by the time I got down to the river it had turned to snow. It cast a hush across the city, the river and the valley sitting in silence. At the boat launch I sat on the metal guardrail and watched the water. Most of the boats had already been taken out, dragged to dry dock. Dom’s was still there.

  My father hadn’t been in the living room when I left. I knocked on his bedroom door and he didn’t answer. I decided to let him sleep.

  I sat for a long time, in the snow. Trains passed, heading north to Canada or south to New York City. On my phone I’d called up the schedule, even selected a ticket on the 5:34 P.M. back to the city. Entered my credit card number. But I couldn’t click Buy. I couldn’t go. Not alone.

  Evening; the sky and the water and the Catskills all deep shades of blue slowly blackening. No wind. The snow fell heavy and straight and deliberate. Clump flakes, widely spaced. I wondered which of the sixty words for snow this one was. My father and mother and I used to come here, after going out to eat. We ate out a lot. Most of the restaurants in town bought meat from my dad, and half of them owed him money at any given moment. Business was shit for everyone. My dad made the most of it. And afterward we’d come here, breathe the fresh air, go for a little walk along the edge of the water. For as long as I was small enough, he’d hoist me up onto his shoulders. I could see so much more that way.

  They came easier, now. The memories of him. And of my mom.

  A truck came, with a flat pronged trailer behind. I knew it would. Who knows how. I knew it would come, and I knew they would both be inside. Maybe that was more of Hudson’s metaphysical caul in action.

  “Ronan?” Dom said, getting out once he’d backed the car into place at the water’s edge. The trailer was mostly submerged.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Attalah exited the car as well, and took his place behind the wheel. “Hello, Ronan,” she said, and then rolled down the window to give Dom a thumbs-up.

  I watched them work. They did this together every year. The banal, beautiful details of dry docking. Dom walked down to the boat, got in, started her up. Attalah got out and double-checked the trailer hitch. My throat hurt, watching. Seeing the well-oiled machine that they were. How their love had bonded them into something new.

  Love could do that. It always did. It had bonded me and Dom, all those years ago, and we’d rebuilt that bond these last few months, but we’d never achieve something like what they had. What my parents had, down here in this very spot, holding hands and watching me run screaming after seagulls. Give love enough time, and it could weave people into a quilt as big as a city. With a hundred thousand threads. One for each of us.

  That’s what the whales had done, here in Hudson. They’d knotted us all up together into something that could keep us safe, even if it also kept us stunted.

  The ache in my throat evolved, while I watched. As Dom drove the boat toward the trailer. As it slid neatly into place in the cleft of its prong. As he stepped down into the water, knee-high rubber boots keeping him dry, and began to loop and knot the ropes that bound the boat to the trailer. I realized: I love th
em. Above all things—above the town, above my pain and hurt over what had been done to it, above my hate, above my need for revenge for the people who’d lost their homes and the people who’d lost their minds. Above my need to punish people for what happened to my mom.

  Dom walked out of the water. Went to the driver’s door. Put his hand on the handle to let Attalah out.

  I got up. I walked over. The three of us looked at each other without speaking. They were scared of me. I knew that. I was half crazy; I was an addict; I was accountable to nothing but my own savage inexplicable self. I had intruded upon their happiness. I was a threat to them. But I loved them. And I would do anything to keep them safe.

  “We have to go,” I said at last.

  “Just stop, Ronan,” Attalah said, still sitting behind the wheel.

  “I’m serious. We have to leave here. Something really bad is going to happen.”

  “Something bad,” Attalah said, and smirked. “What the fuck did you think would happen, when you released all those goddamn naked pictures?”

  “That wasn’t me,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy but it wasn’t me.”

  “Who was it?”

  But I couldn’t say it was Tom Minniq. Dom might be open to seeing the possibility of supernatural intervention here in Hudson, but I knew damn sure Attalah wasn’t.

  “I don’t know. I got hacked. I . . .” I let my voice trail off.

  Dom’s lips pressed tight together. He was trying not to say something. But I saw it in his eyes. Their fear; their comprehension. Still beautiful; still wide and round and brown-by-gold, but broken now. The tiniest of cracks in his unbreakable confidence in the world’s essential goodness. Dom had come undocked. He knew. He believed. “I think Ronan might be right,” he said, at last. “We have to leave here.”