As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  Beth had almost shoved all the wires back into the wet cardboard when she saw the hole. It stood just more than a foot high and double that in width. The loose bricks at the edge of the mortar all angled into the cage, as if something had pushed its way through from the other side. Beth squatted on her haunches for a better look and saw nothing but blackness. She felt a coldness coming from the hole that wrapped around her, pulling like a spectral tentacle. At her feet, she spotted raked furrows in the dirt. The scratches seemed big for a rat. A raccoon, perhaps? Something else?

  She gripped one of the loose bricks lightly between thumb and forefinger, ready to let go the instant she came in contact with one of Axis’s infamous roaches. The brick popped loose like a milk tooth. Beth hefted it for a moment, gauging its weight, then lobbed it into the breach. She listened as the brick tumbled and tumbled and kept tumbling until there was nothing but hollow silence. She thought she heard a faint splash far below but couldn’t be sure. If there was something lurking inside, it wasn’t coming out for a visit.

  As she headed back upstairs, the jackhammer beats and buzz-saw synths of the dance floor hit her long before she mounted the last step. She pushed through the basement’s swinging saloon doors and then pushed through the club’s throng of swinging patrons. She brushed past costume after costume, rubbing against a carnival of the sensual and the grotesque.

  There was no sign of Ryan. Of course, he could have been standing right next to her and she wouldn’t have known it, not without any idea what his costume was. Ryan had wanted his and Beth’s to match, boyfriend-girlfriend. And when she’d politely pointed out that matching costumes was what she and Zoë did—had been doing since kindergarten—he got moody. He usually did that when he didn’t get his way. So he sulked, telling Beth that his costume would be a surprise, then.

  Beth knew she should probably tell Hank about the hole in the basement’s back wall and mention that the rats were back. After a quick lap around the dance floor, she finally spotted him by the entrance. He was trading quips with one of New Harbor’s finest, who stood just outside. She watched Hank pull a thick envelope from his hip pocket and press it into the flatfoot’s waiting palm. Police payoffs weren’t exactly a QT affair at Axis, but she’d never seen it done so openly. The cop must have sensed her stare. His smile vanished as he nodded in her direction. She looked away but not before Hank snared her with his beady mud-brown eyes.

  “How’s Kelsey working out?”

  Beth could see that Kelsey was swamped at the bar. “It’s her first night. Too early to tell.”

  “I don’t know. She seems to be doing all right for being left all by herself. Maybe I’ll float her a shift or two.”

  Meaning a shift or two of Beth’s. She’d watched him play this game before. If she’d sent Kelsey down into the basement, she’d have been down there for an hour, and Hank would be harassing her about that. Beth just gritted her teeth. There was no way to win this kind of argument, better to change the subject. “There’s a hole in the basement, Hank. I think something might be living in it. An animal, maybe.”

  “So what?”

  “So what if one of us gets bit down there? Gets rabies or something?”

  Hank waved her off. “Just have the barbacks throw down some glue boards. And shove a box in front of it. I’ve got the health inspector coming in next week.

  “Hank, I don’t think—”

  “Nobody wants you to think, Becker. Thinking is not in your job description, got it? All you’re supposed to do is pour booze and make guys want to fuck you.” He was gone before Beth could even form a response.

  Five

  Ryan stood at the far end of the bar, scratching the elastic waistband of his overstarched scrubs. His breath fogged hot against his surgeon’s mask, and his latex gloves were collecting sweat. He could already feel his fingers beginning to turn into prunes. He wondered how anyone could actually work in those gloves. He craned his neck, hoping that Beth would finally see him standing there. Damn, if she didn’t look fantastic in that devil outfit. He thought about pulling down his mask and hailing her directly, but before he could, he was jostled to the side by a guy in a Sumo fat suit whose padded arm sent drinks flying, and Beth scrambled to clean it all up.

  Ryan wondered if perhaps it was time to head outside for a lungful of air that didn’t stink of nightclub fog and cocaine residue. He took a step back and bumped right into something warm, something female that wrapped its arms around his waist and drew him close. “Hey there,” came a breathy whisper, hot on his neck.

  He shimmied around to see a slinky blonde, fit to burst from a tight latex cop outfit. He tugged down his mask. “Hey there, yourself.” She reached for the dangling ends of his stethoscope and backed him up against the bar top. He caught whiffs of her perfume: ambergris, basil, and white jasmine.

  “Mmmmm . . . paging Dr. McDreamy. I think I need a shot.” Her husky voice was as much moan as speech. She traced the caduceus stitched to the breast of his lab coat. “Or maybe an injection.”

  “That’s cute.”

  “I might have a fever, Doctor. Tell me . . .” She lifted his wrist to press it against her forehead. “Do you think I’m hot?” When Ryan offered no answer other than a bemused smirk, she pulled the hand down to her chest. “Feel my heart.”

  He did feel it, along with an ample handful of what lay in its path. “I’m sorry,” he said, finally pulling away from her. “I’m not that guy.”

  She gave him a look that screamed Every guy is that guy. “Pity.” And with a shrug, she was gone.

  Sometimes Ryan wished he could be that guy. He really did. He watched as the latex costume melded with countless others, and was about to turn back to the bar when he spotted a woman who made the bombshell he’d just given the brush-off look like a grainy photocopy of sex appeal. Alabaster skin, high forehead topped by a mountain of fiery red curls, eyes like jade. She wore a slim velvet dress that swept the floor. She could have walked straight off the canvas of Rossetti, exuding the type of Pre-Raphaelite allure that Ryan had spent his entire pimple-pocked youth fantasizing about. She looked up. Her copper-flecked eyes locked on his. He would go to her. He must go to her. He—

  “Ahem!”

  The spell was shattered. Ryan turned to see Beth glowering at him as he shook himself back to sense, trying hard not to steal one last glance.

  “What was that all about?” She handed him an opened Red Stripe.

  “What was what all about?”

  “That girl.”

  Which girl? he wondered. The one he was still trying to sneak a glance at, or the one who had been grinding against his junk in full sight of the entire club? “What girl would that be?”

  “That would be that girl.” Beth swept her arm out to the crowd in a gesture that offered absolutely zero clarification.

  Ryan took a swig. “You don’t seem to have any problem getting flirty with the guys who come here.”

  “That’s part of the job, and you knew that when you started dating me. Just an act. Bread and butter.”

  “So? Can’t I get my bread buttered now and again?” Half the beer was gone now. It tasted like cold soap suds. “Good for the gander, right?”

  “Oh, screw you, Ryan Hall!” She gave him a playful shove, playful but rough. “You don’t have the balls to cheat on me.”

  Ryan looked down at his girlfriend’s hands. Her knuckles were bruised and scraped. “What happened there?”

  “Nothing.” She quickly pulled them out of sight. “Liquor delivery. Just clumsy.”

  Ryan doubted that. Years of corporate litigation had gifted him with a highly sensitive bullshit meter. He knew that part of Beth was always going to be that scrappy tomboy from the Docklands, more than ready to let her fists do the thinking. That was a big part of what excited him about her. Beth wasn’t some hothouse orchid; she was a hardheaded dandelion poking t
hrough the cracked New Harbor sidewalk.

  Ryan watched her drop a pair of pony glasses onto the bar and reach for a bottle behind her without looking. “I’ll pass. Got an early day tomorrow.”

  “Don’t embarrass me,” she said, pouring out the shots.

  “Oh, I’m sure you can do that on your own.” Beth’s wildness might be exciting, but it could also be a handful.

  “Suit yourself, lightweight.” She downed her shot. And his.

  “And that?” He pointed to the glasses. “That part of the act, too?”

  “This job’s all an act, Ryan. I thought that, being a lawyer, you could relate.”

  “Funny. Bit crowded tonight.”

  “Yeah. Amateur hour. Only night worse is the one right before Thanksgiving.”

  Another unthinking elbow nailed Ryan’s rib cage. There was no apology. “Think I might jet. Need me to pick you up?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Ryan knew Beth didn’t need him to pick her up, but he wouldn’t have minded hearing that she wanted it. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’ll catch a cab.”

  “Why don’t you just come over to my place?” Ryan asked, as he had many nights in the past. “Actually, why don’t you just move in?”

  “Ryan . . .”

  “Seriously. I just made partner. The condo’s got an extra parking spot if you ever get a car and an extra bedroom if I’m ever snoring. Heck, there’s even a second bathroom I’ve never even gone into. What do you say?”

  “I say . . .” Her eyes bounded all over the bar like an errant Ping-Pong ball. “I say, do you really want to have this conversation here? Do you really want to have it now?”

  “Beth, come on.”

  “You know I only feel safe in my own bed.”

  Bed. Ryan thought that a very generous term for the lumpy futon sandwiched between a nuclear-level radiator and an overdrafty windowpane. “You can bring it when you move in.”

  “You’re funny.” Beth tweaked his nose, punctuating it with the kind of smile only a eunuch could ignore.

  “That’s why I get paid the big bucks.” Ryan leaned in for a kiss.

  Only to meet her hand. “Not in front of the meatheads, okay? You know the drill. Bad for business.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Fine for her to kiss whomever she wanted in the name of bread and butter, but heaven forbid it ever be him. He rolled out, trying not to watch as his girlfriend got overfriendly with the meatheads. That was Beth Becker, always trying to dance the razor’s edge between social critic and Dionysiac playgirl. Always with a foot in both worlds but citizen of none.

  Six

  Nobody had ever accused Gil Gibbons of being an artist; that much was certain. And by the look of his latest work—sprayed in shaky lines across yet another crumbling brick wall—it was an assessment unlikely to change. The air was still thick with the chemical stench of propellant as Gil shoved the spray can into the outer pocket of his M-65 field jacket and rubbed his beard. It was so matted in spots it felt like Scotch-Brite, and a couple of fleas popped into the air at his touch.

  “That joo, Gil?” came a voice from the shadows. It sounded not only drenched in grain alcohol but also set alight. “What’s that joo putting up there?”

  “What’s it look like, Loper?” Gil gazed at his work. His monochromatic statement was chicken scratch compared with some of the sprawling aerosol frescos that covered so much of New Harbor’s downtown. “It’s a warning.”

  Beware the Night Angel.

  True to his moniker, Loper loped into the pool of sour light next to Gil, blowing across his nails to fight the chill. Loper’s age was tough to gauge. His skin was as weathered as a peeling fence post, but he moved like a teenager who hadn’t quite grown into his body—talked like one, too. “Joo don’t really believe all that? Them ghost stories ’n’ shit?”

  “What a man believes a man believes,” Gil said. “Truth and the Big Man don’t give no never mind about what you or I believe.”

  “Joo got a mind as shaky as your hand, Gil.” Loper wrapped his trench coat so tightly around his tomato-stake frame he looked like a towel in the process of being wrung dry.

  Gil grunted. His hands were shaky and had been that way fairly nonstop since they’d shipped his black ass off to Nam more than four decades ago. First, they shook from fear, trudging through rice paddies with an ungainly M-16 clutched in his teenage hands, jungle rot eating away at his feet and the clap doing the same to his jimmy. Later, his hands would shake from the skag he’d shoot to cope with it all. Then from kicking the skag when he’d come back stateside and couldn’t afford it anymore. Now they shook from lack of booze and the creeping New England cold. “Long as it gets the message across, don’t reckon I care what it looks like.”

  “It looks like joo crazy’s what it looks like.”

  “Tell that to Country Ray or Frenchie. Tell it to Mary.”

  Loper shuffled his dirt-stained shoes. The dangling sole of the one on the left flapped like an idiot’s tongue. There would be no telling anything to Mary or Frenchie or Country Ray. Since they’d disappeared, they’d been the subject of more than a few hushed conversations held in soup kitchen queues.

  Country Ray had been the first. Some University kids discovered him in five ragged pieces being fought over by a roving pack of Docklands dogs. Official story was death by exposure or canine attack. With Mary, the pigs pinned it on some angry John who’d decided to skip her fee and just tear her throat clean out. No one knew what happened to Frenchie, and no one with any juice seemed to care much. But Gil had a pretty good idea what was responsible. “It was the Night Angel.”

  “Come on, Gil. That’s like bad-acid talk.”

  “Like I said, the truth don’t give no never mind.”

  “And joo seen this Night Angel, then?”

  Now it was Gil’s turn to be silent. He had seen her. It was more than ten years ago, in a place as far from New Harbor as one could get without a passport. Back then, the rumors were swirling just as they were here. A stranger, beautiful beyond all description, would come for the street people, taking them from park benches and cardboard homes, and they would never be seen alive again. At first, Gil dismissed the stories. Then he saw her with his own two eyes.

  He and another vet had been sharing a heating vent on the far side of a shuttered loading dock when she slipped into view. Night Angel—those were the only words for her. Even as she took his buddy into the shadows, even after Gil heard the screams, he wished it had been him she’d come for. He rode his thumb out of town the very next night.

  Loper pulled a twisted dog end from his pocket and lit it with a paper match. He managed two drags before he was smoking filter. “Where joo sleeping tonight?”

  “Catholic church, maybe.” Gil stamped one foot and then the other to chase away the numbing chill that gnawed at his bones. “If I can get a pew.”

  “Shouldn’t be no thing. Empty last time I was there. People all spooked up by the Strip.”

  Gil grunted again, knowing full well why all those prime spots for bedding down—turf that guys had been shanked over—suddenly stood abandoned. Mary, Frenchie, Country Ray—the last time anyone saw any of them was on the Strip. He stole another glace at his handiwork. Beware the Night Angel. “I’ll sleep with one eye open, then.”

  “Might need ’em both,” Loper added. “Hey, joo holding, man?”

  “Only thing I’m holding these days is my dick. You can have some of that if you want.”

  Loper let out a laugh that was half racking cough. “What kind of language is that for a preacher?”

  “Ain’t no preacher.”

  “Joo said joo was a preacher. First time joo started with all the spray paint ’n’ shit.”

  “No. I said I was a prophet.” A preacher spread the gospel, the good news. A prophet delivered God
’s other messages, the kind no one wanted to hear, the kind that got your head on a plate. Every Sunday-school ass-kisser dreamed of being a preacher. Being a prophet was something you jumped into a whale to avoid. It was the stuff of nightmares. “There’s a big difference.”

  “So joo ain’t got no sacramental wine or some shit?”

  In truth, Gil had a couple of pulls left in the flat plastic gin bottle that hugged his hip. He drained half and tossed the rest to Loper, who drank it in one greedy gulp. Loper was always ready to share, provided it was your hooch that he was sharing. In spite of it all, though, Gil liked the kid.

  “Joo heading to the church?”

  Gil tugged out his spray can and gave it a purposeful shake. The clacking ball sounded almost like a thurible. “I got work to do.”

  “Okay, then, prophet. I’ll see joo around.”

  “See you around,” Gil echoed, not knowing those words would prove hollow. Or that Loper would be the next to go.

  Seven

  Zoë danced her way across Axis’s packed floor, bobbing against an ocean of flesh like human driftwood as she inched ever closer to the bar’s safe shore. “’Bout time,” Beth said when she finally landed. She cleared a space among the crumpled bev naps and dead soldiers, then slid over an icy vodka cranberry.

  A pack of frat daddies at least five years too old to still be in college crowded around Zoë, polluting the air with a cloud of Axe body spray. All of them were dressed as well-fed white-bread reboots of classic movie monsters: Frat Dracula, Frat Mummy, Frat Wolfman, Frat-kenstein’s Monster, Fratboy from the Black Lagoon, complete with zipper running up the back of his rubber costume.

  Beth tapped the other bartender on the shoulder. “Take care of those guys,” she said. “I need a minute.” The girl obeyed. Zoë didn’t recognize her, and by her frazzled air, it was clear she was new.