Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  In a rage, Nox threw his drink across the room. It shattered against the stone wall. The kingpin stripped off his expensive coat and rolled up his sleeves, cuffing them at the elbows, exposing a tattoo across his wrist that read aiséirí—Gaelic for “resurrection.”

  Nox wound up like he was going to strike Jack again, this time across the face, but his hand stopped just shy. Instead, the gangster gave his men a single softly spoken order: “Funnel him.”

  Before Jack could make sense of this, Drumm forced the end of a plastic tube into his mouth. While Jack gagged, Aries uncapped a bottle of vodka and began to pour it into a funnel attached to the tube.

  The alcohol hit Jack’s mouth like a tidal wave of napalm. While his throat burned, he tried to push the tube out with his tongue, but it was jammed so tight that he was forced to swallow the booze to keep it out of his airway. His stomach turned from the onslaught. Right as Drumm removed the funnel at last, Jack vomited. He had to turn his head to keep from drowning in his own bile.

  “Where is the journal page?” Nox screamed. When Jack gritted his teeth and shook his head in response, Nox motioned to his henchmen and the process repeated. Drumm had to pry open Jack’s jaw to get the tube back in, but eventually he prevailed, and again the vodka flowed down his throat.

  By the time the second round of torture was over, the alcohol had already bled into Jack’s system. The room spun in lazy, uneven circles, and when he turned his head, there seemed to be a three-second delay before his body would obey the commands of his brain.

  This time, Nox grabbed a handful of Jack’s hair and forced the teenage boy to stare into his eyes. “Last chance, Tides,” Nox seethed. “Where is the journal page?”

  Jack brought his lips as close to Nox’s ear as he could.

  And then he whispered, “I used it … to wipe my ass.”

  Nox took a step away and sized up his prisoner. “He’s not going to tell me,” he said, his fury giving way to resignation. “If he wants to be a martyr, then let him die.” From a tray in the back of the room, Nox produced a large syringe. A transparent liquid squirted out of the needle when he tapped the plunger. “Pure ethanol,” he explained. “See, when your blood alcohol level rises above point-three percent, your body slowly begins to shut down. Severe motor impairment. Loss of bladder control. Irregularities in breathing and heartbeat. Unconsciousness. And death. Combined with the alcohol already in your system, this should put you right up around point-six percent.”

  Jack squirmed beneath the ropes, but Drumm and Pearce held him down by his shoulders. Nox handed the syringe to Aries. “I’m going to find that riddle, with or without your help, Jack. Once I obtain the Serengeti Sapphire and am resurrected, I promise to send two bereavement cards to your mother. One for you and one for Echo.”

  With that, Nox turned and headed back for the elevator doors.

  “What do you want us to do with him, boss?” Aries asked, twirling the syringe between her fingers.

  “Once his heart stops, toss him out in front of a rival nightclub,” Nox said. “Preferably the Mad Raven. Tonight he’ll be just another college student who didn’t know his limits and drank himself to death.” The elevator doors closed, and Jack’s last image of Nox was of him grinning softly and humming the tune We’ll Meet Again.

  Jack felt at once terrified and sluggish, as the vodka in his stomach continued to leach into his bloodstream. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad way to die. Maybe he’d feel nothing.

  He shut his eyes, crying softly, as Aries came toward him with the needle.

  But behind his closed eyelids, he saw something else.

  Poor Echo, laid up in her hospital bed, looking pale and gossamer as ever, her dimples growing smaller with each passing day. Sabra and his mother sitting by her bedside. All of them, staring at the hospital door, waiting for him to come.

  They’d never know the lengths he had gone to try and save Echo.

  He felt Drumm and Pearce relax their grip on his shoulders. He felt the needle bite into his skin.

  And that’s when he struck.

  With every vestige of strength he had left, he flung open his arms and jerked his body upright. Though the vodka may have diminished his coordination, it hadn’t sapped his brute strength. The rope burned intensely as it cut into his shoulders, but he felt its resistance suddenly give way.

  The rope snapped.

  Everyone was caught by surprise, and even Jack was shocked that it had worked. He ripped the syringe out of his leg before Aries had fully expelled its contents, flipped it around, and plunged it into Drumm’s thigh. Jack could feel the metal tip slice through the man’s mammoth quadriceps until it struck his femur bone. Drumm screamed and collapsed to the ground.

  Aries, doped up on Blyss, was slow to react, and Jack seized her by her prosthetic horns. With a savage jerk down, he smashed her face into the table and she too crumpled to the cellar floor.

  Pearce wrapped an arm around Jack’s neck and squeezed. Jack threw his elbow back into the dog handler’s gut to stun him. Pearce’s grip didn’t falter, so Jack kicked off on the table. The momentum carried the two of them to the floor, with Pearce on the bottom. Jack’s weight came down hard on the man, and there was a crack that must have been Pearce’s skull striking the cement. His hold on Jack slackened.

  Jack could already hear Aries stirring on the opposite side of the table, and Drumm was rolling on the floor, clutching his bloody thigh and growling something about murder.

  Jack knew that as the alcohol continued to seep into his bloodstream, he would soon lose consciousness. So with no other choice, he limped across the basement, hobbled up the steps, shouldered his way through the cellar doors, and stumbled out into the chilly October night.

  He had to call Sabra before the darkness took him.

  I loved stalking this particular street corner, because the tourists migrated here in droves.

  And tourists made for the easiest marks.

  As I idly spun the bicycle pedals in reverse, I decided the corner of North and Congress was the Bermuda Triangle of oblivious Boston tourists. A hundred feet from where I had parked my pedicab stood Quincy Market, a regal building with stately columns guarding its front entrance. From the outside it looked like a courthouse, but inside was a crowded, deafening hall of fast-food vendors that vacuumed in hungry tourists and college students alike. They flocked here by the thousands to stuff their faces with “authentic North End pizza” and “New England’s finest clam chowder.” Basically any food that would simultaneously empty their wallets and clog their arteries. I loved and hated the market at the same time, a sentiment I shared with most native Bostonians.

  While the other pedicab drivers tended to lurk in the vicinity of the baseball stadium, squabbling with each other over fares, I liked to wait here and prey on the post-dinner crowd, who were generally too full to waddle any farther.

  Unfortunately, not everyone was keen to climb into the back of a pedicab. I pedaled up beside a middle-aged couple who were trying to flag down a taxi. “Hop right in,” I instructed them. “Twenty dollars and I’ll take you anywhere within a three-mile radius.”

  The husband eyed my neon green reflective vest and my pedicab, all with measured disgust. “What the hell are you riding, girl?”

  “This?” I gestured from my seat to the three-person carriage in tow. “Well, you see, when a bicycle loves a stagecoach very much, and they decide to bring a child into the world …” No response from the couple. “It’s a pedicab. Cheaper than a taxi, and you get some fresh air on this beautiful October night.”

  The wife drew her fox-fur coat tightly around her. “Beautiful night? It’s fifty-five degrees and plummeting—hardly a heat wave.”

  At that moment, a cab swerved sharply into the curb and the couple piled impatiently into the back without another glance at me. “Do you know how many drunken college kids have probably puked in that backseat?” I yelled after them, but my words were lost in the slipstream as the taxi
peeled away. “Vultures,” I muttered.

  “Vultures are not indigenous to Boston, Sabra,” said a familiar, nasally voice. “Seagulls, yes. Vultures, no.”

  I hadn’t even heard Rufus pull up alongside me. Between his gangly frame and the sandy hair and beard that poked out from under the brim of his helmet, he always reminded me of an overstuffed scarecrow. Rufus was my only real friend in the competitive pedicab driver community. That said, the guy was a total train wreck for somebody pushing thirty years old. By day, he ran a disreputable private detective agency out of a dingy flat above a butcher shop in Malden. Despite working two jobs, he still never made rent on time, most likely because he smoked away the lion’s share of his profits.

  I nodded to the empty backseat of Rufus’s pedicab. “Slow night for you, too?”

  “Damnable college kids,” he muttered in his best elderly voice, while shaking his fist. “Willing to spend hundreds of dollars on their parents’ credit cards at the bar, yet unwilling to spend more than a two-dollar subway ride to get there.”

  “Says Boston’s finest role model for healthy life choices,” I added.

  Instead of responding, Rufus tilted his head up, gazing off toward the five-hundred-foot-tall clock tower of the Boston Custom House. “Storm’s coming,” he said reflectively.

  The sky was clear. I shook my head. “Rufus, I can’t tell half the time if you’re talking about the weather, or if you’re so high that you think you’re Nostradamus.”

  Rufus stroked his scraggly beard. “Perhaps both,” he mused. “Perhaps both …”

  To my surprise, I felt the first raindrops speckle my vest. The sporadic rain soon gave way to a light shower. “I guess you’re not such a shoddy weatherman after all,” I said. I slid down from my seat and busied myself drawing the convertible top over the pedicab carriage. Not that it mattered—the rain meant we’d automatically lose all our business to the dirty-yet-dry interiors of the taxis queued up along Congress Street.

  As I raised the plastic hood, Rufus studied me through the rain with his bloodshot eyes. “Why do you do this, Sabra?” he asked. It sounded like another one of his stoned, faux-philosophical questions, but there was a certain clarity about him as he leaned over the handlebars. “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on, “you’re better company than any of those other Lance Armstrong wannabes we ride with. But I have to figure most teenage girls spend their Friday nights doing teenager-y things. You know, like playing in field hockey games, or walking aimlessly around the mall, or parking their Honda Civics at Make-Out Point for a little R&R.”

  I snorted. “This isn’t the 1950s, Rufus. We’re not throwing on poodle skirts and racing cars around Dead Man’s Curve anymore. And have you ever been to my hometown? Dorchester isn’t exactly suburban bliss.”

  “Point is,” Rufus said, leaning over further, “you haul your butt into Boston six nights a week so that you can sit in the freezing rain, and if you’re lucky, you schlep around a few fares, all for some shitty tips from stingy tourists. Why do you do it?”

  I tugged at one of the wet ruby ringlets dangling out from under my helmet. I had a cookie jar chock full of reasons for the lifestyle I’d chosen, and I wasn’t in self-denial about any of them. There were selfless motives, like being closer to my sister’s hospital in case, God forbid, anything went wrong. There were selfish reasons, too, like how I craved background noise, the kind that my perpetually empty home failed to provide.

  But I wasn’t in the mood for a therapy session tonight. I shrugged. “I like the exercise.”

  I caught sight of a couple jogging hand-in-hand through the rain. While all the other families were rushing for cover and looking miserable, this twosome couldn’t stop laughing. I pedaled up beside them and pointed to their Red Sox jerseys. “Headed to the big game?” I asked.

  “If it doesn’t get rained out first,” the woman replied, turning her head up to the sky.

  I nodded to the carriage. “All aboard. It’s not like you’re going to get any wetter at this point.” The couple hesitated, gazing questioningly at each other, so I said, “I’ll tell you what—if you hitch a ride with me, I’ll have a talk with the clouds and make sure this pesky rain stops before Martinez throws the first pitch.”

  The couple caved. “Three miles is a long way to pedal in a downpour,” said the man as he climbed in. Meanwhile, the woman fished through her purse until she found a crumpled twenty.

  I waved off the money. “This ride’s on me.” I pulled away from the curb, my legs giving the pedals a little extra oomph to accommodate the added weight of my two passengers. “I’m headed in that direction anyway.”

  Boston Children’s Hospital

  On the seventh floor of Children’s Hospital, my mother emerged from Echo’s room right as I exited the elevator doors. With her red-going-on-gray hair pulled back in a bun, there was nothing to hide her disapproval as she eyed my soggy reflector vest and biking pants. She crossed her arms tightly over her bright blue scrubs. “Please tell me you weren’t out there pedaling that monstrosity in the rain.”

  “No, I’m just breaking in my Halloween costume,” I said. “I’m going as a sponge this year.”

  Mom sighed. “At least when the pneumonia sets in, you’ll only be an elevator ride away from the ER.”

  I turned to the closed door of the hospital room. I could hear muffled voices, one of them male—Jack must have been visiting, too. “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  Mom lowered her voice. “Nausea’s been getting the best of her. Her appetite hasn’t reared its head since Tuesday. The hardest part is seeing the way she looks at food. I remember when she was in first grade and we’d take her to that pizza buffet. She was like a bottomless vortex.”

  Nostalgia only ended in tears, so I rubbed my mother’s arm. “I’ll kick it here with Echo until she falls asleep. If you happen to see any cute male candy stripers downstairs during your shift, send them on up.”

  Mom actually laughed. “For you or for Echo?” She shook her head as she walked away, heading for the elevators.

  When I stepped into the room, Jack was seated on a stool at the foot of Echo’s bed. He held a small hardcover book open in front of him, reading a passage from it in a lofty lilt, while Echo listened, fully enthralled.

  “And so,” Jack concluded, “after Arachne hung herself, Hera took pity on the young weaver. She anointed Arachne’s corpse with a special juice and resurrected her—only not as a human, but as a spider. Arachne’s descendants continue to live on as the spiders, or arachnids, that inhabit the world around us today, the same brilliant weavers as their ancient Greek ancestor.” Jack snapped the book shut.

  Echo rapturously applauded and offered me a sleepy smile. “Oh, Sabra—Jack brought the most wonderful book! You must read to me from it when he leaves.”

  I tried not to chuckle at the way Echo said “the most wonderful book.” The more time my sister spent around Jack, the more she sounded like Anne of Green Gables.

  I plucked the book out of Jack’s hands and turned it over. The title emblazoned in gold letters on the leather cover read Goddesses, Nymphs, and Dryads, Oh My: A Crash Course in Greek Mythology.

  Echo tried to sit upright, even though I could tell it took most of her strength to do so. Still, she gestured animatedly as she talked. “Jack brought that to show me where my name comes from. See, Echo was a handmaiden for Hera, the queen of the gods. And when the king of the gods, Zeus, wanted to—”

  Jack cleared his throat. “When Zeus wanted to, uh, hang out with other women who weren’t his wife.”

  “Yes!” Echo said. “When he wanted to get coffee with the other women, Echo would distract Hera by talking to her incessantly. But when Hera figured out what Echo was doing for her husband, she punished her by cursing her so that she could only repeat things that other people said. Then, one day, Echo was walking through the woods when she came across a boy named Nar … Nars …”

  “Narcissus,” Jack said helpfully.


  “Yes! Narsissy was so in love with himself that when he caught his own reflection in the river, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. He stared at it for so long that he eventually died of hunger.” Echo abruptly closed her eyes tight in pain—another wave of nausea. I tried to hand her the bedpan, but she waved me off. “Can you finish the story, Jack?” she asked quietly.

  Jack knelt on the other side of her bed. “Because Echo was in love with Narcissus, she withered away alongside him, pining after him, wasting away until only her voice remained. And that’s why, sometimes, when you say something loudly in a cave, or a canyon, or an empty hall, you can hear her spirit repeating the last words you said right back at you—an echo.”

  Echo’s eyes remained closed, but her grimace transformed back into a smile. Before long, her head relaxed against her pillow and her breath whistled through the gap in her two front teeth, the way it always did when she slept.

  It was the most comforting sound I swear I’d ever heard.

  When I was sure Echo was fast asleep, I raised an eyebrow at my brother. “Seriously?” I pointed to the book at the end of the bed. “What kind of smut have you been reading her?”

  Jack sniffed with insult. “It’s not smut. It’s mythology.”

  “Ancient smut then,” I amended. I put a hand to Echo’s clammy forehead, checking her temperature. The last few rounds of treatment had claimed most of her hair, but one long wisp of her beautiful red bangs still defiantly clung to her head. It dangled out from under her green cap, curling into a question mark against her temple.

  Jack jabbed a finger at the small television mounted to the wall. “It’s no worse than any of that reality TV garbage you watch with her on Tuesday nights,” he said. “Think of it as The Real Housewives of Olympus. Greek myths are just like … colorful fairytales.”

  I laughed dryly. “Fairytales with suicide, and murder, and booze, and gods fornicating with nymphs.”

  “What does ‘fornicating’ mean?” Echo had chosen that moment to stir from her slumber, her eyes blinking sleepily.