Jesus.
Something with huge wings that beat slow as bellows, as if marking time. Two skeletal bodies linked like chain, moving awkwardly forward with the crowd. Misshapen flesh, skin that draped and quivered, deformities he couldn’t make sense of at first, miscolored, scaled, feathered; a man, apparently normal except for the bright ring of blood around his smile, smeared across his cheeks, down his neck. From the inkiness that welled up around the creatures’ feet something slithered forward, a dusky cloud, a tangible gibbering shadow with smoky amber eyes and the smell of death. There was no physical trace of humanity in the black form, only the hungry rage of the eyes.
Dear Jesus God.
Tietjen shuddered convulsively, wanting to deny what he saw. You’re not real! He clutched the stone at his left and a piece crumbled in his fingers. This is real and I am real, the city is real … . You things … He stared at the creatures but they did not vanish in the face of his outrage. And they—he and Fratelone and Ketch and the kid—had one pistol, a couple of knives, and two carts full of drugs and bandages. Defenseless. Tietjen wanted to turn to the others and tell them not to breathe so loud; it seemed he could hear them sweat, hear the echo of his own thoughts ringing clearly through the street.
He turned away from the street, pushing the others back with him. “Back—quietly,” he whispered, and they moved as one for the shadowy protection of a half-fallen wall.
Fratelone moaned almost soundlessly and sagged against the wall. “I thought I dreamed it, I thought—” The man closed his mouth tightly.
“Tietjen, how long are we going to stay here?” Ketch whispered. “We can’t defend this place—”
“Shut up. The only way out is right past them. We have to wait till they pass. And goddamned keep quiet.”
They pressed together, huddling for warmth in the purple dark, listening. In the street the high laughter continued, the muttering. Now and then a word or two of chillingly normal conversation drifted in to them, spoken in unhuman voices. “Is he bringing her?” one voice asked.
“He’s got her,” another confirmed. “I can feel it.”
Tietjen could not explain the horror in those words, the way they made him shudder. Fratelone sat on a chunk of granite, as still as if he were cut from the stone; the others leaned with Tietjen against the wall, breathing carefully, waiting and listening. With a peculiar obstinacy that Tietjen prayed was not deliberate, the crowd of monsters had stopped in the street almost in front of their hiding place, and were waiting there.
“Is he bringing her?—” someone asked again.
“I hear it.” Another voice.
A distant, thin wailing played on the air, a woman’s voice wavering between terror and hysteria, beyond pain. “I hear it too,” another voice said with satisfaction. The whine grew closer, the murmurs of anticipation and satisfaction rose: he’s bringing her, she’s coming, I hear her.
Tietjen edged past Ketch, motioning the others to stay still. Slowly, so as not to cause the least disturbance in the dust and stones under his feet, he made his way to the gray darkness of the shattered doorway. He was there to watch as they brought the woman in. The monsters lounged in a semicircle fifty feet away, like an audience waiting for the curtain to rise. The darkness still puddled and pulsed at their feet like a living thing—Tietjen believed that it was alive. At the end of the street a man emerged from the darkness, carrying a woman over his shoulder like a sack of grain. The man was enormously tall and thin, with lank dark hair that brushed his shoulders, and skin so fair that he had an almost greenish glow in the new moonlight. Among the creatures that had been waiting for him he looked comparatively normal, until you saw his eyes: the sockets were black pits rimmed with red and there was no eyeball. And yet he could see, it was obvious with every motion: he read his crowd, turning his head to acknowledge the presence of one, the hunger of another. That he was the leader was obvious in the way the others yearned toward him, followed his movements, let loose a breath of release at his arrival.
As the eyeless man reached the group of monsters he slung the wailing woman from his shoulder and draped her on the hood of a car, the altar of her sacrifice. She was stocky, hair a pale tangle and her skin pasty white with shock. Faced with the horror that ranged around her, she seemed unable to do anything but weep and laugh. She did not struggle, even when one of the creatures drew the hook that passed for his hand slowly, deliciously across her throat. No blood was drawn, but there was a sigh of satisfaction from the monsters. The eyeless man smiled broadly at his followers.
Unable to watch any more, Tietjen returned to the others with infinitely careful steps; it seemed he was hardly breathing. “We can’t go anywhere,” he told them, low. “They’ve got someone out there and—we can’t do anything.” Just be quiet. He thought longingly of the Store, of New York before all this, of his walks undisturbed through the cool air of uptown Manhattan at midnight, and he silently, venomously hated what had happened to the city. In the street the prisoner screamed. There was a low mutter of laughter. Against his will Tietjen listened, and watched the muscles bunch and release in Fratelone’s arms as the man clenched his fists rhythmically. There were sedatives in the laundry cart, Tietjen thought, looking at the other man. The search for them would make too much noise; if they had to run or fight, he did not want to have Fratelone drugged. Fratelone would have to cope. Like all of them. They could not go anywhere, they could do nothing except listen and wait.
Tietjen was so absorbed in the wait, straining to hear the smallest sounds, trying to drown out the larger more horrifying ones, that he missed the moment when the prisoner stopped screaming and the creatures began to drift away. Not until the silence they left behind them became a sound itself did Tietjen break out of his trance. Ketch was stock-still, leaning against the wall with grimy tear streaks down her face, her eyes closed. Fratelone stared into space, still clenching and unclenching his hands. The kid, Ted, was snoring slightly, sound asleep.
“Come on,” Tietjen said very gently. “Let’s get back home. Barbara’s waiting for us.”
7
JIT flitted from voice to voice, from mind to mind, listening, tasting, playing with his new power, seeing through other eyes. He had always been kept down by the wave of feelings that pounded him, waking or asleep. Now he could separate the voices, savor them individually. Parts of the city he had never seen—which was most of the city—were now unfolded to him in a scattered collage. He saw the flooded south of Manhattan, the waters stopped by a wall of brick and stone washed from the offices of Wall Street. He saw the delicate outlines of midtown towers and understood, with someone else’s knowledge, that these skeletons had once been concrete honeycombs filled with activity and expectation. He heard the wind fluting between splintered skyscrapers and remembered the strains of a serene Mozart clarinet, winding together and almost interchangeable in the mind of his contact. Jit saw a street littered with carrion, thousands of dead rats like a plush carpet gone to seed, and felt the squeamish horror of his host. Sitting in his tunnel, back pressed against the chilly stone wall, Jit could travel all over the city.
There were things happening that Jit did not understand. He heard voices full of light, of hope and faith that made him briefly yearn for what they loved, even when he did not understand it. Others were black dark, filled with rage, madness, and strangeness, imagery that pleased Jit’s casually bloodthirsty soul even as it pleasurably frightened him. Until the strangeness grew too rich, Jit would tease those thoughts, playing with them. Watching through hosts he had seen people dancing wildly to a new god; Jit amused himself by making a big voice that he pushed through one dancer, and then another, so that the others thought it was magic, their master.
But after a while it wasn’t enough fun just to sit in the darkness, listening. He began to explore on his own, ranging outside the Park in daylight, wandering at noon through streets he had formerly seen only after dark, hidden in doorways, tossed by the inner thunder of voices.
He walked with growing confidence. No one came to the Park except the squirrels, gaunt for lack of pickings from the street vendors’ scraps. Jit found no human being alive in the Park, little evidence of the old Park dwellers’ enclaves. There were strange things, though, strange to rival anything his voices told him. The carousel was gone—by the look of what was left it had been twisted out of the ground like a top—and the monument that old Nogai had called Bolivar was a puddle of frozen bronze. The bronze sled dog that Jit had often stroked and patted in the dark was gone too, without disturbance, leaving its footprints in the cracked pavement.
“I wan’,” he said once, loudly, waiting, but was not sure of what he wanted. The dog back, perhaps, something to touch and murmur to safely in the night. Nogai or the kid at the handball courts, even the old crazy woman of the park benches. The furtive community of street people which had populated the Park. “I wan’,” but nothing came to him, and he began to venture even farther from the Park.
He was searching for one voice in particular, a voice surrounded by others: one voice like a strong old tree bearing apples; another voice brown and strong like a fine-fleshed nut; voices that sought and voices that worried and voices that simply were, uninteresting except that they all relied on and yearned for that central voice. Jit was drawn to the voice that drew so many others to it. He reached for it, tasting fear and sorrow, hard determination and confusion, as if its owner was not sure of how to get what it had determined upon. A strong voice uncertain of its own strength.
Through this one’s eyes Jit saw the others, children, a dark woman with her face beaded with sweat, a kid Jit’s own age, a short blocky man with an unsmiling face, an old woman, a young woman with narrow dark eyes. Not one of them followed the Man for a reason that Jit understood. And the thing that Jit wanted in the Man was not something any of the others seemed to share. He had found it there at the first touch: the Man needed the city. And Jit did too.
Until the change Jit had never understood loneliness except as a bleak sharp note among the voices. But the day and night of silence had scared him, the reedy thinness of feeling where there had been a rich soup scared him. For the first time in his life, Jit wanted people; wanted the Man, whose need and love was so encompassing that Jit himself might be included in it. When Jit reached out and found the Man he sighed with satisfaction and for a little while he was not lonely. Now, when he left the Park, he walked with a half-hope that he would find the Man and be taken in.
As it grew warmer Jit wandered the transverse roads south to the avenues and walked, no longer bothering to efface himself against the buildings. He passed bodies, some of them ripely foul-smelling, others gray and neat and without a scent; the smell didn’t bother Jit, but they seemed in the way to him, so he made them go away. That was a good new trick, but he was sure he would learn more as he walked; there was so much to learn: in honey-colored afternoon he peered through shattered glass and twisted steel mesh, trying to make sense of what he saw. Things. Tools for doing and making, things that had no use at all. Clothes, bright colored cloth and oddly shaped shoes; Jit took a long scarlet skirt from one window display and, tearing open a seam, had a cloak that swept from his shoulders to trail in the stone dust that was everywhere. One window was filled with bottles and jars and plastic packets, electric banners hanging unlit and illegible. Jit was curious enough to reach through the grating and take one of the jars displayed there, but was disappointed to find only small yellow and white pills. He tasted one, spat it out: it was dry as dust and tasteless.
Without thinking, Jit reached out with his new talent—the thing that brought the trees in the Park back to leaf—and made the bottles on the shelf explode, their contents spraying dust until the store was hazy. Satisfied with this small revenge, he turned to continue, tucking the jar he held into the pocket of his jeans. Every now and then he spilled out a pill, tossed it into the air and exploded it, enjoying the tiny puff of dust and sound.
As he walked, Jit sensed someone watching. He was being followed, but he could not see, could not hear, could find nothing when he turned his head. It took long moments for his body to let him know that he was scared; then his hair bristled and his heart sped in weighty thumps. Jit made a sudden sweeping turn, trying to surprise something. The scarlet cloak snapped around behind him as he moved. He found nothing and kept walking.
After a block or so he pulled a handful of the pills from his pocket and started tossing them into the air, exploding them, showing off for the unseen audience. He walked resolutely ahead, away from the safe containment of the Park, into a part of the city he did not know at all, rather than turn and face what was not there. Gradually, as he became accustomed to the sensation, the prickling at his neck and back of his hands subsided. He walked on, exploding the pills.
“Do it again!”
Jit swung around, but the voice did not come from behind. Swiveling back, he saw a girl, thin and knob-jointed, with the pale skin of a night person and a tousle of red hair, sitting in a doorway. Maybe she was a woman: when she stood up, hands in the pockets of denim overalls, and moved close, Jit saw deep lines around her mouth and eyes, one eyebrow drooping lower than the other. Her arms and shoulders and throat were bare, goosefleshed in the cool air. She grinned at Jit. “Do it again.”
Jit reached and found her voice in his head, flat and unpleasant; she was waiting for something. Harmless as the people in Lincoln Center, dancing to dead gods.
Jit poured a handful of pills into his palm, threw them in an arc over his head, and made each one erupt in a cloud of white powder. The woman’s grin widened, showing close white teeth and too much tongue as she laughed. Jit’s own laughter bubbled up briefly; he was hopelessly pleased that someone else liked his trick. “Know what Jit can do?” he asked her, thinking of the leafing trees in the Park.
She was not interested. “Again!” she commanded. Jit did it again. “More!” He exploded the pills again, but the trick was beginning to bore him. When she asked one more time, Jit shook his head and turned on his heel, walking back the way he had come.
She followed him.
Up Seventh Avenue, past the fallen marquees and shattered glass that had sifted through the gratings; past a miraculously unbroken window behind which holographic mannequins still gyrated. Once Jit turned around and waved his hands at her angrily. “Go ’way, you Ducks!” She still followed him, and drew her hands from her pockets and waved them in return, only she had no hands, just three long tentacles at the end of each arm, each with a claw at the end. Jit stopped in his tracks, curious. The woman should have tasted wrong, but when he let his mind lick out at her he found no sense of her own wrongness in her. What he found in her voice was dull, matter-of-fact rage; sly curiosity; and something else, a fearful hoping about Jit himself. He did not understand it.
“I can do a trick,” she called to him. She took a step toward a doorway, reached down, and the tentacles on her left arm snaked out to grab something and pull it toward her. It was a body, one of the bad ones, gray and patchy with decay; a man in a suit. Something had been chewing at its face. “Watch me!” the woman said. The tentacles on her left arm held the body by the neck with the head up; one tentacle slid across the cheek until it caught on the upper lip. She began to work the mouth as if the man were a puppet: “Hello, how are you?” she faked a deep, pompous voice. “Are you having a good walk?”
Jit laughed once. But the woman kept on going, didn’t make the body say anything funny, just “Hello, how are you?” over and over. He shrugged and turned away.
“Don’t go!” she called to him. “Wasn’t it a good trick?”
Jit turned, shrugged again. “Whyfor you after me?” he called at her.
She blinked at him. “Do me your trick again!” she said. And, “Gable told me.”
Jit shook his head in disgust; he understood none of it. “You go ’way,” he said again.
She stared at him with an empty smile. Jit read something beyond the smile, somethi
ng beyond the woman herself, and it made his stomach turn. “Lea‘me alone. Go ’way.”
Her smile broadened. “Gable told me; you’re the one.” She stepped forward again, reaching out to him with one arm, each of the tentacles reaching out as well with a little life of its own. “Gable told me so. Come on, come with me. Gable’s waiting.” The voice Jit tasted in her warmed at Gable’s thought.
Jit shook his head, annoyed. He was the master of voices, the master of Central Park and the city. Whoever this Gable was, Jit did not like him. “Go away!” he called again, waving his hand at her. He turned his back and started off toward the Park.
She kept following. The sky faded to dull lavender edged with pink as the sun went down, and her pale skin glowed pink and mauve. “Gable said—” she began. In her mind Jit read an uncomprehending confusion: Jit was not acting the way she believed he would.
“Don’t know no Gibble-gabble. You go!” Jit yelled.
When she kept walking Jit reached with his mind and pushed her, knocked her to the ground hard enough to take the breath out of her, and held her there while he walked away. Enough of that game.
The Stone War Page 14
