THE PACK
THEY RETAINED some of their human attributes. For example, they could and often did stand upright—though it seemed more natural and felt more comfortable to run and walk on hands and feet; fingers tight and curled, using the knuckles like the great apes. And they could smile, and laugh, and shout. There were also curious mixtures that seemed part conscious joy, part compulsive instinct: dancing, leaping, bravado, show-off displays of strength and agility, foolish risks of life in daring feats, as if death itself were dead and they immortal.
And there was play, and more play: physical jokes, teasing, surprises, games of biting tag so energetic they drew blood from neck and limb, so prolonged they left all exhausted, stupefied, tongues exposed, breath panting, staring at each other dumbly until sleep lidded their eyes and they once more moved together into the silky warmth of their tangled sleep.
At night, especially before the dawn, which was the time they hunted, they became what they were: a deadly pack—as if each move any one of them made was guided by a single brain: concerted—prearranged, devised to be a kind of orchestrated stealth and cunning that sought out, pursued, encircled, trapped, struck down its prey.
THE RENDEZVOUS
THE MOON is at the bottom of the lake, and seeing it there, trapped in water grass and weeds, Jamie and Angel are enchanted, watching a cloud like an eyelid close over it, then open again, returning their world of the night to all its brilliance. When Jamie paws the water, the image shatters into looped and spinning ripples before it settles back to reflect their fractured, grinning faces, becoming finally lightly silvered, mirror-still.
Not far away, Julia is grubbing and sniffing around the earth and leaves at the bottom of a tree, the sound of it attracting Kathy and Maria to her side, seeking the source of an odor so exquisite it intoxicates. Together, they unearth the remains of a bird, an owl perhaps, half skeletonized, feathers and flesh a rotting pulp.
The sweetness of the scent dizzies their senses, and in the next moment they are down on the carrion, rolling over and into it, especially the back of the neck and shoulders, grunting their pleasure.
A Nembutal, a Seconal, a capsule of Darvon compound, two cans of beer, and a shot of vodka: none of it helped, leaving him at four in the morning with nothing but his grief and aching eyes and pounding head.
Harry Meyerson threw back the sheet, waking Yippity at the foot of the bed who, even after only a few weeks’ exposure, knew what the final stages of Harry’s newly acquired sleeplessness meant, and ran for her leash in the hall.
Harry lived in a ground-floor-front apartment, and it was his habit to leave his keys with the doorman who kept an eye on Rosalie while he walked. This done, he crossed the street.
He never went very far into the park at night, knowing of its publicized dangers, but tonight he seemed drawn to do so. The moon was full, the night air cool, and the beauty of the trees and winding paths inviting. It was perhaps only an hour before dawn, and surely the city’s legions of murderers and muggers were sound aleeep. So he told himself. But the sad truth was this: he didn’t care. Maybe there was something after all to all that shit about life-after-death, and if there was, he wanted to be immediately knifed twenty times in the chest by a seven-foot Haitian New Yorker, voodooed and berserk in the park, with chicken blood all over him. That was one way he might be able to see Sarah again. Perhaps the only way.
So, unleasing Yippity, who bounded off in delight, he dared wander where the ache of his battered heart and his morbid fancy led him.
Perhaps it never would have happened if Yippity hadn’t wandered off.
Harry called and whistled softly, then stopped, slightly dazed, to wonder where he was, because he had been walking for the longest while unconsciously. The area seemed exceptionally dense with trees that shuttered out the moonlight, but to the left, down an incline, he could see the pale shimmer of the lake, so he had a rough idea where he was.
He whistled again. It was unusual for Yippity to leave him for so long, unless she’d found another dog, or a wounded bird—something to keep her occupied. And as he stood there, silent, holding his breath in order to listen carefully, the short hairs at the back of his neck began to bristle. He was afraid!—actually afraid!—but the fear, whatever its cause, figment or reality, was good to feel. Any emotion other than the unrelieved, intolerable burden of his grief was welcome.
So—! Let him seek out and find his seven-foot Haitian!—he’d already signed the contract with God: anything in exchange for Sarah, and he stumbled, half fell, down the incline toward the lake which, simply because it was there and white with moonlight, seemed the logical place to go.
When he rose from his knees, he heard a soft nuzzling growl from the leafy darkness at the left. So Yippity had found something, and whistling, Harry pushed through an opening in the underbrush toward the sound.
It was Yippity all right. But she hadn’t found anything at all; something had found Yippity.
Crouched on its haunches, in a blaze of hard moonlight, a dirty, blood-smeared, wild-haired, naked child was tearing at the dead dog with its teeth, Yippity’s head virtually torn from her body, the underbelly ripped open, oozing thick blood and uncoiling the white snake of her intestines.
In the most tragic and grisly moments of our lives, humor has a perverse habit of surviving, and in the next few incredible moments as Harry’s now perfectly round dark eyes met the slitted, glinting gold of those of the surely supernatural beast-child, he tried to worm out of his contract. I didn’t mean it!—this to God; that is, about the seven- foot Haitian and the knife twenty times in my chest. It was a lousy joke. I really don’t want to die. Look: I’ve got a daughter; I’ve got Rosalie to take care of. . . .
Never promise anything to God; His contracts, like those of the Prince of Darkness, are flawless and irreparably binding.
Angel rises, dripping blood, his eyes freezing his new and thoroughly fascinating prey. And the moment he rises he shares his knowledge with the others who, distant or near, know exactly where to go and what to do.
His mind useless, Harry’s body behaves on its own. At his feet lies a heavy broken branch, as neat as a weighted club. Like a slow-motion sequence in a film, he bends to pick it up. Angel can make no meaningful connection between the wood and the man; he perceives only an inexplicable motion and growls his displeasure several times as he watches.
Behind Harry: a rustle; his head jerks in time to see the flash of Julia’s body, then, some distance away, her face through the leaves, barely a foot from the ground.
Another rustle. Another. And a third, and he knows there are five, now in a circle closing in. He watches Angel’s incredible face as the child crouches for a spring, and not a moment too soon, lets the club fly, leaping in the same instant clear over the boy’s head in a panicked, tumbling scramble down the stony slope toward the lake.
In a lunge of concerted movement the pack is after him, overtaking him in seconds, Angel leaping on his back, Maria and Jamie tearing at his legs. He goes down with a startled cry, striking out in every direction, rolling, twisting, beating the children off.
Now on his feet, he kicks out viciously at Jamie who is snarling and snapping at his thigh; then, he literally catches Kathy in midair who, having backed off, had found enough room to fling herself at him. Seizing her by the throat he squeezes until Maria’s long teeth sink into his wrist.
With cracked cries of loathing and despair, he picks up and flings one child against the massed others, gaining a few moments’ time in which, after a leap, he slides spinning down the remainder of the slope to the water’s edge.
There, his clothes half gone, bleeding from wrist, legs, back, throat, he pauses, panicked to know what to do; then, wading knee-deep in the lake, he seizes a rowboat tied with a long rope to a tree. There is no time to free it; he scrambles in, picks up an oar, facing the five children now lined up on shore.
The water deters them; they are used to it about their ankles, but to wade in to the knee
, and then waist-deep, is too much of a shock. They attempt it, retreat; attempt it again, come back, jaws jabbering, whimpering their rage and frustration.
Then—an astonishing thing. In a moment lucid with regained humanity, Angel stands up, seizes the rope, and pulls the boat to shore.
They swarm into it in a howling rush as Harry, reeling with terror, swings the oar, knocking one, then another of them over the side. But Angel is truly inspired. He rocks the boat until Harry loses balance and falls—with a scream so thin and wild with terror that God must have covered His ears.
He is inundated instantly, Jamie getting to his throat first. There is a frenzied flailing of arms and legs, a thrashing of torso, fluid, strangled cries, until water and blood and moonlight mix; then all is still.
The bruised children retreat to the bank, there to shake themselves free of dripping water, their breath short and panting. Some, still excited, occasionally growl; all begin to lick at their wounds and scratches.
In the water Harry lies, hair liquid and fanned, entirely nude now except for his belt; his eyes shiny glass, blood clouding the water from his open mouth, the wound in his throat massive.
And behind his head, just the edge of it touching: the moon: a perfect halo.
THE LAST OF THE VICTIMS
TWO DAYS AFTER the body of Harry Meyerson was dragged from the lake, another body was found—this one in Bethesda Fountain; or rather, various dismembered parts of a body were found which, later assembled, formed that of a young Caucasian male identified as Peter Sommers of Sunnyside, Queens.
The severed head was the first grisly discovery by a girl of eight chasing her Frisbee. When she looked into the shallow water, she saw what she first thought to be a magnified doll’s head. But through scrolls of fluid hair, two very real dead eyes stared up at her, and because the flesh of the mouth had been torn away, every tooth was exposed in a dazzling smile.
The following day, two dead dogs were found, and at the end of the week, the corpse of a fourteen-year-old child, with evidence that it had been dragged almost a quarter of a mile along the shore of the lake to a mountainous area close to a stream. There, surrounded by hundreds of clear, sharp footprints, the body had been so fantastically mutilated that the police, reporters, examining physicians, and a visiting U.S. Army general and his lieutenant were literally aghast. What remained actually was little more than a gnawed skeleton with shreds of flesh clinging to it. Even the eyes were gone, and the cartilage of the nose. The head was picked clean: a skull crowned with a scrawny tangled wig of human hair.
On Saturday the police barricades went up with more than two thousand men assigned. Special flood lamps were erected lining Fifth Avenue, and Central Park North, South, and West. The park, in effect, became an island afloat in a sea of light.
THE MEN
THEY WERE HUNTED the way all highly dangerous, man-eating animals are hunted: by many men with high-powered rifles, six of them with shotguns that could have blasted whole heads from their bodies or holes as big as heads in their chests.
A “jungle expert” had been hired by Lieutenant Shrader, who was in charge, and he had constructed immense flying nets and vast hidden pits—so large and cunning they could have captured twenty Bengal tigers. As a final precaution, Art Davis carried a pocketful of hand grenades— just in case.
Yet it was so easy to find them once they knew where to look, and so effortless to kill them, picking them off the face of the cliff with the rifles, that all the elaborate preparations were an embarrassment and a folly.
The footprints, avowed a footprint expert, led to a cliff; there they saw the little niches on the surface, leading up, serving as footholds for hands and feet. And two hundred feet above, perhaps a little more, was a break in the rock, a few branches, a cluster of leaves and hanging shrubs: obviously an entrance to a hidden cave.
A special gun was used to shoot a capsule of tear gas into the nest, and the rifleman who fired it was so expert, he hit his target at the first shot.
After the all-clear, the mayor of New York City stepped from his shiny black limousine to view, officially, what the dawn’s hunting had wrought.
What had he expected—Dracula’s children? He was amazed.
Terrified, he turned to look into all the blank faces and empty eyes that surrounded him: the police corpsmen, the detectives, the Army personnel, the reporters, and doctors in white.
“These. . .these! are the monsters?!”—for what he saw on the ground at the face of the cliff were five naked dead children lying in a careless heap, all of them bloody and riddled with holes, as worthless as Gooks, or Jews ready to be shoveled into the lime pits.
THE STREET
AT THE END of the street, or the beginning actually, if it is entered from the south where the numbers, if there are any, run upward, the buildings are unoccupied.
Uninhabited is a better word.
The doors are gone; the windows long ago shattered and smashed.
The roofs expose jagged patches of blue, and most of each floor has been eaten away, leaving only a vast crosspatch of beams and two-by-fours spliced with the knuckled slime of broken and crumbling plumbing, so blackened they look charred.
Occasional kids play in and out if the smell is tolerable—faint enough to wrinkle a nose in quick disgust and forget it.
More often the stench is unbearable.
Bums and drunkards and wandering derelicts stumble in to piss or bend down and shit in the shadowed corners.
Starving cats, sometimes a dog or two drag in carrion to munch on slit-eyed and growling in the dark, while an army of rats, often crazed with hunger and disease, fight among themselves, eat their dead, leaving what remains to rot until the stink is so strong it would gag you as easily as if it were being fogged out into your face from a canister of teargas.
Time, decay, neglect, indifference; lack of feeling and of love: these create a bomb as deadly as the atom, and indeed, ruins that are far more beautiful.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, or on the fringes of Black or Spanish Harlem, block after block, sometimes mile after ragged mile of these hideous buildings, viewed from a distance, say on a clear and moonlit night, have all the ghastly, ghostly beauty of Berlin, or Dresden after the holocaust.
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