Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

by Chris Vola

  Ryan flashed back to the night in 1919—twisting and sweating on a hard cot, listening to the low moans of other patients separated only by faded linen sheets, trying to avoid breathing in too deeply the unmistakable odor of death that permeated the ward. A tall, gaunt man with thinning, cottony-gold hair in a white doctor’s coat appeared over him in the gray predawn light, exuding a calmness that Ryan had never felt before as he pulled up a sleeve and gouged into his arm with a scalpel, letting the black drops fall over Ryan’s face and naked torso, causing Ryan to cry out as it burned into his flesh and blinded him for what seemed like a long time.

  When he could see again the man was propping him up, holding a clay cup covered with strange symbols and stick-figure animal drawings, pressing it to Ryan’s lips, telling Ryan to open his mouth, to drink the thick, corrosive liquid that didn’t taste like any kind of medicine. And then a greater, spinning darkness, a feeling of being pulled apart, a loss of identity, of life, of everything, a cocoon of emptiness pried open with an electric shock, Arthur’s palm pressed against his scalding forehead, and then …

  “The one thing you could be certain about with Arthur was that he was never soft, right until the end,” Natalia said, chuckling at a private memory Ryan hoped she wouldn’t be sharing with him. “That’s why he did most of the culling whenever an infectious disease reared its head, something, thankfully, we rarely have to worry about anymore. No, it’s more likely that he saw a quality in you,” she continued, “something in how you’d managed to survive an illness that had destroyed everyone else who’d come in contact with it. An inner strength, perhaps something more profound than that. Arthur had a precise, mathematical mind. Nothing he did was ever random or arbitrary, but he wasn’t cold, either.”

  “Besides abandoning the only person he’d ever turned, I’ll take your word for it,” Ryan said, his voice tinted with the petulance of his youth.

  “Still riding the self-pity train after all this time,” she said with a sigh. “I thought we’d taught you better than that.”

  “Just calling it like I see it.”

  “It’s not like you ever asked about what happened.”

  “I didn’t think I needed to.”

  Natalia began untying the knot in the leather strap that held together the stack of papers in her lap. “That’s a conversation for another day. Now,” she said, “let’s get back to Arthur, before he left. Yes, he was originally a mapmaker for the Dutch West India Company in the early seventeenth century. But more than anything, he was a curious soul, an anthropologist before that word existed.

  “He was fascinated by the local tribes that had been living and trading in New Amsterdam, the Lenape and the Canarsee, and when he wasn’t working in any official capacity, he spent most of his time with them, both here and in Manhattan, learning their languages, their social customs, and their spiritual practices, all of which he documented on these pages.”

  Ryan flipped through the pile of yellow, disintegrating parchment. Most of the papers were covered with the same dense, italic script; he assumed the language was Dutch. There were also numerous sketches—the faded outlines of coasts, islands, hillscapes, and other vague geological features that composed a mapmaker’s rough drafts, as well as detailed watercolor drawings of loincloth-wearing Native American men, women, and children performing a variety of activities. Hunting, fishing, carrying wooden canoes to an unknown body of water, dancing around a giant bonfire at the center of a large dome-shaped hut, weaving baskets, whittling arrowheads and baseball-bat-like clubs, eating and drinking from large clay-colored bowls, braiding each other’s hair. Intimate, carefully crafted moments that would have been forbidden to any outsider.

  “Neat,” Ryan said, the sarcasm on full blast as he handed the stack of papers back to Natalia. “I’m so proud to be descended from a humanitarian so far ahead of his time.”

  She sighed. “I’m not interested on your opinions about Arthur’s character. Frankly, I don’t care about what you think. I care about what you know, what you need to know, so that we can figure out an endgame to a situation that, if you haven’t noticed already, affects the well-being of your entire tribe. Or you can continue being an ass and end up like Seamus. Your choice.”

  Ryan stared straight ahead, unblinking.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, when Manhattan Island was sold to the Dutch in 1626 by the band of Canarsees who lived there, the chief of the Brooklyn Lenapes saw the writing on the wall and guessed correctly that it was only a matter of time before the Europeans would either pay them in beads and seashells to evict them from their ancestral lands or simply annihilate them. Yes, the chief had a handful of dead warriors, but from his perspective it would have been foolish to start a war against an enemy who controlled gunpowder, a powerful magic against which even the Ànkëlëk-ila might not survive. Of course we know that’s not true, but you can see why they wouldn’t want to risk it.”

  “Why not just turn everyone?” Ryan asked. “Surely they must have realized that an army of Ànkëlëk-ila would be pretty much unstoppable, even against an enemy with guns.”

  “Well for one thing, we’re sterile,” Natalia replied. “This was a people that put respect for nature above all else. Those who were chosen to become dead warriors knew that their immortality was only temporary, that they would eventually return to their original condition and live out their days in an ordinary manner. An entire village that was incapable of perpetuating the natural cycle of life would be far more offensive to the spirits than simply leaving the ancestral homeland and starting over elsewhere. In any case, the chief decided to pack up and move his tribe westward, somewhere far from Long Island.

  “Before he left, Arthur and the few of his colleagues who had gained the respect and trust of the Lenape approached the chief and his shaman and asked them if they might be able to carry on some of the tribal traditions, to preserve a way of life they smartly thought of as being superior to the inherent misery of colonialism. The chief took this to mean that they wanted to be turned, and for whatever reason, he agreed to it. Arthur’s maker was the oldest dead warrior at that time, apparently famous throughout the region for his strength and brutality in battle. Arthur received not only his blood, the same blood that flows in you, but also the weapons and totems of his order that had been passed down to each succeeding generation of Ànkëlëk-ila since a time before memory, as he told it to me. Take a look at this.”

  She removed a sheet of paper from the pile and handed it to Ryan. It was a drawing of three Lenape men, one of them much taller than the other two, wearing a crown of white and gold feathers and a large metallic disk attached to a silver necklace that covered his chest. His shorter companions were broad-shouldered, muscular, with shaved heads and no visible jewelry besides the long knives that hung from their waists. Their entire bodies were painted cobalt blue. The same three symbols appeared in black ink above the head of each man: two jagged, parallel strokes that might have been lightning bolts, a fish, and an X within a circle. In their hands they held what looked like small figurines, made of stone or painted wood, in the shape of monkeys or maybe bats’ heads attached to human bodies. Below the image were two lines of text, written in the same foreign script that appeared on the rest of the papers.

  The drawing awoke in Ryan a twinge of memory: a granite crucifix under a starless sky, a wooden vessel in the earth, Arthur’s muddy fingers. He thought he knew where he’d seen something like the statues before, but he couldn’t tell Natalia, or anyone, until he was sure.

  “What does the writing say?” he asked, handing the sheet back to her.

  “It says, more or less, ‘King Yellow Tree reuniting with his soldiers after a diplomatic journey to Raritan,’ which could be any of the tribes living in Staten Island or northern New Jersey at the time.”

  “His soldiers are dead warriors?”

  “Correct,” Natalia said. “And they’re using the statues. I don’t know exactly how they work, and I haven’t seen
one in person in at least a century, but it seems likely that’s what Manhattan is looking for. What I want to know from you is, did Arthur ever give you anything before he left, any, shall we say, family heirlooms? Or any location where he might have stored them? Did he talk about anything like this with you?”

  The southwest corner of the graveyard … the box underneath the earth … you’ll know when to use it …

  “No,” Ryan said, “to all of the above. I can remember maybe three or four conversations between us and none of them had anything to do with totems, weapons, King Yellow-whatever, none of that. I didn’t even know we had anything to do with the Lenape until years later.”

  “Believe me, you’re better off for it,” Frank said as he walked back into the room and sat down. “Arthur used to go on and on about those fucking creepy child’s dolls, that they were older than the tribe itself, that they were controlled by some kind of dark sorcery or some such nonsense. I can’t believe you’re asking him about this, Nat.”

  Ryan had rarely seen Frank get as worked up about something as he was now, breathing heavy, brow creased, scowling. But after the last few hours, maybe rarely was par for the course.

  “What about us?” Ryan asked. “How do you explain what controls us?”

  Frank snorted in mild amusement. “Us? It’s simple science. What happens when we turn someone? We introduce our blood into their body. Our blood acts like a virus, changing the chemistry of our so-called offspring’s blood until it matches our own. The same transformation occurs every time, no exceptions. And one of the rules of the virus is that it can’t survive outside a specific geographical area. It’s like certain animal species in the Himalayas that can’t survive below a specific altitude. Whatever’s flowing inside us has designed itself to exist within an extremely limited set of environmental conditions, which just so happens to roughly coincide with the boundaries of Brooklyn. But instead of destroying us when we travel outside those boundaries, the virus dies, returning us to our original state. That’s how it is and how it will be, until there aren’t any of us left. You can’t change the rules of biology.”

  “What about, like, magnetic fields?” Ryan asked. “I read an article recently that—”

  “It’s irrelevant,” Natalia said, cutting him off, “because you don’t have the statues and you don’t know where Arthur might have stored them, if he didn’t take them with him when he decided to return to the land of the living.”

  She placed the stack of papers and the girl’s phone on the coffee table next to her half-drunk flute of now-coagulated blood. “Who were you talking to, Francis?” she asked.

  “Fiona,” he replied. “She and Asher are at the safe house. They got there a couple hours ago, apparently with no problems, no signs of anyone trailing them. They’re waiting for us.”

  “I’m surprised they responded at all,” Natalia said, with a slight air of disdain. “It’s been decades since they bothered reaching out to me.”

  Fiona and Asher were the youngest members of the tribe, both in physical appearance and in actual age. They had both been students—she at Brooklyn College, he at St. Francis—when they were turned less than a year apart in the late 1940s, when the rest of the tribe had begun to separate, to explore and enjoy the fruits of a postwar era on a mostly singular basis. But a lack of camaraderie had never been a problem for them because they’d always had each other, always had been inseparable. Their penchant for doing their own thing made Ryan look like the tribe’s mayor.

  Frank used to say that it was a good thing that the two of them couldn’t reproduce, otherwise they’d probably have had enough children by now to put a serious dent in the food supply. It was funny because it was true, but suddenly the idea of being able to fully share a life with someone else caused Ryan to experience an old pang, not quite jealousy, but a longing for something similar that he’d experienced long ago with Vanessa and now with Jennifer, a longing he knew would probably be impossible to extinguish a second time.

  “I think it’s clear that we need to stay together,” Frank said as he stood up and put his phone in his pocket. “We’ll head to the safe house, figure everything out from there. Do you still have a car, Nat?”

  “Audi A3,” she said, with a slightly mischievous grin. “Leased it last week. Not everything in this house is a relic. Give me a moment to change into some real clothes and find my keys and I’ll meet you boys downstairs.”

  Ryan followed Frank out of the study, through the hallway, and down the main staircase. They zigzagged toward the front door, careful to avoid most of the foyer’s wreckage.

  “Frank, wait,” Ryan said. “I can’t go with you guys now.”

  Frank stared at him, eyebrows arched, looking like he’d heard the beginning of a joke and was waiting for a punch line.

  “I need to talk to Jennifer. We’re supposed to meet for brunch in a few hours. I’ll go to the safe house directly afterward. But this is something I need to do.”

  “Mm-hm. Jennifer. Is that your fuck buddy?”

  Frank’s sarcastic smirk made Ryan suddenly want to impale him against the glass shards that littered the floor, to drive his brain through his spinal column as his shoulders smashed together and caved in. “It’s more than that,” Ryan said, trying to control the rage that had begun to flow as fast as when he’d been shot.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “You’re not going to stop me.”

  Frank held up his hands defensively, palms facing Ryan. The smirk vanished. “Easy, pal,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything. Nat might try if she heard you. But it’s only because she feels the same way I do. We’ve never had to deal with a real threat like this before, it’s new territory for all of us. We need to stay together in order to protect each other, that’s all.”

  “I understand that,” Ryan said, “and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me tonight, coming to check on me at my place, dragging me into the car after I blacked out, bringing me here. I’d be fucked without you. But I won’t feel right with myself unless I try to explain to her who I am, what I am, as honestly as I can. Especially if it’s my last chance.”

  “It won’t be,” Frank said quietly, as he pulled out his pistol from under his shirt and handed it to Ryan. “The clip’s full.”

  “Thanks,” Ryan said. “I’ll be at the safe house no later than four o’clock. If I’m not there by then…”

  Frank shook his head, not letting Ryan finish, trying to ward off the possibility of further complications. “Get out of here,” he said, “before Natalia comes down here and tries to change your mind. You know how persuasive she can be.”

  Ryan tucked the pistol against the small of his back, then fist-bumped his former mentor.

  “Thanks,” he repeated before opening the front door and bolting into the predawn mist.

  8

  He paused in front of the intricately carved, chapel-like double arches of Green-Wood Cemetery’s main gate, listening and smelling the air for any signs of human activity. The sun was just beginning to rise over Battle Hill, Brooklyn’s highest natural point, the thin beams of light cascading over trees and endless rows of tombstones, marking the direct path Ryan planned on taking once he scaled the gate’s brownstone walls and landed on the other side.

  As he started walking in the direction of the gathering brightness, the windows of the gatehouse were suddenly illuminated by interior artificial lights, meaning that at least some of the caretakers and grounds crew had already arrived for work, that it was later in the morning than he’d thought.

  To get what he’d come for and remain unnoticed, Ryan would have to take a more roundabout route.

  The oldest and largest private cemetery in New York City’s five boroughs, located a few blocks southwest of Prospect Park, Green-Wood spanned nearly five hundred acres of valleys, hills, ponds, and paved paths, a rural oasis that was home to more than half a million permanent, decomposing residents, surrounded by a postindustrial
wasteland of automotive shops, government-owned warehouses, crumbling commercial buildings, and the odd public housing behemoth. In an hour or two, the fenced-in grounds would be overrun with tourists looking to visit and later post pictures of the mausoleums of robber barons, Civil War generals, and baseball legends; marble sculpture gardens; monuments honoring the heroes of the Revolutionary War and every war since; and granite tombstones featuring names like Tiffany, Roosevelt, and Ebbets.

  For Ryan, Green-Wood was a repulsive place, filled with the sour reek of several generations of bodily decay, a stench that made it hard for him to breathe as he changed course and began walking southward on 5th Avenue, parallel with the eight-foot-tall cast-iron fence that separated the cemetery’s manicured permanence from the borough’s more familiar milieu of charred asphalt and car exhaust.

  Ryan had, for many years (and especially after killing his food became unnecessary), put up his own mental fence around the idea of death, kept it at a respectable distance, a distance that until the previous evening had been easy to maintain. Yes, he could smell cancer and every other chronic and fatal condition afflicting the people he passed on the street and sat near in the subway, but for Ryan that information had been mostly impersonal and emotionless, the equivalent of seeing a rotten piece of fruit at the supermarket and knowing not to choose it. You let it sit there until someone else threw it away, without having to participate in the moment of its demise.

  Now that there were forces at work that were actively trying to exterminate his tribe—and apparently possessed the ability and manpower to carry out that desire—the possibility of death had reentered the forefront of Ryan’s life for the first time since he’d been turned. He thought about Jennifer and his emotional response to Frank’s dismissal of her as nothing more than a casual hookup.

  Maybe Frank was right. Maybe they shouldn’t have shared anything more than a couple of hazy (from her perspective) fucks. Besides a handful of donors, the overwhelming majority of the humans who had come in contact with him over the years had had one thing in common: a quick and violent extermination.