Lowland Rider

by Chet Williamson

  Footsteps pattered down the hall, or so Sinclair imagined. The noise of the gunshot had deafened him for a moment, but now he shook his head and took the smaller pistol from his pocket, wiped it on his jacket, and pressed it into the dead right hand. Then he grabbed the leather bag, zipped it open, and looked inside.

  Clothes. Nothing but clothes. There was no money at all. Just a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, some underwear and socks.

  Sinclair rummaged frantically through the items, his fingers crooked into claws, scrabbling for a wad of bills, but there was nothing to find, nothing to jam into locker 4614, hell, goddam, shit, no money at all! He stood up, shoved his pistol into his holster, and ran out of the alcove, right into two uniformed policemen.

  There was a brief scuffle, and the officers grabbed Sinclair by the arms, roughly frisked him, and took away his .38.

  "Police officer, goddam it!" Sinclair wailed. "Police officer!"

  "Yeah, we'll see . . ." growled the larger of the two officers, as they manhandled Sinclair back into the alcove where the body lay.

  "Holy shit," said the other officer, a thin but wiry black man whose grip Sinclair was not able to break. The pair shoved Sinclair face down on the floor, his arm pressed behind his back. The black officer pulled out his service revolver and jammed it behind Sinclair's neck. "You just ease off now, just relax."'

  "I'm a fucking police officer," Sinclair said again.

  "Yeah, okay. He dead, Sam?"

  "Dead as hell," said the big officer. "Better pat him down again."

  Together, they emptied Sinclair's pockets, and the black cop looked in the wallet. "He is a cop, Sam. Transit."

  "That's what I said, man! Now will you let me the fuck up?"

  The cop holstered his revolver and released Sinclair, who pushed himself painfully to his feet. "What the hell happened?" asked the white cop the other had called Sam.

  "I saw this guy out in the hall . . . thought he was acting suspicious, looking around and all," Sinclair babbled. "So I followed him in here and he's standing at the locker. He turns around and sees me and all of a sudden he takes out this pistol, see, there, he still has it, and starts to point it at me. Well, shit, I mean, the guy's gonna shoot me, so I got out my gun and shot first."

  The big white cop made a sour face. "You always shoot in the head?"

  "I . . . I didn't have time to aim, for crissake . . . I mean, the guy could've killed me . . ."

  The big cop shook his head. "I don't think. Not this guy."

  "What . . . what do you mean?"

  "Why were you running out of here?"

  "I … I was going for assistance, what the hell else?"

  "Uh-huh." Sam showed the locker key he had taken from Sinclair to his partner. "4614," he said. "Quite a coincidence."

  “I…”

  "Read him his rights, Tony. We'll take him downtown and see if he can explain what this is all about.”

  “I just told you!"

  "Yeah, you wanta tell us about that key? About why your locker and his locker are side by side? You wanta tell us why you shoot station janitors in the head?"

  "Station . . . station janitors?"

  "You maybe got mixed up and thought the gray uniform meant he escaped from prison?"

  CHAPTER 26

  It was ten o'clock in the morning when Jesse Gordon put two more quarters into the locker at Grand Central Station that held his nearly fifty thousand dollars in cash. He smiled as he pocketed the key, and wondered if Montcalm had figured a way to get into his old locker. He hoped that his jeans would fit the man all right.

  Jesse had seen Montcalm following him, had figured that he had somehow learned that it was Jesse who had taken his money and given it away. He was surprised, though, that he had been found so easily in the labyrinth of tunnels that honeycombed the city. It seemed like more than luck. It seemed like a miracle. But it would surely be a miracle to Montcalm when he found that Jesse's money was no longer there. He had taken the rolls of bills out of the locker right in front of the lounging policeman who had apparently scared off Montcalm long enough for Jesse to lose him. He knew, though, that Montcalm had seen what locker he'd been in, and that would be enough to keep him busy and off his trail, at least for a while.

  At least until he found Enoch.

  In the past few weeks, the rumors had been increasing among the skells, and most of them were scared. There was something that was down there in the tunnels, they said, something that had always been there, but which was now growing in power and influence until it threatened all of them, anyone who lived beneath the city.

  Anyone who was not already part of it.

  Part of what? Jesse had asked the skells who were willing to talk to him. Part of Enoch, they would answer, telling him what he already knew. Part of Enoch.

  Enoch was the power and the evil. Enoch, Jesse thought over and over again, was the reason he had been drawn below. Enoch and his white, glowing angel's face, a mask behind which lay the horror of the city. It was all in him, all in Enoch.

  Jesse's destiny. Enoch.

  It was because of Enoch that Jesse could not take the menace of Montcalm seriously. Montcalm, despite his own corruption and the extent to which it corrupted others, was unimportant compared to the absolute horror that was Enoch's domain. At the thought of Montcalm, Jesse shook his head in pitiful disgust. Small change. But Enoch…

  The day before, after Jesse had lost Montcalm, he had ridden the Jamaica Avenue line back and forth until midnight, when he disembarked from the train at the Woodhaven Boulevard station. He sat on the benches for a while, dozing occasionally, and some time after one in the morning went into the men's room to wash himself and clean his teeth. When he came out he saw, in the dim light at the end of the platform, a man in his sixties bent over the body of a teenage boy. Months before, when he had first descended, he might have thought the boy had fainted and the man was trying to help him. But his innocence had long since fled, and he saw the act for what it was, and walked slowly and silently down the platform.

  The man was working something in his hands with a sawing motion, like a diner bent over a particularly tough steak, and Jesse finally saw that he was attempting to sever the boy's hand at the wrist. The boy was beyond help. A gash showed wetly across one side of his neck, and his eyes were already glazed over. The man did not hear Jesse until he was three yards away, then turned and looked up at the tall form standing over him. His eyes widened, and he tensed like a gray cat too old to spring. Still, he made an effort at it, and leaped feebly, the knife scratching on concrete as Jesse easily sidestepped and kicked the man's knee so that he fell heavily, the knife skittering across the platform.

  Jesse snatched it up, pushed the man over, placed his left elbow on the man's chest, and held the knife across his throat. The man's body shook beneath him like a mass of congealed rage, but he made no attempt to push Jesse off, his energy depleted by his stalking and killing the boy.

  "What?" Jesse asked him. "What is this for?"

  The man's head shivered, the jaw jutted upward, as though he were possessed, and he tried to spit into Jesse's face, but the gobbet fell back weakly on his own.

  "The hand," Jesse went on. "Who the hell is the hand for? Answer me, you bastard." He pressed the edge of the knife against the white stubble that covered the wattled neck, and a thin line of blood appeared, though the man made no outcry. "Who is it for?"

  Suddenly there was recognition in the man's face, and he smiled so that Jesse could see the yellowed teeth, a brown stain capping each one like a wig on a skull. "For you," the man whispered wetly. "For you, Lord!"

  Jesse shuddered, then slashed the knife across the man's throat. After he rolled the body off the tracks, he could still see the man's smile.

  He saw it even now. The man had been insane, that was certain. He had to be insane to do what he'd done in the first place, and he had to be insane to mistake Jesse for Enoch, for surely that was what he had done.

  The h
and was for Enoch, the murder was for Enoch. Somehow all of it, every death down here, every beating, every crime of man against man was for Enoch. How far did his influence reach, Jesse wondered. How long were the fingers of that bloody hand? Did they reach to the surface of the city? And if so, how far beyond the city's edges? Where did they stop?

  Did they stop?

  And what, he wondered most of all, would he be killing when he killed Enoch?

  PART

  4

  CHAPTER 27

  It was beginning to grow quiet on the trains. Rags figured it must be about 11:30. The theater crowds were all home, the middle-shift workers were at their neighborhood bars. Nobody riding the trains now except for the people who really had to get somewhere and couldn't afford a cab.

  The car Rags was on was empty, a Lexington Avenue local going downtown from 241st Street. It was a nice long ride, safe and secure, a good train to sleep on. Not many transit cops this time of night, and the ones you did see didn't bother you unless you were making a nuisance of yourself or smelled like shit or something. Rags took a deep whiff of himself and decided that he didn't smell too bad for a summer night. He had been washing more frequently in the months since he met Jesse. It just seemed like something he wanted to do.

  Get himself clean again.

  He had been having weird thoughts ever since he told Jesse about why he came down into the tunnels. He had never told anyone before, and he wondered why he'd gone and told Jesse something so secret, so personal, so terrible about himself. Still, he was glad he had. Jesse hadn't said or done anything that led Rags to believe he thought Rags's sin was unforgivable. Instead, he'd said some things about being forgiven, about good works saving his soul. And he'd said that when Rags died he wouldn't go to hell. Now how did Jesse know that?

  Then Rags remembered the poem that had affected Jesse so much when he'd read it, that Lowland Rider poem. He fumbled in the layers of cloth and brought out the book of ballads. As if by chance, it fell open to Jamie Gordon, The Lowland Rider, and Rags read:

  "So take thy saddle and thy sword,

  Avaunt into the night,

  Nae seek for rest, nor walk again

  Beneath the bright daylight."

  Well, that was on it, sure enough. Jesse hadn't seen sunlight since he'd come below. Rags read on:

  "But be my faithful harvester,

  And ride the lowland dark,

  And gather in the men of sin

  On whom I place my mark.

  "For when their time is come to die,

  Then shall they see thee ride

  Upon the path that they must cross

  Til you be by their side.

  "Then hold thy sword in front of them,

  That sword that brought thee woe,

  Command them, in sweet Jesu's name,

  Away with thee to go.

  "Then bring them to the Judgement seat

  Where God alone may tell

  Them whether to fly Heavenward

  Or sink, condemned, to Hell."

  Rags hadn't read the ballad for a long time, and the words made him feel funny, as if something really strange was happening down here with Jesse. "Gather in the men of sin ..." Wasn't that just what Jesse had been doing? Messing with all these people he had no business to be messing with? Still, all the same, Rags respected him for it. He didn't remember ever respecting anybody as much, unless maybe it was his Daddy, who'd died when he was just a little boy.

  But if Jesse was making the ballad come true, and it surely looked like he was, then he wouldn't be the final judge, would he? It was God alone that would tell Rags whether he went to Heaven or Hell, not Jesse. Still, if Jesse had some inside information…

  Stop it, Rags told himself. It was stupid—worse than that, it was blasphemy—to think that Jesse was some kind of messenger of God or something. Hell, no. He was just some poor soul like Rags, down here for much the same reason. Trying to pay. Just trying to pay for what he'd done. But Rags wondered if maybe Jesse wasn't getting more sins to his account than he had when he started.

  Rags closed the book of ballads and tucked it away into one of his soft crevices, then sat back with his head against the glass. No matter what Jesse's sins were, he thought, he'd profited by knowing him. Even though Rags thought he was going to die, knew the cancer on his neck was going to kill him, he wasn't as afraid anymore, and that was good.

  Rags was dozing, and only dimly aware that the train had stopped at the 86th Street station. The doors were open for only a short time, and he heard a pattering of feet, the unequivocal crash of the doors closing, a choked exclamation that was definitely out of the ordinary. Rags's eyes opened.

  Standing five feet away from him was Baggie, a snarl smeared across her face like blood. Her elbows jutted outward, and she held to her chest by twine handles a shopping bag, the contents of which rounded the bottom. Her shoulders hunched over the bag like a, bat's wings.

  Rags's mind was still dulled by sleep, but he was awake enough to realize that this was not the Baggie of old. That woman had been insane, not dangerous. But now there was something about her that terrified Rags, a look in her eyes that went far beyond the aggressive madness she had previously displayed. There was violence, murder, blood, and although the bag she carried bore no red stains, he knew that inside there was something alive, possibly dying. Possibly human.

  "What you got?" he asked roughly, ready for her to leap at him with those clawlike fingers. The train lurched as it pulled out of the station, and Baggie smoothly moved with it, years of long tenure underground giving her the motion of the train itself.

  "Not for you, nigger!" she spat at him. "Not for you!"

  Rags got to his feet. "You show me what's in that bag."

  Baggie looped the handles over her left arm, and dipped her right hand into a pocket, from which she drew something hard and shiny. Rags heard a clicking sound, and found himself looking at a long-bladed knife, its blade dulled by something that looked like, but that Rags knew wasn't, rust. "You get back, nigger. Nigger breeder. All want to fuck me, don't you? Fuck me and take what's mine, take what I done for Him. Oh no you won't. I'll cut off your black balls first, cut 'em off and take 'em to Enoch."

  Rags felt suddenly, horribly cold. "What you got?"

  "For Him, not for you. You get back now. I don't need no more, but I will, you try and take it . . ." She started to back toward the door to the next car.

  They were at a standstill. Baggie did not want to have to fight while she carried the bag in her arms, and Rags didn't want to go up against the knife. It was long and sharp, and he knew she had used it recently and would be willing to use it again. When she bumped against the door, she reached back with the arm that bore the shopping bag and pulled the handle, then pushed her way through, closing it firmly behind her.

  Rags waited for several seconds, then went up to the door and looked through the window. Baggie was walking down the aisle of the next car, which was empty except for a young Hispanic boy, his head buried in a comic book. He glanced up when Baggie passed him and watched her until she went by and looked through the window into the car ahead. Rags figured she saw more people, for she sat at the end of the car, her eyes fixed suspiciously on the boy, who now ignored her and read his comic book.

  At 14th Street she got off the train and transferred to the BMT west, then, shortly afterward, to the IND train that, when it went beneath the East River, became the Beast. Rags followed her every step of the way, slipping behind posts the few times she looked behind her. Her monomania concerning the contents of the bag seemed to free her mind of a minor disturbance like Rags, and he could see that she now had a smile on her face, and her shoulders shook with what Rags, at a distance, could only imagine to be laughter.

  He positioned himself in the car behind hers and continued to watch her through the window. At one point he could have sworn the bag moved, and Baggie's head jerked down and looked inside it. Her long fingers joined to make a fist, and he
saw her punch into the bag once, twice, then smile and nod calmly. Though the noise of the train was loud, just before she had struck the thing within, Rags imagined that he could hear a high-pitched wail like a cat's. He wondered if it was, after all, just a cat, and if he was on a fool's errand. But then he remembered what she had said, and what her eyes had said, and he leaned back against the metal, following without motion.

  Baggie got off the train at Van Siclen Avenue station, the next to last stop on the line. Rags got off as well, and lurked behind a stanchion, peering out with one eye. They were the only ones who had left the train at the stop, and the hard surfaces of the station amplified every sound. Rags scarcely dared breathe.

  Finally he heard Baggie's footsteps move off in the direction of the tunnel out of which the train had come, and he moved slowly around the stanchion so that it would remain between them as she passed by. She walked to the end of the platform without turning around, then set down her bag and lowered herself heavily to the track bed. She reached up, took the bag, and walked off over the loose stones into the darkness. Rags waited until he could barely hear her footsteps, then dropped over the edge of the platform and followed her. He hugged the wall from fear of trains, and so that if Baggie turned she would not see his silhouette against the light of the station.

  Walking through the tunnel was a nightmare. The stone walls seeped water which collected in puddles, and often Rags heard things nearby splashing their way through them. They sounded big enough to be dogs, but Rags suspected they were rats. In a way he was glad there was no more light than the small blue bulbs spaced every fifty feet or so. He didn't want to see what was down here, skittering along near him. When he began, he stopped frequently to listen for Baggie's footsteps, but was so appalled by what else he heard that after a while he stopped listening and simply walked, as quietly as possible.