City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  "You think you've seen it before?" Laika asked.

  He shook his head slowly and thoughtfully. "I don't know, but I've seen what it means." Then he snorted. "That doesn't make much sense, does it?"

  It did, more than he knew. She hadn't heard a similar conviction from Joseph, probably because she hadn't heard much of anything from Joseph in the past few weeks. The day after the incident in the townhouse, she had congratulated him on his acumen, but he had not accepted it gracefully. "It was simple," he said vacantly. "The comparisons to Borley made me think of the train. That's how I figured out the lights."

  "What train?" she asked.

  "There were lights in Borley Rectory, too," he said, "and no one knew where they came from, either. It turned out they were the reflections of the headlight of a train that wasn't readily visible from inside the room, and not at all from down on the ground. That's why they appeared at about the same time every night."

  One evening they were alone together in the warehouse, while Guaraldi was taking a catnap on a cot in the small anteroom. She took the opportunity to ask Joseph if he was troubled by what had happened in the house.

  "By the shooting?" he replied, and she was glad to see he didn't pretend not to know what she meant. "A little, at first, but not anymore."

  "Did you think you hit the child?" she asked.

  "I knew I hit the child. What I thought was that I killed it. Two at one blow. That wasn't the case, and I was glad. But still, I killed the woman."

  "You didn't have a choice."

  Joseph kept his eyes fixed on his monitor screen. "I shouldn't have had to do that. We're trained to deal with situations like that without gunfire."

  "No, Joseph. It was the only way—the closeness of the room, she was already on top of you . . . you did the right thing." He didn't respond, and she added, "Don't worry about it."

  But he did. Joseph Stein, in his many years in the Central Intelligence Agency, several of which were spent in field operations, had never been forced to kill an enemy before. He had incapacitated several, and had even shot an agent in Bucharest in the right lung, but the man had survived.

  This madwoman in the house had not survived. Joseph's bullet, after passing through the body of her dead child, had entered her heart and killed her almost immediately. As he had told Laika, for a long and terrible moment he'd thought he had killed the baby as well. There had come upon him a clutching and writhing sickness that would have left him vulnerable to anything that the man in the corner might have wanted to do. It had not been until Laika had spoken sharply to him that he'd regained his senses and realized that he had not killed the child, just the mother.

  Just the mother. Just a poor insane woman doing what any animal would have done, trying to defend what she thought of as her home and her child, even though the baby was dead. And he had been so cavalier about it all, tracking the mysterious squatters down through the hidden passageways, just like the goddamned Hardy Boys, with a plucky grin on his face, right up until the second that the ugly truth stared him in the face out of its empty, hollow eyes.

  And came at him with an ax, Laika might have added. But Joseph thought that Laika, for all her belief in things he had long ago discarded, was more of a pragmatist when it came to humanity.

  Humanity was all Joseph had left to believe in, and though he knew it was a foolish, liberal, outmoded concept, he sought the potential for good in most people, not the evil, and he was more ready to forgive that evil. Since there was no afterlife, this life was only that much more precious, for friend and enemy alike. It was all any of us had. And it was all that Katherine Lambden had had, and he had taken it away.

  In his spare time in the warehouse, Joseph had found out much about Katherine Lambden. His passwords gave him access to police and medical records, the New York City Department of Welfare, and a multitude of other agencies through which Katherine Lambden's brief and tragic life had wound. The more he learned about her, the more he wanted to know, and slowly her life spread itself before him in every appalling detail.

  She was twenty-eight when she died. As a girl, she had lived in Brooklyn, and she had been impregnated by her father when she was fourteen. An abortion followed. She dropped out of high school shortly thereafter and became a prostitute to support a crack habit. She lived in that manner for several years, until she began to display signs of mental illness during her frequent arrests.

  She then spent two years in a public mental institution and released herself at the end of that time, turning again to prostitution, and was arrested several times in Central Park, where she apparently turned tricks under the shelter of bushes. Her last arrest had been for vagrancy, a year and a half before. The court transcripts stated that she showed signs of mental illness, but she had served her six weeks in prison. After her release, she disappeared not to be seen again by the officialdom of New York City until she was discovered with a man, still unidentified, in Clarence Melton's town-house.

  Joseph thought that he could fill in the blanks. She linked up with this loser, probably as crazy as she was, but still streetwise enough to ensconce the two of them in a deserted and crumbling block of houses and hide like rats there, stealing food out of garbage cans and crapping in the walls, both of them growing crazy as bedbugs if they weren't already.

  But even crazy people had sex, and then the baby came along. The man probably helped her deliver it, but it couldn't have lived long. The medical report that Joseph downloaded estimated the baby's age at death as approximately two weeks old. Joseph was surprised it had lasted even that long.

  He had had plenty of time to think about Katherine Lambden and what her last few weeks must have been like, having enough mother love to drag around a dying and then dead baby, but not enough mental faculties left to keep it alive, or enough caloric intake to ensure a supply of breast milk for her new child. The medical report had established that pitiful detail as well.

  Then, when an interloper had come into their inner sanctum, invaded what passed for their hearth and home with crowbars and loud voices, she had reacted as any mother would, and he had killed her for it. He felt guilty over that, and that guilt would be a long time leaving him, if it ever did.

  Now, at last, there was a dead end. He could learn no more about Katherine Lambden, and he sat back from the computer, looking at the message, "No further files," and sighed.

  "What is it?" Laika asked, looking over his shoulder at the screen.

  "Nothing," Joseph said, then turned and smiled at her. "Just trying to track down an old . . . friend."

  "Girlfriend?" Laika asked.

  "Not really. It never quite went that far." He clicked on the mouse, and the words on the screen vanished.

  Laika walked away from Joseph and his computer and turned her attention back to the sculpture. Adam Guaraldi was high on one of the portable stairways, soldering several small pieces of iron into place with the acetylene torch. He had been working nonstop for the past eighteen hours, and prior to that had had only a half-hour nap.

  It had been five weeks since the reconstruction had begun, and there was hardly any iron remaining on the floor. It would not be long now, she thought, if Guaraldi was able to hold out.

  Laika walked slowly down the length of the room, her eyes, as they nearly always were, on the mighty shape rising before her. She heard Guaraldi coughing and looked up at him high above, grasping the rail of the stairs as coughs shook his body. With all the dust and the rust particles in the air, Laika thought it was a wonder they all weren't in some lung ward by now. The spasms passed, and Guaraldi resumed his work.

  Laika stopped at the end, where the sheets of paper that had been Peder Holberg's plans were piled. She noticed that only one sheet was on the right-hand pile. The others were all facedown next to it. Could Guaraldi be that close to completion?

  She almost barked a cold laugh. And then what? she thought. Figure out what the hell this hunk of cold, rusted metal was all about—come up with an explan
ation of how it was involved in Peder Holberg's disappearance, a logical, rational explanation that would make Skye happy.

  She let her fancy wander to ridiculous extremes. Maybe the thing was a spaceship, and all it needed was some pixie dust to make it fly. Maybe Skye could provide that. Or maybe Peder Holberg had been reading too many Calvin and Hobbes books and had made a transmogrifier. Maybe they could lure Skye into the middle and he might become a human being. Or it could be a Star Trek transporter, a little bit bigger than Scotty was used to, and it just transported Holberg to another planet.

  She could almost hear Skye demand loudly, "What planet?"

  "Uranus," she whispered aloud, holding the "A" a beat.

  Then she chuckled to herself. This was one hell of a way for an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency to be acting. She was working too long, that was it. Too many damned hours in this warehouse, surrounded by this nightmare of a sculpture. It was enough to make anybody nuts.

  She turned around and looked at the goddamned thing, towering above her and nearly surrounding her where she stood. At that moment, it looked like some monstrous city of iron, and she imagined futuristic monorails whining along under the horizontal iron rods. She followed the route of one such imaginary train, balancing on top of its round iron rail as it whirled across and spiraled down, down to nearly touch the dusty wooden floor before turning upward again and shooting off in a different direction.

  But Laika's gaze did not follow her imaginary train upward. Instead, she kept looking at the floor near the end of the warehouse. There was something beneath the dust that she had not previously noticed. It was just at the edge of the sculpture, a pattern on the boards.

  She put out a foot to wipe the dust away, but then thought better of it and went back to the anteroom for a broom. Though Guaraldi did not look down at her from his perch, Joseph looked up from the monitor. He frowned as he saw the seriousness of her mien. "What is it?" he asked, getting up.

  "I don't know," she said. "Something on the floor."

  They walked back to the far end of the sculpture, and Laika took a few swipes at the wood with the broom, sweeping away the dust and debris from a square-foot area. What was revealed was a letter nearly a foot long, scratched into the floor.

  "N," Laika said.

  "Or Z," Joseph suggested. "Depending on from where you look. Or it could be something completely different. A symbol, perhaps."

  Laika looked at the letter again, then at the structure that lay before them. A quick movement caught her eye, and when she looked at where Guaraldi was working, she saw him slipping down the first few steps at the top of the metal staircase.

  Guaraldi tried desperately to grasp the handrail, but failed, and then he was rolling underneath the rail and out into space, falling from a height of thirty feet.

  His tiny cry was swallowed up in the immensity of the room.

  Chapter 30

  Adam Guaraldi did not land directly on the floor. If he had, he might have lived. Instead, his body struck a thick iron bar six feet off the floor, and Laika heard the sharp, sickening sound of his back breaking.

  Guaraldi hung there for a moment across the bar, as if uncertain which side to fall over. Then his body slid head downward as limply as a fried egg sliding off the edge of a plate, and he landed roughly on the wooden floor.

  Laika and Joseph had started to move the instant they saw Guaraldi begin to fall, but could do nothing to arrest his flight. When they reached his side, Laika was amazed to see that he was actually laughing, despite his pain, in small bursts as sharp as the shards of bone that must have been prodding his flesh. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose, dabbling his chin and upper lip.

  "Slipped . . . damnit . . . just goddam slipped . . . but I finished. . . ." Guaraldi said weakly. "Jesus . . . Jesus . . . got the last piece in . . . the last goddamn . . ."

  His voice trailed away as his final breath hissed softly from his throat. His eyes remained open, looking upward at the iron monstrosity that he had recreated and that, according to his eyes, had killed him.

  As she checked for a pulse and found none, Laika wondered if his open eyes saw any answers there. She wondered if he saw Peder Holberg.

  "Joseph," she said, a thickness in her throat, "check the ladder . . . see if you can tell what happened."

  Joseph walked almost dazedly to the metal stairway while Laika grabbed a cell phone from one of the desks and dialed the number that would bring removal experts from the Company. A party on the other end answered, and Laika spoke only a few words and snapped the phone shut. She looked up at where Joseph stood, high above, his hands clinging with white knuckles to the railings.

  "There's a wet spot," he said dully, and so softly that she could barely hear him. She saw his fingers touch one of the steps, saw it move to his mouth. "Salt," he said. "He slipped on his own sweat . . . just slipped." He shook his head and came slowly and carefully down the ladder.

  "They'll be here in a few minutes," she said, as Joseph knelt next to Guaraldi's body, looking at the man as though he couldn't believe he was dead. "Who?"

  "The clean-up crew. They'll take him away, make it look like the accident happened somewhere else."

  Joseph looked up at her. "Cover it up."

  "We're in the business of cover-ups. We can't have any attention directed at this place. Not now, not ever."

  Joseph slowly nodded and stood up, his eyes still on Adam Guaraldi's twisted corpse.

  Laika then called Tony in the city. He must have been sleeping, for his "Hello" sounded slurred. "Tony, it's Laika. Good news and bad news. The good news is that the sculpture is finished. But Guaraldi . . . he had an accident. He's dead."

  "What . . . what? Jesus! What happened?"

  She told him, and he said that he'd drive right over. He sounded far more upset than Laika had thought he would. She had assumed that Tony was used to death, but he had sounded genuinely shocked at the news about Guaraldi.

  The crew arrived less than ten minutes after Laika had called them. It always surprised her how quickly the Company got the necessary people where they needed to be. In a way, it was nice to think that she and her colleagues were being watched over so carefully, yet in another way it disquieted her.

  She talked to the person in charge, told him what had happened, and was assured that everything would be taken care of. Then she and Joseph watched the unmarked van drive away with Adam Guaraldi's body, leaving them alone in the night with the completed statue.

  Just as they were about to walk back inside, a car drove into the lot and Tony Luciano hopped out. His face was grim, and his first words were, "Was that the crew just left?" Laika nodded. "Okay. Let's see the thing."

  He didn't ask about Guaraldi and didn't act as though he wanted to be told anything, either.

  They went inside and walked around the sculpture, and Laika showed Tony the letter scratched into the floor. "N," he said. "North?"

  Laika had been thinking the same thing. "It's a map?"

  Joseph didn't respond at first, but then grabbed the broom and started to sweep away thin layers of dust and rust to reveal the hardwood underneath. "If it is, maybe there are other markings." He moved around the sculpture in a counterclockwise direction, to the west, if the N did indeed indicate the north.

  There was only one broom, so they took turns sweeping, stepping over the rods and moving in toward the center of the piece, then out again, trying to expose every square inch of the wooden floor before they had to sweep the dust back over it again. They found a number of marks, but on closer investigation they saw that they were probably random markings made in the floor over the period of years in which the place had functioned as a warehouse.

  But several yards from where they had started, at the north-northeast area of the sculpture, Laika swept away the dust to expose not one, but several letters. There was a freshly carved X, and four other letters near it: BHLM.

  "X marks the spot," said Joseph.

  Tony kne
lt and ran a finger along the grooves of the dug-out letter. "You think X is where we'll find Holberg?"

  "Maybe."

  "Or," said Laika, "X as in, 'You are here.'" She looked up from the letters at the towering mass of iron and frowned for a moment. Then her face grew totally blank as the truth came to her all at once. "Oh, my God," she whispered. "It is a map. It's New York. . . ."

  She ran along the side then, looking at it. "Look at the shape, the length of it. And here. . . ." She ran back to the X. "See the piece going across there?" She pointed ten feet above at an arching rod of iron. "It's the Third Avenue bridge. And the X is here. We're on the X! The Bronx is here, near the top—northeast. This rod over here must be the Willis Avenue Bridge, and look—the X is right beneath the Third Avenue pipe. That's got to be the warehouse we're in. This thing is a map of New York City!"

  Tony and Joseph looked at the work with such awe and recognition on their faces that Laika knew they agreed with her theory. "But then," Joseph said slowly, "what's BHLM? The name of a demon or something? Like the letters YHWH represent the Hebrew god Yahweh?"

  Tony looked down at the letters and frowned as if concentrating. Then he gave a weak laugh. "You know the old maps?" he said. "The ones where they hadn't sailed any further and didn't know what the hell was ahead? Remember what they wrote on the edges? I think Holberg is trying to tell us something."

  Laika nodded. "BHLM—'Beyond here lie monsters,'" she quoted.

  "Right," Tony said. "Beyond here . . ." He gestured expansively to the huge warehouse in which they stood. ". . . Lie monsters."

  Chapter 31

  "All right," Joseph said, always the skeptic. "It looks similar, but that could be coincidental."

  "Coincidental, my ass," Tony countered. "Look at it—Jesus, I knew there was something familiar about it. For weeks I've been thinking that, and now . . . New York," he finished quietly.