The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  Caleb leaned against the window and brought his left arm as far toward his right kidney as it would go. That fired a starburst inside his broken shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. He got his fingertips into his right pocket and started pulling the lining.

  When they passed the Trident, Caleb turned away. He didn’t want to see the building again. Instead, he saw the dashboard’s digital clock, reflected in the dark window beside Garcia. He read the backwards numerals.

  3:31.

  It had been 3:33 when they got in the car.

  Soon, Emmeline had said. And as he remembered her voice, the promise she held in the palm of her hand, he smelled her perfume. Not in the car. The car smelled of sweat and bleached-out vomit. Gun oil. But she was coming. He knew that. He looked to the front of the car again. Officer Gedarro was a tall man, and the back of his uniform collar spilled over the top of his seat and pressed against the expanded metal grate that separated him from Caleb. A little bulge of the blue-black cloth was pushing through to Caleb’s side.

  Garcia wasn’t wearing his seat belt.

  As they came into the last turn of Alexander Avenue before the underpass and the ramp to Highway 101, the swirl of siren lights and road flares came into view.

  “Oh shit,” Garcia said. “No one said it was here.”

  “Said what?”

  “Just slow up. Stop next to this guy.”

  Gedarro hit the brakes. Caleb’s fingertips touched the paperclip. He pulled it out, let it fall into his palm.

  He looked up at the clock’s reflection.

  3:30.

  Gedarro came to a stop at the first line of flares and put down his window. A patrol officer came over and leaned in. He nodded at Gedarro, but spoke to Garcia.

  “There’s no way around, sir. Some kind of motor coach, like a private bus—it’s flipped just around the bend. You want to get on the bridge, you’ll have to go back through Sausalito, go down Spencer and get onto the highway from there.”

  “You can’t just get us through?”

  “No, sir. I would if I could.”

  “All right,” Garcia said. He looked at the flashing lights, and then at Gedarro. “Turn us around. We’ll go back through town, then use the ramp at Spencer.”

  Gedarro did a three-point turn on Alexander. They hadn’t gone far before he spoke.

  “We could take the tunnel on Bunker. Save us going back.”

  “Bunker’s faster?” Garcia asked.

  “Should be.”

  “Up to you. I know I don’t like going back.”

  In thirty seconds, they reached an intersection. Caleb couldn’t see the name of the crossroad, but Gedarro turned left onto it. They passed a turn circle and the entrance to the Bunker Road Tunnel was ahead of them. Its small black mouth opened into the hillside. Then they were rushing underground, burrowing west in a one-lane tunnel as narrow and as dark as a hand-hewn mineshaft. The closely spaced overhead lights streaked past, and the curved concrete walls threw the engine’s roar back at them. Caleb worked his wrists against the cuffs and stared ahead at the rushing dark, at the back of Gedarro’s neck.

  He heard her before he saw her, the Invicta’s straight-eight thundering up from behind them. Caleb looked to his left. He saw the chrome-plated headlamps, the upright radiator grille, capped with a statue of an armored knight. The hood came next, ghost gray and impossibly long. To fit alongside them in this tunnel, she’d have to be driving with her left wheels riding on the tunnel wall.

  Something behind Caleb’s back clicked. There was release of pressure from his left wrist, the relief of fresh blood flowing into his fingers.

  He ignored it.

  His eyes were on the Black Prince. The tunnel lights glared off its windows, flickering and orange, as if someone had set the leather coachwork aflame.

  Caleb glanced ahead.

  Gedarro was wearing a gold chain beneath his uniform shirt. Some of the electroplating had worn away from the links crossing the back of his neck. The metal underneath the gold was steel. The chain’s clasp was out of Caleb’s reach, beyond the grate. But with the paperclip in his fingers, Caleb knew how he could get it, how he could catch the links with a hook and pull the chain through. The thought that came next was just an image, not a plan: he had the chain in his fist and was yanking it backwards. It would feel like a blade against Gedarro’s soft windpipe.

  The Black Prince was right alongside him now, riding the tunnel wall like a scurrying insect, so close he could feel the pulse of its cylinders in his gut. Then he saw her behind the wheel. Her left hand was out the open window, one lacquered fingernail resting on the door-mounted mirror. In the roaring tunnel wind, her dark hair swirled about her head, like starlings at sunset.

  Emmeline.

  He let his lips soundlessly shape her name as he leaned toward the grate.

  When Emmeline swerved into them, there was really no contest. The Invicta was bigger and heavier, and it was going faster. The patrolman hesitated between the brakes and the gas, and that decided everything. The Invicta’s bumper slammed into the driver’s-side door of the cruiser, pinning the car against the tunnel wall. A horizontal shower of sparks filled Caleb’s window before it shattered. He hit the grate behind Garcia’s head, felt his nose break inside the weave of the heavy wire. Then the patrol car’s right tires were in the air. Caleb flew to the low side of the car and bounced off the barred window.

  He heard an engine running, but he wasn’t moving. Nearby, a pane of glass shattered, but nothing hit him. He sat up, and when he did, his neck popped and all the sound and light exploded away for a second.

  Then everything came back.

  There was blood on the window next to him, a spatter of it so thick he could barely see through the cracked glass. Something was moving out there. He heard footsteps. High heels on concrete. But there was nothing moving in the front seat: Garcia was halfway through the windshield. His feet were still inside the car, and they kicked a little. That was more than the other officer could muster. The patrolman had snapped his neck. His head was bent around backwards, wide eyes staring at Caleb.

  Caleb’s door swung open, and then he smelled her: that enthralling scent of midnight dew. Flowers that can’t exist. That never have and never will. He looked at his hands. He didn’t remember getting the cuffs off, but they were gone. He was gripping a broken gold chain in his left hand. He let it go, then wiped his bloody hand down the front of his khakis.

  “Hello, Caleb,” she said. “I promised I’d come soon. Didn’t I?”

  He turned and looked at her. She was still wearing the same dress, its black train burned through with holes. She held out her hand to him. The dashboard clock glowed 3:28.

  “Are you coming?”

  Her voice was only reaching him through one ear. The other ear just registered a high-pitched ring. He stared at her hand. The fine lines on her palm, the veins barely visible under the smooth run of her skin. He’d drawn that hand once. He tried to remember when. It was a picture he’d carried with him for so long, he couldn’t say where he’d picked it up.

  “Are you coming?”

  When he spoke, the words sounded as if they were coming around a mouthful of melting ice. That was blood, probably. Bits of broken teeth.

  “You’re not standing there,” he said. “You’re—you didn’t do this.”

  “Does it matter, Caleb?” she asked. “Do you care what any of them say?”

  His vision split into doubles whenever he moved his eyes. He closed them, blinking away the blood. When he looked again, she was still standing at the open door. The two separate images of her floated into each other and made one. A solid, beautiful whole.

  “I loved you,” he said. “The first time I saw you. I was just a little kid.”

  “I know.”

  “And I wanted you—to save you—for you to save me.”

  “Do you remember when we found each other?”

  He tried to shake his head, but his neck was
a knot of twisted nerves, and the motion shot fiery bursts of pain down his arms. He screamed until his breath was gone. When he could, he looked up at her again.

  “I can give it to you,” she said. “Do you want it?”

  “I can’t do this. Not alone.”

  “Close your eyes, Caleb. I’ll give it to you,” she said. “We made time stop, that morning. Let me show you.”

  He closed his eyes. Her fingertips touched his forehead, tracing a circle in the blood. It was there, the memory. It was on her fingers, and then it was mixing with the blood on his skin, and then it was soaking into him. It hadn’t been lost for twenty-five years. Emmeline had been keeping it for him. Saving it, until he was ready to take it back. She pulled her hand away when she was finished.

  “Do you remember it, Caleb?”

  They filed out of the bus and stood on the sidewalk in a light rain while their teacher and the two field-trip chaperones did a head count. Then they went up the steps, Caleb walking beside Henry, who pushed his glasses up to read the plaque next to the door.

  They were in the kitchen when he saw it.

  The repairman must have stepped out for lunch. Tools were sitting on the floor around the sink. Wrenches and a soldering torch, a long flathead screwdriver with a chip of carbon steel missing from its blade. Caleb was standing at the back of the group. No one but Henry noticed when he took a step closer to the toolbox. The docent was talking about ice delivery wagons.

  There was a knife on the floor, its curved blade as black and as sharp-looking as a tiger’s claw. It was exactly like his father’s knife, except there was no blood on this one.

  “Caleb,” Henry whispered.

  Caleb heard the guide leading the class out of the kitchen and into the dining room. The repairman had wrapped the knife handle with black electrical tape to give it a better grip. His father had done that too. Near the end of his father’s work, the handle would have been very slippery, without the tape.

  Caleb closed his eyes tightly and then opened them.

  He was in the museum house, alone in its kitchen. It couldn’t really be the knife. His mother was at the new apartment, her face in bandages. The other children were in the next room. He knew that, but he couldn’t hear them. There was just his father, his barking cries.

  The knife was on the floor where his father had dropped it. But that wasn’t right. He wasn’t in the basement anymore. A man had come and had let him out. He was in a museum. A kitchen in a museum. The knife was where the repairman had left it.

  It belonged in the dump, where his father’s ashes had gone. He knew he had to get rid of it. The blade couldn’t be burned, but at least it could be buried.

  Caleb thought he was alone, until the shadow fell across him. He looked up, then quickly got off his knees. The kid taking the knife from the floor was named Drew. Until today, he’d just been a face in the back of the room. The kind of boy who still followed the words with his finger when the class was reading, who wore shoes with Velcro fasteners because laces confounded him. But now Drew held the knife so that its clawed blade pointed to Caleb’s stomach.

  “Was it one like this?” Drew whispered. “What he used?”

  Caleb stared at the knife. His throat was locked so tightly, he might have been dangling from a gallows.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Drew said. His voice was just a hiss. Their teacher was in the next room. “And you wanted it.”

  Even if he could have spoken, he wouldn’t have. The boy had it wrong, but Caleb knew he didn’t owe him anything.

  “Did you like watching it?” Drew asked.

  He let the blade slide back and forth in the air, an inch or two from Caleb’s eyes.

  “Did you like to see him cut her?”

  Caleb felt a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t turn, didn’t take his eyes from the wavering blade, but he knew the hand was Henry’s.

  “Put it down, Drew,” Henry said.

  The kid took a step back. Henry was the tallest boy in their grade, and he had nearly a foot on Drew.

  “I wasn’t—”

  Henry was also the fastest boy in their class. He darted around Caleb and caught Drew’s wrist, yanking his arm upward and twisting it. Henry shoved him against the sink and clapped his palm over the boy’s mouth. The knife fell to the floor.

  “You shut up,” Henry whispered. “I’m gonna let you go, and then you get back to the class. You got it?”

  Drew nodded, his eyes bulging.

  “You don’t say shit,” Henry whispered. “I see you on Caleb again, I’m not telling the teacher. It’ll just be me and you.”

  Henry let the boy go, and watched as he hurried from the kitchen. Then Henry put his hands on Caleb’s shoulders.

  “You okay?”

  Caleb didn’t answer. If anything, the noose had drawn tighter. But Henry could read him, whether he spoke or not.

  “Just breathe,” Henry said. “It’s gonna be all right. You know?”

  Gently now, Henry turned him toward the door. They went into the dining room, where they caught up to the class. Several of the children turned when they came in, marking him with their dark eyes.

  He’d understood, then, that he could never come all the way back. Drew knew it, and so did the others. Maybe Henry most of all. They’d found a nightmare, and a monster. It was safe for them, because it was over. It was just a story, a fairy tale. And though Caleb would never belong with them, now a part of him belonged to them. They would tear out his history, cut it from him before it stopped beating. Claim his darkness for themselves. Something to marvel at, and then throw away.

  It was too much, trying to meet their eyes. He looked around the new room. His throat was still closed off, and he might not have drawn a breath since he’d seen the knife. There was a fireplace, and above it was a painting. The young woman was looking at him, but her gaze didn’t hurt at all. The pain left his throat. Light poured from the painting into the room. As he watched, the woman moved her left hand. He stepped back and bumped into Henry.

  “Caleb,” Henry whispered. “You need to breathe.”

  He turned to his friend, eyes wide, and then he looked back at the painting. Now she was using one elbow to prop herself off the straw mattress. Her left hand reached toward him, palm out. Three times, she curled her forefinger in. She wanted him to come nearer, but Henry was leading him away.

  He knew enough to stay quiet.

  But in the next room, he slipped from Henry’s grip and drifted to the back of the class. And then at the top of the stairs, he left them altogether. At the landing, he heard a whisper. She was calling him from the mantel. All she said was his name, the two syllables drawn out as if spoken by the wind.

  Caleb.

  He went to her. How couldn’t he?

  Downstairs, it was as though the sun had set. A servant might have passed through, lighting unseen candles. Above him, the children’s voices rose skyward, fainter and fainter. When they disappeared, the house sighed.

  He crossed the room and stood before her. The moment stretched to infinity. He didn’t even feel himself fall past the horizon, because he was alone with her. Just Caleb and Emmeline, inside the cataract. Warped space and looped memory. Time was so soft, the clocks might hang like limp rags. They were a foot apart, their eyes on each other. He wanted her so badly, it ached.

  She was hauntingly lovely. And waiting to be hanged.

  He wasn’t afraid when she sat up in the painting, swiveled to the mantelpiece, and bounced down as lightly as a dancer. She took the cushions from the couch and stretched out on the floor. That was the image that would become so treacherous, so persistent in his thoughts and deepest memories, waiting for the right season to sprout and grow anew. Her eyes were half closed, the ghost of a smile on her lips. She was waiting for him, begging for his touch. Pleading him to make the clocks run backwards so that he could come to her. So that he could take her away. Save her from the dawn. No chains could stop him this time. There were no
eyebolts in this floor.

  The fireplace fluttered alight behind her as she opened her arms to him.

  Before going to her, he looked at the mantel again. The prison cell in the picture frame was empty. He fell on his knees in front of her, shaking with tears he’d never have to explain, because he knew that she was—

  “Caleb?”

  He looked up. They were in the tunnel. She was holding her hand out to him, palm up. Her fingertips were painted black-red with the blood from his forehead.

  “A part of me,” he whispered.

  “So come,” she said. “Please come. We have to hurry now. You have to drive the police car. Get it out of the tunnel. I’ll meet you.”

  “Henry told them about me—about us.”

  “You have to hurry, Caleb. You have to go north. Hide the bodies and switch cars. I’ll meet you. But you must hurry.”

  He closed his eyes again and reached for her hand. It should have been right there, should have been so easy to catch. He’d found her hand while blindfolded. He’d found her in the dark half of San Francisco with nothing to track but the scent of her perfume, the memory of her fingers on his wrist. He’d found her secret room—their room.

  But now when he reached for her, his fingers caught nothing but air. When he looked up, he just saw the tunnel wall.

  She was gone. The Black Prince was gone.

  “Emmeline?”

  The tunnel’s sounds dropped away. The ventilation fans and the squad car’s engine ran in silence. Garcia’s feet kicked soundlessly against the dashboard. The only noise was a dry scraping: the sound of autumn leaves swirling on a sidewalk in a cat’s paw of wind.

  He leaned from the car’s open door and looked back along the roadway.

  A piece of paper was sliding toward him along the pavement, riding the air current that flowed through the tunnel. He couldn’t read the text on the page yet, but he knew what it was and felt his skin go cold in dread of it. And he understood, too, that this was from Emmeline. She wanted him to see this, as she’d wanted him to find the secret door. He hadn’t needed a key to enter the room behind the fireplace; the room required no key because it was itself a key. She’d known that if he ducked inside and breathed the decades-old dust and mold, if he saw the scatter of drawings and the web-covered cot, then he would open a more deeply hidden door. Now she was asking him to open one more.