The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  “I’d also like to buy some ammo,” Caleb said, as George was tallying the bill at the counter. “Thirty-aught-six.”

  The man made a certain expression: You and everybody else. He continued jotting figures with a stub of pencil. “I can give you six.”

  “How many in a box?”

  “Not boxes. Rounds.”

  It seemed like a joke. “That’s all? Since when?”

  George poked his thumb over his shoulder. Tacked to the wall behind the counter was a sign.

  $100 BOUNTY

  Mountain Lion

  Present carcass at Hunt Township Office to collect.

  “Folks cleaned me out, not that I had much to begin with. Ammo’s scarce these days. I’ll give ’em to you for a buck apiece.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  George shrugged. Business was business; it was all the same to him. Caleb wanted to tell him to stick it, but on the other hand, a mountain lion was nothing to mess with. He rolled off the bills.

  “Think of it as an investment,” George said, depositing the money in his lockbox. “You bag that cat, this won’t seem so much, will it?”

  Everything went into the wagon. Caleb surveyed the empty street. It really was awfully damn quiet for the middle of the day. He found it a little unnerving, though mostly he felt disappointed that he would return with so little to show for his visit.

  He was about to drive out of town when he remembered the doctor Tatum had told him about. It would be good to introduce himself. The doctor’s name was Elacqua. According to Tatum, he had once worked at the hospital in Kerrville and retired to the townships. There weren’t many houses, and the doctor’s was easy to find: a small frame structure, painted a cheerful yellow, with a sign that read, BRIAN ELACQUA, M.D. hanging off the porch. A pickup tuck with rusted fenders was parked in the yard. Caleb tied up the horses and knocked. A single eye peeked through the curtain on the door’s window.

  “What do you want?” The voice was loud, almost hostile.

  “Are you Dr. Elacqua?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  Caleb regretted coming; there was obviously something wrong with the man. He thought he might be drunk. “My name is Caleb Jaxon. Phil Tatum is my neighbor, he said you were the doctor in town.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I just wanted to say hello. We’re new out here. My wife is expecting. It’s all right—I can come back later.”

  But as Caleb stepped off the porch, the door opened. “Jaxon?”

  “That’s right.”

  The doctor had the look of a derelict, thick at the waist, with a wild mane of snow-white hair and a beard to match. “You might as well come in.”

  His wife, a nervous woman in a shapeless housedress, served them some kind of bad-tasting tea in the parlor. No explanation was offered for Elacqua’s curt behavior at the door. Maybe that was just how things were done out here, Caleb thought.

  “How far along is your wife?” Elacqua asked, after they’d gotten past the formalities. He had, Caleb noted, put a little something in his tea from a pocket flask.

  “About four months.” Caleb saw an opening. “My mother-in-law is Sara Wilson. Maybe you know her.”

  “Know her? I trained her. I thought her daughter worked at the hospital, though.”

  “That’s Kate. My wife is Pim.”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t remember a Pim. Oh, the mute.” He shook his head sadly. “The poor thing. Nice of you, to marry her.”

  Caleb had heard statements like this before. “I’m sure she thinks it’s the other way around.”

  “On the other hand, who wouldn’t want a wife who couldn’t talk? I can barely put two thoughts together around here.”

  Caleb just looked at him.

  “Well,” Elacqua said, and cleared his throat, “I can pay a call if she’d like, just to see how things are going.”

  At the door, Caleb remembered Pim’s letter. He asked Elacqua if he would mind posting it for him when the office opened.

  “I can try. Those people are never there.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Caleb said. “The town seems kind of empty.”

  “I didn’t notice.” He frowned doubtfully. “Could be the mountain lion, I guess. That happens out here.”

  “Has anyone been attacked?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, just livestock. With the bounty, a lot of folks are out looking. Stupid, if you ask me. Those things are nasty.”

  Caleb rode out of town. At least he’d tried to post the letter. As for Elacqua, he seriously doubted Pim would want anything to do with the man. The mountain lion didn’t concern him unduly. It was simply the price one paid for life on the frontier. Still, he would tell Pim not to take Theo to the river for a while. The two of them should stay near the house until the matter was resolved.

  They ate their supper and went to bed. Rain was falling, making a peaceful pattering on the roof. In the middle of the night, Caleb awoke to a sharp cry. For a terrifying second he thought something had happened to Theo, but then the sound came again, from outside. It was fear he was hearing—fear and mortal pain. An animal was dying.

  In the morning he searched the brush behind the house. He came to an area of broken branches; tufts of short, stiff hair, tacky with blood, were spread over the ground. He thought it might have been a raccoon. He scanned the area for tracks, but the rain had washed them away.

  The next day he walked over the ridge to the Tatums’. Their operation was much larger than his own, with a good-sized barn and a house with a standing-seam metal roof. Boxes of bluebonnets hung beneath the front windows. Dorien Tatum greeted him at the door, a plump-cheeked woman with gray hair in a bun; she directed him to the far edge of the property, where her husband was clearing brush.

  “A mountain lion, you say?” Phil removed his hat to mop his brow in the heat.

  “That’s the word in town.”

  “We’ve had ’em before. Long gone by now, I’d guess. They’re restless sons of bitches.”

  “I thought so, too. Probably it’s nothing.”

  “I’ll keep a lookout, though. Thank your wife for the johnnycake, won’t you? Dory really enjoyed her visit. Those two were writing messages to each other for hours.”

  Caleb made to leave, then stopped. “What’s it usually like in town?”

  Tatum was drinking from a canteen. “What you mean?”

  “Well, it was pretty quiet. It seemed odd, in the middle of the day.” Now that he’d said it, he felt a little silly. “The town office was shut, the farrier, too. I was hoping to get one of the horses reshod.”

  “Folks are usually around. Maybe Juno’s taken sick.” Juno Brand was the farrier.

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  Phil smiled through his beard. “Go round in a day or two. I bet you’ll find him. But you get hard up for something, you let us know.”

  Caleb had decided not to tell Pim about what he’d found in the woods; there seemed no good reason to alarm her, and a dead raccoon meant nothing. But that night as they were cleaning up the dishes, he repeated his request that she and Theo stay close to the house.

  You worry too much, she signed.

  Sorry.

  Don’t be. She turned at the sink to surprise him with a lingering kiss. It’s one of the reasons I love you.

  He wagged his eyebrows cornily. Does this mean what I think it does?

  Let me get Theo down first.

  But there was no need. The boy was already asleep.

  28

  She began the night, as she began all nights, atop the partially constructed office tower at the corner of Forty-third and Fifth Avenue. The air was blustery, with a hint of warmth; stars bedecked the heavens, thick as dust. The shapes of great buildings crenellated the sky in silhouettes of perfect blackness. The Empire State. Rockefeller Center. The magnificent Chrysler Building, Fanning’s favorite, soaring above everything around it with its graceful art deco crown. The hour
s after midnight were the ones Alicia liked best. The quiet was richer somehow, the air purer. She felt closer to the core of things, the world’s rich chroma of sound and scent and texture. The night flowed through her, a coursing in the blood. She breathed it in and out. A darkness indomitable, supreme.

  She crossed the roof to the construction crane and began to climb. Attached to the exposed girders of the building’s upper floors, it soared another hundred feet above the roof. There were stairs, but Alicia never bothered, stairs being a thing of the past, a quaint feature of a life she barely recalled. The boom, hundreds of feet long, was positioned parallel with the building’s west face. She made her way down the catwalk to the boom’s tip, from which a long hooked chain dangled in the darkness. Alicia winched it up, released the brake, and drew the hook backward along the boom. Where the boom met the mast was a small platform. She laid the hook there, returned to the tip, and reset the chain’s brake. Then, back to the platform. A keen anticipation filled her, like a hunger about to be slaked. Standing erect, head held high, she gripped the hook in her fists.

  And stepped off.

  She plunged down and away. The trick was to release the hook at just the right moment, when her speed and upward momentum existed in perfect balance. This would occur roughly two-thirds up the back side of the hook’s arc. She swung through the bottom, still accelerating. Her body, her senses, her thoughts—all were attuned, at one with speed and space.

  She released the hook. Her body inverted; she tucked her knees to her chest. Three aerial rolls and she uncoiled. The flat-topped roof across the street: that was the target. It rose in greeting. Welcome, Alicia.

  Touchdown.

  Her powers had expanded. It was as if, in the presence of her creator, some powerful mechanism within her had been fully unleashed. The aerial spaces of the city were trivial; she could vault vast distances, alight on the narrowest ledges, cling to the tiniest cracks. Gravity was a toy to her; she ranged above Manhattan like a bird. In the glass faces of skyscrapers her reflected image dove and darted, plunged and swooped.

  She found herself, sometime later, above Third Avenue, near the demarcation between land and sea; a few blocks south of Astor Place, the encroaching waters began, bubbling up from the island’s flooded underworld. She descended, ping-ponging between buildings, to the street. Broken shells lay everywhere among the dried husks of ocean weeds swept inward by storm surges. She knelt and pressed her ear to the pavement.

  They were definitely moving.

  The grate pulled away easily; she dropped into the tunnel, lit her torch, and began to walk south. A ribbon of dark water sloshed at her feet. Fanning’s Many had been eating. Their droppings were everywhere, rank, ureic, as were the skeletal remains of their feeding—mice, rats, the small creatures of the city’s clammy substratum. Some of the droppings were fresh, a few days old at the most.

  She passed through the Astor Place station. Now she could feel it: the sea. The great bulge of it, always pressing, seeking to enlarge its domain, to drown the world with its cold blue weight. Her heart had quickened; the hairs stood up along her arms. It’s only water, she told herself. Only water …

  The bulkhead appeared. A thin spray of water, almost a mist, shot from its edges. She stepped toward it. A moment’s hesitation; then she extended a hand to touch its frigid face. On the other side, untold tons of pressure lay in stasis, stalemated for a century by the weight of the door. Fanning had explained the history. The entire Manhattan subway system lay below sea level; it had been a disaster waiting to happen. After Hurricane Wilma had flooded the tunnels, the city fathers had constructed a series of heavy doors to hold the water in check. In the throes of the epidemic, when the electricity had failed, a fail-safe mechanism had sealed them. There they had rested for over a century, holding the encroaching ocean at bay.

  Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid …

  She heard a skittering behind her. She spun, raising her torch. At the edge of the darkness, a pair of orange eyes flared. A large male but skinny, the bumps of his ribs showing; he squatted, froglike, between the tracks, a rat gripped in his mouth with the very tips of its teeth. The rat squirmed and squeaked, its bald tail whipping.

  “What are you looking at?” Alicia said. “Get out of here.”

  The jaws clamped shut. An arcing pop of blood and a sucking sound and the viral spat the empty bag of bones and fur to the ground. Alicia’s stomach tumbled, not with nausea but hunger; she hadn’t eaten for a week. The viral extended its claws, petting the air like a cat. It cocked his head: What sort of being is this?

  “Go on.” She waved the torch like a pike. “Shoo. Scat.”

  A last look, almost fond. It darted away.

  Fanning had already prepared for daybreak by drawing the shades. He was sitting at his usual table on the balcony above the main hall, reading a book by candlelight. His eyes lifted as she approached.

  “Good hunting?”

  Alicia took a chair. “I wasn’t hungry.”

  “You should eat.”

  “So should you.”

  His attention returned to his book. Alicia glanced at the title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

  “I went to the library.”

  “So I see.”

  “It’s a very sad play. No, not sad. Angry.” Fanning shrugged. “I haven’t read it for years. It seems different to me now.” He found a certain page, looked at her, and raised a professorial finger. “Have a listen.”

  The spirit I have seen

  May be the devil, and the devil hath power

  T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps

  Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

  As he is very potent with such spirits,

  Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds

  More relative than this. The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

  When Alicia said nothing, he raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re not a fan?”

  Fanning’s moods were like this. He could go silent for days, brooding incessantly, then, without warning, would emerge. Lately he had adopted a tone of dry cheerfulness, almost smug.

  “I can see why you like it.”

  “ ‘Like’ may not be the word.”

  “The end doesn’t make sense, though. Who’s the king?”

  “Precisely.”

  Wedges of sunlight peeked through the drapes, making pale stripes on the floor. Fanning seemed unperturbed by them, though his sensitivity was far greater than her own. For Fanning, the sun’s touch was deeply painful.

  “They’re waking up, Tim. Hunting. Moving through the tunnels.”

  Fanning continued reading.

  “Are you listening?”

  He looked up with a frown. “Well, what of it?”

  “That’s not our agreement.”

  His attentions had returned to his book, though he was only pretending to read. She got to her feet. “I’m going to see Soldier.”

  He yawned, showing his fangs, and gave her a pale-lipped smile. “I’ll be here.”

  Alicia cinched on her goggles, exited onto Forty-third, and headed north on Madison Avenue. Spring had come on sluggishly; only a few trees were budding out, and pockets of snow still lay in the shadows. The stable was located on the east side of the park at Sixty-third, just south of the zoo. She removed Soldier’s blanket and led him out of his stall. The park felt static, as if caught between the seasons. Alicia sat on a boulder at the edge of the pond and watched the horse graze. He had taken on the years with dignity; he tired more easily, but only a little, and was still strong, his gait firm. Strand of white had appeared in his tail and whiskers, more on the feathers at his feet. She watched him eat his fill, then saddled him and climbed aboard.

  “A little exercise, boy, what do you say?”

  She guided him across the meadow, into the shade of the trees. A memory came to her of the day she’d first seen him, all that coiled wildness inside
him, standing alone outside the wreckage of the Kearney garrison, waiting for her like a message. I am yours as you are mine. For each of us there will always be one. Past the trees she brought him to a trot, then a canter. To their left lay the reservoir, a billion gallons, lifeblood of the city’s green heart. At the Ninety-seventh Street Transverse, she dismounted.

  “Back in a jiff.”

  She made her way into the woods, removed her boots, and scaled a suitable tree at the edge of the glade. There, balanced on her haunches, she waited.

  Eventually her wish was granted: a young doe tiptoed into view, ears flicking, neck bent low. Alicia watched the animal approach. Closer. Closer.

  Fanning hadn’t moved from the table. He looked up from his book, smiled. “What’s this I see?”

  Alicia heaved the doe off her shoulders, onto the bar top. Its head hung with the looseness of death, the pink tongue unspooling from its mouth like a ribbon.

  “I told you,” she said. “You really need to eat.”

  29

  The first gunshots rang out on schedule, a series of distant pops from the end of the causeway. It was one A.M. Michael was concealed with Rand and the others outside the Quonset hut. The door swung open with a blaze of light and laughter; a man stumbled out, his arm draped over the shoulders of one of the whores.

  He died with a gurgle. They left him where he fell, blood darkening the earth from the wire’s incision around his neck. Michael stepped up to the woman. She wasn’t one he knew. Rand’s hand was covering her mouth, dampening her terrified shrieks. She couldn’t have been a day over eighteen.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, if you keep quiet. Understand?”

  She was a well-fed girl with short, red hair. Her eyes, heavily made up, were open very wide. She nodded.

  “My friend is going to uncover your mouth, and you’re going to tell me what room he’s in.”

  Cautiously, Rand drew his hand away.

  “The last one, at the end of the hall.”

  “You’re certain?”

  She nodded vigorously. Michael gave her a list of names. Four were playing cards in the front room; two more were back in the stalls.