Lisa Miscione - Twice

Ford took a photograph from his pocket and slid it over to Jetty, waiting patiently for him to finish eating. When he was done, Jetty wiped his hands on his jumper, leaving long streaks of chocolate up his leg. He reached for the photograph and stared at it.

“It’s a painting. But does this face look familiar to you?” asked Ford.

“Yeah… yeah. It’s the man I saw that night. The one I told you about.”

“Tell me again what you saw that night.”

“I was behind this building looking through the garbage. I was a junkie then and I was always looking for something to sell, you know. I heard voices up above me… loud, scared. It sounded like two men and one woman.” He was talking fast, the sugar making him hyper.

“Try to remember now, Jetty, did you hear anything that you could understand? Did you hear what they were saying?”

Jetty closed his eyes as if trying to transport himself back to that night.

“I heard the woman. I heard something she said.”

Ford looked surprised. “You did? You didn’t mention that ten years ago.”

“Didn’t I?” Jetty shrugged. Then, “You don’t believe me?”

“Sure I do. What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I don’t love you. Not like that. I never did.’ She screamed it. I mean, she was screaming her lungs out. And then another voice, said, ‘You’re lying. It’s time to surrender.’ He was yelling, too. That was all I could understand.”

Lydia caught the word and remembered what Julian had said to Dr. Barnes, that she’d chosen to surrender.

Ford looked at Jetty and couldn’t decide whether the guy was full of shit or not. Jetty had given a statement and testified in court ten years ago and had never mentioned those words before. But why would he be lying now?

“Then there was a, like… I don’t know how to say other than it was like a roar . It was scary, man. I almost bolted, but there was a lot of good garbage. Then I didn’t hear anything for a while except a sound that could have been the woman crying, like a low wailing. And then, when I thought it was over and started looking in the trash again, the back door of the building came slamming open and a giant man with long gray dreads, just like this,” he said, lifting the picture, “came out. He turned, but I was behind the Dumpster, he didn’t see me. It was dark, but I saw part of his face. Then he ran. I don’t know why, but I followed him. But he just disappeared… he rounded the corner of Prince and Lafayette and he was gone. That’s it. That’s what I saw.”

Ford was impressed that this man who was so fried from drugs and medication remembered anything at all. Except for the conversation he claimed to have overheard, the details of the story hadn’t changed much in ten years, though Ford didn’t remember Jetty telling him that he’d seen the man’s face. He would have remembered that; they would have had a sketch done or something. As far as he knew, the man in the painting was a figment of Julian Ross’s twisted imagination and Jetty was just embellishing his story to make himself feel important.

“And you’re sure that this person in the photograph is the person you saw?” asked Ford.

“You wouldn’t forget that face if you saw it,” said Jetty, and Ford could see Jetty believed it to be the truth.

“You sure you didn’t see anything else when you rounded the corner? Think back. A cab speeding off, a door closing… any hint of where he could have gone.”

“There was a subway station.”

“When we went down into that subway station, there was a metal gate. It was locked up. He couldn’t have gone any farther.”

“Well, that’s not true. I know things now about those entrances that I didn’t know then,” said Jetty with a sly smile, tapping his foot rapidly on the floor. Lydia could see that some of his teeth were brown and jagged, some of them missing entirely.

“What’s that?” asked Ford.

“People live down there, man. In the tunnels. The mole people.”

“Give me a break, Jetty.”

“No, for real. There’s, like, a whole society under there… mainly psychos and junkies, but they’re under there. They make whole, like, towns… with mayors and ‘runners,’ people who go topside for stuff. I’m not making this up. You can check it out for yourself.”

“I’ll do that,” said Ford. He wasn’t about to engage in an argument with a prisoner in a mental institution. It was a story he had heard before but never quite believed. The thought of people lurking beneath the ground, living their lives out there, was just too weird to be true. A lot of cops he knew believed it, but he’d never seen any evidence of it. Anyway, anybody who was willing to go down there to investigate the possibility had a screw loose, as far as he was concerned-Jeff and Dax included.

Jetty seemed to have fixated on Lydia after he finished talking. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her and Ford couldn’t blame him. It must have been a long time since he’d seen a woman like Lydia.

“I know you,” he said suddenly, pointing a bony finger at her, his mouth widening into a jagged grin.

“I don’t think so,” said Lydia with a polite smile.

“Yeah, I do,” he said, nodding vigorously. “You’re Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.”

The sound of Dax knocking on the metal door reverberated on the concrete around them and sounded like thunder. Silence was the answer and the two of them stood holding their breaths, waiting. Jeff was half hoping that no one would respond to the knocking so that they could get the hell out of there.

After a moment, they heard a shuffling inside and then a thin tentative voice whispered, “Who?”

“Danielle sent us. She said you could help us find someone,” Dax answered, sounding as casual as if they were selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door.

The door opened slowly and Dax and Jeff entered a small, tidy, warm space that was lit with hurricane lamps. The ceiling must have been sixteen feet high and the floor was actually carpeted. Large cushions and beanbag chairs were scattered about the floor, and a wooden table leaned against the far wall covered with a black crocheted tablecloth and topped with silk flowers in a blue and white vase, a chair on either side. A futon mattress was covered with sheets and quilts and plenty of pillows. A small refrigerator hummed in the corner and a kettle sat on top of a hot plate.

“There’s electricity here?” said Dax, incredulous, looking around him.

“Of course, young man. Just because we’re houseless doesn’t mean we’re uncivilized,” said the woman who let them in.

“Of course,” said Dax, throwing Jeff a look.

“My name’s Violet,” she said. Her voice sounded like coins dropped on tin, her white hair stuck out like wires. Her eyes, sunken and misshapen, were an unnerving shade of violet, hence her name, Jeff imagined. And it only took a second to realize that her fixed stare meant she was blind. Short and round, with hunched shoulders and a shuffling gate, she took Jeff’s hand as he and Dax introduced themselves with a strong confident grip. She wore a gray bathrobe over a pilled, stained green sweater and navy blue sweatpants. Her feet had been shoved into too-small black Chinese slippers. Using a cane to move across the room, she seated herself stiffly on a pile of cushions.

“Have a seat and tell me, what can I do for you boys?” Violet asked affably.

Jeff and Dax seated themselves across from the old woman and told her who they were looking for. Jeff wondered if it was impolite to point out at this time that he was unsure how a blind woman could help them to find Jed McIntyre.

“Just like topside, there is good and evil under here,” the old woman said as she stared off at nothing. “The balance is the same, just some people up there hide themselves better. Down here, all pretenses have been dropped. The one you are looking for is down here. He’s a different kind of bad.”