Andrew Klavan - The last thing I remember

I bent down and picked up the knife the drunk had dropped. I looked at it. It was a crummy old thing, a switchblade, good for nothing but stabbing people. I drew back my arm and hurled it into the night. I heard it give a distant chuck as it hit the gravel on the train tracks.

I started walking again along the line of warehouses. I got about ten steps before a hand shot out of the darkness and grabbed my arm.

I turned. It was the woman, the woman who’d been attacked. She was hiding in a recessed doorway. As she took hold of me, she stepped out, peering up at me intently.

I looked down at her. She was small. Her torn gray overcoat dwarfed her. She had a large, round face with a strangely innocent, even childlike expression. Her cheeks and forehead were covered in grime and red sores. Her brown hair was so filthy it was matted into dreadlocks. She was so dirty I couldn’t tell how old she was-not very old, I thought, maybe thirty or something. She had large, almond-shaped green eyes that moved over me quickly and nervously.

Her voice was a low murmur. “I know you,” she said. She said it dreamily, in this kind of distant, eerie tone.

I felt my arm go tense in her hand. “Oh yeah?”

She nodded, a quick, squirrel-like motion. Then, glancing this way and that, she said, “Come with me.”

She took me to the corner and down a street, then to another corner and down another street. The whole time she was talking to herself-or maybe she was talking to me, I couldn’t be sure. She was talking very fast in that dreamy, low murmur, saying stuff like, “Jane knows… they sent the knife-man to keep her quiet… about the impulses… they’re electric, you understand… mind control… but they can’t get Jane…” She kept hold of my arm, moving along beside me with small, swift steps. She kept her eyes moving, too, scanning this way and that. Once, suddenly, she drew me into the alcove of a warehouse bay and we hid there. “They’re coming. They’re coming. Jane knows… ” she murmured. I figured she was crazy. There was nothing to hide from. I didn’t hear or see anything to be afraid of, anyway. But the woman said again: “They’re coming. Jane knows.” And it turned out she was right: a few moments later, some hulking thugs went by, a small gang of them. We waited in the alcove till they were gone.

We walked on, Jane holding my elbow, murmuring the whole way. Finally, we came to an old brick apartment building, its walls practically black with graffiti. Some of the windows were broken, but there were lights on in some of the others. I caught glimpses of shadows moving inside, so I knew the place wasn’t deserted.

“They haven’t found this… my hideaway… my secret place… they don’t know about it… the impulses can’t come here…”

She pushed the front door open. There was no lock. Murmuring crazily, holding on to my arm, she drew me up the stairway. The second floor was destroyed, abandoned, the same as the building I’d hidden in before. But on the third floor there were walls and doors. Some of the doors were shut, and light came out from underneath them. I heard some low music coming from behind one of the others.

We climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Then she drew me down the hallway to her door. It was locked with a padlock. The woman-Jane-finally let go of my arm in order to fish the key out of her huge overcoat.

“It’s the door, that’s why,” she murmured. “It’s special. The electricity can’t get through. It’s blocked.”

She unlocked the padlock and pushed inside. I followed her.

The air in the apartment was dense and gnarly. It smelled bad, like a litter box that hadn’t been emptied in a long time. Sure enough, as soon as I stepped over the threshold, I heard cats mewing. Jane pressed a switch. A dim yellow light came on in the ceiling. And there they were: three cats-one black, one orange, one gray. The gray one took an exploratory pass through my legs, then all three of them clustered around Jane’s feet. Jane went on murmuring, but she was murmuring to the cats now, her tone more tender than before. She rigged an iron bar across the door as a makeshift lock. She was talking to the cats the whole time. “There they are, safe and sound, my darlings… the impulses can’t touch them here… none of that nasty mind control for my beautiful darlings… Jane will protect you…”

The cats, meanwhile, wove in and out between her feet, tumbling over one another and meowing. She had to step carefully not to fall over them as she moved away from the door. The cats continued to follow her as she stooped down and turned on a small electric space heater sitting in one corner. Then she moved on into the kitchenette, murmuring to the cats as the cats mewed back at her.

I looked around. The apartment was one room, and it was an unholy mess. The walls were all cracked and chipped. Some of them even had holes broken through the plaster so you could see the beams and wires underneath. There were great big black plastic bags everywhere-in the corners, against the wall, up on a counter in the kitchenette. The bags were stuffed full of what looked like junk as far as I could see: old clothes and broken appliances and cans and bottles and stuff like that.

There was an old dirty mattress lying on the floor and a lamp standing next to it with no lampshade. There was a chair, too, a dirty old canvas chair, set low to the ground like a beach chair.

And then there were the newspapers. They were all over the place. They were everywhere. They were taped to the wall like wallpaper. They covered the floor like a carpet. They were stacked between the plastic bags. They lay littering the bed and the chair. Newspapers on top of newspapers. The place was practically stuffed with them.

I looked over to the kitchenette. There was a microwave oven on the counter in there, and some stacks of food cans and some spotty bowls and glasses. There were no kitchen cabinets, but you could see the marks on the wall where they’d been torn down. There were more newspapers there too-on the wall, on the counter, and on the floor.

Jane stood in the kitchenette with the cats twining around her ankles. She was cranking a can opener around a can of cat food.

“Have to eat to keep your strength… for the big fight when they come… they sent a knife-man after Jane tonight, my babies… but then he came… mm-hmm… because he knows… because they’re after him, too, just like Jane…”

The cats fell over one another as she spooned some cat food out into a bowl for them and set it on the floor. They took their places around the bowl and ate hungrily.

“Just like Jane… mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You hungry?”

It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. “Oh,” I said. “No. Thank you, ma’am. I’m fine. I ate a little while ago.” Even before I finished, she had gone off muttering again, chattering softly in that same dreamy, eerie tone.

She had gone to work opening another can now, a can of soup. She poured it into a bowl and set the bowl in the microwave, chattering softly all the while it cooked. Finally, she brought it out and carried the bowl over to the mattress. Newspapers on the mattress crumpled as she sat down on them. She huddled there, blowing on the soup, still talking softly.

“If they think so, they don’t know Jane… not me, not Jane… electric rays, impulses, connections… that’s what they know, that’s what they think… but not Jane… Take a seat, Charlie… I’m not afraid of them… I’m not going to let them in… we know, don’t we?”

I stood staring at her. She had called me by my name. Take a seat, Charlie. Out in the street, when she said, “I know you,” she was telling the truth. She had recognized me. She knew who I was.