James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“Well, the police have already been through all that with him,” Aaron said.

“Not you, I assume?” I arched an eyebrow.

“Not a chance,” Aaron said. He shook his head. “Conflict of interest.”

When I got to the bedroom to get ready for my night’s outing, I took the chance to read through the written information my doctor had passed to me. The one on Falkovich was just an address. The other one, my trade for Celso, went into a bit more detail. As I began to read through it, my heart sank.

“GOD damn it!” With the luxury of privacy, I swore out loud and threw the slip down onto the floor, exasperated. Doctor Levental’s fighter was a man named Viktor Bravic. His opponent for the Saturday semi-final was Zane Salter.

When one went to accost a well-known, expensive ex-Jewish surgeon at his place of residence, one did not expect to end up in Hunts Point. A prestigious title like ‘Pediatric Transplant Specialist’ generally conveyed a love of comfortable living somewhere east of Brooklyn: Colonial architecture, a well-manicured lawn, small fluffy dogs. Doctors tended to keep houses that were clean and respectable, at least by appearances.

I forgot all about Zane and Celso when I pulled up in front of the house, checked the address, rubbed my eyes and read the number on the fence again to make sure. Moris Falkovich’s house was a dump. He lived in a two-story white clapboard squeezed between a warehouse and a wholesale bakery in what was otherwise an industrialized wasteland. The strip of buildings – including the house – backed out onto a large, empty dirt lot with a lot of trash and rows of jagged concrete stumps that could be seen from the end of the driveway. There was a huge scrapyard across the street. It was desolate, cramped, and dismal. It was the perfect place to hide a monster.

The place made my lip curl and my feet hesitate. The tiny yard and driveway had a short, white chain link fence that reminded me all too much of my family home in Brighton Beach. The yard was studded with old merry-go round horses impaled on poles. Their intricate details were blocked out by thick layers of cheap acrylic paint, each horse a different solid color. Their eyes were flat and lifeless, painted solid black.

The cold wind had turned to pelting rain. I ran from my car to the shelter of the porch, my hand on the butt of the pistol under my jacket. When the wind turned right, the gusting rain carried the smell of something unpleasant, wrong, a sick sweetness that stood out against the normal rusty undertone that pervaded all of these older parts of New York. It smelled like meat left out for too many days in the weak winter sun. I was glad that I’d left Binah behind, but the gun was looking like a bad decision. I drew the knife instead, turning it back along my arm.

The front door was loose, banging with each shift in the storm as it blew down the street in waves. I reached for the handle: from the back of the warehouse next door, something rattled and banged, loudly. I threw myself around the concrete retainer separating the porch from the yard, pulse hammering in my throat. A long, tense minute passed, but no one rounded the yard, no shoes sounded against the pavement. Warily, I rose, and sniffed. Nothing, no one was out there that I could see, but it had put me off wanting to try the front door.

I went back out into the wall of rain, jumped the flimsy chain link gate dividing the rear from the front, and dropped down to the mud on the other side. The empty lot was very dark, lit only by the low reddish clouds. Here and there, old children’s toys were scattered like rubbish. A sour feeling pressed at the back of my throat, and I turned the knife around on the way to the back door, blade facing out. It was locked, but the deadbolt was old and easy to slip. I bumped it carefully, pausing after the handle turned to see if anyone had heard the knock of the knife hilt against the bump key. No one responded. I opened the door and slid through in a wary crouch, only to back out half a second later as the stench of decaying meat, old piss and rotten food slapped me so hard that my eyes watered. “Jesus Christ.”

It was warm inside, and lightless. GOD help me, but I wanted the gun. The knife felt tiny, useless, as I pulled my cap off and pressed it over my mouth and nose. I slipped back inside, letting my eyes adjust before heading deeper into the house.

The kitchen was the source of the smell. The counters were piled with dirty dishes, many of which had slipped to the ground and shattered amongst empty mac and cheese boxes and crumpled cling film. There was a dog bowl half full of rotten food, and the room reeked of animal urine, acrid and suffocating. Microwave meal trays and empty plates had been thrown against one of the walls, the overflow from trash bags tied to the cupboard handles. My boots crunched on broken porcelain and glass from one end of the room to the other. There was a short hall leading to the den, where the fetid odor of death and feces gathered in a grim, stagnant cloud.

The den was where I found the fluffy dogs: two Pomeranians. One had its skull crushed along the floor in a long smear of dried gore, recognizable only by its fox-like fur and drumstick legs. The other dog hung over the back of the shabby sofa like an abandoned accordion. Something had not quite pulled it apart into a distended mess. Blood was smeared in double tracks across the ground, a ten-fingered trail from the sofa to the stairs and up. The bloody trail continued up to the loft landing and around the corner.

The door at the end was closed, smeared with black and red. There was no hiding my approach – the floor creaked under my weight as I stepped forward and tapped the door hilt with the handle of the knife. No static, no explosions, no trappings of a ward that I could see. I was beginning to regret not bringing any of the Weeders, but the dead weren’t dangerous in and of themselves – merely disturbing.

I took a moment to steel my stomach and my nerves, then turned the knob and kicked the door in, flashlight held up, the knife held low. The door swung in and crashed off the wall inside. A wave of putrefaction roiled out from the room into the hallway. Whoever, whatever was in there, it was extremely dead.

Moris Falkovich – I presumed it was Moris – hung motionless from the exposed rafters of his attic bedroom: a large space with a huge bed in the center, a door leading off to some smaller room on my right. His face was swollen, a livid, eyeless lumpy sack close to bursting with old blood. Empty orbital sockets stared straight at the entryway, boring into me. A thin whine was growing in my ears, a chorus of tiny drills that grew louder and more insistent over seconds of time. Then I saw her, smelled her. Another hanging, another death.

My mother.

No. No! I locked my teeth and focused on the real, the man. Moris was small and thin, with a deeply recessed chin and a hairy, bony pigeon chest. His mouth was open. It was full of black things, crawling. My vision cut, chopped, blurred: I saw my mother hanging in his place, her dress limp, her blue eyes bloodshot and bulging.

My teeth creaked. I stumbled back against the wall, hands burning inside my gloves. They itched like they were covered in dirt and slime, blood, fluids. Dirty dirty dirty.

“Why weren’t you there, Alexi?” The body’s stiff, slug-thick lips twisted. The tongue moved, rasping each word into the echoing darkness of the attic, and in the torch beam, I saw a convulsive ripple pass through its limbs.

“No.” I stepped back, behind the threshold, slapping at the wall to find the light switch. “This is a trap.”

“You weren’t there, Alexi.” It spoke in her voice now, breathy and fragile, ripping it from my memory. “Why did you leave me here with him?”