Welcome to Fear City, page 21
And Sylvie couldn’t stop smiling.
They arrived home late, having eaten dinner in Yonkers with most of her class. Gary’s door was closed, and her dad was in front of the TV, whittling something onto a sheet of newspaper. She showed off her trophies and yawned through a recount of the day, then shuffled off to her room. Jessie Baby hovered in the hall, then retreated to the living room.
Sylvie held up the championship trophy. Her fingerprints had blighted the surface, but it still had that optimistic shine of a new win. She turned it over, glancing over the surface at the name of the feis and the placing (first). She remembered when she won her first trophy as a kid, how excited she was after acquiring dozens of tiny medals.
She looked at her reflection on the surface, at the stretched and distorted shape of her room and the chaos of posters and medal banners around her. She thought she could see a smile on her face, though she was pretty sure she wasn’t smiling. A new solo costume on, with new embroidery and a new lace collar.
Impossible to see on the surface of a trophy, but it was clear as day in Sylvie’s mind.
Shining hardshoes. Perfectly laced softshoes. The highest kicks, the strongest leaps, standing high on her toes in front of adjudicators so mesmerized that they forgot to give her a score.
A sash across her shoulder. A bigger trophy in her arms. A metal crown atop her head. A podium. A blonde adjudicator shaking her hand. She would change the face of Irish dance.
Now she did smile, a little, and as she set the trophy down, she noticed something just behind her. It rose up above her, a dark strip of something—a shadow too tall for the room. Gasping, she dropped the trophy and spun around, almost climbing onto her desk. But nothing was there.
She shoved the trophy away with her foot, not looking at it, and hurried out of her room to join her parents on the couch. Jessie Baby raised her head to watch her, thumped her tail once, but did not come any closer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was easy enough, with the distance of another day, to convince herself that she had just been seeing things in the trophy. Still, Sylvie left it on the floor, covered with a t-shirt.
It was less easy to convince herself that the events at the feis made any sense. Because they didn’t. Most of it she no longer remembered at all. And as the morning turned to afternoon and Jessie Baby continued acting cautiously around her and her brother, jumping if either one of them made a sudden movement, Sylvie would watch Gary and a low panic, like a fever, began to take hold inside her.
But there was still a part of her that didn’t really care. Obviously nothing had actually gone wrong or she wouldn’t have won. It wasn’t typical for her to sweep all of her dances, either, so maybe she had relaxed enough to shut off all her doubts, and she just wasn’t used to that.
That’s what she chose to believe as she went down into the studio to practice. She wanted to practice—she felt like she had to, that she would imprint upon herself some powerfully new level of skill if she ran through her steps right now.
As she unlocked the studio door, she heard footsteps on the stairs below. Fear came, but then it went, and then Ilan appeared. She hadn’t heard the buzzer, and his sudden appearance didn’t startle her at all, which surprised her. Then she stopped thinking about it.
He kissed her a long hello.
“I was just gonna practice,” she said by way of explanation and apology as she went into her dad’s studio.
“I’ll pretend to be a judge and look impressed,” he said.
The needle on Sylvie’s barometer twitched, briefly. She laughed. “Go ahead. But you’re gonna be distracting.”
The room was stiflingly hot, so she opened one of the windows. The back of the studio was cluttered with the usual melee of objects that might look terrifying from the corner of her vision, but she didn’t think about it. Ilan was with her, and actually with her. They were crossing that bridge, and she was enjoying the journey.
Toeing off her sneakers, she rifled through her bag for her hardshoes and pulled them on.
“You’ve really killed the floor in here,” Ilan observed as he crossed over it and sat back in the windowsill. The sight of it felt incredibly good. Calming.
“Yeah, it’s pretty terrible, isn’t it?” She went over to the stereo. “There’s about to be a lot of accordion, just so you know.”
As the first hornpipe began to thump its way from the speakers, Sylvie jumped around for a while, listening to the discordant notes of her shoes and trying to warm her body. She stretched the arches of her feet, flexed and pointed her toes, did some weak and ineffectual stretching of her hamstrings, then stood back along the wall.
As soon as she counted herself off, she jumped into motion, beating out her rhythms as though it was before everything. Before gunshots and screams and ghost dogs and all of that.
CRACK
A heel click without a hitch. Without a wince. She almost laughed, but there wasn’t time. She had to dance. She frowned instead—no, Deirdre hated that—she relaxed, she relaxed right into her muscle memory, banging out the rhythms harder, wanting to leave gouges in the grain so deep that not even the best polish could seal it off. She would linger here long after her family was gone, and it wouldn’t take someone with her useless hindsight to see it.
She could hear her steps echoing back around her, then cutting off as she stopped, breathing hard, a flash of sweat beginning to form at her temples and neck. The record moved to another track and as she went to stop it, the toe of her shoe snagged a sliver on the floor, scratching the leather.
That didn’t matter. They’d get polished.
“That’s pretty cool, actually,” said Ilan. “It’s like angry tap dancing.”
Right. Ilan!
Sylvie snorted a laugh through her panting breaths. “Thanks. Hey, uh, Marz has a show tonight. You wanna come with me, or is your schedule all booked out?”
Ilan laughed. “Not tonight. I’m all yours.”
Sylvie flushed, but as she was already flushed, his words only made her hide a wide, silly grin.
“And you’re gonna see a lot of me, ’cause I told my parents I’m dropping out of Stanford,” he said.
“No way! What’d they say?”
“They’re a little pissed, but it’s not like they can force me to go. Anyway, they’ll save some money. That wasn’t my scene. It’ll be good.”
And Sylvie believed that it would be. Believed that he knew what he was doing, because why wouldn’t he? “Now you really gotta move out and come back to the neighborhood,” she said.
He parted from the sill and came over to her and kissed her.
Good. She didn’t need to practice, anyway.
It was so easy to kiss him and keep kissing him. It exceeded the drawn-out fantasy she had cultivated around getting to this part. He pushed her securely against the desk, his knee between her legs. One quick motion that didn’t require stopping or starting. A dance in itself, the easiest choreography.
“Will they check on you?” he murmured, parting for air and for her neck.
“No.”
The window was still open.
Good.
“Have you …” he whispered to her ear.
She didn’t even hesitate. “Yeah.”
“Come back to my place.”
All she could do was nod.
He slid his hands up her shirt, around her back, to pull her away from the desk. She put her shoes back on in a daze and didn’t even go upstairs to grab her purse.
They took a cab from Houston and parted for air only once or twice before stumbling back out on West Tenth. He had her hand in his at once and she started to cross the sidewalk to his apartment, but he pulled her the other way, back across the street. And at first, Sylvie just walked. She grabbed his waist and walked because she would have walked with him anywhere. But then he slowed down in front of the Mark Twain house. The House of Death. And that simmering note of panic began to steam.
“Hang on—where’re you going?” she asked him, because she wasn’t going to fuck anybody in a place like that, even Ilan. And Ilan had a bed (presumably, as she’d never seen it) just across the street. Not that a bed was important, but a place without mold and rats definitely was.
She had to pull her hand out of his. “Are you messing with me or what?”
Suddenly, so suddenly that Sylvie did jump this time, Ilan turned to look at her. She had never seen anyone look so afraid.
“Ilan?”
“No. No, no, no,” he muttered to himself, turning around again, his hands threading through his hair in a gesture of pure panic. Only now did she see the raw, bruised mark on his arm—how had she not noticed it before?
She had been about to step closer to him, but he dodged her, walking toward the street, then looping back again, as though he was trying to outrun something.
Sylvie was aware that people were out there, coming toward them. “Ilan.”
He looked at her again, but it seemed to hurt him to do it. He kept averting his gaze. His brow furrowed; his mouth quivered. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ. What’ve I done.” His voice wasn’t quiet. He spoke as though he was alone.
“Can we please get the hell away from here?” She tried to grab for his arm, but he wrenched it away. Sylvie dropped her hands to her sides.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Sylvie. It isn’t—” He turned away from her, kept walking in circles. “We can’t. I shouldn’t have—I wanted to, but—it’s not—”
“Spit it out!” she snapped at him, then she regretted snapping at him. He hadn’t done anything wrong—yes he had. “Ilan—you gotta stop. Just stop! Let’s just go to your place and calm down, okay?”
“No! No, Sylvie! You can’t go to my place! You can’t ever go to my place, no matter what I say!”
“What?” It caught her so off-guard that she thought she had misheard. Brain fog. Absolute brain fog. “But you just—Ilan, c’mon—”
“Sylvie. Please. I’m begging you. I’m begging you.”
“You’re not making any sense!”
“Gary’s right. I shouldn’t have gone to see you. That was stupid. Don’t let me come near you again. Not until—this isn’t safe.” His eyes were bright, now, still terrified but threatening to spill tears. Sylvie couldn’t even tell how she was feeling. Swells of anger, then deep confusion.
“What happened?”
This time, as he came near her, she grabbed hold of his arm, right below the wound.
“What is this? Tell me what happened!” She bent his arm as though he needed to see it to remember, and he pulled his arm back almost immediately.
“I’m sorry, Sylvie. I really am.”
“What happened to you and Gary?”
“I wanted to—I’ve wanted to—I like you a lot. More than a lot. I love hanging out with you. I’ve always loved hanging out with you. But I—I fouled it up real, real bad.”
“How? What did you guys do?”
He glanced at her, covered in so much shame she felt like pushing him into traffic.
“You owe me that much!” she said.
“This was a mistake. God, I probably—please don’t come after me. Don’t come near my place. Don’t you dare come near my place.”
“I heard that already!”
“Sylvie, listen to me,” he snapped at her. Finally touched her—only to hold her arms in a firm grip. She clamped her mouth shut. “I love you, and I want you to live. Now get the fuck out of here.”
He shoved her, slightly, as though she needed help to start her legs, and as he did it, a warm breeze kicked up the leaves in the trees around them, and something slithered around Sylvie’s mind, bursting into her thoughts like radio static.
STAY WHERE YOU ARE.
Ilan almost dropped to the ground. Sylvie could see his legs weaken. He covered his ears. “GO, SYLVIE! RUN! GO HOME!”
All at once, like a cosmic drain being pulled, everything came rushing back down to her. Everyone on the block around them had stopped walking. And maybe it was Ilan’s outburst that froze them, but Sylvie knew what was happening—knew and didn’t know. The man walking his dog had dropped the leash, and the little white mutt was whining and barking at everything and nothing. In the distance, unseen, other dogs in other apartments began to howl.
Sylvie turned around and bolted down the street.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
People turned to her as she ran, so she ran in the street, dodging between cars that seemed almost to slow down for her. She didn’t want to look back, but as she turned down Sixth Avenue, she couldn’t stop herself. And there, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk several yards at her back, was the tall black dog.
Calling it black didn’t even seem right. It was an absence of everything. Of light, of color. In the sun, its corrupted form was so much worse, and Sylvie marveled that they had been so calm the first time it appeared.
She wasn’t calm now.
The air felt thick, though this had little to do with the sun. It also felt heavy, like her ears needed to pop. She ran for another block, dodging far more people—some of them stopping, most of them watching her with only a mild interest. A normal interest.
Waiting for the light, she looked back again and there it was—at the same distance, sitting in precisely the same way. It always sat, so that it looked like a long, thin column topped by sharp ears.
She ran into traffic, but it was harder to simply run. Everyone was out, going into and out of shops, looking for lunch, picking up laundry. Sweat trickled at Sylvie’s temples. She looked back again and knew it would be there before she saw it. Sitting at the same distance. She didn’t even notice how people gave it a wide berth, seeing it just as clearly as she did. To her, it had become her entire world.
Sylvie’s run slowed to a fast walk. She sucked in shaky breaths of muggy summer air. As long as the dog wasn’t getting closer, she didn’t need to run. Running would get her home too quickly, anyway, and she couldn’t go there if she was being followed by this thing.
Above her, she heard a funny rattling noise, then a much louder one. It carved through the air and landed with an ear-splitting collision of metal and rock right behind her. She felt the breeze as it stirred her hair. She heard several people shout in surprise. A fire escape ladder had come free.
Sylvie launched forward, but then there was another rattling sound and the next ladder fell. Then the next. She ran, one fell, she ran, one fell. The air was a cacophony of rattling metal and the screams of everyone around her.
She was going to die. This was how she was going to die. Crushed or impaled on a sidewalk outside a shoe repair shop.
Sylvie was gasping for air, now, and running without thinking. She kept to the far side of the sidewalk, jumping over the curb when she had to.
She didn’t know where the hell to go or what to do, but her feet beat their customary path south, toward home. She kept her gaze up, the sound of the fire escapes still clamoring around her skull. She wanted to sit down and cry out for help, but she couldn’t do that, either. Where was safe? Hide in a gallery? Hide in a store?
Behind her, she knew something was there, following at her heels. There was a presence in the air, a movement, a disturbance. The dog could probably nip her if it wanted to, if it could.
She shuddered and touched the wall of the nearest building as though the people there would save her. Like the memories stored here would form an army of the dead for her. The dog knew she was there, so what difference did it make if she used her powers now? She didn’t even lift her hand away as she walked. She dragged it along one building, then the next, awkwardly climbing over stoops and loading docks to keep contact. Her eyes filled and she rubbed them. All around her, shadows of the past went about their lives unaffected and unafraid, consuming her in their midst, filling the air with obsolete street sounds and the familiar patter of conversation and confrontation.
She looked over her shoulder just once, and through the overlay of time she could make out the black hole shape of the dog sitting there, further back now than before, but the most visible thing in the world. Her heart raced, her skin felt cold. She pulled her hand back and returned to the outside edge of the sidewalk, knowing she looked no different to everyone out here, but feeling completely naked.
Turning down Greene Street was like pushing against the wind, and the sensation stunned her. She wanted to scratch at something that couldn’t be scratched. She felt like people were watching her, murmuring to her, though there was no one even glancing in her direction. Go up, Sylvie. Turn around. Check on Ilan.
Afraid to go home, afraid she would bring something inside with her, she sat down on the marble stoop of the old, brick house she loved so well, and put her hands on the steps. The dog appeared across the street from her, then, in the middle of a blink. It came no closer.
And Sylvie sat there, buffering herself with visions she didn’t need to pay attention to because she knew them better than a favorite film. If the dog came for her, if it sank spectral teeth into her leg and dragged her back to West Tenth, she would let it, she supposed. She didn’t know what else to do.
She sat there as neighbors saw her and waved, saw the dog and avoided it. She sat there as tourists scouted for dinner and locals walked to the nearest gallery opening or a show down at Ali’s Alley. She sat there until smoke from the long-ago fire in the floor above brought her back to herself.
Sylvie.
There was no sibilance in the word this time. It was harsh and cold like a crack in a frozen lake.
If you will not come to me, I will come to you.
She blinked. The dog was gone. She waited another minute before slowly rising back to her feet and running the rest of the way home. She didn’t look behind her again. She knew nothing would be there now.
