Tommy cut his eyes in the direction of the barred door at the other end of the warehouse, which was now slightly ajar. How far was it from here to there? Two hundred yards? Three hundred?
“Ah, one last game, I see,” the stranger said, as if reading Tommy’s thoughts. “Go on, then, Thomas. Place your bets. Roll the dice.” His voice echoed in the cavernous slaughterhouse. “Run!”
Tommy was off. His knees moved like pistons, his elbows jabbing back against the dead air. The door bounced in his vision as his legs gobbled ground. It was known that he was the fastest boy on Tenth Avenue. He’d outrun cops, priests, gangs, and his own mother, who was quick with a belt when he made her angry, which was most of the time. A hanging chain clanged into him and he batted it away, feeling the sting as it hit his wrist, but he did not slow down. Far behind him, he could hear the stranger’s voice ringing out above the clang of the slaughterhouse chains. “ ‘And the sixth offering was an offering of obedience….’ ”
Tommy could see the door. It was maybe sixty yards away, and still there was no sign of the stranger. A frantic chorus pounded in Tommy’s head as he cleared the last carcass: King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets! Fifty yards. Forty. Beautiful moonlight peeked through the crack where the door was slightly open. Tommy didn’t stop to ask himself how it had been opened. All he could think about was pushing through it to freedom, racing for the shortcut to Thirty-ninth Street.
Thirty yards. Twenty…
Tommy no longer saw the door. One minute it had been within reach, and now it was gone. Instead, the stranger stood before him. It took Tommy a moment to slow down, for his brain to signal to his legs that there was trouble ahead—a cliff’s edge in the shape of a man with burning eyes. He had run in the wrong direction. How was that possible? How had he gotten so turned around? Nothing looked right to him anymore. Tommy turned the other way and saw hideous shadows crawling along the walls and ceiling of the slaughterhouse, as if devouring it whole, the stranger walking just ahead of the movement like a carnival barker leading a parade of darkness.
How? Tommy thought. He dashed left, fighting through the smothering pigs only to find himself facing a brick wall that surely hadn’t been there a minute ago. He went right, and there was another wall. When he faced forward again, the stranger was once more before him, standing in a patch of terrible moonlight. He was stripped to the waist, and Tommy stared at the glowing skin, the tattoos like brands, crawling across the man’s flesh and underneath it as well, as if his skin were a false one and the thing underneath was waiting to come out.
“You lose, Thomas.”
Devilish growls filled the warehouse. The darkness swirled behind the stranger, blotting out the walls and any hope of escape.
“ ‘I am he, the Great Beast, the Dragon of Old. And all will look upon me and tremble….’ ”
The stranger kept talking, but Tommy was beyond hearing. He kept his eyes on the moving dark and the unspeakable things inside it, on the changing form of the stranger who loomed above him.
“P-please…” he croaked.
The stranger only smiled.
“Such perfect hands,” he said as the darkness descended.
AND DEATH SHALL FLEE
Evie sat in the tub, two fat cucumber slices placed over her swollen eyes, and sang in contempt of her throbbing head. “We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too…. I had Manhattan, all right,” Evie mumbled. “And it… had… me.” She slipped under the water and let it carry her until a fierce pounding made her surface.
“I’m bathing,” she yelled.
“Will you be long?” Jericho answered.
Evie let a prune-ish toe play at the hot-water tap. “Hard to say.”
“I need the… the, ah…”
“Oh, applesauce,” Evie said on a sigh. “Okay, okay. I don’t want you to die of peritonitis like Valentino. Just a minute.” Evie rinsed the cucumber slices under the tap and popped them into her mouth. She pulled the plug and let the water swirl down the drain while she slipped on her robe and opened the door with a flourish. “All yours,” she said as Jericho pushed past her.
In the kitchen, Evie squeezed an orange into a glass, fished out the seeds, and gulped down the precious juice along with two aspirin. “Oh, sweet Mary.”
A moment later, Jericho emerged from the bathroom, scowling.
“What’s eating you?”
“Nothing.”
He sat on the couch and quietly laced up a shoe, but his disapproval hung in the room like the lingering scent of Evie’s perfumed bath salts. Evie didn’t mind yelling, but she hated feeling judged. It got under her skin and made her feel small and ugly and unfixable. She sang cheerily in rebuke of both Jericho and her throbbing skull. “You’re the berries, my bowl of cream, a dream come true, dear…”
“I was only wondering if this is going to be your usual routine,” Jericho said at last.
“Usual routine. Hmm, well, I might add a trained monkey. Everyone loves those.”
“Is that all this is to you? One big party?”
Evie was angry now. At least she wasn’t afraid to get out and live. Jericho didn’t seem to know life beyond the pages of a musty old book, and he didn’t seem interested in knowing anything beyond that, either.