North-Central University had absorbed much of that old territory of rooming houses, saloons, and brothels. And the Uptown Mall had taken the rest. Gone were the smelly community wells that had once spread outbreaks of cholera and typhus, the rows of high narrow warehouses and the Chicago-Northwestern train yards, the stables and stockyards whose drainage turned the Black River red and stinking at high summer. Gone too, were the linen mills and ironworks that stamped out everything from sewer lids to sections of railroad tracks, and whose high, filthy stacks belched out black clouds of smoke twenty-four/seven that settled back over the area like coal dust.
So now there was just Pennacott Lane which had been withered down through the years to a mere four blocks of dirty brick tenements and factory houses, many condemned and many more boarded-up and slouching on weedy lawns or behind rusty wrought-iron fences. Pennacott had once been the very heart of Guttertown, crowded and noisy, but now it was nearly deserted. You would no longer see the flapping, overloaded clotheslines strung building to building in such profusion that sometimes the sky seemed barely visible or the gangs of children chasing balls up the wooden walks, the street cars and bustling traffic of wagons and carts, the crowds of workmen lingering outside taverns and lunch counters. And you would not hear the scream of foundry whistles marking shift- change or the smattering of European dialects and sub-dialects echoing in the streets. And you would not smell the crowding, the horseshit, the reek of the mills themselves.
Pennacott was but a tombstone to that colorful, desperate past, a rawboned cadaver seeking a shallow grave to while away eternity. But, sometimes, if you closed your eyes and opened your mind, you could still feel and hear the echoes of those ghosts, the impressions they had left and the memories bleeding from dirty brick and cracked foundation like tired blood from narrow arteries.
Stokley stood there amongst those haunted streets, knowing that even now the city fathers had their eyes on the final remnants of Guttertown and how they would finally raze it, brooming away the nasty residue of Witcham’s seedy proletariat past and the poor that squatted there…many of whom were direct descendants of those long- gone laborers.
Just as he was.
He swallowed down some rain, hoped it would cool the firestorm in his belly that had absolutely nothing to do with what this place had been or what it was now, but a most disturbing feeling that told him today was going to be a very bad day for him indeed. He’d felt it all morning and most of the afternoon, of course. Had woken up at six that morning, a full thirty minutes before the alarm clock chimed, sweating and trembling, his eyes peeled white in his strained face, a terrible knowledge of impending doom laying over him just as heavy and eternal as six feet of graveyard earth. The rain had been tapping against the windows and he had felt it inside, too, flooding him.
“What?” his wife had said, suspecting the steak and lasagna from the night before, but then looking into her husband’s blanched face and knowing better. “Eddie? Eddie? What is it?”
He told her in an airless squeak that it was a dream, just some crazy inside-out dream about his dead brother and a cat they’d had. He wasn’t even sure why that lie had leaped onto his tongue so completely unbidden. But he wasn’t awake yet and his subconscious-which was full to brimming as any man’s with half-truths, un-truths, and complete fabrications-was still open, the lid askew, and this was the pearl it had vomited onto his tongue.
At his side, rain running down his face like teardrops, Dave Rose said again, “You okay, Eddie? Look like you seen your own ghost.”
Stokley could have laughed at that one.
Lots of cops on the Witcham force could have. Not Dave Rose, though. Dave Rose had just come in yesterday night after two weeks of vacation and he had missed all the fun. He only knew the clipped versions of the explosion at the Fort Providence base and the flooding and the bodies over in River Town, all those awful, dark matters that hid in the cracks between those incidents. Unlike him, Stokley had seen ghosts. He’d seen several. He’d seen dead people walking and it was this knowledge that had settled into his guts like a tumor, eating and eating. But Dave Rose had not seen any of that. Yet.
But soon, soon…
“I’m all right,” Stokley said and, God, did that sound hollow or what? Like having your hand crushed to pulp in a vise and saying it was just a scratch, get me a Band-Aid, will ya?
Maybe all of it was laying on him. Those things with the white faces he’d seen yesterday disappearing beneath the dirty waters of Bethany and that awful certainty he’d woken with this morning. The certainty that told him, sorry, Eddie, really and truly sorry, old shoe, but today is the last one for you. No more Australian-rules football on ESPN or late-night lasagna and steak parties. It all winds down today and in this place where your Irish grandfather came a-squatting, pockets empty and eyes bright, from that slum in Londonderry.
“Full circle,” Stokley said. “Full circle.”
Rose looked at him and then just looked away. “Listen, we gonna answer this call or do we stand here and get soaked?”
The rain kept falling, trying desperately to wash that pile of dirty tenement clean, but failing miserably. The tenement-some three stories of filthy brick with a mangled, rusting fire escape clinging to its side like the abandoned web of a spider-was high and shadowy in the grainy light of this rainy day. Shadows pooled at its windows and crawled over its roofs. Water spilled from a rainspout into the alley.
“Let’s go,” Stokley said, feeling that windy noose that had dogged him all day finally dropping over his throat and tightening.
They stepped into the tenement and right away that stink of age and generations past fell over them…mildew and rotting plaster and garbage. This mixed with more recent odors of cat piss and seeping damp. There were three kids waiting for them. Two girls and a boy. The oldest couldn’t have been more than six or seven, the youngest still in diapers. They were smelly, thin, and unwashed.
“You kids the ones that called?”
The two girls would not speak, but the boy nodded and mumbled something. Stokley and Rose surrounded them, pegging them with questions and getting answers that made little sense. The girls were crying. The youngest had an overflowing diaper on. It had not been changed in days.
“Tell us what happened,” Stokley said.
The boy tried to, but he was having trouble. There was despair and pain that had no business in a kid his age. But it was there, especially in his eyes that were looms that could spin tales of desperation and ugliness without his mouth ever opening.
Stokley listened patiently as the boy tried to get it out, but it took time. It was not easy. The bigness of his dread would barely fit up the channel of his throat. Stokley heard something of the sort he knew he would hear. When he had arrived and looked up at the place his heart had hammered almost painfully, but now it had settled into a dull and disquieting rhythm. Even with what he heard, it did not so much as hitch.
The boy told him that his mother had been up in her room for three days and that she would not come out. She had in fact locked the door. He had been caring for his sisters and it was only yesterday that he had heard her moving around in there again.
“It smells funny from her room,” the boy said. “And she makes me go get her things.”
What kind of things? Stokley asked him and the kid said his mother had started whispering through the door that she wanted dead things. She said there were plenty of dead things floating around in the streets and that he was to bring them home. He brought her a dead cat, a dead cocker spaniel, and three dead rats. She told him to leave those things at the door and to not look when she opened it. The kid had not. He had never looked, even though a smell of warm, rotting things had wafted out. The kid said he thought she was eating those carcasses, that he heard her slurping and chewing on them. And then this morning, when she’d reached out to take a swollen rat corpse, he had dared to look. He said she was sick because her arm was bumpy and white and there were little things crawling on it.
“Davey,” Stokley said to Rose, “get these kids out of here. Get on the horn with Child Protective Services. Go, move, now!”
When Rose had ushered them out the door, a wild look in his eyes, Stokley had started up those creaking, ancient stairs. The banister rail was oily and smoothed by generations of grimy working hands. What struck him the strongest was the sheer silence of that building. He wondered vaguely if anyone even lived there besides the woman and her kids. The silence was so pronounced it reminded him of walking through a funeral home, seeing all the display rooms with their comfortable furniture awaiting grieving bodies. It was much like that.
Too quiet, like they said in the old movies.
Up Stokley went until he hit the third floor, his guts continuing to boil and froth in his belly. Even had he not
