We talked to hustlers who leaned against graffiti-thick walls or smoked between tricks under the trestles of the elevated train. Talked to runaways who warmed themselves over fires built in rusty oil drums. To castoffs who made homes in boarded-up warehouses, or factories where smokestacks held their last stale dying breath, beneath a sky that still looked irreparably seared.
“Never heard of him” — this we got most often, a relief to me.
“Oh yeah, I heard of that guy” — this, too, sometimes. And:
“Hey, I think I saw him. He’s a killer.”
“Right. Some kind of saint, right?”
“Fag. Fags.”
“You just missed him, by, like, a day.”
Never enough to discourage Jared from continuing. Just enough to keep me from feeling sure this was mere rumor.
There seemed to be no end of places to look, and if we began to think we must have covered them all, then we’d find more. More sprawl, more shadow, more derelict hulks etched against sooty new horizons. It made me recall something I’d been told by one of the street people I used to see all the time near the video store, for whom Danielle and I would sometimes buy sandwiches.
The city grows at night, he’d told me. On its own. That’s why so many people can pass a spot for the hundredth time and look at some building as if for the first…even if logically they know, from the way it looks, it must’ve stood there crumbling for sixty, eighty, a hundred years. The only thing they can figure is that it has somehow escaped their notice until now.
The city grows at night, and that’s why people can drive past some spot on their way out of the city and think, wait, last week didn’t it all used to end right around here? So they decide their memories must be playing tricks on them again, and knit the changes into the way it’s always been.
Then most of them don’t give it another thought, he told me. But a few can still feel the city’s growth pains in the deepest places inside their dreams, and even those who don’t remember on awakening, at least awaken with a growing dread of the city and its demands, realizing that it’ll never be satisfied until it’s consumed everything there is to be had, making slaves of all who live there. Feeders, and those fed into the maw.
He told me these things one day on my lunch break, then lived another month. Died of acute alcohol poisoning two blocks over, in the alley behind a Thai restaurant. But his face was gone, I heard. Rats. And maybe it’s only creative hindsight, but now I swear he told me these things like a man who’d already heard his death searching for him, stalked for dreaming too deeply and brushing dust from the wrong secrets.
He’d said the city had sorted out long ago who it could use to maintain itself, and who would taste best between its teeth.
But why listen to paranoid drunks, anyway?
Hieronymus Beadle recognized intent as soon as he saw them coming, moving with trepidation through the musty Welsh pub until they could see him near the back, sunk comfortably into his chair and drowsing by the fire. During his sumptuous weeks in the city, his waistcoat had grown frightfully snug, buttons a-popping and threads a- straining.
“Sit! Sit!” he bid them. “Been expecting you, I have.”
“How’s that?” asked the older of the pair, the more prickly; clearly the skeptic, the sniffer out of charlatans.
Mr. Beadle gestured toward the fire. “I’ve been watching the news, of course.”
He could unfailingly spot those who’d made a concerted effort to find him, and such was this pair, if the elder against what he thought to be better judgment. But if that wasn’t love, Hieronymus Beadle didn’t know what was. Always most touching, when they came two by two.
“Wine?” he offered, showing them the stemmed glasses ranked before the fire, glowing like purplish orbs. “There’s no place left to serve it mulled. Criminal, that. I’m forced to do it myself, but if you’ll look ‘round at the sad state of disrepair here, you’ll understand why they’re only too happy to allow me the indulgence. Cloves and cardamom, cardamom and cloves. They smooth and mellow, they round off the bite.”
“Jared,” said the skeptic. “The man’s an escapee.”
“Perhaps. But is it a true escape after the jail’s fallen to ruin? Of course not — it’s opportunity seized. Now. Seize some chairs, why don’t you? They’re not half uncomfortable.”
When they moved to sit, he leaned forward as if to shake the skeptic’s hand, catching him by surprise and clenching tight.
“Don’t mind me, just browsing,” he told the man, whose lean and startled face had begun to show the true lines of age and of character, and harder times in sorrow’s forge. “You’re possessed of a fitness mania to prolong the illusion of youth. You’ve a cat named…Voodoo, is it? whom you feel you’ve quite ignored as of late. Your favorite sexual act is mutual oral, but you’ve never bothered to dig deep enough to understand why. Shall I tell you?”
Always a treat, shocking doubters into silence.
“I’ll take that as a tacit affirmative. Somewhere very, very deep within you, the act you call sixty-nine satisfies a yearning for wholeness in creation. Reminds you of the uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. Much more apropos, I say, betwixt two men than man and woman. You’re each half the world to the other then, yes?”
“It’s like that, yeah,” he said, dry-throated, and yanked his hand free.
“How…?” said the one in need. Jared.
“Psychometry, plain and simple. A gaudy parlor trick, though, telling present and past. But the future, now, if I could only have managed that one, why, the world would’ve come to me instead of the other way around.” Hieronymus Beadle smiled, eyes crinkling above plump cheeks. “Still, here you are. You’ve met me halfway, at least. Tell me what carries you through yonder door.”
But he knew already. Spend a few weeks anywhere, and whispers inevitably churned like an undertow to draw out seekers of relief from the torments of existence. They came looking precisely like this Jared: miserable with hope, before the court of last resort.
“I take souls, gentlemen,” he began, sparing himself the need of listening to questions heard a hundred thousand times already. “I’m no devil, I wreak no sulphurous damnation. A humble peddler, am I, a tinker of flesh and spirit. A dying trade, but all I know to practice, and ironically, more needed today than ever before. I take souls. They’re never missed, for with them goes the capacity to miss them. It’s not unlike the snipping of a giant nerve that connects one to a gangrenous appendage. And just as the amputated limb may be burnt without bringing further suffering in the flames, so too will that troublesome soul wither quite on its own, unfelt. I take souls, and give peace in return.”
“And what do you do with them then?” asked the skeptic.
“None of your bloody business.”
Hieronymus Beadle sipped his wine, folded hands over belly, and watched them argue. Once he’d provided his services for kings and princes, sultans and emirs, who’d feared themselves in danger of attack by malign sorcery. They’d paid him fabulous sums for the safekeeping of the stuff of their hearts and dreams, until enemies could be rooted out and destroyed. Quite the comedown, this, for so few believed in true magic anymore, motivated only by hopes of an end to suffering. He refused to blame them. It had been a cruel century, overall.
The argument was over, and Jared unswayed.
“Can you…do it here?” he asked. “Now?”
“Good heavens, no. Don’t be absurd. Souls can’t be handed over like wallets. They can’t be stolen. They must be surrendered willingly, because they cling to the flesh they know, and must be coaxed and bullied into quitting the familiar. Rather exhausting, the process, but then, peace must often be preceded by a war.”
“And is there any other…cost?”
“To you? Oh no. The overhead’s already been paid.” Hieronymus Beadle now regarded the skeptic. “And you, sir? Is there naught I can do for you? Because if you’ll pardon my bluntness, I caught quite the potent whiff of soul’s gangrene from you, as well, a few minutes ago. Serge, was that the name? Indeed it was.”
Mr. Beadle watched him wriggle on temptation’s hook.
Some days he felt there to be no honor left in what he did, what had once been a noble trade, suffering no master but his own soul and the short-term dictates of royalty. Never had he dreamt back then that he would one
