“Is a tunnel built in ye olden days. It was big enough for two locomotives to pass each other side by side. They closed it down before the nineteen hundreds. Now it’s a tourist attraction. You can go down a manhole back at the Court Street intersection on some guided tour.” I’d reloaded my Glock and tucked it in the back of my pants and pulled out my shirt, the blood on it now reddish brown, to cover it up. The xiphos I gave to Niko to tuck away in his coat. “So bite me. Who’s the genius now?”
Robin slapped his forehead. “I forgot. Ishiah has those crass ‘unknown facts of NYC’ bar napkins that were delivered by mistake. I saw them at the Panic.”
With an internal shudder, I wished that had been all I’d seen at the Panic.
“Yep, a mistake,” I said, pushing the Panic far from my thoughts, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I read them, because I’m not dense.” In reality I would’ve, as Niko said, embraced that lack of knowledge thoroughly, but bartending had its slow moments; a Wolf had thrown another Wolf through the TV and the wall behind it, and porn was not allowed in the Ninth Circle. Your boss and your best friend doing it was no problem, but no porn in the bar. I didn’t get it either. Ishiah had some weird rules.
Until the new TV arrived, I read napkins.
“Regardless of your newfound brilliant knack for trivia, not all of the tunnel is a tourist trap. At least half of it was walled off and that is where the market is.” Goodfellow walked us to the back of the funeral home and knocked.
A few moments later it was opened by a man in his fifties with a long, narrow face, eyes moist with unshed sympathetic tears, a charcoal suit, a deep, somber voice, and a box of Kleenex in one hand. “You’ve come to the wrong door, but how can I direct you in your time of sorrow?”
“Relax, Jackie boy. We just want to go downstairs,” Robin said.
The eyes overflowed with tears and Jackie snatched a Kleenex, which I’d thought was for distraught clients, to blow his nose. “Sorry, Rob. I’m trying out some contacts and they’re eating my goddamn eyes alive. I can barely see ya. Sure, get your asses in here before Pinky brings the police running with all that blood.”
Me being Pinky. Goodfellow and that damn shirt he’d forced on me would make sure that nickname stuck around for a year or so.
“How’s the wife? She up front?” We followed Goodfellow up the stairs and inside while he talked up Jack the Snot Machine.
“Yeah, snooty bitch.” He frowned. “She wants me to go by Jacques instead of Jackie while we’re working, so’s we seem fancier. Then we ran out of embalming fluid a week ago—a shortage on fricking embalming fluid, you ever heard of shit like that? And that’s when the bus wreck happened. Family reunion. Been coming to our funeral home to be stuffed in overpriced boxes since great-great-great-whoever. So’s I’m out raiding every grocery store in Brooklyn for that runny maple syrup. Almost like water, cheap-ass shit. But it runs through the embalming machine like a dream. And I’m thinking, Praise Jesus and halle-fucking-lujah, ’cause twenty of those suckers are stacking up in the morgue and starting to go off in a bad way.” He opened a door off the hall marked, JANITOR ONLY. DANGEROUS CLEANING SUPPLIES. FLAMMABLE. “But that ain’t the end of it. The next morning Grandma Nosy wants to know before the service why her father smells like a pancake breakfast.” He stepped back out as we stepped in. “Eh, what can you do? It’s always something.”
“That, Jackie, is truer than you know. Good luck with the wife and the waffles.” Robin gave him the Brooklyn aim of the finger and firing of the thumb before closing the door behind us.
“He’s human,” I said.
“That he is.” Robin unlocked another door on the other side of the room. It was double bolted and had a security pad for a password.
“He doesn’t know about Monster Mart?” I persisted.
“No. That would only mess with his tiny mind, and Jackie has far too little to endanger. Besides, a zombie or vampire running a funeral home? What a cliché,” he noted with disdain.
The door opened. “He thinks I’m a drug dealer or a gun runner or run a white slave ring. As long as I pay him something every month, he minds his own business.” There were more stairs and no light as the door shut behind us. Robin clapped his hands and half domes of plastic sprang to a soft white light. They sat on the stairs and up against the wall. “Pick up the pace. We have a few blocks to walk, and every once in a while I get blood leeches nesting down here. Fourteen feet long. Not something you want to get tangled up in because you’re too slow.”
All of us limped faster while Robin explained the marketplace was in the part of the tunnel walled off from tourists, civilians, and the homeless. Also all the monsters had their own ways in. Some species shared: the Wolves, the revenants, the vampires. Others, like Goodfellow, preferred their entrance private.
About two blocks later we walked through a massive brick arch that had to be as thick as a man was tall. The ceiling was brick too and about ten feet high. And beyond the arch were booths, tents, tables…anything you could imagine from an ancient bazaar to a white-trash yard sale was here.
“You…stained with blood. I see your past, right before me. I’ll tell it to you for a sip of fresh blood.” To my right, a creature crouched on the wet brick floor. He…I thought…he was stirring a spidery seven-jointed finger around a cracked plate of intestines. I didn’t have to think twice on that. I’d spilled enough that I knew what they looked like. Eyes of dark gold streaked with fungus green studied me, the slippery mass before him, and then me again. It could’ve been a salamander from its moist skin—if its mother mated with about twenty South American face-eating spiders at once and a snake to top it off for the mottled green-and-gray forked tongue.
“No, thanks, froggy. I’ve lived it once. I can do without the rerun.” I kept moving until the hand wrapped around my forearm twice over.
“For two sips I’ll tell your present and future. I see those as well,” came a needy, sibilant hiss. “Everyone wants to know what lies beyond and what lies within.”
He stood four feet tall and I could’ve bent down to his level, but I didn’t. I grabbed his neck and jerked him off the ground up to mine. I stared into his eyes—close enough that I could see a perfect reflection of myself in the black pupils. “You have no idea what lies within me,” I said, soft, smooth, and
To give me credit…it had been a long day.
I dropped him then with the unpleasant sound of a snail squashed under your shoe. “If that’s the best this place has, Goodfellow, we are wasting our time and I’m spending more of
“Lighten up, Pinky.” Robin grinned. “All fairs, carnivals, markets, bazaars have their fakes. Be grateful he isn’t a real expert in extispicy and doesn’t have the true sight or he’d be screaming the ceiling down. We’d die in an avalanche of brick.”
“I focused on the one word that interested me. Extra spicy?” I stepped over the tentacle of the Bride of Cthulhu who was browsing a jewelry stand.
“No, Taco Bell. Back to the bar napkins for you. Extispicy…the ability to read omens and predict the future by reading entrails.”
“Cal calls that lunch and hasn’t delivered a prediction yet,” Niko said dryly. Kalakos stayed behind us, but not too far. He thought he’d seen and hunted the unclean. He was a babe in the woods.
Sometimes things are so nasty that you don’t want to get close enough to do your job. Carrying a gun in one hand and a barf bag in the other because their ugliness was beyond extreme wasn’t worth the money. But then I saw something else. There was a shimmer to one side. Not the love-at-first-sight idiocy shimmer, but a true shimmer of what I thought was a silver-blue light. But when I glanced over, there was no light. There was a woman.
As I stopped to get a closer look, she was already facing me. She, like Cthulhu’s main squeeze, was at a jewelry stall. A choker of polished black tears and garnets or rubies cut into star shapes hung from her hand. “It’s beautiful and it’s sad, isn’t it, sugar? But family is that way. I had it special-made to remind me. Life is shorter than we know and we’d best get our asses out there and kick up our heels.”
The choker looked nice on her when she held it to her throat. Her accent reminded me of my trip down to South Carolina, Southern, although not quite the same Southern, but neither of those things were what caught my attention most of all. Not close to it.
