Then the man startled her by giggling. “I made a mistake. You couldn’t still be Dawn. Don’t be mad at me.”
He advanced another smooth silent yard into the room. There was an ugly black-handled knife in his hand. He drifted a few feet sideways into shadow and waited.
Maggie began to inch on her hands and knees down under the table, and at the bottom end of the table she gathered herself to make a rush for the door.
“Come out and talk to me,” he said. “There’s a reason for everything, and there’s a reason for this. I’m not a lunatic operating in a void, you know. I have come thousands of miles to stand here right now, in the middle of the world right here. It’s important for you to understand that.”
He hesitated in the shadows.
“I am a person who always knows when something is going to happen, and this is a thing that is going to happen. You are going to stand up and walk toward me. You are afraid. You smell blood. That is from something that already happened a long time ago, and you are here now and you have to see that what happened then was part of a general pattern and you are in that pattern too. Worthy, worthy is the lamb that was slain. He was a warrior, and I was a warrior, and I have been called back.” The man stepped closer to the center of the room. “So this has to happen. Stand up and walk out toward me.”
As he spoke, Maggie shrugged her coat off her shoulders and let it silently fold onto the floor. She crept back up the length of the table, crawled around the chairs at its far end, and very slowly and quietly moved up onto the platform.
The man startled her by backing a step toward her.
“I know where you are. You are under the table. I could go over to you now and pull you out. I am not going to do that. I am going to give you the chance to show yourself. Once you show yourself to me, you can leave. You can see where I am now. I am at the back of the room. I promise you that I will not move from this spot. I would like to see your face, I would like to know you.”
Maggie saw him shift the knife in his hand to hold the tip between his thumb and forefinger, the handle dangling below.
“There is the Elephant,” he said. “Justice does not exist in the world system. Fairness is a human invention. The world abhors only waste, waste is forbidden, and when waste is eliminated love is permitted. Behold, I tell you a mystery—I am a man of sorrows and I loved Pumo the Puma.”
Maggie had begun moving backward with greater care. She was very near the desk, and when she touched it with one backwards-reaching hand she forced herself to move even more slowly until she had found the side of the empty clay pot she knew was there. It had once held a tiny hibscus tree, a gift from Maggie; when the tree had died from lack of light and an infestation of mites around the time of the insect problem in the kitchen, Pumo had dumped the hibiscus and kept the pot, promising Maggie that they would get another. It had sat empty beside his desk ever since.
“One minute or another, we will meet one another. In this minute, or the next, or the one after that …”
He stood there, about five feet away from her now, as prepared as ever to throw his knife into her back. Maggie lifted the big pot off its base, and in one motion stood up and raised the pot above her head.
The man looked back over his shoulder, already beginning to react, and Maggie stepped forward and brought the pot down with imperfect accuracy. She was sobbing with terror. His own reflexes undid him. Ducking sideways, he brought himself directly beneath the heavy pot, and it connected solidly with the side of his head. There was a dull heavy thud followed almost immediately by the smashing of the pot on the floor and the loud crash as Tina’s killer pitched onto the coffee table and snapped it in two like a sheet of ice.
Maggie jumped down from the platform and skimmed across the floor before Pumo’s killer had picked himself up out of the wreckage of the table. She threw open the door and went pell-mell down the stairs. As if with three- hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, she saw her huge shadow on the wall beside her and a darker shape filling the opening at the top of the stairs. Even though she was flying, she seemed to be moving with terrific slowness, as if time were muscle-bound. The man must have dropped his knife, for he did not throw it. Maggie burst through the street door as she heard the man thundering down the stairs.
Again she flew, now toward noise, lights, people. She was entirely unaware of the cold.
Maggie risked a glance over her shoulder just before she reached the corner of West Broadway. The scene behind her seemed as flat and artificial as a stage set. The door to the loft hung open, and light spilling out melted into the circular light from a streetlamp. A few people had turned around on the sidewalk to watch her run past. In the midst of all the light and activity on Grand Street was a sliding shadow, a man who melted toward her invisibly, using other people as cover. Maggie snapped her head forward, her breath freezing in her throat, and did her best to narrow down to a small black line speeding along above the pavement.
Maggie ran down the block, her arms pumping in the thin sleeves of her shirt, her knees rising and falling.
Finally the subway was only a block ahead of her. Her face dripped sweat and the staple burned in her side, but still her elbows pumped and her knees rose and fell. The boys, still occupying the middle of the sidewalk, saw her racing toward them and went wild.
“Chinkie!”
“Baby, you came back!”
This wide-grinning boy in a Fila sweatshirt danced in front of her, giving big come-to-me gestures. A gold chain spelling out a name in letters as large as front teeth bounced on his chest. Maggie was yelling something, and they made to close on her, but when she came within a few yards of the boy he saw her face and moved out of the way. “Murder!” she yelled. “Stop him!”
Without any transition she was flying down the steps, moving as if there were no gravity. From above she heard shouts and the sound of somebody falling. Before Maggie hit the bottom of the steps she heard a train pounding into the station, and she hit the ground running. Perhaps fifteen people were in the station, another fifteen or so on the platform. Voices still came from the top of the stairs. To her right the train came to a stop, and its doors squeaked open.
Maggie kept on winding through the people, and when she reached the turnstile she pretended to drop in her token and passed beneath the motionless bar swiftly and unobserved. Once past the turnstile she risked another glance over her shoulder and saw a wall of people advancing toward the train. Then a grey shadow melted away behind a man in a black topcoat, and she saw the suggestion of a smile as the shadow flowed on toward her. The being was quietly, gleefully capering toward her, and she sprinted across the final few yards to the waiting train.
Maggie rushed into the car and darted to the nearest window as the doors closed. The man in the black topcoat was just now nearing the turnstile, and behind him something else melted and flowed, passed between the men and women waiting to get to the platform, grinned at her and danced all but invisibly, seeing her but unseen as the train pulled away from the station.
Maggie collapsed into a seat. After a time she became aware that she was trembling. “He killed him,” she said to herself. When she repeated this statement, the few people around her stood up and moved farther down the length of the car. It seemed to Maggie that what had killed her lover and pursued her into the station had not been human but a supernatural force, a grinning evil thing that could change its shape or become invisible. The only proof she had of its humanity had been the way the pot had connected to its head, and how it had sprawled onto Pumo’s glass table. A wave of nausea and of disbelief went through her. Maggie was sobbing now, and she swiped at her eyes. She bent over and looked at her shoes. They were not bloodstained, not even the soles. She shuddered again and wept to herself all the rest of the long way uptown. Tears streamed down her face while she changed trains. She felt like a beaten animal returning home. Now and then she started and cried out, thinking that she had caught a glimpse of Tina’s crazy shadowy killer moving behind the backs of people standing at the straps in front of her, but when the people parted and fled no one was there, he had melted away again.
At 125th Street she ran down the steps, crossing her arms over her chest for warmth. Her tears were going to freeze, she thought, and she would be trapped inside the icy seal over her face.
She parted the doors of the General’s storefront church and slipped inside as quietly as she could. Warmth
