Dying Is My Business

keep an eye on me, like a pet you don’t quite trust.

From the corner of my eye I saw the second gray door swing silently open. I turned. Peeking out from behind the door was a woman. She had a thin face, big eyes so dark they almost looked black, and long, ragged black hair that fell in slender wisps across her features. She was Underwood’s wife, or girlfriend. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what the status of their relationship was. Underwood never talked about his personal life, only business. But she was never far from his side. She never spoke a word to me, or to anyone as far as I knew. In the year I’d been here I had yet to hear Underwood address her by name. Maybe she didn’t have one.

She glared at me, her eyes narrowing. I hated when she did that, which was all the time. I got the feeling she was scared of me, or disgusted by me. Maybe both.

She disappeared behind the door again, and I went into my room. The cement walls there were just as bare as in the main room, but unlike the main room there was no rug, just more cement that felt cold and hard against my feet when I took off my shoes. I’d never bothered to decorate the room in any way. It would have been like admitting this was where I would always live, that I’d never find my real home, and I refused to accept that.

A twin-sized bed, rescued from a garbage dump, rested along one wall, its metal frame speckled with rust, the mattress moldy and stained. I sat down on the bed. I wondered what was happening to Bennett on the other side of the black door. I expected to hear the sounds of torture coming through the walls, the high-pitched whir of a drill or the meaty slap of fists hitting flesh. I expected to hear Bennett scream. I waited a long time, but the sounds never came.

In a way, the silence was worse.

Three

I don’t sleep. I can’t, my body won’t let me. I learned pretty fast that it’s one of the side effects of not being able to die, like there’s some kind of battery inside me that won’t turn off. I feel tired sometimes, but never sleepy. That makes my downtime boring, frustrating, or both.

But that night I had a special ritual to perform. One I didn’t enjoy but felt compelled to do.

I lifted the mattress. On one side was a small tear in the fabric. I reached inside and pulled out the pen and sheet of paper hidden inside the stuffing. There was a list written on the paper, a list I’d been keeping—and adding to—for the past year. I kept it hidden in the mattress because I didn’t want anyone else seeing it. It felt sacred to me in ways I didn’t fully understand. No one else would understand it, either. I sat down on the bed and read over the list:

1. Ford

2. Wellington

3. Braum

4. Langan

5. Francisco

6. Perry

7. Petrucha

8. the boy

Then I took the pen and added another name to it.

9. Maddock

All the lives I’d stolen, reduced to the equivalent of a shopping list. Writing down their names was a compulsion. It helped me remember them, and that seemed like the right thing to do. I could recite the list forward and backward by now, knew their names by heart, all except one. Number eight, “the boy.” The only one who didn’t belong. The others were killers, racketeers, and thieves, but not him. He hadn’t done anything to anyone. He hadn’t tried to kill me first the way the others had. The boy had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I thought of the crack house on Fourth Avenue again, and had to forcefully push it from my mind. The memory of the boy had been lurking in the back of my head like a ghost ever since. I didn’t want to think about it. One night off, that was all I wanted. A way to forget, even if only for a few hours.

There was an old TV set in the corner of the room, rescued from the same garbage dump as my bed. It barely worked, and when it did its rabbit ears only picked up a single station, a local-access channel that showed old movies. I watched whenever I could. It was more than a pastime—it was my teacher. Everything I learned about the world that didn’t come from Underwood came from watching Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff.

I turned it on and watched for a couple of hours, taking in all of Werewolf of London and part of The Maltese Falcon before I realized I was too distracted to pay attention. I kept thinking about the boy, and God-knows-what happening to Bennett behind the black door. I needed something stronger than the TV. I turned it off and pulled out the other item I’d hidden inside the mattress. It was a paperback book I’d found one rainy day on the stoop of a brownstone in Park Slope after running a collection for Underwood. Something about the sight of the book lying there, discarded, unwanted, and alone, pelted mercilessly by the rain, had filled me with an unexpected sadness. I pitied it, felt almost a kinship with it, so I stuffed it inside my coat to keep it safe from the storm, and brought it back with me.

It seemed so small in my hands now, a fragile thing. Its rain-battered pages had dried, but they’d also become swollen and brittle from the moisture they’d absorbed. The cover art was a painting of a flat blue sea with a big white castle on the far shore. A ship with tall sails floated upon the waves. Standing on its deck was a woman in a white dress with long, flowing auburn hair. She held a sword in her hands. Above her, a winged horse and a flying lizard faced off. The title was printed along the top in a curled script: The Ragana’s Revenge by Elena De Voe. I opened the book carefully so the damaged pages wouldn’t tear.

At the front was a detailed map of a land called Kallamathus, charting regions with names like the Cliffs of Treachery, the Forest of Dark Secrets, and the Sea of Miseries. I thought it was ridiculous and chuckled at the idea of New York City’s geography named in a similar, absurdly specific manner. The Street of Forgotten Trash Bags. The Avenue of Impossibly Expensive Restaurants. I turned the page to a foreword by the author explaining how the magical kingdom of Kallamathus was based on an alternate version of Eastern Europe, and in fact the word ragana was Lithuanian for witch. Then, finally, the story began, describing the adventures of a dirt-poor peasant girl named Armelle who lived in a realm of magic and strange creatures, and discovered her world was far more dangerous, yet far more richly rewarding, than she ever knew. At the back of the book was a lengthy glossary of invented words that I found myself consulting regularly as I read, just to figure out what the hell the characters were talking about, and who was who. It didn’t help that most of the characters had unpronounceable names comprised of strings of consonants broken by random apostrophes—all except for the heroine, Armelle, and the villain, the Ragana. Armelle befriended a magical, telepathic horse (or rather, a Q’horse, only the Q and the apostrophe were silent), fell in love with the pointy-eared elf prince Ch’aqrath, and discovered she wasn’t a peasant at all but an orphaned princess who was prophesied to save the kingdom from the Ragana.

“There are worlds within worlds,” Ch’aqrath declared, petting the Q’horse’s soft, snowy mane. “The Ragana plans to tear this world asunder and reveal the true world that lies beneath its mask.”

“And what world would that be?” Armelle queried bravely, though her full, rosy lips quivered with the foreboding fear that overcame her.

Ch’aqrath set his handsome jaw, alerting her that what he was about to tell her was knowledge known only to Elfkind. “It is a world of wonders and terrors the likes of which you could never believe,” he replied. “Your kind is so fragile, my beautiful companion. Were they to behold the truth, they would surely fall into fits of madness.”

I grunted, annoyed. Elena De Voe had gotten it wrong. You didn’t need a secret, hidden world to scare people. The real world was awful enough. I continued reading, but by then the spell the story had cast over me was broken. As the Ragana unleashed an army of dragons upon the royal palace, I stopped, closed the book, and