And so I went down, to the very bottom, alone.
The steps narrowed. The suppurating walls closed in. A stench rose up to meet me, the smell of raw sewage. A pipe had burst and never been repaired, transforming the tenement cellar into a cesspool. The smell nearly overpowered me. Midway down I gagged; my throat burned and my stomach rolled in protest. I heard nothing at all now, and that emboldened me, for it must have meant he was not down there, but I knew I had to look to be sure.
The water at the bottom was more than two feet deep and was covered in a greenish-yellow slime. Broken boards—the remnants of storage barrels—floated in the stagnant stinking pool. I saw the body of an enormous rat floating near my feet, the skin of its bloated corpse peeling off as it rotted; something had already devoured its eyes. I could see its yellow fangs glimmering in its mouth, which was yawning open in a silent howl.
I stopped on the last step, upon the banks of this foul underground pond, holding my light high, but it could not drive back all the darkness. The far end remained swallowed in stygian shadow. What was that bobbing just on the edge of the light? A piece of broken wood? An old bottle? The scum-covered surface undulated; the boards seesawed in the reeking black water. I heard nothing except the steady drip-drip of the leaking pipe.
I turned to leave—clearly nothing was down here—and a voice inside my head spoke up. It was the voice of my master:
Pay attention, Will Henry! What do you notice about the water?
I hesitated. I had to get out. I could not breathe in that nasty hole. Chanler was not there. The baby was not there. Dobrogeanu needed me.
And still the voice persisted: The water, Will Henry, the water.
I started back up the stairs. Should I call out for Dobrogeanu? Or had he already met the same fate as Gravois, and now it was my turn?
Will Henry, the water . . .
Shut up about the water! I shouted silently at the voice. I have to find Dr. Dobrogeanu. . . .
I froze about six feet above the pool. I turned back. The rat’s empty eye socket stared back at me.
“The water is moving,” I said to the dead rat. “Why would it be moving?”
The voice in my head fell silent. Finally I was using that indispensable appendage between my ears.
Hot tears stung my eyes, partly from the smell, but mostly from understanding. I knew why the water moved. And I knew why I’d heard no crying.
The lamp created a perfect sphere of light around me. I waded into the sewage, my feet slipping on the slimy brick bottom. I could feel the filthy water seep into my boots. The dead rat nudged my knee with its long nose as I passed.
It was not a bottle or an old board I had seen floating in the excremental soup. When I reached for it, my foot slipped and I fell with a soft cry, catching myself by dropping the gun and pushing against the bottom with my right hand. That allowed me to keep the lamp aloft in my left. Its light played along the upturned face that floated a foot away; that was all I could see—the baby’s face. The rest was hidden beneath the mustard yellow scum. I pushed myself up. Now I kneeled before it—coughing, gagging, sobbing. I didn’t care anymore if the beast heard me. All I could see was that face, smeared in jellylike feces, the blank eyes sightlessly staring into the abyss above.
I could not leave it there, not in this place. I reached out for it.
My knuckles brushed across the cheek. The face dipped down, bobbed up again. It turned leisurely like an unmoored boat.
I knew then. I had found him, but not all of him. I had found just his face.
“Oh, no,” I whimpered, as Dobrogeanu had, as the doctor had when in the wilderness he’d realized we were lost—the timeless refrain, the ageless response. “No.”
We can take it to the priest. He’ll know what to do with it.
With those words I had abandoned him in a cold and dirty hallway. I had stepped over him, thinking there was nothing I could do. I had stepped over him, telling myself that his suffering had nothing to do with me.
In the wasteland of the gray light, where the black buteos rode on updrafts above the ruins of the forest, a man had heaved his burden over his shoulder. This is mine! he had cried in the cold, dead air. Mine! He had not sent him there; it had not been the doctor’s choice that he go. But the doctor had claimed his friend after the fall. He had accepted his burden.
So overwhelmed was I by the enormity of my crime that I did not hear the beast. The water bubbled behind me, a board bumped against my back; I did not feel it. When the beast rose out of the filth and its shadow fell hard upon me, I did not see it. The sightless eyes of the child held me. The discarnate face gripped me.
Out of the corner of my eye, there was the blur of its arm rocketing around before the hard fist slammed into the side of my head. Something tore free in my mind, a violent upheaval like a volcano exploding. The lamp flew from my hand and shattered against the cellar wall with a loud pop before dropping into the sewage and sputtering out. I pitched forward, tumbling into the abyss.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“I Have Found Him”
My name was in the wind, and the wind was high above the snowbound city. There was no difference between the sound of my name and the sound of the wind. I was in the wind and the wind was in me, and beneath us were the crystalline haloes of golden light wrapped about the streetlamps, and the muffled plops of snow falling from eaves, and the dry rattles of the dead leaves clinging to the indifferent boughs.
It is beautiful here on the high wind. From here our suffering shrinks to insignificance; the wind drowns out the human cry. The city in snow glitters like a diamond, its streets laid out in mathematical precision, the rooftops identical blank canvases. There is perfection in the emptiness. They say God looks down upon us, like the buteos that soar above the blasted landscape of the gray land. There is God in the distance. Humanity’s stench cannot waft this high. Our betrayals, our jealousies, our fears, they rise no higher than the tops of our heads.
In a lightless cellar flooded with human waste, a starving infant is held under until it drowns, its tiny lungs filled with the effluvia of six hundred of its fellow human beings, and then its face is peeled off, as one takes off the skin of an apple, peeled off, and cast into Dante’s river. . . .
In the name of all that’s holy, tell me why God felt the need to make a hell. It seems so redundant.
I woke in the arms of the beast.
I smelled it first—the cloyingly sweet odor of putrefying flesh. Then the powerful arms locked around me, hugging me from behind, like Dobrogeanu had embraced Gravois on the tenement stairs. The floor upon which we sprawled was hard and cold; the air was musty and basement-damp. I had a sense of gaping space, like a subterranean cave deep in the belly of the earth.