The Curse of the Wendigo

TWENTY-SEVEN

“The Water”

They were not so different in the end, the place where he was lost and the place where he was found. They differed only in their topography.

The wilderness and the slum were but two faces of the same desolation. The gray land of soul-crushing nothingness in the slum was as bereft of hope as the burned-out snow-packed brûlé of the forest. The denizens of the slums were stalked by the same hunger, preyed upon by predators no less savage than their woodland counterparts. The immigrants lived in squalid tenements, crowded into rooms not much larger than a closet, and their lives were mean and short. Only two of five children born into the ghetto could expect to see their eighteenth year. The rest succumbed to the ravenous hunger of typhoid and cholera, the insatiable appetites of malaria and diphtheria.

It was little wonder that the beast had chosen this for its hunting ground. Here was prey numbering in the hundreds of thousands, packed into a radius measured in blocks, not miles, prey more anonymous and powerless than the most isolated of Iyiniwok villagers, but just as familiar with the call that rode on the high wind, beckoning them in the universal language of desire.

By coming here, the beast had come home.

By lot my group had drawn the Bohemian ghetto, where a young girl named Anezka Nováková had vanished the day before, her disappearance not reported to the police but to the local priest, who in turn had told Riis.

Anezka, we learned, was not the sort of girl who would simply take off. She was extremely shy, and small for her age, a dutiful elder daughter who helped her parents roll cigars for $1.20 a day (to feed, clothe, and house a family of six). She was shut up in their tiny two-room flat for eighteen grueling hours each day, just one of the thousands of indentured slaves of the tobacco lords. Her family had discovered her missing that morning. Sometime in the night, while the family had slept, Anezka Nováková had vanished.

Dobrogeanu, who spoke passable Czech, obtained the address from the priest, who seemed to have some trouble understanding our interest in the case, but the name of Riis held great currency in his parish. The reformer’s involvement granted legitimacy to our cause, though the cleric retained his native distrust of outsiders.

“You are not detectives?” he asked Gravois. He seemed particularly suspicious of a Frenchman poking his Gallic snout into the neighborhood.

“We are scientists,” Gravois answered smoothly.

“Scientists?”

“Like detectives, Father, only better dressed.”

Anezka’s flat was within walking distance of the church, though the walk was more like a hike in the premature twilight of billowing snow. On every corner the fires of the ash barrels burned like beacons marking our descent into the teaming tenement, the smoke from which thickened the curtain of snow and obscured the landscape. We moved in a world of few contrasts, a purgatory of gray.

Midway down the block, Dobrogeanu slipped into a narrow space (it could hardly be called an alley) between two decrepit buildings, a passage so narrow we were forced to turn sideways and shuffle along, our backs to one wall, our noses only an inch or so from the other. We emerged into an open space no larger than von Helrung’s parlor.

We had arrived in the warren of the rear-houses—so called because of their location off the main thoroughfare. There were perhaps thirty to forty hastily constructed tenement buildings crammed three or four to a single lot, separated by winding passages as narrow as jungle footpaths, amid a labyrinth of weathered fences and clotheslines strung from posts and rickety stair rails, the lifeless ground packed as hard as concrete by the tread of a thousand ill-shod feet. I heard the bleating of goats and smelled the reek of the outdoor privies that sat astride shallow trenches brimming with human waste.

“Which one is it?” wondered Gravois nervously. His hand had vanished into his overcoat pocket, where he carried the gun loaded with silver bullets.

Dobrogeanu scowled. “I can’t see three feet in this hellish soup.”

A group of four ragamuffins materialized out of that soup—the oldest no more than ten—dressed alike in the filthiest of hand-me-downs, their baggy trousers held up with belts fashioned from rags. They crowded around the two monstrumologists, tugging on their coats and extending their palms, piping in a cacophonous chorus, “Dolar? Dolar, pane? Dolar, dolar?”

“Yes, yes,” Gravois said testily. “Ano, ano.”

He distributed the begged-for coins into the clawing hands, and then withdrew a five-dollar note from his purse, holding it before their startled faces. Suddenly they were as quiet as church mice.

“Znáš Nováková?” asked Dobrogeanu. “Kde žije Naváková?”

At the mention of the name the little group grew very grave, their avariciousness replaced by trepidation. They quickly crossed themselves, and two made a sign to ward off the evil eye, muttering, “Upír. Upír!”

“Kdo je statečný?” Dobrogeanu asked in a stern voice. “Kdo mě vezme domů?”

While three of the boys shuffled their feet and cast their eyes upon the ground, a lad—by no means the oldest or the largest of the lot—stepped forward. His face was drawn, the cheekbones large, the eyes dominant. He tried his best to speak bravely, but the tremor in his voice betrayed him.

“Nebojím se,” he said. “Vezmu vás.”

He snatched the note from Gravois’s hand. It disappeared into some secret pocket in his filthy attire. His comrades melted back into the shadows, leaving the four of us stranded on that little island of bald earth, ringed on all sides by the crumbling edifices of the rear-houses.

Our newfound guide navigated the serpentine course through the bewildering snarl of clotheslines and fences with unerring step. This was his universe, and no doubt, if every particle of light had been sucked from our atmosphere, he could have found his way through the utter blackness left behind.

He stopped at the rear of a building indistinguishable from the rest—the same sagging stairs masquerading as a fire escape, zigzagging four stories up to the roof; the same warped platforms that passed for balconies, framed in by broken rails.

“Nováková,” the boy whispered, pointing at the tenement.

“Which floor?” Dobrogeanu asked. “Jaký patro? What flat? Který byt?”

The urchin’s reply was silent. He merely presented his palm. Gravois sighed heavily and gave him another five-dollar note.

“Ve čtvrtém patře. Poslední dveře vlevo.” His expression became very serious. “Nikdo tam není.”

Dobrogeanu frowned. “Nikdo tam není? What do you mean?”

“What does he mean?” echoed Gravois.

The boy jabbed his finger at the brooding tenement. “Upír.” He clawed the air and bared his teeth. “To mu ted’ patří.”

“He says it belongs to the upír now.”

The urchin nodded vigorously. “Upír! Upír!”

“‘Upír’?” asked Gravois. “What is this upír he’s talking about?”

“Vampire,” answered Dobrogeanu.

“Ah! Well, now we are getting somewhere!”

“The building is empty,” the other monstrumologist said. “He says it belongs to upír now.”

“Does he? Then, we are wasting our time. I suggest we return to von Helrung and make a full report—tout de suite, before night falls.”

Dobrogeanu turned to ask the boy another question and was astonished to find him gone. He had disappeared into the icy mist as abruptly as he had appeared. For a moment no one spoke. Gravois’s mind was already made up, but the elderly monstrumologist teetered between charging forward and sounding the retreat. It was a tantalizing lead—an abandoned building that now belonged to the upír, the closest the lexicon could come to Lepto lurconis. Yet he suspected our guide may have been merely giving us our money’s worth. For five dollars more he might have gladly informed us that in the basement we might find a stairway to hell.

“He could be lying,” he mused. “It may not be abandoned at all.”

“Do you see any lights inside?” asked Gravois. “I do not see any. Monsieur Henry, your eyes are young. Do you see lights?”

I did not. Only dark panes dimly reflecting the glow from the ash barrels in the courtyard.

“And we have none,” pointed out Gravois. “What good will it do, stumbling about in the dark?”

“It isn’t dark yet,” countered Dobrogeanu. “We have a few hours still.”

“Perhaps our definitions of ‘dark’ differ. I say we let Monsieur Henry break the tie. What is your opinion, Will?”

So rarely was I asked for one, I did not realize I even had an opinion until it came out of my mouth. “We should go in. We have to know.”

Up the rickety back stairs we climbed, Dobrogeanu leading the way, one hand hidden in his cloak, no doubt gripping his revolver. I followed next, fingering the hilt of the knife to steady my nerves. Gravois brought up the rear, muttering in French what sounded like curses. Once or twice I caught the word ‘Pellinore.’

The stairs were alarmingly insubstantial, swaying with each step of our slow ascent, the old boards crying tremulant squeaks and protesting groans. We reached the fourth-story landing, whereupon our leader pulled the revolver from his pocket and pushed open the door, and we followed him.

A narrow, poorly lit hallway ran the length of the building, its walls coated with decades of accumulated grime, the floor speckled with water stains and darker blemishes of unknown origin, perhaps urine or excrement, for the passage reeked of both—and of boiled cabbage, tobacco, wood smoke, and that peculiar funk of human desperation.

It was very cold and deathly quiet. We stood for a moment without moving, hardly breathing, straining our ears for any sound that might give proof of life. There was nothing. Dobrogeanu whispered, “End of the hall, last door on the left.”

“Will Henry should investigate,” urged Gravois. “He is the smallest and the lightest of tread. We’ll stay here and cover his advance.”

Dobrogeanu stared at him from beneath his thick gray eyebrows.

“How did you ever become a monstrumologist, Gravois?”

“A combination of familial pressure and social retardation.”

Dobrogeanu grunted softly. “Come along, Will; Gravois, stay here if you like, but watch those stairs!”

We proceeded carefully down the hall, passing midway down a central staircase on the right. The sole source of light came from the fire escape door, and that light faded as we went.

Dobrogeanu stepped over a bundle of rags, pointing it out lest I trip over it in the gloom. To my surprise I saw the bundle was moving—and then I realized the rags were wrapped around an infant, no more than a few months old, its toothless mouth stretched wide in a pitifully silent cry. Its dark eyes moved restlessly in their sockets; its stick-thin arms flailed the air.

I tugged at the old man’s sleeve and pointed at the child. His eyebrows rose in astonishment.

“Is it alive?” he whispered.

I squatted beside the abandoned child. Its little hand caught my finger and held it tight. The eyes, which appeared very large in the emaciated face, had fixed upon me. It considered me with frank curiosity, squeezing my finger.

“Its parents must be somewhere,” Dobrogeanu surmised. “Come, Will.”

He urged me to my feet. The baby did not cry when I withdrew my finger. Perhaps it was too weak or too sick to cry.

Dobrogeanu started down the hall, but I did not move. I looked down at the baby by my feet. It was too much for me. How many times had I bemoaned my fate, the gross injustice of my parents’ deaths, or my service to an eccentric genius whose dark pursuits demanded that I endure the most alarming of scenarios, unto the risk of my very life? Yet what was my experience compared to that hungry child’s, forlorn in a filthy hall reeking of piss and cabbages? What did I understand of suffering?

“What is it?” asked Dobrogeanu. He had looked behind and discovered me frozen to the spot.

“We can’t just leave it here,” I said.

“If we take it, what will happen when its parents return for it? Leave it alone, Will.”

“We can take it to the priest,” I said. “He’ll know what to do with it.”

I could see its dark eyes in the gathering night, seeking mine.

The line between what we are and what we pursue is razor thin. We will remember our humanity.

My soul writhed. I felt as if I were being ground between two great stones.

Dobrogeanu was now at the end of the hall. “Will!” he called softly. “Leave it!”

Biting my lip, I stepped over the child. What could I do? Its suffering had nothing to do with me. It would have been in that cold, stinking hall whether or not I’d been there. So I stepped over it. I turned my back upon it and left it there.

The baby did not cry after me; in its eyes I had recognized the same dull listlessness I’d seen in the wilderness, the way Sergeant Hawk’s eyes had looked the night he’d disappeared, the vacant stare of hunger, the inexpressible ache of desire.

Dobrogeanu commenced banging on the door. The sound jumped and bounced between the close walls; it seemed very loud, as all sounds do in the near dark. We waited, but no one answered. He tried the knob next, and the door opened with a protesting screech.

“Hello?” the old monstrumologist called. “Je někdo doma?” He drew out his revolver.

The Nováková flat was typical of most dismal tenement roosts: walls of cracked and crumbling plaster; a ceiling pockmarked with water stains; a warped floor that groaned in protest with every step. The room was clean, though, and an effort had been made to brighten the dingy walls with cheap prints of bright sunlit landscapes. It was heartbreaking—almost cruel—those fields of daffodils and lilies mocking the squalor around them.

A table and bench ran the length of one wall. Large wicker baskets filled with cut tobacco leaf were lined end to end beneath the table. Here Anezka and her parents had hunched with cramping fingers, rolling cigars that would, by the great machinations of American commerce, end up in the mouths of men such as Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes.

There was only one other room, separated from the first by a ratty sheet, a closet-size sleeping space that was a disaster of wadded clothing and rumpled bedsheets. I spied a doll propped up against the far corner, its bright eyes glittering in the washed-out light filtering through the window behind us.

“Where have they gone?” I whispered.

“To look for her,” Dobrogeanu surmised, but it was as much a question as a statement.

“The rest of the building too?”

He shook his head and turned back. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a lamp that sat upon the table. I understood at once. After I lit the lamp, he said, “We’ll have to search the building. Knock on every door, top to bottom. . . . Either they have fled into this foul weather—and there is only one reason I can think of—or they huddle in terror inside their hovels. Only one way to find out, Will!”

We left the flat. I looked for the baby immediately, but it was gone. The significance of this was not lost on Dobrogeanu. “Someone is here, at least,” he said. He turned toward the fire escape and caught his breath. “Filthy coward!” he softly snarled.

Gravois, like the child in the hall, had vanished.

Dobrogeanu pushed open the fire escape door and stepped outside. He leaned over the rickety railing and squinted down to the courtyard below.

“Useless,” he muttered. “Completely useless!” He shook his head with frustration. “What to do,” he muttered. “What to do?”

From the stairway down the hall came a resounding crash. A moment later we heard the heavy thump-thump-thump of a large object tumbling down the wooden steps. Dobrogeanu yanked his gun from his pocket and hurried as fast as his old legs could carry him to the head of the stairs. I trailed a few steps behind, heartbeat thudding in my ears like a sympathetic echo of that unseen fall. Our light fought against the dark, failing to penetrate but a few feet in the deep gloom. Dobrogeanu laid a hand upon my shoulder.

“Stay here,” he whispered. He pulled the lamp from my hand and proceeded downward toward the third-floor landing. He turned the corner, gun thrust in front of him, his shadow hard-edged as if etched upon the boards, and then I lost sight of him. The glow of the lamp faded.

“Oh, no.” His disembodied voice floated up to me. “Oh, no.”

I followed the light down. Midway to the next landing I discovered Dobrogeanu sprawled on the stairs, his back pressed against the wall, and cradled in his arms the lifeless, broken body of Damien Gravois, his white shirtfront shining with fresh arterial blood, his sanguine face enshrouded by the same soiled swaddling clothes that had wrapped the baby in the hallway. His eyes had been pulled from their sockets; they dangled over his cheeks, still attached to the optic nerves.

“I found him,” Dobrogeanu said. It was an absurdly obvious observation.

He eased the body onto the stairs and pushed himself to his feet, using the wall behind him for support. I grabbed the lamp off the step.

“What do we do?” I whispered, though my voice seemed terribly loud.

“What we are trained to do,” he answered grimly, echoing Torrance. His gray eyes sparked with fire. He yelled down the stairs, “Chanler!” and then he took off, descending with the speed of a man half his age. I caught up to him on the first-floor landing, where he had paused, listening.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

I shook my head. I heard nothing but the sound of our ragged breath and the far-off drip-drip of a water pipe. And then I did hear it, the soft, plaintive crying of an infant. It seemed to be coming from everywhere—and nowhere.

“He has taken the child,” Dobrogeanu whispered. He peered down the stairs leading to the cellar. He wet his lips nervously. He seemed torn. “Down there, do you think?”

We had only minutes to decide. If we chose wrong—if he had taken it instead to the first floor and we chose the other path—the child was doomed. My companion, with his years of experience, seemed paralyzed by indecision.

“We’ll have to split up,” I said. He did not reply. “Sir, are you listening?”

“Yes, yes,” he muttered. “Here,” he pressed Gravois’s pearl-handled pistol into my hand. He nodded toward the blackness beneath us. “You keep the lamp, Will. I should have enough light up here.”

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.