Personal Effects: Dark Art

22

We scrabbled down the concrete front steps of our building into a world of darkness. Every light bulb on this block of Avenue B was dead. People around us yelled and cursed with frustration. The sound-scape of the city played kick-drum backbeat to our high, ragged breathing. The wind howled.

Lucas was gasping, his limber knees bent, his pose feral. Rachael’s eyes burned bright with confusion. I was sweating, bone cold, paralyzed by panic and fright and a sudden certainty that’d I’d been wrong all along, that the thing was here, alive, snaking around us, constricting.

“What the hell’s going on, Z?” Rachael screamed. “What’s happening?”

“Blackout,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Oh yes, you do. Tell the bitch she’s been damned, that she’ll be devoured, that you did it, Zach, you killed her just like you killed Emilio, cursssed cursss—

“LOOK!” Lucas wailed.

He pointed north. Far beyond our block—and the darkened block beyond that—was East 14th Street. Blue and red strobes flashed on the horizon, from its major intersection.

“Dad’s accident!”

“Luc, you don’t know th—”

But he took off at full speed, not listening. The door of Seventh City Comics, a ground-floor shop in our neighboring building, swung open. Blake Lafferty, Seventh City’s owner, dashed onto the sidewalk, swearing at the blackout. Lucas was nearly on him, about to plow into—

Lucas leaped sideways, his body soaring parallel to the ground. His hands slapped onto the metal light pole by the curb, and his body tucked into a ball, sneakers screaming toward the pole. Their treads slammed into the metal—bong!—and he shoved off at an angle, flying past Blake like an agile tree monkey. Lucas somersaulted on the sidewalk, found his footing and tore off north again, toward the intersection.

This all happened in the span of an eye blink.

“Come on!” I yelled to Rachael.

We followed him, shouldering past a wide-eyed Blake.

Lucas was an urban kangaroo. He bounded, rolled and slid past pedestrians, every footfall a close call, every leap reckless and magnificent. The world was his Autobahn, his junglegym. Store awning supports became monkey bars. Fire hydrants, rocket launch pads.

We ran and ran, screaming his name.

My brother did not see the shopping cart until it was too late. The homeless man’s cart, overflowing with cans and clothes, rattled directly into Lucas’ path—and from my vantage point a quarter-block away, I thought he was done. But Lucas pushed further, faster and dove… forward.

Again, his hands slapped home first, gripping the top edge of the metal basket… and in an instant—stretched thin like taffy—his arms took over, wrenching his torso skyward. My eyes freeze-framed him there, a Central Park handstander, a Cirque de Soleil performer… and then his momentum propelled him forward, and his hands were free. His body backflipped, feet smacking safely onto the concrete.

But he tumbled. He smashed into a cluster of strutting boys, none of them a day over seventeen. They toppled like tenpins, howling. Lucas was up now by the street curb, patting the boys, manically barking “dookle, sorry man, dookle, sorry, real sorry.” One of them shoved him. Lucas flopped into the arms of another boy. This one punched him in the face.

My brother reeled, snatching at a third boy. He grabbed the kid’s jacket and—in a blurred miracle maneuver—performed a simultaneous foot-sweep and toss. The kid blasted into the puncher, and they went down again.

The first kid pulled a gun.

“Fuckin’ cap you, yo!”

I barely heard the gunshots over my screams.

Either Lucas was fast, or the kid had lousy aim. The three bullets went wild, one of them splintering a store window across the street. And that’s where Lucas was bolting now, into traffic, away from the danger, still heading toward East 14th. His body made a graceful slide across a car’s hood, like a ‘70s cop-show hero.

The world around us plummeted into pandemonium. Bystanders ran from the gunfire, others dropped to the pavement. Still others rushed toward storefront doors, bottlenecking the entrances. The block had gone raving mad.

“Coincidence!” Rachael yelled as we ran. Her voice was raw, manic.

“What?”

We were in the street now, dashing alongside the cars, questing for a gap in which to cross.

“Rationally explainable,” she gasped. “The pictures, timing—yes—timing, all bad timing, the call, blackout, call on the phone, call from a dead person, not dead, battery’s bad, transistors going, we saw that earlier, bad screen, cracked case, number belongs to someone elll—”

She stumbled and spun, her body flailing into the street. My goddess’ magenta hair glowed neon. Her glasses glittered like a mirror ball.

Headlights.

“NO!” I bellowed.

I leapt beside her, snatched at her arm. The tires screamed.

The car’s grille stopped inches from her face.

I pulled her up and we crossed the remainder of Avenue B, still tracking Lucas, ignoring the verbal diarrhea spewing from the terrified driver’s mouth.

Tracking. Hunting.

Oh yes, I thought. Drake was right. It’s here. It’s real. We’re all being hunted now.

We finally arrived at the intersection of B and East 14th. I was reeling on an adrenaline high, wheezing, legs burning. Rachael gasped beside me, her face pale and sweaty.

The cityscape here was soaked by the strobes of a police cruiser, stopped in the center of the intersection. The Crown Vic’s rear bumper was a crushed, mangled mess. Behind the cruiser was a black BMW, its hood crumpled. Smoke billowed from beneath the steel.

Lucas stood by the Beamer. He’d been right. Dad was there, pressing a handkerchief against his bleeding nose. The cop was gone; I figured he’d responded to the gunfire.

“You’re okay,” Dad said as he saw me approach. He sidestepped Lucas and strode toward me. “Thank God. Now do you believe me? What I said about Grace?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “I’m just glad—”

“You’re going to tonight, young man.” He threw the handkerchief onto the asphalt. “This gets settled tonight.”

“Pop,” Lucas said, “he doesn’t want t0—”

“Shush, goddamnit,” he snapped. Lucas flinched. Dad’s eyes returned to mine. “You can undermine me all you want, Zachary, and I can live with that. But you’ve undermined my case. The media is circling like sharks now over this so-called ‘conflict of interest.’ I’m the victim here. You’re the perp. Why couldn’t you just drop this? Taylor Family Loyalty, son. Thicker than water, thicker than profession—we always tell each other the tru—”

I wanted to punch him in the face.

“You’re a fucking hypocrite, Dad,” I said. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

I turned around and walked away.

As Rachael, Lucas, and I walked the East Village streets in silence, a war raged in my brain.

The rational and irrational sides of my mind screamed at each other, one-upping each other in vitriolic arguments and counter-arguments. This is textbook paranoia, my Spock-side said. When the mind looks for patterns, it finds them. The Dark Man is a delusion; it’s always been. The emotional side of me—the part that powered my sketches, that spoke through my art—insisted that an unholy thing was set to feast on my friends and me.

Unprovable, Spock said.

That’s what the atheists say, came the reply, but God’s still up there.

I smirked, nodding at this. I was quoting Henry, my uncle-who-never-was. Henry had been put away for a crime he said he didn’t commit—a crime my heart didn’t believe he could commit. Twenty years ago, the Dark Man had been paid, paid in blood, and had destroyed my family in the name of vengeance.

Vengeance for what, I did not know. But I knew it was back. I’d sensed and seen enough today to finally understand that.

And I knew, with steel-bladed certainty, that I wouldn’t let that fucker harm my family.

You’ll find the path, Uncle Henry had said. Or the path will find you.

Oh, yes. In this eclipsed world, the path blazed bright.

I strode between them, my hands in my pockets, wincing at the wind.

“We have to talk about this,” Rachael said. “Make sense of what happened tonight. Explain it. We have to understand those photos, and that effed-up phone call. Coincidence. Timing, bad timing…”

I wrapped my arm around her waist. I think I loved her more right then than I ever had. There was Rachael, her purest essence bared on a Manhattan street corner: my better half, the brains of our operation, looking for answers.

“You’re right,” I replied.

Lucas glanced up from the sidewalk.

“Dude, there’s no way I’m going back to your apartment.”

I threw my other arm around his shoulder, drawing him close. What happened at the apartment had been terrifying… but for Lucas, I think our father’s actions had somehow been worse.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “You guys head on over to Stovie’s. It’s a few blocks away and I bet the power’s on over there. I’ll go get Drake’s map and cell and meet you there. We’ll talk over burgers and brews, sort it all out.”

My brother’s face brightened. I grinned back at his thousand-watt smile.

Rachael nudged me.

“Z. Babe. What about the dark?”

I looked into her eyes. The wind gusted, again.

“We all have to face our fears at some point,” I said, and kissed her.

Autumnal leaves swirled around us, skittering against the sidewalk.

Tktktk.

The kitchen match scorched to life in my fingers as I stood in the front doorway. Our living room flared in a dance of amber and shadow. I picked up the nearby scented candle and lit it. The thing flickered feebly, beating back the black.

I made quick work here, harried by the surroundings.

Drake’s bizarre mural map went into my back jeans pocket. I slid his cell phone and the rest of the personal effects into my canvas satchel. The Brinkvale files went in, too. I thought of where I was headed and considered liberating Lucas’ pen flashlight from his backpack. Instead, I retrieved our stocky Maglite from the kitchen tool drawer.

I scooped up my pencil and small Moleskine sketchpad from the steamer trunk. I tore out a page, placed the pad in my bag.

There. Nearly ready now.

I stopped at the end table by the front door, bending low to write my note by candlelight. They’d hate me for this, and I loved them for that.

I blew out the candle, locking the door as I left.