Lowland Rider (18 page)

"No, not if I don't have to, no, no, not at all, no, I don't kill people." Which was a lie. He had.

"You'll be killed," she said flatly, and he wondered if what he had told her had numbed her somehow.

"No. I'm careful." He smiled thinly. "But if I do die," he went on, "it doesn't matter much, does it?"

"Yes, it matters. It matters to me." She put a hand on his arm. "You're a good man, Jesse. What happened to you, to your family, it was awful. But you've let it
bury
you down here. You've done nothing wrong. You can come back up, be who you were before, be Jesse Gordon. You don't have to be this person they're talking about, you don't have to prove anything. . ."

"I'm not trying to prove anything."

"You are . . ."

"I don't want to talk about it, all right? You wanted to ride the Beast, you're riding it." He stared hard at her. "So just enjoy the trip. Ask your questions to the people. But don't ask them to me." He shook his head. "Not yet."

Gladys H. Mitchell stared at the man and listened. It was two in the morning at the Rector Street station of the IRT line, and everything was quiet. The man was drunk, that much she was sure of. She had smelled the whisky on his breath as he walked past her when he came into the stations and he had tottered as he moved. Oh, he was drunk all right. She had seen enough drunken men, rubbed enough of their limp cocks to recognize a drunk when she saw one. He sat down on a bench at the end of the platform, no doubt to wait for his train, or to wait for a train that he thought was his.

This station saw very few trains this time of the night, and the first reason Baggie was here was that no one would chase her away. The second reason was that if no one was there to chase her away, no one would be there to stop her from doing what she had to do to serve Enoch.

"
Enoch
." She whispered his name, and it seemed as though the station, the tunnel, the whole network of lines trembled with the majesty of it. She loved him as she had never loved anything before, not even the days in the sunshine when she was her mother's Sunny girl. For even then, even at that young age, she knew those days would pass away. But Enoch—Enoch would go on and on forever and ever, World Without End, Amen. He would not die, nor would he age, as had she, his worshipper. She knew that he was God.

And she would do what her God had asked her to. She would kill men, she would know what it was like to kill men, as those men had killed her, over and over again, with their great, sharp cocks, their devil's tails whipping her insides, and now she would kill
them
, yes she would, and she would scrape
their
insides now with that knife, that long and shining knife with the button she caressed even now, rubbing her thumb over it, the smoothest thing on earth and under it, but no devil's tail, oh no, not her sweet knife—no, her knife was God's tongue,
that's
what her knife was, and it would sing to her the songs of blood, and she would sing them back to her God, back to Enoch.

The station was quiet. The man was alone, all alone. And for the first time in so many years, perhaps the first time ever, Gladys H. Mitchell felt power.

She stood, and left her bags—actually left them there behind her, something she had not done since she had filled the first one years before—and started to walk toward the drunken man, who sat unaware, his head hanging almost between his knees, moving slowly back and forth like some hairy, ovoid pendulum.

But it was not a pendulum that Gladys H. Mitchell saw. It was something else dangling between the man's thighs, something she had seen too many times between too many thighs, something that her knife, her sweet, holy knife, was made to slash and cut, to let the breeders breed no more.

She would cut off his balls, and offer them to God.

"That big one," she said harshly, seeing only the back of the man's head, covered with coarse hair, swaying back and forth, back and forth, "I'll cut off that
big
one . . ."

She pressed the smooth button and the blade sprang out, the Tongue of God, ready to sing its anthem. She drew closer, raised her arm above her head…

And God's eye shone out of the tunnel, blinding her, God's voice roared against the filthy walls, and the train, God's mailed fist, came thrusting into the tunnel, filling it up from wall-to-wall. The man's head came wavering up at the sound of it, and he saw the woman, the arm, the knife, saw and stared as the train slowed and stopped.

Gladys H. Mitchell fixed him with a glare that sobered him instantly, and he moaned and threw himself away from her, off the end of the bench, falling hard onto the concrete. The doors of the train opened.

And Gladys H. Mitchell stepped on, holding her clean and shining knife.

She continued to glare at the man until the doors shut and the train rattled north toward
Cortlandt
Street. Then she fell onto her knees in the empty car and wailed. "Forgive me, my God, oh, forgive me, my Lord Enoch…" She had not killed the man, and prayed fervently that she was not damned for her cowardice. The train had frightened her. There could have been people on it who would have seen her sacrifice the man, and then she might have been caught, and then she would have been taken up above and locked away. Being locked up would have been bad enough, but crueler still would be her absence from the place where Enoch walked. That was the one thing that she could never bear, now that she had basked in his glory.

"Oh, forgive me. . ." she blubbered for several minutes, before she remembered that in her flight from the Rector Street station, she had left her bags containing everything she owned except her knife. Her first reaction was to plan to get off at the next station and go back. But when she thought about it, she decided that what was in her bags did not matter
any more
. She still had her knife, and she had her love for Enoch, and that was all she needed now.

Nevertheless, she got off at
Cortlandt
Street and rummaged through the garbage cans on the platform until she found a discarded shopping bag and a bit of a hot dog. Putting the meat in the bag, she went down to the end of the platform and waited. In another hour a small rat came up over the edge of the tracks, paused, moved toward the bag, paused, moved, paused, over and over again until it was within a few inches of the open mouth of the bag.

From the time the rat had appeared until the time it stood at the portal was fourteen minutes, but they had been the longest fourteen minutes of Baggie's life. She had begun to sweat copiously when the animal appeared, and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from trembling. When the animal was halfway between the track and the bag, she urinated from excitement, and the smell made the rat take an even longer pause before moving again. By the time it was at the bag, her mouth was filled with blood, and she could contain herself no longer. The animal's eyes were hidden from hers now, and she raised the knife and threw herself downward.

She had not waited long enough. Had she maintained her former patience, she would have caught the animal through its torso. As it was, the knife ripped through the mouth of the bag and glanced off the skull of the startled beast, which had only just begun to put its head inside. It gave a brief, sharp screech, turned, and ran back over the lip of the platform.

Baggie gave a howl of rage and frustration, and flung herself after the fleeing creature, but she was far too slow and too old, tripping and tumbling to the edge, where only a savage effort kept her from falling onto the tracks below. Furious, she lay there, impotently drawing the knife in long scratches over the concrete, thinking over and over again that animals were no longer enough, would never again be enough, thinking how true it was that a single glimpse of heaven made the earth hell forever after.

Jesse Gordon rode and thought and watched. He rode alone most of the time, joining Rags for an occasional ride and a game of chess. But Rags seemed uneasy around him now, as if Jesse were carrying a sign around his neck that begged for trouble.

He met Claudia only once since their trip together on the Beast. She brought him a brown, crew neck sweater that she fished self-consciously from a Barney's bag. "I thought maybe you could use it," she told him. "Those black ones you wear are pretty thin."

He didn't take it when she held it out to him. "I don't need it," he said. "I've got a jacket if I get cold."

"But I bought it just for you . . ."

"Thank you. I appreciate the gesture. But I don't want you to bring me anything."

She smiled and shrugged to hide her embarrassment: "Okay, I'll just keep it. I love men's sweaters anyway. They're so nice and roomy . . ." Later, when she bought a soft pretzel and offered him one, he shook his head. But when she started to throw hers away after eating only half of it, he stopped her. "Wait. I'll eat it."

She looked at him, puzzled. "I just asked if you wanted one and you said no."

"I didn't want you to buy me one," he told her. "But I'll eat what you throw away."

"What's the difference?"

"There's a difference," he said, taking the pretzel from her hand and biting into it.

Claudia gave a little laugh and shook her head. "I don't understand you, Jesse."

He swallowed before he answered. "Maybe you're not supposed to."

They traveled the safer and more comfortable Washington Heights line early on a Sunday morning, and Claudia spoke to and actually got some rational responses from several skells. An older man confessed to her with tears in his eyes that he had been in prison for twenty years, and when he had been released he had found that the world had changed so much that he didn't know how to live in it anymore, and had gone below into the tunnels, where he had remained for the past four years.

Another
skell
, a woman, told Claudia that she had come down below because she hated the sun. When Claudia asked her why, she answered that the sun had killed her child and made her blind. Claudia remarked that the woman did not seem blind, but the woman answered very calmly that no matter what things seemed, she was indeed blind, even though she could see Claudia and everything else in the subway car. When Claudia asked how the sun had killed her child, the woman said that it had given her daughter cancer and sucked her life away. Skin cancer? Claudia asked, but the woman said no, that it was deeper than that, and then very politely excused herself and walked into the next car.

Jesse had no idea if what Claudia was getting from these bizarre conversations was useful to her, but when they parted, with plans to meet two weeks later, she hugged her notepad to her chest like a purse filled with money. Only once had she mentioned his vigilantism, but when he made it clear that he would not talk about it, she did not speak of it again.

Now he rode on the Sixth Avenue IND on a hot Tuesday afternoon, watching the people sitting across from him—a young and expressionless Puerto Rican couple holding hands, two older white men in business suits, a black man wearing a jogging suit and a Walkman. The door to the car ahead opened, and Bob Montcalm walked in.

Jesse knew it was him immediately, though he wore no uniform and displayed no badge of office. Rags had described him often enough, and there was no mistaking the air of propriety that accompanied the man as he moved through the car with the rough grace that came from years of riding. He walked as though he owned the car, and so, Jesse thought, he did. He was the power here. Others may have had guns and knives, and prowled through the tunnels in numbers, but Bob Montcalm was the power.

He stopped beside Jesse, who looked up at his fissured face under the thinning hair. Montcalm was not a tall man, but to Jesse he looked big and burly, like a man used to fighting, and Jesse was reminded of his own comparatively short time underground. He wondered for a moment if he could beat this Montcalm in a fight, and knew in a flash of self-realization that he could, and easily. Montcalm had the bulk, but Jesse had the will.

"Mind if I sit down?" Montcalm asked, nodding to the seat beside Jesse.

Jesse slowly looked around the car. "There are lots of other seats. You sure you want to sit beside me?"

Montcalm nodded. "Yeah. Even though you stink a little." That was a lie, something to get under Jesse's skin, which he had washed thoroughly not less than three hours before in the 49th Street station men's room.

"Sit down then," Jesse said.

Montcalm sat, leaving a foot of space between them. Jesse noticed that Montcalm was looking him up and down, but the visual frisk didn't last long—it was obvious that there was no room in Jesse's T-shirt for a weapon, and the pockets of the jeans were snug against his thighs. Montcalm sat back and sighed, then gave a twisted smile of exasperation. "You've been causing me trouble."

Jesse didn't answer right away. He only sat and watched the man, noticing how the lines around the eyes twitched, while the rest of the face struggled to hold steady, look firm. The man was close to rage. "I don't know how," Jesse said finally.

"You been getting into things that don't concern you."

"How do you know that? How do you even know who I am?"

Montcalm nodded shortly. "I know who you are.”

“What's my name?"

"I don't know your name. But I know who you are."