The Light at the End (10 page)

“
The other side.
” Rudy’s face, as he said it, was a terrible thing to behold. “The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, my friend: a place beyond your wildest dreams.”

“I think I’d like to take you there.”

Rudy reached over to take Stephen’s arm. His hand was extremely cold.

Suddenly, the train began to slow down drastically. Without realizing it, they had gone all the way down to West 4
^th
Street. Rudy looked up, startled, and his hold on Stephen was broken.

Stephen snapped back into ordinary awareness. All at once, the sweat welled up from his pores and soaked him in tingling dampness. A sharp breath escaped him, and he cringed from Rudy like a beaten puppy, eyes wide and full of terror.

“Omigod,” he croaked. “Omigod, Rudy, I…”

Rudy whirled back around, lips curled in annoyance. He started to say something.

And then things started happening very quickly.

The train stopped. The doors opened. Next to the doors, directly across from Rudy and Stephen, a young couple was seated in nervous silence, watching the whole thing. The girl had an ornate, woven gold chain around her neck.

A large, muscular youth stepped up to the doorway. He took one look at the girl’s necklace and, without hesitation, reached down and tore it from around her neck. She screamed.

“Hey!” her boyfriend yelled, half-rising out of his seat. Again without hesitation, the chain-snatcher smoothly drove one fist into the boyfriend’s nose. There was a loud snapping sound, and the kid went flying back into his seat, blood flowing from his nostrils. The thief ran quickly out the door.

“Oh, holy Christ!” the boyfriend hollered, leaning forward into his cupped handful of blood. With his free hand, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, which he promptly applied to his nose. By now, everybody in the car was watching the action.

But Rudy was leaning forward, red eyes wide and glazing over. His mouth opened a crack, and his tongue flicked out across the trembling lips. The air around him crackled like a static charge. His whole body shuddered, and he let out an unearthly moan.

Then, without warning, he surged out of his seat and grabbed the boyfriend’s bloody hands. There was a brief, insane struggle. The girl screamed again. And again. And again.

“
RUDY!
” Stephen shrieked, his hands pulling down at the sides of his face, mouth and eyes locked in a rictus of stunned horror.

Rudy spun around, yanking free of the boyfriend. He had the bloody handkerchief in his hands. As if to stifle a scream of his own, he touched it to his lips and started backing toward the door, his expression twisted into something beyond rage, beyond madness, beyond any conceivable human emotion.

He was directly in the center of the doorway when the doors slammed shut, pinning him from either side. He screamed like an animal and struggled against them. They recoiled for a second, as if in pain, then closed on him again. Rudy writhed and flailed and twisted until he finally broke free.

The doors slid shut.

And Rudy disappeared into the West 4
^th
Street station, leaving a carload of people behind him in stunned, astonished silence.

“Oh, shit,” moaned the boyfriend, as he and his girlfriend collapsed into each other’s arms and began to cry.

Stephen just stared at them. He stared at the blood on the floor. The train lurched into motion, and he stared at the pillars as they drifted slowly by like clouds on a windy day. He stared at his hands, shaking uncontrollably and knotting together like two awkwardly mating spiders.

Faintly, as if from a distance, the tiny voice of reason informed him that he was losing his mind.

Then a hand reached down to touch him on the shoulder. He looked up blearily into the face of the enormous shaggy man who had frightened him way back at 42
^nd
Street, when fear had a different, lesser meaning. The man said something. Stephen had no idea what it was.

The man shook him then, and Stephen’s mind began to clear. He heard the words, “I said, did you
know
that guy?” And, like a movement made in a dream, he felt himself nodding
yes
.

“At the next stop,” the man said, and this time Stephen heard him clearly, “we’re gonna get off and go for a little drink. And you’re going to tell me everything you know about him. Okay?”

“Okay,” Stephen said, as the tears started to trickle down the sides of his face.

Joseph Hunter nodded, squeezed Stephen’s shoulder in a gesture of almost fatherly reassurance, and then turned to stare out the window into the tunnels of forever night.

The West 4
^th
Street station is a sprawling, multi-leveled subterranean structure of reinforced concrete and steel. At its deepest point, a good 60 feet below street level, run the trains of the 6
^th
Avenue line: the D, the B, the F, and the JFK Express. On the top level, perhaps only twenty feet from the outside world, the 8
^th
Avenue line veers over to the west, consisting of the A, AA, CC, and E trains. Both of these platforms are brightly lit, as are most subway stations; both are reasonably well-populated at all hours of the day and night.

Sandwiched between them is yet a third level, continuously rumbling from the tracks above and below it but bearing no rails of its own. It is neither well-lit nor populous; rather, it has the appearance of an empty warehouse, lined symmetrically with massive steel girders and periodic staircases on either side which, when standing at any point near the center, give it the appearance of infinite length, the far ends disappearing into darkness.

It is an ominous place, reeking of mildew and at least a decades worth of wino piss. It is not the kind of place where anyone would care to linger, unless they were a bum seeking shelter from the elements, or a mugger waiting to drag some innocent into those boundless crosshatchings of shadow. Most people… most sane people… pass through this level with wrinkled noses, a sort of nightmare apprehension, and as much speed as they can muster.

It would not be a good place to die.

Deep in the shadows, next to a pile of human feces rendered odorless by time, Rudy Pasko leaned against a moist, grimy wall and played nervously with his hair, twirling and twisting it around one pale, bony finger. The bloody handkerchief sat like a lump at his feet, caked with dirt and saliva, discarded like an empty granola bar wrapper.

It was a snack, that’s all: a little something to tide him over. He had snatched at it impulsively, like a kid passing by a candy store. He had fought over it like a dog vying for a bone, a pigeon desperately grappling for an old crust of bread.

And that was all it was, actually: a scrap tossed by Fate to make him crazy for a moment and further whet his appetite. It bothered him now that he’d gone for it so automatically, so instinctively… that the sight and smell of so little blood could make him lose control.

More than that, however, he was worried about Stephen. He could have kicked himself for talking so much, flexing his new muscles like that. It would have been just as easy to lure him somewhere, out of the simplest of pretexts…
let’s go have a drink, Stephen, you wouldn’t believe what kind of week it’s been
… and laid it all on him after the fact.

How much does he know?
Rudy asked himself, still twiddling absently with his hair.
How much did I tell him?
It angered him that his concentration was so scattered. Even now, less than ten minutes later, he could barely remember what he’d said.

The last several days had been, for Rudy, like an endless and incredibly potent acid trip. The same kind of insane sensory clarity. The same surreal disorientation. The same flood of images so powerful that they took on the aspect of Visions From God. And though he found the idea of God and the Devil laughable, he couldn’t deny that the visions seemed to be coming from somewhere higher, or lower, than himself.

Rudy pulled away from the wall and stood in the middle of the vast second landing. To his sight, the shadows seemed to be crawling with a power and a life of their own, like blind protozoa slithering across the face of all earthly creation, invisible to the ordinary naked eye.

Maybe it is alive
, he thought, chuckling quietly to himself.
Maybe the darkness does have a life of its own
. It made sense, suddenly. It made complete and utter sense. It moved from the realm of ideas to the domain of absolute certainty: another vision.

It served to explain his own strange new existence.

Rudy giggled aloud. It echoed off the naked walls, ghostlike as it bounced back into his ears. He grinned, entertained. It was all he could do to keep from howling like a wolf, filling the air with riotous sound. But that would bring the transit cops running, and force an unnecessary encounter that could blow his cover to smithereens.

“No,” he whispered to himself, no longer giggling. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later.” Smiling faintly, wickedly. “All the time in the world.”

Rudy Pasko listened to the thunder of a train overhead. He looked up, drawn by the power of it. Slowly, the sound of his footsteps drowned by the echoing roar from above, he moved toward the nearest flight of stairs. Slowly, he ascended them.

It would have been fun to ride the trains again tonight; the subways had always fascinated him, though never so much as in the last several days. But the newspapers he’d found abandoned in the stations, and his own recent encounter with Stephen and the bloody nosed boy, led him to believe that the streets would be far safer. The night was young, and the Village would be teeming with life at this hour.

Hot-blooded life.

Just waiting for his kiss.

Besides
, he thought,
there’s still the matter of Stephen. I’ll have to get to him soon, before he puts two and two together. Not that that’ll happen any time soon. Stephen’s such a schmuck. He’s probably shaking in his shoes right now, taking a couple Darvons from his asshole psychiatrist and sitting at his stupid typewriter.

Rudy laughed, thinking about Stephen. What a wimp. What a spineless little jellyfish: afraid of life, afraid of death, afraid of sex, afraid of his own goddamn shadow. Rudy knew that Stephen wanted to get it on with him; he’d been playing with that for a long time, teasing Stephen subliminally with it, though the idea of actually bedding down with Stephen didn’t interest him at all. It would be too easy, like seducing a twelve-year-old girl. It would be boring. No challenge. No risk.

But he has uses
, Rudy added, reaching the top of the stairs and moving toward the ramp that led to West 4
^th
Street and the great outdoors.
I like his parents’ money. And who knows? He might make an excellent slave.

The AA train rumbled away from the platform, covering the sound of his private laughter as he proceeded, shrugging his way past small clusters of people who completely failed to interest him. He looked up for a moment, and noticed a transit cop who was eyeing him strangely.

Fuck you, prick
, Rudy thought, averting his gaze and continuing on his way. He felt the same kind of insolent paranoia that he used to feel while dealing drugs: an irrational, overwhelming distrust of anyone who looked at him askance, coupled with the desire to lash out and smash those prying eyes back into their sockets.

Rudy continued to walk, containing his fear and anger. He felt the cop’s eyes burning into him from behind. He kept walking. Not until he reached the ramp and began to climb it did he turn around to look; when he saw that the cop was still staring, but had not budged an inch, Rudy laughed and nodded as if to say
yeah, clown, you just stare all you want
.

Then he turned, his white lips pulled taut in an unpleasant, vindictive smirk. Ahead of him lay the turnstiles, the token booth, and the stairways leading up into the night.

“I’m coming, Stephen,” he said, in a singsong. “I’m coming for you now.”

“But first, I’ll grab a little something to eat. Just a bite,” he added, chuckling and running his tongue along the sharp incisors that were growing out quite nicely. “Because,
God
, am I hungry!”

And with that, he proceeded again toward the stairs and the first moon that he’d seen since the night that he died.

“In here,” Joseph said, a bit impatiently. “Let’s go.” He was practically dragging Stephen along behind.

As the shock began to wear off, and the original fear loomed up again, Stephen had become more and more reluctant to talk. Joseph had tried to be understanding for a while, as calmly persuasive as he had ever been in his life, but this was the end of the line.

“No, I don’t think…” Stephen droned, his eyes wide and timorous, pulling slightly against Joseph’s grip on his wrist.

“
Now
,” Joseph said, yanking him forward with one hand, pushing open the door of the Blarney Stone pub with the other.

As the door slammed open, a number of old men looked up from their mugs and shots, eyes full of drunken disinterest. Two young couples in a booth near the back laughed boisterously, unaware of anything in the spinning universe but themselves. The bartender, a great burly Irishman with twinkling green eyes and massive sideburns, nodded and grinned at Joseph and Stephen, while cars collided noisily and exploded on the TV above his head.

Joseph nodded back, not smiling. “Two pitchers of Bud,” he shouted over the noise from the tube, the laughing hyenas in the rear booth. The bartender made the A-OK sign with the fingers of his left hand and pulled two pitchers off the shelf with his right. Joseph turned back to Stephen, pointed at a table near the door, and said, “Lets sit here.”

“Wuh… we don’t really need two pitchers,” Stephen said, allowing himself to be led to the table.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll probably drink most of it myself. You just have what you want.” Joseph pulled out a chair for Stephen, then crossed to the other side of the table and seated himself with a small grunt of weariness. “Sit down,” he said.

Stephen sat. They looked at each other for a moment, then away; their minds were racing. The silence went on for nearly two minutes. Then a waitress emerged from the ladies’ room, saw the bartender point at the two pitchers and the new arrivals, nodded tersely, and went to bring them their drinks.

“How ya doin’, Joe?” she asked, setting down the beer and empty mugs. He shrugged, digging in his pocket for a ten spot. “Who’s your friend?” she inquired further, looking from Stephen to Joseph and back again.

“Uh… Stephen,” said the smaller man, trying hard to smile warmly. “Stephen Parrish. How do you do?”

“Alright,” she answered, flashing a glance at Joseph that said
what’s with the gimp?
He laughed and handed her the money.

“Keep the change, Rita,” he said quietly. “Thanks.”

Rita smiled, tucked the money coyly into her blouse, and sashayed back over to the bar. Stephen watched her move, more than casually drawn by the swivel of her hips. Joseph disinterestedly filled his mug.

“Are you a regular here?” Stephen asked.

“I’m a regular almost everywhere,” Joseph answered, taking a long swig. He all but drained the mug, filled it up again, and set the pitcher down in front of Stephen. “Here. Have some.”

Stephen nodded, saying, “Thanks,” so quietly that even
he
couldn’t hear it, and poured himself a mugful. He took a tiny sip, smacked his lips, and then took something close to a healthy swig. “Ah, that’s good,” he said, setting down the mug and looking at Joseph.

Joseph stared back coldly.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Okay, man,” Joseph said finally. “Stephen, right?” Stephen nodded numbly. “Okay, Stephen. I want you to tell me about that guy you ran into on the train. Like, for starters, what’s his name?”

Stephen hesitated. A mad thought flickered through the back of his mind. Then he cleared his throat and said, as calmly as he could, ‘‘Uh… Bruce.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, seriously! His name is Bruce…”

“Then why’d you call him Rudy?”

“His name is
Bruce Rudy
!” Stephen yelled, aware of how absurd it sounded, how obvious a fabrication it was. And in the back of his mind, he was wondering
why am I saying this?
But he didn’t have an answer.

“BULLSHIT!” Joseph shouted back, slamming his mug on the table for emphasis. In the space of a second, his right hand shot across the table to grab Stephen by the lapel and yank him forward.

“Now you listen to me,” Joseph hissed, his face very close to Stephen’s. “If you talk to me straight, you can go home to Mommy in less than an hour if you want to, or you can sit here and drink all night for free. But if you feed me this kind of crap, I’m going to snap your scrawny little neck in two. You got me? I’m going to twist your miserable head off if you don’t tell me what I need to know. Alright?”

Stephen nodded rapidly, eyes bulging, unable to speak. Joseph held him there a moment longer than he needed to, getting a sort of cruel enjoyment out of it: and it occurred to him that he didn’t much like this Stephen kid, the way he whimpered and stuttered and talked out his ass. He was kind of pathetic.

But he’s the only lead I have
, Joseph mused, letting go of the kid’s collar.

Joseph thought back to the subway platform, to the oddly gripping sensation he felt when he first picked Rudy out of the crowd; there was something profoundly
wrong
with the spiky-headed little bastard, something that transcended fashion, or politics, or personality. It rolled off him in waves. Even blitzed, even from a distance, he’d felt it. And this sniveling collegiate twerp was his bestest friend. Stephen would tell him what he needed to know—or else.

Stephen slumped back in his chair, shaking and shivering. He reached for his beer and took a sloppy swig of it, getting his face wet. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. He brought a hand up nervously to wipe it all away, then snuffled and stared at the table.

“Let’s try it again,” Joseph said, no emotion in his voice. “What’s his name?”

“Rudy.” Stephen’s voice was wobbly, weak. “Rudy Pasko. He’s an artist.”

“He’s an artist,” Joseph repeated, musing. “I bet he’s just the greatest. Where does he live?”

“I… I don’t know…”

“Now,
listen
…”

“I DON’T KNOW!” Stephen screamed, collapsing face-first onto the table and sobbing hysterically. Joseph turned and looked at the other people in the bar. They were all staring now.
I’ll let it go for now
, he decided, even though he knew that Stephen was lying.