Dust City (16 page)

“No!” the boy cries. “I’m frightened!”

“Why? Why are you frightened?”

The boy’s nearly in tears. “There’s a wolf,” he says quietly. “There’s a wolf here. I saw him. A wolf.”

The word stings me, but I understand. Sometimes it’s easy to forget what you look like to the rest of the world. Sometimes you need a child to remind you.

The woman clutches the boy and looks at me with sad, apologetic eyes. “Tell you what,” she whispers to her brother. “If you let me put you down and you have a nice visit with Papa, then I promise to chase the wolf away. Does that sound okay?”

The boy nods, and is promptly plunked down on the bed beside his father.

Out in the cluttered corridor, the woman thanks me. “You can go now,” she says.

But I can’t leave yet. “What happened to him?”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“I’d like to know.”

Without meeting my eyes, the woman tells me. “His mother died when he was born, and Papa remarried—that was my mother. But somehow, after marrying Papa, my mother became a madwoman. Something changed in her, I don’t know what, but she was suddenly filled with an all-consuming jealousy. She envied the boy, you see, the attention my father doted upon him. And so—” The woman’s voice catches in her throat. “So my mother killed him. She used that chest in there to do it, slammed it down on his tiny neck until he was dead, until his head was severed from his body. And worse, she tried to make me believe it was my fault, that I had caused it. She convinced me that I’d go to prison, that I’d be punished, and so I helped her.” The woman covers her mouth, remembering. “To hide the crime, my mother led me as we cut up his body and boiled the flesh. We buried the bones in the yard.”

“You could have told the police.”

The woman nods. “When I was old enough, I thought of that. But by then, my mother was gone. She had already died herself, you see.”

I don’t know what else to say, so I let the woman speak for me.

“You read about these things in the paper all the time. It’s horrible, the things people do.” The woman’s eyes are welling up, full of regret and sadness. “I swear, there’s something very
rotten
at the heart of this city.”

Rotten. Maybe so. The woman’s story reminds me of my father, of what he told me in the East Pen, how dust could cause a murderous shift in character. It also reminds me of what Jerry told me. That dust could go either way, good or bad.

“If you don’t mind my asking, was your mother a user?”

“Dust?” The woman asks. “Of course. Who isn’t? It’s not so bad, really. In moderation. Look what it did for my father’s boy.”

“It brought him back. But I need to know something. Is it permanent?”

The woman puts her hand on the closed bedroom door. “Papa doesn’t believe in a life after this one. I told him they’d be together soon, but he’s not a believer. So we saved and saved for this.” She looks at me. “To buy your nixiedust. The man I spoke to—a dwarf with a terrible face—he promised it would last. He said it was fairy magic.”

“He said that?”

She nods. “He promised Papa would have his boy back for as long as he wanted.”

The woman’s brow furrows. There’s a soft knock on the door. It’s coming from inside the room. She pulls the door open and there’s the boy.

“Something’s wrong with Papa,” he says.

The woman rushes to the bed, kneeling beside her father—who lies dead and still beneath the blankets.

Meanwhile, the little boy is frozen in the doorway, staring up at me in fearful wonder. The darkness of his eyes appears to be seeping into the rest of his face. Gray circles begin to pool in his cheeks. Then, slowly, a deep red bruise spreads across his throat.

“My neck hurts,” he whispers.

The woman looks up from the bed, coming to comfort the child, but already I can see what’s happening. Skinner lied to her. The effects of the dust are wearing off. He’s beginning to decay, beginning to return to the dead.

“It
hurts,”
he says, louder this time, tears in his eyes.

The woman kneels in front of him, hugging and squeezing, hoping her embrace can keep him alive. But the boy screams in pain, which makes her hold him even tighter. Too tightly, in fact, because the body is coming apart, the solidness of the boy’s pale skin is beginning to shred. The pressure of the woman’s embrace is all too much and the boy screams—
“Papa!”
—as his head is once more wrenched from
his shoulders. It thumps on the bedroom floor, and yet still the boy’s mouth is open wide, wailing in pain.

The woman turns her despair at me now. “Get out!” she shrieks, clutching the tiny, dissolving body. “You
beast!
Look what you’ve done! This isn’t fairy magic! It’s rotten! It’s
evil!”

So I run. I run out to where Tom is waiting, racing past him without any answer to his questions, galloping down the alleyway, leading him back into the echoing safety of the tunnels.

26

SUNLIGHT AND FILTH

DAWN IS ON ITS WAY. SPORADIC SHAFTS OF EARLY MORNING LIGHT CUT
through the grates above us. We’re going as fast as possible—at least without tripping over the loose stones or killing ourselves by falling over an edge. The passages, the gratings, the pockmarked walls, the unforgiving ceilings, the vicious inclines, the slim bridges over rancid waters—they all flash past like half-asleep dreams.

But none of it fazes me. All I can see in my mind is that resurrected boy. Is that what my father meant about bringing Mom back? It can’t be, because that woman back there was right. It’s an
evil
kind of magic—dark, fleeting, morbid. Maybe that woman was right about something else, too. At the heart this city, something’s rotten.

Suddenly, Tom stops and I nearly slam flat into his haunches. “Wait,” he says. He flicks his flashlight on, blinding me. “Hold this.” He hands the flashlight to me as he flips the map open.

“What are you doing?”

“I figured out a shortcut.” He points to the map, where the reservoir is marked off as a cloud of black. His claw traces the border with Dockside. “If we go left up here and cut under the cemetery, we can bypass all of this.”

It makes sense for about a second, until I see it’s one of the red tunnels. “We’re not supposed to go down there,” I tell him. “Besides, it’s a dead end.”

Tom squints. “Prob’ly a typo.”

“It’s a
secret map
. Who makes a typo on a—”

He snaps it closed. “I listened to you back there, and you made us late. So now we’re gonna do things my way. C’mon!” He takes off and I’ve got no choice but to bound after him. This tunnel is larger than the others, which allows us to really get our speed up. The padding of our feet and the raggedness of our breath echo everywhere. Then, suddenly, the echoes get louder. We slow down.

“I
told
you,” I say, but without satisfaction. A vast black wall looms up ahead of us. It’s a dead end.

“God
damn
it!” Tom slaps the rock face. He turns to me, his dark hair melding with the blackness of the wall. All I can see is the dim glow of his eyes and his bared teeth.
“You
did this.” He takes a step forward. “All you wanna do is give folks a helping hand. But that’s
not our job.”

“Don’t you get it? That’s why she asked for someone big, like me. She needed someone who could—”

“Shut up.” He says it quietly, twisting the words into something sinister. “It oughta be my cousin standing where
you are right now. He’s fast, even faster than me.” He takes another step. “But Zeb didn’t make it, did he? Instead I’m stuck with you. And because of that
we’re late.”
Another step. “Bet you don’t even know what Skinner does to latecomers.” Another step. “Which means now I gotta come up with a story, see?”

I’m bracing myself for a fight. But I can hardly see him.

“How’s this? Newbie trips and falls off a ledge. I try to save him, but I can’t and that’s why I’m late. All I could do was watch him get swept off, slapping and howling on a river of shit.” He smiles broadly, a white slash hovering in the air like a crescent moon. I can sense him about to lunge when he stops. The grin vanishes, and I know why.

I can smell it.

A mixed-up scent fills the chamber, something like sunlight and filth, burning hair and melted rubber, still water and rotting flesh.

“You smell that?”

“I think I’ve smelled this once before.”

“What is it?”

“I didn’t stick around to find out.”

Tom points at me. “This ain’t over,” he says quietly. “But, uh . . . maybe we oughta head back to the other tunnels.”

So we do, loping warily back the way we came. But the mixed-up scent whirls and spins all around us.

“It’s moving,” he whispers.

“I know.”

“Keep going,” he says. “We passed an alcove back there with a slope to it. It’ll head back to the surface. I don’t care who sees us.”

One more step and something huge and dark comes out of the very alcove we’re trying to get to.

Tom leaps backward, tripping over his legs.
“Run!”

We both backpedal toward the rock face. Tom pants with fear. “What is that thing?”

It roars, the sound echoing off the walls. It’s enough to flatten us against the stone.

“Gotta get around it,” says Tom.

“It’s too big.”

Could it really be a giant? Surely, it’d never come down here, and the shape of it—it doesn’t seem right. I can’t tell where it starts and where it ends. How do you get around a thing like that?

The roaring stops. It’s sniffing the air. It’s coming for us.

Tom sets out to run, but I grab him. “Wait,” I say. “Not yet. Wait’til it lunges.”

“Are you insane?”

“That’s how we’ll get around it,” I whisper.

The creature swings its shadowy head at us and rushes forward. Tom and I dart away from each other, sprinting along the wall. The creature’s body slams into the rock. It howls a shriek of frustration. The whole chamber quakes as though it’s made of nothing but pressboard.

Then it gets worse. The whole cave starts crumbling.
Chunks of rubble fall from the ceiling. It’s even harder to see than before. But my plan worked. We got around the thing. We’re on the far side, running blind through a shower of falling rocks. But it’s still back there, still wailing, still coming for us.

“Gotta get outta here!” Tom barks at me.

We meet up again in the middle of the chamber, galloping back the way we came. I glance over my shoulder. It’s still following us, booming forward in a kind of grotesque hobble, moaning and roaring.

“There,” says Tom. He veers left and the chamber narrows, sloping upward. Ahead of us there’re a few stripes of dim light coming through a drain. “As soon as we get—” He yelps when a large stone thumps down on his back. I, on the other hand, keep going.

But then I stop. I don’t know why, but I do. Maybe it’s because of what I did to Roy. I can’t let that happen again, so I turn back for a wolf who was just trying to kill me—for the second time. He’s lying dazed on the ground. A line of light from the grating above cuts him squarely in two.

“Henry,” he whimpers.

“I’m coming.”

Then, out of the darkness beyond, comes a hand—a black, cloven claw, like the forehoof of an enormous mule. But even as I watch it come out of the darkness, I think,
That’s impossible. It’s too big.

It rakes into the back of Tom’s hide and hoists him up, drawing him into the shadows.

“Tom!”

I slip the empty pack off my shoulders. A large chunk of stone thumps down at my feet.

“Here,” I say, speaking to the darkness and waving my forearms. “You want some dust, don’t you? Everybody wants dust. I’ve got some.” I hold up my empty pack. “It’s in here. Put Tom down and I’ll give it to you.”

The creature grunts at me but doesn’t move. “Okay,” I say. I pad farther into the shadows. I can see the outline of both of them. Tom, dangling in the air above me, clutched in the grip of a great black beast.

“Put down my friend,” I tell it, “and I’ll give you some.”

The creature roars.

“Okay, okay—” I start unzipping the pack. I have an idea. I toss it at the thing’s feet. “There you go,” I say. “Take it, it’s yours.” I take out my flashlight.

As the creature bends to reach for the bag, I flick the light on. Suddenly, I can see the creature’s not a mule. Not a giant either. It’s not a goat. Not a wolf. Not a raven or a pig or an elf. It’s not even a hedgehog. It’s
all
of them. I beam the light dead into its enormous eyes. Blinded, the creature screams and drops Tom, recoiling into the dark.

Tom rushes past me and up the slope.

“You’re welcome!” I yell, chasing after him.

There’s a ladder at the end of the tunnel. Tom’s already climbing up.

“Where’s this lead?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer me. He keeps scrambling toward the light. I grab hold of the ladder and it trembles in my fist. I can feel it slipping away from the wall. The whole tunnel is collapsing.

Tom throws the hatch open and the blue light of morning floods in, shooting through the rain of rubble. When I reach the top, the ladder drops off the wall entirely, but I manage to grasp the edge of the cement just as the cavern buckles completely. I clamber out and narrowly avoid being crushed alive. I roll onto my back, staring up at Eden.

My heart’s pounding. Tom’s on his back beside me, his breath ragged and his eyes wide. I look around and see we’re lying right in the middle of the street. We’ve come up through a manhole. There’s a traffic jam freezing cars in both directions. Families on the sidewalk stare and point at us. I tune in the sound of sirens, but I’m too dazed to tell if they’re coming this way.

“C’mon,” I say, helping Tom to rise. “We gotta get out of the street.”

Tom nods, and I usher him to the side of the road. I see now that the families are dressed in black. We’ve come up on a street right beside Earthwood Cemetery, not far from the place where we put Doc in the ground. The trees are thick beyond the fence. I point my snout in that direction
and take a deep breath, trying to clear out the scents of the underground. I’m grateful for the cemetery’s trees, but my snout picks up something else, too. It’s a strong whiff of cigarette smoke.