Lowland Rider (20 page)

There were not as many people there as Frank
Zito
had thought there would be, and it made him uncomfortable. He had hoped that there might be a hundred or more, though that seemed unlikely. Actually, there were less than twenty, and he felt vulnerably conspicuous in the small group. Some of them were as young as he and Harry, while others wore the sagging clothes and skin of old age. But all of them, Frank
Zito
was alarmed to see, had a small parcel, some of them dripping onto the gravel floor, and a touch of fire in their eyes that he found it impossible to emulate. He would have turned and gone away had it not been for his fear of Harry, and the irrational but deeply felt fear that the others, the strangers with the bright eyes, would not let him leave. So he stayed and watched, facing a flat, black wall.

After ten minutes Frank
Zito
turned to Harry and whispered, "When's he show up?"

Harry didn't answer. Instead his eyes went wide, and when Frank looked back at the wall where Harry was looking, he saw that the man he took to be Enoch was there, as if he'd just materialized in front of them. There was a soft smile on his face, and he held his hands out in front of him and a little to each side, like some of the pictures of Jesus that Frank had seen in Sunday school papers when he was a kid. He looked a little, Frank
Zito
thought, like a nigger and a little like a slant, but a little like a white guy too, and Frank was surprised at the beauty of the combination. This Enoch (for who else could it be?) was beautiful, and Frank
Zito
, who had never harbored a homosexual thought in his young life, recognized him as such and felt excited by the thought. His hand that held the wrapped jelly trembled, and he felt a smile, break out upon his own face in response to Enoch's. It seemed as though Enoch were looking right at him, and he felt, not unpleasantly, the hair on the back of his neck tingle.

"Have you brought me offerings?" Enoch said, and the words, gentle and strangely unisexual, poured like honey into Frank
Zito's
ears. A man in his forties stepped up first, carrying a Pick 'n Pay shopping bag. He set it at Enoch's feet, reached in with both hands, and from it drew something dark and dripping. It was some kind of internal organ. Frank
Zito
supposed rather calmly that it could have been a heart, since it was small and he remembered from high school health that your heart was the size of a fist.

To his surprise, Frank
Zito
was neither shocked nor repulsed by the act. It seemed the most natural and gracious thing in the world for this man to bring Enoch this gift. But what did surprise Frank was what happened to the gift when the man held it out to Enoch.

Enoch was dressed in white, all white from his shoulders to his trouser cuffs, and Frank
Zito
tensed in expectation of the way that whiteness would be stained with that dark and dreadful fluid that dripped like red molasses over the supplicant's hands. But Enoch held his own hands out farther, did not change expression as the man placed the bleeding organ into them, and drew his hands into his body, until the heart, if that was what it was, covered Enoch's own heart, hidden by his long-fingered hands. Then Enoch brought his hands out again, and the organ was gone. Not a vestige of red remained on Enoch's garments. Instead he held a pale blue stone whose facets threw the lantern light about the chamber like fireflies.

The man bowed and took the stone, and Frank
Zito
wondered if what he thought had happened had truly happened, or if this Enoch only made him
think
it had happened. Sleight-of-hand was one thing, but to slip a dripping chunk of meat into the front of your shirt without leaving a single stain? He watched more closely as the next person stood before the immaculate Enoch. It was a boy still in his teens, who bowed and held out something that could only have been a tongue. Frank could see the budded surface from where he stood. It was still pink, and oozed moistness where it had been crudely hacked from its root. Again Enoch took the organ, pressed it to his breast, and transformed it into a gem, which he presented to the boy, who bowed again and backed away.

And so the ceremony continued, with the celebrants coming one at a time before Enoch, making their gifts, taking their rewards. Only one person stepped forward without an offering, an old woman who Frank
Zito
thought looked half-mad. He heard her clearly as she fell to her hands and knees before Enoch.

"Oh, master," she sniveled, "I have nothing for you, nothing. I was afraid, so afraid. I almost had him, he was almost mine, but the lights came, and I… I was
afraid
…”

"My girl," Enoch answered her. "My Sunny girl, you must not be afraid when you do my will. You are in my service now, and not the service of this world or those who dwell herein. Have no fear, for you serve me."

The tired face, wet with tears, looked up. "You forgive me then?"

"I forgive you, for you come to me with the truth. But I say to you, do not come before me again without making to me an offering. You cannot enter my kingdom and enjoy its treasures without bearing the key, the key made by your own hands. To come before me again without the key would be death. And to die would be to lose the kingdom."

The crone could not answer him. She only sobbed, backing away on her hands and knees until she finally rose and staggered off into the darkness of the tunnel, out of the sight of the others.

Then Frank
Zito
felt Enoch's eyes upon him, and heard the unspoken command that those eyes made—
Come to me
. And Frank
Zito
was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been before, for he knew that what he brought to Enoch, that gray and rotting thing that Enoch called the key, had not been made by his own hands. What Enoch wanted was murder and violence, not a fleshy souvenir of a tawdry but natural death. The old woman had been spared because, although she brought no key, she at least brought the truth. But Frank
Zito
brought only a lie, a key that he had not forged, only stolen. He knew that he should tell the truth immediately, beg for forgiveness as the old woman had done. But he could not. Not when those calm and peaceful Jesus-eyes of Enoch's looked into his so warmly, trustfully.

Masterfully.

Enoch smiled at him, and he walked forward, trying not to nervously squeeze that soft pouch of Saran Wrap too hard, trying to keep the
lie
off of his face, out of his mind, pretending that he had picked this pulpy fruit himself from living flesh, with his own arm, of his own will, lying to himself as fervently as he could.

He unwrapped the gift with shaking fingers, held its gelatinous softness in his palm, let the wrapping fall to his feet, and tipped his hand so that the dull and slimy orb fell into the pool of Enoch's hands with a faint, wet sound that seemed horribly loud in the silence. For now the chamber was even quieter than before. It was as if everyone had stopped the breath in their lungs, the blood through the veins. It was the deepest silence Frank
Zito
had ever not heard.

Enoch cupped his hands so that Frank could not see the grayish-brown eye, then folded them together flatly, like the picture of the praying hands in Frank's mother's bedroom. Frank winced, expecting to see dark matter seep from between Enoch's fingers, but instead something else came through the cracks.

Light.

It was a white, burning light, and in its nearly blinding glare Frank
Zito
could see that Enoch had for the first time lost his smile, leaving not an expressionless human face, but a blank void into which Frank was afraid he would fall and fall forever. Then, slowly, the face appeared again, the smile returned, and Enoch opened his light-filled hands, turning the palms toward Frank
Zito
.

A human eye, white and healthy and alive with intelligence, glared out at Frank
Zito
from each of Enoch's palms.

"They see the truth," Enoch said tenderly. "You bring no gift, but lies. The kingdom and its treasures is not for such as you."

Enoch's eyes, full of love, and the eyes in his palms, full of hate, held Frank
Zito
. He drowned in them, all fear gone, only a disappointment and a sorrow so great that he did not even feel it when the others fell upon him and tore him apart with their knives and nails and hands.

And while Frank
Zito
died, Jesse Gordon, riding past, saw the glow of the flashlights and lanterns from the abandoned spur, wondered what made the light in the dark tunnel, and felt a pain very deep inside him.

"What is it?" asked Claudia.

"I . . . nothing."

Jesse slumped back in his seat as if he'd just been struck, and Claudia looked at him carefully. He'd been losing weight, she thought, in just the few weeks that she'd been with him. But it didn't appear to be a loss due to malnutrition or disease. On the contrary, it seemed to be a purposeful loss to achieve a rangy gauntness, the tightness and leanness of form for which an athlete would strive before a particularly important encounter. Still, the way he fell back in the seat like that made her even more curious about him than she already was.

He looked up at her. "Aren't you tired?"

"No. I took a nap this evening. Yesterday evening," she corrected, and looked at her watch. It read 4:00 A.M.

"You're not getting much tonight."

Claudia shrugged. "Atmosphere."

"Atmosphere," Jesse repeated sardonically. "We haven't spoken to a soul."

"It's all right."

"What's the point of it? It just wastes your time. And mine."

She smiled at him. "You have somewhere special to go?"

"There's always somewhere to go. Even down here." He turned and looked out the window again.

"If I'm keeping, you from something—"

"I said I'd help you get your story, so I will. But I'm not helping much tonight." He looked at her, and she read reproof in his glance. "Of course that's not altogether my fault. I didn't suggest this line. You wanted to ride this one."

That was true. Jesse had suggested the IND Queens line, long and eccentrically peopled in the early morning hours, but Claudia had asked for a ride on the Concourse line, which Jesse had previously described to her as often dull, sometimes dangerous, but seldom strange.

"Atmosphere aside," he went on, "just what are you getting out of this? I mean, what can this have to do with your story?"

"You'd be surprised," she told him, and he looked at her narrowly. She reminded herself to shut up, not to say too much, to pretend to be more interested in the other people in the car, despite the fact that they were a man who was obviously coming home from a late shift, a couple who had had a night on the town and were now dozing, heads together, and a black kid in a jogging suit who Claudia guessed was a runner for a crack dealer, coming home from a tough night's work. But she wasn't interested in them. Nor was she interested in skells. Skells were no longer Claudia
Dorner's
subject. That function had fallen to Jesse Gordon.

She had already written eighteen pages about him—a compilation of what the news stories had told her, an account of her own meeting with him, physical description, and a character analysis based on both her present knowledge of him and her memories of the time they had been lovers. She'd also scanned the newspapers for incidents that might be connected to Jesse's cryptic comment about "helping" people, and had come across three incidents in past months of apparent murder victims being found in the subways, at different times and in different stations and trains. As she read between the lines, she imagined that there could have been a pattern, that the descriptions of the victims made it clear that they might as easily have been predators who had been caught in the act, though none of the papers, not even the
Post
, had suggested that still another vigilante might be abroad.

Jesse Gordon fascinated her, personally and professionally. He was her story, no one else. After he told her that there was a story for every
skell
in the tunnels, she knew that he was right, and that to classify them all would be impossible. Better then to concentrate on one, whose story was as dramatic and tragic as any other could possibly be. One who she already knew, who posed no threat of violence to her, and who would actually be her protector, one who did not reek of sweat and urine, who, though aloof and mysterious and a little frightening, was clean and not unattractive.

One who she was drawn to despite her attempts to deny it.

He seemed to her the last of the romantic figures. He had lost everything precious to him, and had buried himself to atone for a self-declared sin that most men in the same situation would have commit-ted gladly, and not thought about twice. There was something in his eyes and face that puzzled and mesmerized her. He held her interest unequivocally, and she thought that she might even love him once again, not with that first, basic sexual love she had felt for him years before, but with a deeper, more mature love born of mutual loss. He was her subject, she thought romantically. As surely as Johnson was Boswell's, or "La
Gioconda
" was
da
Vinci's, he was her subject. And he must not know it.

"I haven't seen you for a few days, Jesse," she said to him as offhandedly as she knew how. "What have you been doing with yourself?"