Shadow Dancers (31 page)

“Nine three two four … one eight oh one … one seven two five …” Her voice trailed off in little gasps and wheezes as the narcotic properties of her herbal brew took a slow but commanding hold of her.

The numbers she mumbled came from the book she’d been reading — one of her
grimoires,
as she liked to call them, one of the cherished volumes she used in order to penetrate the mysteries she believed governed all life. These mysteries were the spirits dwelling on some elevated plane that could be reached only by means of the powerful draughts she confected nightly out of herbs grown in her own garden and compounded in accordance with some ancient formula.

The numbers stumbling off her tongue were interchanged with letters that would form words that translated into messages from the spirits dwelling in the higher plane. This was the technique of the tetragrammaton taught to her by Mr. Klink, who had been a third order Rosicrucian. She, in turn, had passed it on to Warren when she’d first brought him to Bridge Street as a homeless waif.

At seven years he could not add a column of numbers or sign his name. It was by means of this system that she taught him, imbuing him, as she did, with her own obsession for an unseen world. He was an eager pupil and learned his lessons well.

Barely audible, the numbers spilled from her lips along with tiny bubbles of saliva. The voice droning through her earphones was that of a late-night talk-show host who made a specialty of putting on the air what he called “night people.” They came there to share with others of like predilections their strange and mostly bizarre encounters in the realm of the extrasensory.

The flickering candle beside her bed cast gloomy undulating shapes on the walls and ceilings of her room. She had by then succumbed to the effects of her “tea.” It coursed through her limbs, exerting in her a tide with a strong pull. It moved from the extremities into her legs and arms, and from there into her head, which had begun to spin pleasantly, changing the focus of her eyes and distorting whatever she looked at.

One of the properties of her “tea” — one she counted most salubrious — was the power of the brew to transform her immediate surroundings; to disorient her to the point where she was transported to some place, far away and far above the drab, prosaic setting of her daily life.

The feeling was pleasant. Even beyond pleasant. But the psychic journey she had to make in order to reach there was terrifying, full of peril and risk that lay in the vast, twilight landscape stretching between one realm and the other.

The voice inside her earphones droned on somewhat louder. Its point of origin seemed to be inside her head. Its resonance seemed to vibrate in the bones of her skull. It carried with it the terrifying, yet oddly pleasurable, sensation that the bones of her skull were about to shatter.

The flame beside her bed transformed itself magically from a small, lambent shaft to the point where it loomed large as a wall oven. It was full of crevices and fissures, hues of purple and green, into which one might walk without fear of injury. Beyond there, she could enter into some cavernous place, vast and silent, fashioned of ice like a frozen waste. It was there in those labyrinthine, tunneled corridors, noiseless and unpeopled, that she liked to wander endlessly, seemingly directionless, but drawn irresistibly as if by a magnet to some specific destination.

Soon there would be a buoyancy to her step as if the leaden weight of her legs were suddenly freed of the force of gravity. A blaze of light somewhere up ahead emitted a peculiar glow, an unearthly effulgence coming from no human agency or recognizable source.

It was toward that light she walked, free of all the encumbrances of daily life. She went barefoot in a plain dress of white cotton. She was neither cold nor hot. Temperature appeared to be no factor here. Gazing at ordinary objects — rocks, water, the foliage of trees — her perceptions of things were magnified a hundredfold. She would see objects as though they were beneath the lens of a microscope, in infinite detail. A molecule of dust would divulge within itself a universe of intricate detail.

Noises heard could be anatomized as though their component parts would split and divide, each then listened to individually. The most simple, scarcely audible sound — the falling of a sheet of paper onto the floor or the passage of air in a corridor — took on exquisite proportions. All sights, sounds, odors of things were immense yet simple, quickly revealing their structural composition. And all the while, something inside her continued to open and expand. She could feel herself filling like a vessel with an awareness of things she could have scarcely imagined. The gnawing rat of daily worry, the ceaseless scramble and grubbing about for sustenance was shed like an old skin, and, for that time at least, she was at peace.

But then, just as suddenly and abruptly as if a switch were thrown, the sensation of transcendence ceased and she found herself standing in the darkened, stuffy little cubicle upstairs beneath the cupola in Warren’s room. The air was close and smelled of sour bedding. Outside, the wind howling up and down Bridge Street rattled the glass of the cupola in its frames. Beyond the glass, the light from the Statue of Liberty glowed with an unearthly golden sheen in the harbor.

Half crouching there in the dark, swathed in coats and robes and layers of outer wear, she slowly regained an awareness of her surroundings. Still resonating from the intensity of her “experience,” she tingled with excitement. She’d been exhausted, bone weary and feverish, when she’d taken to her bed that evening. Now she could feel a current of new vitality surging through her. With her finger she touched tentatively the flesh of her cheek and found it warm and glowing.

For days, ever since he’d left, she’d had no contact with Warren. That didn’t alarm her. With the police poking about as they had, she was glad there hadn’t been any. In the past she’d known him to disappear for months on end, making virtually no contact with home. Then, just as suddenly he would reappear, with not so much as a word about where he’d been or what he’d been up to.

Knowing that the police had traced him to Bridge Street (even though the police themselves didn’t yet quite realize it) and for a time were even watching the house (several times she’d seen the unmarked cars parked with their lights out at the head of the street), she scarcely expected Warren to be so rash as to try and make any sort of contact. He’d be an awful fool if he did, and whatever one might say about Warren Mars, in matters of the police he was nobody’s fool.

Now something had told her that Warren would soon be returning. She no longer had anything to fear about his threats of breaking away. Feelings of imminent good fortune suffused her. Things would go well now. She’d had an inkling while under the influence of her nightly infusion and those inklings were always reliable. Once again, there would be the old closeness between her and Warren. Just like the old days, when he was a slip of a thing seated at her side, his tiny child’s hand in hers and learning the trade.

An angry blast of wind leaned hard up against the cupola glass. The noise of its creaking jolted her rudely from her reverie. Suddenly, she was keenly aware of things to do if Warren was to be returning soon.

Although she was reasonably certain the police still continued their surveillance of Bridge Street, she was not uneasy. Even if Warren did return while they were still about, she knew he was canny enough not to march brazenly up the gravel walk and knock on the front door. The night he’d left Bridge Street in near panic, he’d left through the tunnel. She was certain that if he came back now, it would be by precisely the same route.

As a matter of additional precaution, she moved more of his things out of the little room in the attic, boxed them, and hauled them down into the far reaches of the cellar. As a final gesture, she pulled a chair beneath the light fixture hanging overhead, reached up, unscrewing the small brass crown ringing the bulb, and lifted down from there the little velvet jeweler’s sack of rings and bracelets and brooches of precious and semi-precious stones comprising Warren’s own personal cache. These she would stash away out of sight until such time that any danger of the police re-searching the house would have faded entirely.

Even at that late hour (two
A.M.
, at least), she carried the small sack down into the cellar. She made her hobbling, lurching way into the distant reaches of the icy, subterranean vault. With the fat knob of tallow flickering before her, she found the cast-iron lid marking the entrance to the sewer line, wrestled it off by means of a crowbar, and descended.

Not more than fifty or so feet from the bottom of the stone stair stood the half-dozen assorted barrels and crates that contained the cream of her “collections.” Before tucking Warren’s sack deep into one of those containers, she spilled its contents into her ruddy, callused palm and rummaged through them once again. Several she hefted separately, holding them up to the sputtering candle for closer inspection.

As always, when she handled valuables, something rapt overcame her. She never perceived such objects in terms of pure, simple beauty, but rather as a source of powerful “magic” to be hoarded up against the bad days she was always certain were coming. The sense of physically possessing them produced in her a joy that was oddly sexual. Merely handling them, the sensations in her were nearly identical. In her mind she’d already forgotten that they were Warren’s prizes. Had someone confronted her with that unpleasant fact, she would have said she was merely holding them for safekeeping against his return.

She was protecting him in the event the police might return and search the room again. She had his interest at heart, she told herself, without pushing self-analysis of her motives too far.

She didn’t covet anything of his, she assured herself. But what if he were to return to the house at a time when she wasn’t there and discover that his little cache was missing? What then? The consequences might be dire.

On reflection, however, she concluded that such an outcome was improbable. When the time came for him to return, she would be there to explain. Having pushed all such unpleasantness from her mind, she turned her attention to the fistful of pretty baubles gleaming in her palm — the little bits of colored stone, the chunks of silver and gold shimmering in the murky gloom of the candlelit tunnel.

“Hey, Briggs.”

“Beg pardon?”

“That’s right. I’m talking to you. You’re Briggs, aren’t you?”

Ferris Koops hovered in the shadows beneath the scaffolding of a construction site on Bridge Street. The voice he heard came from the inside of a four-door Dodge sedan parked nearly opposite him at the curb. He couldn’t see the face of the person addressing him, only the featureless silhouette of a disembodied head poised above the driver’s seat.

“You’re Donald Briggs, aren’t you?”

Koops stared blankly at the dark square of the car window, where the disembodied head appeared to be nodding at him. In the next moment, both front doors opened simultaneously. Two men emerged from either side of the car. The doors slammed hollowly through the empty street. Koops could see a pair of dark, boxy forms approaching him, their footsteps ringing on the cold cobblestone of the street.

They approached him quickly from either side, one swooping down on him from the left, the other on the right. The one approaching from the left, a stoutish man with a bull neck and a bristly, well-trimmed mustache adorning his upper lip, flicked open a wallet. A silver badge flashed like a gash of lightning. “My name is Officer Borelli, N.Y.P.D. This is Officer Carpenter.” He tilted his head at a sullen black man in a houndstooth suit of imitation British cut.

“Your name is Briggs, isn’t it?”

“My name?” There was a smile of pleasant bemusement on Koops’s face. “My name’s not Briggs. My name’s Koops.”

“Koops?”

“Right. Ferris Koops.”

The officer calling himself Borelli frowned. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Dutch. My ancestors were Dutch. On my father’s side, that is,” Ferris hastened to explain just in case it was not immediately apparent to the officer.

Borelli stared him up and down skeptically. “What are you doing out here this hour, Koops?”

“Out here?”

“That’s right. You been out here the last three nights. What’s the big attraction? This ain’t exactly Broadway and Forty-third.”

“You been starin’ at that house a lot, Koops,” the black officer chimed in. “Something about that house interest you?”

“I’ve been out here the last three nights?” Ferris replied in the form of a question. The ingenuous smile, the good-natured perplexity gave the impression of someone vaguely distracted but altogether likable.

“That’s right. I can vouch for it, ‘cause we been out here the past three nights watching you,” Officer Borelli said. “You got some identification on you, Ferris?”

“Identification?” The word appeared to elude him. He wavered there beneath the streetlamp, his eyes smiling off into space.

The officers exchanged quick glances. “Driver’s license. Social Security. A credit card,” the black officer said. “Anything with your name on it?”

“Oh, sure. With my name. I get it,” Ferris yelped like an overexcited puppy. Fumbling in his back pocket, he withdrew a wallet. He flipped it open, revealing a swollen compartment of leather, crammed full with cards, scraps of paper, and assorted debris.

From out of that turmoil, he produced several cards. One was a Social Security card and the other a pass with his photograph on it, issued by the Department of Welfare, entitling him to eat in various shelters around the city.

“This your address, Ferris?” Officer Borelli read from an address card inside a plastic window. “Four twenty East Eighty-first Street.”

“That’s where I live. That’s my address,” Ferris proclaimed with boyish eager pleasure. Borelli and Carpenter exchanged more meaningful glances.

“You’re a bit off your beat, aren’t you, my man?” the black officer remarked.

“I guess so.”

“What brings you down here, three nights in a row?”