CITY OF THE DOG

by John Langan

* * * *

Six of John Langan’s short stories have recently been collected in Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. Searching for it on the internet has turned up the fact that another man named John Langan has written a series of college texts on writing over the past two decades. Those of you who remember the story “Tutorial” from our Aug. 2003 issue might think this coincidence of names falls in the category of “Cruel Irony.”
John Langan—this John Langan, the one who blogs at jplangan.livejournal .com—is pleased to report that his first novel, House of Windows, should be out by the time this issue comes off the presses.
And speaking of online matters, we at F&SF have teamed up with the folks at www.suvudu.com to run some of our stories online. Take a look—F&SF readers are almost certain to find something of interest on the site.

I

I thought it was a dog. From the other side of the lot, that was what it most resembled: down on all fours; hair plastered to its pale, skeletal trunk by the rain that had us hurrying down the sidewalk; head drawn into a snout. It was injured, that much was clear. Even with the rain rinsing its leg, a jagged tear wept fresh blood that caught the headlights of the cars turning onto Central—that had caught my eye, caused me to slow.

Kaitlyn walked on a few paces before noticing that I had stopped at the edge of the lot where one of the thrift stores we’d plundered for cheap books and cassette tapes had burned to the ground the previous spring. (The space had been cleared soon thereafter, with conflicting reports of a Pizza Hut or Wendy’s imminent, but as of mid-November, it was still a gap in the row of tired buildings that lined this stretch of Central Ave.) Arms crossed over the oversized Army greatcoat that was some anonymous Soviet officer’s contribution to her wardrobe, my girlfriend hurried back to me. “What is it?”

I pointed. “That dog looks like it’s pretty hurt.” I stepped onto the lot. The ground squelched under my foot.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know. I just want to see if he’s all right.”

“Shouldn’t you call the cops? I mean, it could be dangerous. Look at the size of it.”

She was right. This was not one of your toy dogs; this was not even a standard-sized mutt. This animal was as large as a wolfhound—larger. It was big as Latka, my Uncle Karl and Aunt Belinda’s German Shepherd, had appeared to me when I was seven and terrified of her, and more terrified still of her ability to smell my fear, which my cousins assured me would enrage her. For a moment, my palms were slick, and I felt a surge of lightness at the top of my chest. Then I set to walking across the lot.

Behind me, Kaitlyn made her exasperated noise. I could see her flapping her arms to either side, the way she did when she was annoyed with me.

Puddles sprawled across the lot. I leapt a particularly wide one and landed in a hole that plunged my foot into freezing water past the ankle. “Shit!” My sneaker, sock, the bottom of my jeans were soaked. There was no time to run back to the apartment to change. It appeared I’d be walking around the QE2 with one sopping sneaker for the rest of the night. I could hear Kaitlyn saying she’d told me to wear my boots.

The dog had not fled at my approach, not even when I dunked my foot. Watching me from the corner of its eye, it shuffled forward a couple of steps. The true size of the thing was remarkable; had it raised itself on its hind legs, it would have been as tall as I. There was something about the way it walked, its hips high, its shoulders low, as if it were unused to this pose, that made the image of it standing oddly plausible. Big as the dog was, it didn’t seem especially menacing. It was an assemblage of bones over which a deficit of skin had been stretched, so that I could distinguish each of the oddly shaped vertebrae that formed the arch of its spine. Its fur was pale, patchy; as far as I could see, its tail was gone. Its head was foreshortened, not the kind of elongated, vulpine look you expect with dogs bred big for hunting or fighting; although its ears were pointed, standing straight up, and ran a good part of the way down the side of its skull. I was less interested in its ears, however, than I was its teeth, and whether it was showing them to me. It continued to study me from one eye, but it appeared to be tolerating my presence well enough. Hands out and open in front of me, I stepped closer.

As I did, the thing’s smell, diluted, no doubt, by the rain, rolled up into my nostrils. It was the thick, mineral odor of dirt, so dense I coughed and brought a hand to my mouth and nose. The taste of soil and clay coated my tongue. I coughed again, turned my head and spat. “I hope you appreciate this,” I said, wiping my mouth. I squinted at the wound on its leg.

A wide patch of the dog’s thigh had been scraped clear of hair and skin, pink muscle laid bare. Broader than it was deep, it was the kind of injury that bleeds dramatically and seems to take forever to quiet. While I doubted it was life-threatening, I was sure it was painful. How the dog had come by this wound, I couldn’t say. When we were kids, my younger brother had been famous for this sort of scrape, but those had been from wiping out on his bike in the school parking lot. Had this thing been dragged over a stretch of pavement, struck by a car, perhaps, and sent skidding across the road? Whatever the cause, I guessed the rain washing it was probably a good thing, cleaning away the worst debris. I bent for a closer inspection.

And was on my back, the dog’s forepaws pressing my chest with irresistible force, its face inches from mine. There wasn’t even time for me to be shocked by its speed. Its lips curled away from a rack of yellowed fangs, the canines easily as long as my index finger. Its breath was hot, rank, as if its tongue were rotten in its mouth. I wanted to gag, but didn’t dare move. Rain spilled from the thing’s cheeks, its jaw, in shining streams onto my neck, my chin. The dog was silent; no growl troubled its throat; but its eyes said that it was ready to tear my windpipe out. They were unlike any eyes I had looked into, irises so pale they might have been white surrounded by sclerae so dark they were practically black, full past the brim with—I wouldn’t call it intelligence so much as a kind of undeniable presence.

As fast as it had put me down, the thing was gone, fled into the night and the rain. For a few seconds, I stayed where I was, unsure if the dog were planning to return. Once it was clear the thing was not coming back, I pushed myself up from the sodden ground. “Terrific,” I said. My wet sneaker was the least of my worries; it had been joined by jeans soaked through to my boxers; not to mention, my jacket had flipped up when I’d fallen, and the back of my shirt was drenched. “So much for the injured dog.” Although doing so made me uncomfortably aware of the space between my shoulders, I turned around and plodded across the lot. This time, I didn’t worry about the puddles.

That Kaitlyn was nowhere to be found, had not waited to witness my adventure with man’s best friend, and most likely had proceeded to the club without me, was the sorry punchline to what had become an unfunny joke. Briefly, I entertained the idea that she might have run down the street in search of help, but a rapid walk the rest of the way to QE2 showed most shops closed, and the couple that were open empty of a short woman bundled into a long, green coat, her red hair tucked under a black beret. At the club’s door, under the huge QE2 sign, I contemplated abandoning the night’s plans and returning to my apartment on State Street, a trek that would insure any remaining dry spots on my person received their due saturation. I was sufficiently annoyed with Kaitlyn for the prospect of leaving her to wonder what had become of me to offer a certain appeal composed of roughly equal parts righteous indignation and self-pity. However, there had been a chance we might meet Chris here, and the possibility of her encountering him with me nowhere to be found sent me to the door to pay the cover.

Inside, a cloud of smoke hung low over the crowd, the din of whose combined conversation was sufficient to dull the Smithereens throbbing from the sound system. The club was more full than I would have expected for the main act that Wednesday, a performance poet named Marius Elliott who was accompanied by a five-piece rock band, guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, the whole thing. Marius, who favored a short black leather jacket and tight black jeans onstage, was an instructor at Columbia-Greene Community College, where he taught Freshman Writing. He was a lousy poet, and a lousy performer, too, but he was the friend of a friend I worked with, and the band was pretty good, enough so that they should have ditched him and found a frontman with more talent. This was Marius’s second show at the QE2; I couldn’t understand why the owner had booked him after hearing him the first time. While the club did feature poets, they tended toward the edgier end of the literary spectrum, in keeping with the place’s reputation as the Capital District’s leading showcase for up-and-coming post-punk bands. (That same friend from work had seen the Chili Peppers play there before they were red hot.) Marius wrote poems about eating breakfast alone, or walking his dog in the woods behind his apartment. Maybe the owner’s tastes were more catholic than I knew; maybe he owed someone a favor.

In his low, melancholy voice, the Smithereens’ lead told the room about the girl he dreamed of behind the wall of sleep. I couldn’t see Kaitlyn. Given the dim light and number of people milling between the stage and bar, not to mention that Kaitlyn was hardly tall, there was no cause for my stomach to squeeze the way it did. Chris wasn’t visible, either. Trying not to make too much of the coincidence, I pushed my way through to the bar, where I shouted for a Macallan I couldn’t really afford, but that earned me a respectful nod from the bartender’s shaven head.

The Scotch flaring on my tongue, I stepped away to begin a protracted circuit of the room in quest of my girlfriend. The crowd was a mix of what looked like Marius’s community college students, their blue jeans and sweatshirts as good as uniforms, and the local poetry crowd, split between those affecting different shades of black and those whose brighter colors proclaimed their allegiance to some notion of sixties counter culture. Here and there, an older man or woman in a professorial jacket struggled not to let the strain of trying to appear comfortable show; Marius’s colleagues, I guessed, or professors from SUNY. The air was redolent with the odors of wet denim, cotton, and hair, of burning tobacco and pot, of beer, of sweat. I exchanged enough nods with enough faces I half-recognized for me not to feel too alone, and traded a few sentences with a girl whose pretty face and hip-length blond hair I remembered but whose name eluded me. The Smithereens finished singing about blood and roses and were replaced by the Screaming Trees, their gravelly voiced lead uttering the praises of sweet oblivion.

At the end of forty-five minutes that took me to every spot in the club except the Ladies Room, and that left the Macallan a phantom in my glass, I was no closer to locating Kaitlyn. (Or Chris, for that matter, although I was ignoring this.) Once more at the bar, I set the empty glass on its surface and ordered another—a double, this round. A generous swallow of it was almost sufficient to quiet the panic uncoiling in my chest.

I was about to embark on another, rapid circuit of the crowd before the show began when I caught someone staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought the tall, pale figure was Chris, just arrived. I was so relieved to find him here that I couldn’t help myself from smiling as I turned to greet him.

The man I saw was not Chris. He was at a guess two decades older, more, the far side of forty. Everything about his face was long, from the stretch of forehead between his shaggy black hair and shaggy black eyebrows, to the nose that ran from his watery eyes to his narrow mouth, to the lines that grooved the skin from his cheekbones to his jaw, from the edges of his nostrils to the edges of his thin lips. His skin was the color of watery milk, which the black leather jacket and black T-shirt he wore only emphasized. I want to say that, even for a poet, the guy looked unhealthy, but this was no poet. There are people—the mentally ill, the visionary—who emit cues, some subtle, some less so, that they are not traveling the same road as the rest of us. Standing five feet away from me doing nothing that I could see, this man radiated that sensation; it poured off him like a fever. The moment I had recognized he was not Chris, I had been preparing the usual excuse, “Sorry, thought you were someone else,” or words close enough, but the apology died in my mouth, incinerated by the man’s presence. The Screaming Trees were saying they’d heard it on the wing that I was going to die. I could not look away from the man’s eyes. Their irises were so pale they might have been white, surrounded by sclerae so dark they were practically black. My heart smacked against my chest; my legs trembled madly, all the fear I should have felt lying pinned on my back in that empty lot finally caught up to me. With that thing’s teeth at my neck, I hadn’t fully grasped how perilous my position had been; now, I was acutely aware of my danger.

Two things happened almost simultaneously. The lights went down for the show, and Chris stood between the man and me, muttering, “Hello,” unwrapping his scarf, and asking where Kaitlyn was. The pale man eclipsed, I looked away. When I returned my gaze to where he’d been standing, he was gone. Ignoring Chris’s questions, I searched the people standing closest to us. The man was nowhere to be found. What remained of my drink was still in my hand. I finished it, and headed to the bar as Marius Elliott and his band took the stage to a smattering of applause and a couple of screams. Chris followed close behind. I was almost grateful enough for him appearing to buy him a drink; instead, I had another double.

* * * *

II

In the late summer of 1991, I moved to Albany. While I swore to my parents I was leaving Poughkeepsie to accept a position as senior bookseller at The Book Nook, an independent bookstore located near SUNY Albany’s uptown campus—which was true; I had been offered the job—the actual reason I packed all my worldly belongings into my red Hyundai Excel and drove an hour and a half up the Hudson was Kaitlyn Bertolozzi. I believe my parents knew this.

Yet even then, the August morning I turned left up the on-ramp for the Taconic north and sped toward a freedom I had been increasingly desperate for the past four years of commuting to college—even as I pressed on the radio and heard the opening bass line of Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” which I turned up until the steering wheel was thumping with it—even as the early-morning cloud cover split to views of blue sky—the sense of relief that weighted my foot on the gas pedal was alloyed with another emotion, with ambivalence.

At this point, Kaitlyn had been living in Albany for a little more than six months. After completing undergrad a semester early, she had moved north to begin a Master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at the University Center. We had continued to speak to one another several times a week, and I had visited her as often as my school and work schedules permitted, which wasn’t very much, once a month, if that. It was on the first of those visits, a couple of weeks after Kaitlyn had moved to the tiny apartment her parents had found her, that she introduced me to Christopher Garofalo.

He was not much taller than I was, but the thick, dark brown hair that rose up from his head gave the impression that he had a good few inches on me. His skin was sallow, except for an oblong scar that reached from over his left eyebrow into his hairline. When Kaitlyn and I met him at Bruegger’s Bagels, his neck was swaddled in a scarf that he kept on the length of our lunch, despite the café’s stifling heat. He shook my hand when he arrived and when he left, and each time, his brown eyes sought out mine. In between, his conversation was sporadic and earnest. Kaitlyn and he had attended the same orientation session at the University for students starting mid-year. Chris was studying to be a geology teacher; after trying to find a living as part of a jazz band, he said, he had decided it was time for a career with more stability.

Once he had departed, I commented on his scarf, which I’d taken as the lingering affectation of a musician; whereupon my girlfriend told me that Chris wore the scarf to cover the scar from a tracheotomy. While my face flushed, she went on to say that he had been in a severe motorcycle accident several years ago, in his early twenties. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and should have been killed; as it was, he’d spent a week in a coma and had to have a steel plate set in his skull, which was the origin of the scar on his forehead. As a consequence of the trauma, he’d experienced intermittent seizures, which had required months of trial-and-error with different medications and combinations of medications to bring under some semblance of control. He was a sweet guy, Kaitlyn said, who was (understandably) self-conscious about the reminders of his accident. I muttered a platitude and changed the subject.

I wasn’t especially concerned about my girlfriend having become friendly with another guy so soon; as long as I had known her, Kaitlyn had numbered more men than women among her friends, just as my circle of friends consisted largely of women. She had always had a weakness for what I called her strays, those people whose quirks of character tended to isolate them from the rest of the pack. Driving home that night, I was if anything reassured at a familiar pattern reasserting itself.

Three weeks to the day later, I listened on the phone as Kaitlyn, her voice hitching, told me she’d slept with Chris. While I’d made the same sort of confession to previous girlfriends, I’d never been on the receiving end of it before. I moved a long way away from myself, down a tunnel at one end of which was the thick yellow receiver pressed to my ear, full of Kaitlyn crying that she was sorry, while the other end plunged into blackness. Dark spots crowded my vision. I hung up on her sobs, then spent five minutes furiously pacing the bedroom that had shrunk to the size of a cage. Everything was wrong; a sinkhole had opened under me, dumping my carefully arranged future into muddy ruin. Before I knew what I was doing, the phone was in my hand and I was dialing Kaitlyn.

The next month was an ordeal of phone calls, two, three, four times a week. After the initial flourish of apologies and recriminations, we veered wildly between forced cheerfulness and poorly concealed resentment. Once Kaitlyn started to say that Chris was very upset about the entire situation, and I told her I wasn’t interested in hearing about that fucking freak. Another time, she complained that she was lonely, to which I replied that I was sure she could find company. Rather than slamming the receiver down, she cajoled me, told me not to be that way, she missed me and couldn’t wait until she could see me. However, when I at last drove to see her one Thursday afternoon, Kaitlyn was reserved, almost formal. I wanted nothing more than to go straight to bed, to find in her naked body some measure of reassurance that we would recover from this. Kaitlyn demurred, repeatedly, until I left early, in an obvious huff.

Strangely, Kaitlyn’s infidelity and its jagged aftermath only increased my desire to move to Albany. Those moments regret and anger weren’t gnawing at me, I told myself that, had I been there with her, this never would have happened. I could just about shift the blame for her sleeping with Chris onto us having been apart after so long so close together. There were times I could, not exactly pardon what Chris had done, but understand it. Underwriting my effort to reconcile myself to events was my desire to escape my home. As far as I could tell, my father and mother were no worse than any of my friends’ parents—and, in one or two cases, they seemed significantly better—but I was past tired of having to be home by twelve and to call if I were going to be later, of having to play chauffeur to my mother and three younger siblings, of having to watch what I said lest my father and I begin an argument from which I inevitably backed off, because he had suffered a heart attack ten years earlier and I was deeply anxious not to be the cause of a second, fatal one. Although I was their oldest child, my parents had a much harder time easing their hold on me than they did with my siblings. My younger brother was already away at R.P.I., enrolled in their Bio-Med program, while my sisters enjoyed privileges I still dreamed of. When I had started at SUNY Huguenot, my father had assured me that, if I commuted to college the first year, I could move onto campus my sophomore year; during a subsequent disagreement, he insisted that the deal had been for me to remain home for two years, and then he and my mother would see about me living in a dorm. After that, I didn’t raise the issue again, nor did he or my mother.

Albany/Kaitlyn was my opportunity to extricate myself from the life that seemed intent on maintaining my residence under the roof that had sheltered me for the last two decades. Every awkward conversation with Kaitlyn shook my hopes of leaving the bed whose end my feet hung over, while the arguments, aftershocks of that original revelation, that struck us shuddered my dream of Albany to rubble. That I went from the black mood that fell on me after Kaitlyn and I had concluded our latest brittle exchange, when I was convinced I would live and die in Poughkeepsie, to driving to my new apartment and job was a testament to almost brute determination. In the end, I had to leave my parents’, which meant I had to do whatever was necessary to slice through the apron strings mummifying me, and if that included working through things with Kaitlyn—if it included making peace with Chris, accepting him as her friend—then that was what I would do.

Not only did I make peace with Chris, he was to be my roommate. What would have been impossible, inconceivable, a month before became first plausible and then my plan when I failed to find a place I could afford on my own, and the guy with whom Chris had previously been rooming abruptly moved out. Enough time had passed, I told myself. According to Kaitlyn, Chris was a night owl; he and I would hardly see one another. (I didn’t dwell on how she knew this.) I decided I would stay there only until I could find another, better place, and then fuck you, Chris.

As it turned out, though, after more than a year, I was still in that apartment on State Street, in what I referred to as student-hell housing. Ours was the lower half of a two-story house wedged in among other two-story houses, the majority of them family residences that had been re-purposed for college students. My room was at the rear of the place, off the kitchen, and was entered through a kind of folding door more like what you’d find on a closet. Chris inhabited the front room, next to the combination living room-dining room; between us, there was an empty room opposite the bathroom. For reasons unclear to me, that room had remained unoccupied, though I didn’t object to the extra distance from Chris. Kaitlyn had been right: he was up late into the night, sequestered in his room, which he did not invite me into and whose door—a single solid piece of wood some previous tenant had painted dark green—he kept closed. Probably the longest conversation I had with him had come when he’d showed me the basement, whose door, outside mine, was locked by a trio of deadbolts. The stairs down to it bowed perceptibly under my weight, the railing planted a splinter in the base of my thumb. A pair of bare bulbs threw yellow light against the cement walls, the dirt floor. The air was full of dust; I sneezed. Chris showed me the location of the fuse box, how to reset the fuses, the furnace and how to reset it. After I’d been through the procedures for both a couple of times, I pointed to the corner opposite us and said, “What’s down there?”

Chris looked at the concrete circle, maybe two and a half feet in diameter, set into the basement floor. A heavy metal bar flaked with rust lay across it; through holes in either end of the bar, thick, heavily rusted chains ran to rings set into smaller pieces of concrete. He shrugged. “I’m not sure. The landlord told me it used to be a coal cellar, but that doesn’t make any sense. Some kind of access to the sewers, maybe.”

“In a private residence?”

“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know.”

When he wasn’t in his room, Chris was at SUNY, either in class or at the library. Despite this, I saw him a good deal more than I would have wished, especially when Kaitlyn stayed over, which she did on weekends and occasional weeknights. I would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner, while Kaitlyn sat on the green and yellow couch in the living room, reading for one of her classes, and I would hear Chris’s door creak open. By the time I carried Kaitlyn’s plate through to the folding table that served as the dining room table, Chris would be leaning against the wall across from her, his arms crossed, talking with her about school. Although they stiffened perceptibly as I set Kaitlyn’s plate down, they continued their conversation, until I asked Chris if he wanted to join us, there was plenty left, an offer he inevitably refused, politely, claiming he needed to return to his work. During the ensuing meal, Kaitlyn would maintain a constant stream of chatter to which I, preoccupied with what she and Chris had actually been discussing, would respond in monosyllables. If the phone rang and Chris happened to answer it, he would linger for a minute or two, talking in a low, pleasant murmur I couldn’t decipher before calling to me that it was Kaitlyn. I knew they met for coffee at school every now and again, which seemed to translate into once a week.

Of course the situation was intolerable. Forgiving Chris—believing that what had occurred between him and Kaitlyn was in the past—accepting that they were still friends, but no more than that—all of it had been much easier when I was eighty miles removed from it, when it was a means to the end of me leaving home. As a fact of my daily life, it was a wound that would not heal, whose scab tore free whenever the two of them were in any kind of proximity, whenever Kaitlyn mentioned Chris, or (less frequently) vice-versa. Had I known him before this, had we shared some measure of friendship, there might have been another basis on which I could have dealt with Chris. As it was, my principle picture of him was as the guy who had slept with my girlfriend. No matter that we might share the occasional joke, or that he might join Kaitlyn and me when we went to listen to music at local clubs and bars, and try to point out what the musicians were doing well, or even that he might cover my rent one month I needed to have work done on my car, I could not see past that image, and it tormented me. I was more than half convinced Kaitlyn wanted to return to him, and her protests that, if she had, she would have already, did little to persuade me otherwise.

One night, after I’d been in Albany six months, in the wake of a fierce argument that ended with Kaitlyn telling me she was tired of doing penance for a mistake she’d made a year ago, then slamming her apartment door in my face, and me speeding home down Western Avenue’s wide expanse, I stood outside Chris’s room, ready for a confrontation twelve months overdue. I hadn’t bothered to remove my coat, and it seemed to weigh heavier, hotter. My chest was heaving, my hands balled into fists so tight my arms shook. The green door was at the far end of a dark tunnel. I could hear the frat boys who lived above us happily shouting back and forth to one another about a professor who was a real dick. I willed Chris to turn the doorknob, to open his door so that he would find me there and I could ask him what it had been like, if she’d pulled her shirt over her head, pushed down her jeans, or if he’d unhooked her bra, slid her panties to her ankles? Had she lain back on the bed, drawing him onto her, and had she uttered that deep groan when he’d slid all the way up into her? Had she told him to fuck her harder, and when she’d ridden him to that opening of her mouth and closing of her eyes, had she slid her hand between them to cup and squeeze his balls, bringing him to a sudden, thunderous climax? A year’s worth of scenes I’d kept from my mind’s eye cavorted in front of it: Kaitlyn recumbent on her bed, her bare body painted crimson by the red light she’d installed in the bedside lamp; Kaitlyn, lying on top of a hotel room table, wearing only the rings on her fingers, her hands pulling her knees up and out; Kaitlyn with her head hanging down, her arms out in front of her, hands pressed against the shower wall, her legs straight and spread, soapy water sluicing off her back, her ass. In all of these visions and more, it was not I who was pushing in and out of her, it was Chris—he had spliced himself into my memories, turned them into so much cheap porn. Worse, the look I envisioned on Kaitlyn’s face said, shouted that she was enjoying these attentions far more than any I’d ever paid her.

While I desperately wanted to cross the remaining distance to Chris’s door and smash my fists against it, kick it in, some inner mechanism would not permit me to take that first step. My jaw ached, I was clenching my teeth so hard, but I could not convert that energy into forward motion. If Chris appeared, then what would happen, would happen. In the meantime, the best I could do was maintain my post.

Perhaps Kaitlyn had called to warn him, but Chris did not leave his room that night. I stood trembling at his door for the better part of an hour, after which I decided to wait for him on the living room couch. I had not yet removed my coat, and I was sweltering. The couch was soft. My lids began to droop. I yawned, then yawned again. The room was growing harder to keep in focus. There was a noise—I thought I heard something. The sound of feet, of many feet, seemed to be outside the front window—no, they were underneath me, in the basement. The next thing I knew, I was waking to early morning light. I could have resumed my position outside Chris’s door; instead, I retreated to my room. That was the closest I came to facing him.

Had a friend of mine related even part of the same story to me—told me that his girlfriend had cheated on him, or that he couldn’t stop thinking about her betrayal, or that he was sharing an apartment with the other guy—my advice would have been simple: leave. You’re in a no-win situation; get out of it. I was in possession of sufficient self-knowledge to be aware of this, but was unable to attach that recognition to decisive action. In an obscure way I could perceive but not articulate, this failing was connected to my larger experience of Albany, which had been, to say the least, disappointing. Two weeks into it, I had started having doubts about my job at The Book Nook; after a month, those doubts had solidified. Within two months of starting there, I was actively, though discreetly, searching for another position. However, with the economy mired in recession, jobs were scarce on the ground. None of the local bookstores were hiring full-time. I sank three hundred dollars into the services of a job placement company whose representative interviewed me by phone for an hour and produced a one-page resume whose bland and scanty euphemisms failed to impress me, or any of the positions to which I sent it. I wasted an hour late one Tuesday sitting a test for an insurance position the man who interviewed me told me I was unlikely to get because I didn’t know anyone in the area, and so didn’t have a list of people I could start selling to. (He was right: they didn’t call me.) I lost an entire Saturday shadowing a traveling salesman as he drove to every beauty salon in and around Albany, hawking an assortment of cheap and gaudy plastic wares to middle-aged women whose faces had shown their suspicion the moment he hauled open their doors. That position I could have had if I’d wanted it, but the prospect was so depressing I returned to The Book Nook the following day. When I heard that their pay was surprisingly good and their benefits better, I seriously considered taking the exam that would allow me to apply for a job as a toll collector on the Thruway, going so far as to find out the dates on which and the locations where the test was being offered. But, unable to imagine telling my parents that I had left the job that at least appeared to have something to do with my undergraduate degree in English for one that required no degree at all—unwilling to face what such a change would reveal about my new life away from home—I never went. I continued to work at The Book Nook, using my employee discount to accumulate novels and short story collections I didn’t read, and for which I soon ran out of space, so that I had to stack them on my floor, until my room became a kind of improvised labyrinth.

Nor did the wider world appear to be in any better shape. In addition to its reports on the faltering local and national economies, WAMC, the local public radio station, brought news of the disintegration of Yugoslavia into ethnic enclaves whose sole purpose appeared to be the annihilation of one another through the most savage means possible. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, which had promised brighter days, an end to the nuclear shadow under which I’d grown up, instead had admitted a host of hatreds and grievances kept at bay but not forgotten, and eager to have their bloody day. On EQX, the alternative station out of Vermont, U2 sang about the end of the world, and the melodramatic overstatement of those words seemed to summarize my time in Albany.

By that Wednesday night in November, when I fumbled open the door to the apartment and stumbled in, the Scotches I’d consumed at the QE2 not done with me yet, I had been living in a state of ill-defined dread for longer than I could say, months, at least. I had attempted discussing it with Kaitlyn over dinner the week before we went to see Marius, but the best I could manage was to say that it felt as if I were waiting for the other shoe to drop. “What other shoe?” Kaitlyn had said around a mouthful of dumpling. “The other shoe to what?”

I’d considered answering, “To you and Chris,” but we’d been having a nice time, and I had been reluctant to spoil it. To be honest, though there was no doubt she and Chris were part of the equation, they weren’t all of it: there were other integers involved whose values I could not identify. To reply, “To everything” had seemed too much, so I’d said, “I don’t know,” and the conversation had moved on.

Yet when I saw that the apartment was dark, and a check of my room showed my bed empty, and a call to Kaitlyn’s brought me her answering machine, I knew, with a certainty fueled by alcohol and that deep anxiety, that the other shoe had finally clunked on the floor.

* * * *

III

For the next couple of days, I continued to dial Kaitlyn’s number, leaving a series of messages that veered from blasé to reproachful to angry to conciliatory before cycling back to blasé. I swore that I was not going to her apartment, a vow I kept for almost three days, when I used my key to unlock her door Saturday night. I half-expected the chain to be fastened, Kaitlyn to be inside (and not alone), but the door swung open on an empty room. The lights were off. “Kaitlyn?” I called. “Love?”

There was no answer. The apartment was little more than a studio with ambition; it took all of a minute for me to duck my head into the bedroom, the bathroom, to determine that Kaitlyn wasn’t there. The answering machine’s tally read thirty-one messages; I pressed Play and listened to my voice ascend and descend the emotional register. Mixed in among my messages were brief how-are-you’s from Kaitlyn’s mother, her younger brother, and Chris. When I recognized his voice, I tensed, but he had called to say he had missed her at the show the other night, as well as for coffee the next day, and he hoped everything was okay. After the last message—me, half an hour prior, trying for casual as I said that I was planning to stop by on my way home from work—I ran through the recordings a second time, searching for something, some clue in her mother’s, her younger brother’s words to where she had spent the last seventy-two hours. That I could hear, there was none. An hour’s wait brought neither Kaitlyn nor any additional phone calls, so I left, locking the door behind me.

Two days later, I asked Chris to call Kaitlyn’s parents. He was just in from a late-night library session; I had waited for him on the couch. He didn’t notice me until he was about to open the door to his room. At my request, he stopped pulling off his gloves and said, “What?”

“I need you to call Kaitlyn’s parents for me.”

“Why?”

“I want to find out if she’s there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t seen her since the other night at QE2.”

“Maybe she’s at her place.” He stuffed his gloves in his jacket’s pockets, unzipped it.

“I checked there.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to talk to you.”

“No—I have a key. She isn’t there. I don’t think she has been since Wednesday.”

“Of course you do,” Chris muttered. “So where is she—at her parents’, which is why you want me to call them. Why can’t you do it?”

“I don’t want to worry them.”

Chris stared at me; I could practically hear him thinking, Or look like the overly possessive boyfriend. “It’s late,” he said, “I’m sure—”

“Please,” I said. “Please. Look, I know—we—would you just do this for me, please?”

“Fine,” he said, although the expression on his face said it was anything but. He hung his jacket on the doorknob and went to the phone.

Kaitlyn’s father was still awake. Chris apologized for calling so late but said he was a friend of hers from high school who’d walked through his parents’ front door this very minute—his flight had been delayed at O’Hare. He was only in town through tomorrow, and he was hoping to catch up with Kaitlyn, even see her. A pause. Oh, that was right, the last time they had talked, she had told him she was planning to go to Albany. Wow, he guessed it had been a while since they’d spoken. Could her father give him her address, or maybe her phone number? That would be great. Another pause. Chris thanked him, apologized again for the lateness of his call, and wished Kaitlyn’s father a good night. “She isn’t there,” he said once he’d hung up.

“So I gathered.”

“The number he gave me is the one for her apartment.”

“Okay.” I stood from the couch.

“I’m sure everything’s all right. Maybe she went to visit a friend.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A friend.”

“Hey—”

“Don’t,” I said. I started toward my room. “All because I stopped to help a fucking dog....”

“What?”

I stopped. “On the way to the club. There was this stray in that lot over on Central—you know, where the thrift store used to be. It looked like it was in rough shape, so I went to have a look at it—”

“What kind of dog?”

“I don’t know, a big one. Huge, skinny, like a wolfhound or something.”

Chris’s brow lowered. “What color was it?”

“White, I guess. It was missing a lot of fur—no tail, either.”

“Its face—did you see its eyes?”

“From about six inches away. Turned out, the thing wasn’t that hurt, after all. Pinned me to the ground, stuck its face right in mine. Could’ve ripped my throat out.”

“Its eyes....”

“This sounds strange, but its eyes were reversed: the whites were black, and the pupils were, well, they weren’t white, exactly, but they were pale—”

“What happened with the dog? Were there any more?”

I shook my head. “It ran off. I don’t know where to.”

“There wasn’t a man with it, was there?”

“Just the dog. What do you mean, a man? Do you know who owns that thing?”

“Nobody owns—never mind. You’d know this guy if you saw him: tall, black hair. He’s white, I mean, really, like-a-ghost white. His face is lined, creased.”

“Who is he?”

“Don’t worry about it. If he wasn’t—”

“He was at the club, afterward. Right before you arrived.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was about as far away from him as I am from you.”

Now Chris’s face was white. “What happened?”

“Nothing. One minute, he was standing there giving me the heebie-jeebies, the next—”

“Shit!” Chris grabbed his jacket from the doorknob. “Get your coat.”

“Why?”

“Do you have a flashlight?”

“A flashlight?”

“Never mind, I have a spare.” His jacket and gloves on, Chris shouted, “Move!”

“What are you—”

He crossed the room to me in three quick strides. “I know where Kaitlyn is.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I know where she is. I also know that she’s in a very great deal of danger. I need you to get your coat, and I need you to get your car keys.”

“Kaitlyn’s in danger?”

“Yes.”

“What—how do you know this?”

“I’ll tell you in the car.”

* * * *

IV

For all that I had been resident in the city for over a year, my knowledge of Albany’s geography was at best vague. Aside from a few landmarks such as the QE2 and the Empire State Plaza downtown, my mental map of the place showed a few blocks north and south of my apartment, and spots along the principle east-west avenues, Western, Washington, and Central. I had a better sense of the layout of Dobbs Ferry, Kaitlyn’s hometown, to which I’d chauffeured her at least one weekend a month the past twelve. Chris told me to head downtown, to Henry Johnson. Once I’d scraped holes in the frost on the windshield and windows, and set the heater blowing high, I steered us onto Washington and followed it to the junction with Western, but that was as far as I could go before I had to say, “Now what?”

Chris looked up from the canvas bag he was holding open on his lap while he riffled its contents. Whatever was in the bag clinked and rattled; the strong odor of grease filled the car. “Really?” he said. “You don’t know how to get to Henry Johnson?”

“I’m not good with street names. I’m more of a visual person.”

“Up ahead on the left—look familiar?”

“Actually, no.”

“Well, that’s where we’re going.”

“Well okay.”

I turned off Western, passed over what I realized was a short bridge across a deep gully. “What’s our destination?”

“A place called the Kennel. Heard of it?”

I hadn’t.

“It’s...you’ll see when we get there.”

We drove past shops whose shutters were down for the night, short brick buildings whose best days belonged to another century. Brownstones rode a steep side street. A man wearing a long winter coat and garbage bags taped to his feet pushed a shopping cart with an old television set canted in it along the sidewalk.

“How far is it?”

“I don’t know the exact distance. It should take us about fifteen minutes.”

“Enough time for you to tell me how you know Kaitlyn’s at the Kennel.”

“Not really. Not if you want the full story.”

“I’ll settle for the CliffsNotes. Did you take her there?”

“No,” he said, as if the suggestion were wildly inappropriate.

“Then how did she find out about it?”

“She didn’t—she was brought there.”

“Brought? As in, kidnapped?”

Chris nodded.

“How do you know this?”

“Because of the Keeper—the man you saw at the club.”

“The scary guy with the weird eyes.”

“You noticed his eyes.”

“Same as the dog’s.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t—how do you know this guy, the what? The Keeper?”

“Ahead, there,” Chris said, pointing, “keep to the left.”

I did. The cluster of tall buildings that rose over Albany’s downtown, the city’s effort to imitate its larger sibling at the other end of the Hudson, were behind us, replaced by more modest structures, warehouses guarded by sagging fences, narrow two- and three-story brick buildings, a chrome-infused diner struggling to pretend the fifties were alive and well. As I drove through these precincts, I had the sense I was seeing the city as it really was, the secret face I had intuited after a year under its gaze. I said, “How do you know him?”

“He....” Chris grimaced. “I found out about him.”

“What? Is he some kind of, I don’t know, a criminal?”

“Not exactly. He’s—he’s someone who doesn’t like to be known.”

“Someone...all right, how did you find out about him?”

“Left. My accident—did I ever tell you about my accident? I didn’t, did I?”

“Kaitlyn filled me in.”

“She doesn’t know the whole story. Nobody does. I didn’t take a corner too fast: one of the Ghûl ran in front of me.”

“The what? ‘Hule’?”

“Ghûl. What you saw in that lot the other night.”

“Is that the breed?”

Chris laughed. “Yes, that’s the breed, all right. It was up toward Saratoga, on Route Nine. I was heading home from band practice. It was late, and it was a new moon, so it was especially dark. The next thing I knew, there was this animal in the road. My first thought was, It’s a wolf. Then I thought, That’s ridiculous: there are no wolves around here. It must be a coyote. But I had already seen this wasn’t a coyote, either. Whatever it was, it looked awful, so thin it must be starving. I leaned to the left, to veer around it, and it moved in front of me. I tried to tilt the bike the other way, overcompensated, and put it down, hard.”

In the distance, the enormous statue of Nipper, the RCA mascot, that crowned one of the buildings closer to the river cocked its head attentively.

“The accident itself, I don’t remember. That’s a blank. What I do remember is coming to in all kinds of pain and feeling something tugging on my sleeve. My sleeve—I’m sure you heard I wasn’t wearing a helmet. I couldn’t really see out of my left eye, but with my right, I saw the animal I’d tried to avoid with my right arm in its mouth. My legs were tangled up with the bike, which was a good thing, because this creature was trying to drag me off the road. If it hadn’t been for the added weight, it would have succeeded. This wasn’t any Lassie rescue, either: the look on its face—it was ravenous. It was going to kill and eat me, and not necessarily in that order.

“Every time the animal yanked my arm, bones ground together throughout my body. White lights burst in front of my eyes. I cried out, although my jaw was broken, which made it more of a moan. I tried to use my left arm to hit the creature, but I’d dislocated that shoulder. Its eyes—those same reversed eyes you looked into—regarded me the way you or I would a slice of prime rib. I’ve never been in as much pain as I was lying there; I’ve also never been as frightened as I was with that animal’s teeth beginning to tear through the sleeve of my leather jacket and into the skin beneath. The worst of it was, the creature made absolutely no sound, no growl, nothing.”

We passed beneath the Thruway, momentarily surrounded by the whine of tires on pavement.

“Talk about dumb luck, or Divine Providence: just as my legs are starting to ease out from the bike, an eighteen-wheeler rounds the corner. How the driver didn’t roll right over me and the animal gripping my arm, I chalk up to his caffeine-enhanced reflexes. I thought that, if I were going to die, at least it wouldn’t be as something’s dinner. As it was, the truck’s front bumper slowed to a stop right over my head. Had it been any other vehicle, my would-be consumer might have stood its ground. The truck, though, was too much for it, and it disappeared.

“When the doctors and cops—not to mention my mother—finally got around to asking me to relate the accident in as much detail as I could, none of them could credit a creature that wasn’t a coyote, that wasn’t a wolf, which caused my crash and then tried to drag me away. I’d suffered severe head trauma, been comatose for five days—that must be where the story had come from. The wounds on my forearm were another result of the accident. Apparently, no one bothered to ask the truck driver what he’d seen.

“For a long time after that night, I wasn’t in such great shape. Between the seizures and the different medications for the seizures, I spent weeks at a time in a kind of fog. Some of the meds made me want to sleep; some ruined my concentration; one made everything incredibly funny. But no matter what state I was in, no matter how strange or distant my surroundings seemed, I knew that that animal—that what it had done, what it had tried to do to me—was real.”

To the left, the beige box of Albany Memorial Hospital slid by. I said, “Okay, I get that there’s a connection between the thing that caused your accident and the one I ran into the other night. And I’m guessing this Keeper guy is involved, too. Maybe you could hurry up and get to the point?”

“I’m trying. Did you know that State Street used to be the site of one of the largest cemeteries in Albany?”

“No.”

“Till almost the middle of the nineteenth century, when the bodies were relocated and the workers found the first tunnels.”

“Tunnels?”

“Left again up here. Not too much farther.”

To either side of us, trees jostled the shoulder. They opened briefly on the left to a lawn running up to shabby redbrick apartments, then closed ranks again.

“So why are these tunnels so important?”

“That concrete slab in the basement, the one that’s locked down? What if I told you that opens on a tunnel?”

“I’d still want to know what this has to do with where Kaitlyn is.”

“Because she—when we—all right.” He took a deep breath. “Even before my doctor found the right combination of anti-seizure meds, I was doing research. I probably know the name of every librarian between Albany and Saratoga. I’ve talked to anyone who knows anything about local history. I’ve spent weeks in the archives of the State Museum, the Albany Institute, and three private collections. I’ve filled four boxes’ worth of notebooks.”

“And?”

“I’ve recognized connections no one’s noticed before. There’s an entire—you could call it a secret history, or shadow history, of this entire region, stretching back—you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how far. I learned things....”

“What things?”

“It doesn’t matter. What does is that, somehow, they found out about me.”

“The Keeper and his friends.”

“At first, I was sure they were coming for me. I put my affairs in order, had a long conversation with my mom that scared her half to death. Then, when they didn’t arrive, I started to think that I might be safe, even that I might have been mistaken about them knowing about me.”

“But you weren’t. Not only were they aware of you, they were watching you, following you. They saw you with Kaitlyn. They figured....”

“Yeah.”

My heart was pounding in my ears. A torrent of obscenities and reproaches threatened to pour out of my mouth. I choked them down, said, “Shouldn’t we go to the cops? If you’ve gathered as much material on this Keeper as you say you have—”

“It’s not like that. The cops wouldn’t—if they did believe me, it wouldn’t help Kaitlyn.”

“I can’t see why not. If this guy’s holding Kaitlyn, a bunch of cops outside his front door should make him reconsider.”

We had arrived at a T-junction. “Left or right?”

“Straight.”

“Straight?” I squinted across the road in front of us, to a pair of brick columns that flanked the entrance to a narrow road. A plaque on the column to the right read albany rural cemetery. I turned to Chris. “What the fuck?”

He withdrew his right hand from the bag on his lap, his fingers curled around the grip of a large automatic handgun whose muzzle he swung toward me. “Once this truck passes, we’re going over there.” He nodded at the brick columns.

The anger that had been foaming in my chest fell away to a trickle. I turned my gaze to the broad road in front of me, watched a moving van labor up it. The gun weighted the corner of my vision. I wanted to speak, to demand of Chris what the fuck he thought he was doing, but my tongue was dead in my mouth. Besides, I knew what he was doing. Once the van was out of sight, Chris waved the gun and I drove across into the cemetery.

Even in the dark, where I could only see what little my headlights brought to view, I was aware that the place was big, much bigger than any graveyard I’d been in back home. On both sides of the road, monuments raised themselves like the ruins of some lost civilization obsessed with its end. A quartet of Doric columns supporting a single beam gave way to a copper-green angel with arms and wings outstretched, which yielded to a gray Roman temple in miniature, which was replaced by a marble woman clutching a marble cross. Between the larger memorials, an assortment of headstones stood as if marking the routes of old streets. A few puddles spread amongst them. Tall trees, their branches bare with the season, loomed beside the road.

As we made our way farther into the cemetery, Chris resumed talking. But the gun drew his words into the black circle of its mouth, allowing only random snippets to escape. At some point, he said, “Old Francis was the one who finally put it all together for me. He’d found an Annex to the Kennel during a day-job digging graves. A pair of them came for him that night, and if there hadn’t been a couple of decent-sized rocks to hand, they would have had him. But he’d played the Minor Leagues years before, and his right arm remembered how to throw. Even so, he hopped a freight going west and stayed out there for a long time.” At another point, he said, “You have no idea. When the first hunters crossed the land bridge to America, the Ghûl trailed them.” At still another moment, he said, “Something they do to the meat.” That Chris had not dismounted his hobby-horse was clear.

All I could think about was what was going to happen to me once he told me to stop the car. He wouldn’t shoot me in it—that would leave too much evidence. Better to walk me someplace else, dispose of me, and ditch the car over in Troy. He didn’t want to leave me out in the open, though. Maybe an open grave, shovel in enough dirt to conceal the body? Too dicey: a strong rain could expose his handiwork. One of the mausoleums we passed? Much more likely, especially if you knew the family no longer used it. When he said, “All right: we’re here,” in front of an elaborate marble porch set into a low hill, I felt an odd surge of satisfaction.

I had the idea this might be my time to act, but Chris had me turn off the engine, leaving on the headlights, and hand him the keys. He exited the car and circled around the front to my side, the automatic pointed at me throughout. Standing far enough away that I couldn’t slam my door against him, he urged me out of the car. I wanted—at least, I contemplated refusing him, declaring that if he were going to shoot me, he would have to do it here, I wasn’t going to make this any easier for him. I could hear myself defiant, but his shouted, “Now!” brought me out in front of him without a word.

“Over there,” he said, pointing the gun at the mausoleum. “It should be open.”

That sentence, everything it implied, revived my voice. “Is this where you took Kaitlyn?” I said as I walked toward the door.

“What?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how you did it. Did you meet her at the club and whisk her out here? What—did you have a cab waiting? A rental? I can’t quite work out the timing of it. Maybe you brought her somewhere else, first? Some place to hold her until you could take her here?”

“You haven’t heard a single thing I’ve been saying, have you?”

“Were you afraid I’d discover it was you? Or was this always your plan, kill the girl you couldn’t have and the guy she wouldn’t leave?”

“You asshole,” Chris said. “I’m doing this for Kaitlyn.”

That Kaitlyn might be unharmed, might be in league with Chris, was a possibility I had excluded the second it had occurred to me as I drove into the cemetery, and that I had kept from consideration as we’d wound deeper into its grounds. There would be no reason for her to resort to such an extreme measure; if she wanted to be with Chris, she could be with him. She already had. All the same, his statement was a punch in the gut; my words quavered as I said, “Sure—you tell yourself that.”

“Shut up.”

“Or what—you’ll shoot me?”

“Just open the door.”

The mausoleum’s entrance was a tall stone rectangle set back between a quartet of pillars that supported a foreshortened portico. On the front of the portico, the name UPTON was bordered by dogs capering on their hind legs. Behind me, there was a click, and a wide circle of light centered on the door. There was no latch that I could see. I put out my right hand and pushed the cold stone. The door swung in easily, spilling the beam of Chris’s flashlight inside. The heavy odor of soil packed with clay rode the yellow light out to us. I glanced over my shoulder, but Chris had been reduced to a blinding glare. His voice said, “Go in.”

Inside, the mausoleum was considerably smaller than the grandiosity of its exterior would have led you to expect. A pair of stone vaults occupied most of the floor, only a narrow aisle between them. The flashlight roamed over the vaults; according to the lids, Beloved Husband and Father Howard rested to my left, while Devoted Wife and Mother Caitlin took her repose on the right. (The woman’s name registered immediately.) Under each name, a relief showed a nude woman reclining on her left side, curled around by a brood of young dogs, a pair of which nursed at her breasts. Beyond the stone cases, the mausoleum was a wall of black. The air seemed slightly warmer than it was outside.

With a clatter, the light tilted up to the ceiling. Chris said, “I put the flashlight on the end of the vault to your left. I want you to take two steps backward—slowly—reach out, and pick it up.” I nodded. “And if you try to blind me with the light, I’ll shoot.”

When I was holding the bulky flashlight, I directed its beam at the back of the mausoleum. A rounded doorway opened in the center of a wall on which the head of an enormous dog had been painted in colors dulled by dust and time. Eyes whose white pupils and black sclerae were the size of serving plates glared down at us. The dog’s mouth was wide, the door positioned at the top of its throat. A click, and a second light joined mine. “In there,” Chris said.

“I was wondering where you were going to do it.”

“Shut up.”

I stepped through the doorway into a wide, dark space. I swept the light around, saw packed dirt above, below, to either side, darkness ahead. There was easily enough room for me and Chris and a few more besides, though the gray sides appeared to close in in the distance. The air was warmer still, the earth smell cloying. Chris’s light traced the contours of the walls, their arch into the ceiling. It appeared we were at one end of a sizable tunnel. “All right,” Chris said.

“Where’s Kaitlyn?”

“Shut up.”

“Aren’t you going to let me see her?”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, I get it. This is supposed to be the icing on the cake, isn’t it? You bring me to the place you killed my girlfriend, but you shoot me without allowing me to see her.” I turned into the glare of Chris’s flashlight, which jerked up to my eyes. I didn’t care. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I said, “Jesus Christ: what kind of a sick fuck are you?”

Chris stepped forward, his arm extended, and pressed the automatic against my chest. My eyes dazzled, I couldn’t see so much as feel the solid steel pushing against my sternum. The odor of soil and clay was interrupted by that of grease and metal, of the eight inches of gun ready to bridge me out of this life. Between clenched teeth, Chris said, “You really are a stupid shit.”

“Fuck you.”

The pressure on my chest eased, and I thought, This is it. He’s going to shoot me in the head. My mouth filled with the taste of, not so much regret as sour pique that this was the manner in which my life had reached its conclusion, beneath the surface of the city of my disappointment, murdered by the broken psychotic who’d spoiled my relationship and fractured what should have been the start of my new life. It’s only a moment, I thought, then you’ll be with Kaitlyn. But I didn’t believe that. I would be dead, part of the blackness, and that was the most I had to look forward to.

“Here you are.”

Not for an instant did I mistake this voice for Chris’s. It wasn’t only that it was behind me—the instrument itself was unlike any I’d heard, rich and cold, as if the lower depths of the tunnel in whose mouth we stood had been given speech. Ignoring Chris, I spun, my light revealing him, the white man with the shaggy black hair and seamed face who’d held me with his strange eyes in QE2, the man Chris had dubbed the Keeper. He’d exchanged his black leather jacket for a black trenchcoat in whose pockets his hands rested. Chris’s flashlight found that long face, deepened the shadows in its creases. The man did not blink.

Chris said, “You know why I’ve come.”

“Yes?”

“I’m here to offer a trade.”

“What do you offer?”

“Him.”

“What?” I looked over my shoulder. Chris still held the automatic pointed at me.

“Shut up.”

“You’re going to trade me for Kaitlyn?”

“Shut up.”

“So whatever this guy and his friends—you think—this is your solution?”

“Shut up.”

“Jesus! You’re even worse than I thought.”

“This’ll be the best thing you’ve ever done,” Chris said. “I’ve lived with you long enough to know. It’s the best thing you could ever do for her.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but the Keeper coughed, and our attentions returned to him. He said, “For?”

“The woman you took six days past.”

“A woman?”

“Damn you!” Chris shouted. “You know who I’m talking about, so can we cut the coy routine? In the names of Circë, Cybele, and Atys, in the name of Diana, Mother of Hounds, I offer this man’s life for that of the woman you took and hold.”

“Let us ask the Hounds,” the man said. From the darkness behind him, a trio of the same creatures I’d crossed a vacant lot to help on a rainy night emerged into the glow of our flashlights and slunk toward me. Big as that thing had been, these were bigger, the first and largest as tall at the shoulder as my chin, its companions level with my heart. Each was as skeletally thin as that first one, each patched with the same pale fur. At the sight of them, my mind tilted, all my mental furniture sliding to one side. Everything Chris had said in the past hour tumbled together. Inclining their heads in my direction, the Hounds walked lazily around me, silent except for the scrape of their claws on the tunnel floor. Their white skin slid against their bones, and I thought that I had never seen creatures so frail and so deadly. The leader kept its considerable jaws closed, but its companions left theirs open, one exposing its fangs in a kind of sneer, the other licking its lips with a liver-colored tongue. Their combined reek, dirt underscored with decay, as if they’d been rolling in the remains of the cemetery’s more recent residents, threatened to gag me. I concentrated on breathing through my mouth and remaining calm, on not being afraid, or not that afraid, on not noticing the stains on the things’ teeth, on not wondering whether they’d go for my throat or my arms first, on not permitting the panic that was desperate to send me screaming from this place as fast as my legs would carry me from crossing the boundary from emotion to action. The trio completed their circuit of me and returned to the Keeper, assuming positions around him.

“The Hounds are unimpressed.”

I could have fainted with relief.

“What do you mean?” Chris said. “In what way is this not a fair trade?”

“The Hounds have their reasons.”

“This is bullshit!”

“Do you offer anything else?”

“What I’ve offered is enough.”

The man shrugged, turning away.

“Wait!” Chris said. “There are boxes—in my room, there are four boxes full of the information I’ve collected about you. Return the woman, and they’re yours, all of them.”

The man hesitated, as if weighing Chris’s proposal. Then, “No,” he said, and began to walk back down the tunnel, the things accompanying him.

“Wait!” Chris said. “Stop!”

The man ignored him. Already, he and his companions were at the edge of the flashlights’ reach.

“Me!” Chris shouted. “Goddamn you, I offer myself! Is that acceptable to the Hounds?”

The four figures halted. The Keeper said, “Freely made?”

“Yes,” Chris said. “A life for a life.”

“A life for a life.” The man’s face, as he revolved toward us, was ghastly with pleasure. “Acceptable.”

“What a surprise.”

“Leave the light—and the weapon.”

Chris’s flashlight clicked off. The clatter of it hitting the floor was followed by the thud of the automatic. His shoes scuffed the floor and he was stepping past me. He stopped and looked at me, his eyes wild with what lay ahead. He said, “Aren’t you going to stop me? Aren’t you going to insist you be the one they take for Kaitlyn?”

“No.”

He almost smiled. “You never deserved her.”

I had no answer for that.

When he was even with them, the Hounds surrounded him. From the tense of their postures, the curl of their lips from their teeth, I half-expected them to savage him right there. The straightening of Chris’s posture said he was anticipating something similar. The Keeper bent his head toward Chris. “It’s what you really wanted,” he said, nodding at the blackness. One of the smaller things nudged him forward with its head, and the four of them faded down into the dark. For a time, the shuffle of Chris’s feet, the scrape of the things’ claws, told their progress, then those sounds faded to silence.

His gaze directed after Chris, the Keeper said, “Leave. What’s left of him won’t be too happy to learn the life he’s bartered for was yours.”

I didn’t argue, didn’t ask, What about Kaitlyn? I obeyed the man’s command and fled that place without another word. In my headlong rush through the mausoleum proper, I ran my left hip into the corner of Howard Upton’s vault so hard I gasped and stumbled against his wife’s, but although the pain threatened to steal my breath, the image of what might be stepping into the mausoleum after me propelled me forward, out the still-open entrance.

My car was where we’d left it, its headlights undimmed. I fumbled for my wallet and the spare key I kept in the pocket behind my license. As I lowered myself into the driver’s seat, my hip screaming in protest, I kept checking the door to the mausoleum, which remained ajar and in which I continued to think I saw shadowy forms about to emerge. The car started immediately, and in my haste to escape the way I’d come, I backed into a tall tombstone that cracked at the base and toppled backward. I didn’t care; I shifted into first and sped out of the cemetery, stealing glances in the rearview mirror all the way to my apartment.

* * * *

V

Despite the bruise on my hip, the increased pain and difficulty moving that sent me to the emergency room the next day with a story about colliding with a doorstep, to learn after an X-ray that I had chipped the bone, I half expected Chris to walk in the front door as usual the following night. It wasn’t that I doubted what had happened—I was in too much discomfort—it was more that I couldn’t believe its finality. Not until another week had passed, and the landlord appeared wanting to know where Chris and his rent were (to which I replied that I hadn’t seen him for days), did the fact of his...I didn’t have the word for it: his sacrifice? his abduction? his departure? Call it what you would, only when I was standing at the open door to his room, which was Spartan as a monk’s cell, watching the landlord riffle through Chris’s desk, did the permanence of his fate settle on me.

The week after that brought a concerned call from Kaitlyn’s parents, asking if I’d seen their daughter (to which I replied that I hadn’t had any contact with her for weeks). This began a chain of events whose next link was her father driving to Albany to ask a number of people, including me, the last time they’d seen Kaitlyn. Within a couple of days, the police were involved. They interviewed me twice, the first time in a reasonably friendly way, when I was no more than the concerned boyfriend, the second time in a more confrontational and extended session, occasioned by the detective’s putting together my disclosure that Kaitlyn and Chris had been briefly involved with the fact that both of those people had gone missing in reasonably close proximity to one another. There wasn’t any substantial evidence against me, but I had no doubt Detective Calasso was certain I knew more than I was saying. Kaitlyn’s mother shared his suspicion, and during a long phone call before Christmas attempted to convince me to tell her what I knew. I insisted that, sorry as I was to have to say it, I didn’t know what had happened to Kaitlyn. I supposed this was literally true.

Not that I hadn’t dwelled on the matter each and every day since I’d awakened fully dressed on my futon, my hip pounding, a trail of muddy footprints showing my path from the front door to the refrigerator, the top of which served as a nominal liquor cabinet, to my room, where the bottle of Johnny Walker Black that had plunged me into unconsciousness leaned against my pillows. That Kaitlyn should be at the far end of that dark tunnel, surrounded by those things, the Hounds, the Ghûl, was unbelievable, impossible. Yet a second stop at her apartment failed to reveal any change from my previous visit. I sat on the edge of her bed, the lights out, my head fuzzy from the painkiller I’d taken for my hip, and struggled to invent alternative scenarios to the one Chris had narrated. Kaitlyn had met another guy—she was in the midst of an extended fling, a romantic adventure that had carried her out of Albany to Cancún, or Bermuda. She’d suffered a breakdown and had herself committed. She’d undergone a spiritual awakening and joined a convent. But try as I did to embrace them, each invention sounded more unreal than the last, no more than another opiate-facilitated fantasy.

I weighed going after her myself, returning to the mausoleum suitably armed and equipped and braving the tunnel to retrieve her. I even went so far as to browse a gun store on Route 9, only to discover that the weapons I judged necessary if I were to stand any kind of chance—a shotgun, a minimum of three pistols, boxes of ammunition for each—cost vastly more than my bookstore salary would allow. Trying to buy guns on the street was not a realistic option: I had no idea where to go, how to open any such transaction. On a couple of occasions, I found myself driving north through the city, retracing the path Chris and I had followed to the cemetery. When I realized what I was doing, I turned onto the nearest side street and headed back toward my apartment. Some nights, I unlocked the deadbolts on the basement door and descended the stairs to stand staring down at the cement circle sunk in the floor. The chains securing the bar across it looked rusted right through; with a little effort, I ought to be able to break them, heave the cover up, and...I made sure to lock the basement door behind me.

On the morning of February 2, 1993, as the sun was casting its light across the apartment’s front window, I stuffed every piece of clothing I owned, all my toiletries, whatever food was in the cupboards over the sink, into a green duffel bag that I struggled out the front door, down the front steps, and through my Hyundai’s hatchback. The apartment’s door was wide open, the place full of my possessions, but I started the engine, threw the car into gear, and fled Albany. I didn’t return home to my parents; I didn’t head north or west, either. I wanted the shore, the sea, someplace where the earth was not so deep, so I sped east, along I-90, toward what I thought would be the safety of Cape Cod. I didn’t stop for bathroom breaks; I didn’t stop until Albany was a ghost in my rearview mirror and the Atlantic a gray sheet spread in front of me.

All the way to Provincetown, while I pressed the gas pedal as near the floor as I could and maintain control of the car, I kept the radio at full volume, tuned to whatever hard rock station broadcast clearest. Highway to Hell bled into Paranoid became Lock Up the Wolves. Although the doors, the dash thrummed with a bass line that changed only slightly from song to song, and my ears protested another shrieking singer, guitar, none of it was enough to drown out the sound that had drawn me from my bed the previous night and rushed me to the basement door, hands shaking as I unsnapped the deadbolts and turned the doorknob. Some kind of loud noise, a crash, and then Kaitlyn—I had heard her voice echoing below me, calling my name in that low, sing-song tone she used when she wanted to have sex. I had thought I was in a dream, but her words had led me up out of sleep, until the realization that I was awake and still hearing her had sent me from my room, kicking over several stacks of books on the way. The door open, I switched on the light and saw, at the foot of the stairs, shielding her eyes against the sudden brightness, Kaitlyn, returned to me at last.

At the sight of her there—the emotion that transfixed me was some variety of, I knew it. I knew she hadn’t really vanished, knew she wasn’t lost under the earth. She was wearing the oversized army greatcoat, which was streaked with mud. Her feet were bare and filthy. Her skin was more than pale, as if her time underground had bleached it. Her hair was tangled, clotted with dirt, her mouth flaked with something brown.

I was on the verge of running down the stairs to her when she lowered her hand from her eyes and I saw the white centers, the black sclerae. A wave of dizziness threatened to topple me headlong down the stairs. Kaitlyn smiled at my hesitation, reached over, and pulled open her coat. Underneath, she was naked, her white, white flesh smeared with dirt and clay. She called to me again. “Here I aaa-mmm,” she half-sang. “Didn’t you miss me? Don’t you wanna come play with me?”

A bolt of longing, of desire sudden and intense, pierced me. God help me, I did want her. My Eurydice: I wanted to bury myself in her, and who cared if her eyes were changed, if her flesh bore evidence of activities I did not want to dwell on? I might have, might have crossed the dozen pieces of wood that separated the life to which I clung from that which had forced itself on me, surrendered myself to sweet oblivion, had a large, bony shape not stumbled into view behind Kaitlyn. Of the Ghûl I had seen previously, none had given so profound an impression of being unaccustomed to walking on all fours. It held its head up too high, as if unused to the position. Its weird eyes were rheumy, its gums raw where its lips drew back from them. It curled around Kaitlyn from behind, dragging its muzzle across her hip before nuzzling between her thighs. She sighed deeply. Eyes lidded, lips parted, she extended her hand toward me while the other pressed the Ghûl’s head forward.

The thing pulled away long enough to give me a sidelong glance, and it was that gesture that sent me scrambling backward, grabbing for the door and slamming it shut, throwing myself against it as I snapped the deadbolts. It kept me there while I listened to the stairs creak under the combined weights of Kaitlyn and her companion, who settled themselves on the opposite side of the door so that she could murmur tender obscenities to me while the Ghûl’s claws worried the wood. They left with the dawn. Once I was sure they were gone, I ran into my room and began frantically packing.

If the far end of Cape Cod was not as secure a redoubt as I might have thought, hoped, if Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket proved no more isolated, they were preferable to Albany, whose single, outsized skyscraper was an enormous cenotaph marking a necropolis of whose true depths its inhabitants remained unaware. I fled them, over the miles of road and ocean; I am still fleeing them, down the long passage that joins now to then. That flight has defined my life, is its individual failure and the larger failures of the age in sum. I see the two of them still, down there in the dark, where their wanderings take them along sewers, up into the basements of houses full of sleeping families, under roads and rivers, to familiar cemeteries. Kaitlyn has grown more lean, her hair long. She has traded in her old greatcoat for a newer trenchcoat. The Ghûl lopes along beside her, nimble on its feet. It too has become more lean. The scar over its left eye remains.

For Fiona and for Ellen Datlow, who knows about Albany