—and woke screaming in his uncle’s bed.
He was sitting upright, stiff as a doll. His clothes stuck to his skin. The waterlight that came before the dawn whitened the windows. He swung his feet out of bed and heard a crunch underfoot when they touched the floor.
Beside the bed, the little clay dragon lay shattered. He picked up all the pieces, glad to see that they were fairly large. Some glue should fix it. He assembled it dry on the coffee table and studied the results. All that was missing was the eyes.
He made himself some instant coffee and locked up the apartment when he left. The street was damp and cool from the rain. Puddles of oil in the gutter gave back rainbows. He stood in the doorway, looking down. The threshold stains did not stand out at all now that the concrete was wet. Soon who would know what had happened here? He fingered the tattered end of black and yellow tape still caught in the door hinge and tore off as much of it as he could.
He wondered whether he should call the police when he reached Penn Station and give them an anonymous tip about who had killed his uncle and where to find them. He could describe them exactly, send the police to the bar that was their hangout—
—if the police would take the time to listen to a caller who refused to admit how he knew so much. And if he explained? They’d believe it when the sky between worlds split open. But he had to do something. This was all he could think of to do.
He decided that the first thing he should do, even before he made the call, was to go and see whether there really was a bar where his vision had placed it. He began to walk.
The police cars were there when he turned the corner. Two of them were pulled up at the curb in front of the alleyway, blue and red lights flashing. The ambulance was sandwiched in between them. It wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry, but there was no need for speed. The stretcher slipping away into the back held a zippered bag.
The killer glowered and shouted obscenities at the yellow-haired woman talking to the cops. His hands were manacled behind his back, but there was nothing to stop his mouth. Passersby on their way to work or homeward bound from a life between sunset and dawn stopped to listen. The man did not care for the rights he had been read, it seemed. He was willing to tell the world what he’d done. He didn’t think of it as crime, but a service. He had cleansed, purified, rescued society from a monster. He was a hero, a knight, a slayer of unnatural horrors! How dare they call it murder, even when the victim had once been his friend?
“Honest, I don’t know why,” the yellow-haired woman was saying as the man was forced into one of the police cars. “We was all going along here, real late, and all of a sudden—”
She turned and saw Ryan. For an instant her bruised face flushed, then bloomed, its unmarred beauty embraced by roses.
Then the policeman said, “Ma’am?” She shuddered and shook off all seeming. She went back to telling the officer what she had witnessed.
Ryan stooped at the barricade of black-and-yellow tape. The rose was red without holding memories of blood or fire. It had no thorns. He breathed its fragrance all the way to the train station, all the way home.
—In loving memory of my grandma Cora