“I’m not the one you need answers from. Talk to Hope.”
“Who is he? Who is he really?”
“I don’t know.” Ernie’s bloodshot eyes blinked rapidly in the rain. “I only know he’s using magic…black magic…whole lot of black magic.”
“You can’t really believe that.”
“You’ll believe it soon enough.” He smiled his brown-toothed smile.
Jeff brought his hands to his head, ran them through his drenched hair.
“Could be you already do,” Ernie went on, “but you’re just too scared to admit it.”
“What do you mean when you say it didn’t have to be me?”
“You’ll understand…eventually.”
“No,” Jeff said, lunging for his throat and pinning him back against the alley wall. “No, you’re gonna tell me now.”
Ernie struggled to break free but couldn’t. “You’re choking me, I-I can’t breathe!”
“Tell me what you meant, you fuck!”
“You should’ve stayed away from them like I told you,” he said, gagging. “If you did they would’ve found somebody else and none of this would’ve touched you or your life.”
“How are you involved in this? Are you in on this with them?” He choked him even harder. “Are you one of them?”
“No,” he gasped.
Jeff released him. Ernie’s legs gave out and he slid slowly to the ground, finally plopping down on his behind in the middle of a puddle. He crawled onto his hands and knees and struggled to get up but didn’t seem to have the strength. The rain kept coming, pounding them down. “I’m just a man,” he said, weeping suddenly. “I made some mistakes but I’m a good person. Why do I have to live like some piece of trash in the street? I don’t deserve this. I never hurt anyone.
What did I ever do to anybody? What did I ever do to you?”
Ashamed, Jeff looked away.
He punched the ground, splashing at the puddle with his fist as his body bucked with emotion. “No one gives you anything in this life! You have to take it! Even if you don’t want to, there’s no other way! Life leaves us no choice but to rip it away from somebody else so we can have ours! It’s the nature of things, our nature!”
“No. It’s a lie someone like Foster Hope relies on us believing, because without it he’s powerless.” Jeff stumbled away, head spinning.
When he reached the mouth of the alley, he looked back. Ernie Graham was on his knees, head back and hands reaching for the sky as if to grab hold of something only he could see, some sliver of peace and salvation perhaps, promised by veiled and forgotten gods no longer believed in, safely hidden away in storm clouds and concealed by a relentless rain.
Nothing seemed real anymore. The world took no particular notice.
It just kept churning, bustling all around him as he moved through the city streets, another lost soul barely cognizant of the driving rain. All he could think about was Foster Hope, those horrible emerald eyes, the white hair, the lined face, the big false teeth, and then he’d fade to black and Steven Wychek would take his place, terrified but surrendered to the inevitable as he launched himself through the plastic-covered window and plummeted to the alley below.
The brownstone…
Jeff stood across the street. If they’d already vacated the building he certainly wouldn’t have been surprised. He’d actually expected to find it empty. Regardless, he’d been drawn there. He’d dismissed his desire to simply return home or go to Eden’s office and take her out of there and explain to her what was happening and why together they needed to leave the city and go somewhere else, to put this madness behind them like the bad dream it was and move on with their lives. They’d find jobs, a safe place to live in a quiet little town, maybe have a couple kids and have real lives, real love…peace…
He crossed the street, climbed the steps and tried the door. It opened.
Once inside, he continued on to the reception area, his eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light and bringing everything into eventual focus. The sound of rain softened, but the same annoying dripping sound echoed along the hallway. It smelled musty and old here, as if nothing alive had moved within these walls in a very long time. Rather than going into the meeting room, this time he followed the hall to the rear of the building instead.
Like a tunnel, the dark hallway turned and emptied into a large open room that looked almost like some sort of old ballroom. It was large, with high ceilings, no interior walls, old hardwood floors, plaster walls and a ceiling marred with age and littered with spider web cracks. Void of furniture, it was completely empty but for someone kneeling in the center of the room, rocking slowly in the shadows. He couldn’t be sure if it was a man or woman, as they were wrapped from head-to-toe in a sheer dark cloak, like an ancient burial shroud.
Jeff remained in the doorway. The person’s whispers, the cadence like prayers or chants, bled across the open space, but they seemed unaware of his presence. Even when the familiar clacking sound of heels hitting the floor broke the silence and Jessica Bell entered the room from a door on the far wall, the person continued rocking, head bowed and undeterred.
As she crossed the room in her business suit, towing a suitcase on wheels behind her, he saw her nude and atop him in the hotel room, her breasts wet with perspiration, her hair a tangled mess, her legs tight against his hips as she bucked and rode him, her hands pressed flat against his chest and her eyes wild and alive and burning with the crazed passion and fire of a woman possessed.
She stopped a few feet from him, looking almost pleased to see him. “Jeff,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
“What do you think I’m doing here?”
Jessica smiled, and he felt himself stir. “Same as the others, looking for answers you won’t find, not here anyway.”
“Why do you do these things to people?” He struggled even now to resist her, but the woman dripped sex. Disgust filled him. There, with the lust. “Why are you a part of this?”
“Like the card says, we’re just facilitators.”
“Of what?”
“Human frailty.”
“But why?”
“Why not?”
“What do you possibly gain from all this?”
Her arrogance resembled that of any great predator, one completely confident in its invulnerability. “You can’t figure out if you want to fuck me or kill me with your bare hands,” she purred. “Deep down, you want to do both. Don’t let it tear you up. Truth is neither of us can help it. A mouse to cheese or a moth to flame, it’s no different. It’s the way we’re wired.”
“Does that help you sleep at night?”
“I suppose it would if I slept at all.”
Jeff ignored his fear and motioned to the shrouded person with his chin. “Who is that?”
“Doesn’t matter, aren’t you here to see Mr. Hope?”
He nodded.
She cocked her head toward the far side of the room and the door she’d come through. “Afraid I can’t stay, got a plane to catch.
Things to do, people to see. Business is booming. But then, our business is always booming.” Jessica winked, strolled by him then stopped. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said without looking back, “it was never really about you.”
The sound of her footfalls and the plastic suitcase wheels rolling along the floor resumed then grew fainter until they too fell silent, as if absorbed by the building itself. All that remained was whispers and the incessant dripping.
Jeff walked across the large, open, windowless room, taking a wide path around the shrouded figure. But when he was within reach, the woman-he could tell now that it was female-jerked her head up from prayer. The cloak slipped free of her head and fell down around her neck, revealing a hideously pale and sunken face, the skin so withered it seemed nearly mummified. Where her eyes should’ve been were two empty black sockets, remnants of blood and fluid still staining her cheeks like war paint. Horrified, Jeff took a step back.
The woman’s lips-thin, taut and bloodless-parted and her whispers became a frail voice. “Is someone there?”