“What just happened?” Trix murmured sleepily, propping herself up.
Jim shook his head, wondering the same thing. If it had woken her as well, then it hadn’t been a dream, which meant the sound had come from nearby. Outside? Maybe. Downstairs? Also maybe.
He crawled out of bed, gesturing for her to remain, and to be quiet.
“Fuck that,” Trix whispered. Of course she did. It was Trix. Jim should have known better.
As he slipped his shoes on and Trix dragged on her pants, they heard a muffled shout coming from the bar downstairs. O’Brien’s voice, raised in fury. A pounding noise began, like the fist of God knocking on the front door, and the whole building shook in time to that awful rhythm. A crack appeared in the wall, running from the upper edge of the door frame to the corner of the room.
“What the hell is that?” Jim whispered, not sure if Trix would hear him over the noise-not really sure if he was even talking to her.
Trix had one shoe on and the other one in her right hand as she hurried past him to the door.
“Wait,” Jim said.
“For what?” Trix asked, spinning on him, eyes wide with fear.
More glass shattered downstairs, and Jim pictured the shelves of hard liquor behind the bar being smashed to the floor. There’d been a big mirror there as well. He glanced at the window, wishing there was a fire escape out there so they could go down and survey the fracas from outside.
“Weapons,” he said. “We’re not going down there empty-handed.”
Trix put on her other shoe. “There’s an iron on the top shelf in the bathroom.”
Jim picked up the heavy crystal lamp from the bedside table, pulled off the shade, and yanked the cord out of the wall. He glanced at Trix and nodded for her to go ahead, and she turned the knob and swung the door inward.
Out in the corridor, Jim went for the door that led downstairs to the bar. Trix raced into the bathroom and emerged holding the iron Peter O’Brien had probably used for years to take the wrinkles out of his clothes. It seemed all too mundane a detail to exist in the same reality as the shouting and the noises of destruction from below.
A roar of pain rose from the bar, becoming a scream. The pounding stopped in a violent splintering of wood, and Peter O’Brien’s voice fell silent.
Trix slipped up beside Jim, reaching out to stop him from opening the door. “What the hell are we doing?” she whispered.
She didn’t need to explain. Jim wondered the same thing. From the sound of it, whatever was going on downstairs wasn’t some simple bar fight.
“He’s our best chance of finding them!” Jim whispered back.
Trix nervously licked her lips, then nodded.
Jim tore the door open and burst through it, running down the stairs, wielding the crystal lamp like a club. Trix came right behind him. He had a moment to wonder if she was thinking what he was thinking-that they were batshit crazy, that these were piss-poor weapons-and then the silence in the bar was broken by a human voice. It might have been O’Brien’s, but the big Irishman sounded very small now. “Don’t,” the voice pleaded. “You’ll destroy it all.”
As they hit the curve in the stairwell, the words were punctuated with a terrible crash. Jim leaped the last few steps-there was no door, only an archway leading into the bar-and as he stepped into O’Brien’s, music started to play. Flogging Molly’s “Cruel Mistress.” He knew it well.
“Jesus,” Trix whispered as she stepped into the bar behind him.
The place was a ruin of overturned tables, broken chairs, and shattered glass, but Jim only got a glimpse of the wreckage-and the blood on the brass bar rail-before he noticed something shift near the huge square saw-toothed space where the plate-glass front window had once been. A figure stood amid the shattered glass, the puzzle of partially painted fragments that had once spelled out O’BRIEN’S in green and gold among them. Taller than a man, it was nevertheless shaped like one. A silver shadow, it seemed to have simply appeared there, standing atop the debris.
No. It was there, he thought. You just didn’t see it at first.
“What are they?” Trix asked, her voice a fearful rasp.
Jim blinked, and he saw that she was right. Beyond the demolished front of the bar, two more of the wraiths stood out in the street, faceless silhouettes who seemed somehow still to be looking at him and Trix. Shadows fell upon the smooth slopes of their faces, suggesting eyes and mouth where there were none, only minor ridges that hinted at noses. They were the memories of men, all personality torn away.
Fear clenched at his gut, but Jim took two steps toward the thing still inside the bar, feeling the weight of the crystal lamp in his hand. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, though he thought that Trix’s what was indeed a better question.
In the distance, sirens wailed, coming nearer. Jim held his breath. For the first time since he had fled a high school keg party where weed and coke had been in plentiful supply, he feared the arrival of the police. In this world, he and Trix didn’t even exist. They were the ultimate illegal aliens.
“Why did you do this?” Trix shouted at them.
The music from the jukebox changed to the Von Bondies’ “C’mon, C’mon,” and Jim glanced toward the source and nearly retched. Peter O’Brien’s lower torso and legs stuck out from beneath the heavy machinery, its glass case spiderwebbed with cracks but somehow not caved in.
“Jim!” Trix cried.
He turned, raising the lamp, thinking he had to defend himself, but she hadn’t shouted because they were under attack. She’d yelled in surprise.
The wraiths were gone.
“Did you see which way they went?” Jim asked, taking a few steps toward the front of the bar, glass crunching underfoot.
Trix didn’t move. “I’m not sure they went anywhere.”
Jim glanced over his shoulder at her. “What?”
She gestured with the iron. “They just… moved. First the one inside. Like it took a step and just… walked out of the world. Then the others went, too. How the hell do we know they’re really gone?”
Jim stared at the spot on the partially painted glass fragments where the first wraith had been standing. He moved to the left, trying to look at the space from different angles, but saw nothing. His heart pounded in his chest, full of fear of something he couldn’t see.
The sirens grew louder. A dog barked. Inside the bar, liquor dripped from broken bottles and beer from busted taps. The smell of it filled the place. A cold weight settled on his heart. This might not be his Boston, but it was not make-believe. This was a real city, with ordinary people who lived ordinary lives. He would have given anything to be one of them again-anything but the family he had lost. They were worth any sacrifice. “Screw it,” he said, dropping the crystal lamp, which broke apart when it hit the floor.
He walked toward O’Brien’s broken body. The racks of liquor bottles behind the bar had been decimated. Half of the mirror had fallen away, and the rest clung to the wall like the blade of a guillotine. The brass bar rail was bent and smeared with O’Brien’s blood, and red splashes of his life dotted the wooden floor.
“What now?” Trix said, and he heard a thunk behind him as she cast aside the iron. The optimism she had been trying so hard to project had been forgotten. “Jim, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t afford to be questioned by the cops.”
“We’re going,” Jim said. But he made no move to leave. Instead, he moved closer to the Oracle of this Irish Boston, picturing Peter O’Brien’s face, still hearing the amiable bear of a man’s voice in his head. A couple of hours, that was all he had said he needed, and then he would have tracked down Jenny and Holly. How many years, even decades, had this man been the Oracle? And then within an hour or two of them showing up he was dead.
Oh, you bitch, Jim had heard him say, and he looked around for the letter, keen to see what it had contained.
O’Brien’s legs shifted.
“Jesus!” Jim shouted, staggering backward.