I think he could have bent down and kissed Alicia. I think he wanted, more than anything else that he’d discovered this far into his small life, to become the prince of eternal darkness in the dreams of the unconscious beauty at his feet.
He got on his knees and began to gather all the disparate papers together, attempting to shuffle them into some kind of order. At one point one of his men tried to bend down and help and the Censor screamed for the soldier to come to attention. He wanted no hands but his own to come in contact with the manuscript. Every few pages that he collected, he would stop for just a second and read a line or two from the topmost sheet, then, flushed and making a slight grunting noise, he would go back to his hunt. When he had found all the pages and double-checked under books and produce crates that there were no stray leaves, he sat on the floor and lay the stack of writing in his lap. There was suddenly a very antsy and nervous air about him, something that combined with his fatigue and exhaustion from working without sleep for too long. He put one hand flat on the manuscript, reached his other into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a set of keys, which he tossed through the air to Moltke. Then he quietly addressed his men, in a tone that was more request than order, instructing them to wrap the girl in a blanket and take her to his home.
Moltke began to protest with a reminder of the final paragraph in the Orders of Erasure, but the Censor silenced his underling with a hand on the shoulder.
A deputy named Varnbuler quietly, perhaps even challengingly, asked, “Don’tyou mean that we should take the prisoner to your office?”
Meyrink met his stare and even from a sitting position, willed it down.
“That is not what I said. And that is not what I meant.”
No one spoke. Meyrink walked to a bed and stripped it of a blanket. Alicia stirred momentarily as they rolled her in it, and then without any further instructions they lifted her under their arms like a battering ram and exited the library.
Meyrink sat in the center of the attic and slowly, methodically began to collate the manuscript into its logical sequence. This accomplished, he began at page one and read to the end, through the sections where Alicia’s handwriting changes from her normal flowing scroll to a combined printing and writing and finally into a chaotic mess of abbreviations, unique shorthand, dropped vowels, letters slanting up and down the page, sentences running in counterclockwise circles around the block of main text, cross-outs, splotches of spilled ink, grievous misspellings, a complete lack of punctuation, and grammar made eccentric to the brink of unintelligibility.
He read it all and found himself excited to the point of physical manifestation. He felt empowered in a profound and virginal way. Alicia had single-handedly rewritten an image of himself that he had been unable to create in his entire glacial lifetime. With her eyes and ears and pen, the sleeping girl had erased everything about the Censor’s life that had come before and forged his entire being anew.
I am forced to confess, my hand grows tired. An honest man can find the nerve to admit anything.
Do you know what I think insomnia is, my independent brother? I believe it is a terror so profound that the body would rather decay, would rather cave in upon itself from exhaustion, than ride one more time into the dreams of the demon.
Do you know what I think a migraine is, Gilrein? I think it is the weight of the victims, the corpses, the bones of the despised, pushing, more pressure each night, upon the skull of the survivor.
Do you know of an antidote for these exquisite trials, taxi-boy? You give it some thought. Perhaps you can help me when we meet again, my twin. In the meantime, I have to silence another old man making promises that can’t possibly be kept.
Culpably yours,
Otto Langer
21
Halfway to the Toth Care Facility, the sound of Imogene Wedgewood insinuating the ballad “Whimperative” is interrupted by a staticky bleat from the dispatch radio. Gilrein grabs the microphone and asks, “Mojo, is that you?”
But instead of an answer comes a muffled voice that may or may not belong to Bettman the dispatcher.
“Pickup at Gompers Station. Will you respond?”
Gilrein adjusts the squelch, thumbs the mike, and asks, “Mojo?”
There’s a wait of several seconds and then, through even more static, the voice says, “Fare’s name is Brown. Will you respond?”
The cab rolls to the side of the road. Gilrein sits and stares at the radio, thumbs the mike again, and asks, “Who is this, please?”
But there’s no reply. So, before he can think too much, he makes a U-turn into a stream of traffic and reverses direction.
He bangs up the curbing and rolls over ash and gravel around the back of the train station. Gompers has been closed down for dozens of years and the elements and nonstop vandalism have taken their toll on what was at one time possibly the most beautiful building in the city. These days Gompers is a burned-out shell of marble and granite that serves as communal crib to a transient junkie population as well as a notorious stock exchange for a brand of transactions that will never be reported to the SEC.
The chamber of the.38 is fully loaded and Gilrein sticks it in his jacket pocket, locks up the taxi, and heads for a new entrance that someone has spent a lot of time hacking into the stonework of the south wall. If what’s waiting inside is an ambush, the attackers have made an innocent but possibly crucial mistake. For a few years, Gilrein attended a decrepit Catholic grammar school a block from here, an ancient chunk of red brick crammed between a meat-packing distributor and a tiny used-auto lot. To get to and from his bus each day, Gilrein took a shortcut through Gompers, eventually using the extra time this bought to explore the already abandoned rail house. He probed the mysteries of this arc with the bottomless curiosity and expectation of a hyperdreamy twelve-year-old, always semiterrified of what lay in the shadows of every new tunnelway but unable to walk away with his curiosity unsated.
It was a stupid hobby and a part of him knew it at the time. Some of the Gompers tracks were already being used for the freight lines and there was a known history of more than one rail wanderer losing life and/or limb to four hundred thousand pounds of diesel-driven iron thrown down a track bed at ninety miles an hour. But that might have been part of the allure.
In any event, Gilrein never feared being crushed by the trains as much as he worried about stumbling upon a lair of one of the Gompers tribes, of whom the last-stop drunks who slept with rail-spiked truncheons in their arms were the most serene. Gompers’s endless pockets of always shrouded chambers and vaults, utility rooms and lower-level crevices, underground cellars and balcony dining coves offered a wide selection of housing choices for the city’s disassociated. In his years as a cop, Gilrein didn’t venture into Gompers territory very often. The station was the stomping ground for a very specific breed of security. You had to submit to a fairly grueling psych profile just to apply for metro transit. And nobody could tell whether you needed to flunk or pass the aptitude exams in order to draw assignment. Once in transit blues, you didn’t much associate with the general street humps. Transit policing was a world unto itself. The rail-yard gestapo drew its mission and its clout from a different well than the city’s generic force. They were a small and tight-knit outfit. They ran by their own regs, operated with an autonomy that Chief Bendix could only envy from afar. The watchword among the train bulls was keep your mouth shut. The fact was that the majority of transit cops would love nothing better than to spend a single night scaring the bejesus out of the most street-jaded reporter The Spy could provide. But the unquestioned word from above — an amorphous cloud of authority that comprised some conglomerate of the transit commissioner’s office, the chamber of commerce, and an uneasy alignment of rival freight companies — was that Gompers rumors stayed rumors. No matter what. No one was more tight-lipped than the cinder bulls about the horrors they uncovered on a nightly basis. They carried enough hardware into the tunnels to make the SWAT humps jealous and they never went anywhere inside the station without full backup, three cops to a team, and each one knowing that if a pile of rubble suddenly turned animate, made a run at you instead of away from you, you emptied the chamber of your Magnum without pausing to yell a warning. And you didn’t bother to question the nature of the rubble until coffee was served at shift’s end.