“Fuck, man,” he said, wearing a distant, shit-eating grin. “What the fuck…? Taylor?”
“Yeah, Johnny,” Taylor said. “You’re a motherfucking piece of work, aren’t you?”
“I try,” Johnny said, still wearing that lunatic smile. He let his head drop back down to the floor. “I’m a work of art… always in progress.”
“Just tell me where Weasel is,” Taylor said, shaking her head. “Tell me where he’s staying.”
Johnny was silent for a handful of seconds. His eyelids began to droop, and then, abruptly, they fell shut.
“Motherfucker!” Taylor growled. She clamped her hands over both of Johnny’s ears and started to shake his head back and forth. His eyes snapped open, and there was a look of fear there as he tried to get a fix on Taylor’s angry eyes. “Where’s Weasel, Johnny?” Taylor continued to growl. “Just fucking tell me!”
The violence jolted the dreadlocked girl out of her stupor. She pushed away from Johnny and frantically rolled across the room, finally coming to rest against her other roommate. She pressed herself tight against his sleeping body and curled into a fetal ball. Her eyes remained open. She watched Taylor and Johnny from beneath drooping, heavy lids.
“Fuck,” Johnny groaned as Taylor continued to shake him. “Just stop! Stop! I’m going to be sick.”
Taylor grabbed the collar of Johnny’s shirt and pulled him up into a sitting position. A ribbon of spit poured from his lips, and I thought he really was going to be sick. “The other… the other end of the hall,” he said, trying to prop himself up with a shaking arm. “He emptied out a broom closet. Won’t fucking come out.”
Taylor put her hand against Johnny’s face and pushed, hard, sending him tumbling back to the floor. Johnny let out a loud groan and grasped his head between his palms. He closed his eyes and started rocking back and forth.
“Leave Weasel alone, Johnny,” Taylor said. “Terry might be letting your shit slide, but I won’t let it go. I’ll fuck you up—absolutely fuck you up—if I ever, ever see you near him again. Okay? Okay?”
Johnny let out another groan. I took that as a sign of agreement.
“We’ve got to get him out of here, Dean,” Taylor said as we crossed back through the kitchen. She paused and looked back at me over her shoulder. There was a hint of fear in her eyes, a glimmer of trepidation fighting its way past all of that seething anger. “He’s going to die here if we don’t do something. We’ve got to get him home.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s fine. I understand.”
After seeing Johnny, I really couldn’t argue with her logic. I wouldn’t wish that kind of punishment on anyone.
A grateful smile flickered across her lips. And then she was gone. She barreled out of the kitchen and back down the main corridor, quickly making her way to the other end of the floor.
There were a half dozen storage rooms at this end of the basement, but Taylor barely paused as she darted past, sending a brief flicker of light across each open door. I struggled to keep up. Finally, at the end of the corridor, she pulled to a stop. There was a jumble of debris strewn across the floor, here—a mop, several brooms, rags, a bucket filled with dirty gray water—and it barely left enough space to let open the broom closet door.
Taylor stepped up to the closet and knocked. “Weasel?” she said. Her voice was tentative, weak, a stark contrast to all the energy she’d unleashed against Johnny. She knocked again, this time a little bit harder. “Let me in. I want to help.”
There was no response.
“Please, Wendell,” she said, her voice cracking. She continued in a low whisper: “I’m sorry. I forgive you.”
Then she opened the door.
There was no one inside. The closet was a tiny space, barely large enough to house a sleeping man. There were blankets layered in a stack on the floor, the top blanket turned down in a neat triangle. It looked like a child’s bed, prepped and ready for a good night’s sleep.
“Fuck,” Taylor said, letting out a nervous laugh. In the backwash of her flashlight, I could see tears glistening on her cheeks. “All of this work… I thought we’d find him dead, and the fucker’s not even here.”
She played her flashlight across the floor of the closet. The blankets took up most of the space, but there was more of Weasel’s stuff inside. There was a stack of flannel shirts folded into a pillow at the head of the bed and, lying next to it, Weasel’s fedora. I remembered it from my first day in the city. He’d doffed it like a gentleman as he greeted me.
Taylor once again panned the flashlight across the small room, finally settling on a stack of notebooks tucked into the corner. They were cheap notebooks. I recognized the style: black-and-white marbled covers, the words Composition Book and College Ruled stamped across the front. There had been stacks and stacks of these things at my university bookstore—nearly a full pallet, dumped right inside the front door—on sale for fifty cents each. A worn-down nub of pencil lay on top of the stack, and there were wood shavings scattered across the floor.
Taylor let out a curious grunt. “His journals,” she said. “He’s always writing. Every fucking day.” She got down on the blanket and pulled the topmost notebook into her lap. She held up her flashlight and flipped through the thin pages. I could see densely packed words scrawled in pencil and ink.
She leaned forward to put the notebook back, then paused in midmotion. Her eyes widened, and her left hand started to move slowly at her side, gently caressing the blanket down by her leg, feeling… something. I couldn’t see what she was doing. After a couple of moments of tentative exploration, she scooted off the edge of the blanket and pushed it back violently, bunching it up against the far wall and exposing the concrete beneath.
And then she let out a sudden, strangled sob.
“No, no, no,” she hissed. She clamped her eyes shut and fell back against the wall. Her legs went dead, and gravity pulled her back down to the floor.
There were fingers in the concrete. Four fingers and the tip of a thumb, sticking up from the broom closet floor.
Fingers, reaching up from the world below.
Taylor dropped her flashlight, and it rolled slowly across the floor. The fingers were at the edges of its light, but they still cast sharp shadows: tapered pyramids stretching across the concrete, pointing up toward the left-hand wall. The flashlight stopped rolling, but the shadows didn’t remain still. The fingers were quivering. Not strong, conscious movements, but rather an electric tremor, tendons adjusting beneath skin, pulling tight against bone.
Taylor let out a weak groan. “It’s Weasel,” she said. Her voice was a raw, guttural whisper. She kept her eyes clenched shut. “It’s Weasel,” she repeated.
I didn’t say anything. My heart was beating fast, but I was not afraid.
I was numb. I was astounded.
I got down on my knees and pulled the flashlight over to my side, fixing the fingers in the center of its beam. The fingernails were ragged and packed with dirt, and there was a bruise beneath the middle cuticle. The knuckles had been scraped raw, but otherwise there seemed to be little damage. And the concrete itself was absolutely perfect—no cracks, no crumbling, no hint of violence of any type.
I glanced back at Taylor. She had her hands up over her eyes, as if she were trying to hide, as if she were trying to retreat from the world into the comfort of her pressed palms. I left her alone. Instead, I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures.
14.1