The girl is holding my hand. I haven’t held anyone’s hand for longer than I can remember. Not like this, anyway. Her fingers are slender, grip strong, her skin warm and pale against my own. It’s that feminine hand that has so much more power in this world than one rough and hard. Soft hands build. Hard ones destroy. I feel as if I’m falling in love with her, this girl, but that doesn’t make sense. Not in the normal way I know. She’s a baby. She’s my baby, just starting to get grown, and we’re walking together to Sunday school for a few steps. We round a corner and I’m taking her to the winter dance. She pulls on my hand, leading me down a narrow passageway between crumbling buildings, and then I imagine for a moment that I’m walking her to school on her first day. I look at her and smile. A hard-faced woman hisses at us from an empty window, and the feeling slips away. The girl is a stranger leading me to what could be my doom, and I’m letting her, because I’ve been heading there for years on my own, and I appreciate the company. I don’t know her name, because I don’t need to. She doesn’t know mine, because I don’t have one that fits anymore. I’m the Night Man, and that’s good enough for her.
She stops and looks up, not letting go of my hand. I follow her eyes. In front of us is a massive old French colonial mansion, jammed between a collapsed cement building and a rectangular tower of scaffolding covered in corrugated tin roof panels wired together like a patchwork of poorly sewn sections of rusted skin. The dichotomy of the scene makes it seem as if a giant child hid away an elaborate doll house amid the ruins of a bombed village.
The house is mesmerizing, weather-worn but still lushly ornate and somehow profane with its cornices and baroque touches in such a mean place. Angels and demons taunt each other at the peaks of gambrel roofs topping mini balconies and stairways that wind behind the walls, leading to secret places or possibly nowhere at all. Every window still holds its thick leaded glass, crisscrossed by corroded brass framing, splitting the human faces that look out from them, watching the two of us down below. Generations of damp and the unstable underbelly of the Floating City have shifted the structure several degrees, its stone foundation sticking up above the street, giving the impression that it had been knocked in the head and stayed that way. The tilted porch is lined with people, mostly old women, who look down on us with no expression.
The girl points to the top floor, where a single window has been shuttered, held tight by a knotted chain of copper given over to a tarnish of green. Her face is grave. “Nói với họ những bóng ma của bạn,” she says.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
The rain begins to fall, the sky unable to hold back any longer, and bathes everything below it. A chewed-up river of water pours down in increments from the universe miles above the clouds.
The front door, set deep in the porch, opens, but no one emerges. It’s an invitation, and we take it.
22. Dead Between the Walls
We escape the rain through the open door, and drip onto a threadbare rug that was clearly once a thick, glorious piece of work worn down by years and the comings and goings of a million pair of feet.
Benches are set up in the spacious foyer, where dozens of people sit quietly, even the babies not making a peep. A wide staircase bisects the back of the structure, leading up in a gently segmented spiral to the floors above. There’s a hush to the entire house, except for the rain outside and the sounds coming from the upper levels. Thumps, groans, guttural words and growls. Someone screams for what seems like a minute straight. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman, so stripped down and raw are the tones of it. Chimes tinkle above the door without the aid of wind.
I find myself looking at the ceiling like everyone else in the room when a woman enters from a side passageway. She stands in the exact center of the foyer, her greenish eyes expressionless.
“I am Clotilde,” she says, her enunciated English clinging to the vestiges of a French accent. Her face is lined and handsome, chestnut hair shot with silver, and her attire looks as if Victorian finery slowly went native, adding in colored silks and flowers to the dour black of formal dress. I could imagine that she was born with the house, and arrived with it from wherever it came from, weathering the elements and adapting with the creep of age.
She waits for us to say something, hands clasped in front of her, but I have no idea what to say, nor why I’m here. The girl continues staring at the ceiling, listening to the disturbing noises and moving her mouth in silent prayer.
“Is this your place?” I ask.
“Mine? No, monsieur, it is yours.” She points at the girl. “And it is hers.” She looks at the faces from the porch through the window inside. “It is theirs.” She folds her hands in front of her and regards us evenly.
The girl puts her hand on my chest. “Anh ta có một con ma,” she says.
The woman nods.
“What is she saying?” I ask.
“She says you have a ghost.”
The girl nods. “Con ma đang cố giết nó.”
I look at Clotilde.
“She says it is trying to kill you.”
My mouth goes dry. “Yes.”
“Tôi nghĩ anh ấy đã chết.”
Clotilde walks up to me and looks into my face. She pokes my cheek with her finger, pinching the skin. She pries open each of my eyes, then my mouth, and looks down my throat, sniffing the air leaking out.
“What are you doing?” I say, pulling away. I don’t want anyone touching me. Not like that.
“She thinks you might be dead already.”
I try to say something, but pause. “Am I?” The question sounds stupid, but I’m genuinely curious.
“We shall see.”
She takes us up the staircase, which seems to ascend four or five floors. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell, as the darkness clouding the uppermost ceiling takes in the staircase without showing there it ends. Standing outside, I could have sworn this was a three-story affair, but the house seems to climb forever. At each landing, there are several shrines set up in corners, shallow alcoves. Most of them appear to be Buddhist. Some of them are in supplication to something else, sporting animal bones arranged in crowns, skins stuffed with dried herbs and flowers long dead. Thorns piercing through shriveled bits of mummified flesh. Death magic. Ghost worship. The sounds from the upper rooms have gone quiet.
After climbing an unknown number of floors, we step off onto a long hallway. Much like the height of this house, the width and length confuse the brain, as it seem far too wide or long or deep for the outside visual constraints. Closed doors line the corridor. There are so many closed doors, with one at the far, far end of this passageway open and waiting for us. A tiny woman stands in the doorway, her small eyes reaching out and finding mine, somehow digging in behind them and slowly burrowing down.
The hum starts at the base of my skull and works its way forward, grabbing for my eyes from the back. The River is near again, winding its way toward me from wherever it comes from. Right now it’s below, at the bottom of the hole in the cement surrounded by children. The River is underneath this entire city, making it float. It wants to open up the floor—all the floors—and take me from here.