A long silence. Then, "So you've figured it out."
"You've known all along," I said bitterly. "Ever since I came off the high-tension lines in Manayunk."
She didn't deny it. "I suppose I should be flattered that when you were in trouble you came to me," she said in a way that indicated she was not.
"Why didn't you tell me then? Why drag it out?"
"Danny--"
"Don't call me that!"
"It's your name. Daniel. Daniel Cobb."
All the emotions I'd been holding back by sheer force of denial closed about me. I flung myself down and clutched the pipe tight, crushing myself against its unforgiving surface. Trapped in the friendless wastes of night, I weighed my fear of letting go against my fear of holding on. "Cobb?"
I said nothing. The Widow's voice took on an edgy quality. "Cobb, we can't stay here. You've got to lead me out. I don't have the slightest idea which way to go. I'm lost without your help."
I still could not speak.
"Cobb!" She was close to panic. "I put my own feelings aside. Back in Manayunk. You needed help and I did what I could. Now it's your turn."
Silently, invisibly, I shook my head.
"God damn you, Danny," she said furiously. "I won't let you do this to me again! So you're unhappy with what a jerk you were--that's not my problem. You can't redeem your manliness on me any more. I am not your fucking salvation. I am not some kind of cosmic last chance and it's not my job to talk you down from the ledge."
That stung. "I wasn't asking you to," I mumbled.
"So you're still there! Take my hand and lead us out."
I pulled myself together. "You'll have to follow my voice, babe. Your memories are too intense for me."
We resumed our slow progress. I was sick of crawling, sick of the dark, sick of this lightless horrid existence, disgusted to the pit of my soul with who and what I was. Was there no end to this labyrinth of pipes?
"Wait." I'd brushed by something.
Something metal buried in the earth.
"What is it?"
"I think it's--" I groped about, trying to get a sense of the thing's shape. "I think it's a cast-iron gatepost. Here. Wait. Let me climb up and take a look."
Relinquishing my grip on the pipe, I seized hold of the object and stuck my head out of the ground. I emerged at the gate of an iron fence framing the minuscule front yard of a house on Ripka Street. I could see again! It felt so good to feel the clear breath of the world once more that I closed my eyes briefly to savor the sensation.
"How ironic," Euphrosyne said.
"After being so heroic," Thalia said.
"Overcoming his fears," Aglaia said.
"Rescuing the fair maid from terror and durance vile," Cleta said.
"Realizing at last who he is," Phaenna said.
"Beginning that long and difficult road to recovery by finally getting in touch with his innermost feelings," Auxo said. Hegemone giggled. "What?" I opened my eyes.
That was when the Corpsegrinder struck. It leaped upon me with stunning force, driving spear-long talons through my head and body. The talons were barbed so that they couldn't be pulled free and they burned like molten metal. "Ahhhh, Cobb," the Corpsegrinder crooned. "Now this is sweet."
I screamed and it drank in those screams so that only silence escaped into the outside world. I struggled and it made those struggles its own, leaving me to kick myself deeper and deeper into the drowning pools of its identity. With all my wilt l resisted. It was not enough. I experienced the languorous pleasure of surrender as that very will and resistance were sucked down into my attacker's substance. The distinction between me and it weakened, strained, dissolved. I was transformed.
I was the Corpsegrinder now. Manhattan is a virtual school for the dead. Enough people die there every day to keep any number of monsters fed. From the store of memories the Corpsegrinder had stolen from me, I recalled a quiet moment sitting crosslegged on the tin ceiling of a sleaze joint while table dancers entertained Japanese tourists on the floor above and a kobold instructed me on the finer points of survival. "The worst thing you can be hunted by," he said, "is yourself."
"Very aphoristic."
"Fuck you. I used to be human, too."
"Sorry."
"Apology accepted. Look, I told you about Salamanders. That's a shitty way to go, but at least it's final. When they're done with you, nothing remains. But a Corpsegrinder is a parasite. It has no true identity of its own, so it constructs one from bits and pieces of everything that's unpleasant within you. Your basic greeds and lusts. It gives you a particularly nasty sort of immortality. Remember that old cartoon? This hideous toad saying, 'Kiss me and live forever--you'll be a toad, but you'll live forever.'" He grimaced. "If you get the choice, go with the Salamander."
"So what's this business about hunting myself?"
"Sometimes a Corpsegrinder will rip you in two and let half escape. For a while."
"Why?"
"I dunno. Maybe it likes to play with its food. Ever watch a cat torture a mouse? Maybe it thinks it's fun."
From a million miles away, I thought: So now I know what's happened to me. I'd made quite a run of it, but now it was over. It didn't matter. All that mattered was the hoard of memories, glorious memories, into which I'd been dumped. I wallowed in them, picking out here a winter sunset and there the pain of a jellyfish sting when I was nine. So what if I was already beginning to dissolve? I was intoxicated, drunk, stoned with the raw stuff of experience. I was high on life.
Then the Widow climbed up the gatepost looking for me. "Cobb?"
The Corpsegrinder had moved up the fence to a more comfortable spot in which to digest me. When it saw the Widow, it reflexively parked me in a memory of a gray drizzly day in a FordFiesta outside of 30th Street Station. The engine was going and the heater and the windshield wiper, too, so I snapped on the radio to mask their noise. Beethoven filled the car, the Moonlight Sonata.
"That's bullshit, babe," I said. "You know how much I have invested in you? I could buy two good whores for what that dress cost." She refused to meet my eyes. In a whine that set my teeth on edge, she said, "Danny, can't you see that it's over between us?"
"Look babe, let's not argue in the parking lot, okay?" I was trying hard to be reasonable. "Not with people walking by and listening. We'll go someplace private where we can talk this over calmly, like two civilized human beings." She shifted slightly in the seat and adjusted her skirt with a little tug. Drawing attention to her long legs and fine ass. Making it hard for me to think straight. The bitch really knew how to twist the knife. Even now, crying and begging, she was aware of how it turned me on. And even though I hated being aroused by her little act, I was. The sex was always best after an argument; it made her sluttish.
I clenched my anger in one hand and fisted my pocket with it. Thinking how much I'd like to up and give her a shot. She was begging for it. Secretly, maybe, it was what she wanted; I'd often suspected she'd enjoy being hit. It was too late to act on the impulse, though. The memory was playing out like a tape, immutable, unstoppable.
All the while, like a hallucination or the screen of a television set receiving conflicting signals, I could see the Widow, frozen with fear half in and half out of the ground. She quivered like an acetylene flame. In the memory she was saying something, but with the shift in my emotions came a corresponding warping-away of perception. The train station, car, the windshield wipers and music, all faded to a murmur in my consciousness.