You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.
He stepped inside the room. It smelled the same — rot, dust, desperation. He crossed to where his mattress used to lie on the floor. The other foster kids would trample him half inadvertently when they hopped out of their bunks. He looked at the ceiling, found the crack that forked into a lightning bolt. The one he’d gaze up at in the dark like it was some kind of wishing star and wonder who he was.
Where are you from?
I don’t know. I don’t remember.
Do you have a family? Parents?
I don’t … I don’t know. It’s been so long.
Machinery revved up outside. A jackhammer screamed into asphalt. Gears clanked, a bulldozer lurching forward, blade lifted like a metal claw.
Will you help me? Will you?
Evan had sworn a promise to his twelve-year-old self: I’ll get to you. Here he was. But what did he want?
The echo of the voice came again: You have to remember me.
He walked to the doorframe. Carved into the wood with Papa Z’s trusty pocketknife were the boys’ height markers. The undertaking had lasted one summer month, until it became clear that given turnover and growth spurts, the notches would chew up the entire jamb.
Evan ran the pads of his fingers over the nicks and the carved initials next to them.
There at the top, the highest by a good six inches, were three letters: CVS.
Charles Van Sciver.
Then Ramón. The others descended in a cluster, the initials overlapping, turning the wood into a crosshatched mess.
Way down at the bottom, as far below the scrum as Van Sciver’s was above, there was a solitary notch.
It has to be you.
Evan had to crouch.
There it was, the E still holding on after the years, though the initial of his original surname had long been effaced.
How small he’d been. He’d known it back then, of course, but he’d never let himself recognize it. He’d been too busy scrapping and fighting for his life, for his sanity, for a way out. He had neither size nor strength, so he’d had to rely on grit and tenacity. Only these he could control. Everything else he had to ball up and cram down deep inside himself.
It has to be you.
That nick, set apart so far below, made it undeniable. His vulnerability. His powerlessness. His loneliness.
What had he hoped for back then? What kind of future had he dreamed of when he’d stared up at the lightning-fork crack in the ceiling? Had it been visions of Wilson Combat 1911 pistols and encrypted virtual private-network tunnels and trauma surgeries to patch himself back together? Drinking vodka at his counter, sharing each night with a wall of herbs and a city view? Sleeping inside a penthouse prison cell of his own making?
He’d been desperate enough to grab the first ticket out. Had he stayed behind, he’d be in prison by now, long dead, or jackaled out from the streets or drugs. Jack Johns had saved his life as surely as when he’d swooped in on that Black Hawk. And yet Evan hadn’t looked back since climbing into Jack’s dark sedan as a scared twelve-year-old kid. Hadn’t reconsidered whether the tooth-and-claw skills that had gotten him out of East Baltimore were still the best ones to carry him forward. When he’d driven off with Jack, the world had yawned open to him like a summer day, but a part of him had been put on pause, as stalled as a stuck DVD.
He fought his way back to that scared little kid, pried open the rusty hatches, and looked at what was locked inside. It was hard to acknowledge, harder yet to feel.
And yet crouching here in a slant of afternoon light filtered through a filthy window, he felt it.
This part he wasn’t very good at.
It has to be you.
He wiped his mouth. His throat felt parched, his voice husky. “Okay,” he said. “I see you.”
On his way out, he adjusted the charge wrapping the beam in the hall.
Standing in the crowd a few minutes later, another anonymous body jockeying for position behind the sawhorses, he watched the building crumble. A slow-motion cascade, all that rot and mold collapsing inward until nothing remained but a heap and a cloud.
You have to come.
I got here, he thought. I promised I would.
One moment he was in the heat of the crowd. The next he was gone.
This part he was good at.
64
The Slender Man
The slender man always got excited as the hour neared. All the cues for arousal were there. The big cranes, the smell of diesel, the containers lined up like giant dominoes.
It meant that soon he would claim his prize.
Entering JAXPORT, he felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at the bell. His heartbeat quickened as he took in the sights, breathed the muggy wet of the St. Johns River, which crept by in the background as dark and lazy as lava. He was perspiring through his dress shirt.
His Town Car purred along the roadway. He sat in the back, a bottle of champagne icing in a bucket. It was a celebration sixteen days in the making. Resting on the seat next to him were a set of fleece-lined wrist cuffs and a ball gag. Also, a chilled bottle of Fiji. Hector Contrell would have arranged nourishment for the journey, but the slender man found that they generally arrived parched.
His bodyguard and driver, Donnell, knew not to speak, not to say anything that might break the spell of this magical time.
The drive up, you see, even this was part of the foreplay.
Donnell turned off the main road to a rear cargo zone, the designated area where a series of under-the-table payments had determined that intermodular Container 78653-B812 would be set down. That was the beauty of it. Most everyone who worked at a port took bribes. No one had any idea what the container held.
It was there waiting, placed alone on an apron of asphalt.
Donnell got out first, his coat jacket shifting around his bulk, pulled tight across the holster.
The slender man emerged and took a moment there in the midnight silence. He tilted his head back and drew in a deep breath of fresh air. It was a starless night, the sky an impenetrable sheet of black, save for the moon, which beamed with an intensity that reminded him of the comic-book illustrations of his youth.
He recalled the photographs of her from the online catalog and reminded himself to lower his expectations. They didn’t always arrive in the best shape. But once they were cleaned and rested, they were usually restored to their previous condition, good for several months. Even then he could most often fetch a decent price selling them used. For people with lower standards, there was still value to be extracted.
The slender man nodded at Donnell, who produced a key, moved forward, and fussed with the massive cargo-door lock. Then he swung out the leverage handles, the lock rods clanking in their holds. He stepped back, a magician revealing the prestige. After so much planning, the theatrics were essential. Nothing could shatter the mood.
As the doors creaked open, Donnell eased farther back out of the sight line and stood beside the slender man, leaning against the driver’s door with his hands folded.
This was the slender man’s favorite part, when he let them out of the dark box they’d been living in for weeks. He was their keeper, their owner, their God.
But this time something was different.