Dark Cities Read online

  “He’ll come back from the shower in another minute, and he’ll suggest you have sex again. He’ll pressure you to try on a pair of handcuffs. Then he’s going to kill you.”

  Rose lifted her head from the pillow. She could still feel the alcohol from last night, a sloshing sensation inside her brain, as if she might spill out of herself were she to move too quickly. Zeus, the big black dog, was lying on the floor by the closet. Millie, the little white one, was on the armchair by the window. They were both watching her.

  Jack’s voice continued: “Other girls have decided this was a dream. I hope you won’t make the same mistake.”

  Over on the chair, Millie began to wag her tail. Rose’s clothes were scattered across the floor. She was thinking about how much effort it would take to pick them up and pull them on, and how unpleasant it would be to rush out of the apartment without washing her face or emptying her bladder or rinsing her mouth, when she heard the shower shut off.

  Jack walked toward the armchair, his nails making a clicking sound on the linoleum. There was a square of sunlight beneath the window, and he lay down in its center. He didn’t move his mouth when he spoke—it wasn’t like that. Rose just heard the words inside her head, and she knew they were his. “The knife is in the night table drawer,” he said. “All you need to do is get there first.”

  Then he shut his eyes. So did Zeus and Millie. From one second to the next, the three dogs went from staring at her to what looked like the deepest sort of sleep. Then Patrick was in the doorway, smiling down at her, naked, rubbing his hair with a towel. His penis was edging its way toward an erection, both stiff and floppy all at once. “Wanna try something fun?” he asked. He moved toward the closet, without waiting for a reply.

  Rose was about to tell him that she’d just had the weirdest dream, that his dog was speaking to her in it, telling her that—

  But then Patrick turned from the closet, his penis all the way erect now, a deep purple. He was moving toward her, holding a pair of handcuffs, bending to reach for her wrist.

  She lunged for the night table, and all three dogs began to bark.

  * * *

  Afterward—maybe an hour, maybe two, Rose wouldn’t have been able to say for certain—she was sitting on a bench, five or six blocks away, on the edge of Riverside Park. The panic was starting to ease now, but this didn’t mean she was feeling calm, not remotely. Numb would be the better description, though even this adjective would imply a degree of equanimity that was completely lacking. It was more like the absence of sensation that comes with extreme cold, as frostbite starts to set in: Rose knew there was a lot going on inside her head, but it had reached a point of extremity beyond which she could no longer feel anything specific, just a generalized, deeply subterranean hum of distress.

  It was early April, and the wind off the river retained a wintry bite, but the trees didn’t seem to mind: they were beginning to bud. Nannies pushed strollers; squirrels made darting forays across the still-not-quite-green grass. Rose’s nose was running. She didn’t know if it was the wind or an early bout of allergies or maybe just some physiological response to what had happened—to what she’d done. Could terror cause your nose to run? She kept wiping the snot on her sleeve, her leg jiggling with leftover adrenaline, while she tried to decide what she ought to do.

  She’d gotten the drawer open, and there was indeed a knife inside, a large knife, the kind a soldier might carry in a sheath on his ankle, though there wasn’t any sheath for this one, just the knife, its blade forged from some sort of black metal, its grip feeling slightly sticky in Rose’s hand. The next few moments might not have unfolded so easily for her had it not been for the dogs. All three were leaping and barking, and in the midst of this tumult, Zeus made contact with enough force to knock Patrick off balance. Rose wasn’t trying to stab him in any particular place; she was just swinging the blade, and the dogs were leaping, and Patrick was rushing toward her—stumbling, really, and then falling—and that was how the blade ended up piercing his throat, sinking deep, all the way to the hilt. Patrick dropped to the bed, and the knife came out of his body with a sucking sound, like a stick yanked from a muddy yard, and there was blood everywhere, an immense amount of it, fountaining upward, hitting the wall beside the bed and splattering to the floor with a lawn-sprinkler sound, and Patrick was gurgling and frothing and trying impotently to rise, and Rose dropped the knife, gathered up her clothes, and ran from the room. Her arms and face and chest were covered with blood. At first, she’d feared it might be hers, but when she washed it off in the kitchen sink, she couldn’t find any wounds, and finally she decided it all had to be Patrick’s. Standing at the sink, still naked, searching for a towel to dry her body, there was a moment when she thought she was going to call 911. It seemed like the obvious path, and if there’d been a landline in the apartment, she might’ve gone ahead and dialed the number—it would’ve been so easy, just three quick taps of her finger, and then other people would be making the decisions for her. But there wasn’t a landline, and Rose’s phone was still in her purse, and her purse was still in the bedroom, which was where Patrick was, along with the three dogs, so Rose found a tablecloth to dry herself, and she crouched to pee into a drinking glass, and emptied the glass into the sink, and then she was shivering, so she pulled on her clothes, and suddenly it seemed like maybe the easiest thing to do was leave, just leave, walk across the little entranceway to the front door, undo its three locks, and flee.

  Sitting on the park bench, Rose tried to imagine what she must look like to the people passing by. It was a shock to realize she probably seemed perfectly fine; it made the whole situation feel that much stranger. A horrifying, desperate thing had happened to her, and none of these strangers who saw Rose here, sitting in the sun, wiping her nose on her sleeve, jiggling her leg, none of them would ever be able to guess.

  Not one. Not ever.

  She’d made mistakes. Jesus fucking Christ: it appalled her to think how many.

  If she were still planning to call 911 (and she was, wasn’t she?), she should never have left the apartment—she shouldn’t even have left the room, shouldn’t have washed herself at the kitchen sink, shouldn’t have pulled on her clothes. She should’ve scrambled for her cell phone, should’ve called for an ambulance right there, standing beside the bed, bent over Patrick, balling up the sheet and pressing it against the jagged wound in his throat.

  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. She’d fucked this up.

  Now, when she dialed 911, the police would want to know why she’d left, why she’d waited so long to call. And what was she supposed to tell them, anyway? That she’d stabbed a near stranger in the throat because his dog had warned her the guy was planning to kill her? How well was this story going to play for her? Rose didn’t have any wounds, not even a bruise— Patrick hadn’t managed to touch her.

  And the dog… well, she had to think through that part of the morning’s events, didn’t she? It had seemed so obvious when she was there in the room, half-awake, hearing his voice.

  But now?

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. She’d had one of those weird early morning dreams, hadn’t she? She’d mistaken it for real, and she’d killed a guy.

  But what about the handcuffs? And how had she known there was a knife in that drawer? And why was there a knife in that drawer?

  Rose thought of Doctor Dolittle. She thought of Son of Sam. Neither model seemed especially helpful.

  She’d left her purse in the apartment. Her phone. Her wallet. And that was just the easy stuff. There would be fingerprints. Hair. Saliva. Vaginal fluid. Tiny flakes of dead skin. There would be other stuff, too—there had to be—stuff she’d probably never be able to think of.

  Rose had no idea what she was going to do, but one thing seemed unavoidable: she needed to go back.

  * * *

  The street door was locked.

  Rose hadn’t thought of this, and it made her angry with herself—there was so much she wasn’t thinking
of, so much she was getting wrong. She tried the knob; she pushed at the door with her shoulder. There was a buzzer system, with buttons for the different apartments. In movies, people were always using this sort of thing to gain illicit access to buildings. They’d push a button, claim to be a UPS deliveryman, and some too-trusting tenant would buzz them in. Rose didn’t think this strategy would work for her, but she also didn’t think she had much to lose in trying: she started with the top floor, pressed the button, waited long enough to realize there wasn’t going to be a response, then tried the next apartment down the line. She was on her fifth button before she got an answer. What sounded like a very old man’s voice said: “Hello…?”

  Rose put her mouth up against the speaker: “UPS.”

  There was a long pause—too long, it seemed to Rose— maybe there was a camera? Or maybe the old man was coming downstairs to sign for the supposed package? Or maybe he’d seen all of those movies Rose had seen, and he was calling the police right now, so she’d have one more inexplicable thing to explain to them when they finally showed up? Or maybe—

  The door buzzed, and she jumped forward, pushing it open.

  The building had fifteen stories. Rose got into the elevator and pressed buttons for the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and fourteenth floors. That way, if the old man had stepped out into the hallway and was watching the elevator, he wouldn’t know which floor Rose was going to. She rode to nine, then crept along the hall to the stairs, and tiptoed back down to the seventh floor.

  Apartment 78. The gray door, with its three (not locked) locks.

  Rose felt an impulse to ring the bell (which she resisted), and then—once she’d pushed open the door and stepped into the apartment—she had an even stronger urge to call out Patrick’s name (which she also resisted). From the entranceway, you could see into the kitchen. The tablecloth Rose had used as a towel lay in a damp mound on the linoleum in front of the refrigerator. To the right of the kitchen, a short hallway led to the bedroom. Beyond the bedroom, the hallway turned to the left—Rose assumed this must be where the bathroom was.

  She made her way to the bedroom. Part of her was hoping that none of it had happened—that it had all been a dream, not just the talking dog: everything. Patrick would still be asleep in the bed, or else awake now, drinking coffee, wondering where Rose had run off to so abruptly, and why. The sight of the bloody sheets cured Rose of this fantasy: the blood on the wall above the bed, the blood pooling on the floor. There was no sign of Patrick, so Rose assumed he must’ve slipped off the mattress, that he must be sprawled on the floor now, hidden by the bed’s bulk. But when she edged her way into the room, angling toward the armchair by the window, where her purse awaited her, and inside her purse, her cell phone, and through the magic of the cell phone, the police… when she cleared the foot of bed and forced herself to look, there was more blood, there was the knife lying in the center of that blood, and there were paw prints—dozens of them—around the margins of the mess, but there was no Patrick.

  He must’ve crawled under the bed as he bled himself out. It gave Rose a shivery feeling to imagine this.

  She crouched, bent to peer into the darkness. Down low like that, just an inch or two above the puddle, the raw-steak smell of the blood hit Rose with extra vigor, and for an instant she thought she might vomit. The sensation passed as quickly as it came. She could see nothing under the bed but dust bunnies and clumps of shed dog hair.

  Which meant… Patrick was alive?

  Such an outcome seemed impossible to Rose, but even as she thought this, she was stepping into the pool of blood, and reaching for the knife. It was the purest sort of reflex, fear-driven, from the base of her spine. Part of her was saying: Couldn’t this be a good thing? And another part—the stronger part, the part that had never intended to call 911, that had known all along the only way through this was to bury what needed to be buried, and run away from the rest—that part was shaking its head, and saying: No, no, no, no, no…

  Rose didn’t see any blood on the linoleum in the hallway, and this puzzled her. She couldn’t imagine how Patrick had been able to escape the bedroom—crawling or staggering— without leaving some sort of trail behind. Then she reached the bathroom, and came upon Millie. The hallway was dim, and Rose’s first impression was of a soccer-ball sized clot of white fur, tensely vibrating. It took her a moment to realize that Millie was licking the floor, with a frenzied aura of purpose. The dog swung its tiny body toward Rose; she stared up at her for a half-second, her muzzle stained dark-red. Then she pivoted away, lowered her head to the floor again and resumed her licking, audibly panting with the effort. Beyond her, Rose could see that the linoleum was smeared with blood. The trail led to a shut door at the end of the hall, fifteen feet past the bathroom.

  Rose could hear something making a shuffling sound on the other side of the door, and… was that a grunt? She took a step forward, and called out: “Patrick?”

  The sound stopped.

  “Patrick…?”

  Jack seemed to materialize from the center of the door. Rose flinched, almost dropped the knife. Then she realized there was a swinging panel cut into the wood—a dog door. Jack had pushed his way through it, and he was standing there now, in the dim light, his front paws in the hall, his back paws still on the other side of the door. His muzzle, like Millie’s, was stained with blood. There was a strong odor coming from the room; Rose couldn’t identify it—all she knew was that it was unpleasant. Jack stared at her. She could feel him looking at her face, then at the knife in her hand, then back at her face. She heard his voice in her head again. “Why don’t you go wait in the kitchen? Get yourself something to drink. I’ll be out in a minute, and we can talk this through.”

  And then, without waiting for Rose to respond, he ducked back through the tiny door.

  * * *

  The strangest part wasn’t that the dog could speak. It was that —while it was happening, at least—Rose didn’t find it strange at all.

  The first thing Jack said when he came into the kitchen was: “Would you mind freshening the water in the bowl?”

  There was a dog bowl sitting on a mat beside the refrigerator, half-full of water. Rose took it to the sink, rinsed it out, refilled it, and set it back on the mat. Then she sat in her chair again and watched Jack lap at the water. When he was finished, he lay down beside the bowl, facing her. He’d managed to clean most of the blood from his muzzle, and Rose was thankful for this. She’d found a Diet Coke in the otherwise almost completely empty refrigerator, and she sat clutching the can in her hands, feeling grateful for the chill against her palms—there was something soothing about the sensation, something grounding. She’d been sitting here for the past five minutes, waiting for the dog to appear, and wishing that she’d never posted her ad on Craigslist, wishing this, and then wishing it again, and then again, which was a pointless expenditure of energy, she knew, and a stupid thing to waste a wish on.

  “Where do you live?” Jack asked.

  “In New Jersey,” Rose said.

  “With roommates?”

  Rose shook her head. “At my mother’s. In her basement.”

  “That’s good,” Jack said. “That’s very good. So moving in here won’t be a problem?”

  Rose just stared at him. I’m talking to a dog, she thought. I killed a man, and now I’m talking to his dog. She felt exhausted suddenly, and dizzy to the point of nausea. She thought she was about to faint, so she bent forward and placed her head between her knees. It helped, but not a lot.

  Jack made a noise—it sounded like a sigh. “I know this is probably quite confusing for you, but if we can just focus on the basics, I’m confident you’ll soon find your bearings.”

  “How do you know how to speak?” Rose asked, without raising her head.

  Jack ignored the question. “It might feel uncomfortable for you to acknowledge this, but you’re not really in a position of power here. And the sooner you come to grips with that fact, t
he sooner we’ll sort everything out. There’s a body in the back room. A body with a knife wound to the throat. Your fingerprints are on the knife. Are you with me this far?”

  Rose could feel the dog watching her, waiting for her to lift her head and look at him. She didn’t move.

  Jack seemed to take her silence as an affirmation. “Would you like to know what would happen if you were to run away? Zeus and Millie and I would eventually get hungry. We’d start to bark and whimper and howl, and soon enough one of the neighbors would call the landlord, and the landlord would call the police, and the door would be broken down. And the body would be found. And the knife. And your fingerprints. And inside the back room? Other bodies. I think you’d be startled to learn how many. Now, you could certainly try to tell the police: ‘I didn’t kill those girls. Daniel did.’ But then they’ll ask how you came to know this. And you’ll say that his dog—”

  Rose lifted her head from her lap. “Who’s Daniel?”

  “The young man you stabbed in the throat.”

  “He said his name was Patrick.”

  “What did you tell him your name was?”

  Rose dropped her head back between her knees.

  “You’re a Jersey girl,” Jack said. “Isn’t this what you’ve always dreamed of? A Manhattan apartment?”

  “How can you talk?” Rose asked again.

  Once more Jack ignored the question. “You don’t have to worry about the body. Zeus and I are taking care of it. Millie will handle the blood on the floor and walls—I think you’ll be surprised at how clean she can get things with that tiny tongue of hers. The mattress and pillows are lined with plastic—Millie will lick them as good as new. It’s really only the sheets that are ever a problem. Daniel used to tie them up in a Hefty bag—double bag it. There’s a chute beside the elevator; it leads straight down to the building’s incinerator. Just drop the bags in, and it will be like he never even existed.”

  Rose lifted her head again. “What about his family? His friends?”