Grief Street

Prologue

    B elow, the clanking furnace and the dripping ping of cold water, the buzz of flies...
    ... Its guttural wheezing.
    Night-gray alley light fogged down through cellar windows, settling into its eyes: oval slits of gassy yellow, like an alligator’s eyes reflecting the moon. The stench of excrement and rotting flesh was overwhelming.
    I pulled a tin of Vicks chest rub from my coat pocket and slathered my nostrils with biting blue menthol. It hissed at me sharply as I blocked out the putrid odor. When I again breathed freely, its alligator eyes cut me a look that said it knew the one thing sure to scare me clean to the soul.
    My head dropped.
    I lifted a boot from a lump in the mushy dirt floor. A stone, I thought. But in the withered light striped across my toes I saw instead the remains of a forearm, a wrist, and a small white human hand. A plain gold band encircled the bone of a ring finger.
    I bent to reach for the ring, and the possibility of its power. I tugged gold from a stiffened sliver of flesh, almost releasing it...
    …A column of fat beetles marched past my feet, spooking me.
    The ring fell. The beetles scuttled toward a sweating cement wall. Something that lay hidden there in the dark snatched them up. From shadows came the sound of tiny teeth crunching insect shells.
    I straightened myself and looked back at it.
    It was surrounded now by rats the size of rabbits, at least a dozen of the things. The biggest of them straddled its ragged lap, tail worming between thighs. It stroked the nape of the rat’s grease-brown neck, as casually as somebody would scratch behind the ears of a collie dog.
    “Do you know who I am?” it asked. Its breath plumed in the close, refrigerator-humid air, filling the space between us with a rank bowel smell.
    Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. This now echoed in my frightened head, a Latin drill from Holy Cross schoolboy days; this, the greatest of all Virgil’s lines: These are the tears of things, and the stuff of our mortality cuts us to the heart.
    “Yes,” I answered. “I know you.”
    “Understand, then—you mustn’t say my name. Not ’til you’re one of mine, and I swallow you.”
    “That I can wait on.” When I am supposed to be as brave as the city of New York pays me to be, I take my sweet time. Also I try to crack wise. There is more percentage having a smart mouth than a dumb mouth.
    “Aye, there’s time enough for you,” it said, in a voice now with the overlapping echoes of New York and Dublin. It said, “For me there’s all eternity.”
    “And time enough for the truth at last?”
    “The truth of me, you’d be asking?”
    “Yes.”
    “There are truths that go ’round so dressed up that people take them for lies—but which are pure truths nonetheless.” It paused, rasping. “You’re after such purity?”
    “I think so.”
    “Then ask me what you will.”
    “When you say name, you mean O’Shaughnessy, for instance. Or Brady, or Harrigan, or—”
    “You know exactly what I mean.”
    “The mortal name people call you?”
    “Come now, Detective Hockaday. Not people —our people.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “It’s said I’m the fiandiu, the shooskie, the fule tief. Isn’t that so? The auld sheeld —the muckle maister. Which do you fancy?”
    “I’ll go with your favorite.”
    “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the grim reaper!” Its bellowing laughter frightened the rats. They skittered off in a dozen directions.
    Another smog-cloud of its foul breath stung my eyes. I wiped a sleeve over my face and crouched low, feeling around on the gummy floor for the ring.
    “Leave the cursed thing be!” it shouted, knowing what I sought. “Leave it lie!”
    “Why?”
    For a split second, it hesitated, then said, “For the luck of it, lad!”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The muck you’re kneeling in’s like my altar is what. My memento mori. It’s so nicely shat through-and-through with blood and bone chunks and man-meat and vermin dung. Ah—where there’s muck, there’s luck!”
    I yanked my hand from the floor. Again it laughed, loudly, sourly. I shut my tearing eyes for relief. My feet shifted, my boot heels sank an inch into muck. And suddenly my head was weaving, as if my neck was a toy spring; this jogged the helpless memory of a thousand nights of my drunkard past: swaying on a raft in a nauseous sea, looking hard at some fixed object, praying to God