Grief Street

house. Mice skittered over my boots, but I dared not move. Up front, I heard something being dragged across the floor. Then down a stairway.
    I moved from the back room toward the front of the house. In the hallway, before I reached the parlor, a door was open beneath a grand staircase. I stepped through the door and found myself at the top of stairs leading downward into pitch black, relieved only by night-gray alley light fogging through cellar windows. There was below the clanking furnace and the dripping ping of cold water, the buzz of flies...
    Its guttural wheezing. The overpowering odor of excrement and rotting flesh.
    Yes, the one. I take a man serious should he fancy himself the devil. He spoke in the more natural rhythms of the other side, that was all; the Dublin side of him, and the dark side of him.
    I pulled the tin of Vicks from my coat pocket and slathered my nostrils with biting blue menthol.
    I heard a shovel spading dirt into a hole. I moved downward, step by step, under cover of this sound. As I crept, I watched it work to bury something in a shallow plot next to a large gray stone.
    The shoveling task was finally complete. I listened as it moved over the oily cellar floor. I crossed myself. Here and now was no percentage in being a doubter.
    It hissed, and lit a match. The match fueled a candle, which it held beneath its face. Its eyes seemed oval slits of gassy yellow, an alligator’s eyes reflecting the moon.
    I reached for the Vicks again, and coated my face against its stench.
    It moved to light more candles, arranged on a rack of black tapers of different sizes, circled around a chair. Candles lit, it sat down in the chair. Rats were at its feet, staring at me. An enormous rat sat in its ragged lap, worming a fleshy gray tail between its master’s thighs. Master stroked the nape of the rat’s grease brown neck as casually as someone scratching behind the ears of a collie dog.
    My head dropped. I lifted a boot from a lump in the mushy dirt floor. What I thought to be a stone was the remains of a forearm, a wrist, and a small white human hand. A plain gold band encircled the bone of a ring finger. Sister Roberta’s hand.
    I bent to reach for the ring...
    Scuttling beetles spooked me, as well as its voice in the refrigerator-humid air, addressing me as if I were an expected guest.
    “There’s some graves back there, at the bottom of the stairs. I was putting away the last of my mortal antecedents. Did you happen to notice as you was creeping down on me?”
    “Yes.”
    “There’s a tombstone I planted to mark the graves of the dearly departed.”
    “Including the one you just murdered.”
    It ignored my accusation. “I’ll make you the proverbial Faustian bargain, Detective Hockaday: answer me the riddle of the epitaph, and I’ll permit you to live.”
    “Some choice.”
    “Did you ever strike a deal with the devil, by the way?”
    “I have an ex-wife.”
    “Such a glorious wit. Let’s see if you’re as smart about calculating the epitaph. You’ll be needing a candle to see. Come here and get it.”
    I stepped forward slowly, and saw clearly now that I was right, that this was what I was after. I saw, too, what it was wearing: half of Marvin Paznik’s skinned-off face, draped over the earless left side of Edward Michael Mallow’s own.
    “Hah!” It was a laugh and a spray of spittle. “Will you now be asking me. What do you hear, Eddie?”
    I fell backward from the wet force of his words and from the stink. And Eddie the Ear laughed and sprayed again. The rats stayed where they were, and seemed to be laughing, too. I picked myself up from muck, and approached the candle rack.
    I chose a candle, a thick one with a good long wick, then crossed the cellar floor to the tombstone.
    “Fifteen minutes,” Eddie the Ear warned me, hissing. “No more. Fifteen minutes before we learn if Neil Hockaday lives, or if he dies.”
    I crossed myself again and read the chiseled stone:

    Here lie
    Two grandparents with their two grandchildren
    Two husbands with their two wives
    Two fathers with their four children
    Two mothers each with daughter and son
    One maiden with her mother and father
    Sister and brother times two.
    Yet but six corpses all lie buried here,
    Though how this number, ’tis unclear.

    “There’s nothing unclear about this.”
    I counted off twelve minutes before saying so, not wanting to give Eddie the impression that his riddle was a simple one, if a guesser knew