How? Tommy thought. He dashed left, fighting through the smothering pigs only to find himself facing a brick wall that surely hadn’t been there a minute ago. He went right, and there was another wall. When he faced forward again, the stranger was once more before him, standing in a patch of terrible moonlight. He was stripped to the waist, and Tommy stared at the glowing skin, the tattoos like brands, crawling across the man’s flesh and underneath it as well, as if his skin were a false one and the thing underneath was waiting to come out.
“You lose, Thomas.”
Devilish growls filled the warehouse. The darkness swirled behind the stranger, blotting out the walls and any hope of escape.
“ ‘I am he, the Great Beast, the Dragon of Old. And all will look upon me and tremble….’ ”
The stranger kept talking, but Tommy was beyond hearing. He kept his eyes on the moving dark and the unspeakable things inside it, on the changing form of the stranger who loomed above him.
“P-please…” he croaked.
The stranger only smiled.
“Such perfect hands,” he said as the darkness descended.
AND DEATH SHALL FLEE
Evie sat in the tub, two fat cucumber slices placed over her swollen eyes, and sang in contempt of her throbbing head. “We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too…. I had Manhattan, all right,” Evie mumbled. “And it… had… me.” She slipped under the water and let it carry her until a fierce pounding made her surface.
“I’m bathing,” she yelled.
“Will you be long?” Jericho answered.
Evie let a prune-ish toe play at the hot-water tap. “Hard to say.”
“I need the… the, ah…”
“Oh, applesauce,” Evie said on a sigh. “Okay, okay. I don’t want you to die of peritonitis like Valentino. Just a minute.” Evie rinsed the cucumber slices under the tap and popped them into her mouth. She pulled the plug and let the water swirl down the drain while she slipped on her robe and opened the door with a flourish. “All yours,” she said as Jericho pushed past her.
In the kitchen, Evie squeezed an orange into a glass, fished out the seeds, and gulped down the precious juice along with two aspirin. “Oh, sweet Mary.”
A moment later, Jericho emerged from the bathroom, scowling.
“What’s eating you?”
“Nothing.”
He sat on the couch and quietly laced up a shoe, but his disapproval hung in the room like the lingering scent of Evie’s perfumed bath salts. Evie didn’t mind yelling, but she hated feeling judged. It got under her skin and made her feel small and ugly and unfixable. She sang cheerily in rebuke of both Jericho and her throbbing skull. “You’re the berries, my bowl of cream, a dream come true, dear…”
“I was only wondering if this is going to be your usual routine,” Jericho said at last.
“Usual routine. Hmm, well, I might add a trained monkey. Everyone loves those.”
“Is that all this is to you? One big party?”
Evie was angry now. At least she wasn’t afraid to get out and live. Jericho didn’t seem to know life beyond the pages of a musty old book, and he didn’t seem interested in knowing anything beyond that, either.
“It’s better than spending every night brooding like Byron’s long-lost brother. Don’t make that injured face—you are a brooder! And what good does it do you? You’re eighteen, not eighty, kiddo. Live a little.”
Jericho got up from the couch. “Live a little? Live a little!” He let out a bitter ha! “If you only knew…” He stopped suddenly, and Evie could see him force an almost mechanical calm to descend. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand. I have to get to the museum.” He grabbed his dog-eared copy of Nietzsche and slammed the door behind him.
Evie sat on Mabel’s bed. The aspirin hadn’t helped much, but like a true modern girl, she wasn’t about to lie in bed all day, unlike poor Mabel, who had succumbed to a terrible hangover. She lay curled in her bed, clutching a bowl in case she felt the need to vomit.
“Hot off the presses, today’s headlines: The love of your life does not approve of my wanton flapper ways,” Evie said in a voice of affected mystery. “Really, Mabesie. You might want to reconsider—he is a bit of a killjoy.”
“My stomach doesn’t approve of our wanton ways, either,” Mabel said miserably. She hadn’t lifted her head from her pillow. “I am never drinking again.”
“That’s what they all say, Pie Face.”