Above it on a natural stone ledge crouched Mahey X. Demola’s pet. He was covered with golden fur except for the snout, which was a striped black and blood red. His paws were nearly hands, and though he squatted down on all fours I believed that he could stand upright and tall.
A growl sounded in my throat. All rational thought fled my mind. A rage, deep and frightening, sang through my muscles, and the beast above me howled.
I saw an eye in the darkness above Mahey’s dog. It stared at me and wondered while the creature leaped from its ledge.
I saw the golden blur coming. I wanted to dive and roll, then grab and rend and bite and tear. But instead I was dazzled by that eye, wondering what it could mean…
Reynard slammed into me and I went flying. He was hard as stone, and I was, for the first time in decades, merely human. Reynard swiped at me, raking his claws first across my face and then on my chest.
I hit him with both fists and had no effect whatever. He bit into my arm then butted me with his high crown. I fell to the ground, senseless but still hating. Reynard hovered above me, his mouth a stench-filled yawn of hunger, hatred, and vicious anticipation.
There came seven small pops. I thought for an instant that it was the sound of Reynard ripping off one of my limbs, but then I heard a gurgling cry. It was my name being spoken.
Juvenal.
The thoughts cascading at that moment didn’t have a linear progression. Lester’s face was there and his .22 pistol—that had made the pops. He used his weapon to try to save me, dooming us both in the process. The small-caliber gun was his only weapon.
The black iron knife, shoved in my belt, was mine.
I didn’t try to unroll the blue velvet. While Reynard looked up to see what was stinging his face, I plunged the blue roll into his chest.
His howl was what I can only call a cacophony of exploding stars. I was falling, careening through an emptiness that was unending. I was impossible and so was the idea of me. I was bleeding and hating, killing…
“Juvy, stop!” Lester yelled. He was trying to pull me off the beast’s corpse. I was plunging the knife into its inert body again and again. I was outraged by the visions he’d shown me. I wanted him to take them back.
“He’s dead, man!” Lester cried and he managed to pull me back.
I was weakened by the wounds and loss of blood, but the rage still filled me.
The knife pulsed in my grip and I turned away.
“Juvenal,” Lester called.
“Not now, man,” I said. “Not now.”
I STAGGERED AWAY DOWN tunnel after tunnel, having no idea where I was going. The iron knife thrummed in my hand. It felt good. It felt diseased. It felt alive and angry, like a bumblebee clenched in your fist.
I came across an abandoned campsite in a recess in a wall. There I pulled out a soiled trench coat. I put it on to hide my bloody wounds and held the blade up in the sleeve of the coat.
I climbed up into the subway and made it to the Twenty-Eighth Street stop. I climbed out and staggered into the gathering dawn.
“Mr. Nyx,” a gruff voice, which maybe shouldn’t have spoken in words at all, called.
It was Mahey’s piggish chauffeur standing next to the cherry red limo.
He held the back door open and I didn’t have the strength to refuse.
“Hello, Mr. Nyx,” Mahey said when I fell into the seat beside her.
I didn’t respond.
“Did you find Reynard?”
“Yeah. You didn’t say what you wanted me to do, so I killed him.”
“Just so. Do you have the knife?”
It was throbbing against my forearm. I didn’t want to give it up. But those green lights would not be denied. I pulled out the blade and handed it to her. She took a plastic sheet from her skin purse and took the thing without actually touching it.
She placed the knife in the bag and gave me a smile that was supposed to be friendly. Then she produced a wad of cash and handed it to me.
“Where can I drop you, Mr. Nyx?”
I SLEPT ON MY office floor for more than sixty hours.
My small suite of offices has a bathroom with a change of clothes hanging in the closet. After two and a half days of comatose sleep, I washed off at the sink and dressed. Then I went to sit in a chair at the window and thanked the night that I was still alive.
My physical wounds were almost healed, but the memories still pained me. Reynard and I had something in common. He was a creature like me. His howls carried knowledge and his stench spoke of an alternate history to the evolutionary blunderings of known life.
And Mahey also was part of my hidden lineage. I was sure of this. And what was that black blade that she wouldn’t touch? And that eye which I imagined but am also sure of its existence?
There came a knock on the door.
I wondered for a moment if it was Tarver with his gun or maybe Mahey, or one of her henchmen, with a pulsating black knife.
A creature like Reynard would not knock.
“Who is it?”
“Eerie,” she said.
I opened the door and the woman I loved all the way down to the molecular level stood there before me dressed in yellow and white.
She looked me in the eye and I looked back.
“We have to talk,” she said.
I ushered her in.
Perched in chairs across from each other, it was the first time in months that we’d come together without a kiss.
“Yes?” I said.
“Tarver’s in a mental ward, out of his head and with his right arm completely paralyzed.”
“Uh-huh?”
“He goes in and out, but at one point he said that you did this to him.”
“Oh. Well, you see—”
“What’s going on?” Iridia asked.
“Tarver came here with a pistol,” I said.
“What?”
“He came up to me and pulled it out, but before he could shoot, the woman I was with, a client, blocked his arm. He screamed and ran away, but as far as I could see she didn’t cut him or anything.”
“But then how did he get paralyzed and crazy?”
I hesitated. Up until that moment, my identity, my abilities were secret. Secrets are like the night: they hide from sight that which we suspect and fear. But I no longer wanted to live in darkness. Iridia, the love of my being, was not someone I wanted to hide from. And even if the truth made me lose her, at least she would know me, if only for a while.
“I want to tell a story about a woman named Julia,” I said. “She named me Juvenal Nyx and made me a child of the night.”
THE KNIFE
Richard Adams
ALL THAT IS NARRATED IN THIS STORY took place in 1938.