In the end, I decided to trust Claudia and Mr. Bowditch. I turned the trike in the direction the arrow pointed and pedaled on.
The streets are a maze, Claudia told me. She was right about that, and Mr. Bowditch’s initials—his marks—took me ever deeper into it. New York made sense; Chicago made a degree of sense; Lilimar made no sense at all. I imagined it was the way London must have been during the time of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper （for all I know, it’s that way now）。 Some of the streets were wide and lined with leafless trees that gave no shelter from the rain. Some were narrow, one so skinny that the three-wheeler barely fit. On that one we got some relief from the pelting rain, at least, because double-decker buildings hung over the street, almost touching. Sometimes there were trolley wires, a few still hanging down in tensionless swags, most lying in the street.
In one window I saw a headless dressmaker’s dummy with a jester’s cap and bells on its neck and a knife planted between its breasts. If that was someone’s idea of a joke, it wasn’t funny. After the first hour I had no idea how many rights and lefts I’d taken. At one point I went through a dripping underpass where the sound of the trike’s wheels splashing through standing water sent back echoes that sounded like whispered laughter: hah… haah… haaah.
Some of his marks, the ones out in the weather, were so faded they were hard to see. If I lost the trail they made, I’d have to retrace my course or try to take a bearing from the three spires of what I assumed was the palace, and I didn’t know if I could do that. For long stretches, the buildings crowding in on me blotted it out entirely. It was all too easy to imagine myself blundering through this snarl of streets until the two bells… and then the evening three… and then having to worry about the night soldiers. Only in this rain, and with the steady coughing from behind me, I thought by nightfall Radar would be dead.
Twice I passed gaping holes that slanted down into darkness. From these there wafted drafts of ill-smelling air and what sounded like those whispering voices Claudia had warned me about. The smell from the second one was stronger, the whispering louder. I didn’t want to imagine terrified city-dwellers taking refuge in vast underground bunkers and dying there, but it was hard not to. Impossible, really. Just as it was impossible to believe those whispering voices were anything but the voices of their ghosts.
I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be home in my sane world, where the only disembodied voices came out of my EarPods.
I came to a corner with what might have been Mr. Bowditch’s initials on a lamppost or just a swatch of old blood. I got off the three-wheeler for a closer look. Yes, it was his mark, but almost gone. I didn’t dare wipe the water and grime from it for fear of erasing it entirely, so I bent until my nose was almost touching it. The crossbar of the A pointed right, I was sure of it （almost sure）。 As I went back to the trike, Radar poked her head out of the blanket and whined. One of her eyes was glued shut with ooze. The other was at half-mast but looking behind us. I looked that way and heard a footstep—for sure, this time. And caught a flash of movement that could have been a bit of clothing—a cloak, maybe—as its wearer stepped around another corner a few streets back.
“Who’s there?” I called, then clapped my hands over my mouth. Quiet, be quiet, everyone I’d met had told me that. In a much lower voice, almost a shouted whisper, I added, “Show yourself. If you’re a friend, I can be a friend.”
No one showed himself. I hadn’t really expected them to. I dropped my hand to the butt of Mr. Bowditch’s revolver.
“If you’re not, I have a gun and I’ll use it if I have to.” Pure bluff. I’d been warned about that, too. And strongly. “Do you hear me? For your sake, stranger, I hope you do.”
I didn’t exactly sound like myself, and not for the first time. I sounded more like a character in a book or a movie. I almost expected to hear myself say My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
Radar was coughing again, and she had started to shiver. I got back on the trike and pedaled in the direction the latest arrow pointed. It led me onto a zig-zagging street paved with cobblestones and for some reason lined with barrels, many of them overturned.
11
I continued to follow the initials, a few almost as bright as the day he put them there in red paint, most faded to ghosts of their former selves. Left and right, right and left. I saw no bodies or skeletons of the long departed, but I smelled rot almost everywhere and occasionally there was that sense of the buildings slyly changing their shapes.