Alfie felt the evil slither out of him, leaving its taint behind. He turned and vomited onto the floor. The strings were cut. Root’s influence had retreated.
He wept. The last time Alfie had cried had been in 1934. He’d been thirteen years old, and both his legs had been broken when his mother’s boyfriend had pushed him out a fourth-floor window. He’d always told himself the tears had not been born of pain but from anger and grief. His broken legs hurt far less than the sight of what the bastard had done to his mother, and the way she’d forgiven him through a bleeding mouth and broken teeth. Now, his tears were from relief. Dead or alive, he was free now, and that was all he’d wanted. Root’s hijacking of his mind had left a filthy stain inside him that would remain always, but even that he could endure, as long as his mind and body were his own.
For as long as he had.
A voice issued from the gray shadows. “Alfie.”
He blinked, trembling from shock. “Who… I thought you were all dead.”
The police station had been so quiet. A telephone had rungand rung, and he could hear the rain on the roof and the way the building groaned against the wind, but there were no human sounds. Nobody left alive.
“Alfie.”
He narrowed his eyes. His vision had dimmed, and not only from the gray, rainy-day gloom. “Who the hell is that?”
But he knew the voice. In the gray, the man stood well over six feet tall. His orange curls and beard seemed to have their own illumination.
“You’re dead, Joe,” he said.
Joe Hannigan took a step nearer, or what appeared to be a step. His legs were not fully formed, just a coalescence of shadow. He smiled down at Alfie.
“One of us has to stick around. You have a lot more mischief to make in this life, Alfred. Hold on.”
The ghost took his hand. He inhaled sharply, catching the tobacco-and-ginger scent of Tabarome, the cologne Joe had always favored because legend claimed it as Humphrey Bogart’s favorite.
He felt a bit stronger then.
Footsteps and voices drifted in from the front of the police station. Wary, worried locals, about to stumble into a bloodbath. Everyone in the building was dead except for Alfie, or so he believed.
The ghost of Joe Hannigan sat on the floor opposite him, watching hopefully, an encouraging smile on his lips. He faded in and out, but Alfie felt Joe there even when only a trace of him lingered.
Alfie wondered if he might live.
35
Tommy Fogg pushed back the old woman’s hair. At her age—and dead—the hair ought to have been dry and bristly, but it felt soft. Supple. He stared at her as if she were a puzzle he felt on the verge of solving, that if he looked just a bit longer, some great epiphany would arrive.
“What’s happening?” he whispered to the dead woman, leaving unspoken the last two words—to me.
Fogg began to hum. Slowly, deliberately, in time with the piano notes that floated on the air around them. His boss had been unable to hear the music, which meant either Fogg had lost his goddamn mind or that he was somehow special. The idea embarrassed him, but thrilled him even more. He told himself he wasn’t a lunatic, evaluated his own thoughts and found them quite rational, and nothing else amiss.
He had never heard music so painfully beautiful, but he had no doubts about its origin.
From her. For me.
Soft, lilting piano, full of heartbreak.
Where had the police found her? Fogg had prepared unknown bodies for burial in the past and never needed to know their histories, but his questions about this woman would stay with him forever.
He imagined he saw her fingers twitch. He stared, waiting for it to happen again. A full two minutes went by before he told himself it had been his imagination.
Fogg ran his thumb over her lip. Did the music come from inside her? If he forced open her mouth, would it grow louder? Would he hear it more clearly? Would anyone else hear it then, if it was somehow amplified?
Two notes rang out, loud enough for him to flinch and jerk away from the table. He looked at the corpse. He’d closed her eyes, but they were open again, cold and blue. They shouldn’t have been able to open even if she were alive.
The next time he blinked, he saw that her eyes were closed.
A thump came from overhead, the front door opening hard enough to crash against the wall. Footsteps followed, hurried and heavy. Dwight was up there. Fogg heard the familiar tone of his boss’s voice, then a shout. A thump as something hit the floor.
