The Pure Cold Light Read Online Free Page B

Amerind’s neighbors poked their heads in through the ratty curtain. Their faces seemed swelled up at the sight of her all naked and bloody. The Ripper’s disease had spread to them, she could tell, and Amerind yowled and swiped her knife at the fiends before they could finish cutting her up. They backed off out of sight, but not for long.
    The curtain lunged at her. It tore off its nails, grew hands that reached for her, and two bodies slammed into Amerind and pinned her to her bed. Maybe she stabbed one of them. She couldn’t be sure. The curtain twisted them all up. But they got the knife away from her.
    Their hands swarmed all over her, shredding the curtain with her knife, taking her skirt, her sheets, making bindings and a gag. Ripper’s blood thick upon her hid her own flowing wound. She kicked and writhed and screeched like a banshee, and looked like something equally fantastic.
    They hoisted her up and carried her through the narrow aisles of Box City, up and down the black slate walk, past the Liberty Bell, and into the street. Her flesh in the daylight was sallow where it wasn’t bloody.
    From out of the foamboard and plywood and plastic shacks, people emerged, drawn by the noisy parade. She saw their breaths smoke like fires, their faces stinging pink in the chill morning air.
    A cheering, crazy crowd accreted. She, like a flayed sacrifice, hung up ahead of it all. Appropriately, her black hair glistened with blood.
    By the time they reached 9th and Chestnut Streets, Amerind had recovered her senses and was pleading for her life, but the gag kept her protestations secure, and, besides, the matter of disposing of her had become a festival. She did not hate them for it exactly. She thought this might be God’s fit punishment for the times when she had taken part, when she’d urged other hands to throw other sacrifices into the Snake Pit. That was what they called the unknown depths of Market East Station.
    All kinds of stories existed about what lurked down there, on various levels, in endless tunnels, in dark recesses where no sane citizen—not even derelicts such as themselves—would venture. Graffiti glyphs on the walls shouted spraypaint warnings of the contaminating madness down there.  
    If only they’d let her explain  herself…but they flung her down the steps as if she were a sack of garbage. She tumbled and rolled, struck her elbow and cried out at the pain, struck her head and lost consciousness.
    To those above, watching, the bluish dark of the Snake Pit swallowed her whole. Everyone cheered.

    ***

    Amerind awoke to hands softly caressing her, as delicate as bat wings. The darkness was so pure that she thought she had been blinded, and in a panic she tried swatting at the hands. Her right arm hardly moved, and that little motion slashed the perfect darkness with lightning bolts of agony. The gentle hands withdrew. A moment later the wick of a lumpish candle flared to life beside her.
    She found herself inside a box hardly larger than the one she’d been thrown out of, except that this one had a funny little barred window and a bench. She was lying beside the bench.
    Holding the candle was a man she at first took to be wearing black livery. Then she realized that she was looking through most of him.
    Seeing her astonishment, he tried to reassure her with a smile, but this was complicated by the absence of most of the left half of his face. “I fixed your arm,” he explained softly, too embarrassed to look at her directly. He took a brown cloak off a hook by the window and wrapped himself inside it; his invisible body took on substance, folds of drapery outlined a spindly torso. It was a kind of magic trick—hey, presto! and now you see him.
    “It’s fractured,” he said, “the ulna, just behind the wrist. Lucky that’s all, the way the topsiders threw you.” She wondered if he’d been watching the whole time. He floated nearer, his one blue eye wide as if with hysteria. “I’ll