I jumped over the body of the splintered man and looked up to the roofs above. There, a silhouette stood looking down at his good work. He then ran along the ledge, then turning inward and out of view. There were two ways out of the alley, north or south. I elected to trot south.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” The Chief yelled.
I turned back and saw him standing as only a shadow backlit by his men’s lanterns. “I’m running south, you fly north.” I yelled back. The lanterns boggled then turned and with them the chief. I sprinted in the muck to the mouth of the alley and stopped on Columbia Street, facing the fire station. It stood out as if it were embossed with some twinkle of significance I was yet to understand. I could see it burning in an ironic blaze of sharp flames and blistering wind. Then, looking left, into the dead of the streets, the silhouette of long arms and outstretched legs flew across the street. There he is. I ran up the street and connected with his path and turned south onto 2nd Avenue in pursuit. The streets were nearly empty. Random nightwalkers shivered with the gaslight reflecting off the lines of stagnant puddles collected into the wheel ruts of the street. The killer’s athleticism, his mechanical gate sent the staggering bodies against the walls of the decrepit wooden buildings and I was loosing him. The poison from the booze and cigars from earlier in the night broke from their slumber and injected new violence into my bloodstream and I felt as if I was going to be sick. I had to run faster. I had to concentrate.
He turned right. I passed the St. Charles Hotel and turned with him onto Cherry. Yesler’s Hall stood like an arrogant idiot on Front Street. Without lanterns I couldn’t see the shadow any longer. He had evaporated. I guessed left and pushed south on Front and then he reappeared out of a doorway and stood in the distance looking back at me. He turned and continued, hovering over the softness of the street. But, I was beginning to warm up, I could feel the gears in my legs loosen and I coughed out the needles in my lungs and surged into a sprint down the block to its end. He veered right, the triangle block with the Puget Sound National bank at its apex pointing my direction down west with him, and our trajectories were linked because I was gaining on him now and being pulled closer. Together we shot passed Washington St. and I felt the tug of the rope as he cut off the open street and into the entrance of the Brunswick Hotel.
I pushed though the front doors and the garden pattern of the foyer’s long carpet came alive and the dahlia’s bloomed at my feet and her ivy stocks snaked up my legs as I stopped in a huff of panic. “Where?” I yelled to the gloomy skeleton key shaped concierge. Without a word he pointed to the end of the hallway and grinned. I ripped free from the stalks of ivy tied around my ankles and came to the end of the hall. There, to the right was a pine tar and burned oil scented bar manned by a barkeep building a glass pyramid of snifters on top of the cool slate. Could it be that the concierge and the barkeep were the same man? For, they looked the same and pointed the same and administered the same seditious smirk.
I punched through the back door and into the alley. Facing me was a Chinese laundry. A red lamp hummed blood in a window beside a wooden door dog-eared ajar. I entered and the weight of the darkness inside jolted me. The quiet set in. The smell of detergent and starch mixed with the sweet smell of incense. My heavy breathing shook the walls covered with wool coats and shimmering silk costume. My eyes had trouble adjusting, as if they were not meant to, as if I didn’t belong there. In this house I stuttered ignorant in the dark like a foreigner. Tapestries of kanji script pushed out from the hallway walls that I stumbled between to impress upon me that I was perhaps approaching a final act; that this race was to soon come to a sinister conclusion. I reached another door and back out into the cold nigh–onto a laundry platform subjugated with white sheets hanging from sagging wash lines.
“Here is the moon, finally.” The devil said. “How many days has it been since the last time?”
The soft voice knocked me back on my heels and the door slammed behind me, and then a shadow blazed passed. My blood solidified into mortar. I was bricked in, afraid; I had chased fear into a room of mirrors, of white screens of which echoed the alleyway where this nightmare began. The moon indeed was out, showing through a crack between the smoky clouds overhead. All was nearly still besides the sheets gently rippling with the breeze.
“What brings a Scotsman to such an unfortunate place? Could it be for a love of money? Have the English finally taken your wild spirits and made you theirs?”
I hadn’t the bloodiest of ideas what he was on about. However, my warming blood told me that he was wrong; I wanted his life and nothing more.
“What do you know of it?” I said, the words barely spilling out of my mouth.
“What do we know of wherever we are from?”
The ghost’s silhouette appears three deep amongst the sheeted lines, standing distortedly taller and thin from the projection.
“Possibly this is not the most opportune moment to traverse Smith’s social theory, but do you not see yourself living in another time now that your soul is again housed within the trees?”
“Not all Scotsmen are philosophers.”
“No, but the death of culture is a preoccupation that you carry like a stain on your pressed collars, is it not? But, enough of that!”
The sheet broke, and the man charged thought the rest, landing his shoulder into my chest with such force that I was lifted from my feet and sent back a meter, cracking the back of my head against the ground. But, when I opened my eyes, expecting him to be standing over me to reveal him self before ending me, he instead wasn’t there. I gasped for air, and tried to stand, but staggered and fell back to my seat. Again, he spoke.
“However, I’m happy that you came.” He said. “And, you came right when I had finally figured out my place in this town. Right when I realized where my place was in this miasma of social disunity. I find so much religion in this broken experiment.”
He spoke nonsense, but with such clarity, I could not help but be somewhat captivated by his words; they spun against the washing like American verse, and indeed perhaps he was an artist, I thought. I begun to feel safe, feeling confident in my assumptions that he had no desire to kill me. But, my own relief for life crushed me, for I had wanted nothing else to die, especially by his hammer, and now that I was there, I wanted to live? I deceive myself—instinct over the heart.
“Kill Me!” I shouted. “Kill me.”
“I don’t believe in suicide without principle.” The man’s childish voice stipulated. “Nor should you.”
“I will kill YOU then.”
“A redundancy, truly. Lets not talk in circles. Why not we cultivate our gifts amongst the deaths of others; isn’t that a more constructive mode of expression?”
Then, I heard a crash—what sounded like a door being kicked in—and the warmth of the devil being close withdrew his blade from my body, and I knew he had left. I stood and forced myself to ignore the pain in my chest and at the back of my head, and continued the chase. The connection I still felt—the tug of the rope tied around our respective waists carried me through another Chinese laundry like a weightless spirit. I ended out the other side and onto what must have been 2nd Ave. He stood waiting in the middle of the road adjacent to the Standard Theater. He looked still and black as a stencil, his long coat growing a popped collar into a murderous crown. He looked so magnificent in the street swollen with eroded kanji signage and decaying edifices that I could have loved him. The moon slipped away and the curtain returned. No, I wanted my revenge; there would be no more philosophy tonight.
PROLOGUE:
Ink To Stone 