Twenty-five-year-old Julie Festinger was running with her dog on the border of gentrified Williamsburg. She turned a corner and a feral cat hissed at them from a brick retaining wall. The animal’s fur was sparse—more than three-fourths of it had fallen out—and its eyes were frosted. Her dog barked and the cat rose on shaking legs as if it were going to pounce. Julie pulled her pet back and called the city. By the time the Animal Control officer arrived, the cat was dead. The call was logged and the corpse incinerated.
Just like all the others.
And the chef knew. My colleagues and I were the dense ones. We didn’t see animals as compatriots. We saw them as vectors. As carriers of disease. As threats. Not as potential victims. But to a man raised in the jungle, they were allies. Guides, even. The first place to turn for help.
Cats eat rats. Rats eat anything. The city doesn’t record the same level of detail with the animal population as with the human, but they at least had a record of every “work order.” The best I could do was filter by date. I plotted it all on a map, everything they’d handled since Alonso White disappeared. The case management software they used actually made it very easy. The scatter plot was messy, though. Dots were all over the place. But there definitely seemed to be an arc cutting around the east side of the city.
When I restricted the date range even more, the pattern became clearer. Fewer dots, but a definite curve. It moved clockwise from the lower Bronx, into Queens and down toward JFK, then around to Brighton, then across the water to Staten Island, which is where the data stopped—at the New Jersey border. I couldn’t say for sure, but it certainly looked like two-thirds of a circle. A big circle—around 30 miles wide and roughly centered on Manhattan, south of Midtown. I spent the better part of an hour manually removing any obvious outliers, such as animals killed by automobile, and fitting a clean circle to the data so I could see where we would expect similar cases in Jersey. Then I added the spot where Alonso’s signal stopped. It was less than half a mile off the line. The apartment complex where I cut myself was a smidge closer. It fit.
But I had no idea what to make of it. And I didn’t want to rush it this time. It was always possible this was chance, that I was seeing a pattern where there really wasn’t one. Modern cities do have a sick kind of circular geography to them: a city center that’s the focus of wealth and trade; around that, a ring of restaurants and nightlife and hi-rise condos for the single crowd and childless couples who don’t need lots of space or a good school district; around that, a ring of urban decay—older, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Less money. More crime. Finally: white flight. The wealthy suburbs. What I was seeing could’ve been an artifact of that. Or it could’ve been the cause. I didn’t know.
The perfect test, I decided after staring at the map, would be a visit to Hoffman Island. Built from a shoal in the 1800s, it used to be a quarantine for immigrants entering nearby Ellis Island. Anyone who had indications of contagious disease had to lay up there. It rested very near the line of the circle and bridged the water gap between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was tiny, the size of a city park, with nothing but trees and a couple decaying structures. Would be easy to search. But human visitation was prohibited by the Park Service, who kept it as a wildlife preserve, including for a small population of harbor seals. I wouldn’t have minded breaking that particular regulation, but the simple truth was, I didn’t have access to a boat, nor was there any way Dr. Chalmers would approve a requisition. I needed to make my case first.
I packed up my tablet and notes and went for coffee. Unlike the multi-borough megalopolis of New York, the Jersey side of the metro was a collection of smaller communities, none of which had all the data I needed in one place. Much of it was collected by the state, but I’d found that the State of New Jersey didn’t like dealing with the City of New York. More to the point, positive cases wouldn’t be enough. To do it right this time, statistically, I’d also need negative cases—otherwise I’d just be fitting data to the circle, looking for evidence of what I wanted and nothing else.
There was no way I could do all that in a day, which was about as long as I could disappear without getting into trouble again. I was now being deliberately insubordinate. Dr. Chalmers wouldn’t be as nice the second time. There would be consequences. Permanent ones. So I decided to focus on identifying a single positive case on the hopes that it would be enough to justify my actions and maybe even renew her interest. I spent the rest of the afternoon at a cafe hunched over my tablet, combing the metro sections of local newspapers. Luckily, none of them were very big, and I only had to go back a few weeks.
Oliver called while I was there. Twice.
After 45 minutes of tedious failure, I realized I was going about it all wrong. I brought up the map again and looked for a town that my circle ran squarely through.
East Orange, New Jersey.
Since I couldn’t submit an expense report for a taxi, I took a train across the river and a bus to city hall. I used my credentials to cut to the front of the line—by then it was near closing time—and got access to the city housing records. I brought up a list of all the structures in East Orange that were condemned and cross-referenced it against all records of sale. It wasn’t a long list, but there were more than I expected. I plotted the locations on my map. Two looked like clear fits. I flipped a coin and hoped luck was with me. It was gonna be dark soon.
Heads.
Abandoned school.
Close enough to walk.
The lot was rimmed in a brand new fence. Clusters of signs warned that it was private property, that it was dangerous, and that there was an organic food center coming soon courtesy of the retailer and Rex Magnus & Associates Property Development. The companies’ logos sat next to each other, a cartoon frog and a crown. I didn’t see any construction equipment, just open earth and a square, U-shaped brick monstrosity that had once been the Mortimer Jay Elementary School. Built when Roosevelt was president—Teddy, not Franklin. I walked around to the back, hopped the fence, and stepped through urban decay at its finest. Leaf litter chatted with the breeze and danced in circles with the trash. The few lifeless trees left in the lot looked like skeleton hands erupting through the withered earth, which was damp from an earlier drizzle.
Except for a few that had been knocked out, every one of the building’s regularly spaced windows was neatly boarded. A ring of graffiti ran around the base of the building like a colorful collar. I stepped up cracked concrete and through the doorless entry and entered another world. It was quiet. The graffiti was sparse, and I could see why. The floor had collapsed and the only path was a dangerous shimmy around the remaining rim at the sides. I didn’t try the upper level. That seemed like suicide. But the steps to the basement were poured from the same concrete as those up front, and they had held. Still, it was very dark inside. The sun was low in the sky, and if not for the open ceiling, the lower level would have been completely black. I had to be careful. No one knew where I was. One slip and I just might spend my last hours in that place.
I walked over the debris-strewn foundation, around a corner, and into a large open space—what I imagine had been a boiler room. There was a heavy sliding steel door with a shiny new padlock. But that’s not what caught my eye. At the back wall, barely discernible in the dusk light, was some kind of altar. It was small, maybe four feet high, and made of twigs bound into bonelike bunches that crisscrossed and fanned out like a spine and open ribcage. Strips of hairy twine dangled from it like moss. Several held small bones in knots at their ends. There was a big deer skull at the top, complete with full antlers, while on the ground, a single rat carcass, skinned to the muscle, was propped against the lattice, like it was sitting in judgment over all the world. Big sucker, too. Melted wax from the candle on its head had run over its skinless face and torso and hardened in overlapping dribbles. The candle had burned all the way to the animal’s scalp and left a black and crooked wick inside the hardened remnants of the running wax, which poked up like the spires of a crown.
That’s what it looked like. The Rat King. Skinned and evil.
On the one hand, it seemed weird that such a thing even existed. On the other, it somehow seemed right at home in that place. An altar to an unknown god. I wondered what Ollie would’ve made of it. I wished he was there. He was the consummate bureaucrat, but he was a wealth of practical information. He’d know exactly who to call. I sure didn’t.
I was standing there, staring, when I felt a long, cold shiver slip slowly down my spine. And then the same uncanny feeling I’d had in the abandoned apartment. Before the dark hole. When I felt like I was being watched. I turned around and saw a shed by a field and a light on a high pole. My brother was there. We were young. A door was open.
My phone buzzed and shook me out of the past. I didn’t look at it. Probably the office again. I walked to the sliding steel door with the brand-new padlock. I tried the handle a few times. I yanked on the lock, but it was solid. I kicked hard with the sole of my shoe and almost fell over. Nothing. It didn’t even budge.
I looked at the altar. I looked at the lock.
I walked back up the steps and around the edge of the collapsed floor to the front. I couldn’t keep doing the same things and expect a different result. I needed help. But there was no one at the office I could ask. Not even Ollie. Not anymore.
My phone buzzed again, a reminder of my unread message. I sat on the front stoop of the school and took it out. I’d been wrong. It wasn’t the office. It was a text from Amber. She said she hadn’t heard from me and just wanted to know if we were still on.
“Shit.”
Dinner was tonight. That’s why she’d texted me earlier. To engage in conversation. A subtle reminder. I’d told her the other day that I’d get back to her about my schedule and never had.
I looked across the barren lot to the fence line.
I kept seeing a shed. I remembered it. It was behind my Auntie Susan’s house. Bug and I were there. Mom and I were dropping him off. She told me he was going to stay awhile. I didn’t want to go home. A light on a high pole clicked on and broke the dusk.
My phone buzzed again in my hand. Dr. Massey was sending messages like you do when you need to hear back from someone but they’re not responding. She said politely that she knew a great little Italian joint not too far from the DoH.
There was no way I could get back to my hotel, shower, and get out to a restaurant before any hour that normal people eat. I’d be late as it was, even if I went directly there. So I texted her back and said I was so sorry. I’d gotten some bad news that day and had been running around for work all afternoon. I was still in jeans. I hadn’t showered. But if she was cool with it, there was this unusual little bistro in Brooklyn I wanted to try.