Page 33 of If Looks Could Kill

The rear entrance to the Curiosity Musée spat me out into a grimy alleyway. I made my way to the end of the block and back onto the garish Bowery. It took only a few minutes to reach the Lion’s Den on Spring Street.

Through the etched windowpanes and shaded lights I saw a thick swarm of people inside, but they seemed animated only by the ordinary, cheerful roar of a Bowery tavern on a Sunday evening. No chaos on display.

Another door stood at the building’s right edge. Dark, peeling, and barely noticeable. I pressed my ear against it and tested the knob gingerly.

It clicked. The door opened, and a man’s body slumped forward and rolled out, spilling down from a dark set of stairs, landing skull-first on the pavement.

I believe I screeched a little bit.

He was dead. At least, it seemed he must be.

In the murky light from the tavern windows, I peered at the body. He was no one I’d seen before. A gruesome-looking sonofagun, with perhaps a face a mother could love when he wasn’t scared stiff—literally—by a mythical monster.

I pinched his wrist and hovered a hand above his mouth. Still breathing. Heart beating.

Welcome to the Bowery, the only neighborhood in the world where a Salvation Army girl can drag a man’s body down the street, plainly visible to anyone who cares to look, and attract no particular comment.

Where the raucous, rowdy throng were so accustomed to drunkards passed out on the curb that they gave me not so much as a second glance.

That unpleasant task accomplished, I returned to the door. I swallowed down my terror, and up into the dark mouth of the pitch-black stairs I went.

Every footfall seemed to wail. I paused near the top, straining to hear any sound.

There was noise from the tavern below, of course. Loud singing, laughter, a tuneless piano. Sounds from the street—the swell and ebb of conversations of people passing by. But nothing above.

I reached the top. My foot searched in vain for one more step and landed with a stomach-dropping fall on the floor. I righted myself, but I couldn’t see anything in the dark.

The stairs seemed to have brought me directly into a flat rather than a hallway. Dimly, I sensed furniture ahead and another room beyond this one.

I felt an awareness of my presence that made me tremble.

I could turn around, run down the stairs, and escape. I nearly did.

I heard the striking of a match, then saw a glimmer of light up ahead, underneath a door.

Two vice-grip arms seized me from behind. A thick, rough hand clapped itself over my face, and the other arm pinioned my two arms to my sides.

I thrashed and tried to scream, but the man’s roughness scared me senseless. His chin stubble scraped my cheek, and his foul breath dampened my ear as he spoke.

“Keep still,” he growled softly. “Now, what have we here? Another one?”

Both his hands were occupied, yet he gyrated himself about to rub his forearms and body against me. Appraisingly.

No words can describe the terror that gripped me then. I could barely suck in a breath.

Another one. Pearl.

Sound exploded around me. The grunts and scrabbling steps of a sudden scuffle. Thumps and clatters as of deadweights dropping. The deafening report of a gunshot.

Pearl!

My captor, cursing in my ear. The heave of him tossing me aside like a sofa cushion, turning, and clattering down the stairs below.

The impact as I struck a wall, leaving my head ringing.

The sound of my own breath flooding into my throat, choking me, like one drowning.

From the room ahead, where the commotion had been, a feral scream that froze my blood.

I groped my way feverishly through the darkness, colliding painfully with furnishings, racing toward that glimmer of light. Just as I reached it and flung the door open, a gaslight flared into existence. When my eyes and wits had settled, here is what I saw:

Three men lying sprawled upon the floor of this second room.

A smoking pistol not far from one’s hand.

A lead pipe near another. The third man, apparently the first to fall, as the others’ bodies lay partly across his trunk.

And a long knife blade, its point plunged deep into the floorboards, wobbling upright with a thin stripe of blood curving across its side.

Curled in one corner, two girls huddled, their arms wrapped around each other. Both were dressed in sheer red satin slips and black lace dressing gowns. One’s face was smeared with kohl and rouge.

At last. Cora.

The other had a nasty black eye. She wouldn’t look at me. Without her spectacles, it took me a moment to realize who she was.

Freyda Gorbady. My God.

And in the corner, with red eyes burning and a hundred mouths hissing, was Pearl. Behind her, on the wall, a crumbling bullet hole in the plaster.

And in Pearl’s outstretched, shaking hands, the severed body of a thin golden snake.