King Cage and the Worth Street Djinni Read online

  The King sucked in a gulp of dirty subway air, then lifted himself up so that his feet were at the top of the metal wing. It squawked with the excess weight. The King grabbed the handholds above the doorway with either hand and lifted himself up. Just the top of his head reached over the peak of the train car. The wind whistled through the crevices of his ears.

  “No fucking way,” the King muttered. It was crazy to climb onto the arched roof of a moving subway car. Absolutely mad. But what choice did he have?

  The King lifted his left foot and wedged his toes in the handhold along the left side of the doorway. He heaved, throwing his weight over the top of the train so he could do the same with his other foot.

  The train lurched, and the King swung right. He threw his arms out so that his body fell flat against train’s roof. But the extra friction wasn’t enough. The King slid. His left foot came loose from the hand hold, and his right leg twisted around the wrong side of his knee.

  Jagged pain shot down his leg, then up again. The King screamed, and stupid as it was, he kicked his right leg free, so that his entire body was perpendicular to the train. But he was still sliding, his fingers grasping at each of the ripples of the corrugated metal roof.

  The King’s heart raced, and he screamed again as his right hand slipped beyond the train’s edge. He had to turn, or slide head first into the space between the train and the cement wall. But how?

  The King threw his right leg right and his left arm left, pivoting over the peak of the train car. Unsettled dirt caught in his eyes like daggers, and he closed them tight, willing his outstretched limbs to cling to a surface he couldn’t see.

  The train rumbled and lurched beneath him, but he held fast.

  The King blinked away his tears in time to catch the Worth Street Station speeding by. In the half-light of the train, he saw the piece anew. Maybe the G was better the way it was before. Now it looked more like a spiral staircase from above. A perfect exit for a vengeful spirit. Did he really think his puckered lemons would fool a djinni? Or a color-coded prison? He was a hack, and tonight was the night he’d finally prove it.

  “Keep it together,” the King whispered. He dragged himself forward, his toes and fingers gripping at the greasy, metal surface. “Just get your fucking cans, goddamn it.”

  The King peeked over the front edge at the walkway between cars. Then with a sharp twist, he swung his legs and landed between the adjoining doors.

  “Don’t be locked,” the King prayed as he put his hand to the handle. “Please.”

  The door slid open, and the King raced forward.

  The four a.m. trains were nearly empty, and filled mostly with exhausted night-shifters napping their way back to Pelham Bay. None were happy to have the King tumbling through, his arms swinging from rail to rail as he lunged to the left and right with the rhythm of the train.

  The King raced through three cars this way, not finding the kid behind any of the train’s sliding doors. But when the King entered the fourth car, he met the kid’s eyes through the far window, where the kid still hung from the steel support he’d latched onto.

  The King ran, dodging an old lady with a carriage full of empty, plastic bottles. But it was too late. The brakes screeched, and the King reached the door between cars just as the Brooklyn Bridge Station came into view. Sure enough, the express train waited across the platform.

  The King swung the door open just as the kid leaped onto the subway platform. With his long arms and legs, the kid looked more like the victim of a drunk puppeteer than a human being.

  “Why?” the King screamed over the screeching train.

  “Only one way to get a crown, KC,” the kid answered, now far away and out of view.

  The King ran back down the train car, and when the doors opened, he continued down the platform, checking each of the express train’s cars for some sign.

  “Hey, kid!” the King yelled, wondering just how the kid thought you get crowned. “You don’t get it! You just don’t—”

  Bing-bong. “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

  The doors closed. The express train pulled out of the station, then the local. The King was beat.

  “On the night of a Red,” he murmured, thinking of the blood, of the burns, of the screams. “On the night of a goddamned Red.”

  Chapter Four

  “You burned it, you fucking idiot.”

  Lawrence Kincaid lay on the floor of the big room. The living room. The dining room. The foyer. His bedroom. A bedroom fit for a king.

  He was nine. There were papers all around, torn from his marble notebooks. Some were filled with perfect circles—almost-perfect circles, anyway—and others with spirits. Figures he’d seen on the horizon when the sun set early. Creatures divined from the corner of his eye when he entered a vacant room.

  Lawrence had once seen a street artist complete an entire portrait with a single, unbroken line. He’d captured the cleft in the woman’s chin, the arc of her lips, the lump of her nose, and the curls of her hair without ever lifting his pencil.

  It was magic to Lawrence. Magic that made sense. Magic he could learn. And he practiced, ceaselessly. Anything to catch the spirits he saw in the dark of his eyelids, in the flash of a camera, in the deep ravines of his young heart.

  All day at school, with his notebook concealed in the drawer beneath his desk, he worked. Then after his homework, on the big room’s decrepit carpet. And on the days when the big room felt too small, he’d race downstairs into the yard of the Wagner Houses, East Harlem’s projects. There he’d find an empty patch of brick to lean on, and there he’d draw as others hurried along the path or huddled in groups of pungent smoke, waiting for guys from other neighborhoods to trade something green for something white.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Uncle Joey growled from the kitchen.

  A few of Lawrence’s spirits were pretty good. Almost true. Not in the sense that he’d captured their features. In those early years, his eyes hadn’t opened wide enough to see what he was up against. But he’d still been able to capture their essence. In the curves. In the colors.

  It took so very little to draw them in, really. But it took even less to break the link between the picture and the spirit it contained. One wrong twist, and the spell would fizzle. And it did, every single time. The trouble, of course, was that he had so little paper, and even fewer crayons, markers, pencils. He could only dip into the communal baskets at school so often.

  But Lawrence did something different on the paper that evening. Something wonderful. Rather than allow his uncle’s anger to petrify him as it so often did, he channeled that anger into his sketch. That and his own fear. He watched as his hand etched the hooks of the spirit’s horns, the crow’s feet of its violent eyes, and finally, its wild, toothy grimace.

  “A djinni,” Lawrence murmured, knowing he hadn’t simply drawn a picture, but opened a portal. The djinni was there, in that paper, boring a hole right through him with its molten, red eyes.

  Lawrence sucked in air, and it was only then he smelled the smoke. Only then he realized what he’d done—what he’d forgotten to do—and why his uncle was angry.

  “That was the last fucking slice.” The trashcan slammed closed.

  Lawrence rolled off his belly. The old carpet had left its mark in his bare skin.

  His uncle stood in the doorway, his face swelled and red and snarling.

  “I was drawing,” Lawrence whispered.

  “Drawing.” Uncle Joey seemed so much taller from the floor. “Another fucking waste.”

  His uncle wore an oven mitt on his right hand. And in that hand, he held something thick and metal. The old, chrome toaster that had been in the family since the stone-age. The old, chrome toaster that got as hot as an oven and never cooled.

  Lawrence threw his hands to either side to shove himself off the floor, but both his palms landed on papers. Even as Lawrence pushed himself up, the papers slipped against the carpet, and he
plummeted back down.

  His uncle landed on top of him, tucking Lawrence’s little body between his heavy legs.

  “No!” Lawrence screamed, his arms flailing. “No!”

  But his uncle pressed his left hand around Lawrence’s neck and shoved him down. Lawrence reached for his uncle’s neck in turn, but his arm’s length was no match for that of a full-grown man.

  “I work hard for every scrap we got.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lawrence choked. His bare skin pinched between the denim of his uncle’s jeans and the floor. He pushed against the carpet beneath him, his most recent work crinkling against his back, the djinni laughing. “I’m sorry.”

  “But you never learn.” Uncle Joey squeezed his legs more tightly together. Lawrence was trapped.

  “I just forgot,” Lawrence begged. “I won’t do it again.”

  But it was too late. When Uncle Joey got an idea in his head, he saw it through. The red-faced man pressed the mouth of the big, old, heavy toaster against the thin skin of Lawrence’s left breast.

  Lawrence groaned. Then he moaned. Then he screamed. The three hot metal bars made his skin feel strangely cold, while the space between them sizzled and blistered and popped with the moisture of his exploding cells.

  Lawrence’s fingers scraped against the denim of his uncle’s jeans as he yowled and screeched and gasped. But none of it mattered. Not the gagging or the begging or the tears. His uncle held the searing hot toaster there for hours, days, decades. Until Lawrence’s heart was ready to burst from pounding so fast and so hard for so long. Then Uncle Joey released his grip on both the toaster and Lawrence’s throat.

  The toaster rolled off Lawrence’s little body, tearing away three adjoined slices of charred skin. Lawrence squealed, and his uncle slapped him quiet. Then the heavy man got up, and Lawrence curled in on himself, sobbing.

  The air smelled of burnt matchsticks and bacon.

  “Don’t waste food.” Uncle Joey grabbed Lawrence’s notebooks and all of his scattered drawings save the one beneath the boy’s shaking body. Then he tossed them in the trash. “And don’t waste paper.”

  Lawrence didn’t remain on the old carpet long that night. His uncle would expect him to clean the mess, then run to the store for something else to eat. It didn’t matter he was oozing that sickly mixture of blood and pus. It didn’t matter he still tasted his own burned flesh on the air. He had to move.

  So Lawrence wiped away his tears and turned to look once more at the red djinni he’d drawn. The red djinni that had gotten him into so much trouble.

  But the page was empty. The djinni was gone.

  Lawrence glanced around the big room for it. He scoured the empty kitchen cupboards as he ran water over the mouth of the toaster and the burned skin that had crusted there. He even peeked into his uncle’s room.

  “The Giants are up 21-6,” the sportscaster blared.

  In the bathroom, Lawrence unraveled nearly half the roll of toilet paper. He used it to wipe the sopping mess that had dripped down the left side of his body. Then he turned to the mirror and gasped. The djinni was there. Not its horns. Not its eyes. But its toothy grimace, burned across Lawrence’s beating heart. The djinni had escaped his drawing after all, only to be caught in the tangle of his flesh, in the prison of his heart.

  Tears welled in Lawrence’s eyes, but he couldn’t allow even a single drop to fall. Not now. Not ever.

  Lawrence padded his wound with as much of the single-ply toilet paper as he could get to stick. Then he put on as many shirts as would fit, took all the crinkled dollars from the table at the door, and never went home again.

  Chapter Five

  The Brooklyn Bridge Station focused and unfocused in the King’s sight.

  He rubbed his knuckles gently against his chest, just as he had when the skin was still tight and cracked and healing. When he couldn’t trust his own fingers not to pick at the infected, ochre crust. It took a long time for the scab to flake and fall away, but even when it had, the raw, red grimace remained. And it itched.

  The King filled his mind with how he’d finish the piece. And as he paced down the platform looking for some clue of the kid, it hit him. He’d put kitchen windows on the skyscrapers. With curtains like a 1950s housewife would have. And he’d put pies on the windowsills, stacked as high as the eye could see.

  He laughed. What would happen if so many nuclear families came so close together? Would the weight of their happiness fold the city in on itself like a dark star? Would it repel all opposites—loneliness and callousness and grief—relegating all to the secret recesses its bright white light couldn’t reach?

  The King’s insides grated and churned. He couldn’t let a Red go free. Not so long as he had hands to spray with and cans to spray. If there was any way he could finish the piece that night, he would take it. No matter the consequences. He couldn’t risk letting someone else suffer. Not someone happy, anyway.

  “Wish kicacaa kicaa kicaa… Wish kicacaa kicaa…”

  The King looked up. One gargantuan man took up most of the six-seat bench before him. Or was it only his layers of tattered, dirty clothes? The man’s true nature was impossible to discern. He might have been three hundred pounds under all his cottons and wools and occasional silks. Or no more than a starving hundred, all but immobilized by the weight of his earthly possessions. Even his race was oblique, hidden beneath a heavy beard and a mask of sewer grime. He might have been a dead ringer for Joe DiMaggio or for Muhammad Ali. You just couldn’t tell.

  But that was the way his kind preferred it. The priests of the streets. The lords of the sewers. The rat and pigeon and cockroach whisperers.

  At the sight of the druid, the King’s breath caught in his lungs. There was still hope. It was stuck in the paw of an angry lion, if only the King could pry it loose, but there it was.

  “The eyes of God face all,” the King said, careful not to meet the druid’s gaze. It was their way not to give any more importance to man than to the environment he’d created. The King respected the druid’s beliefs, though he found it no easier to keep from tracking the two-inch long cockroaches traveling up the man’s leg, over his gnarled fingers, and across his dirty cheek.

  The King waited, unsure of whether the druid had heard him. Or if the druid had deigned him worthy of address. The King thought of the years he’d been sheltered by them, trained by them, belittled by them, and betrayed. He thought of all the times since he’d been faulted, ignored, cursed, and commissioned. He was a knight in their game when they would have rathered a bishop, and they hated him for it as much as he hated them.

  “The eyes of God face all,” the King repeated, encouraged only by the fact that he didn’t know this particular druid. If he was lucky, neither would the druid know him.

  “But not all face the God.” The stiff man tilted his head without ever meeting the King’s gaze. “Do you?”

  “I turn their eyes,” the King said, though it felt more like a wish than a statement of fact. “Or burn them out.”

  “An artist still.” But not a bishop. Not a rook for them to castle.

  “I need help,” the King whispered. “I don’t know how much longer I—”

  “You stain these walls with your protections and you think it earns you privilege.” The druid’s voice was dry and rough and thoroughly without malice. “Yet you’re as much a stain as your creations.”

  The King winced, and the skin above his heart itched. It took everything not to scratch it. Not to let the druid know his words rang true.

  “You fight a general, Lawrence. That which is near enough the source, it burns. By its light, the Ashen Lord will finally see. What then?”

  The King shut his eyes, wishing only for the dark. But there were colors. Shapes. Ceaseless djinn clawing at the veil that divided their world from ours. He saw them always, and he knew someday their time would come. That they would find a place he couldn't go, and one after the next, they would enter. The angry Red and the glutton
ous Blue and the selfish Yellow and the Black. The horde.

  “I need help,” the King insisted. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

  “When the time comes, say no,” the druid said, the dark words catching in the brambles of his unkept beard.

  The King scowled. Leave it to a druid to replace one question with ten more, binding him in a prison of his own uncertainty. It was a game they played on him too often as a child, and one they never tired of.

  “Now ask your question.”

  Say no to what? To whom? The King’s whole life was a no. No friends. No family. No place to call his own. That much, they’d drilled into him already. What more could he reject? And why would the druid request it?

  “Where is he? The kid who took my cans.”

  “Ignacio,” the druid said. “He turned back.”

  Back? Back to the wall. Back to the piece. And the King knew why. It wasn’t enough for the kid to nab his cans. He had to throw up his mark. And where better than on the King’s unfinished work?

  Only one way to get a crown, KC.

  The King stared into the dark at the end of the platform, up into the mouth of the downtown track, and back to the Worth Street Station. The kid would tag his work and the piece would be ruined and the djinni would go free. Someone was going to get hurt tonight.

  “Face the god,” the King said, pointing his first two fingers at the cement beneath the druid’s feet. That was where God was, wasn’t it? In the works of his works? In the blackened tunnels and the painted walls and the atom bombs?

  “Say no,” the druid repeated. “He’s the thread you must not tug.”

  The King ran.

  Chapter Six

  The King hurdled himself from the platform and onto the tracks, landing with a clatter. He didn’t give a damn who saw him. The kid was going to break what little magic held the djinni down. And for what? To take the King’s crown? Didn’t he know how worthless a thing it was? To toil on work that faded as quickly as he threw it up? To know eventually all would be lost beneath the weight of years?