Third, that Mick Skinner had just asked a favor of me.
With a strong sense of martyrdom, I accepted all three revelations. “You have any problems with tall buildings?” I asked.
He looked up, startled, shaken out of a focused expression that looked like an exercise in mind control. “Hell, no.”
“Some people do,” I added, hopeful. But of course, none of them were him. No mercy for me tonight. “Come on. I owe you.” I turned and headed up the street, not waiting to see if he followed.
The possibility had crossed my mind, as I spoke, that I was going to commit suicide after all, that I’d chosen my method in showing a stranger where I lived. I didn’t trust Mick Skinner. But like that wolf, there was something straightforward about him, that was part of his alienness. He would do what was smart, what made sense. I just had to keep watching him for signs of hunger. That, at least, was the rationalization.
A block later, he said cautiously, “And I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”
“Did I say I liked you? I said I owed you.”
“No, you don’t. They thought you were me; it was my fault. I’d have felt bad if they got hold of you. Purely selfish on my part.”
“Philosophical tail-chasing,” I muttered. He walked beside me in contemplative silence, as if he hadn’t heard me anyway.
The only break in that silence happened at the sight of the car. It was long enough that in parts of town it might scrape walls when it turned, black enough to have been cut from Death’s own tailcoat. The windows were black, too, the windshield one-way, the engine no louder than snow falling. It appeared like a cruising shark at the end of the street, and Skinner swatted me into the deep shadow of a courtyard entrance. “Back!” he whispered.
“What are you—”
“Turn your face away!” The black car swept slowly past.
“What was that?”
“Trouble,” Skinner said firmly, but would say no more.
There were a number of places around the City where I could spend the night. There was a room on the second floor of the Underbridge, behind the sound balcony; it even had its own outside entrance. There was a squat in an underground garage, which was more comfortable than it sounded. But there was only one place I thought of when I heard the word “home.”
On the south side of the Night Fair there was a rose-red sandstone office building, dating from the far end of the twentieth century. It was over half empty, like many of the buildings in the Fair. On the third and sixth floors, the windows were wide, many-paned arches set in ornamented openings like baroque half-moon picture frames. On the seventh floor, jutting from the mansard roof, were dormers with arched tops, like wide-open cartoon eyes. It was an interesting structure.
Home was a corner of the seventh floor, and the rooftop, somewhat. Or, certain things that were mine took up space on the roof. The stairway that rose out of the lobby inside the front doors was railed with ornamental cast iron, and wrapped level by level around the open center of the building to the third floor. Where it stopped. The back stairs were nearly rotted away; it would have been safer to climb the sandstone bare-handed than to try them. The lobby elevator was ruined; the car was jammed in the shaft between the second and third floors, and the cables were ripped out. The doors were boarded shut.
I was the only tenant above the third floor, because I was the only one who knew where the service elevator was, and that it worked.
I saw the place with Skinner’s eyes when I brought him in the side entrance. The shabby grandeur missed being romantic and fell back on pitiful: the broken black-and-white marble floor, the gouged oak wainscoting, the bits of mirror clinging to the wall above it. The hall smelled like cooked cabbage, and I heard an old-man voice behind one door, singing a pop song with only occasional reference to the tune. The huge brass light fixtures were all defunct; instead there was a swagging of wire from the ceiling, with a bulb every twenty feet. It was dim, but it worked, and no one there could have afforded the juice for the original wiring. Still, it depressed me suddenly, and I blamed Skinner for that.
I unlocked the door to the basement stairs, and led Skinner to the service elevator. He looked around dubiously. I wasn’t inclined to offer him reassurance, so I turned my back on him, dug a pair of wires out of the seeming ruins of the control panel, and crossed the bare ends. I kept what I was doing out of Skinner’s sight. If he missed killing me on this trip, I didn’t want to have shown him how to get upstairs and try again. The cage shuddered and began to climb at an irregular pace, mostly very slow. But silent; I’d used a lot of lubricants to ensure my privacy. Inside the elevator was the inspection certificate, light brown with age and dated 1995. Skinner looked at it and made a clicking noise with his tongue.
“Is this the only way up,” he asked, “or are you doing this for my benefit?”
“You could still find room on the sidewalk for tonight.”
He shook his head, smiling faintly. I didn’t seem to be scaring him.
We ground to a halt on the seventh, and left the box of the elevator. High above the rest of the tenants’ cooking and living, my hallway smelled like decaying building: dusty, dry, abandoned. I fumbled with locks, and opened the door onto the darkness of what had been a reception area. It was an empty room; a last defense against anyone who broke in. Sound bounced off bare walls, the light switch didn’t work — anyone would have concluded that they’d picked the locks for nothing.
I thumbed a box in my pocket that had once opened garage doors, and the bulb lit in the corridor behind the front room. Skinner jumped. “This is it,” I said sourly. “Enter freely and of your own will, and leave something of the happiness you bring.” He laughed. A lot of people wouldn’t have gotten that one, either.
I walked the streak of light from the open doorway and was home. The left-hand room must have held supplies, once; it was just big enough for my wadded-cotton mattress and a chest of drawers. The middle one, which was larger, I’d turned into the living room-and-kitchen. The dormer windows were covered with black felt (a light in the top floor might have attracted attention). I’d hung a sink on one wall, stealing water and drainage from the john beyond it, and had a propane stove on a metal cabinet and an old RV propane/electric fridge next to that. There was a wooden desk that served as countertop and table, and things to sit on, including a leather-and-chrome armchair that looked like a compound slingshot, and a shabby upholstered wing chair. There was also a shelf unit of books, enough to be convincing. I went in and lit the gas lamp over the sink.
Skinner stopped in the doorway, and I watched his gaze go straight to the books. He walked forward and began to read the spines. He touched one now and then, never actually taking a book down. I found myself almost wanting to show him the third room.
“Pale Fire. I haven’t seen a copy… ” His eyes and fingers wandered on. “Four Quartets. ‘The Lady’s Not for Burning.’ Oh, God, The Prisoner of Zenda.” Suddenly his drawl thickened to parody. “Land sakes,” he said, “have you read all these?”
My insides gave a leap of anger. He’d betrayed me into a momentary thaw of attitude, only to dump the resulting ice water over my head. Then I recognized the familiar sound of self-ridicule. My books had caused some failure of reserve in him, and he was only repairing the damage. “Have you?” I asked.
He was a little white-lipped. “Some of them,” he said.
“If you walk off with one, I’ll rebind a few in your hide.”
He ran his thumb down a ragged Britannica spine. “What do I do to get a little slack around here?”