Page 67 of Breaking the Dark

“The girl,” says Jessica. “The kid. Where did she go?”

“What kid?” says the bartender.

“The—” Jessica stops. “Nothing. Never mind.”

She turns to look back at the glass of scotch, still sitting on the table in the side bar. She thinks of the child holding the heavy table aloft. And suddenly she knows. She absolutely knows.

The girl is not real. But she does exist. She has to exist.

Jessica walks back out onto the street, and then, with a start and a shock, she opens her eyes, her voice catching on a forgotten word, and finds that she is on her hotel bed, tangled up in sheets, awaking from a dream.

TWENTY-THREE

JESSICA LEAVES THE hotel for a walk around the village a short while after waking from her vivid dream. While she walks, she listens to a podcast called Is There a Vampire in the House?

“It was once a lively bar and music venue,” it begins, “beloved by locals for many years, but by the 1980s the Upside Down bar, like Harlem itself, was run-down and neglected by the powers that be, crime-ridden, blighted by the drug problems prevalent all across New York at the time. But while drug deals and fights were breaking out on the first floor, underground, unimaginable things were happening. In 1998, city workers made a disturbing discovery underneath the disco lights of the dance floor in the basement—the remains of three young men, wrapped in layers of cloth, their corpses drained of blood and partially mummified. Two of the victims were identified by their teeth. One, who disappeared from the streets of Harlem in 1986, when he was twenty-two years old, was a local man named Diep Davis, known by all as DD. The second, Jean Michel Diavolo, had been reported missing by his brother in 1988 after losing touch with him when he moved to the city four years earlier. Diavolo was twenty when he left his hometown of Detroit. The third victim has never been identified.

“In 1988, the bar’s manager, a man named John Warshaw, had been brought in by detectives from the NYPD for questioning after he was seen letting a young man into the premises in the early hours of the morning, a man who was later reported missing by his wife. The premises were searched and when no evidence of the missing individual was found, Warshaw was released without charge. Warshaw left his job at the Upside Down soon afterward and the bar closed for good in 1994. When gas line workers gained access to the lower floors of the building in 1998, it had been empty for years. After the discovery of the men’s remains, a nationwide police search was undertaken for John Warshaw, but his whereabouts to this day are still unknown.

“In this episode I will be recording my journey as I attempt to track down Warshaw and find out what really happened under the bright lights and in the darkest shadows of Harlem’s Upside Down bar.”

By the end of the final episode though, the podcaster isn’t any closer to tracking down the elusive vampire bartender and the narrative trails off into rambling theorizing, as these things so often do. Still, there is a witness whose anecdote jumps out at Jessica, a man named Judd Winter, who had employed John Warshaw to run his bar during the eighties.

“A nice guy,” Judd tells the interviewer. “Genuinely, just a nice guy. But had…issues. Childhood trauma, that kind of thing. He flunked med school, then just bummed around the world as far as I know. Turned up here fresh-faced and desperate for cash. I gave him a room above. And he worked for me for, yeah, round about six years in the end. He liked it here. He was regular and hardworking, the customers liked him, he could talk, but he also knew when to stop. Most importantly, I could trust him. I could trust him with my life. And so when the police came to my door back in ’98, telling what they’d found under the dance floor, telling me they were looking for John. I mean, no way was all I could think. No way.”

The interviewer asks him, “Where do you think he might be now?”

Judd Winter sighs. “Honestly? I have no idea. He had no roots. He had, well, he had no one. I mean, there was a girl, she used to come in a lot. A British girl. A real looker. She’d sit at the bar, and they’d flirt, but to be honest, I thought she was wasting her time because he never seemed like that kind of guy. She was really young, you know. He was in his thirties by then, a bit of a loner. But he seemed taken with her. I don’t know what happened to her, but I figure if you could find her, you might be able to find him.”

“What was her name?”

“Her name—and I remember this because it was so beautiful—was Ophelia.”

Back in her room, as she waits for the night to fall, Jessica spends some time googling first symptoms of pregnancy. It’s not the first time she’s asked the internet about her predicament, but it is the first time she’s lasted longer than five minutes before slamming down the lid of her laptop in horror. Apparently, she is not meant to be drinking more than two hundred milligrams of caffeine a day and that, frankly, is beyond a joke.

The world on the other side of her positive pregnancy test alarms her still. It is illustrated on the internet by fresh-faced women cupping neat bumps and sitting in airy rooms in white clothing with handsome husbands. It is peopled by women who are not like her in any way whatsoever, living lives that bear no resemblance to hers. And what of her powers? And Luke’s? Will their abilities automatically guarantee a child with powers? Will the baby grow faster? Bigger? Will it burst from her womb hard enough to break her in half? Will it fly across the birthing unit and smack its head on the wall? She remembers what Luke said last week, about life being hard enough in this world for a normal kid, let alone a kid with super-powers. Should she even be considering this?

She clicks on a link to a “due date calculator” and puts in the date of the first day of her last period.

You are 8 weeks pregnant.

Jessica slams down the lid of her laptop and picks up her phone.

The time is 11:30 a.m. in New York. Malcolm will still be in class, so she messages him instead:

I’m heading back to the farmhouse soon. I’m going to get Belle out of there. If you haven’t heard from me by the time you wake up tomorrow morning, I want you to call this guy Elliot at the pharmacy in Barton Wallop. He knows where I am. OK?

And do not do anything dangerous tonight. Message me the minute you are through. And stay the hell SAFE.

She pastes in the number for the village pharmacy and presses send.

TWENTY-FOUR

NIGHT HAS FALLEN as dark as night can get as Jessica arrives outside Belle’s house. The perimeter wall looms above her, ten feet high. She looks from left to right and back again, and then hurls herself upward. She perches on the wall for a second and she waits for the noise of the dogs. Sure enough, it comes. Like a tornado in the night, the pack appears below, and with a lurch in the pit of her stomach that almost makes her puke, Jessica throws out a handful of cubed ham, then jumps, legs ablur, arms pumping the cold night air like engine parts, heart swelling in her chest. As she lands, one dog manages to get close enough to take her heel in its mouth. It’s the same dog that Belle was feeding morsels of lamb to earlier, who’d taken them from Belle’s fingers as daintily as a highborn lady. Now that same soft mouth is embedded in her flesh and Jessica kicks her leg hard enough to boot the dog a few feet across the grass, where it lands with a whimper. Jessica knows she has a very short opportunity to make it across the grounds to the house before Debra and Belle are alerted, so she overrides the pain and runs.

The house is in darkness when she reaches it. Jessica has a few seconds to get into the house before the dogs arrive and wake everyone up. She shimmies up a water pipe toward the middle floor, where Belle will be sleeping, but is halfway up when she hears the dogs. She pulls in her breath and peers around the corner, where she sees Debra in a towel robe and sheepskin slippers, standing just outside the front door with a huge flashlight in her hand. She looks like someone’s mother, waiting to greet their late-returning child. She does not look like a child abductor or a killer, with the soft slippers, the glasses on top of her head, the moonlight shining off the night cream on her cheeks.

“Hello?” she hears Debra call out. “Someone there?”

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