Title: none of your business. You won't need it to take in the tale. But for the sake of argument, let's call it The Hunter for now. A novel in progress.
Have fun.
I hate Chinatown.
It has nothing to do with the people; I like the people. The people are smart. They know how to keep their mouths shut when people come around asking questions; they know how to be blind to things happening directly in front of their faces. They can, when needed, so convince themselves that something so blatant, so obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes, actually didn’t happen that they feel no remorse telling anyone who’ll ask that nothing happened, because in their minds, it’s an unshakeable truth.
The people in Chinatown know how to survive. I can appreciate that. No, what I hate is this goddamned neighborhood they live in.
Forget that it smells like a fisherman’s outhouse in the summer heat; there are other parts of Manhattan that smell worse, and don’t need a day baking in the New York sun for the stench to make you lose last week’s lunch.
And let’s ignore the way the streets twist and turn into each other, angling sharply down one way and ending at a brick wall like some medieval hedge maze. These streets weren’t so much designed, as they were thrown together, with no regards for logic or common sense. There are streets down here that last all of one or two city blocks, and if you make a wrong turn down a wrong alley you’ll need a compass and flares to help find your way out.
Of course I exaggerate, but I’m making a fucking point here. Deal with it.
No, what I hate about Chinatown is that there’s just no place for a guy like me to blend in. Either the streets are too small or I’m just too big, I don’t give a fuck; all I know is that every time I come down to this part of the city I stand out like a goddamned hooker at a Catholic Christmas mass.
Yes, I’m a pretty big guy; three hundred pounds and just over six feet of well-earned muscle will get me that description, sure – but there are plenty of guys bigger than I am, and they’d love to prove it to you. And yeah, I’m about a hundred shades of black darker than the darkest person down here, but again – so fucking what, it’s New York. Bruthas work these streets like cockroaches on a kitchen counter, either selling or buying knockoffs at prices that’ll even make the Jews on 48th sit up and take notice.
So if I ain’t the biggest, and I ain’t the blackest, then why the fuck is it each and every goddamned time I have to come to this part of town, everybody’s staring at me from the side of their faces like Jesus Christ came down, landed on my forehead and said “boo!” to them?
Casper tried to explain it to me once. Some people, he said, are just naturally more in touch with all that supernatural shit than others. I can walk around on Riverside Drive like I own the whole fucking park, and people will pretend to ignore me because they see what they expect to see – a big, scary black man. And this works for them because I’m something they know how to deal with – by crossing the street, like if they so much as make eye contact with me I’ll end up molesting their daughter. That’s normal for this city.
Not in Chinatown, he says. No, these fuckers are old-school – they’re barely a boat ride removed from all that ancient shit, and they have this way of noticing crap that others won’t. Not just noticing; seeing. Seeing stuff that may or may not really be there, stuff that either scares the hell out of them or fascinates them so much they can’t take their eyes off it.
Like, apparently, me. Except when I ask that little shit Casper what any of that crap has to do with me, he smiles that shit-eating little “I know something you don’t” grin of his and clams the fuck up for the hundredth time.
Personally I think it’s his shit on me they’re smelling, and they don’t quite cotton to the scent of it. He’s the one whose got them spooked, except they can’t quite get past me to see it’s him.
Did I mention that Casper is my personal ghost?
Yeah, hah hah, big joke. Okay so he’s not a ghost; I’m still not sure what he is, exactly. He swears up and down a stack of Bibles that he’s my own personal guardian angel, and if I was stupid for that Jesus shit I might be inclined to believe him. No, I think he’s some deeply buried psychosis, an imaginary friend from my childhood who just doesn’t know when his time is up. He’s definitely been around long enough that it makes some sense, but if I try bring it up with him he starts in on this wailing and whining and I end up with a migraine and a nosebleed, so I don’t even bother anymore.
Real or figment, Casper’s saved my ass too many times for me to just ignore him completely; maybe he’s my sixth sense, maybe I’m really totally bonkers - but rubber-room material or not, he’s way too useful to me. So I make a point of not taking the pills the army docs prescribed, and I throw away the letters the shrinks send me reminding me how overdue I am for a session with them.
But forget all that. None of that does a thing about explaining what I’m doing walking this smelly, cobble-stoned maze of a neighborhood at damn near midnight on a Tuesday, when any sensible New Yorker is at home right now curled up in bed watching Seinfeld reruns.
It’s because I’m on a hunt. And the things I hunt don’t usually keep nine-to-five hours.
Yeah, I can hear it now, “oh god, here we go again.” Been there, done that, seen the movie and the tv series and the spinoff with her ex-boyfriend too. Do I carry a special sword, or have a crackpot team of professionals on my payroll standing by with all the latest gadgets and weapons?
Well fuck you, my name ain’t Van Helsing and if vampires exist, I’ve never seen one. I carry a shotgun, two handguns and a whole bunch of knives. Maybe a hand grenade or two. Or three, if it’s a good day.
Why?
Because in my experience, a shotgun blast to the head from about five or six feet away is more than enough to stop anything that comes at you. If Count Chocula came after me, it’s gonna be pretty damned hard to sink his fangs into my neck with his head blown the fuck off. And if by some lucky chance the sumbitch does manage to get up? Well, the ol’ boomstick’s got two rounds for a good reason.
Leave all the fancy moves to the cheerleaders on tv, that’s my theory.
What most people who don’t live in New York don’t know, or don’t want to know, is that in too many ways the city really is just a jungle with light posts and traffic signals for trees, and blacktopped streets in place of rivers. If you don’t know what to look for, the things you’d better be aware of that hide in the dark alleys and ride the potholed streets behind tinted windows; if you don’t learn how these things hunt, and respect them for the beasts they are, this city will swallow you whole. And if your family is really lucky, your bloated carcass might just come floating to the surface of the Hudson in a few weeks, with your face intact enough for them to identify your body at the morgue.
On the other hand, I could write an entire set of encyclopedia volumes on the things that hide even deeper in the shadows of those alleys and sewers, things that even the average New Yorker won’t admit is out there, watching. Waiting.
Waiting for what? What the fuck do you think, dipshit?
Do you really think that hundreds of people go missing in this city each year because they just moved out of state? Or that the police department has dozens of unsolved murders each month, because there’s some genius killer on the loose who they’ve yet to find enough evidence to arrest? Do you think the human vermin you see on the 11 o’clock news is responsible for all the things that happen when the lights go down?
This cesspool of a city, just like all of her sisters around the world, is crawling with monsters.
Don’t even think of laughing; just don’t. I learned a long time ago just how real these things are, and at the same time discovered two very important things about myself.
One is that I’m very, very good at finding and killing these things. I once tracked a really nasty goblin-like thing through about three hamlets outside of Frankfurt in Germany, finally trapping the little shit in a badger den it thought it could hide out in. I’ve gone down sewers, subways, caverns…hell; I even once climbed a radio broadcast tower chasing after this baboon-like thing running around just south of Texas.
Which that leads me to the other thing I found out about myself. Because when I finally got my hands on that monkey-chattering fucker, I didn’t even bother with the knife or gun; I just squeezed with my hands until I popped his windpipe, and watched the life wash right out of him.
And it felt good. I mean really good.
Let’s be clear about this: I enjoy hunting these things down. When I’m on a trail of a particular nasty, it’s like I really come alive – my skin tingles, my senses are sharper than you could possibly imagine. I feel stronger, faster than anything on the planet; I’m a true predator, a hunter.
THE hunter.
And you know what? If I didn’t have these things to hunt down, these things that lie in the darkness and plot ways to snatch your child from its crib because it wants to see how tender Little Timmy’s fingers will be in its nasty little mouth, if these boogeymen and trolls and nightmares didn’t exist…
I’d probably be hunting you instead.
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