Odd.
That was the
only word Schuldig could think of to describe the feeling he had: odd.
Perhaps it
wasn’t a strange feeling to have, considering he was snooping about in a
long, dark, nastily dank alley in one of the less favorable neighborhoods of
New York City; although, in New York, no neighborhood could really honestly be
called favorable, and Schuldig himself could barely remember a time during
which he’d been a stranger to long, dark, nastily dank alleys.
No, the feeling
Schuldig had came from something else.
It was more a
sense of anticipation than anything else; a sense of something about to happen,
which was unusual. Precognition, of course, was Bradley Crawford’s forte.
And this feeling was even getting specific, sort of: whatever was about to
happen would be completely surprising.
Schuldig hated
surprises.
He hated not
knowing what was about to happen, which was one of the many damnable reasons
that Crawford was so fucking smug all of the time. Schuldig vehemently disliked
this newfound odd feeling of uninformed anticipation, and decided to beat a
hasty but dignified retreat from the alley and let whatever it was that was
about to happen, happen without him.
Unfortunately, some
higher power apparently knew what he was thinking, didn’t like it and
decided to do something about it, because just as Schuldig turned to leave the
alley and venture again into the back streets of the West Village, something
happened.
The thing that
happened was profound enough to stop Schuldig in his tracks and make him
irritably frown and rub his ears with his knuckles. To the casual
passer-by—though in this particular instance it would have been difficult
to be passing by casually as the alley was quite out of the way of pedestrian
traffic—it would have appeared that nothing, really, had happened at all.
In other words, the amount of interest that a casual passer-by would have taken
in this situation would have been none at all. But Schuldig was struck dumb,
and, to his own delicate senses, deaf by some unknown occurrence.
What happened to
Schuldig was that he abruptly stopped hearing other people’s thoughts.
They’d
been quite muted anyway, considering the fact that Schuldig was well removed
from the presence of any human beings and it was that certain time of night
when everyone who’s not properly at home in bed is at the very least in a
club or movie theater, and not moving back and forth between any of those
places. Even in the always-populated West Village there was very little action.
But the slight and constant rumble of thought and emotion and feeling that
always hovered at the periphery of Schuldig’s consciousness was
undeniably suddenly and without warning cut off.
To Schuldig, for
whom telepathy was a sense that he took for granted like sight or touch, this
was quite alarming, and he stood stupidly in the middle of the alley for
several moments, rubbing helplessly at his ears, until a young woman hurtled
unexpectedly off of a third storey fire escape and landed briskly in front of
him.
Since Schuldig
was himself in the habit of occasionally hurtling off of fire escapes and
landing unhurt, this was not overly alarming, but it was still admittedly a bit
of a surprise because he’d never before seen anyone else do the hurtling
bit and had not quite understood before how daring and impossible it looked.
Also, he hadn’t heard—and persisted in not hearing—the young
woman’s thoughts, which under normal circumstances would certainly have
alerted Schuldig to her presence.
“Hi,”
said the young woman. Listening to her speak without knowing what she was
thinking was to Schuldig like trying to hear someone shout from a distance, or
like trying to read lips without knowing how. He felt cheated, as though he
wasn’t getting the whole message.
“Hi,”
said Schuldig vaguely, still rubbing at his ears.
“Look,”
the young woman continued, having made sure he was aware of her existence,
“This isn’t really a safe place for you to be right now—you were
just about to leave, weren’t you? Why don’t you keep on doing
that?” She paused. “I mean that in the nicest way possible, of
course. But, er, not-here would be a great place to be, don’t you
think?—Oh, shit,” she added, apparently as an afterthought, casting
an anxious glance over Schuldig’s shoulder. “Get down!” She
pushed him firmly to the ground, in case the statement had failed to reach him,
which it might very well have done.
The silence
Schuldig was experiencing grew to a dull roar not unlike that of the inside of
a wind tunnel as several tall, dark and menacing figures stepped from the
shadows to surround the young woman. Schuldig lay faintly with his cheek
pressed to the rough concrete as the sounds of an enthusiastic fight rose
around him. Every once in a while the noises would be interrupted with an
aggressive poof of
displaced air, and then the fighting would begin again. Throughout the
skirmish, Schuldig’s mind, enveloped as it was by the outward-reaching
silence of his natural sixth sense, felt rather as though it were being sucked
into a high-powered vacuum cleaner.
At long last the
sounds of fighting ceased. Schuldig hesitantly lifted his head from the ground
as a last decisive poof
settled into the remaining quiet. Immediately an impudent gust of wind tossed a
cloud of dust in his direction and Schuldig broke into a hacking cough.
Somewhere in the back of his mind (distracted as he was by the small trouble of
trying to breathe again) he was able to note with no small amount of relief that
the uncomfortable vacuum-like feeling seemed to have gone.
“Hey, are
you all right?” The young woman, apparently the victor of the battle,
knelt tentatively at Schuldig’s side. “Sorry I had to shove you
like that, but you might have really been hurt if I hadn’t got you out of
the way. Here, let me help you up.”
Schuldig, still
coughing the last of the dust from his throat, allowed the young woman to
assist him in regaining his feet, realizing with some horror that he was still
unable to hear what she was thinking.
“Look, I
don’t know about you,” she was saying, “but I am starving,
and there’s this great pizza place like a five-minute walk from Abingdon
Square. I’ll get you a slice if you’re hungry. People usually are—I
think it’s a shock reaction. You’re totally fine, don’t
worry, you’ve just got some dirt on your knees, but I think a nice tall
soda will help you out—”
Schuldig at the
moment would have far preferred something a good deal stronger than a soda, but
when he attempted to express that thought he started coughing again.
The young woman
kept a steady grip on his arm as they made their way out of the alley, which
was a help Schuldig would never have stooped to express his thanks for;
fortunately, she had the excellent judgment to step away to the side as they
entered into the jumble of streets that assembled the West Village, allowing
Schuldig the small but significant measure of dignity that accompanied walking
on his own.
“Um,”
the young woman said, as they reached a large intersection, “Fourteenth
Street and Eighth Avenue is that-a-way, and I can point you towards the subway
stops if you want. Or if you want to talk about what just happened, Two Boots
Pizza is that way.” She pointed downtown and East helpfully.
Schuldig peered
around him. They stood in front of a trendy restaurant on the edge of Abingdon
Square; Fourteenth Street was indeed nearby. There was a distracting buzzing in
the back of his head, and as his eyes focused on a middle-aged man standing at
the crosswalk who was wondering to himself if Barb had remembered to give Mitzy
her evening walk or not, Schuldig found with relief that he could hear the
thoughts of the general populace again…
… Except,
for some inexplicable reason, those thoughts belonging to the unlikely young
woman who stood beside him, smiling encouragingly. If he tried hard, Schuldig
could feel the presence
of her mind—a calming throb like a pulse or heartbeat. But the thoughts
themselves, even the usual flighty surface ones, were concealed beneath a
careful, deliberate blank.
Schuldig decided
he wanted to know more about this young woman—and, if possible, more
about the vacuum-like silence that had threatened to pull his mind into some
kind of taut, painful oblivion during the attack earlier.
“You okay?
D’you want me to take you home?” the young woman asked, just barely
laying a light hand on Schuldig’s shoulder.
It was extremely
difficult to listen to and understand what she was saying without her thoughts
to help him along. “No,” Schuldig said slowly, shaking his head.
“Pizza sounds all right.”
