Willow Locke - Anarchist Detective

Duplication

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It was late, close to eleven when they arrived at Hannah's building. Clara had become increasingly taciturn as they walked and now she stared up at the tenement in brooding silence. She walked with her arms folded across her chest, her thin pale fingers splayed out against her dark overcoat. She seemed nervous, upset, so different than the indomitable revolutionary she had met a few hours earlier. Zilpah reached for her, touched her shoulder.

"What's wrong, Clara?" she asked.

Clara wrenched away and trudged up the stairs to the front door of the building in silence. Zilpah glanced over her shoulder and surveyed the street. Sitting beneath a streetlamp in an amber pool of arclight, a little old woman dressed all in black sat on a low stool and turned the crank of her hurdy-gurdy, smiling up at passers-by, nudging her wooden begging bowl forward with her foot. The adroit, melancholy tune interwoven through the noise of traffic and drunken revelry. Clara leaned against the bricks, following her gaze. Zilpah's building was right across the way. Mother. She could look in on her. What would she find there? An abbatoir, a naked corpse in its rigor, lying twisted on the floor, deformed by the tremens that had wracked its last living moments. No! Mother was resourceful, without them she would adapt. Put on her rags and get to the stale beer saloon. Forced to work, she would drink less.

Then she saw her! Shuffling down the street, dressed in the only clothes she owned, peering around like a wary animal in the yellow arclight. Zilpah could even see her eyes, glazed and shining in the dark, too little white, too much black, like an animal. Zilpah flattened herself against the bricks and watched from the shadows of the eve. Her mother bent down low to the old woman, who stopped playing for a moment to half-rise from her stool and whisper something to her. Zilpah's mother nodded, eyes closed, hands steepled before her as though in prayer. Then the old woman sat down and began her song again. Zilpah's mother stepped back, lifted up her arms to the sky, and howled. That was the only way to describe the sound, a wild animal noise, a savage ululation. People on the sidewalk lept away. But as she listened she heard modulation in her mother's strange loud moan. A note in a minor key descending, then rising again, then descending once more. She was singing! Zilpah's blood coursed cold through her veins. She couldn't breathe. Just get away.

She opened the door and slipped inside, Clara followed. The musty darkness of the tenement, mouldering carpet over irregular wooden planks—Hannah's building was another Koch property, no electricity, no water. They walked up the narrow stairs in the dark, clinging to the rail. It was the fourth door, Zilpah heard someone weeping inside. She knocked loudly, and the weeping stopped abruptly. The door opened a few inches and Hannah's dad stared at her over the security chain.

"Zilpah," he whispered her name, closed the door, the chain rattled and the door opened wide.

"Come in." Hannah's father Noam was backlit by the dim kerosene lamp which lit the room. Zilpah looked at Noam's face in shadow, but she could see that he was unwell, had missed many nights of sleep. His face looked lined and guant, the skin near his eyes was dark, almost purple. He lowered his head and turned, opening Zilpah's view to the rest of the room. Sarah, Hannah's mother, sat at the kitchen table, her head buried in her folded arms. She looked up at Zilpah, her hair wiry and unkempt, her cheeks tearstained. She glared at Zilpah wildly and bit her lip.

"Zilpah, do—do you know? Do you know where she is?" She stood up from her chair and took a step towards Zilpah, but then she stopped in her tracks. Her gaze slid over to Clara, still standing in the doorway.

"You!" she screamed. "This happened because of you! How dare you show your face here again!" She ran towards Clara, her hands splayed claws, but Noam caught her in his arms, pulled her back. She fought him, pushed at the barrier of his arms.