Hellraisers by Alexander Gordon Smith

shouldered his way through the thin crowd toward the turnstiles. He didn’t have any money on him but it had never stopped him before, and he checked that the coast was clear before leaping the barrier and sprinting to the downtown platform.
    It was a cattle train, rammed tight with sweating livestock, and Marlow clung on to the handrail as it tore beneath the city. As hot as it was down here, it felt good to be moving. Moving away from the police, away from the place where he’d been held prisoner. Away from his attackers, who’d filled his veins with poison. It’s what he did best, after all. He ran.
    Now that he had some distance, it kind of made sense. They’d dosed him up so that nobody believed his story. It was a madman’s tale anyway, he figured, but making him a drunken madman had to help. What was it they’d said? The first rule or something, that the world couldn’t know.
    â€œSteely Dan!” yelled a voice, right in his ear, almost making him jump out of his skin. He looked up, saw a guy with a huge belly and an even bigger beard breaking the cardinal rule of the subway—under no circumstances acknowledge any other passenger—in order to give him a rocker’s salute. Marlow smiled nervously at him and edged down the train, stopping only when that same thumping discomfort began to creep into his guts, vertigo making the whole train feel like it was tilting upside down.
    He grabbed for the handrail, closing his eyes against the rush. When he opened them again and stared through the crowd he could have sworn he saw the same girl there, that stab of familiarity. Their eyes met for a second before the train rocked around a bend and she was lost in the swaying bodies.
    Losing it, he told himself.
    With any luck, the fact the police had let him go meant they were done with him. Nobody would believe his story, nobody would investigate it. He could just get on with his life. He sighed, loudly. His amazing, fulfilling, fantastic life. Now the churning in his gut was something else, something that might have been disappointment. It was making him feel hollow, like part of him was missing. Secrets are like a hole in your life, Herc had said. And he was right. Marlow would have to live with the not knowing for the rest of his days.
    It doesn’t matter, he told himself. Just forget it.
    He screwed his eyes shut, feeling the motion of the train, imagining the city far behind him, fading fast. The memories would be the same. They had to be. If he kept moving, then they’d vanish, in time. Yeah, it was good to be moving.
    And he almost smiled, until he remembered where the train was taking him. South, to the ferry terminal. Back toward Staten Island. Back into the nightmare.
    *   *   *
    â€œMom?”
    Marlow hovered on the steps that led up to his front door, shuffling his feet. It was a decent enough place that he’d lived in since he was born, although it had seen better days. The blue paint had all but peeled away, like leprous skin. The filthy windows, too, were like eyes dulled with cataracts. The only new thing on the whole building was the satellite dish that spoon-fed his mom her stories day in, day out. He could hear the TV now, the dull roar of applause from some game show.
    He eased the door open a couple of inches, his face pressed into the gloom beyond. It was dark inside, the way it was always dark inside, even on a day like this when the sun seemed hot enough to burn a mile underground. His mom had closed the curtains on the day of Danny’s wake and the shadows had never left.
    â€œYo, Mom, it’s me.”
    There was a scrabbling of claws, a soft bark, then Donovan came trotting around the corner. The old mongrel—part Doberman, part English sheepdog, maybe part dalmatian, nobody really knew—slipped and slid on the wood, his tail beating so hard that his ass was almost ping-ponging off the walls. Marlow crouched down