The Styx Read Online Free PDF Page B

reflection was of a man with dirty-green eyes and high cheek bones. The aquiline nose was slightly bent, broken only once by a beer bottle, and the ears were somewhat large but pinned back as if in perpetual full charge. There was a dark streak running down the left side of the muscled cables of the neck, which appeared to start somewhere inside the light brown hair. He followed the trail up to a slick, sticky mass just above the ear. He touched the spot with his fingertips and could feel the sharp flash of open nerve endings but did not flinch. Byrne had always had an unnatural threshold for pain. He probed around the area a bit before determining the wound was minor and then went to the large metal sink that had been installed only a year ago when plumbing came to the building. He’d run a basin full of water and set it inside yesterday, not trusting that the pipes bringing water to the second floor would not be frozen in the early morning. Indeed, he now had to crush the top skin of thin ice on the porcelain, and then he dipped a rag and began cleaning the rip in his scalp that had likely come from a ringed fist or some lucky swat of a length of pipe during the fight last night.
    He gathered the rag and the basin, moved to the bureau top and began washing his face with the now blood-tinged water. The crusted scrape on his left cheek came clean though raw, and the grime of soot, constantly in the city’s polluted air, wiped off as well. He found both a bar of lather soap and a small bristle brush and lathered up his slight whiskers. He then bent to retrieve the single-bladed knife he always carried in a sheath strapped to his ankle. The instrument was small enough for concealment and had many uses, some routine, some that just happened to come along. He shaved himself clean. He would be meeting his new bosses today. Better to present his best. When he’d finished, he cleaned the blade and put it back in its holster and then packed everything he owned into a single old leather satchel. The fact that he had so little made no impression because no one he knew had much more. He donned the warm coat given to him by the same Pinkerton supplier who gave them all their shoes, took one last look around the apartment, to absorb its memories and its lessons, and locked the door behind him. The landlady would know soon enough when the rent was due that he had gone.

    Outside, an early morning gloom was on the day, though it was always hard to tell whether it was the cloud cover or the density of coal smokeand ash hanging in the air. When Byrne stepped off the threshold he nearly bumped into old Mrs. McReady, who was mumbling and moving her equally old produce cart into position for the day. The woman was bundled in layers of dull and worn clothing that as far as Byrne could tell never varied, whether worn in the heat of summer or the freezing nip of winter. He had known the woman all his life and long before she’d lost her mind.
    “Pardon, Mrs. McReady. Didn’t mean to startle you,” Byrne said, using a touch of the old country in his voice for her, a holdover that he tried to avoid when speaking to anyone else in the city who might take a dislike to him because of his heritage.
    The woman looked up into his face with milky eyes and an illusory recognition.
    “Danny, me boy. Good mornin’ yourself and how is it you’re so late gettin off to school?” she said, mistaking him for his brother as she always did and chastising him though he had not been school aged for a good ten years.
    “No school today, Mrs. McReady, and it’s me, Michael.”
    The old woman huffed at the correction, whiffed her hands and turned to wrestle with the handles of her cart, the diameter of the wooden posts thicker than her own tired legs. Byrne swung his satchel over his shoulder and helped her move the cart to the position where it had sat every day for two decades.
    “Bless you, Mikey, but don’t touch my cart again boy or I’ll tell your mum