The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  Or thinks it knows.

  Such efforts somehow helped the tapeworm. And the tapeworm presently provided more of the good, anesthetizing blood. The wallpaper sponged it up; the cement cracks drank it; the lintels and flashings and doorjambs got drunk on it.

  Just as a person with Alzheimer's Disease might win a caesura of lucidity and drug himself to avoid the coming agony of affliction, so does Kenilworth now desire more of the stuff that renders it so wonderfully uncaring. What the building remembers can help the tapeworm to provide more.

  It did.

  Now the tapeworm has augmented the blood with a new intoxicant. When mixed with the blood, the sensation is trebled. The building desires even more, and so helps the tapeworm to feed.

  It is nothing akin to human consciousness. Birthed from the discards of elder structures, Kenilworth has spent most of its existence on the brink of shutdown.

  Or overdose.

  It is long past time to be dead. The long fall of years toward oblivion has been fraught with malfunctions and internal failures. The stabbing pains of dysfunctional pipework. The scores and scabs of vandalism. The ravages of weather. All the losses of tone and tension and strength that come with the extremities of age. The millions of tiny ways bodies can hamper and betray their owners. All transpire now, within Kenilworth 's remembered walls.

  The walls are breaking down as memory is lost. They lose integrity like decaying flesh.

  Kenilworth Arms, self-narcotized, tries to use what it knows. Or what it can imagine, in its final hours.

  Drugged deeper than ever before, it has what we might call a dream.

  ***

  'You can go back there and take a survey of all the blood and busted glass, but I don't see any point. Bauhaus and his squad of monkey dicks are going to swoop down on that place. And probably kill everybody in sight.'

  The backstory had not hurt Jamaica 's appetite. Bash had lost his.

  He sat. To keep his hands from shaking he clasped them tightly together. They throbbed. His right one ached from hitting Marko. The late Marko, he of the shotgun shell mug and sniper's disposition, was now interred in his own snowdrift outside Kenilworth. Bash wondered if the body would dissolve to black water come spring, and run in the gutters the way he had described it to Jonathan.

  He did not say anything.

  'Listen. Listen to me.' Jamaica 's attitude left him no room for bullshit. 'I know what's probably going through your head right now. I am so goddamned sorry about Jonathan. But believe me, there is nothing to do right now. There is no action that is takeable. You saw Marko; these guys are serious as cancer when it comes to payback. We need to stay out of their way. We need to not let them know where we are. The only thing to do is wait. Wait and see if Cruz shows up.'

  'How much longer you going to give him?'

  'If nothing happens by noon, I'm hitting the road. If the storm will let me. There's gonna be another storm - a shitstorm of questions about Jonathan. You've got to decide whether you want to be the guy to answer them.'

  'Damn.' The Louisiana accent had crept back, muffled by loosened teeth. If even part of what Jamaica had told him was true, no way Bash wanted to try explaining it all to guys in uniforms. She was a hooker… but Jonathan had taken her straight… and why would anybody invent a story as crazy as this?

  'I keep thinking it's my fault,' she said. 'He wanted to help me out, that's all. He did stuff for a total stranger. But I think he never would have gotten trapped in this if it wasn't for that chick Amanda, down in Texas. He gave me the skinny on her. I think she's the reason he crawled down that shaft for me.'

  That made Bash snort and look away. When he turned back there were tears blurring the rich brown of his eyes.

  'Oh. Oh, goddamnit all to fucking hell…' He clamped his eyes shut. Jamaica reached and folded his unhurt hand in both of hers. He jerked it back. 'No. You don't understand.'

  'Look at me.' She was trying to help, to do for Jonathan, in a way. 'Jonathan was…'

  'Shut up!' He thumped the table and the flatware jumped. Conversation throughout the room hitched. 'You're the one who doesn't get it,' he hissed. 'All that bullshit about Amanda.'

  'She broke his heart. They weren't right for each other. What's to understand?'

  'Amanda does not fucking exist.' His tone was low and lethal, his eyes locking Jamaica 's. 'Amanda does not lucking exist because Jonathan made her up. There was never an Amanda in Texas. All bullshit. He invented her. He fabricated her like the Bride of Frankenstein out of bits and pieces of other people's personalities. He created, in his head, an ideal woman to break his heart so he'd never have to risk getting involved with a real person, ever. He was walled into himself to the point where he'd do that. If he always had the Amanda story to fall back on he could forever say, here was the love of my life and look how I fucked it all up. He could keep people away from him with that story. He could get pity with that story. Mercy fucks, even. He could justify never bothering to look for anyone because no one could ever be as good as his idealization, as worthy of his love as this fantasy he named Amanda. That was why I goaded him into coming here. That was why I refused to listen when he tried to fall back on the Amanda story. I even paid his fucking freight just to knock him loose from Fort Worth. God. If he kept up with that Amanda rap, he would just… don't you see?'

  His hands did not know what to do, so they spilled his coffee and Oh Miss was there in a shot to put things right.

  'You're talking like a guy getting ready to blame himself,' Jamaica said once the waitress had withdrawn. 'Don't. Waste of energy.'

  He was fresh out of angles of attack.

  'We go to so much trouble to prove stuff to ourselves,' he said. 'Then, once we've settled, we change the rules and have to start all over again.' His gaze clouded, looking through her, not at her. His eyes were like the front windows of the Bottomless Cup full up with storm. 'You know dinosaurs? You got the Brontosaurus. Everybody's happy until some guy decides to more properly name it Apatosaurus. Doesn't change what it is. Used to be they couldn't prove why a bee flies. It's totally un-aerodynamic, yet you and I both know it flies. So they spend tons of money and they finally prove that it flies. Big goddamn deal for all the difference that made. Now they're knocking down bigger rules - Schrodinger's Cat, Occam's Razor. All riffs on the same basic take. If a tree falls over in the woods, does it make a noise? Would it matter whether there was a human being around to document this? Would it have even hit the ground at all if Newton hadn't given a name to gravity?'

  He was upset and babbling. It wasn't designed to track, but Jamaica thought she had grabbed the gist.

  'Record this in Dolby stereo, J.B.' She nailed him full bore with the potent green of her eyes. 'Shit happens. Sometimes with no explanation. Dingdongs call it 'God's will.' They hate thinking, is why. It's possible to not think about anything. Just listen to Whip Hand records and eat at McDonald's and never make a wave. But - hear me, now - you can also think things to death. Just as bad as not thinking at all. And if rehashing Jonathan over and over is just going to cause you to blame yourself, what's the point? Shit happens.'

  His eyes were downcast, evasive.

  'Repeat after me: Shit happens.'

  His voice leveled off. 'Shit… happens.'

  'Now we're getting somewhere.'

  A heavy gust bowed the windows and the lights flickered, dunking the restaurant in gray. Everyone stopped eating. Ms Sparrow, two booths down, said a swear word.

  'More shit is happening.' Bash's eyes indicated the ceiling tubes.

  The blizzard's next big buffet caused M s Sparrow to flinch and drop her water glass. The windows were inundated by white-out. Nothing out there but churning cold and a world of hurt.

  The radio playing in the kitchen went dead as the power was knocked down to stay down, this time.

  'Have a refill,' Jamaica suggested. 'I think we're stuck here for the duration.'

  THIRTY

  'Have to. Leave here.'
<
br />   Cruz forgot. Whatever he might have cried upon seeing the dark figure awaiting him in the tunnel, he lost any memory of it the second it had traversed his lips. His mind tried to resist filling with what he could see in the bilious light.

  The shadowman took another broken-boned step, its shredded gloves radiating the organic green glow, one hand a switchblade, the other a razor. From half a face, Jonathan's unmistakable green eyes assessed him.

  Cruz's eyes tried to avert. No go there, either.

  'Jonathan…?'

  The motorcycle jacket was alive with decay, rust-caked, the spikes and pins securing the sundered denim and rotten leather all scarified to the junkyard brown of obsolescence. Within the flaps and tatters of leather was the pale lambency of morgue flesh and the dull russet of stale blood.

  Another eye, watery blue, was jammed into the sagging bread dough of one cheek, where the flaccid tissue was about to smother it. The crosscut mess of the throat housed more eyes amid its folds and incisions and fissures. An aquamarine one blazed like a wet diamond. A deep brown one seemed to be dying. One with a cataract of pink blood winked at Cruz. Chameleonic, they all monitored different aspects of this intruder's disposition.

  There was only the echo of breathing in the tunnel. It was solely Cruz, panting in short, choppy breaths etched with a distant cocaine wheeze. The figure confronting him drew no air. When it spoke its vocal cords buzzed, a rattle of dry desert air across brittle petals of dead flesh. Cruz could see slime glurting from the downtwisted gash of mouth. It looked as if this creature was speaking, coughing, and vomiting yogurt all at once.

  'Cruz.' It flooded its chin.

  A bloody hank of snow-white hair sprouted where there should have been an ear. A strip of orange punk bristle, up top, was denuded by patches of exposed skull, shiny and scabbed.

  'Jonathan?'

  'Not.' It choked. The yogurt flew enriched with stringers of blood. It took another step and Cruz could see the long pinky fingernail on the switchblade hand.

  'Far enough.' Cruz had gotten his wits and hauled out the Sig Sauer.

  The creature rippled. No other way to describe it. Cruz saw its entire surface shimmy, as if it were an envelope of dead flesh packed with busy bugs.

  He had to catch his balance. Had the floor shifted or was the coke doing him dirty?

  'You gave,' said the puzzlebox corpse. 'Give again.'

  Okay, he'd crested out for sure and wasn't really seeing any of this. Not for real. He hurt. All he wanted was out.

  'Give,' the thing repeated. Cruz knew the voice. It was a zombie mockery of every whining school kid who couldn't pony up for this week's dime of crack.

  One ragged talon rose to plunge the switchblade into the tunnel wall. The metal parted like porkfat as it was sliced in a bleeding vertical line.

  Blood began to pool around the creature's crusted combat boots.

  Give. Cruz could ask give what. He could waste even more time.

  It extended its other arm. The razor bit into the wall to Cruz's left, slicing deep. Cruz shuddered, thinking of Emilio's hobby again.

  The tunnel floor was vanishing under a sheen of blood as the long cuts in the wall continued to void.

  'Give now.'

  Jonathan's rucksack held most of the surviving kilo and one more clip for the gun, yet unloaded. That kilo was his whole idealized future, wrapped up tight in waterproof plastic. He wasn't sure he wanted to relinquish this particular pot of gold, and so he gave. With the pistol.

  His own incoherent howl was lost in the jackhammer noise of gunfire. His torn finger pulled the trigger again and again and he watched holes appear in the thing with Jonathan's eyes. Pulverized meat jumped free and pattered into the skim of blood.

  Cruz fired and fired…

  One cheekbone, the one without the eye, vaporized to cloud the dank air. A scoop of worm-ridden fat tore free of the neck and splattered the wall next to the razor gash. One knob of shoulder smithereened to powdered leather and mummy dust. A brown eye popped like a ripe zit.

  … and fired and fired and…

  It made a hissing little snort with each impact, not even staggering. One flattened Luger round from this gun could turn your hand into pate. The thing stood and jerked as it sucked up each shot.

  … the Sig Sauer's action jammed full back. Empty.

  'Give now.'

  Cruz knew he had more bullets. What a funny; this thing would probably even grant him time to reload.

  'Give you what?' It was lame. Dumb.

  The creature merely extended its switchblade hand, palm up.

  Cruz could give, and meld with the jigsaw monster. Give everything. Or he could give, and conceivably escape. His reservations about Emilio began to look a mite silly.

  'You show me the way out of here, and I'll give.'

  The creature turned left and sank both bladed hands into the fissure begun with Edgar Ransome's straight razor. It pulled the rim wide and the incision tore crookedly, spouting darker jets of veinous blood.

  The narrow hole had been ripped to head height.

  'Out.'

  'You mean I have to walk into that?'

  'Out.' It stepped back from its handiwork, blood-soaked and dripping. Cruz watched a steaming gob of the yogurt-stuff drip slowly down from the skull cavity to fill the bite removed from its neck by a bullet. It anchored and began to mesh and bind, patching the damage.

  A new eye poked through the jellied mass like a surfacing periscope. Smaller than the others, and brown.

  One of Mario Velasquez's eyes, Cruz realized.

  'Give. Now.'

  ***

  The racketing oscillation of gunshots against metal made Fergus contract, hands over ears, prone in the tunnel. Violence was taking place just around the next turn.

  Between that and him his pet had been coiled sleeping, logy and unresponsive from too much of a good thing. It had fed several times outside of Fergus' supervision, and was presently twice the girth he'd ever seen it before. It barely fit the tunnel. That could become a major problem.

  But the venom, the stuff that brought on wet dreams without compare, that would be at an efficacy Fergus had never before experienced. The sensual feast would almost justify the bother.

  At first he thought some invader was discharging bullets to wound his pet. The acoustics were all wrong. The shots came from further down the tunnel, around the curve. So difficult to tell, with all this metal, and the oozing brown bulk of his pet blocking passage.

  Even the shots did not stir it, and Fergus had to pound on its tail end to bring it around.

  He had not counted on its mood. The torpedo head slithered from beneath the tail coil, and it bit Fergus. Harder, probably, than it intended. But it had just been rudely knocked up, and had lashed out.

  Fergus tried to retreat from the bite. No room to manuever. He saw his drowsy and annoyed pet slide around on itself, breaking up the sleep coils. Fergus had backed off about five yards when the venom piled into his nervous system like a train wreck.

  It was what he imagined an overdose of pleasure might feel like. He would have preferred to be on his bed, or in his familiar office chair, instead of banging his head against metal the first time orgasm cut through his stomach. But it was beyond his options to be picky just now.

  At least he had located his pet, which did not seem anxious to lose him again.

  Fergus trembled. The juice took hold and his eyes filled with brain pictures.

  He probably only imagined he saw his pet crawling right into the sheer metal wall of the tunnel. That was crazy.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Come on, addled rodent fuck. Just a bit snore.

  An antique Italian armoire stood tall at the end of the hallway leading to Bauhaus' color-coordinated bedroom collection. People paid obscene prices for such things, only to retrofit them as bars and buffets; upscale liquor cabinets. Emilio had found this one to be stocked with guns.

  Now he drew a short-barreled Wilson Arms Witness
Protection shotgun, a heavily-modified version of the trusty Remington 870. This one had rubberized assault grips and a ventilated rib. His free hand supported Bauhaus, whom he'd had to dress for the cold. Bauhaus carried no weapons. No way. Sooner would Emilio trust a burp gun to a drunk Nazi at a Jessie Jackson rally. Or give an ICBM to a Republican.

  A galaxy of felony chemical was playing suicide thrash inside Bauhaus' skin today. Red giant, white dwarf, burnout. But he had managed to note that Jamaica would most likely try to warn Cruz, and Emilio needed a native guide.

  The riot gun's shorty magazine held two rounds of triple-ought Magnum buckshot alternated with two rifled 'Sluggers' - a third was already chambered - making the whole package a very ugly thing to be on the wrong end of. Emilio wasn't into drug dealer guns.

  He had slotted in each round thinking of what they would do to Cruz's face. First Jamaica, then Cruz.

  One more set of stairs, and Bauhaus could be shucked as well. He was dead already and too high to know it.

  Cold pierced to chill the platinum razor against his chest. Once the shotgun stopped them, the razor could kill them. So slowly.

  Emilio licked his lips. The silence of the building was acute.

  His heart thudded at combat speed, goosed by a double belt of crank. His brain raced with humiliation. The shame, as he had been untied by Bauhaus' security guards, who knew a whore had foxed him. Naked, trussed, his own socks in his mouth. He had been unmanned and robbed of his cash. Robbed but not broke.

  And there was nothing more worthless than a dead prostitute.

  The sentries had come piling in with MAC 10s and Ithaca pumps unslung. There was nobody left to shoot. Bauhaus squirmed and hollered while he received first aid, then vomited into the bar sink twice. Emilio mixed him a special calm-down cocktail, stirring mystic powders into a glass of Perrier. The concoction would sideswipe the overload of dope Jamaica had compelled Bauhaus to swallow. A few moments and one more visit to the sink, and Bauhaus told Emilio he was straight enough to go hunting.