Cellars

by John Shirley

  “I don’t see anything funny,” Lanyard said flatly.

  “Anyway, I think she was killed this morning, maybe between four and five. Maybe as late as five-thirty. But no one found her till not much more than a hour ago because the station was closed—normally it’s open all night but the token clerk had to leave about three because his wife got mugged, she was at the Bellevue emergency room. They couldn’t get anybody to replace him on short notice, so they closed the station till about nine-thirty. When they opened it they found the gate broken—we think the killer stunned the girl on the street, dragged her down here, broke the gate with a tool, and laid her out on the platform—”

  “Can’t you for God’s sake cover her up?” Lanyard’s eyes kept straying to the cyanotic corpse on the dead-gray concrete floor.

  “We’ll see.” Gribner spoke to a man in plain clothes, who nodded, and covered the body with an ambulance blanket. “They’re done with the layout photos now. So: What’s your theory about—”

  A bubble of anger burst in Lanyard. “What the hell is the idea, dragging me down here with no explanation when my plane is about to leave? There must be lots of people able to give you the same information. The curator of the Museum of Natural History, or—”

  Gribner nodded slowly, apologetically sheepish. “I suppose so, but my wife reads your magazines. She leaves them around, and I read them sometimes. I thought of the magazine and I knew you were in New York because I saw you on that talk show. I didn’t know where you were, so I called the magazine’s office in San Francisco and the answering service put me onto a Mr. Maguss. He told me he’d just talked to you, said you were the ideal man. Said I should get you before you leave. Told me you were at the airport, about to leave for San Francisco. Almost missed you. I got a picture of you from the magazine—sent it by computer to a patrol car—forgot to explain what the situation was. I guess they thought you were wanted—I—”

  “Look, there are other people qualified to handle this—people better qualified than me. I don’t like the way I’ve been treated. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to return to the airport—”

  “Actually,” Gribner began, packing his pipe sloppily, shreds of tobacco falling on his brown shoes, “I was kind of hoping you’d maybe stay and help us out on this. This is the second killing of its type, I got reason to believe we’re maybe having a small epidemic of—”

  “I told you, I’m not qualified.” Lanyard was angry at the way he’d been treated—but most of all he wanted to get away from the thing under the blanket on the subway platform. And he was very much afraid of having to examine another like it.

  He turned and pointedly strode away from the cluster of men about the corpse, and went, almost loping, up the stairs and onto the street.

  He stood on the sidewalk, leaning on a mailbox, gasping. The mailbox was blue in the few remaining spots not covered with layers of peeling posters and spray paint. Numbly, he picked at the edge of the poster, prying it up, feeling for the moment incapable of anything else. Call a cab, he told himself. But there was another priority. Out of the numbness came anger, like the headlights of a subway train in a tunnel, bearing down. The anger had to be discharged. He went to a corner pay phone, open to the drizzle. For the second time that day he punched Maguss’s phone number. No response. He punched the Operator button repeatedly, annoyed, until he noticed that the coin box had been jimmied open. The phone was out of order.

  He walked a block through the gathering grayness, stepped over an old man who was grimed the same color as the sidewalk. He’s be come one with the sidewalk, Lanyard thought.

  He found a working phone booth, tried Maguss’s number again, gave the operator his credit-card information, and waited.

  “Hello.” Even more high-pitched with impatience than before.

  “Maguss? I understand that it was at your recommendation the police kidnapped me at the airport and detained me with a defiled corpse at a subway platform…?”

  Maguss laughed. “That must be Lanyard. I only recommended that you might be willing to help them look into the matter. Not only because you want to help solve a crime, like any decent man, but because there’s a story in it for us.”

  “The hell there is. I resign. That’s that.”

  “Fine. Don’t work for the magazine anymore. Instead, work for me, privately, on this last…inquiry. I’ll give you ten thousand dollars—half now, half when—”

  “No…”

  “Twenty-five thousand.”

  “No.”

  “Fifty.”

  “I don’t care to be dragged about for the use of whomever—”

  “One hundred and fifty.”

  Lanyard hesitated. “Are you offering me a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Yes. Fifty now, the rest when you’ve turned something up. All right?”

  “I…” Something bitter in his mouth. It was a lot of money, and Lanyard had learned that money, when there was enough of it, could be independence. He craved independence. He didn’t want to work for anyone else. This way—one job—he could invest $100,000 of the money, and live on the rest for two years, if he were careful.

  At the same time, he wanted to tell Maguss to roll the cash up in a neat little spindle, and shove it.

  Various sayings about missed opportunities passed before his eyes like ad copy on the Times Square electronic message board.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. What hotel are you going to stay at?”

  “The—” He changed his mind. “You paying expenses plus this fee, right?”

  Maguss laughed in consent. Nothing jolly about that laugh.

  “Okay. I’m at the Hilton. I’ll let you know what room. You wire me the advance. I’ll get to work. The hell with it.”

  “Lanyard—my advice is…tell the police only—um—what you have to tell them…about what you find out. They’ll tell reporters. We want the story first.”

  “Yeah.” Privately, Lanyard resolved to tell the police everything he thought could be useful. Delays in obtaining information could slow the police investigation.

  But why was Maguss sticky about the police? The magazine was monthly. No way it could scoop anyone.

  He turned thoughtfully away from the telephone—and took a startled step backward. Gribner was there, smoking, staring vaguely into space.

  “How long you been standing there listening?” Lanyard asked.

  “Not long. You’re a touchy sort of guy.”

  “Maybe seeing disemboweled corpses makes me irritable. Anyway, I’ll help you if you want me to. I’ve changed my mind. I suppose I know as much about occultism as the man at the Museum of Natural History…”

  Without changing his dour expression, Gribner said, “Sounds like you’re doing a sales pitch on me.”

  Lanyard shrugged.

  “Okay, then…That writing with the body? What language is it in?”

  “Some Greek, some Aramaic, but the important stuff was—I think—Ancient Farsi…Persian. I recognized the name of a deity—Ahriman. That type of mongrel mix of ancient languages is something you get with Western occultism…” Lanyard’s voice trailed off. “Sorry. I’m queasy.”

  Gribner nodded. “Me too.”

  “You? You must see stuff like this all the time.”

  Gribner’s dim gray-blue eyes became a shade more hooded. “Sure.” He snorted, faintly.

  Then he said, “Actually—no. Not like this.”

  LANYARD SAT ON the edge of his hotel bed, wishing he hadn’t given up smoking. A cigarette would have been soothing. He took a slip of paper from his jacket pocket, unfolded it, and punched the phone number that was written on it in narrow, feminine handwriting. Ear to the receiver, he waited, chewing his lower lip.

  “Yes?” Madelaine’s voice.

  “I’m glad you didn’t pick it up and say, ‘Hello, Mr. Lanyard.’”

  “No, no, I’m not out to impress anyone.” She didn’t laugh. Th
at disappointed him.

  “I guess, then, you’re not going to be smug about being right…about my not leaving town.”

  “Is it my imagination or are you a little hostile today, Mr. Lanyard?”

  “Carl. I’ve been calling you Madelaine. Are you going to make me feel I’ve stepped out of line?”

  “Carl.”

  “Yeah, I’m a little hostile. I’m sorry. I’m tired. Had a bit of a shock this afternoon. The police asked me to help them on a ritual killing—I don’t mean they want me to help perform one…” She didn’t laugh at that either. “I mean, they asked me to…oh…about the…”

  “You’re nervous. You’re trying to tell me they asked you for information about the sort of ritual involved?”

  “Yeah. And yes, I’m nervous. Trying to work up nerve to ask you to have dinner with me. Purely social. No attempt at interviews. I’m not working at Visions anymore. I never fitted in there anyway. I was always too evasive in my articles about whether I believed…and sometimes I brought my skepticism out in the open. But they didn’t fire me. I quit. I’m staying at the Hilton.”

  “You quit? My, my.”

  “You don’t sound surprised. But about dinner…”

  “How’s your appetite after what you’ve seen?”

  “How’d you know I’d seen the actual—Never mind. My appetite is not good. I’d just like a few drinks. But if you’re hungry, I—”

  “I’m supposed to have dinner with some friends, at Joey Minder’s club. The Valencia. He just bought it, so he’s celebrating. You’re welcome to come with me.”

  “You really don’t mind?”

  “I’d like the company—I don’t know most of the people he’ll have there.” But she sounded distant, distracted. “You remember my address?”

  “Sure. Etched in my mind.”

  “Meet me out front at nine. Okay? Bye.” She hung up.

  Slowly, he replaced the receiver in the cradle. He ruminated on what he knew of Joey Minder. Smears of dirty black newsprint ink on the scandal sheets. Raffish producer, plays and films; notorious for wild parties and sudden disappearances, turning up in odd spots overseas. Madelaine had had a part in Nero—how big a part? And how big was Minder’s interest in her? And who the hell was Carl Lanyard to object?

  Who the hell was Carl Lanyard?

  Lanyard wondered about that, because he’d just passed his thirty-fifth birthday. He had reached the midpoint of his fourth decade, and he could see middle age ahead. He’d worked at Visions for just under a decade—now what?

  He had one divorce behind him. Jill. A short and disastrous marriage to a tall and dissatisfied woman. Too tall for him, for starts.

  Lanyard had wanted to live in the city, near the university where, at the time, he’d been lecturing on anthropology. Jill had wanted to live in the suburbs, had wanted to belong to women’s clubs, had urged Lanyard to “join a lodge. Daddy was in the Elks and Mom said it kept him—well, he always had something to do.”

  “A lodge, for Christ’s sake,” Lanyard muttered.

  He went to the suite’s bar, mixed himself a highball, and sipped without tasting it, eyes tracing the Manhattan skyline through the thirtieth-floor window.

  In the waning light, the buildings deepened their shadows from blue-gray to indigo, the skyscrapers taking on rosy highlights as the sun expanded in the smog belt at the horizon. The light glanced brilliantly from the scaly white-metal roof of the Chrysler Building but was soaked up with hardly a glint by the polarized windows of the Citibank tower. Most of the older buildings were graduated to the top, almost like ziggurats; a few roof gardens added forlorn touches of green. So tightly packed was the island, so bristling with monolithic buildings, Lanyard felt for a moment that he was looking out at an underground cluster of crystal; the clouds were dense and oppressive—like the roof of a cavern. Lanyard sipped his drink uneasily.

  There are always caverns beneath caverns, he thought, remembering the subway platform. Caverns under caverns and deeper, darker places under those.

  He smirked, remembering a movie he’d seen as a boy. Invasion of the Mole People. Worlds within worlds.

  He peered down, between buildings. The street lights were coming on. The traffic moved with what seemed from this height to be astonishing orderliness. The appearance of order was deceptive: He had just braved a harrowing cab ride. “The bastards don’t use turn signals. Drive like skateboarders on an obstacle course.” But the memory made him smile. “Running red lights…” He realized he was talking to himself. Maybe he’d been a bachelor too long. He’d had a string of affairs after he’d explained to Jill that he didn’t want to move out of San Francisco, didn’t want to live in the suburbs, didn’t want to join a lodge, didn’t want to raise children and give them Christmas presents and advice and college educations, didn’t want to become part of a social set. So she’d left him. Expecting him to break down and call her up and promise to reform. Instead, his attorney called her. What had alienated her most was his indifference to financial ambition. He didn’t mind making money, and Simon Maguss had given him a fairly easy opportunity. But he was damned if he would pursue it like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. She’d been nagging him to go to law school; she had an uncle, a corporate lawyer, who told her more than once he’d be glad to take Carl into the firm—providing Carl went to The Right School and passed the Bar. But Carl’s father had been an attorney, a “fixer” for the more successful criminals, springing men everyone knew should be jailed. In a letter to his mother, just after he’d left home, Carl had described his father as “a cold-blooded sonuvabitch.” Carl did not want to emulate him.

  The divorce had been the beginning of a two-year crisis for Lanyard. He’d been twenty-six, an assistant professor at the U. of C. After the divorce, he felt lost; he’d formed his life around Jill as a raindrop forms around a particle of dust. Then the raindrop hit the ground. Not that they’d had much in common. In the last eight months of their two-year marriage they had trouble even making conversation.

  Two years of marriage, two years of getting over it. But it wasn’t just the marriage. His mother had died. Why couldn’t it have been his father? He winced, despising himself for the thought. His mother’s long, elliptical letters had been one of Lanyard’s greatest pleasures.

  Lanyard lost his job when he told the dean to his face he was “a senile, purblind demagogue” because the old man wouldn’t approve his prospectus for a course called “Delusions of the Supernatural.”

  Shortly before his mother’s fatal stroke—which came just before Lanyard’s divorce, and contributed to the tension that made the divorce necessary—Lanyard’s mother had been increasingly interested in psychic phenomena. Lanyard didn’t want to think of her as doddering—so he tried to become a little less hidebound on the subject. Like Arthur Koestler, Lanyard supposed that although nothing was definitely proved, there was too much that was difficult to disprove. And too many damned “unexplained coincidences.” Largely to please his mother, Lanyard had written a paper on synchronicity, expressing both his skepticism and his fascination.

  Maguss had read Lanyard’s paper and offered him the chance to write a column. “I need someone coolly objective,” Maguss had said. Lanyard would have a salary to sustain him while doing research, and additional money for each column. The job paid better than the assistant professorship had. Lanyard shrugged and accepted. But, he wrote to his mother, “I’m never quite at home, working for Visions.”

  Lanyard by now had begun to feel his life was aimless, pointless, hopeless. He’d lost his teaching job: then he’d lost the one relative he cared about; and then he’d lost his marriage. Life had to be more than a great obstacle course. The world seemed to be falling apart. There was a feverishly rising crime rate. There was inflation. There was the pathetic debauchery of the bored rich. Soaring drug-addiction statistics. Neoconservative fanaticism. The government turning the country over to big business. Mounting national tensions. Pakistan and
India glaring at one another and frantically building hydrogen bombs.

  There had to be some hidden pattern making sense of it. Beneath it all.

  He looked down at the streets. His eyes strayed to a plume of steam rising from a manhole. The steam marked some mysterious activity beneath the streets; a steam main venting pressure, perhaps. The underground of a city was orderly place. New York City had the largest, most complicated systems of water distribution, sewage disposal, and underground mass transit in the world. Its sublevels were a whole different city. So many miles of subway tunnels. So many stations.

  Gribner had said both the killings happened in subway stations.

  Moodily, Lanyard watched the steam rising from the manhole.

  AND MOODILY, MADELAINE Springer tried to compose a letter to her brother. Her brother Leonard was six years older, and so protective she’d moved away from Seattle to escape his “guidance.” She loved Leonard, but she was rarely in the mood to obey him. He was old-fashioned, like Daddy. But she’d enjoyed talking to Daddy, while he was alive.

  Daddy was more difficult to talk to now.

  She sat at her dressing table, writing with a Flair pen, frowning as she chewed the pen’s plastic cap, glancing up occasionally at herself in the mirror, rearranging a strand of curly black hair.

  Her bedroom was austere. There was a mattress on the floor covered with a light-blue sheet and there was a blue frame around the window—she’d painted it herself. The small living room wasn’t much more elaborate. A white vinyl couch, hell to keep clean, and a crucifix Jesus, which she’d painted white, almost invisible against a white wall. The crucifix gave her a sense of protective harmony. Somehow, it kept her from being frightened of the Voices that called from the places inside the walls.

  There were no pictures on her walls. When she looked at a painting or photo it sometimes became a kind of signal, transmitted via her Gift. Once, gazing at an Aubrey Beardsley print, she heard a woman’s voice reciting:

  “…I shall never forget the sight. The vessel of crystallization was three-quarters full of muddy water…and from the sandy bottom there strove upwards a grotesque little landscape of variously colored growths: a confused vegetation of blue, green, and brown shoots…remarkable not for its appearance, strange and amazing though that was, as on account of its profoundly melancholy nature…It turned out that these growths were entirely unorganic in their origin; they existed by virtue of chemicals from the apothecary’s shop…as the result of a physical process called ‘osmotic pressure’ there sprang the pathetic crop…pathetic imitations of life…”