Cellars

by John Shirley

  She wrote down what she could remember of it, and was told by a more scholarly friend that it was from the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus…and that the most recent edition of the book bore on its cover a reproduction of the Beardsley drawing she’d admired. Someone had been reading the book, had paused to admire the cover and made the psychic connection with her.

  All this was routine for Madelaine, and she screened it out, when she could, as a victim of tinnitus tries to deny the constant ringing in his ears.

  Now, she bent again over the letter and, raking her hair back with her white fingers, she wrote: .

  I’ve been thinking about Daddy, and the similarities between you two. I rarely feel him around anymore. I know he would have said the same thing about my going to Joey Minder’s. You both worry too much. Joey Minder’s reputation is nothing to take seriously. In New York it’s kid stuff. Maybe Minder is a little dissolute. But I’m never alone with him. Within reason, I mean. I think it’s important to meet people, it’s good for me, good for my career. And Joey Minder knows everyone. I’m determined to follow up my career. I’ve got to feel like someone normal, if I’m going to keep sane. I’m still picking up more than I want to. Lately, my attitude is that any amount of psi-flash is too much. I’d like to tune it out forever.

  She sighed and sat back. She couldn’t concentrate on the letter. She found herself thinking of Carl Lanyard. She wasn’t sure what it was about him that attracted her. Maybe it was his intelligence, combined with his vulnerability. She’d acted on impulse when she went to see him at the airport, which was completely uncharacteristic of her. Normally Madelaine didn’t pursue men.

  Thank God he quit his job at that awful magazine. She wondered if she’d made a mistake in inviting him to accompany her to Joey’s. She had agreed to have dinner with Joey again because when she was around him, her Gift was quiet. The messages, the flashes stopped coming. She had no idea why that should be. She only knew that it was a great relief. More often than not, her Gift was a torment to her. She had taught herself to remain insulated from it in certain mental states—when she was involved in a character on the stage, it rarely troubled her. But when she was around Joey Minder…

  There was not even a whisper.

  The man in the apartment beside hers was playing his TV too loudly again. She plugged her ears. But still she heard:

  “Police revealed that the killing was the second ritual murder on the New York subways in two weeks. Lieutenant Gribner of the Ninth Precinct…”

  That’s all she heard. The rest was blocked by a formless roaring, and a picture of a little boy.

  The little boy stood with something unseen clasped in his hand. Something glossy on a chain.

  The boy was scowling, staring through the narrow crack between the curtains separating his bedroom from his aunt and uncle’s living room. The boy was visiting. He didn’t like it there. He wanted to go home. But he didn’t like home, either. He was a brown-eyed boy, too skinny, with a birthmark on his right cheek. He watched the old man in the living room; the old man was playing with a pair of Pekingese dogs. The boy didn’t like the dogs. The Head Underneath told him he ought to kill the dogs. There might be a garbage disposal in the kitchen…

  The vision faded.

  The familiar throbbing behind her eyes was there. She heard herself say, “Gribner.” There was another name she nearly said—but stopped herself. The name of the Head Underneath.

  The Head Underneath spoke with many voices from the places inside walls.

  GRIBNER SMILED WHEN Randi jumped, all four paws off the rug, trying to nab the rubber ball from his fingers. The ball was well chewed, slick with the dog’s saliva. The two Pekingese dogs chased one another, snarling, in frenetic circles, as Gribner crouched over them. Gribner threw the ball to the other end of the room; it bounced and rolled to spin in place behind an old wooden rocking chair. The dogs flounced after the red ball, skidding on the hardwood floor, racing to get behind the chair. They collided with the chair, which began rocking as if someone invisible were sitting in it.

  Cyril Gribner was glad his wife wasn’t home. Trudy was a needless worrier, always about inconsequential things. But Gribner himself would have been disturbed if there were damage to the small ceramic knickknacks on every available surface in the living room. Every two days Trudy carefully dusted the miniature Victorian courtiers. Gribner had been mildly annoyed by them at one time. But over the years the miniatures had become emblems of domestic security.

  Strangely, the dogs disturbed nothing. They wended skillfully between the low lamp tables, the coffee table, the heavily shaded, lace-edged antique lamps, too many for the room. Gribner found comfort in the durable tackiness of the furnishings. That’s why it had bothered him when Everett defaced the seventy-year-old photograph of Trudy’s father in Iran. The yellowing tintype showed a young man smiling foolishly in a burnoose; her grandfather had been in Iran on business. He’d bought a number of artifacts for the British Museum. She was fiercely proud of the old framed picture.

  Their nephew Everett had drawn a human skull with a beard on the glass, over the old man’s smiling face. In red crayon. Fortunately, Gribner had caught the boy at it while Trudy was in the kitchen, making dinner. He’d quickly scrubbed the skull face away with a bathroom washcloth. Gribner had asked Everett why he’d drawn on the tintype. “It was there back then, that time,” Everett said, seeming mildly confused about his own motives.

  “Who was there?” Gribner asked.

  He waited in vain for a reply. The boy had seemed to be studying a framed GOD BLESS THIS HOME sampler. Gribner asked, “You mean the bearded skull was there?”

  The boy nodded, vaguely. Then he shrugged and went back to his room. He hadn’t apologized.

  Now, watching the dogs play tug-o’-war with the ball, Gribner felt Everett watching him from the next room.

  The boy was odd that way. Was it shyness? Wanting to participate but not knowing how?

  Whatever the reason, Everett had a disquieting habit of watching from the next room, sometimes for hours at a time.

  Two nights earlier, Trudy had sent the boy to bed. Gribner sat up watching TV, using earphones so it didn’t keep anyone else awake. He’d sensed the boy watching through the curtains closing off the tiny bedroom. Gribner had assumed the boy was sneakily watching television, until he realized Everett couldn’t see the screen from that angle. He was watching Gribner watch TV.

  Gribner turned now and took one long step, sweeping aside the curtains over the little alcove, more than half filled by a bunk, that they called “Everett’s room.” Everett stood beside the bed, gazing up at him. He clutched something in his hand.

  “Watcha doing, Everett?” Gribner asked, trying to smile, ashamed that he’d tried to catch the boy unawares.

  “Nothing, Uncle Cyril.” Mechanically delivered, predictable answer.

  “Would you like to come out and play with Randi and Louie?”

  “No. I think they are creepy. They look like dust mops.”

  What Gribner thought was creepy was the way Everett carefully spaced his words, as if trying each one for the first time, never using contractions. He said they are when anyone else would’ve said they’re. But the boy was only eight, and his mother said he had a reading problem. Dyslexia, maybe. But that didn’t account for the boy’s perpetual sulkiness. Probably Everett’s father was the cause of that. His mother—an alcoholic—had hinted that her husband sometimes caressed Everett rather too intimately. “He was bothering the hell out of the poor child,” she’d said. “If you know what I mean. And Everett, he’s all the time moping and muttering. Not healthy for a boy. I haven’t been well…and I’m thinking: Maybe Cyril and Trudy, they’d like to take him for a while, a few weeks…?”

  But Everett didn’t seem much happier here. He knew few of the neighborhood children. Trudy said that most of the time he played alone.

  “What you got in your hand there, Everett? You
got maybe something special?” Gribner asked. The boy’s knuckles were white around the thing he clutched.

  The boy’s face reddened, bringing the diamond-shaped birthmark on his right cheek into prominence. He shook his head, too briskly.

  Gribner sighed. He was very much afraid that Everett had gotten hold of one of Trudy’s miniatures. “Can I see it, please, Everett?”

  Everett shook his head and took a step back.

  “So—what’s the big deal?” Gribner muttered. He put out his hand.

  Slowly, Everett extended his hand and opened it, palm upward. Within, sticky with perspiration, was a bit of rusty necklace chain and a cracked piece of jade, no bigger than a walnut. It was shaped like a head. Looking closer, Gribner could see the head was without a nose or eyeballs. Skullish, though not quite a skull. The figure had a sort of Fu Manchu mustache and a spade beard….

  “Who…where did you…uh…?”

  “Father gave it to me,” the boy said. He looked away, and put the thing in the pocket of his blue jeans.

  Gribner was certain the boy was lying. But why would he lie about it?

  The phone rang, and Gribner guessed it would be Leibowitz. He’d told Leibowitz to call when the autopsy was complete. He went to the phone.

  “Hello, yes, what?” Gribner said.

  Leibowitz said, “You want the thing in a nutshell?”

  “Sure, so speak already.”

  “Two different guys did the killings.”

  The phone buzzed to itself in the lull. Gribner shook his head and finally said, “No, that’s…they were just alike, the killings.”

  “So, maybe we got a cult that does them and all of them do it alike. Maybe they give out franchises. But it was two different guys. Two different cutting styles. Same type of blade, though. Surgical. Real scalpels. Did I say same type of blade? Both scalpels, yes—but not the same scalpel. One had a heavier blade than the other.”

  “That doesn’t prove it’s not the same guy.”

  “The cutting style proves it. It’s like a signature. There was a lot of it for me to study, remember.”

  “You can’t be sure of that. Maybe he was in a different mood, maybe he used a different hand, maybe—um…”

  “Sure.” Leibowitz’s laugh was like the wind through a holly hush. Scrape scrape scrape.

  “Hell. Hokay, operating on the assumption—” Gribner began, grudgingly admitting to himself that Leibowitz was usually right, “—that it was two different people, you get anything more on them?”

  “No prints. Rubber gloves, for sure. I think we can assume that the whole cutting took nearly a half hour. You’d think someone would have come down into the subway in that half hour, late as it was. Trains run not so often that time of night…but good chance someone saw something and they’re afraid to speak. Maybe a reward, a call for help…I wouldn’t want to sort through all the crank calls, but—” “You got nothing more?”

  “I got carloads more, Lieutenant. But we got to collate facts. You get a positive I.D. on this girl?”

  “This afternoon. She was studying to be a computer programmer. Not much in common with the other, except they were both about the same age. They didn’t know one another. Her parents say she was well liked, had no enemies, no problem with current boyfriend. She probably didn’t know the killer.”

  “How about the note in her hand?”

  “Got that translated. It’s Greek. I guess there was Greek, Hebrew, Persian in spray paint, but this note was—”

  “But what does the note say?”

  “It said, roughly, I give to you that you will give to me.”

  Gribner was silent. “Just the beginning…” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Uh, how long dead?”

  “Three hours, approximately, before the Transit cop found her. Died maybe just before five AM. Stab wounds to heart. Lot of stuff I could have learned if she’d been brought to me earlier.”

  “I had an expert I wanted there, I delayed the removal. Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “No. But I’ll tell you something: Your killer had a cup of coffee just before the killing and he ate his steak too quickly, didn’t chew enough, the night before.”

  “Now how you know that?”

  “He threw up. There were traces of it mixed with the girl’s blood. So well mixed, I couldn’t tell much about him—except that it was definitely a he, and it was his emesis content. I tell you, I don’t think his heart was in the job. Couldn’t stomach it…”

  For God’s sake, did Leibowitz think that was funny? “Anything more?”

  “Not at the moment. More later.”

  Gribner hung up. He stood at the telephone, hand on the cradled receiver, thinking, staring into space. Moving mechanically, he filled his pipe from a leather pouch. He put the pipe in his mouth, wrongly tilted, and half the tobacco fell out of it. He didn’t notice. He was thinking about Lanyard, wondering if it had been a mistake to bring him in on it, when he saw, from the corners of his eyes, Everett going out the front door. “Everett!” he called. “It’s too late at night to—”

  Everett closed the door behind him.

  Trudy came into the room and crossed in front of Gribner without looking at him. She was a wiry little woman who always wore one of two flower-printed housedresses indoors; she shuffled everywhere, head down, inspecting “her things” as she went.

  She went to the bedroom, to change into her “meeting dress.” She was going to her spiritualism seminar. She was still trying to get in touch with her father. It was her only vice. “Your dinner’s on the kitchen table,” she called from the bedroom. “And we could have eaten it together if you’d come home at something like a dinner hour, Mr. Big Cop.” Mr. Big Cop was the closest thing to an affectionate term she had for him.

  But he was staring at the door Everett had gone through, formless unease creeping up on him. He went to the door and opened it. The elevator doors were closing.

  Why’s he taking the elevator? Gribner wondered. Why doesn’t he take the stairs? It’s only one flight down to the street.

  He watched the lights on the elevator’s floor enumerator. Second floor blinked out, and the first-floor light came on. But to Gribner’s surprise the elevator didn’t stop there. It kept going down. It passed B.

  It stopped at SB.

  Sub-basement.

  THREE

  Madelaine lived in a well-kept Italianate apartment building in the West Eighties, two blocks from Central Park. The building even had a doorman, a small Asian man of indeterminate age who clearly didn’t trust Lanyard; he asked him his name and business twice. Perhaps Lanyard had dressed too casually. He usually did. Lanyard wore a rumpled blue suit jacket over an equally rumpled shirt—the shirt was a luminous lime, a shade that did not complement his coat—and gray dress slacks. The crease in the pants zigzagged. His wholly inappropriate brown oxford shoes were scuffed.

  Lanyard was short, well-muscled, dark, his hair shaggy over his ears; his only vanity was a close-clipped mustache, which his ex-wife Jill, wincing, had called “early Errol Flynn.”

  As the doorman looked him up and down, Lanyard realized he’d clipped his mustache but had forgotten to shave his chin; his jawline was bristly.

  The doorman shook his head and grudgingly called upstairs. “Gentleman says he’s Mr. Lanyard, here to see you, Miss.”

  “I’ll be right down,” she said, her voice tinny through the intercom.

  Lanyard turned his back on the doorman and went outside to wait.

  It was a windy evening. The clouds had descended even lower, obscuring the tops of some of the skyscrapers. In the distance, the dark mass of trees in Central Park lunged in the wind; Lanyard pictured something huge and scaly shouldering through the trees.

  Don’t walk in Central Park at night. People in Manhattan said it a little apologetically, a little defensively. They complained about taxes and housing shortage and subway-fare hikes and cab-fare hikes, but t
hey couldn’t be shaken from their implicit conviction that it was the only city in the world where anyone could reasonably want to live.

  He almost felt that way himself when Madelaine met him on the sidewalk. She had dressed elegantly and carefully. In his rumpled clothes, Lanyard might look silly beside her.

  She wore a soft red satin evening gown; her bare shoulders were wrapped in a shawl of the same material. No longer quasi-punk chic, she looked Continental and moneyed. A common preoccupation in Manhattan, Lanyard had observed, was looking more moneyed than you were.

  And renting apartments in buildings one couldn’t really afford, for the sake of appearances. Madelaine clearly worried about being accepted. Perhaps her gift made her feel freakish and lonely. “You look lovely,” he said. “And that inadequately describes the facts.”

  “You look like a writer, I’m afraid,” she said. “That’s fine. They’ll find it touching.”

  “Yeah, well…I guess I should have gone to a dry cleaner’s, but there wasn’t time to—”

  “Never mind.” She kissed him on the cheek gingerly, so as not to leave lipstick. “I think that when formality is expected, one should be casual, and when casualness is expected—”

  “One should be formal. Right.”

  When they reached Columbus Avenue, he hailed a cab. The cab swerved from the other side of the street, cut across three lanes in front of a bus and two limousines, then backed up erratically to them. Lanyard opened the door for her.