Cellars

by John Shirley

  Lanyard folded the papers in half, nodding, “Do my best.” Thinking: Send a copy of this to Maguss. He winced at the thought. He didn’t feel like communicating with Maguss.

  But there was the money to consider.

  “IT’S TOO HOT,” Buddy Rothstein complained. “It’s not supposed to be this hot this time of year.” He kicked at a broken squirt gun lying next to the yellow fire hydrant. He wished the squirt gun wasn’t broken. He might have started a water fight.

  Everett was standing behind Buddy. Everett was eight; Buddy was nine. Everett was in the shade of the alley’s mouth. Buddy knew he was there, but he ignored him. Buddy was talking to his dog, Shag-Rug. It was too hot for Shag-Rug. No one was quite sure what sort of dog Shag-Rug was, but he was shaggy. The black and white fur covered him thickly from his collie’s nose to his husky’s tail. Buddy was talking to Shag because none of the other kids seemed to be out on the streets. They were probably all inside watching afternoon cartoons. Buddy thought cartoons were dumb.

  Of course, Everett was there. But Buddy felt nervous around Everett. He didn’t like to talk to him much. Everett talked funny.

  But he turned around when he heard Everett say, “I don’t know why you say it is supposed to be fall. It is fall. That is something anyone can see. The leaves are dead. I’ve seen them fall. They are dead.”

  “You talk like Mr. Spock,” said Buddy, tugging Shag-Rug’s tail just to see him snap at it.

  “Who is Mr. Spock?” Everett asked.

  “He’s on TV. He’s got pointed ears. He’s on reruns. I wish my goddamn squirt gun wasn’t broken. I’d get Paco. Have a squirt-gun fight.” He was conscious that, he had said I’d get Paco and nothing about allowing Everett to play with them. He hoped the slight would make Everett go away. Everett’s eyes narrowed a little. That was all. That was all you could see on the outside. But with a guy like Everett, hard to tell what he really thought. His face didn’t change very much.

  Everett came out of the shade, blinking, his hands tenting over his eyes to block the late-afternoon sun. Shag-Rug trotted off when Everett got near. He always did. Buddy would have followed Shag-Rug, except that Everett said:

  “If you want to cool off, we could open the fire hydrant.”

  Buddy was intrigued. “I wish we could,” he said wistfully. “But they put new caps on them and you can’t open them with a wrench anymore. You have to have some special tool nobody but firemen have.”

  “That is for those who don’t Know,” said Everett.

  There he goes with that stuff again, Buddy thought. “Oh, fuck off,” said Buddy. He didn’t know what the words fuck off meant, exactly, but he’d heard it said a great deal and he knew it was a powerful means of dispensing with someone. But it was lost on Everett.

  “Do you want me to open it for you so you can play in the water?” Everett asked.

  Buddy considered. Maybe Everett was like Mr. Spock, always coming up with last-minute technical answers to problems, saving the day. Everett was less likable, but he might be just as smart. No one knew much about him. He’d only come to the neighborhood two weeks ago. He was Mr. Gribner’s nephew, and he was excused from school for some reason.

  “How come you get out of school?” Buddy asked, enviously.

  Everett ignored that, too. “Do you want the fire hydrant to work?”

  Slowly, Buddy nodded. “But…I don’t know if the water’s any good. I don’t like dirty water.”

  “What is wrong with the fire hydrant’s water?”

  “I don’t know. My mom said the water’s going bad some places. She’s afraid to use our water. She says it tastes funny. We buy bottled water. My dad said some of the fire hydrants have something stuck in them. Some pollution stuff. I don’t know. Can you get the cap off?”

  “You wait up here. Do not stand close to it. I will come back.”

  “Okay,” said Buddy, looking up and down the street for Shag-Rug. It was one of the nicer streets on the Lower East side. It was clean, all the trash in garbage cans beside the stoop and not spilled over the street. The fire hydrants and spike-topped metal fences along the stairwells were painted bright yellow, which gave the block a cheery look. Here and there, small trees protected by small round fences shed leaves into the heavy air. But it didn’t feel like October. It felt like August.

  He looked back at the alley. Everett had gone into the building, probably to get a tool. Shag-Rug was nowhere around. Mrs. Bassett was walking her poodle; she had a patented pooper-scooper in her hand; she waited patiently as the dog snuffled along the curb. A few taxis moved by a block down. Buddy waited, wondering if Everett were playing a joke on him. Maybe he wouldn’t come back at all. After all, Everett was only eight. Little kids lied and made things up all the time. Buddy had outgrown that, his mother said. But Everett still told stories. Like that stuff about the Head Underneath.

  It became darker.

  Just like that it was darker. It was because—Buddy reasoned—the sun had dipped behind the skyline. He looked west; sure enough, the sky was orange and pink between the high buildings. It grew even darker as he watched, and, though the heat didn’t diminish much, he felt a chill.

  The chill deepened when the long, echoey, growling noise came from the fire hydrant. Buddy looked at the hydrant, and backed away. The cap on the nozzle, where the firemen attached the hose, was turning. It was turning, squeaking, all by itself. It was turning outward on its threads. Suddenly it popped off, making Buddy jump. The metal cap bounced on the pavement and rolled in a circle, heading for the gutter. Buddy followed it with his eyes, his mouth drooping in amazement. When he looked back at the fire hydrant, something was leaking out around the edges of it—something that wasn’t water. It was a red foam. A thick, gooey red foam. He stared, and moved back even farther when the red foam burst out, spattering the sidewalk in a way he didn’t like. It was followed almost immediately by a surge of clear water, scattering the red foam and jetting over the sidewalk and curb, causing heads to turn on stoops down the street. It occurred to Buddy, then, that he had never seen a hydrant opened on his block; he’d seen them open on Paco’s block, children playing in the gush, their parents looking on, shouting at them in good humor. Here, most of the adults wouldn’t approve.

  He might get in trouble for this. And anyway, he didn’t want to play in the water, now. Not after seeing the red foam.

  He turned and ran up into Everett’s building, and nearly collided with Everett, who was coming out the lobby door. Everett’s expression was the same dour mask, but now his eyes were hot and his cheeks feverish red. “Did you see?” he asked, “it is coming out, is it not?”

  Buddy nodded, regarding Everett with a kind of awe. “How—uh—how did you do it inside the building?”

  “The Blessed People.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I mean: the basement. There is a special control in the basement. It is in the sub-basement.”

  “You have a sub-basement here? My Dad—um—he’s a building super. He knows all about that. We used to have a sub-basement, but it’s sealed off. He says they don’t use them anymore.”

  “No one uses this one. It is empty. Part of it is dirt. There used to be a coal bin there. The elevator does not go down there for other people. It goes down there for me.”

  Buddy was caught up in the excitement. “You have a way to open hydrants from basements?”

  “Do you want to, see this? Do you want to go down?”

  “Yes-I-do-want-to-go-down-thank-you-very-much,” said Buddy in a parody of Everett’s funny way of talking. It would have made Paco and Larry laugh, and it should have made Everett angry, but he didn’t seem to notice it.

  “Come with me, Buddy.”

  Buddy hesitated for just an instant. He had the cold, tight feeling in his stomach again. The feeling he’d had when he saw the icky stuff come out of the fire hydrant. What was that stuff?

  Rusty water, probably.

  He followed Everett to the
elevator. Everett was already waiting inside, his hand on the Door Open button. Buddy hesitated again. Everett had a look about him like an outlaw Buddy had seen on a Bonanza rerun. The outlaw had crouched alongside the trail waiting for Little Joe, his hands tight on a rope connected to a noose that was supposed to close up around Little Joe’s legs and pull him down. The outlaw had waited, hands poised…

  “Come on in, Buddy. I will show you and you can show the other kids next summer.”

  Buddy shook himself, and felt the excitement returning. This was something different. It was exploring a sub-basement. The sub-basement was probably off bounds to kids. It was, therefore, an adventure.

  He giggled as he stepped into the elevator. But he cut the giggle short—because Everett didn’t giggle with him. He just looked back at him as the elevator doors closed and they sank into the earth.

  The light in the elevator flickered, and went out.

  “Uhh!” Buddy heard himself shout. “Hey, it’s—” That cold tightness was back in his stomach. The air seemed very close. And what was Everett doing, in his corner of the elevator, in the dark? “Ev—hey, Everett, the light!”

  But he fell silent, startled, as the elevator doors opened and a rectangle of red light expanded in the darkness in front of him.

  “It is all right. There is a light down here, you see, Buddy,” said Everett.

  Everett sounded like an adult, patiently explaining everything. It irritated Buddy.

  Everett stepped out of the elevator, into a small gray-walled room. The red light came from a lamp with a brass shade-frame, though the shade itself was missing. The lamp sat precariously on the uneven dirt floor like the leaning tower of Pisa. It was probably Everett’s lamp.

  Stepping into the sub-basement, Buddy was surprised to find that it was hot there. But no furnace. Why should it be hot? The heat and the red light seemed to go together.

  The lamp was near the middle of the little room, its plug wire running up to an outlet in the side of an empty ceramic light fixture screwed to a wooden rafter on the low ceiling. An adult would have had to stoop here. There was just enough light so that he could see the knot of hungry darkness in a spiderweb on the rafters, without being able to make out the spider clearly. The web looked red.

  In the right-hand rear corner was a sort of low wooden corral, and after a moment he realized that it had once held coal.

  A distant rumble was building up, becoming a rattling roar that brought sweat out on his forehead. He knew it was a subway train, somewhere nearby, underground. But knowing that didn’t seem to help. It scared him anyway. He was glad when it died down.

  Just the uptown subway, he told himself.

  There was one wooden post in the middle of the room, held to the rafters by rusty square-edged nails. The rafters were two-by-fours, running diagonally across the concrete ceiling, penetrating the walls. The back wall was old, black brick. He had never seen a cellar so old before. He felt like he wasn’t alive in his own time anymore. He’d gone to the sort of world where people hid in cellars like this, to avoid being caught. And never came out, because they were afraid. Died there, in the darkness, hiding.

  He wanted to leave.

  But Everett was watching him intently. Everett stood by the short wooden fence in the corner, the left half of his face in shadow, the right half, in the red light, showing up the diamond-shaped birthmark as if it had been drawn there just now in crayon. Like war paint.

  Buddy moved closer to the lamp, squinting into the corners. He picked up the lamp by its squat wooden base; it was slippery in the perspiration of his fingers. He heard himself panting. Was it just him? He heard other panting sounds. Maybe coming from Everett.

  Buddy carried the lamp, stretched out in front of him, to look at the walls, trying to find the metal wheel or whatever it was that Everett had used to open the hydrant from down here. He wanted to find it all by himself. He didn’t want Everett to think he was the smarter one.

  He didn’t see any wheels. No pipes—except an upright one, with nothing like a wheel on it, in the left-hand rear corner. But at the base of that pipe was a cracked wooden crate containing three broken bottles. The bottles were empty, and they had yellowed, peeling labels with Xs across them. Buddy laughed. His voice sounded faint in the room. “Hey, Everett, you know what I think they used this room for, really? You know what bootleggers was?”

  Everett didn’t say anything. He was standing outside the ring of wavery pink light cast by the lamp. He made no move to come into the light. He was just a shadow.

  Why didn’t he come into the light? Anybody else would’ve come into the light. Buddy walked toward Everett, holding the lamp high, holding it like a red-hot sword between him and Everett. The light in Buddy’s shaking hand rotated the dark places like a kaleidoscope without color. No color but red and black. The shadows squirmed away like dirty thoughts.

  Now Everett was full in the light of the red bulb, like an actor in a spotlight. His shadow flickered back and forth behind him with the wavering of Buddy’s arm; the shadow split into two which seemed to open and close like great black flapping wings attached to Everett’s shoulders. Someone had scribbled strangely on the wall behind him. Buddy was standing just three feet from Everett now, near the wooden rail in the corner. Something made a low, coughing sound from the floor inside the wooden enclosure. Buddy looked down. “What?” (That was Buddy’s voice, but he didn’t know it.)

  There were two small heads on the floor, looking up at him with three tiny animal eyes. They had dirty brown fur on them. Just heads with pointy ears and no bodies, muzzles open, white tongues lolling, panting, panting. The gums of the tiny mouths were cracked and dry. They were the heads of small dogs. Pekingese dogs. He guessed with a sick feeling that they were Mr. Gribner’s dogs. Buddy had seen Mr. Gribner walk them many times. They were buried up to their necks in the dirt floor, close together. Close enough so that they could chew one another in the frenzy of entrapment. One of the dogs was missing an eye; the other had chewed it out.

  It was the ugliest thing Buddy had ever seen. But he saw something uglier a moment later, when he looked at Everett: Everett’s smile.

  Buddy realized with a small shock that he had never seen Everett smile before. Everett was smiling as he looked at the dogs. He had one hand in his trousers.

  “Get them out!” Buddy said. He looked away from the dogs. “Let them out of there!” His voice was shrill.

  “You want to know how I opened the hydrant, Buddy? I know you want to know.” He took his hand from his trousers. His smile had gone away. He held something green and gleaming up in the red light. It was a tiny head carved of green stone, no bigger than a walnut. “The Head Underneath does favors for me. He opened the hydrant. I speak to him with this. I hear him between walls. A man gave this to me. He was watching me at school. He said, ‘You will be a good one. You will be just right. You are going to have a friend come and live with you.’ Then he gave me this.”

  “Let them go!” Buddy’s voice was going out of control, like a little man made out of scared was inside him, shouting out through him. His mouth felt dry; he felt he was buried alive. He felt what the dogs must be feeling. It was so hot.

  Everett just watched him. Buddy burst into tears.

  Buddy dropped the lamp and, waves of tension shaking through him as he cried, dug under the dog’s heads with his fingers. The dirt was dry, and hard-packed, and the dogs snapped at his hands. As he bent over them, one of them gave a wheezing sound, barked three times rapidly—and its head lolled to one side. It was dead. The other one began to bark—Buddy could hear, in the dog’s weak rasp, its desperation, its last strength going, the dryness in its throat. He suspected that Everett had done something more than just bury them. As he dug into the earth, he came to a layer soaked with blood, and knew that Everett had cut the little dogs open.

  Face sticky with tears and sweat, feeling buried himself, Buddy got to his feet and looked around for Everett. Everett was go
ne.

  Feeling the room squeezing itself smaller and smaller around him (and knowing he was imagining it didn’t help—somehow be was sure that imagining a bad thing strongly enough could make it happen), he ran to the elevator doors. The doors were closed. He couldn’t find a button to press. He pounded repeatedly on the doors. He shouted “Everett!” And “Everett!”

  He was quiet then He was very quiet, listening.

  A nasty growl was coming from inside the elevator. It didn’t sound like Everett. And then he heard Everett’s voice, distantly. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought Everett said: “If I give him to you, will you let me come with you?”

  “Everett!” Buddy shouted. Somehow he was sure that Everett was keeping the elevator door shut.

  Everett spoke again, and this time Buddy heard him clearly. “Will you let me come with you?”

  There was another, lower, nastier growling in reply.

  It came from the cellar. It came from behind Buddy.

  The one dog that was alive began a frantic yapping. Convulsively, clapping his hands over his mouth, Buddy turned to look. He could see over the railing, to the right of the glowing red bulb, into the coal bin. One of the dogs was missing its head. Blood oozed from a hole in the ground. Buddy could see nothing else in the wooden square, except a dust-devil. It was just a wind, a wind that was kicking up coal-dust and dirt around the head of the remaining dog. But as he watched, that head vanished, as if it were a vegetable plucked from the ground by an invisible hand, then hidden within an invisible fist. A second hole spouted wet red.

  The air quivered and waves of tingly heat came over him from that corner. He closed his eyes, tightly.

  He saw it behind his eyes.

  It was as if closing his eyes had opened a dark window. Through that gap in the world he saw something like the twisty reflection you could see of things in a glossy coat of black paint. The shape came closer, and he could see it more clearly. It was an animal made of red sparklers. That’s the way it looked to Buddy. Like Fourth of July sparklers, sizzling, but very thick in its sparking, and bent into the bristling shape of a four-footed animal…made all of red outlines…He couldn’t make out its shape perfectly…its shape wobbled and changed…but he knew that it was making the heat. He knew that it was the servant of the Head Underneath. And he knew that it had eaten the heads of the dogs. And he knew that it was hungry still.