by John Shirley
Tooley opened the passenger door for Krupp. The wind burst into the car, bringing tears to Krupp’s eyes, making him feel he’d just awakened from a pleasant dream into the cold necessity of a day’s work. “Billy…” Tooley said. “Coming?”
“Hm? Oh…sure!” Krupp climbed from the car. Tooley shut the door and locked it.
A couple of tramps shuffled toward them, to beg for money—and stopped, at the same instant. Krupp looked at them, puzzled. The tramps were looking at Tooley, and muttering to one another. They backed away. Krupp glanced at Tooley. Tooley was walking toward a subway entrance; he seemed amiable enough. He wasn’t waving a gun or anything. So why did the tramps back away like that?
Krupp caught up with Tooley halfway down the subway stairs. “Boy, that’s some wind,” Krupp said.
Tooley only nodded.
“We—uh—taking the subway to avoid traffic?” Krupp asked.
Tooley glanced at him. “You might say that. We’re taking the Direct Line.”
“That’s a new wrinkle for me.”
“You might say it’s a private subway train.”
“What? Are you kidding?”
Tooley took two subway tokens from his coat pocket and gave Krupp one. They went side by side through the token turnstiles and down grimy concrete steps to the platform. The platform was empty, here on the downtown side, except for overflowing trash bins and the graffiti that seemed to squirm restlessly when glimpsed from the corner of the eye. To Krupp the station seemed like a big garage that stretched on and on, measured with metal support beams. The wind soughed even here, intruding through some ventilation shaft. Krupp fought down a chill.
Tooley glanced at his watch.
Krupp stood beside him, thinking muzzily: Maybe the guy’s crazy. Hallucinating. No such thing as a private subway line.
The objection was faint; and it was washed away in Krupp’s growing sense of destiny. He felt like a piece of paper sucked through the air after a passing car, following down the street because it was caught in the car’s air current.
Two bright lights glared from the right, deep in the shadow-face of the subway tunnel. Tooley looked again at his watch. He nodded. “There she is.” He turned to smile reassuringly at Krupp, holding his wrist under Krupp’s nose. “You see this? Rolex. How much you think that cost me?”
“Well, I…” Krupp was too logy to think about it.
The train shot into the station, swaying a little, sparks jumping under the massive metal wheels. The station boomed with its entry.
It was moving fast; Krupp was sure it wasn’t going to stop. It was one of the old trains, out of service, layers of half-scraped spray paint making its metal hide piebald. “This one won’t be stoppin’,” Krupp shouted over the roar.
Tooley ignored him. The train made squealing, grinding noises and slowed. It stopped after pulling its tail alongside them. The doors of the last car opened. Only the doors of that car. The windows of the car were closed, and every one was opaqued by black paint. Krupp stepped into the car after Tooley, feeling like a burglar.
The doors slid closed behind them.
“It’s like one of those old-fashioned railway cars…like the tycoons had, a private…” Krupp mumbled, looking around dazedly. How was it possible? The Transit Authority would never permit this.
He was standing on a thick red pile rug. Looked like real wool.
The original seats had been pulled. The straphanger’s handholds had been stripped away. The ad racks were gone. The dark-paneled walls were lined with long, low, black plush velvet couches bolted to the floor. Small chandeliers swung pendulously overhead, tinkling, as the train lurched onward. Over the growing rattlebang, Tooley said, “Would you like a drink?”
Krupp nodded numbly. He sank onto a couch. It was soft.
Tooley went carefully—walking like a sailor, adjusting to the floor’s shaking, the tilting and inertia when they took turns—to a wooden cabinet. Inside were rows of bottles, good booze, Krupp noted, in wooden racks, rattling with the motion. Despite the jerky ride, Tooley performed an almost acrobatic feat of drink-mixing. Without spilling a drop he brought Krupp a whiskey sour, and sat down beside him, sipping his own martini from a crystal glass.
Once again, Krupp began to feel dreamy, logy, sedated. And again time collapsed on itself, so that it seemed but a breath later—though he’d drunk his glass dry—that the train ground to a halt. “This way, Billy,” said Tooley, as the doors slid open.
They stepped out onto a darkened subway platform. Krupp swayed in the dimness. The train’s doors hissed shut and it rumbled away down the tunnel. Now the only light was from a single red light bulb in what was clearly an abandoned token booth. The light spilled tenuously across spiderwebbed turnstiles, tinting the platform the color of diluted blood.
Krupp realized he was still holding the whiskey sour glass. He set it on a bench. Something scurried away under the bench as he set the glass down. “Mouse,” Krupp muttered, straightening. He squinted through the shadows at the walls. The street sign that should have identified the platform was painted out, consistently, everywhere. There were metal gates blocking the exits to the street. The station was entirely abandoned. “Whudduhfuck?” Krupp said groggily.
“Over here, Billy,” said Tooley.
Krupp turned to look. Tooley was standing between the turnstiles, silhouetted against the red light from the token booth. Krupp moved toward him. “Tooley…?” Tooley must have a key to the street exit’s gates. Krupp started to push past him through the out turnstile.
“Krupp,” Tooley said. A single warning syllable.
Krupp froze. “Ah—uh-huh?”
“Not that way. Stick close by me.” Tooley turned and began to walk down the platform, into the darkness.
Krupp picked his way nervously through the darkness. The shadows thickened around him. His foot struck a beer bottle and he stumbled. He recovered, cursing.
He caught up with Tooley. His eyes adjusted gradually to the darkness; he could see the girders and benches and the edge of the platform as gray outlines.
They reached the end of the platform. Blank tile walls. No place left to go. Tooley must have gone the wrong way.
And then he saw that Tooley was descending metal rungs, down to the bed of the train tracks.
Forty years in New York had habituated Krupp to staying well clear of the tracks. He pictured getting caught on the tracks as a train roared down on him. He pictured tripping and falling against the third rail and shaking to death in electrocution. He pictured stumbling and breaking his leg, set upon by swarms of rats….
Numbly, he followed Tooley down the rungs and along the track bed.
He was startled when Tooley switched on a small flashlight. It was a wan illumination, just enough for Krupp to make out the strip of water between the tracks, the muddy gravel, the tail of a rat disappearing into a hole in the concrete. The tracks looked very old, their supports half-rotted, so that Krupp thought: We ride the trains over those every day? They don’t look like they’d last a week.
They walked along a moraine of gravel near the left-hand wall. Now and then Krupp glanced apprehensively at the third rail. It looked dark, dead. All that power rushing through that dark, dead metal. You just never knew by looking at a thing what was really in it. Like the streets and that deserted station.
Krupp stopped walking to listen.
There was a slow thunder building up behind.
“Tooley…there’s a train coming.”
Tooley said nothing. He maintained his measured pace, picking his way calmly but carefully, his pocket flashlight swinging at the end of his arm like the lamp of a brakeman.
“Tooley…” Krupp realized that he was whispering. He wondered why.
The roar was building.
Krupp glanced over his shoulder. Far down the tunnel, two white eyes glared and grew.
He turned back to Tooley. But Tooley was gone. The flashlight’s beam was gone. There was darkness
ahead and darkness behind—except for the lights of the approaching train. He could sense the train vibrating the tracks, though it was still far down the tunnel.
“Jeez,” Krupp muttered. But he didn’t feel half as frightened as he should have. He felt like lying down and—
“Krupp!” Tooley’s voice. “What are you doing, my friend? Come on!”
Tooley was standing by a niche in the wall. He’d stepped into it when Krupp was looking away.
Krupp hurried to the niche and, following Tooley, stepped inside. It was a narrow passage half blocked by utility pipes, dripping with water, redolent of rust. Tooley sidled by the pipes; Krupp followed.
Tooley bent over a metal box, opening its padlock with a key from his key ring. The lock popped open just as the train roared by behind. The suction of the train’s passage pulled at Krupp’s coattail.
When the train had passed, Tooley handed Krupp a pair of gray overalls taken from the metal box. “Slip these on over your clothes. Keep you neat. And these….” A pair of gardener’s gloves.
There were other things in the metal box, but Krupp couldn’t make them out. Tooley relocked the box, and set his flashlight, pointing at them, on a brace. They each climbed into a pair of overalls, drew on the gloves, and, Tooley leading, climbed rusty metal rungs up a damp concrete wall over the box.
Krupp’s heart was pounding. They were ascending into warmth. Sticky, itchy warmth. There was a light growing up ahead. The light was sulfur yellow and came from a rectangular gap, the opening of a horizontal shaft about three by four feet. Tooley climbed unhesitatingly into the passage; Krupp followed. They had to travel for about ten feet on their hands and knees. Krupp heard things scratching in the dark cracks of the concrete walls around him. He felt sweat trickling along his spine, making a swamp of his underarms. But with every inch he moved closer to the source of the light; and the closer he drew to the light, the more the sweet excitement grew in him. It wasn’t like the excitement that came with stimulants, it was the excitement that came with drunken abandon, or with too many tranquilizers. And somehow he felt he was coming home.
They reached the end of the horizontal passage and emerged into a circular chamber; a heavy vertical iron pipe thick as three men together was clamped to the wall to their right. The chamber had no discernible ceiling. The huge pipe sank into the metal floor; in the room’s center was a trapdoor.
Something moved toward them on hands and knees.
It was a tramp, getting to his feet, shaky, blinking in the light from the portable lamp clamped to a pipe brace overhead—a sulfurous-yellow lamp, not something the city maintenance men would have left here. The thick black cord for the lamp led into a passage half seen behind the huge pipe. “Say—uh—yo, par’ner,” said the old man.
He was a classic Bowery bum. He was missing a shoe, his bare right foot was caked with grime, toenails bloody; his left eye was puffed purple, infected; the lower half of his face was lost in a mass of white whiskers stained yellow from food and nicotine; the whites of his eyes weren’t—they were yellow; his clothing was a shapeless tumble. He was having trouble staying on his feet, and he coughed before every word. “Say, I dunno—uh—I don’ mean nobody probl’ms. They—uh—”
“I told you people to stay out of here, didn’t I.” It wasn’t a question. There was a metallic sharpness in Tooley’s tone that Krupp hadn’t heard before.
“Nobud’ tole me—”
“I put the word out on the street. Everyone was told. No one is to go underground this winter.”
Krupp looked at Tooley with surprise. Traditionally, New York tramps took refuge from the winter cold in the utility tunnels and sewage vaults and abandoned subway stations under the city. How could Tooley possibly keep them all from the places under the streets? And why would he want to try? “What—uh—” Krupp began. He cleared his throat. “What difference does it make if they—”
“It provokes the Stalker, and we don’t want it prematurely excited,” Tooley said casually. To the tramp he said, “You were warned. You wait here.”
Tooley nodded to Krupp and led him to the door beyond the pipe. The tramp stumbled out of their way. As they stepped into the passage, Tooley stopped. He took a blindfold from his pocket and a roll of adhesive. “You’ll have to be blindfolded after this.”
He offered the blindfold.
Krupp took it. His hand was shaking. He raised the cloth to his eyes, and then hesitated. It was black silk. He lowered the cloth and glanced at the tramp.
The tramp was doing a strange kind of dance.
He was staggering back and forth, clawing at himself. He moved as if he’d stumbled into a swarm of bees, invisible insects darting at him, stinging viciously. Probably the old man was having some kind of fit. DTs.
But the tramp’s screams expressed pure terror. They were the sounds a mouse makes as it’s being swallowed whole by a snake—the same sounds, but amplified monstrously. The chamber echoed with the shrieking.
And there was blood leaking from the old man’s trouser cuffs. And from his sleeves, from the gouge that—as Krupp watched—just appeared on the side of his face. The wounds weren’t self-inflicted. Krupp was sure of that, because he could see more wounds ripping open as he watched. Strips of the tramp’s throat were raked away, as if he were unraveling.
The old man wasn’t alone on the round black metal floor. Krupp closed his eyes, to shut out the scene.
That’s when he saw it. A creature made of nasty blurs like—
Krupp remembered a bestiality film he’d done two years earlier. He’d finally found a woman willing to be fucked by Bernie’s trained wolfhound—and the damn editing machine had caught fire inside, a short in the wiring, and damaged the film. When he’d looked at the film on the screen, the image of the hound had been twisted up by the heat, warped and reddened and as nasty-looking. That’s what this creature looked like…this creature glimpsed on the back of his eyelids.
He opened his eyes and saw the tramp flung backward, as if struck in the chest by an unseen two-by-four; he bounced off the wall and fell face down. And then his limp body was dragged by nothing, by nothing at all, toward the other entrance.
In a moment the room was empty and silent and nothing remained of the tramp’s strange dance except the splash of blood on the black metal floor.
Krupp stared. His mind tried to click with an idea, and then backed away from it, and then tried to close with it again, and then retreated. A sort of mental record-scratch-repeat, never quite coming to the conclusion.
He wasn’t aware that he was shaking and crying until both the shaking and crying came to a sudden halt. All of the fear and tension drained out of him, almost in one instant, when Tooley touched his arm. That’s when Krupp understood.
He understood several things. He realized that his sensations—sweet excitement, sedation, acceptance—flowed out of Tooley, somehow. Out of Tooley personally; from his presence, his voice, his touch.
And he realized that Tooley was magic.
He understood, too, that what had happened to the tramp was appropriate and inevitable. Tramps were bad luck personified. Tooley was good luck personified. The tramp had disobeyed Tooley, who commanded the power of good luck; Tooley had sucked all the good luck out of the tramp, the little that remained, so that the old man was entirely at the mercy of the hatefulness that was bad luck. And that hateful energy had torn him apart.
Krupp knew this, because he was looking into Tooley’s eyes; it was all written there.
Tooley represented the power of Good.
Krupp’s eyes went to the gold coke spoon glittering in the yellow light; it hung like a sort of ankh on a tiny lovely chain around Tooley’s neck, and it was the color of promises.
It was the last thing he saw before Tooley wrapped the blindfold over his eyes and taped it thoroughly into place.
Krupp allowed himself to be led through narrow places and low places—more than once he bumped his head, but it didn’t seem to
hurt much—and into a room he realized must be an elevator. He could feel a rising sensation in his chest.
After a while he was led by the hand into the smell of oiled leather and burning logs and oak paneling and the fragrance of expensive cigarettes. Tooley peeled away the tape and the blindfold.
It looked like the basement rumpus room of a large suburban house. Only they couldn’t be in the suburbs. There were no windows. He’d been right about the oak paneling, and at the far end of the long room, to his right, was a fireplace where logs crackled. Not a familiar sight in Manhattan.
The only light came from a single yellow ceiling light-strip and from the fire.
Just in front of him was a brown leather couch, dimpled with buttons; it smelled new. On a stand between Krupp and the couch, was a large color TV set, with its back to him. Tooley led him gently by the elbow to the couch. They sat facing the TV set.
Dimly, on the wall above the elevator doors through which they’d entered, Krupp could see a TV camera, the sort one sees in banks. The camera’s monitoring light was on, its lens looking straight at them.
“Hello, Billy,” said the TV screen.
Shaken, Krupp leaned forward on the couch to focus his bleary eyes on the screen image. It was the outline of a man. A round-faced man with hair that wasn’t long and wasn’t short. That’s all Krupp could tell about him, for sure, because he was sitting in half-light.
“How do you feel, Billy?” said the voice from the speaker under the TV screen.
“Sort of sleepy. Sorta weird. But good.”
“Billy—can you answer a few questions?”
“You want my life story?” Krupp felt silly. He felt like joking
“No. We have that already. We have all the facts on you, Billy, including your home address and the addresses of your relatives—should you be indiscreet.”
“I gotcha.”
“We’d like to ask you a question or two about your attitudes. To see if you’re ready. You ever read a book called The Art of Intimidation? It was a popular book.”