Cellars

by John Shirley

  “That sounds like euphemistic boondoggle for ‘brainwashing.’”

  “No, Miss Chancery. We are not hypnotists, but we are limited by the same principle: that we cannot make someone do what they would otherwise be incapable of doing. We can only suggest what is already possible. Or release what is concealed.”

  There were just the two of them, standing, and the TV screen between them; the dark image that had filled the TV screen minutes before was gone. The TV was lit but dark, though there was something pensive and alive in its blue-white flickering.

  Lily Chancery looked around at the basement game room, new leather-covered furniture, the windowless paneled walls.

  “Too fucking harmless,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing.” She gazed down at Tooley; Tooley’s head didn’t reach her shoulders. She was five-foot-eleven, willowy, her billowy blond hair, eyes the blue of ice found deep beneath the surface of a frozen sea; her long face, in its careful mask of makeup, was so modelesque it could have been stamped out on some Madison Avenue assembly line. The lines of her black suit were severe, but her high heels and lacy cream-colored V-neck blouse brought a kind of flirtatiousness to the outfit.

  She was striking. She was a failed model.

  She had the looks. But, as her agent had said, “I—ah—I guess they think that you’re just too damn cold-blooded. No—uh—no warmth. They don’t see the sexiness they need to go with the coolness. And warmth is coming back. It’s a look.”

  She’d walked out of a shooting because the photographer had insisted on putting his hands on her. He was gay and no threat to her. And, though he carefully explained he had to manipulate her limbs at first until she relaxed enough to fall into the poses more naturally, she couldn’t tolerate him—or anybody—touching her; unless she was very, very stoned.

  But she rarely ever relaxed.

  She’d been sitting rigidly in a corner at the party for the opening of a new line of designer jeans—a party she’d crashed, more or less, in her smug, matter-of-fact way—when Tooley had said, “Pardon me, but aren’t you Lily Chancery? The model? You know, it’s funny, we were just looking at your portfolio—Joey Minder and I—and we were talking about how underrated you are. I was wondering why you haven’t—uh—been seen lately. Professionally. Are you going into acting, or—?”

  How had she come from that party to here?

  She couldn’t remember. It had been underground, a train, and then an elevator…down. “We’ve just had the elevator installed,” Tooley had said. “We put it in for important customers.”

  There had to be a way out. She looked from side to side, perceived no doors. The room was too dark to be certain, but instinctively she felt she could leave only if she gave herself over to them.

  If she didn’t give in—she’d never leave.

  She sank onto the couch before the TV. “If it wasn’t hypnotism,” she repeated dreamily, “what was it?”

  Tooley shrugged. “A harmless kind of possession. Just a temporary borrowing of your mental faculties. And we bring something special out…Let me put it this way: Everyone has inside them an instinctive personality that is just waiting to be released. It is the personality that becomes dominant when a person’s survival is threatened. The one that takes over when that person needs to become completely selfish in order to survive. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and people sacrifice for one another. But it’s there, in the sacrificer, suppressed, unsprung, waiting. And what happens when it is released? You gain a new perspective on other people. They lose their so-called humanity for you. They become things to be pushed aside. Used. Or killed. Or toyed with in the ugliest way. And it’s a great liberation! It’s the purest delight, when it’s developed. It is a triumph of the spirit of individuality, in a way. In its lesser manifestation, it is what makes it possible for people to shove through the crowds on the subway platform; in its greater manifestation, it allows one business partner to pull the rug out from under the other, destroying a colleague for the sake of controlling the business. It is what you need if you’re going to get in touch with the power that makes things happen for people… the Strength we talked about before, the essence of luck. You’ve got to let that personality take you over thoroughly. What we really want is for you to realize yourself. Yourself. Yourself. Yourself.”

  “Is she there?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tooley to the shadows. “She’s tranced.”

  Lily Chancery stared fixedly at the images on the TV screen. The ritual in all its details. The words to be written, the words to be spoken. The marks to be made on the body of the Chosen. The cuts to be made within the marks. The opening. The rearranging. Simple though wet work. Not much more complicated than making a casserole, really. And similar somehow.

  It would nourish her.

  Her lips were parted and her tongue traced them.

  “She’s a natural. I can feel that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You spoke her into it quite nicely. More cleanly than the speaking-into-place for Krupp.”

  “Thank you, sir. But it was easier, for her, once we got to the speaking-into-place, because she understands more. She responds in a more sophisticated way. She is, also, as you say, a natural.”

  “I think she’s going to be valuable. The sort of energy we can use. She can work in high places.”

  “Yes, sir. And I think she’s going to enjoy her work.”

  SEVEN

  “Madelaine? I—”

  “You have reached Madelaine Springer. I am unable to come to the phone at the moment—” The voice on the tape machine sounded tired and far away. Lanyard pressed the receiver closer to his ear—he couldn’t hear her voice clearly enough. “But I will be pleased to call you back if you leave your name, number, and a brief message.”

  He waited for the beep and when it came he said, “Madelaine, this is Carl Lanyard. I’ve tried to call you several times. I need your advice and I’d like to see you. Not necessarily in that order. Anyway…Shit!” The machine had broken the connection.

  He checked the clock on the table across from the couch. Seven PM. He felt restless and decided to go out for a drink. Outside the window, pigeons were fighting the wind, trying to reach a perch on the tenement building across the junk-crowded backyard. The night sky was restless with breeze.

  Lanyard stood, stretched, put on his jacket, and went out the door. He locked both locks and descended the five flights to the street.

  Near the sidewalks the tenements reflected the bluish glow from the street lights; but above the street lights the façades rose into deepening darkness, so that the rooftops were almost lost in the night.

  He walked west, away from “alphabet town”—Avenues A, C, and D—and toward the cluster of bars and restaurants on St. Marks Place. Overgrown silvery radios carried by young Hispanics blared at him as he passed.

  He crossed the street, dodging through a fleet of reckless taxis, and passed a series of burnt-out, deserted buildings. Some citizens’ group had pressed “tenement decals” over the boarded windows, contact-paper depictions of neat shutters and curtains and flowerpots. They were supposed to give the building the appearance of being occupied, to discourage squatters and vandalism. At best they were convincing only in half-light, and here most of the decals had peeled in bad weather to hang like torn skin, flapping in the wind. Between the decals someone had spraypainted: LANDLORDS ARE NOT LORDS OF THE LAND, THEY ARE SCUM OF THE EARTH.

  A spatter of cold rain made Lanyard cringe into his brown leather jacket. He wished he’d worn a cap. A movement caught his eye, and he looked to identify it: a tramp shuffling toward him from the doorway of a deserted building. He’d camped there for days; the doorway was littered with empty pint whiskey bottles and quart wine bottles, and over the doorstep were flattened cardboard boxes, damp around the edges, where he slept.

  Lanyard’s first impulse was to look away. The neighborhood was rife with tramps, and one soon
learned to “not see” them. But he forced himself to look. “You exist,” Lanyard murmured, not expecting to be heard.

  “You betcher I exist,” said the old man as Lanyard gave him a dollar.

  He wasn’t as badly debilitated as many of the tramps. He had both his shoes, and they matched. He had a jacket—a torn ski jacket, once blue, now grimed to gray. Some of his shirt was tucked in. His white hair was like a thatch of frosted weed, and his mouth worked spasmodically between phrases. “I’m here, no earthly reason I ain’t here. Betcher.”

  At last he thrust the dollar bill in his side pocket and extended his hand to Lanyard, this time for a handshake. “M’name, it’s Finley.”

  “Finley?” Lanyard shook the crusty hand, gently disengaged, and wiped his hand on his trousers. “Finley—it’s getting cold. What the hell you doing out on the street on a cold night like this? Be November soon. You ought to get out of this wind. Beginning to rain out here. Find yourself some shelter. Maybe go down in the subways or one of these buildings—”

  “The buildings, they dangerous. Kids around here prowl aroun’ in there, catch you with yer pants down, kick th’ shit outta yuh fer no reason. Betcher. Can’t go undergroun’ neither.” He looked at a sewer grating. “Wish I could. I was snug as a cricket inna thicket last year—down them utility tunnels under Grand Central. Hardly nobody going down there now…”

  Why not?” Lanyard found himself listening very closely.

  “They won’t letcha. An’ you go down there, maybe ya never come back up. Big animal down there, it killed Dusty.”

  “Big animal? A rat?”

  Finley shook his head. He turned away and moved toward the doorway.

  Lanyard continued down the street. Half an hour earlier he’d written in his notebook:

  I’ve become convinced that the animal made out of red barbed wire—that’s how I think of it, now—that I thought I saw in the cellar of that apartment building…I’m convinced it was a hallucinatory projection of my own terror and/or hostility…

  And now he told himself: If the tramps are attacked underground, probably someone’s dog found its way down there and got lost and grew wild.

  But he hastened his pace. The street was darker here.

  Another two weeks and it will be Halloween. Now what brought that to mind? It was almost as if a voice had spoken the words in his ear.

  His mind was a carousel of anxieties. He would temporarily resolve one, and the next one to come around on the carousel would whirl into his thoughts. Madelaine. Madelaine and Minder. Minder and Maguss. (What was Maguss’s relationship to Minder?) Gribner. The remains of the child in the basement. A news report he’d seen on TV: There were an unusual number of missing-person reports in the city lately, particularly on children.

  He turned down St. Marks Place, into the bellow of the drippy wind.

  The wet streets reflected traffic lights, chrome bumper gleams, and neon.

  He sidestepped a bald, wrinkled black man who was orating to the lampposts. The man’s gapped yellow teeth made his words whistle as he shouted, “Th’ Pope he comes ovuh heah the motherfuckuh wantsuh fuck wid evvybuddy bud he don’ want no pregincy pills ’n’ he gets ’em pregint when he fucks widdim—”

  The constant din of traffic noises drowned the man’s voice as Lanyard left him behind, pressing through a bristling knot of krazy-kolor, leather and shiny-plastic punk rockers. They were laughing at something; Lanyard fancied they were laughing at him. He felt his ears redden. Farther on, when the street noises lulled, he heard, “Lanyard…walk in garden canyons and…” and what sounded like “Lanyard: Santeria and Macumba, they….” The voice faded. Lanyard stopped, glancing about irritably. Someone who knew him, hassling him for fun? He didn’t see anyone he recognized. Probably he’d only thought he’d heard his name called; someone had said something that sounded similar, and his brain had processed it to the nearest familiar analogue: Lanyard. “Santeria” and “Macumba” were religions related to vodun. He’d written an article on them. Nothing at all like the Ahriman appeasers. Except that they, too, made appeasement sacrifices—usually killing only small animals.

  Lanyard looked around once more. A few people glanced incuriously at him and walked on. The street flowed busily with Saturday night traffic, tourists, laughing couples on dates crowding the sidewalks, portable radios calling dance themes.

  He shrugged and hurried on.

  It’s loneliness, he decided. I need to talk to someone. That conversation with Maguss spooked me. Which is probably what the old fraud intended.

  He thought he glimpsed a shape, eel-like and airborne, slithering through the shadows to one side. Just caught a flicker, from the corner of one eye. Probably an autumn leaf blowing by.

  But he didn’t turn to make sure. He hurriedly turned, instead, toward a bar. He didn’t stop to notice the name or the sort of bar it was. It was a place with the tavern-style neon in the window, and as the door opened he could hear bottles clinking, glasses tinkling. That was all that mattered.

  He was dimly aware that he’d shut off part of himself. He wasn’t noticing much. Details seemed painful, no matter what they were. He tried to ignore his acid stomach too. Psychosomatic, he thought. He elbowed with uncharacteristic rudeness into a narrow crevice in the crowd at the bar, muttering, “Psychosomatic…”

  The bartender misheard him. “Whuh? Sickoso? We ain’t got that. The only kinda Japanese beer we got is Asahi—”

  “No uh—I—Oh, okay, give me an Asahi beer. And a straight vodka with that. Take the beer as a chaser.” He spoke to the air; he didn’t really see the bartender. It was as if he were selectively blind. He saw only what he needed to. A bottle came into range and a shot glass filled with something transparent. He was willing to focus on the bottle and the shot glass. He automatically fished a bill from his wallet.

  “You shouldn’t ought to flash that stuff,” said the bartender quietly, taking the twenty to make change.

  Lanyard frowned. Flash what?

  And then he realized that the bartender meant the wallet. The wallet still open in his hand. There was too much visible money in it. Nearly four hundred dollars. He’d cashed some traveler’s checks. Had meant to deposit some of it into the checking account he’d opened, a bank near his new apartment.

  He stared at the wad of money. In the open wallet it resembled something gone green in an untended wound. He winced at the thought. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the cash. I’m staying in New York, he thought, and I don’t want to stay here. I want to go away from the killings. I don’t want to look at any corpses. But I’m staying here for this stuff: for the money Maguss is paying me. And for Madelaine?

  He focused his attention only on the glass and the bottle. Maguss had implied (The bottle, bring it to your lips, taste it, nothing else) that be was interested in Madelaine because (The glass! Knock it back!)—

  He coughed, the hard liquor searing his throat, further convulsing his stomach. To one side, someone laughed and said, “John can’t hold it.”

  John?

  “Carl,” he murmured, trying to make himself laugh.

  Relax. He took another drink.

  It worked…partly. He stopped thinking about Maguss and Madelaine and the movements in the air—movements like a magician’s hands disembodied, slicing….

  Someone offered him a way out. “Yo, my man, whuh you wanna drink fo? That shit give you hangover, man.” A young Hispanic with red-rimmed eyes whispering in his ear. Lanyard could smell strong, cheap after-shave.

  Lanyard shrugged. “Drinking’s the best I have at the moment.”

  “Hey checkitout, got some blues, top-drawer shit.”

  Blues? Lanyard was tempted. It was a way out. He didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t sure what drug blues were. “Uh—they good quality?”

  “Pharmaceutical, my man.”

  A cupped hand below the level of the bar. No one seemed to notice. In the man’s palm were four blue tabs.

 
“How much?”

  “I leddem go for five each. Goodshit, checkitoud.”

  Lanyard didn’t know the proper method of haggling. So he didn’t haggle. He shrugged again. “You got it. I’ll try anything tonight.” He dug a twenty from a side pocket, handed it over under cover of the bar. The man dropped the pills in Lanyard’s palm and slipped away.

  Two pills Lanyard slipped into the change pocket of his pants the other two he swallowed—the bartender’s back was turned, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he were looking.

  Fifteen minutes later, Lanyard was humming and looking for the jukebox. “Quarters, quarters,” he murmured, squinting over the selection.

  The jukebox glowed like a geode, purple and rosy in the bar’s darkness. A subterranean egg of crystal. It was playing some undistinguished disco tune; black girls chanting “You do that thang to me, makes me so dizz-zee, when you use that thang on me—”

  Lanyard looked up from the jukebox, trying to get a handle on the sort of place it was. But the bar had no particular decorative theme. Its ornaments had been culled randomly: On a plywood cabinet behind the bar was a murky aquarium containing a few gasping, piebald angelfish and up-ended plastic plants. A four-foot plaster model of a cigar-store Indian stood between the aquarium and a rack of low-cost liquors.

  A woman sidled up to him and said: “Can I play a tune, babe? You put a quarter in and you didn’t pick nothin’.”

  “Mm? Oh, hell yeah—play anything you like.”

  “Could you press the buttons for me? Play ‘I’m Lonely Tonight’.”

  Laboriously he searched through the numbers till he found the tune, and carefully punched its code.

  He expected her to thank him and walk away. But she asked him for something more. “Do you have an extra cigarette?”

  He did, and shakily lit it for her. He lit one for himself.

  “I went a year without smoking,” he said, in an effort to make conversation. “I blew it yesterday.”

  “Did you? What happened?” She seemed genuinely interested. Something in her manner implied that she was concerned for him, that she wanted to help.