by John Shirley
“Oh—uh—someone tempted me. I tempt easily.”
“Yeah?” She smiled. She was dressed for partying. She wore a high-slit tight tan dress, tan high heels, tight peach-pink sweater (so much that was the color of flesh, Lanyard thought); she had wavy shoulder-length dyed-blond hair. Her eyes were dark, her skin olive.
Lanyard knew she was probably a hooker. But seeing her in the stained-glass glow of the jukebox and through the drugs, he didn’t care.
Looking close, he could see she had acne scars on her cheeks; but somehow the scars were charming. Her teeth were crooked, but somehow this was endearing.
“Buy you a drink?” he heard himself ask.
They sat in one of the booths. She told him her name, Julie. A thin black man with three overcoats on, one buttoned over the next, came into the bar carrying a paper sack. From the paper sack he took a broken blender and a single stereo speaker, held one item in the crook of each arm, and said, “Blender works good, speaker works good, good price. Blender here; speaker.”
The music from the jukebox had somehow merged seamlessly with the noise of the crowd, the clatter from the bar, the quasi-futuristic noises of the electronic games, so that it all became one wallowing liquid sound, washing over him in regular waves of drone.
He hardly noticed that he’d begun talking (now and then stopping, thinking he saw a shadow take impossible shape in the air, or imagining he’d glimpsed Madelaine in the shifting faces passing their table); his mouth had become a dam’s spillway. “You can see whatever you like in the world, really, Julie, you ever think of that?”
“Oh, I know just what you mean,” she said, just as if she did.
He went on, “I met this tramp—they’re human beings. We walk right past them like they’re pigeons with broken wings. You can see Bowery tramps filling with pneumonia on the streets when it gets cold. This is still, eighties or not, still the Me Decade. So we see their deaths as natural selection, right?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, seeming interested, taking another cigarette from the pack he’d left on the tabletop between them.
Not till much later did it occur to him that he hadn’t been speaking loudly, that she really couldn’t have heard him clearly, that she was only pretending to be interested.
Not till the next morning, when he woke and found her gone.
He was in his apartment. His wallet was missing. His radio was missing. He dimly remembered bringing her back here. He didn’t remember what happened after they’d arrived, except that she’d stroked him and cooed in his ear as they lay on the bed.
He’d awakened on top of the bedclothes, fully dressed. He was fairly certain they hadn’t had sex. And he realized that she hadn’t come onto him in the bar, hadn’t talked money. She’d known that robbery would be more profitable than hustling. She’d gotten four hundred dollars cash, and by now she’d have purchased some expensive things, with the aid of a male friend, using his credit cards. Then she’d ditch the cards and sell the furs, the shoes, the—
He thought: Oh, Christ. Madelaine.
KRUPP WAS AFRAID to answer the phone. It would be the phone company with a last warning. It would be the bookie. It would be his ex-wife demanding and demanding. It—
It might be the police. He’d thrown the knife into the river and burned the pants soiled with the girl’s blood, and the next day he’d walked past the newsstands with his eyes closed, knowing nevertheless that thousands of people were reading NEW SUBWAY HORROR: CULT KILLERS TAKE 8TH.
But he answered the phone; Tooley had told him to keep in touch, to wait for their call.
It wasn’t Tooley, or the cops, or his wife. It wasn’t his bookie. It was his brother, Reggie. The cold-blooded lowlife prick. “Hey, pal, you get over here and pick up this damn lottery ticket and you take it down to that office and collect! The ticket’s registered to you, and you know damn well I can’t use it. Shit, when you left it here for collateral, I laughed at you. Who coulda guessed? Now you owe me four hundred bucks and—”
“Just shut up,” Krupp interrupted. “Shut up if you want to get your money.”
His brother shut up.
“How much?” Krupp demanded. “For God’s sake, how much did I—”
“You bought the damn ticket, you know how much it’s—”
“How much?”
A pause. “You won seventy-four-thou, what you think?”
“Seventy-four thousand dollars?” Krupp was almost as disappointed as he was elated. But it was enough, sure it was, yeah. Yeah. Enough so that Lydia Backstrom wouldn’t laugh when he asked her to do the film with him. Shit, it was enough so she’d fuck him on the side, too. It was enough to pay off the bookie and to pay off—
“Hey—” Krupp said suddenly. “You didn’t say anything about this to that bitch, did you?” Meaning his most recent ex-wife.
“No, Christ, no, what kind of bastard you think I am?”
“The bastard who turned up his nose at me more’n once,” said Krupp impulsively, realizing he didn’t have to be nice to his brother anymore. He’d always hated the lowlife prick anyway. His brother was using a genial tone now, ingratiating himself, because the money was there, hovering like a golden goddess in the air between them.
“Ha, ha,” said his brother, pretending that Krupp was joking. “I guess you can help me out with that financing that annex to the shop. You know, the bank wouldn’t lift a finger to keep God Hisself from going under, and—uh…” He paused, working up his pitch.
Krupp wanted to say, Fuck you. And hang up. He had Tooley’s Organization with him now. He didn’t need the shithead anymore.
But his brother still had the lottery ticket. He had to get it from him. If he pissed the guy off he might drop it in the Cuisinart or something. “Oh, yeah, sure, I can help you out,” Krupp said. Let him believe it for now. His brother rattled on for a few minutes more about his plans for the annex, and other ingenious ways he had for spending Krupp’s money, and Krupp was thinking: I’ll get a gram—no, three grams—of coke and maybe a Toyota, get my cameras out of hock, make that big one, talk to the mob about distribution, and—oh God what if the police come, what if they find out, what if Tooley calls, what does he want me to do?
He mumbled an excuse, said he’d be over to pick up the ticket, and hung up.
He sat staring at the gold coke spoon on the mirror laid flat over a table beside his bed. His right hand clenched the imitation zebra bedspread. His left reached tremblingly for the gold bauble. He thought: What will they want me to do next?
He picked up the spoon and the coldness of the metal seemed to travel along his fingertips and into the veins of his hand and into his bones and up along his arm and into his shoulder and his spine until his back was prickling with the chill of gold, the cold of gold. “Gold,” he muttered, “is cold stuff.”
He knew the cold was fear.
What scared him, what really bothered him deep down, was that the ritual had worked. He had generated luck by killing. Doing the ritual, he’d felt that Thing around. The Head Underneath. He felt it send its pet and he’d run to get away from the kill site, the night air making the sweat that covered him feel like a coat of ice. He’d run to be out of the subway. No one had seen him. He’d gone up the stairs, crossed to the uptown side of the station, all out of sight of the token-booth operator. Not a soul around. He’d paused on the uptown platform to look across the tracks at the person—a once-person, now less than a person, a piece of meat in a crazy splash of paint—and he’d glimpsed the red-flickering animal that was there, and wasn’t there….He’d seen it poised over her, snuffling at her like that dog he’d seen—as a kid he’d seen a big dog corner a kitten. A German shepherd. The dog had the little big-eyed kitten cornered against the bole of a big Douglas fir tree in the park of his hometown. No one was around then either. He knew the dog was deranged; the big boys who owned the dog tortured it and chained it up a lot of the time. You could see it in the dog’s manic eyes, its muzzle all slathery
and grinning, the way it zigzagged across the park, looking for trouble, hoping someone would try to pet it. Showing its teeth and grinning. Then it saw the kitten—two months old, nearly half grown—and the dog lowered its head, stopped its zigzagging, and started moving in a straight line for the little furry thing—
He’d been scared. He looked around for someone to call. When he looked back the dog had the kitten in its mouth and he was snapping it back and forth. The dog’s testicles jiggled to the right when it jerked its head to the left. Five or six of these obscene wagglings, the kitten’s body kicking, whipped like a rag caught in a racing car’s grille, the squealing was submerged under the dog’s half-hysterical growling. And then it snapped the kitten’s back. The dog glanced at the young Krupp and raised a leg to piss, as if to suggest its indifference to the boy’s presence, its awareness of the boy’s impotence.
That’s how Krupp felt on the platform, seeing the red whirly toothy thing, the pet of the Head Underneath, poised over the body he himself had carved. Seeing it dart down, the way the German shepherd had gone for the kitten.
That’s how he felt now, too. Thinking: It’s too late for me now. Because it works. That means it could be anywhere. It has that much power. And it knows about me. I’m part of it now.
I have no choice. I have to do exactly as it says.
EIGHT
“There’s always a choice,” Gribner said, jabbing his index finger at Freeberg, “especially when the guy has no gun showing.”
“I had no choice,” Freeberg persisted. “I had to shoot, and that’s the way it was. You weren’t there, Lieutenant. You had to see the suspect’s face to know. It was kill it or it would have killed me.”
“It? What do you mean, it, Freeberg? We’re talking about a child here. Maybe fourteen years old at the most. Still a child. A human being. A boy. A he. Not an it. Am I getting across to you?”
Gribner was shouting.
“Cool off, Lieutenant,” Captain Lubbuck told him. “I told you—you are not going to be relieved of this case, and your shouting during a debriefing is not going to change my mind. You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You’re on this case, Lieutenant. So stop looking for trouble; that won’t get you off. You understand? No one asked you come uptown for this briefing. You came on your own. Understand?”
Gribner snorted and looked away. He thinks I’m faking. But for the first time in my life I think I understand rooftop snipers.
The four other men in the captain’s office were giving Gribner much the same look of quiet disbelief they’d given Freeberg an hour before.
An hour before, about six PM, Officer Freeberg had given his oral report on a shooting. He’d shot a teen-age boy, who so far remained unidentified, in the utility tunnels under Grand Central Station. Freeberg wasn’t a transit patrolman but he’d been walking his beat just outside Grand Central, on Forty-second Street, when a burly, “strong-looking” black man, a tramp wearing grimy army-surplus clothing and rotting tennis shoes, ran screaming out of the station with the left side of his face torn away. He’d collapsed, bubbling blood and sobbing, at Freeberg’s feet. Freeberg used his walkie-talkie to call a patrol car. The patrol car pulled up and took the tramp, pumping blood from a gash in his neck as well as the ragged face wound, to a hospital. Freeberg, a gangly, blond-mustached, ambitious young officer, had meanwhile plunged into the station.
For two weeks he’d been trying to catch a team of teen-age purse snatchers who had been working his beat, always a step ahead of him. The tramp had babbled about “a bunchakids, all buggy weirdshit…inna lowuh tunnels….” The lower tunnels were seven levels beneath the streets, and contained mostly heavy power and steam mains. They were a filthy, rat-infested but relatively warm haven for wintering hoboes. Freeberg was supposed to report his suspicions to the Transit Authority cops. It was their turf. But he was bored, and he wanted the bust for himself.
He’d pushed rudely past the crowd on the down stairways; the stairways seemed endless. He pounded downward, level on level, till he saw the sign he was looking for: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. At this point, the transcript of his oral report read:
I looked at my watch. It was eight PM I went through the door. There was no one around. I think they should have someone watch it, it was too easy for me to get in. They ought to lock it. Then maybe this would never have happened. It was a construction site in there, ladders and paint buckets everywhere. And on the other side was a metal stairway. I went down and I’m prowling through the tunnels and they got these overhead lights there and…I didn’t have a flashlight on me…every third light was out. Now and then there was like a little place where there was some light, and—uh—I noticed there weren’t any tramps or any bag ladies down there. And usually, the way I hear it, there would be. I figure these kids scared them away. Anyway, I was going through a stretch of darkness, real jumpy, I could hear the rats running around, and I was crouching down a little, see, because the ceiling was so low and this big rubber pipe filled with power lines, I guess, was next to me. I glanced under it at one point and I saw these eyes. So I’m backing up and the kids, they’re coming out from under the pipe at me, so goddamn dirty it’s unbelievable. I didn’t have a flashlight with me and it was real tight in there and the only source of light—there was a bend up ahead—the only light was about forty feet behind me, so I’m backing toward it and the little bastards come at me and they’re…some of them are like seven, eight years old. The oldest one—well, he was coming at me ahead of the others, he had his face painted up in some marks, I didn’t know what they were. He was saying things in some language and then he would switch to English and say these things….I suppose I should tell you what he said, to explain my feeling about him….but I can’t. I can’t tell you just now. I can’t think about it too much. He said things that made me want to kill him to keep him from saying anything like that to anyone else. But that’s not why I shot him. I’m—I’m making myself talk like he was a human being, but he—at the time I thought of him as an it. Because he was shaped like a human but he was acting like an it. It was the way he was backing me up, snarling at me, and saying those things. He was coming along at me in a sort of walking crouch, his head moving from one side to the other, almost. The way he was moving his hands too, like they were cobras, almost like he was a dancer…He ignored my gun, he looked me right in the eyes, and I kept backing up till there was enough light—
GRIBNER: Enough light for what, Freeberg?
Enough light to shoot. I knew I had to shoot him. He wasn’t no purse snatcher. He was—I had no choice! If you’d seen him, you’d know, if you’d seen the way he acted…I had no choice.
That’s where Gribner had said, “There’s always a choice.”
“He was outnumbered,” said Lubbuck, a little later, sitting in the captain’s office opposite Gribner, Freeberg between them. “They probably had knives.”
“Oh, I know, I know, more than you people do, that that kid was dangerous,” Gribner said. “But I don’t think you should have shot him, Freeberg. The officer who called me from your precinct, that guy knew the connection, he could see that the little bastards you ran into are mixed up with the subway killings. You may have shot our only lead. And anyway, that kid didn’t know what he was doing—he wasn’t himself. You were killing his body, and someone else, the someone who controls him, whoever’s running this cult, he’s getting away scot free.”
“Oh, Christ,” Lubbuck said, “he’s giving with the mystical stuff again. ‘Killing his body’…‘Controls’ him, Gribner?”
And Freeberg was staring at Gribner in open horror.
The captain sighed and said, “Lieutenant Gribner, take a break, okay? We’ve got no reason to believe this is part and parcel of the subway killings, and that’s what you’re supposed to be—”
“What?” Gribner snorted. “Are you joking, or what? Didn’t you hear the part about the marks? They have the symbols painted on their—”
“Gribne
r,” said the captain warningly. “Take the rest of the day off. That’s an order. I’ll call your precinct captain to get that order confirmed with him if you want…”
“That won’t be necessary… sir,” said Gribner sarcastically. He was older than Captain Lubbuck.
He left the office, thinking about the small warm friends who’d died ugly in the cellar of his building, of the boy they’d found in that cellar, of the nephew still missing, and that would be the time, right, just the time that S.O.B Lanyard would call.
“You Gribner? Call for you…”
“Gribner? They said you were at this number, I hope you don’t mind I chased you down…I called the Ninth Precinct twice…”
Gribner sat on the corner of some absent officer’s desk, talking to the black instrument that people called a telephone, staring at the dirty green ceiling, saying, “Now what is it you want to know, Lanyard? You’re talking too fast, gimme a break here, I got a pain you wouldn’t believe, trying to get something done, and these people—what?”
“I said, I want Minder’s address.”
Gribner hesitated. “Why?”
“Because…” Lanyard’s voice became falsely blasé. “Because—well, it’s a long story, but I was invited to a dinner there, and—uh—I have to meet Madelaine there, and—uh—I lost my invitation. It has the address.”
Gribner felt sure that Lanyard was lying. “Tell you what, Lanyard, I’ll believe that story and give you the address, if you talk to this guy I’ve got here. I want him to describe some symbols—oh, wait, here’s the report. He’s already drawn them out here. Now, one is an inverted pentagram with a skull face in the middle, some smears on the skull that might be a sort of antenna or…or mustache.”
“Yeah. Those symbols come from the same cultural set as the ones we saw in the subway and in the cellar….” Lanyard’s voice seethed with impatience. But he said, more slowly, “What were the circumstances in which the symbols came up?”