by John Shirley
Gribner described Freeberg’s encounter under Grand Central.
“Huh…” Lanyard sounded far away. “Gribner, maybe you ought to talk to the people at Public Utilities. Sewage workers, utility workers of all kinds. Subway techs. Maybe this thing is more connected with the tunnels than we thought. I mean, I always assumed the killers were just going down into the subways and cellars and…and then coming back up again. But maybe they—some of them—live down there.”
“That’s the way the kid looked. The others—after Freeberg fired the shots, the others ran away like frightened rats. He carried the kid’s body up, and I had a look at it. Filthy, like it lived down there. The face ‘paint’ from Magic Markers. Like graffiti.”
“Yeah. But I’ve been doing some research, Gribner. I’m convinced this thing somehow is rooted in the underside of the city. I mean that literally. You mentioned Grand Central: seven levels underground there. A forty-acre area, mostly underground. The city’s sewer system is sixty-five-hundred miles long. There are sewer mains, telephone and electricity lines, water mains, storm sewers, water tunnels, and the damn subway—the damn subway covers two hundred and thirty miles! And in all that there are lots of places to hide. Hundreds of deserted tunnels. Unused, closed-down subway stations…there are two hundred sixty-five stations in use, but—”
“Yeah, yeah, and New York produces thirty thousand tons of garbage per day! That’s a fact, too. So what?” And then Gribner understood. “You’re saying we’re going to have to systematically search all that underground, maybe? If those people are living down there…”
“Can I have the address now?”
“Gramercy Square. Number seven. Just below Twenty-third and Lexington. Private park with a locked gate, townhouses. You’d better have an invite—”
“Thanks.” Lanyard hung up.
Inexplicably, thinking about his wife at home staring at the TV, trying not to cry, Gribner’s unconscious chose that moment to spring a leak—
He burst into sobs.
LANYARD PAID THE cabdriver, again overtipped in his nervousness, and climbed out. He stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the townhouse. A chill wind made him cringe. The wind whipped his wet hair. He stared up at the gray stone townhouse; its face was ornate, with carved figures he couldn’t quite make out in the darkness, the shielding blue-white of the anticrime street lamp glaring down at him.
There was a gray-green wake of decapitated rose bushes on either side of the building’s aggressive, unwelcoming prow.
A pay phone stood at the corner. Maybe that one would be working. He couldn’t bring himself to crash Minder’s place without trying to call Madelaine once more. She might have come back while he was in the taxi. He walked past the front of Minder’s townhouse, trying, without craning his neck too much, to see past the shuttered windows. The house was mute; no noise of partying, no bright lights whirling at the upper windows. But then, the building was five stories. And it probably had a basement.
He winced as a fire truck raced along Lexington, a block away, its warning horn blasting with a noise like the earth’s crust sundering.
He dialed the number and heard, dimly over the traffic noises and wind, “You have reached Madelaine Springer. I am unable to come to the phone at the moment…”
He hung up. He hunched deeper into his coat, fists balled in the pockets, and turned toward Minder’s house.
Lanyard…Carl…“And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh…”
He ignored the voice.
He heard it, picked it out clearly from the background tapestry of sounds. But refused to acknowledge it. Some mutinous brain cell informed him: The voice quoted Edgar Allan Poe.
He ignored it, just as he ignored the eel shapes flickering around the eaves of the house.
But he stopped at the black-iron gate, his hand on the cold metal as he gazed at the building. It wasn’t really that it was a forbidding sort of place. It wasn’t Gothic, or particularly grim: It’s windows were trimmed in bright blue, its shutters sea-green. The roses must be quite cheerful in the summer.
But still, when he looked at it, he had an odd sort of feeling.
It was an elusive feeling. He’d had it before. It’s a feeling you get when you’re driving down a highway and the highway’s horizontal plane becomes vertical, in your mind’s eye, so that, you feel for a moment that you are no longer driving cross-country, but pitching headlong into a lighted shaft, a deep, deep pit whose walls are inexplicably marked like a freeway….
It’s the feeling you get when you see an old man sitting utterly alone in the lobby of a flea-bag hotel, his toothless mouth drooping, gazing out at the world traipsing indifferently by, making you wonder why he had to live his whole life just to come to this.
It’s the feeling you get when you realize, really know for the first time, that yes, definitely, someday you are going to DIE.
The first time Lanyard had the feeling he was a little boy. He felt it just before he’d tried to tell some people what Mrs. Connely told him from the Otherwhere. No, he corrected himself: What he imagined Mrs. Connely told him.
Later, he’d had the feeling after a dream. In the dream he’d come upon a bottle with a cocoon in it. As he watched, the cocoon split open and out of it crawled a tiny golden skinned little man. The little man had two glittery wings on his back. Wings of lacy black sparkle, beautifully articulated feathers. The little man’s eyes shone with beams of light. The golden man had escaped from the cocoon but he was still trapped in the bottle. He pounded at the glass of the bottle, in some distress, trying to break out. The bottle was uncorked, but the neck was too narrow to admit the tiny man to the world. Young Carl had known that if he broke the bottle to let the little man out, he might accidentally hurt him. The little man was obviously fragile. But Carl didn’t know what else to do.
He couldn’t get the tiny man’s attention because he was fluttering madly about in the bottle, hysterical at being trapped. Overwhelmed with pity, Carl tried to break the bottle, at one end, with a rock. But his effort was indelicate; the whole bottle was crushed, the tiny man impaled on glass shards. That’s when Carl woke up with that feeling…that odd, hard-to-define feeling of…
He shook his head. He still couldn’t define the feeling.
Every second you live brings you closer to the time you will die, Carl.
You’re not hearing voices, he told himself. Those are auditory hallucinations from your bad night, and what happened with that bitch and you’re splintered with worry about Madelaine.
He opened the gate and walked up the flagstones, trying to frame his opening lines for whoever came to the door.
He stood on the porch, thinking. Some bald-faced lie. That’s what I’ll have to do. Make up some outright lie and hope she plays along.
It was always possible that she wasn’t here. His suspicions might be silly. Or she could be out with Minder somewhere.
But somehow he knew she was there. Realizing that, he had that odd, indefinable feeling again.
He fished a cigarette from his coat pocket, put it in his mouth—and changed his mind. It wouldn’t do to smoke when he was trying to get inside. They might have rules against it. He put the cigarette back in his pocket, took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell.
He stood a long time waiting, wondering if he should go.
At last the door opened. The man who looked out at him might have been a husky second-year college chemistry student, with his large round glasses and his gray sweater, the collar of a blue work shirt neatly overlapping the sweater’s crew neck. His black hair was fashionably long, but not too long. He appeared to be waiting for Lanyard to exhibit some sign that he was either Type A or Type B of something. He was big. He could have crushed Lanyard’s head in the crook of his arm. He said nothing; he waited.
“Lanyard, Carl Lanyard,” said Carl Lanyard, smiling and businesslike. “I was to pick up—ah—Madelaine Springer. Mr. Minder called me�
�”
Apparently the man at the door—clearly a bodyguard—had sized up Lanyard as a Type B: Not Admitted. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s my understanding that Ms. Springer is not to be disturbed. She’s studying her part for Mr. Minder’s production.”
“You studied that part well,” Lanyard said. The door closed in his face. He heard the big man’s footsteps recede.
Lanyard was insulted: The man hadn’t bothered to remain to make sure that Lanyard went away. By the sound of it, he hadn’t even locked the door. Alarming overconfidence, in New York City. Lanyard tried the knob. The door opened easily. Moving as quietly as possible, picturing himself in jail for breaking and entering, he stepped inside and closed the door softly behind him.
He was standing on a polished hardwood floor. The Ivy League Juggernaut, as Lanyard thought of him, was nowhere in evidence. Lanyard padded to the left, breathing shallowly, a rippling of warning moving through his chest. He entered a high-ceilinged room furnished with antiques; the undyed woolen pile rug sank deeply tinder his feet. The Early American furniture was in excellent shape. The furnishings, the yellowed oils, the antique clocks, the bronze mantel sculptures—all chosen by a decorator.
Passing beneath the chandelier of the dining room, Lanyard realized that these were essentially showrooms. Not much dining done in the dining room.
So, Lanyard wondered, what’s all this a front for?
A grandfather clock ticked. Its ticking seemed too slow, maddeningly sluggish.
Lanyard was, unconsciously, holding his breath. The crackle of a dead leaf blowing against a shutter made him freeze, until he identified the sound. He moved on, down a short flight of stairs to the kitchen, half below street level.
There was something cooking in a pot on the stove; it smelled like Italian food. Probably the cook would return any moment.
Surrounded by all this domesticity, Lanyard felt for the first time like a burglar. An intruder.
But the sense of danger connected with Madelaine was too acute to allow him to feel actually ashamed. Still, he knew that his tactics were foolhardy. He was in hot water. He was in deep shit. He was—
He was staring at a door at the far end of the long kitchen: Somehow he knew the door led to the cellar.
He hurried toward it, his eyes fixed on it, seeing nothing else—not seeing the chrome dog dish on the floor; he struck it with his right foot, then leapt back, bit his lip to keep from shouting at himself in anger. It went clattering against the wall, loud as any burglar alarm, nastily spattering dog food in an arc across the tile floor. “Shit,” he muttered. He hurried toward the cellar. He heard the sound of a large dog barking from the front hallway. He could hear its nails clicking on the wooden floor of the hallway, the sound of its barking growing louder, coming at him. Jeezus fucking Christ, he thought. An attack dog.
He yanked at the cellar door. The knob wouldn’t turn. He looked frantically around, his breath coming in noisy gasps. He heard someone yelling from the dining room.
“I dunno, I—” The Ivy League Juggernaut’s voice.
“You dolt, you left the front door unlocked—”
“I’m not used to this place, I thought it locked itself when—”
Lanyard felt his fingers close on something small and metallic beneath the knob. A key in the lock. He turned it, fumbled with the knob, snapped the door open, just as the dog bounded into the kitchen behind him. He didn’t see the dog; he felt the vibrations of its coming in the floor, and his back went up with its aggressive snarling. He slipped through the door and slammed it shut, his heart’s pounding almost louder than the thuds the dog made leaping again and again at the door.
He remembered the dog that wasn’t a dog, the thing made of red-hot wires he’d glimpsed on the back of his eyelids in a cellar furnace room.
He turned and descended the stairs. The concrete stairs had recently been painted bright blue. The ceiling was covered in a rug. Why? For sound absorption? The way was well lit by fluorescent bulbs.
The walls were paneled wood. It was a perfectly ordinary stairway—except that it went much, much deeper than it should have.
Lanyard hadn’t quite reached the bottom when the door above him opened. He leapt down the last few steps shouting, “Madelaine!”
Someone was pounding down the steps after him. He heard the dog whining, snuffling, as it came along behind.
He sprinted along a short, mirror-walled hallway and turned a corner. And stopped cold.
Madelaine was sitting on a plush red bench, in a small dimly lit alcove, leaning against silver-velvet wallpaper; the kitschy wallpaper depicted valentine cherubs. To one side was a curtained doorway; the curtains were of coral beads, and they swayed slightly as if someone had just passed through them.
Madelaine looked weary, her hair had been hastily brushed and tied back—it was still partly disarranged. She wore a black kimono. Nothing more.
Lanyard didn’t care for the look on her face. It was a look that said, Oh, great. After all I’ve had to put up with. Now you…
“I—um—thought you might like…” Lanyard began. All his badly contrived excuses shattered when he was wrenched from his feet by what felt like thick iron pipes catching him under the armpits. The pipes were the Ivy League Juggernaut’s arms. Lanyard was short, the bodyguard was tall; he lifted Lanyard off the floor with the armlock and whirled him about.
Lanyard found himself facing a black Doberman that rocked back on its haunches, looking as if it were about to spring. Lanyard’s feet dangled off the floor; in his shoulder blades he could feel the bodyguard’s massive heart thudding. Lanyard squirmed uselessly. The dog’s jowls slavered, its eyes were hot, its teeth bared. It leapt at Lanyard and nipped at his kicking feet. It seemed to understand that—though a short leap could take it to Lanyard’s throat—it wasn’t to rip into him till the bodyguard gave the signal.
Lanyard struggled against the bodyguard, whose muscles were as hard as the steel bumper of a Cadillac. Lanyard could feel the bodyguard’s breath on his neck and he could feel the dog’s breath on his ankles and now and then the spiteful pinch as the dog nipped him and pulled back. He looked down at the dog’s face, shouting “Heel!” and “Down!” in an attempt to intimidate it, all the time writhing in the air, caught in the big man’s arms like a moth stapled to a wall.
Insinuated into the sounds of the dog’s barking and snarling, the rasp of the bodyguard’s hard breathing, and Madelaine’s shouts at them to “Stop it and get out of here!” was something more…Woven in with this grotesque tapestry of noises was the Voice—not necessarily the same voice—laughingly advising Lanyard, “You know all about the Head Underneath. They kill underneath, in the dark places under the city, because it’s closer to Hell…”
Ten seconds of this, between the bodyguard’s lifting him over the dog and the last words of the Voice, “because it’s closer to Hell…”
Two more seconds, then, for the flicker of remembering. He was ten years old and running across a deserted playing field until: Carl tasted dirt and there was a funny ringing in his ears. He thought he would break in half from the pressure on his back. Frank banged the back of his head…No more hearing, no more seeing, except the dirt under his nose….
The dog’s snarling seemed to crowd into his ears, then, so that everything else was drowned out by it, so that it filled the world with its tearing; it was all the ugly noises he knew, combined and whetted: the sound of a bone breaking (though no one had broken his yet) and the sound of cartilage ground into slivers (though no one had yet crushed his face) and the sound of glass breaking and the sound of claws on metal and the sound of a scream in the subway overcome by the roar of an incoming train.
All this was gone, in an instant, reduced to panting, when Minder’s voice boomed at the dog: “Down, Ronnie! Get down, sit!”
The dog obeyed and the bodyguard quickly came to heel, lowering Lanyard to the floor, when Minder said, “Let him down.”
Lanyard
stood gasping, waiting for the hammering in his chest to subside. A high-pitched whine seemed to come through the bones around his ears. He leaned against the wall, unable to take his eyes off the dog. It sat on its haunches, now and then washing one of its front paws. It was sleek and shiny, its short coat seemed almost reptilian. It turned to look at Minder when he spoke again: “Lanyard, I think, isn’t it? They tell me you called earlier today, looking for Madelaine. You didn’t mention that you would be burglarizing the house in order to find her.”
Lanyard said, “Maybe, strictly speaking, it was—” He paused for a breath, and to glance at Madelaine. She had her head in her hands. “Uh—it was breaking and entering, but I’m not sure your bodyguard’s attempt to feed me to that warped creature you call a dog is a legal means of dealing with—”
He stopped, choking with anger, because Minder was laughing at him.
“Lan-yard! You act as if I’m going to turn you in to the police. No, and”—this next seemed to be in answer to an inquiring look from the bodyguard—“I’m not going to punish you in any other way, either. I’m glad you dropped by. Gave me a chance to chat with you again. Saved me the trouble of arranging for a limousine for Madelaine. I was just going to send her home….”
He stopped, his eyes flickering-to the empty air between his left hand and the wall.
But the air wasn’t empty.
Lanyard was staring at the spot, and Minder had noticed him staring.
“See something my housekeeper missed, Mr. Lanyard?” Minder asked softly.
Lanyard’s vision was blurred with sweat, and his eyes didn’t focus properly. So, he reasoned, he might not be seeing the eel shapes whirling, chasing their own tails, in an obscenely sinuous column in that space to Minder’s left.
Lanyard shook his head and turned to look at the dog. “No. I don’t see anything.”
“Come on, Ronnie, I think you’re making the man nervous.” Minder turned and, the dog at his heels, climbed the steps. The bodyguard bent to whisper to Lanyard, the man’s lips close beside his ear, “Not ever, not ever again. Piece by piece next time. Don’t you ever come here again for anything. And don’t you fucking linger about now.” The Ivy League Juggernaut turned his back on Lanyard and climbed the stairs.