by John Shirley
No witty comeback occurred to Lanyard. He felt only an inward churning. The churning was relieved, as the minutes passed, by a hollow sense of exhaustion.
Lanyard waited as Madelaine changed her clothes in the room down the hall.
She was ready with unusual speed; she came out dressed in a blue-black business suit. She seemed wobbly on her high heels. Her makeup was still smeared.
The atmosphere between them was somehow sensitive. He chose not to speak, just then, though he wanted to ask her: Have you really been rehearsing all this time? and Why were you wearing nothing but a kimono? Is it only because you were waiting to change for a dress rehearsal?
He preceded her up the stairs, wanting to leave the cellar badly, his exhaustion momentarily forgotten as he took the steps two and three at a time. He found the kitchen door slightly ajar. Half afraid the dog would jump him from somewhere, he stepped into the kitchen, blinking in the brighter light, and looked around. No one around. Voices came from an adjoining room. He waited at the top of the stairs, watching Madelaine climb them. It was as if he were looking down a throat that was swallowing her, frustrating her efforts to clamber out; the stairway seemed endless and for a while he thought she wasn’t going to make it free. She climbed slowly as if her legs hurt.
Her face was white with strain when she reached the top. She smiled at him, blinking away small tears, and pressed past. He followed her out through the kitchen, up the stairs into the dining room, and hurried past her to act as insulation between her and the others, into the hall, all the time afraid that at the last moment Minder would rescind his pardon and the dog would come leaping at him from behind. Just as he put his hands on the front door, the dog would come.
He put his hand on the doorknob. A bark of laughter came from behind, and for a moment he froze. He turned the knob, it rotated in its collar, and then the door swung open and he stepped into the tingling night air.
He took her by the hand—the hand seemed limp and there was no discernible affection in her touch.
He hailed a cab, and the driver ignored them. He hailed another, it stopped and, enigmatically, the driver shook his head and drove on again. A third cab stopped for them.
“I’d like to go home, please,” she told Lanyard. “I need to spend a night alone. I mean—I’m really tired. And I think it would be easier to sleep if I were alone.”
“Sure,” he said, puzzled by the vacuum between them. She hardly seemed to be there.
She gave the driver her address. The trip went by in silence. Silence, except for the drone of the motor, the rattle as it bumped over the badly kept Manhattan streets, the unintelligible braying of a deejay from the driver’s radio. And the silence was broken, too, by the snarling Lanyard still seemed to hear, the dog snapping at his heels as if he were a biscuit held enticingly by its trainer. Lanyard trembled with suppressed fury. Visions of blowing the bodyguard’s hamlike biceps in half with a shotgun came to him.
“This is it,” Madelaine said, startling him. She spoke to the driver: “My friend is staying in the cab, he’s going home from here.”
“Shookay, lady,” said the cabbie.
She climbed out, rather laboriously. She bent and peered into the cab at Lanyard long enough to say, “Hey, thanks and everything.” Then she closed the door.
NINE
“Special messenger,” said the tinny voice on the intercom.
“Special messenger from who?” Lanyard asked. He had not moved from his apartment since coming home the previous night after “rescuing” Madelaine from Minder. He hadn’t slept much. He was afraid he’d find himself, in his nightmares, back in the grasp of the bodyguard, dangled over pink-gummed white-toothed jaws. He was irrationally afraid that the “special messenger” was actually someone sent by Minder. With Madelaine not watching—he had assumed Madelaine’s presence was the only thing that kept him safe from Minder, the night before—Minder might well decide to come down on him.
“Messenger from Data Digs,” said the man irritably.
“Oh! Damn!” Lanyard pressed the button to open the door. “Come on up.”
“You got to come down for it,” said the messenger.
“Just leave it in the hall, I’ll pick it up shortly,” he told the intercom.
He paced, glanced at the clock. Wait at least fifteen minutes, he told himself. They’ll get tired of waiting and go away.
It was seven-fifteen PM The radiator whistled a keening note of alarm. Ticking sounds came from the pipes in the kitchen. He looked around. The apartment came into focus for the first time that day. It was a mess. Dirty clothes were piled in a heap by the bed; his coat lay sprawled across the couch like an animal drained of blood. The papers on which he’d tried to record his theories about the subcity killings for Maguss and Gribner were scattered about the floor.
He glanced at the clock and decided: Ten minutes more. He paced. And then, “Oh, to hell with it.” If it were Minder’s boys, he would deal with them.
After all, he had the gun.
Like something obscene, the gun was guiltily concealed, tucked under clothes half spilling from the wooden bureau to the right of the desk.
He had bought it on the street. Carrying it could net him jail time. But after the bodyguard had dangled him over the dog, helpless and humiliated, he could not bring himself to go anywhere without a gun. He went to the bureau, took it out, and looked at it. It was so nakedly specialized. He put on his jacket and tucked the cold, snub-nosed revolver in his jacket pocket.
He went to the door—and hesitated.
Lanyard was afraid of something more. He was afraid he was going mad. The Voices couldn’t be what they seemed to be. If he was hearing voices, he was experiencing some of the symptoms of classic paranoid schizophrenia. A paranoid schizophrenic should not carry a gun.
He told himself: You are not insane. You have to protect yourself.
He opened the door and clattered down the stairs. He felt dizzy, today, going down them for the first time in twenty-four hours. He had a sense of forever, of being caught in an endless spiral staircase. Descending endlessly. He counted the floors. Fourth. Third. And—he stared in frozen horror at the number above the landing: 4. But he’d already passed four. He’d passed the third. This should be the second floor.
It was going to go on forever. He was caught in an existential whirlpool. He wanted to scream. And he nearly jumped over the banister in shock when the high-pitched giggling came from behind. He turned around, his hand closing on the pistol in his pocket. He had a glimpse of small children—rather dirty small children, with their faces oddly painted—disappearing into apartment 2A.
But 2A was on the second floor. He reached out and touched the number 4 on the wall; it slipped away, fell scraping to the floor. It had been loosely taped to the wall. The children had played a joke on him. That was all. He was on the second floor.
Shaking with relief, he descended the last flight and looked furtively around. No one in sight. A large manila envelope was leaning against the wall atop the metal frame around the double rows of mailboxes. Half of the mailboxes were deeply cored at the locks; three were hanging open, permanently broken. The mail was routinely stolen.
Glancing around once more, he bent and retrieved the envelope and took it upstairs with him.
When he’d locked himself in the apartment, he decided that it was late enough for a cocktail. He poured himself a bourbon on the rocks and sat at the table to inspect the contents of the envelope.
There were photostats of police reports. How had Data Digs acquired them? There were also copies of newspaper clippings and a sheet of statistics (drawn from where?) that he didn’t at first understand.
He glanced at one of the newspaper articles. Then he frowned, and reread carefully. Feeling an excitement that was both unsettling and euphoric, Lanyard fetched his notebook from the living room, returned to the kitchen, and sat down to paraphrase the article for his report to Maguss. He wrote:
A fam
ily of three: Mario Escondido, Sally Escondido, both twenty, and their daughter, Julie Escondido, two years old. There was, in a way, a fourth: Sally was three months pregnant. They were driving along Avenue B in a 1958 Pontiac sedan, on their way to Mass at an unspecified church, when they swerved to avoid a sack of garbage, a very large plastic sack, which for some reason was in the middle of-the street. According to witnesses, when Escondido came out of the swerve, returning to his own lane, the street “broke open under him…like when ice breaks under somebody on a river.” The front end of the car dove into a hole that was later measured as nine feet wide, twenty feet long. The people on the street were at first afraid to approach the break in the street, afraid something would explode—a gas main?—or the street might collapse further. As they watched, the car sank further into the street till its rear wheels were lost from sight; a painfully loud grinding noise issued from the hole “like the car was getting all blended up in a blender.” Over the grinding noise, the screams of the car’s occupants were faintly heard. Smoke rose from the break, and exhaust fumes. And then a burst of flames announced that the gas tank had exploded. Smoke rose up thickly from the hole. At that point the screams ceased.
The city’s maintenance crew set up a derrick to pull the car from the hole. When it was cranked up, creaking on its heavy chain harness, the wreckage was empty. There was no trace of human remains, except a little burnt blood on the dashboard, across the stopped clock. Nothing else.
The street had collapsed into a closed-off manhole which, “for unknown reasons” had been widened “by unknown persons.” As if to accommodate something as big as a car. A passage led down to an unused water main. “Presumably, the Escondidos found their way down the manhole and into the empty water main, and got themselves lost in the tunnels.” The search for them has so far been unsuccessful.
Lanyard stood, took another swig of his bourbon, coughed, and went to the telephone. He dialed Madelaine’s number, and he was greatly relieved when she answered.
“Hey-lo, hey-lo,” she said, sounding rather more giddy than usual, “this is not a machine speaking. This is a Madelaine speaking. Hello.”
He smiled. “Hello. I’m glad you’re not a machine.”
“Who’s this, pray tell?”
He was hurt that she didn’t recognize his voice. “Carl Lanyard, Madelaine. Think back now. You remember. Hey, you okay? I mean, physically?”
“Sure…why?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I—You just didn’t seem well when I saw you last.”
“I was just—tired. And upset because that guard was roughing you around. But you know, Joey has to be careful, crazed actors are always threatening to come and commit hara-kiri if he doesn’t give them parts and—uh—all kinds of people try to nail him with lawsuits because they know he has money—”
“I see he’s given you the whole rationale. So I guess it’s okay with you that his bodyguard tried to feed me to—”
“No, no, the guy was an asshole, but—he says he just wanted to scare you.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did want to scare me. For starters.”
“Yeah, well, you brought it on yourself, Carl…I mean, I appreciate—uh—” She gave a noisy sigh. “Oh, never mind, I don’t know why I’m bothering-to try to explain it. It was just an ugly misunderstanding. I have to hang up, Carl, I have to do some hard work on my script—”
“Did he give you a good part? What’s it like? He—”
“Yeah, uh-huh, it’s a good part, but really, I have to go. Thanks for calling, we’ll get together—”
Lanyard groaned inwardly. How had he made her so defensive? He’d alienated her. “Look I’m sorry, Madelaine, if I—”
“Doorbell’s ringing. Got to run.”
Lanyard closed his eyes. “Okay. Talk to you later.” He hung up, then dialed the Ninth Precinct. As he waited for Gribner to come to the phone, Lanyard carried the telephone into the kitchen and put it on the table next to the spread of papers sent him by Data Digs. When Gribner answered, Lanyard immediately launched into the story about the Escondidos.
“What, you think I don’t know about that? I don’t think there’s any connection—”
“Are you kidding? No connection? Someone undermined that street. People are living down there somewhere—and this demonstrates that they’re malicious, that they’re playing vicious games with us. I think there may be a whole community of them. They’re creating an atmosphere of terror because it suits their—”
“Lan-yard, boy, you’re talking sensationalism, not sense. Living down there? Why should they do that? You said the rituals were designed to make them rich, to bring them success, right? So in the meanwhile they’re living in the goddamn sewers?”
“I don’t know why, yet, except that it may be necessary for the full effect of the magic—what they think of as magic—to come to pass. Or the people living underground might be the—uh—henchmen, for lack of a better term, working for the people who would benefit by the rituals. But in the particular magic tradition I believe is responsible, there is a belief that the god who bestows riches actually dwells in the rock underground. After all, that’s where gold and jewels and other valuable ores come from. Therefore, they—”
“Lanyard, I haven’t got time. I—my wife is very upset because of what happened with that boy. We never found him. She feels responsible…And our dogs… She—I have her staying at her sister’s. She’s frantic. I’ve got to go see her. I can’t stand around right now—I was at work at seven this morning—uh—I can’t stand around listening to your theories. Write it up for me, okay?”
“But listen—there’s another report here that says that, in a part of the Upper West Side where rats are almost never seen, a woman was attacked by more than two hundred of them when they just sort of poured from a hole in the ground. Now the city pest-control people say there’s some kind of underground disturbance, like maybe a tunnel fire or a wild dog lost in the utilities tunnels that drove them out—”
“Lanyard, write it up and—”
“And there are two reports of tramps being found mangled by ‘wild dogs.’ Now, what does that suggest to you? Maybe if you locate the specific places the bodies were found, you’ll know where it is that the tramps came too near to—”
“Lanyard! Forget it! Write it up! Gowan, knock yourself out with it—” Gribner’s voice was cracking. “Good-bye.” Click.
Christ, Lanyard thought. Everyone I know is falling apart.
FOR A MINUTE after she spoke to Lanyard, Madelaine stared at the telephone blankly. She wanted to call him back; But it would mean having to explain everything.
There were things she didn’t want to think about.
“I guess I’m just not the type,” she’d said, smiling apologetically at the four nude men and three nude women on the vast, almost oceanic waterbed in Minder’s basement.
She was still dressed, then; Minder had brought her down, had introduced her to the seven people on the waterbed just as if they were in a restaurant, and not nude and fondling one another. She tried to be casual, mildly indifferent, as if she were turning down a cigarette: Oh, no, thanks, I don’t smoke; you go ahead. She didn’t want to seem priggish. “Hey,” Minder had said, “there’s no pressure on you here. Come on, you don’t have to do anything…but look, let’s just you and me hop in the hot tub down here, to the right, you can put your clothes in this locker—and—uh—relax and—”
“I can do that much,” she said, laughing lightly. She’d made it with Minder before. It was like having sex with a giant sponge, but it wasn’t intolerable. In fact, he had a certain flair, at times.
And after the hot tub, he’d given her three lines of the best cocaine. And just a little heroin to take off the rough edges. And after that, a towel wrapped around her, she went with him easily to the orgy room, nearly flying there, not thinking, working hard at not thinking about it, and just as she entered the room they all looked up to give her the same look. Their expressions we
re so uniform from one face to the next that it was as if their seven heads were extensions of a single creature, a hydra of tangled human flesh. (And the disco ground away urgently in the background, never ceasing, panting the euphemisms.) Their expression was knowing.
None of them had yet touched her, but they looked at her as if they knew her when she screamed in orgasm. As if they’d watched secretly her every intimate moment; as if they’d watched even when the gynecologist had tied her tubes. The look wasn’t a leer. It was recognition.
Later she told herself it had been the coke and the heroin and the cocktails that had made her melt for them when they’d risen to surround her.
But really it had been that expression of knowledge, though she’d never seen them, except for Joey Minder, before that night. And she knew somehow that all the time that man Tooley was watching, watching and masturbating, from a room where the mirrors around her were really a window.
She had gone down on every one of them. She couldn’t remember their names.
And then they’d done some more coke and the two dark olive-eyed women had taken the little Italian with the close-clipped beard and tied him, as he giggled, to his chair. And beat him with leather straps and toyed with him. “It’s all right,” the little man with the beard had said, when she’d burst into tears. He’d smiled at her from between the two flaps of the leather mask they’d tugged over his head, inanely piping, “It’s all in fun and performed with love.” One of the women put her cigarette out on his leg.
So Madelaine had tooted more coke, and chased it with a smaller hit of heroin, and felt herself carried on a whirlwind into a place where there was no differentiation between fantasizing and doing. None at all. She’d let the two women tie her up; olive-eyed women, sisters, dark sisters, their hair swirling strangely in the red lights. Madelaine’s breasts were remade by a tight black rubber brassiere with its tips cut out so that her nipples extruded in globular deformity. The third woman, the tall slender blonde, used the butt of her riding crop to probe…at first it was probing. Then it was digging, prying. It didn’t hurt, at first; Madelaine was massively stoned. And she was spread-eagled, gagged, wriggling in a drugged continuum where all her sensations were as remade and deformed as her soft flesh under the tight ropes and straps, the black rubber brassiere.