by John Shirley
Krupp was gazing fixedly at the drain, and shaking his head. His voice was a squeak when he said, “Uh-uh. Not till…I got to have protection. I mean, I want two armed men with me. And a priest. I don’t know if the priest’ll help, but I got to try. ’Cause I seen what the Strength can do. I seen it turn guys into the Blessed People.”
“What?”
“The Head Underneath looks at you and decides if you’re more use to Him in the upper world or the lower place. Some people, He changes them, man, He—I didn’t get that far. I didn’t get taken to Him, so He could decide. But the Director, he said I’d work in the upper world. So I never worried about—”
He was chattering on so quickly Gribner could barely make out what he was saying. But the phrase the Head Underneath seemed to ring in his ears.
“Who is the Director?”
Krupp shook his head bard. “Could I have a glass of water? I—”’
“Just as soon as you tell me.”
Krupp swallowed. He shook his head, more slowly. “Not till I get the guards, and the priest. I know it sounds dumb, but I ain’t safe here. And it’s got to be in a room that hasn’t gotta drain…”
“Why?” So, maybe the guy was insane. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t one of the killers. They had to be crazy, to do what they did.
“Because He can reach me that way. And they know if I’m betraying them, man. They know, no matter who I’m talking to…”
“You can have whatever you like, once you—”
Krupp shook his head. “I’m fucked up on all kindsa shit. But I’m not going to tell you any more till I get what I want—” He cracked his first smile. “And until I can get a good lawyer in here. I want my phone call now, man. I got to call my brother. He knows a lotta slick shysters.”
Krupp was now trying on a false bravado. He knows a lotta slick shysters. As if he were in command of the situation; as if he had strings to pull. Krupp was, Gribner realized, genuinely scared.
Gribner caught himself looking at the drain: remembering Everett crouching in the bathtub, Everett fondling himself mechanically; pallid little boy growling in response to the ugly noise from the bathtub drain.
Gribner puffed his pipe alight and stood, trailing ashes. “We’ll take care of you.” He used a key on the chain extending from his belt to unlock the door, and opened it to shout, “Hey, send in a couple of patrolmen—ah—and… yeah, you…” He spoke to the young snot. “And bring me in a telephone. That one, it’s got a long cord. And bring us a glass of water. And—” He hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at Krupp, then spoke to the young snot again. “And bring me a priest. There’s a referral number for clergymen on my desk, taped to the top drawer.”
“A priest, Lieutenant?”
“Right. A Catholic—” He turned to Krupp. Krupp was staring at the drain. “Mr. Krupp?”
“Yeah?” Krupp jerked his head up with a snap.
“A Catholic priest?” Gribner asked.
“Oh, yeah, sure, any kind. Any Christian kind.”
“Yeah. Right.” He turned to the rookie. “Yeah. A Catholic priest. Start by bringing the telephone.”
KRUPP WAS AFRAID to drink the water in the paper cup, though his throat was dry. He sat in the metal chair with the phone on his lap, the receiver pressed to his ear, listening to the ringing at the other end. He was alone in the little room; Gribner had been unable to turn up two spare patrolmen. He seemed shifty about telling anyone what the special guards were for. No priest yet, either. He had the water and a telephone.
But he hadn’t touched the water.
It was tap water, from a spigot. From under the city. They knew all the pipes, and all the watercourses. They could get to anyone’s water supply. And they knew, by now, what Krupp had done.
He found out everything you did, once you became one of them.
Only now was it beginning to dawn on Krupp: His chances of survival amounted to a dewdrop in a blast furnace.
Unless—he could stipulate to Gribner that he be interrogated away from the city. Far away, upstate. Even there, his chances weren’t good. He’d been drunk, and stoned, and feeling sentimental about the Springer girl. Maybe he could call Minder instead and explain all that and ask forgiveness—and they would get him away from the police before anyone made him talk. (And while he wondered, the phone continued to ring, and ring.)
But even then, they’d kill him. They’d feed him to the pet, or make him, at best, one of the Blessed People. Since the night he’d glimpsed one of the Blessed People after a group rite, Krupp had worked industriously to forget what he’d seen.
He felt sick to his stomach, and weak. He wanted to lie down somewhere. But he couldn’t sleep (Why the hell didn’t Reggie answer the phone? He was at the store, Krupp knew he was) until the guards were posted. No, not even then. First he’d have to make Gribner take him far away. He glanced at the drain in the floor. It was completely rusted, and one of its pinning screws was missing; the drain-screen had been scuffed by some careless foot, swiveled to one side so that half of the actual hole in the floor was exposed in a shape like a quarter moon; a dark moon.
“Yeah, what?” Reggie’s voice on the phone.
“Reggie—this, hey, this is Billy. Lissen, I gotta problem. Now, you know that check was cashed an’ I got the money in the bank and I’m gonna use some of that prize money to help you build that annex on the store, okay?”
“Hey, you know I’m good for it and anyway you got that scratch gratis—”
“Yeah. Well, anyway, I want you to do two little things for me and then we’ll call it clean and you don’t have to pay me back. First, I want you to get me a damn good lawyer, a criminal defense attorney, and I’m talking the best. I’ll use alla that prize money—’cept what I give you for the annex—to pay him off if I have to. You get him down here, I’ll make arrangements to get him some cash in advance, I’ll get the Lieutenant to—”
“Now goddamn it, Bill, slow down! You’re babbling like a motherfucker. Where are you, anyway?”
“I’m at the Ninth Precinct police station. I’m accused of offing somebody and that’s all I’ll say about it.”
“Oh yeah? Was it…was it Eunice?”
“Eunice? Why the fuck should I kill Eunice? I don’t give her alimony and we don’t live together—” He cut himself short. “Why? Something happened to Eunice?”
“I tried to tell you. I tried to call you. I—she found out about your prize money a couple of days ago. She wanted to get an attorney to put a claim on it for her, she—well, she was acting prit-teeee weird, boy. Flipping out. I guess finding out about that money really got under her skin. Made her crazy to think she was going bankrupt and she didn’t get a penny from the divorce and—”
“Hey, that’s bullshit, she got some blood outta me, pal, believe me. Now get on with it—what the hell happened to her, Reggie?”
“They say she drowned herself in the bathtub. Suicide. Her boyfriend found her and…well, he had a hard time getting in because there’s no window in that bathroom and it was locked from the inside. But I—”
“She’s dead?”
Reggie didn’t reply. There was a brief interval when neither of them spoke and the telephone seemed to whisper to itself over the lines.
“What makes you sure it wasn’t an accident?” Krupp asked. “I mean—why suicide? Maybe she slipped and fell.”
“Well—she was acting so weird, and she kept saying, ‘It isn’t worth living, to have this aggravation, these people trying to hurt me.’ That kinda shit. And three times she called her boyfriend and two other times she called the police and she told ’em that someone was in her basement. She said she heard squeaking sounds down there. And growling noises in the drain, and she was sure they were trying to poison her. She wouldn’t drink the tap water. And I forgot to tell you: When they found her in the tub, she was on her knees with her face by the drain, you know, and there was a towel rack she’d pulled off the walls in her hand, you know, a
nd she’d jammed it down in the drain….Kinda hard for a big woman like that to drown herself accidentally in the tub—she had to have held her head underwater, right? Or somebody held her head underwater. She had her hands wrapped around that towel rack when they found her. Weird shit.”
“Yeah, well…I didn’t have nothing to do with Eunice’s death or…” Sobering, he said, “Or this other thing either. They set me up to make it look—”
“Yeah. Well, I’ll get you a lawyer, buddy, don’t you worry.”
“Like right now, if you want that money, Reggie. Don’t think I don’t know what you were trying to pull. You went to Eunice and told her about the money to see if you could work a deal with her to get it out of me so you could get a good cut on it. So you do as I ask, pal, or you won’t see a fucking penny. I’m at the Ninth Precinct. Send somebody quick. Promise him anything.”
He hung up.
Slowly, he turned in his seat to stare fully at the drain in the floor.
Tooley said they’d protect me, he thought. They killed Eunice because she was going to take away the money they got for me.
He ran for the door. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, get me outta here!” He tried the knob. It was locked, the bastards had locked him in. He pounded on the door. Then he froze, his hands clammy on the metal surface of the door. He stood rigid, listening.
There was a noise. It was a noise like the squealing of a train’s wheels as it comes to a stop. Or like a city bus hitting brakes short on brake fluid. A noise that was a combination of squealing and grinding, with an undertone of growling.
The noise was coming from the drain, behind him.
He tried to find his way to calmness, so he could think, decide what to do.
But the only thought that would come into his mind was: They won’t send the pet of the Head Underneath. I’m too far above-ground. It can’t come up here. But the Blessed People could. He remembered fragments of the chant:
These are Blessed, for they have become part of Him.
The growling from the drain became a roar. Krupp recommenced his pounding, shouting, “What the hell are you doing out there?”
…become part of Him; Ahim Ahriman Maz; these are Blessed, who eat when He eats, for they are His mouths…
A bubbling made Krupp turn around, and look. The mouth of the drain was erupting red foam. Rusty water? But it had a phlegmlike cohesiveness, and came in frothy dollops. No, not rust. And now there were red buckets of it, geysering like a burst water main, higher, a column of bubbling red high as his waist, bringing with it another noise, a noise like a soundtrack run backward at high speed.
…for they are His mouths, and they speak as He speaks, and by His hand they are transfigured, they who were once only men…
The crimson geyser subsided; the floor was inch-deep in slimy red liquid; the air choked him with the stench of a thousand dead rats. Gagging, he fell to his knees, trying to remember the invocational words, hoping to gain favor. He couldn’t remember a thing. “I didn’t tell them anything!” he shouted.
The red muck on the floor congealed in seconds, as he watched, becoming something like a layer of gelatin; gagging, shouting without words, he tried to climb onto the desk.
He couldn’t reach the desk; he couldn’t move an inch. The stuff had hardened around his shoes, had moved up to grip his ankles.
He screamed and tried to jerk his feet loose—
Krupp tripped and fell face down. The stuff felt awful against his cheek, and under his fingers, it was like gelatinous skin. He held his breath so he wouldn’t have to breathe the stink of the red membrane. His head was only two feet from the drain; his body pointed toward it. His arms were outstretched in front of him, close together, as if he were diving into the drain; he lay flat, hardly moving for a moment, gasping, laughing now and then (why? at what? he didn’t know).
The right side of his face was pressed to the red slick, the living mucilage; he could not tear himself loose; the contact burned, and he could feel patches of his skin sizzling where it touched acidic pockets.
“Uhhh…” was all he could manage. The membrane moved.
He was being drawn toward the drain. He tried to lift his head; he managed a half inch, and felt sections of his face ripping away as he made the effort. The red membrane spread out around the drain like a monstrous, ugly poppy petal; the floor sloped slightly toward the drain, and the membrane entered the hole in the floor evenly, leaving a round gap in the middle, like the female part of a flower. A great, stinking flower of flesh drawing him toward its stem, as if closing itself for the night. And just the way a bubble appears in the chamber of a bubble pipe, growing from within, the glossy top of a head appeared in the drain, expanding from within the pipe, emerging even as the red membrane drew itself downward; it was as if the withdrawal of the membrane caused the extrusion of the rubbery head. Krupp knew that it was the top of a head, because he had seen the Blessed People once before, conjured by Tooley at the edge of the hidden pond—the pond in which He lived. The Blessed People were the issue of His blessing.
Flexible, semitransparent, hairless and slick like the head of an oversized tadpole.
…they who were once only men, they move like quicksilver to do His work, they squeeze sleekly through the city’s veins…
Krupp had just a glimpse of the thing’s eyes before the membrane sucked him flat again. Sucked him flat, and began to flow over his face, to shut off his breathing. He had a distorted view of the room as the slick crimson skin covered his eyes; he saw the little room and the desk, untouched by the membrane, all wavery and red-tinted through the translucency. Krupp knew the shape of the emerged once-man, one of the Blessed People rippling quicksilvery by, its boneless, see-through body moving like a whiplash, its head snaking on the stretchable neck, the neck extruding farther and farther from the body like the stalks of a snail, its fingers moving independently of one another, bending themselves backward; curling up against the knuckles, impossible boneless wrigglings.
After that, the red membrane gave a great shudder, and righted itself over the drain so that it was as if Krupp were standing on his head, arms outstretched, feet pointed at the ceiling, suspended vertically, the membrane wrapped around him, upthrust like a tropical bloom closed for the night. And after that he couldn’t tell one thing from another, because all shapes were absorbed into the white-hot crackling of pain as the red skin, its texture somewhere between artificial plastic and natural skin, tightened and closed, tighter, tighter, squeezing inexorably, twisting itself like a wrung towel, and descending. Screwing itself down into the drain. Breaking everything hard in him. He heard a sound like the note an opera singer makes that breaks glass, but more abrasive. SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Pop.
The red membrane screwed itself into the drain, taking the pulped, liquefied remains of Billy Krupp with it.
“UH—YES, SIR, there was a helluva commotion. I beard this big splashy sound; and then a groan from in there. I figured he threw up. Well, they got the drain in there, so I didn’t worry about it because I was taking a call from a fella reporting a burglary in progress. So I got that information, Lieutenant—uh—to the dispatcher, and then I was passing Interrogation and I heard this weird, long squeaking sound and a growling underneath it, sort of, and—well, it didn’t sound right. So—uh…” The young snot paused to marshal his excuses.
Gribner waited. “Yes?”
“So I went to open the door. Couldn’t get it open. Someone was holding it shut.” He shrugged, embarrassed.
“Holding it shut. But—you’re much bigger than that little man in there. He couldn’t have held it shut against you.”
“Not just against me, sir. I called Windy and Leibowitz and we all put our shoulders to it—all three of us couldn’t get it open. It didn’t feel like it was jammed. It was like there was… something…I…And—uh—finally there was this squealing, and then a squishy sound. And then the door just came open, like it hadn’t been blocked, and he
was gone.”
The young snot ran his fingers through his hair, his face scarlet.
“The hell you say!” Gribner, holding his kerchief over his face to diminish the stench that rolled over them from the interrogation room, stepped inside. His eyes watered as he looked around. The room was as he had left it, except that it stank like a maggot’s belch. And—Krupp was gone. Something more: There was a ring of red, like a bathtub ring, around the walls, about an inch off the floor; it was slightly damp, and crusty. A sort of high-water mark.
The, room had only one door. No windows. No way out but the drain. “Get the lab…” Gribner said slowly, “to test that stain on the wall. See if it’s blood. If you can find medical records on the guy Krupp, see if he has the same blood type. If that’s blood, I think I know what it is. We’ve been hearing…Ah, and…search the building. Maybe someone let him out. And the door was stuck. Right. Sure.”
Gribner hastily left the room. He was halfway down the hall, heading toward the locker where he kept his overcoat, when the young snot caught up with him. “Sir…”
“What?” Gribner turned on him, shaking with fury. He knew perfectly well that the rookie wasn’t responsible for Krupp’s disappearance. Something had held the door shut from the inside? Yes, Gribner believed it. But he needed, badly needed, to blame someone.
Rubbing his temples with one hand, the rookie said, “Uh—I thought I ought to tell you what I saw when I opened the door. I mean, it probably was nothing or my eyes were seeing things funny because I’d been pushin’ on the door and I used to see spots when I exercised hard—”
“What the hell did you see?” Gribner was white, rigid, cold inside.
“It—looked like rubber gloves.”
Gribner just stared, waiting.
“I mean, sir—like a pair of rubber gloves with something heavy and wet in them. Going down the drain…the fingers part sticking upward. And then it just got sucked down. And I heard this big noise. Like a crashing, crunching, growly sort of noise. From the drain, sir.”