Cellars

by John Shirley

  “And what are you suggesting?”

  He hesitated. “Nothing.” He was becoming angry. “I thought I ought to tell you.”

  Gribner slumped. “I’m going for the day. I’m sick of staying late for this shit. They don’t listen to me. I told them where to look.” The fury had gone out of him. Self-pity was speaking now, and he knew it.

  “Yes, sir. Shall I tell them to call you at home if this guy Krupp turns up?”

  “He won’t turn up… I’m not going home. I’m going to temple.”

  “Where?” The rookie blinked.

  “To synagogue, schmuck.”

  And maybe he wouldn’t come back to the station, ever.

  ELEVEN

  Lanyard waited as the doorman tried the intercom for the third time. “I know she’s there,” Lanyard told the little Asian in the brass-button uniform. “I just called her. She said she’d be there.”

  “She’s not here,” said the little man, adding, “In fact, I doubt she’s been home all this afternoon.”

  Lanyard was close to losing his temper. He restrained himself from punching the doorman. “Just try it one more time and I’ll leave,” Lanyard said, his voice straining with leashed anger. Thinking: I’m making a fool of myself. He’d felt better, that afternoon, though he hadn’t slept much. He’d been almost optimistic. The Voices hadn’t come back; he hadn’t had the hallucinations. He was bleary-eyed but cheerful. He’d called Madelaine. His spirits had soared even more when she’d agreed to see him. And now this.

  The doorman shrugged. “It’s a matter of no concern to me,” he said. “I’ll try it once more.” He pressed the buzzer and spoke into the intercom. “Miss Springer?”

  “Yes?” Madelaine’s voice. Lanyard’s heart leapt.

  “There’s a man here to see you. His name is Lanyard—?”

  “Oh. Okay. Send him up.”

  The doorman sighed, perhaps disappointed that she hadn’t said, “I don’t know any Lanyards.”

  Lanyard shrugged and went to the elevator. Automatically, just before entering, he glanced at the mirror snugged in the upper left-hand corner of the elevator, a convex triangle of chrome placed to reveal anyone who might be hiding inside. Lanyard stopped short. Wasn’t there a figure reflected in it? Someone pressed against the wall near the floor-selection console? A narrow figure, almost sexless, who seemed to be wearing a rubber suit or a sheath of plastic; the head was bald and the color of long-dead fish; the shape of the head reminded him of Munch’s painting, The Scream. The figure was clearly inhuman. Probably it was an illusion, a trick of the light, or someone had left a raincoat and hat on a hook in the elevator.

  Still, Lanyard stepped back and allowed the elevator door to close.

  He was not at all surprised to see the floor indicator over the elevator lighting up B. The elevator had gone down to the basement.

  I’m sleepy, Lanyard thought. Dreaming awake. It happens to people that way: They don’t get enough sleep, their eyes distort what they see. There was nothing there—a blur, is all.

  “Something wrong with the elevator?” asked the doorman.

  “Uh, no—someone inside wanted to go down.” Lanyard’s instincts warned him against trying to explain. The little man would want to call the police. The police! Lanyard chuckled.

  The doorman looked at him suspiciously, eyebrows raised. Lanyard’s chuckle had seemed sinister. Lanyard pressed the button again.

  The elevator returned and squeaked as its doors opened. Lanyard studied the mirror. It reflected nothing but the opposite corner of the elevator now. Still, he looked around cautiously when he stepped inside. He pressed the button for Madelaine’s floor. The elevator ignored him: It went down.

  “Shit!” Lanyard muttered.

  The elevator sank. It was taking longer than it should. No—his imagination made it seem that way; when one was afraid, time protracted. And when one was afraid, Lanyard remembered, one noticed peculiar details. Like the red crust around the floor molding of the old wooden-walled elevator and the access hole for some kind of utility panel in the floor. It was emitting peculiar sounds. Gurgling.

  His hands were clenched tight, now.

  He heard a buzzing, a distant whispering. He wrenched his attention away from that. From the Voices, coming back.

  The elevator stopped moving. Was he trapped between floors?

  The elevator door opened onto the basement. A clean, white-tiled corridor; a long fluorescent light overhead, giving off buzzing sounds, as if it were conversing with the gurgling hole in the elevator floor.

  “Hello?” Lanyard called tentatively. “Someone going up?”

  His voice echoed along the corridor. He couldn’t hear a washing machine going; he thought he heard a burring sound, from the right, the sort of sound a furnace makes when its thermostat turns it on.

  It should have been a comforting domestic sound. But he didn’t like it just then. He pressed the button for Madelaine’s floor again. The elevator clicked, but did nothing else. He waited nearly three minutes. The elevator doors didn’t close. “Damn rickety old elevators,” Lanyard said, stepping out into the corridor. He was trying to believe this was a mechanical problem. He looked up and down the white hallway. To the right were two doors, almost facing each other. He sauntered toward the one he guessed to be the entrance to the stairs, laughing softly at himself: The clutching in my gut, the prickling, it’s all left over from the memory of the basements I visited with Gribner. That furnace room with the little boy laid open, his insides redistributed like condiments set out on a table.

  He was adjacent to the door to the furnace room. It was half open.

  But the noises at the back of his mind rose like the sound of surf, a surge of white noise. One can hear anything in white noise. One can seem to hear Voices.

  “Carl!”

  And that was Madelaine’s voice. Heard clearly, as if she were standing behind him. He was almost past the furnace room door.

  A cold hand closed on his wrist, from behind. He whirled, wrenching away.

  Madelaine was there. She was really there. She wore a short white cotton shift. No shoes. Her hair was up in an untidy bun; her eyes looked out wearily from lavender sockets. She’d lost weight. Her face was rosy; she was breathing hard. Had she run down the stairs?

  “How—how did you find me?” Lanyard asked, his voice shaky.

  Once more she took his wrist in her damp hand. “You didn’t show up. I called the doorman and he said the elevator went down and got stuck in the cellar. I came down the stairs.” She raised a thumb to point behind, over her shoulder. Lanyard looked. He hadn’t noticed that door, at the far end of the hall in the shadows.

  “So that’s the stairs.”

  She was looking just past him, through the half-open door of the furnace room.

  Her eyes widened.

  He began to turn, wondering what she saw behind him. A rat, probably.

  She clenched her clammy fingers about his wrist and pulled him toward the stairs, toward the shadows, away from the furnace room. He hadn’t time to look. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  “Hm? No, I just don’t like it down here.” She smiled, and for a moment she was her old self again. She inclined her head toward him and did a barely recognizable imitation of Boris Karloff as she said, “It’s too spooh-key-eeee here!”

  He laughed. Always the actress, he thought. And somehow the thought disturbed him.

  She was still breathing hard, and that prompted him to ask, “Did you run down the stairs or what? You sure got here fast.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said softly, suddenly serious. “I was in a hurry. Yeah.”

  They climbed the steps, Madelaine’s bare feet slapping on the concrete, Lanyard’s shoes clacking out echoes.

  Madelaine glanced down, past Lanyard, more than once. She never let go of his wrist.

  She fumbled at the door to her landing. “In my own fucking building,” she muttered, sniffing. “In my building.”
/>   “What? Oh, the elevator breaking down?” Lanyard was puzzled.

  “Yeah. You might say that.” She tugged the door open and led him to her apartment. She had left it unlocked, the door slightly ajar. Lanyard was amazed. Leaving an unoccupied apartment open was most uncharacteristic of any New Yorker. She had been in a hurry.

  He followed her into the apartment. She didn’t offer to take his coat; she didn’t ask him, at first, if he’d like a drink. That was unusual for her, too. She seemed depressed. The apartment was the same except that, if it were possible, it was even cleaner and barer than he remembered it. The white crucifix was gone from the wall.

  She locked the door behind him, and even connected the chain. She went to the small living room’s single piece of furniture, the white couch, and sat down, saying nothing. There was a sealed manila envelope on the cushion beside her.

  “So,” he said, in an effort to fill the gulf of silence between them, “what’s the part Minder gave you?”

  “The part?” She looked at him vacantly, calling her mind back from some place distant. “The part. Oh yeah. Here, let’s see…” She spoke in an undertone. She tore open the manila envelope, murmuring, “I dunno, he told me what it was. But I guess—I forgot.”

  She forgot? Her first major part and she hadn’t looked at it yet? He sat down beside her, shaking his head wonderingly. “You sure you’re okay, Madelaine?”

  One corner of her mouth twitched. That was her only reaction to his question. She drew out a sheaf of papers. “Um—the play is Shake ‘Em Down!! Two exclamation points yet. And I am to be the con artist’s lost sister, who he is stealing from, because he doesn’t know she’s his sister.” She shrugged. “Drivel.”

  He sat well apart from her on the couch. He could tell, though, by something in her posture, maybe the way she was hunched forward, a little defensively, the way she kept her arms close to her body, her knees together, that she didn’t want to be touched just then. He ached to touch her. Suddenly he felt tired. He yawned. “I’m sorry….” he said. “I’m half asleep. Had some trouble sleeping.”

  She snorted. “You and me both.”

  He glanced at her and tried to smile his warmest, “I hope you lost a little sleep over me. Did you miss me at all?”

  She rubbed at her eyes, sniffed, and nodded. “Sure. I missed you.” As if admitting to the telephone man that she hadn’t been home on installation day.

  “I—guess there’s something wrong with your buzzer…”

  “Yeah.” She pursed her lips and nodded vigorously. “I guess so.”

  That’s as good an explanation as any, Lanyard decided.

  “Well,” she said, as if gathering herself together, “let’s listen to some music.” She went to the small stereo in the bedroom and turned on the radio. It played a Beatles tune. Something about “Love, love, love, all you need is…”

  Lanyard stood and, as she returned, impulsively took her in his arms. At first he thought by her stiffness she would push him away. But she slumped, and her arms went around him. She passively allowed him to squeeze her; she dutifully tilted her face up for a kiss. She kissed him back, but her lips were as clammy as her hands, and no warmth passed from her to Lanyard.

  “Hey,” she said, “Joey gave me a little present.” She gently broke free of him and went into the bedroom. “Come on.” He followed her to the dressing table.

  A small heap of cocaine was laid out on the mirror. Beside it was a gold coke spoon on a tiny chain.

  “Oh—no, thanks,” Lanyard said, feeling odd. “I don’t much care for cocaine. I don’t like it when you come down and feel yourself wanting more.”

  She laughed. “Oh come off it, it’s not that you don’t like cocaine.” As she spoke she used a single-edged razor to chop the white crystal more finely. “You don’t like Joey Minder, that’s all. And this came from him. Listen, you don’t have to be jealous of him. I let him flirt a little, but, uh…” Her voice had become almost too soft to hear. “But that’s all….”

  “Oh, no, really, I’d rather just talk than do drugs, I haven’t had a chance to see you and—uh…”

  “Come on, Carl, this will help us talk. It’ll…” She laughed, too loudly. “It’ll have us talking too much.”

  Lanyard sighed. Anything to get closer to her. “Okay.”

  “Here, use this A hundred-dollar bill, rolled and taped into a tight tube. Where had she acquired a hundred-dollar bill? She was on unemployment, last he knew. Minder must have given her an advance.

  “Yeah,” she said, between sniffs of white powder, “I’ve—” Snuff. “I’ve been—” Snuff. “—sort of depressed. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, frankly, but I think this’ll help. Here, I’m going to lay out some more. A massive hit…”

  Lanyard snorted his two lines, wincing at the pharmaceutical taste, but feeling more cheerful almost immediately.

  The radio was playing “Little Triggers,” an old Elvis Costello tune. Lanyard found himself swaying to the music. For a moment he felt foolish, thinking: I feel good now, artificially. It’s like pushing a button on a machine to get a certain programmed reaction. To make the elevator go up. We put the chemicals in ourselves and we’re elevated. Automatically.

  But in a moment another wave of drug exhilaration crested in Lanyard and washed the doubts away, and he again encircled Madelaine with his arms. This time she was pliant against him, moved to caress his chest with her breasts, the small of his back with her fingers.

  He started to speak, but she closed his lips with a kiss, despite her promise that they’d be able to talk more easily after doing cocaine. She was making love more aggressively than he remembered, and he suspected that she wanted to use sex to avoid conversation. But she broke away from him rather abruptly when a newscast came on the radio: “…unconfirmed reports of a reliable witness to the subway killings who later disappeared from the Ninth Precinct police station. Police denied allegations of a cover-up, although sources said—” Madelaine moved to switch channels so swiftly she might have been running to hit a fire alarm.

  Lanyard was about to say, Hey, I’d better listen to the news, I’m supposed to be investigating the killings.

  But he didn’t want to hear the news, really. He wanted something else entirely. For a time, his weariness and his fear had melted away from him. Magic potion, he thought.

  The radio now played some mindless, assembly-line, softpop tune.

  She came to him and fell to her knees and, with no hesitation at all, unzipped his pants, reached into his underwear, withdrew his rigid organ, and popped it into her mouth.

  Lanyard was too amazed to question her behavior. He focused on sensation.

  When he came he felt like a spool unwinding its thread all it once. And he was unraveled. Spent.

  He disengaged. She sighed and said, “Whew…” But it sounded false. She turned away from him so he could move, as clumsily as he’d anticipated, to pull up his pants.

  “At least,” Lanyard said five minutes later, when they sat together on the couch, his arm around her shoulders, gin-and-tonic in hand, “we broke the ice.”

  She laughed at that, and her laughter seemed almost genuine.

  Lanyard went on, “what would you like to do for Halloween? There must be some great costume parties in Manhattan. That’s this Saturday, you know, and I thought there might be a party—anybody’s but Minder’s. I haven’t worn a costume for years, but I thought it might be fun.” He let his voice trail off, disturbed by sudden sadness in her. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugged. “My moods change quickly, I guess. I’ve always been a bit manic-depressive.” She added softly, “I won’t be able to go out this Saturday. I have a meeting. A business thing.”

  “On Saturday night?”

  “Yeah. A business dinner.”

  She quickly changed the subject. “Hey, there’s an article here,‘in this envelope somewhere. Joey put it in, says it has my name in it. I haven’t looked yet
.”

  She opened the manila envelope again, took out the script, and beneath it she found a clipping from the theater section of the daily New York Times.

  Looking at the script, Lanyard remembered that last time he’d called her and she’d said she couldn’t talk because she was studying her part; but today she spoke as if she were seeing the script for the first time. Maybe he should confront her with the discrepancy. A burst of honesty might do them both good. The cocaine and the alcohol made him feel capable of blurting almost anything. He decided against it. Too soon for a confrontation. He sipped his rum; the drink alleviated the ennui and the crash from the coke.

  “Here it is, one great big line: ‘Madelaine Springer, formerly a member of Minder’s cast for Nero, will play the part of Edwinna, the con artist’s sister.’ What a dumb name Edwinna is—oh hell, wouldya look at that!” She’d spat out the last five words loudly, as angrily as someone catching their cat urinating on a mink stole.

  Jarred, Lanyard said, “Uh—what’s the matter?”

  She was oblivious to him. She was staring at a glossy color photo stapled to the clipping. It showed a tall, gaunt, icy-blue-eyed blonde modeling fall fashions: a dark-brown dress and black wool jacket. “Well, she got hers,” Madelaine muttered. “Her little present.”

  “You know that model?” Lanyard said, irritated at being ignored.

  “What?” She snapped her head up. “No—oh, sort of. She’s a bitch. I can tell you that much.”

  Sensing that once more the time had come to change the subject, Lanyard said, “Has your ‘Gift’ been bothering you?” He was tempted to tell her about the Voices. About his boyhood. About Maguss. He was on the point of doing so when she said:

  “No!” She gave him a hard look and stood, snatching his glass too briskly from his hand. “I’ll get us a refill.” Though he’d only drunk half of his gin-and-tonic.

  He watched her movements as she padded into the kitchen; the pleasure of watching her mingled with his growing weariness and a sense of disorientation. Already, the brunt of the cocaine up was long gone. Lanyard felt sure she was going to bring out the drug again. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, either.