Cellars

by John Shirley

  The old man who came into the room was so short he would not have intimidated a midget. He was carved of black walnut, handsomely offset by his cream-colored suit, with white silk cravat and white shoes. He hobbled forward on his light aluminum cane, pausing to peer balefully at Lanyard with eyes yellowed like old dice, hobbled forward a step or two more, pausing to size up the stranger again. His voice was musical, almost as lilting as the Muzak version of “The Way We Were” coming from the desk. “You have gone to a great deal of trouble to see me, sir.”

  “Maguss sent me to you. My name is Lanyard. He seems to think you might be able to help us find…” Lanyard searched for words. “…find the people who are the enemy of us all. So that we can stop them.”

  “You are a very direct young man. You are also not doped. They told me you were doped, and that it seemed likely, therefore, that you were not police. Stupid of them to assume that the police don’t take dope.” His accent was faintly Caribbean. “Are you the same Lanyard who wrote ‘Animus Rites of the Lower Cameroon’ for Visions?”

  “Yes!” Lanyard blurted, pleased.

  “Then you probably know a little bit about me and my people as well. So there is no point in pretending.”

  “Pretending what, Mr. Merino?”

  “Pretending you don’t believe. I perceive in you a fanatical skepticism. But you are drawn to us—to write about us, people like us—for a reason. I know a man who believes but does not want to believe.”

  The old man studied him like a biologist identifying a species of lower anthropoid.

  “Maguss must have spoken to you,” Lanyard said, thinking aloud. “He told me that he couldn’t. That you two are not friendly, and that you couldn’t be reached except in the way I did it. But you sound too much like him. You and he are setting me up for something.” His head buzzed with pain and the rushing, whispering background was coming to life again. He felt distanced from everything around him, as if he were seeing the little black man and the room on a home-movie screen, detached and two-dimensional. Merino’s voice came to him from a long ways away.

  “You really ought not to leap to conclusions,” said Merino, looking at him quizzically. “The fact is simply that your Mr. Maguss and I see you the same way, because we both perceive the same truth about you. There are skeptics who are genuine, who debunk in an effort to expose fraud, and then there are skeptics like you, who believe deep in their hearts.”

  Lanyard was finding it hard to breathe. The air swarmed with dark ribbonings, like ticker tape come alive; he noticed, now, that their movements took on definite patterns in particular areas of the room, and around Merino they swarmed at a respectful distance in a sort of in-and-out dance, as if they were trying to reach him, wriggling toward him like sperm. They were repelled, and returned a moment later only to be driven back again.

  “You are more than a believer,” said Merino. “You are charged. I see that now.”

  There was fear in Merino’s voice. He began to turn away, saying, “I have nothing to tell you. I would not help Maguss, no matter who I am helping him against. It is all the same. And they are too strong. Too deeply rooted.” He turned back to Lanyard. “I will tell you this: Leave the city. I hear Him breathing at night. His breathing is excited. He is aroused. He is well fed. They feed Him to feed themselves. But He is never quite full.” He turned again to the door.

  But now the door was shut.

  The old man raised a trembling hand to the knob. The dark things swarming the air congested near the doorknob. It would not turn for him. “Ryonna!” He shouted, rapping against the door with his cane. “Open it!” And something more in another language. From beyond the door came a prolonged, low rumble which built in volume and rose in pitch to become the shriek of an infuriated beast. The snarling, grinding sounds that followed, along with the whispering in Lanyard’s head, almost covered the scream of the girl Ryonna.

  Carl…My daughter…Madelaine under…Madelaine beneath…

  Lanyard clapped his hands over his ears. But the Voices resonated from the bones of his skull—resonated in sympathetic frequency with the bone in a thousand fleshless skulls, skulls lying empty under rocks and soil and in the throats of caves, echoing behind their dusty sockets with Voices.

  He closed his eyes, and wind swept by his face. His eyes flew open when the great thump went through him. The room had tilted askew. And then he realized that he’d fallen, that he was lying on his side, his palms still clamped over his ears. He lay just beneath a book shelf; he tried to wriggle closer to the wall, to hide in the shallow space under the shelf, as far as possible from the living darkness that possessed the air itself. He was almost blind with it. It looked as if beetle-black maggots were eating holes in the stuff of Space, crawling in and out and in and out, so densely he couldn’t make out the details of the wall on the other side of the little room.

  Carl, voilà, chéri…je t’ai délivré de tout ce qui te geneaité…Il faut dormir… Demain…

  Lanyard wondered if he’d been drugged, after all. He preferred to believe he was hallucinating, when he felt the wetness on his arm and looked up to see the red foam vomiting from the drain in the floor, rising like a crimson fist and forearm, foamy but gelatinous, spreading, filling the floor in seconds, giving off a smell that made bile rise in his throat.

  He was nearly blind with the black swarmings; he couldn’t see the old man. He could hear him shouting, invoking weaker gods, over the buzzing, the whispering, the rasp of his own labored breathing.

  The red muck had covered the floor—except where Lanyard lay. It touched him…and drew back.

  It hardened like batter in a hot pan—and the room was hot, the heat soaked the strength from him; and now the light was reduced to a distant glimmer, blurred and frightened, filtered by the dark swarming in the air. There was something deliberate in the motion of the eel shapes, the blackness flowing into channels that coursed about the room, dipping to taste this and that, retreating, shaping and reshaping…coming, now, to hover over Lanyard, darting tendrils at him, recoiling.

  The power currents encircled the sputtering drain; the drain was the eye of the hurricane.

  Through the smoky swarm Lanyard made out the old man on his knees in the thick, glistening red muck. Merino’s face was hidden by a thickening of the black swarm; Lanyard could see that he was shaking violently, snapping from the waist, backward and forward, fighting something unseen, spasming with an elasticity that should have been impossible for so old a man.

  He was moving horizontally, too; dragged slowly, like someone pulled on a rug. Toward the drain. The red fountain had stopped. In its place, a single glossy bubble was rising from the hole in the floor. As it expanded from the drain, it took on a coherent shape. It was a bubble shaped like a head. Or a head with the texture of a bubble. But it wasn’t so fragile as a bubble. As the body of the thing came into sight Lanyard was reminded of a novelty-store snake springing from a can, its inner spring forcing it out—but the body came in slow motion, now, unreeling. Somehow he knew it was a strong body. When the head popped completely free of the drain it bounced a little on the thin neck, repulsively rubbery. The rest of the body came swiftly, rising to man-height over the drain. It shouldn’t have been able to fit in the drain at all.

  You’re Carl Lanyard, don’t forget who you are, hold on.

  He recognized that voice. His mother’s voice. A calm descended on him, and he watched with renewed detachment. It was all on a screen somewhere. He wasn’t part of this. The red membrane on the floor was wrinkling up, closing around the old man like a sea anemone—but that was part of the dream. The rubbery thing, whose fingers were moving without respect to bones or knuckles—nobby nailless fingers, each one with a life of its own—that thing was walking toward Lanyard and standing over him and opening its mouth. In the dream.

  Not because it was happening to him. Not to Carl Lanyard.

  It was happening to someone else.

  You’re here with me, C
arl. You’re okay. But you’ve got to live with the world when they’ve gone away.

  The Blessed People, said another voice. This is one of the Blessed.

  The Blessed One stood over him like a skeleton molded out of the stuff of slugs. It was almost transparent, and like the exotic fish in aquariums whose entrails are visible, the Blessed One’s insides were all there to see: a beating heart that was like a thing of lemon Jell-O, an esophagus like a glass tube leading down to a stomach of rose quartz within which was a silhouette: a severed human hand.

  The Blessed One’s genitals were colorless, inhuman, and depended from its crotch in four whipping, seeking, oozing feelers like the whiskers of a catfish. Dripping yellowish phlegm.

  The swarm wheeled behind the Blessed One, like a weightless snakepit. Like a lamprey mouth. Like a suctioning whirlpool.

  The radio, somewhere remote, played a Muzak version of “Send in the Clowns.”

  The Blessed One stood with its splayed feet, toes fused into duck-foot appendages, planted to either side of Lanyard’s head; the pus dripped from its quivering four-part genitals to splash by his cheek. He lay on his left side, gazing up at it, paralyzed.

  The Blessed One remained rigidly upright—but its head, alone, came down to visit Lanyard.

  To pay him a little visit, chuckled one of the Voices.

  Leave him alone, let him withdraw! His mother’s voice again.

  The Blessed One’s head lowered itself from its shoulders, neck unreeling to a five-foot length, the head drooping on it like a heavy swamp blossom on a long slack stem; the head was still solidly attached to the unmoving shoulders on an upright torso. The head tilted on it so that the face—blackbutton eyes, lipless mouth, a nose that writhed like the fingers and genitals—within an inch of his own. Its cold, lidless black eyes looked into his eyes.

  There was a recognition in the eyes that made him want to hide forever from seeing, and from thinking. Mentally, Lanyard recoiled. The Blessed One withdrew, encompassing with the little man trapped in red—and methodically crushed as he was drawn to the drain. The black swarmings fell away too; the room shrank to an image the size of a dime against a great field of night. And finally was gone altogether.

  He had time for one thought: If this is death, I hope it’s final.

  The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was the radio playing a Muzak version of David Bowie’s “Changes.”

  THIRTEEN

  “Morty, my good friend, how is it for you?” Gribner’s cheerfulness was forced. Morty could detect the false note.

  “Cyril, you don’t look so good. I heard they took you off this subway-killing business. It’s some nerve I got bringing it up, but maybe that’s what’s bothering you? I mean, I’ve never known you to be taken off a case. It’s politics, my friend, that’s all.”

  “They took me off? That’s what they say. I say: I quit. I’m retiring from the force altogether. I need this aggravation? I don’t need it.”

  They sat at the bar in the China West, a Chinese restaurant and cocktail lounge on Delancey. There were two other people in the room, Chinese businessmen talking in their own language over tall, multicolored drinks at the far end of the curving leather-padded bar.

  Morty Abramowitz, New York City Assistant Utilities Commissioner, was overweight by a good ninety pounds, and too short to carry it well. He wore a glistening layer of Vitalis on his gray-black hair, and there was something of the same glassiness in his wide-set black eyes. He shifted in his suit, and undid the top snap of his trousers to ease the pressure, as he ordered a second round of Tom Collinses. Morty was an earnest but humorous man, and Gribner had always liked him.

  Gribner glanced at his Timex. It was 7:45 PM. Morty had said he had a meeting at nine. He supposed he should tell Morty why he’d asked him to the bar. Morty knew it was business. They were making small talk till the right moment came.

  But Gribner didn’t much want the right moment to come. “So you remember when you were on the force, Morty, or did you manage to forget yet?”

  Morty gave the little toss of his head and the grunt that he used for laughter. “It’s as far from my thoughts as I can make it. But sometimes I think about that slob Strieker. He says, ‘Who are you guys? You ain’t cops, we paid the cops yesterday.’ You got to be a bagman to be a cop, he figures, right? So then he tries to offer us shoes! Hot crates of shoes! He was a resourceful man. You know, my kid, eight years old then, came into the station once and he sees Strieker in the cage waiting to be booked, so—so Strieker tries to offer him a candy bar for the keys on the desk and the kid says, ‘How low-class you think I am? I should spring creeps for candy bars?’ Eight years old!”

  “How is the little guy, Morty?”

  “Ten years older, Lieutenant.” Morty was suddenly solemn. “He’s got draft-age worries. Going to school.”

  “Right, yeah, studying veterinary, right?”

  “Yeah, he’s a good kid. So how’s the old lady?” He brightened. “She still goes to the Madame Sees-It-All or Madame Fortune Cookie, or whatever—?”

  Gribner chuckled. “Madame Tanya. The old fraud. Sometimes I think I ought to send the bunko squad around, save myself some money. But the old girl’s got to have something to…I guess you heard about the dogs.”

  “I heard. Some people ought never to have been born. To do something like that. Any word on the kid? Your—what was he?”

  “What was he? I don’t know. But if you mean was he my relative, he was my nephew.”

  Morty glanced at Gribner sidelong, the creases around his eyes deepening. He waited. The time had come.

  “At first, Morty,” Gribner said (as the sad-eyed blonde at the piano bar began to play “Love Is Blue”), “I wanted to resign from the case, myself, my own idea. I begin to get a picture what’s going on here, deciding I got to do it my way. A kind of private investigation. Because they’re not listening to me. But they wouldn’t let me quit. So yesterday I went and told them what I really thought was going on. I told them about the growling in the pipes—”

  “What?” Morty seemed startled.

  Gribner looked at him. “What I said maybe brings something to mind?”

  Morty hesitated. “Uh—we had to fire some guys. They wouldn’t go down in 216 and 217; that’s where they found those ripped-up bums. And they claimed they heard some growling noise coming from the pipes. And one of ’em says he saw a ghost. A guy you could see right through. We thought, maybe you inhale methane fumes, it can cause hallucinations, am I right? And—uh—”

  “You read my report on the kid under Grand Central?” Gribner’s voice was suddenly crisp. He leaned back in the bucket-seat chair.

  Morty nodded. “Sure, Cyril, I’m not going to read your report? Natch I read your report. I think this guy, this patrolman, I think he shot too quick, myself. I’m with you on that. He got spooked down there. He said he’d gone there when he was a kid and got scared, right? So it all came back, and he spooked and started seeing things. Like the way he claimed those kids were acting.”

  “I don’t think he was ‘seeing things,’ Mort. That kid he shot—we didn’t get a chance to look at the body. Not much. It disappeared from the morgue. There was a red crust on the drain in the morgue, and around the walls, near the floor—same shit we found when this man Krupp came forward, and we lost him—” He lowered his voice. “You heard about the other stuff, so maybe you heard about this Krupp, too?”

  “I heard.”

  “The stuff on the walls was blood—but blood from lots of people, mixed, dried, and with something else in it—some kind of organic soup.”

  He waited, tapping his glass, watching for Morty’s reaction.

  Morty shrugged. “Some sewer backed up. Sometimes we get a lot of blood in the sewer, from lots of different sources…slaughterhouse, meat packers…”

  “This was human blood.”

  Morty stiffened. “Okay. Stuff builds up in some sewage leakage pools in layers, and there could be
a layer of blood backing up…maybe from a hospital. What—uh—?”

  “What do I think? I think it has something to do with the subway killings, and I don’t know what yet. I think there’s something smart down there that’s not human, and you know I’ve been on the force a long time, I’m not going to jump to wild conclusions. And I think those people have their temple underground—if they are people—and I think some of them live down there. And we’re not getting anywhere. I mean, clues dry up overnight. It’s unnatural for a case with so many killings to have so many dead ends. It’s unnatural….”

  Morty was studying his hands, looking very unhappy.

  “Morty,” Gribner said in a friendlier tone, “on you is the look of a man who has to tell a friend something he doesn’t want to tell him. Like, ‘Cyril, you’re getting senile,’ or ‘Cyril, you worked yourself into exhaustion. You’re snapping.”

  Morty let out a long slow breath. “Some of that occurred to me. But we been getting stories…things that make me wonder. I guess you heard about the new guys on the MTA board?”

  “What? No, I thought the Transit Authority was sealed up for at least a year—”

  “Hollins and Bourbon both had a run of unbelievable bad luck. It’s—unnatural. Like you said. Both at the same time. Hollins, his wife died, his son’s a drug addict, all his investments dropped to nothing, and he has a nervous breakdown. He had to quit, to go to work selling real estate again, try and recoup. And Jerry Bourbon tried to shoot himself.”

  “What? Jerry Bourbon? You’d have thought the Post would have splashed that—”

  “Keep your voice down. They don’t know. The guy almost overnight went into suicidal depression. Anyway, we got these two new guys on the board, appointed by the Mayor’s Emergency Committee, and uh—well, they know each other too well, these guys. One, I don’t know what he knows about mass transit or what makes him qualified. I mean…his name is Tooley. And we had an investigation going into the Outside Train thing—”