Cellars

by John Shirley

  “Cyril!” The voice was his wife’s.

  He took a deep breath, and then another, and opened his eyes, and looked to the right. A light shone up, out of the ground.

  Wobbly, he climbed to his knees and staggered toward the light. To the right of the sidewalk, between the concrete and the grass verge of the park, was a black, hard-edged ironbarred grating. A drainage shaft? Ventilation for—what? The light, phosphorescent blue, flared from the grating over the shaft. The grate was square, three feet by three, and screwed down with heavy bolts.

  Shaking, his gun hand quivering like a branch in the wind, he approached the shaft. The light was tenuous, and divided into narrow strips by the bars. He stood near the grating, choking to hold back sobs, afraid to look down.

  “Cyril, help us!” It was her voice. He leaned, and bent his head to look. The shaft was only about eight feet deep, and concrete-walled. She was there. She and the two dogs. Randi and Louie. The Pekingese, alive and well. The little bastard Everett must have stolen them and killed someone else’s dogs just to make it lock as if he’d killed Gribner’s friends because—thank God, there they were and—how did Trudy get down in the shaft?

  The dogs were perched on her shoulders. She wore her usual housedress. He couldn’t see her face very well. The light hurt his eyes. Light came from—from her. He fell to his knees. “Help me!” she called. He could see her mouth moving. But the lips moved a split second after he heard the words, like in a badly dubbed foreign movie. “Cyril!”

  “I—I’ll get you out, I’ll get help, I’ll get you out—” He couldn’t see what she was standing on. It was all blue light and foggy there. “How did you—?” It didn’t matter. He’d get help.

  “Cyril—wait, don’t go—just reach down and take my hands…I’m so scared…” He could hear the terror bubbling in her voice. In two places, the bars had been pried apart, just enough to admit a grown man’s arms, a chest-width apart. He tossed his gun aside and fell flat on the grating and, not thinking, his tears falling to her, to his dogs, his babies, his Trudy, he reached through the widened places.

  Stretching his arms down to her. She reached up and closed her fingers around his wrists.

  And began to pull.

  And began to change.

  But he’d known it wasn’t her, not really her, as soon as she’d touched him. As soon as it had touched him. The fog cleared from his eyes, and he saw the thing that had him by the wrists. The Blessed One. Rubbery. Prehensile, impossibly strong, its boneless, transparent fingers unyieldingly tightened around his wrists. He screamed and tried to pull away.

  It gazed up at him with black button eyes and moved its rubbery lips, making a sound like balloons rubbed together; the dogs were gone, and the things on its shoulders, in place of the dogs, took shape—rats. Big rats, stretching snuffling snouts to gnaw his arms.

  The Blessed One began to pull him down. Gribner strained, screaming so loudly he couldn’t hear himself, trying to wrench free.

  His screams woke the wino. The wino’s name was Finley. “Whadduhfug?” he belched, standing, swaying. He was still drunk. He weaved through the bushes, curious about the noise, but mostly looking for a place to piss, somewhere far enough from his sleeping mat. He remembered a grating, some kind of drain, near the sidewalk. He made for that.

  He stopped, blinking, twenty feet from it, watching as Gribner was pulled through the bars.

  Finley didn’t believe it. DTs again. Time to check into Bellevue, dry out for a while. So he laughed at what he thought was a hallucination. You can’t pull a man between bars like that, like he was cheese. But that squealing sound. That crunching sound. That screaming.

  Finley shook his head and turned away. “Pizz somewhere else…Can’t do that to a man—like a slice-’em-dice-’em slizes innything.”

  He laughed. And then his laughter ceased, abruptly, when the children came running out of the bushes and knocked him down, and dragged him toward the wet red bars where the pieces of the man remained….

  AT NIGHT, THE black squirmings, the power currents, gave off mild inward flickers like static electricity—for those who could see them. Lanyard could see them clearly, over the crowd’s heads as he walked west down Houston Street.

  He was following the flow of the power currents. The currents, made up of the glimmering blue-black strips, like yard-long party crepe come alive, wriggled through the air at about seven feet over the sidewalk. It was a hot night, a weirdly hot night, and lots of people were on the streets, passing bottles, competing for loudness with their enormous radios, clustered on corners or strutting in groups down the street; most were Spanish or black, though here and there were chichi rockers on their way to clubs, and children in Halloween costumes, laughing behind plastic skeleton masks, Spiderman masks, even Ronald Reagan masks; the masks bobbed on their rubber-band supports as the children ran along the sidewalk, clutching bags of candy.

  The power currents followed the course of the crowd, more or less; sometimes a whirlpool formed around someone, and the eel shapes reached down to snap at the head of a white teen-ager with matted blond hair—he stood on the street-corner shouting gibberish.

  Lanyard guessed that the power currents manipulated some of the people; others they seemed to pass by. But the currents flowed, more or less, in one direction. He followed, knowing they would lead him to Minder. To Madelaine. To the Head Underneath.

  At Second Avenue, the stream of flickering eel shapes dipped and entered the subway station. Lanyard descended the steps. He wore a backpack, and in his hip pocket was a map. He fished a token from his pocket, passed through the turnstile, and followed the power currents onto the platform.

  At the end of the platform, he removed his backpack and took a long silvery flashlight from it. He replaced the backpack and, flashlight in hand, ignoring the curious stares of the few people on the dirty gray platform, he leapt over the brink and landed, wincing, on both feet between the tracks. He found a narrow strip of concrete to the right of the tracks and walked into the tunnel, switching the flashlight on.

  He could still see the power currents, alive, squirming overhead, darting into the tunnel. He followed the currents to their source.

  MADELAINE COULD FEEL them moving, up there. She felt Lanyard, moving closer, having left the subway tunnel, following the power currents along the route Krupp had once taken. Lanyard climbing ladders, crawling through drainage pipes, sweating in the growing heat, shaking with the effort at controlling himself: He was scared to the bone. She knew that, and felt it distantly—but she was unaffected. She couldn’t allow herself to be affected.

  She sat in the mouth of the cave, occasionally licking her cracked lips, swooning with heat—never moving.

  Tooley entered the tunnel, alone. Walking in a crouch, he moved past her and unlocked the steel door. He swung the door aside, then came back and took her by the wrist. She allowed him to tow her—she was half walking, half stumbling—behind him, into the deeper places, the tunnel curving to the left and opening into the cavern.

  Here they were able to stand. The pool shone with its own blue light; they could see the cavern quite clearly.

  The underground lake had been here before the Indians had sold Manhattan. Until recently, it had been an empty sump, inhabited only by blind fish. It was about seventy-five feet across, almost perfectly circular. The ceiling was high and toothy with dripping stalactites, glimmering with the bluish light.

  It was peculiar, the light being blue—because it was given off by the underground lake, and the lake was red. Rusty red, edged with foam at the shores. Part of the underground lake had developed a red membrane, a rubbery skin around the edges, and studded at intervals in the membrane were the heads of those undergoing transmutation, destined to become the Blessed People, their bodies, below the neck, hidden in the pool. One of these she recognized as Charlton Buckner, the author of Minder’s production, Shake ‘Em Down!! His face twitched, and his head twisted on the neck—distantly, she wo
ndered what he was feeling. There were seven men and two women trapped, up to their necks in the red membrane, in various stages of transformation; one of the women was almost transparent; her nose was nearly gone and her hair was mostly fallen out. Two of the men, middle-aged men who’d once worn expensive suits and who’d once driven expensive cars and who’d once sat behind expensive desks, called plaintively to be released. Tooley and Madelaine ignored them.

  But then, Madelaine ignored everything; she saw, and recorded, but reacted to nothing.

  Like a pond where the edges have turned into ice while the center remains open water, the membrane extended only thirty feet, all the way round, into the lake. The center roiled, bubbling; as He rose into the uncovered area, the red liquid surging, parting for His great bulk.

  He came in response to Tooley’s silent summons.

  Forty feet high, He reared from the red pool, dripping, glistening, pulsing with light and cancerous life. He sat on His haunches, stunted arms drawn up to cross His chest, His unfinished hands as always caressing the oversized male genitalia, always erect, that rose nearly to the chinless jaw of His grossly oversized head. He was an embryo. He was an embryo, in some ways outwardly very human, big as a house. His eyes were always closed, but the orbs moved behind the translucent, heavily veined red-blue lids.

  Where a human embryo—seven months along—would have had a forehead, He had a great yellow boil; dimly seen seething in the boil were a million snaking, wriggling shapes. Worms. A special sort of worm. The boil always seemed straining to burst.

  From the boil radiated the power currents, the airborne eel shapes, manifesting for Madelaine—and then vanishing as she willed the sight away.

  She didn’t care to see them.

  Tooley gazed rapturously up at Him, and snarled.

  She didn’t have to look at Tooley to know he’d undergone the transformation. His head was no longer in its human semblance. It was the head of a wild, rabid dog, with the eyes of a man. The demon called “Tooley” snarled again. The Head Underneath opened its lipless mouth, and the cavern echoed with a long, low growl like the growing rumble of imminent earthquake.

  Tooley turned to Madelaine, and his head had regained its human aspect. “He says you’re to live, for a while. He says I’m to have a new master. He says you’re a gift for the new master.”

  He waited for her reply. She closed her eyes. That was all.

  He took her by the hand and led her back to the tunnel, through the steel door, and up into the temple.

  All the while, she felt Lanyard coming closer. Someone was helping him. An old man. Maguss. This man Maguss…this man’s thoughts were closed to her. She could feel his influence, however. He was bending the power currents to conflict with Minder’s control of them. He was using them to protect Lanyard. And Lanyard was getting closer.

  SIXTEEN

  Lanyard had discarded his shirt; his bare back was chafing under the straps of the backpack. The utility tunnel, slanting down at a ten-degree angle, was murky with steam. The heat stung his fingers when he reached out to brace himself against the curved metal walls. He moved along in a crouch, duckwalking on the heavy sewage pipe that took up the lower half of the tunnel; the pipe vibrated with the thunderous pour of its contents. It was lead pipe banded with iron, and three feet in diameter. His flashlight played over the walls and down the length of pipe as he looked for the appropriate place to plant the last of the plastic explosive.

  With one blackened hand Lanyard wiped sweat from his eyes and peered through the steam. It was harder to see the power currents here. Now he made them out, shimmering, quivering strips of blue black, rippling with sparks near the curved ceiling. Sticky with sweat, Lanyard struggled down the narrow utility tunnel.

  The currents continued down toward the place where the tunnel forked. There, they wound to the right. “The currents can pass through doors, but not through walls,” Maguss had said. “They can only go where a man could go; they are, after all, the emanations of a man. They follow the path of least resistance, most of the time.”

  For the dozenth time, Lanyard paused to rally himself, taking deep breaths, almost choking in the hot, sewage-foul air. He sat straddling the pipe, feeling its contents sluicing, vibrating between his legs. He listened—and heard it again: high-pitched laughter from behind him. He twisted on his hips to squint down the tunnel, the flashlight beam wavery in his shaking, dirty hand.

  He saw his shirt dangling in midair where he’d left it. It was a yellow long-sleeved cotton shirt, discolored from sweat. It jumped about, arms outstretched, its back to him, dancing on the pipe as though the Invisible Man had removed everything but his shirt and gone into a mad caper. He half expected to see Claude Rains appear.

  Dancing, the shirt turned, exposing its front side to him. Now he could see what was inside it, holding it up. Two huge albino rats. On their hind legs. Albino? No, furless, their gray skin rubbery, almost translucent. More of Minder’s toys. Each rat bigger than a large cat.

  The rats chattered, their miniature, oddly human arms holding the shirt over their narrow heads like shaman dancers in an animal skin, hopping toward him, two pairs of red eyes gleaming in the flashlight beam, their mouths opening pink and wet like Lily Chancery’s—

  “Get away from me!” he shouted. He tucked the flashlight in his right armpit, unslung the backpack, dug through its side pockets till he found the Luger that Maguss had given him. Holding the flashlight in his left hand, he flicked the gun’s safety off with his right. The rats’ claws clicked on the pipe. Closer.

  He shone the flashlight back along the tunnel. They came at him. Twisting backward, firing at an awkward angle, he squeezed the trigger four times; the pistol’s bucking hurt his wrist. The gunshots rang and boomed down the tunnel, and one of the rats burst open, spattering the gray-black walls with its thick yellow blood—yellow?—and flipped over backward, falling out of sight below the curve of pipe.

  The other rat dodged and turned tail, dragging his shirt away down the tunnel, tee-heeing like a funny cartoon animal.

  Maguss had promised to protect him. His protection was waning, as Lanyard neared the temple. Soon, perhaps, the pet of the Head Underneath would come.

  He tucked the gun into the pack, slung it on, and pointed his flashlight.

  Lanyard began to hump along the pipe toward the fork. That method was too slow. He climbed on top of the pipe, his head scraping the concave ceiling, shaking sweat from his eyes, and stooping low, duckwalked down the tunnel. The position hurt his ankles, his thighs, the inside of his knees. In his right hand he held the flashlight, and in the beam, at the place where the tunnel split, a pallid, prepubescent face grinned at him.

  Spotlit, face wreathed in steam, was a boy with shaggy black hair—perhaps six years old. His yellowed eyes were wide, his mouth grinned so widely it seemed a rictus. The boy’s face was narrow, ratlike—had it always been ratlike?

  He held something in his hands.

  He held it up—“Lookie look!”—for Lanyard to see. It wasn’t a shirt. It was a portion of a human head. Like a section of jack o’ lantern…part of the skull remaining, the skin clinging to the facial fragment, the eyes gone. But there was enough so that Lanyard recognized Gribner’s face.

  He turned the flashlight aside; the boy laughed from the darkness.

  Lanyard became aware of the darkness, the palpable density of the subterranean city around him, the endless, labyrinthine stretch of tunnels.

  And it was so damn hot. Giggles from the darkness.

  “Leave me alone!” he bellowed.

  Alone…alone…alone…his voice echoed down the tunnels.

  ELECTRIC MUSIC IN the background. The lights fluttered low. The room was hot.

  She watched impassively, from her place at the magic circle, as Minder and Lily Chancery painted the signs on one another with the blood of the woman they’d laid open, staked and shrieking, at their feet. The Blessed People were there, and the children, and the accou
ntants, and the admen, and the rock stars….

  The temple was a place of flickering twilight, from tall candles on braziers at the corners of the big room. There were almost fifty of them, gathered for the autumn rite, chanting, nude, gaudy with makeup and geometric arcana; their faces bestial in the shifting candlelight, their bodies, every kind of body, glossy with sweat; the floor was sticky with sweat, the room heavy with His heat. The stalker, the pet, the beast of red wires, fed noisily (seen and then unseen) on the body of the sacrificed.

  She watched, and recorded, and felt nothing.

  Not even when Lanyard came up behind, and took her by the arm, leading her around the edge of the transfixed crowd. No one seemed to notice; all eyes were on Minder and Lily, now mainlining cocaine in the center of the circle, in preparation for the transcendent moment, the minute of Time that would be protracted for them forever.

  The room slithered with sounds; acolytes chanting, taped music thudding.

  On the altar, just above the magic circle, was the jade urn.

  Lanyard took it in the crook of his arm. No one so much as looked up. Madelaine was not surprised: “There will be a change of masters,” Tooley had said.

  Lanyard whispered urgently to her, “You’re dragging. Hurry up. Maguss has them confused or something…no one is looking. But we’ve got to hurry, we’ve got two minutes….”

  She looked at him blankly, and he compressed his lips, dragging her by the wrist. She came along, not hurrying.

  Distantly amused by it all.

  She could feel the power currents converging on the magic circle behind them. She could feel the very arches of Space Itself creaking; she could hear the squeal as Time was rerouted. Minder was receiving his reward. He had paid his premiums, in sheer life energy delivered to the Head Underneath, Ahriman’s earthly manifestation. Now his investment was paying off. Minder was achieving transcendence, climbing to a place outside the flow of Time, a place designed to reproduce a minute in Minder’s life, over and over, again and again. And Minder had chosen the minute: He had it timed so that the transcendence would take effect in the next minute; one minute—while he was rushing on cocaine, locked into copulation with Lily Chancery—stretched into Forever.