The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  I stayed in the bathtub for a full three minutes, watching the second hand on my wristwatch. Only when the third minute was up did I step out and cross the room. I shut the door silently behind me and headed for the elevator.

  There was no one in sight. It seemed likely that most of the faithful were glued to the tube, watching the testimonies of the rich and famous. Even the lad at the desk had deserted his post, although the rock star could be seen on the screen of a set hung above the elevators.

  I reached the elevator and pushed the Down button before I saw the fire stairs. There they were, right where they were supposed to be, with the customary warning that they, rather than the elevator, were to be used in case of fire.

  Everything had been labeled but the basement. The man and woman had used the word “basement” as a verb and had argued about it. The elevator wouldn't take you to the basement if you didn't have a key. On the whole, it seemed to me, I rather wanted to have a look at the basement.

  So I took the stairs.

  They were grimy, even for the Borzoi, and ill-lit. More important, though, they didn't stop at the lobby. There was a rickety waist-high grate closing them off, the kind of thing people in two-story houses buy when they have a baby, with a sign across it that said no access. I accessed by stepping over it and continued down.

  The stairs ended in a heavy metal fire door. I turned the knob slowly and inched it open just far enough to peek through. Nothing that I could see. I opened it quickly and stepped through.

  The smell of damp was stronger down here than it had been in the lobby: the place smelled like it hadn't been dry in years. A forty-watt economy bulb hung from a wire above my head. The wire, an electrician's nightmare, was actually stripped bare in places. The Church obviously saved the high-wattage light bulbs for Revealings.

  I was at the end of a concrete-walled corridor. By the time I'd realized I was in a cul-de-sac, the door had closed behind me with a soft, steely sound. Experimentally I tried the knob. From this side, the door was locked. I was going to need another exit.

  Something dripped, and I looked down. The floor was covered evenly with a quarter of an inch of black water. Another drop plopped into it, sending out dull concentric ripples that pushed bits of suspect debris before them. Water had seeped through, or condensed on, the ceiling, and it dripped more or less continuously into the fluid on the floor. This was not the kind of place tourists bought maps to find.

  Well, I couldn't just stand there. Sooner or later someone was going to come through the door behind me or round the corner at the other end to check out my little hallway, and I didn't think they'd be happy to see me. If they didn't want to see me, I certainly didn't want to see them.

  So I sloshed through the water toward the open end of the corridor. Something entirely too large for my liking scuttled past me in the other direction: a rat. It was wet and black and sleek and it looked mean enough to eat snakes. I accelerated away from it and found myself standing in a wider corridor that crossed mine like the longer stroke of a T. My heart was going like a bass drum.

  Neither left nor right was particularly appealing, but I had to go one way or the other, and the right seemed to be more brightly lighted. Figuring that the people were likely to be where the light was, I headed left.

  I'd covered more than twenty yards before I found a door. It opened into a small service closet, even wetter and darker than the hallway, with nothing in it but a couple of buckets and some old rags. I closed it and went on, feeling like Jean Valjean in the sewers of Paris. At least he'd known that his enemies were behind him. I had no idea where mine were.

  A second cul-de-sac, this one jutting off to the left, led to an enormous and apparently new air-conditioning system, probably installed right where the old gravity furnace had been. It roared along at full output, making me doubt my senses. Who could want air conditioning on a day like this one, fifty-five degrees and raining? And then I remembered the television studio and all those bright lights. Couldn't have beads of sweat on little Angel's upper lip.

  Big ducts, almost three feet square, branched off from the business end of the air conditioner like the legs of a spider, except that most of them seemed to lead in one direction: toward what would have been the left side of the hotel if I'd been outside and facing it from the street, which I very much wished I were.

  A square opening had been cut into one of the ducts with a blowtorch, and then the piece of metal had been removed, hinged, and replaced, perhaps for maintenance access. I thought about the man who would willingly crawl through those ducts in this rat's nest and asked myself whether even Dexter Smif would do it. Probably not the career change he had in mind. I opened the little door and looked up the duct. It was blacker than the back door to hell and probably narrower.

  The main corridor now swung to the right, and I paused at the corner to make sure I had my bearings straight. It wasn't much fun being down there under the best of circumstances, but it would be a lot less fun if I were lost. I'd been counting not only turns but hanging light bulbs as well. When I was certain I could get back, I went on.

  I found, first, a changing room, with hooks spaced on the wall at regular intervals for uniforms or street clothes, and then a bathroom with the most ungodly brown water I'd ever seen brimming over in the toilets. On the doors to the toilet stalls hung signs that said dipping pool. Each dipping pool was numbered. I wondered what got dipped in them.

  I left the dipping pools behind and entered a large empty tiled room with no features at all. Every room has features, I thought, studying the walls by the light of what seemed to be a ten-watt bulb. I spotted something dark and round in the center of the floor and went over to it. A drain. When I looked up, I saw the shower heads.

  The details of the morning's nightmare came back to me more vividly than I liked. I had to force myself not to look up for the gray worms as I very slowly left the room, and I tried not to acknowledge the relief I felt when the door opened in front of me.

  Two empty closets and one backtrack later, I found the kitchen of the Borzoi.

  It was vast and cavernous and empty. What seemed like acres of filthy wet counter stretched in every direction, lighted by the standard-issue hanging bulbs. The old gas ranges were cold and rusty, their oven doors hanging open. I didn't much think I wanted to look in the ovens.

  In addition to the one I had entered through, there were four doors in the kitchen. Two opened into dish closets, still stacked high with authentic dinnerware of the twenties that Eleanor would have killed for. The third was as wide as it was high, and as heavy as it was wide. I had to use both hands to pull it open.

  When I did, a wave of cold air broke over me. I had obviously found the refrigerator that had once served the kitchen, keeping the Barrymores’ caviar chilled. I was holding the door open with one hand and feeling around on the inside wall for a light switch with the other, when something in there moved. Then it moved again. Then it scuttled toward me. It had at least four legs.

  The largest rat in the world swam into my imagination, and I yanked my arm out and backed away so fast that I cracked my hip on the edge of a counter. The refrigerator door slowly swung shut. Whatever it was, it was going to stay inside.

  The fourth door was worse.

  It was narrow but tall, and it opened to reveal a dumbwaiter that in the old days had carried hot food up into the chandeliered dining room. When I tugged it open, I saw nothing but a bundle of rags that had been wadded up and thrown inside. I reached in to test the ropes, wondering if I could somehow haul myself up to ground level, and the bundle of rags stirred. A bunch of darker rags slowly lifted itself and became hair, and I was looking into the face of a woman.

  A girl really; she couldn't have been more than twenty. Her face was pasty and hollow. Her eyes were black and flat, as empty and lifeless as windows into a dark room. She looked first at my face and then down at my clothes. Then she sighed and started to lower her head again.

  “Honey,�
�� I said. “For Christ's sake, let's get out of here.” I put my hand on her shoulder, but she didn't even shrug. She was barely breathing. I shook her and got no response. I left the door open and backed away, and she reached out a slender white arm and slowly pulled the door closed again.

  Getting out had become an urgent priority. I left the kitchen and backtracked the way I had come. At the cul-de-sac leading to the fire stairs I paused. Then I went into the small hallway and, avoiding the lethal bare patches on the wire in an effort not to be electrocuted, reached up and unscrewed the light bulb. I needed time to think. Mentally bidding Mr. Rat to keep his distance, I leaned against the door and listened to the water drip.

  At least I'd learned what people meant when they used “basement” as a verb. Now what I needed was to unbasement myself as quickly as possible.

  In the class-conscious twenties, a hotel like the Borzoi wouldn't have subjected its guests' sensibilities to the sight of the help, people largely lacking in real style, coming and going. That meant there had to be a service entrance or two at street level, and also, since so many of the poor souls had slaved in the basement, there had to be a service elevator. And since I'd pretty much exhausted the territory to the left, it had to be to the right. Where the lights were.

  I'd moved only a few steps when I heard voices. I was learning to back up very quickly, and I did it now, heading for what had become the friendly, rat-filled darkness of my cul-de-sac.

  Huddled against the fire door, I watched three people pass from right to left. The first was a short, fat man dressed in drab, loose clothes. The other two were in quasi-military uniforms, faintly Italian in their spit-and-polish, and calf-high boots. As they passed, the man in the lead stared hopelessly at the floor but the man in the middle looked back, away from me, said something, and laughed. It wasn't a contagious laugh. Virulent, maybe, but not contagious.

  The third man laughed too. He was carrying a bucket.

  Judging from the woebegone demeanor of the man in the lead, they were probably heading for the kitchen to pop another simp on the barbie. What the hell, I figured, and followed.

  But they weren't going to the kitchen. They turned left at the short corridor leading to the air conditioner. I edged along the far wall until I could see the cooling unit and the three figures in front of it.

  The man who had laughed pulled open the hinged door in the duct and made an extravagant after-you-Alphonse bow. The fat little man bowed his head submissively, and the one with the bucket lifted it and poured its contents over the bowing man. Then the bowing man got onto his hands and knees and crawled into the duct.

  “A little cooling-off period,” said the one who had laughed. It seemed like a well-worn joke, but the wind-chill factor in that duct must have been something for even a dry man to reckon with.

  “Thank you,” said the one in the duct. He sounded like he meant it. There are more ways of being crazy than there are of being sane.

  The joker closed the door, and I made a beeline for the first closet and counted to a hundred very slowly. Water dripped regularly onto my head. When I shifted my position it dripped onto my shoulder and my head. I shifted back.

  I didn't hear anything outside. I eased open the door and sloshed quietly back to my cul-de-sac. The place had probably become too familiar, too safe by contrast to the rest of the labyrinth. I was backing into it when I felt something move behind me. An arm went quickly around my throat, cutting into my windpipe, and the light went on.

  The guy behind me had to be the one with the bucket. And the one with the laugh, the one in front of me, was my old friend Needle-nose.

  Chapter 17

  “Well, gee,” I said through my constricted throat. “Hi.”

  He didn't seem to recognize me. The guy behind me tightened his chokehold to keep his interest up.

  “I'm lost,” I said in a voice that sounded like Daffy Duck.

  Needle-nose smiled, not a pretty sight, and lowered his hand from the light bulb. “You certainly are,” he said. His eyes were a pale gray, flecked with brown. They weren't smiling. They flicked to meet the eyes of the one behind me, and the forearm relaxed a little. “Perhaps there's something we could help you find.” His voice was very soft, almost girlish. The gray eyes were extravagantly fringed with sable lashes.

  “I don't know,” I said. “A Burger King?”

  “A Burger King.” He considered the answer very seriously.

  “I'd kill for a Whopper,” I said.

  He gazed at me in the gloom. The light bulb above us swung back and forth in a tiny arc. Then the sharp tip of his nose quivered and his eyes narrowed slightly. I lowered my head as far as I could against the restraining arm, throwing my face into shadow, and hoped he'd come closer for a better look.

  When he did, I kneed him in the balls.

  Surfing a tidal wave of pure adrenaline, I snapped my head back against the face of the man behind me. I heard a crack as the back of my head struck his nose, and the arm around my neck loosened. I grabbed the arm and shoved it straight up, up toward the, frayed electrical wire with the bulb hanging from it.

  He must have realized what I was going to do, because he didn't choke me with his free hand or try to dig a finger into my eye. Instead, he grabbed at his own arm and tried to yank it down. He didn't make it.

  I felt a numbing jolt as I leapt back. The man's whole body convulsed and jerked. Sparks flew from the wire. Then the man collapsed, taking the wire with him. Luckily for the rest of us, since we were all standing on the same wet floor, the wire snapped. The corridor went dark.

  I heard a damp slap as the man's body hit the floor, and a small flat explosion as the bulb broke. Something scrambled behind me. Needle-nose. I stood absolutely still.

  The lights were obviously wired in series, 1920's-style, because the bulbs in the main passageway had gone out too. It couldn't have been any darker in the belly of the whale.

  My heart was hammering, and I was soaking wet. I tried to unfocus my eyes and let a form emerge, but there was nothing. Then there was a ragged intake of breath, and I heaved myself toward it.

  I would have gotten him on the first pass if I hadn't tripped over the body of the man on the floor. As it was, I grasped a handful of jacket, and then a hand clawed over my face, searching for the base of my nose. The hand snapped up, trying to shove cartilage into the brain, and hit my cheekbone instead. I struck under it and drove three stiff fingers into an armpit.

  Needle-nose went “Ooooof.” I scrabbled over the body and wrapped an arm around his neck. He pulled in the opposite direction, and instead of yanking back, I pushed with all my strength. Between the two of us, we hammered his head into the concrete wall. It sounded like a breaking egg.

  He sagged in a satisfying fashion. I let go of his neck and stood up, a little more shakily than I would have liked. Then I remembered that he might have Sally Oldfield's fingernails in his pocket. Who knew? Maybe he kept souvenirs. I went back, located his head, and lifted him by the hair. Twining my arm around his neck again, I slammed his face into the concrete floor. Then I did it again. He didn't even sigh. There was just a faint slobbering sound as he breathed into the wet. I left him facedown and edged toward the main corridor, wishing the water was a couple of inches deeper.

  Unless I wanted to run into these guys' teammates, I could think of only one way out. It was only slightly better than staying.

  I felt my way to the end of the cul-de-sac and turned left. Light glimmered in the distance, and I headed toward it.

  The air-conditioning unit was right where I'd left it, and the little metal door was shut tight. I opened it, and the fat man inside looked up in surprise. It wasn't time yet.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I had so little support for my voice that I had to say it again. “Excuse me. Duct patrol.”

  He looked bewildered. “Duck patrol?” he said. It was something new.

  “Duct,” I said. “Duct, goddammit. You'll have to get out for a minute.”
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  He thought about it for a second. Then he shook his head.

  “You can get right back in,” I said. He shook his head again. I heard a rapid tapping and turned to look behind me before I figured out that it was the sole of my shoe. My left leg was shaking uncontrollably. “Listen, it's a rule. All the ducts have to be patrolled every twenty-four hours.”

  Agonizingly slowly, he shook his head again.

  “Get out,” I said savagely, “or I'll take you to the dipping pool.”

  That did it. He squeezed out and squatted next to the opening. He was trembling, and no wonder. He was probably freezing.

  “When I'm gone,” I said, “you get back in here and close the door tight, understand? No fooling around.”

  “No,” he said. “I'll get in.”

  I crawled into the duct. It was just big enough to allow me to progress on my elbows if I kept my rear end down, and the air was cold against my sweat-slick skin. I'd made three or four yards when I heard the little metal door slam shut. Was he in or out? I really didn't want him wandering around asking questions about the duct patrol.

  He answered my question for me. “Thank you,” he said from behind me.

  I couldn't bring myself to tell him he was welcome, so I just grunted and kept pulling myself along.

  With him wedged in behind me, the force of the cold air wasn't quite as great. And I could smell him as I crawled, a fat little man who hadn't bathed in a while. Maybe he hadn't been allowed to bathe.

  It might have been a hundred yards altogether; actually, it was probably less, although it felt like a lot more. The first really difficult stretch began when the duct angled upward at about twenty-five degrees for fifteen or twenty feet. The floor of the duct was smooth and slippery, and for every foot upward I slid six inches back. I was concentrating on the positive by congratulating myself on having quit smoking when I hit my head on the end of the duct.

  “Oh, no,” I said out loud. “No, no, no.” The words echoed around me, and I shut up. Why would an air shaft go nowhere?