Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  Then I close her eyes with my thumbs.

  When the ambulance and police come, I’m still blowing air into her open mouth and pounding her chest. Tears are coursing down my cheeks.

  7

  Maybe it’s just the ragged circle of light and what it’s doing to my vision, but the office doors seem to be opening and closing. I sweep the light across the way by turning my head. The regulator’s rhythmic rattle soothes my nerves. Even so, I can see the bubbles escaping the exhaust faster than they should.

  And those doors are swinging, the darkness behind them

  straining against my feeble light.

  I shake my head to clear it of the stupid thought. The tunnel is submerged. Who could possibly be down here? Alive? I’m the only one here, and I’m breathing canned air. The tunnel’s been flooded a good twelve hours. If people were trapped here they’re not playing with the doors.

  So I kick past the first doors, and the next two, and then -

  I catch the movement at the edge of my headlamp beam and turn my head and then cold, dead hands reach out for me with slug-like fingers and suddenly I’m trapped by rubbery grips that cut off all feeling to my legs.

  I kick and twirl in its grasp but the hands are like vices and then I’m not registering the pain anymore because my light brushes past a bloated face and it’s

  Petey Rondelli ohmygod Petey Rondelli with skin chewed off his face and eyeballs swimming in reddish brine around his face and his goofy smile has no lips to cover young fang-like teeth and he’s naked and I can see where I took the butcher knife and sawed at his rubbery flesh just like the others and

  then I can see that it’s not just Petey anymore, it’s a party and they’ve all come to see me and wish me luck on my next trip and

  as bloated faces blend into each other and slimy hands

  caress my skin I see that this tunnel is somehow connected to that quarry hundreds of miles away and why it’s taken them this long to swim out of the loops of nylon rope and quarry cuts and then

  I flail with my hands in the still water but I can’t beat off their grasp or pry their dead fingers from my skin and wetsuit and then the bubbles burst around my head and I turn and face her as she floats out of the last door

  and Petey’s ragged fingernails start to peel the neoprene from my skin and the water turns red and frothy when the skin starts to go too but I can’t feel it and then it’s

  Shelley and her hands are digging into my torso and I feel my insides rip and tear as I watch helpless and her dead face expresses the rapture of pure animal pleasure just like her reputation except that now she’s the one using my body and

  as her hands encircle my flesh and begin to mangle and

  shred and Petey and the others form a silently floating audience

  I know that they have never been dead

  THEY HAVE ALWAYS WAITED FOR ME TO ENTER A TUNNEL WITH ENOUGH

  fucking doors

  8

  Rich wrings his hands when the police divers climb through the trap door. He has rubbed his lank hair into a crow’s nest and rings have grown under his already deep-set eyes so that his head resembles a decomposing skull. He starts to shake when they wrestle the orange litter straight upward and finally lengthwise onto the floor. Water drips off wetsuits as they gather around Jimbo’s white body.

  “- tangled up in those ceiling pipes,” one is saying, his hood scrunched down onto his neck like a second, flaccid head. “Almost as if he tied himself up in there, except he woulda hafta have bent them all to hell to do that.”

  “And he took off his wetsuit first,” the other adds,

  pointing to a loose pile of soggy neoprene near the trap door. “That ain’t easy. Tank’s about twenty feet away, empty. Gotta be one of the weirdest I’ve ever fished out.”

  Rich hears and wonders what they would think if he told them what Jimbo shouted into his mike just before the static took over.

  He knows they couldn’t accept it. He’s not sure he can accept it. He’s not even sure what it means, but it feels all wrong.

  Jimbo said: “Oh-god-shelley-oh-god-it-was-worth-the-wait.”

  And then his scream turned into a fading gurgle.

  Rich runs a hand through his hair again. Who the fuck

  knows? Let them clean up their own fucking tunnel. His hand rips into his hair like a trembling claw.

  * * *

  INSTITUTION WALTZ

  1

  The music blared from an old-style gramophone. Xavier held his temples, where the sounds seemed to jab like rusty needles through his skin and right into his brain. The gray-haired man’s trousers had bunched around his feet, and his bared muscular buttocks seemed to clench and relax as his hands forced a kneeling woman to service him.

  The sound of her muffled cries cut through the elegant, torturous music as if it didn’t exist.

  Xavier could not see her face, but her hands were white-knuckled fists extended toward his hiding place, one on either side of the gray-haired man’s buttocks. The man’s hands grasped long, stringy hair and ears and forced her jerking movements as he drove his erection ruthlessly into her mouth.

  Xavier ceased breathing.

  2

  Earlier that day, he had stepped into one of the johns.

  Toilets, a row of them. Rust-streaked. Worse. Streaks of things surely not rust. Shit. Blood. Puke. Urinals, too, yellowish stains congealed along the curved sides, foul-smelling bars of supposed deodorant floating in the bowls. The floor tiles streaked with dirt and hair where half-assed mopping had spread them around.

  I could be doing this, Xavier thought, on my knees in this shit. He approached a urinal that didn’t seem plugged and finished his business quickly, trying not to smell the pungent urine residue of a couple hundred disgusting pigs.

  He washed his hands in a sink stained with either dye or blood, maybe both.

  Jesus.

  Two weeks in the facility, and he still shrank at the thought of it.

  He combed his thinning hair with his fingers, his reflection rippled in the non-glass mirror. His clothes were institutional, but clean and creased.

  First day. On the job. Must look good.

  Often he broke up his thoughts in chunks he could digest.

  Xavier walked the halls of Wing A and into Wing B. The nurses’ stations at each end kept an eye on him the whole route, but he didn’t mind. Not really. Wing B held the common areas. Wing C was the restricted area, where they kept the hopeless cases. Strapped down. In Wing B he nodded to the male nurse and orderly watching “The White Shadow” on a hidden TV. They didn’t nod back.

  He’d been given a pass and a job already, and he sensed that some of the staff didn’t approve. Well, he wasn’t as much a mess as some of the others, was he?

  The library. He entered through the double doors and immediately the smell of the facility behind him faded. Here the air tasted of paper, old paper and glued bindings and leather, and even the newer pocket-sized books smelled like heaven to him. The library was a sanctuary for him, former public librarian, who had now become the institute’s interim librarian.

  His hands tingled and his head felt light. Happiness made him nearly swoon, and he reached out a hand to steady himself against a crammed bookstack. Strange, he’d felt quite lucid and alert until now.

  He found his desk, tucked behind a small circulation counter - with its stamps and date due slips and McBee card files - and knew that he would be all right, even if he had to stay here a full year and convince them he was harmless. He sat in the wooden swivel chair that seemed to have been warmed for him, and let his hands caress the blotter. Pens and pencils in the middle drawer. Paper clips, rubber bands, extra stamps. Ink pads. The paraphernalia of his world. It all represented so much freedom in a place where shoelaces and belts weren’t allowed.

  Why, I could stab an orderly’s eyes out with these sharpened number 3 pencils, Xavier thought. He wondered how it would feel, what it would look like. Would there
be much gore? Eyeball liquid and blood squirting out like the guts of crushed grapes? What was eyeball liquid called? Xavier grinned. This was a library - he’d look it up. Xavier sucked in the freedom like others suck in cigarette smoke, and it felt good.

  Time to start his first job-related task. The facility’s Assistant Director, a stocky Dr. Fedderman, had given him the temporary job and this assignment in person. His grease-stained tie and slightly garlicky air hid a fairly intelligent and sympathetic therapist, unlike the head of therapy, Dr. Kohner, who routinely found his charges’ petty dreams and squashed them with unseemly glee.

  “We need a larger facility for the book collection, and we’re also expanding the current periodicals,” Fedderman had explained. “The Foundation will foot the bill for the expansion, but we need to know how much space we currently use so we can project our future needs and build accordingly.”

  “You want me to … measure the stacks? Linear feet?” Xavier spoke slowly. It had been a while since he’d used the library jargon.

  “The new library’s going to be larger, but no one’s measured the collection in decades. I decided that, since you know library ins and outs, you could do it for us. If you’re willing, of course.”

  “Oh, I can do it,” Xavier had babbled, almost tripping over his own tongue. Any sense of normalcy would be like a life raft on a treacherous sea. “I can start today.”

  “Tomorrow’s soon enough.” Fedderman wasn’t all bad, as shrinks go. “You can be our librarian until the Foundation hires a new one from the community.”

  “There’s no chance I…?”

  Fedderman made a condescending O with his mouth. “Did I-? I didn’t mean to give you that impression. It’s just on a temporary basis, I’m sorry. But if you do a good job, there will be two aide positions, and one of them can be yours.”

  Good enough, Xavier had thought, suppressing his rage.

  Now here he sat, his hands stroking the blotter, the desk. His life raft. He opened the drawers again, one by one. He found what he needed in the lower right - a ten foot tailor’s ribbon, thin leather with measurements marked off in 120 increments along one yellow side. The other side was natural, a light tan and coarse. There was also a clicker, a little metal counter operated by way of a lever you pressed with one finger while the gadget nestled in your palm.

  Simplicity. You measured each shelf’s contents from left to right, using the ribbon stretched between your hands, shelf after shelf, until you reached the end of the ten-foot length. Then you clicked the clicker and started measuring again. For every range, you ended up with a number on the clicker. Multiplied by ten, that gave you the total linear feet of books occupying the shelves of that free-standing set of stacks. You wrote it down, then measured the next range. Adding up the range numbers gave you a total of overall feet.

  Xavier glanced at the two ranks of stacks units. About twenty rows deep, ranked on either side of a main aisle, they stretched across the huge room to the far end, ending just under a row of frosted skylights. Metal wire threaded through the skylight panes made them nearly escape-proof. But Xavier had given up thinking of escape long ago. Now he just wanted to make the most of his time, so that it would be short.

  He set his instruments on the blotter, sighing. Might as well start measuring. Customers could tap the bell on the counter, but did anyone even use the library?

  The first range went easily, the ribbon passing through his fingers quickly, his clicker keeping count of ten-foot lengths. Reaching the end of the first side, he stepped around and pulled the ribbon around the corner and picked up the measuring. At range’s end, he jotted down the total footage - 236 feet.

  He cracked his knuckles. It felt good, doing something familiar, something useful.

  In half an hour, he had measured two more ranges.

  While measuring the fourth range, he became aware of muffled music playing nearby.

  What the hell? It was faint, but clear enough. It was - he lost track of his measuring, unsure whether he’d clicked the last time or not, and he dropped the ribbon, bothered that he knew the music but couldn’t recall… Familiar, yes, he knew what it was. It was a - a waltz. A Strauss waltz.

  His head began to throb.

  Jesus, no.

  He hadn’t had an attack since his arrival. He hadn’t lost control since… Since before.

  The music ebbed and waned like a tidal roar, swelling inside his head until he thought he would vomit from the thrumming sound and vibration that threatened to rattle the brain-pan inside his skull. He put his hands on his temples, feeling the throb there, in the veins, the rolling of the music and its tempo, and his head started to swim.

  He staggered to the aisle and looked toward the rear. A glow emanated from there, where it should have been dark, a white glow like bare neon jabbing into his pupils and skewering them like rusted needles.

  Xavier shuffled stiffly, reluctantly.

  The music sent shivers down his back as he approached the rear of the stacks. The scratchy notes hissed in his ears, reaching down into the nerves of his spinal column with frozen fingers. His steps were slow, robotic, unwilling, yet he felt drawn to the eerily glowing rear of the room. Negotiating the farthest reaches of the stacks, his mind registered the fact that there were multiple light switches mounted on the stacks’ end panels.

  And they were all switched off.

  Unable to move forward or retreat, Xavier stood in the aisle for what seemed like minutes. The waltz continued, on and on, swirling above and below his hearing, careening into dissonance and then reestablishing its melody in rapid succession, almost as if the phonograph itself were being spun into some sort of Doppler effect.

  The screeching in his ears threatened to derail the calm he had worked so hard to maintain.

  Xavier ducked into the last aisle and scuttled sideways toward the glow, keeping shelves full of dusty books and encyclopedias between himself and whatever lay beyond the final range. In the gaps between books and shelves, the strange lighting came through almost like sunbeams, but he shook his head. Denied what he saw. It was too bizarre.

  Too crazy?

  He edged toward the middle of the range. Whatever lay

  beyond took up the corner of the room, not the center. He drew nearer to the glow, using the book rows as cover, letting his eyes slowly adjust focus.

  First he saw a head. Male, gray-haired. The man spoke in a low tone, in a foreign language. Xavier could not catch the words over the sound of the reeling phonograph, but the voice was threatening. Cruel.

  Since the man faced the back of the room, Xavier could not see his face, but gray cloth covered his broad back. His arms held something before his abdomen.

  Xavier drew in a gasping breath, suddenly aware of what he saw even as the details solidified through the spaces between the books.

  The music blared from an old-style gramophone. Xavier held his temples, where the sounds seemed to jab like rusty needles through his skin and right into his brain. The gray-haired man’s trousers had bunched around his feet, and his bared muscular buttocks seemed to clench and relax as his hands forced a kneeling woman to service him.

  The sound of her muffled cries cut through the elegant, torturous music.

  Xavier could not see her face, but her hands were white-knuckled fists extended toward his hiding place, one on either side of the gray-haired man’s buttocks. The man’s hands grasped long, stringy hair and ears and forced her jerking movements as he drove his erection ruthlessly into her gaping mouth.

  Xavier ceased breathing.

  He covered his ears. Her choking, crying, snot-dripping snivelling sounds rose and fell with each savage thrust of the older man’s loins, and they formed a hellish counterpoint to the lush notes of Strauss the elder.

  The gray-haired man kept up a low monotone of foreign words as he directed the action below, and though Xavier felt disgust at watching, he could not tear his eyes away. The music and choking threatened to overwhelm him, but s
till he watched.

  He knew his duty was to exit the library and report this … this criminal act as soon as possible, but there was his job and his status to worry about. What could happen to a whistleblower in a place like this? Who was the gray-haired man? Was the woman an inmate? A medical attendant? A visitor? At least the attacker wasn’t Fedderman or Kohner, but that was all Xavier could say for certain.

  The gray-haired man’s voice rose and his words flowed more gutturally as he increased the tempo of his movements and then he groaned aloud a half-dozen times and Xavier flinched as he heard the woman gag wetly, her mouth violated now by the man’s orgasm.

  Finally the man lurched a step backward, pulling himself from her bruised face, and Xavier caught a glimpse of her features for a moment, her cheeks and chin glazed with thin strings of semen, her eyes watery where tears had tracked down her jaw and neck. Then she doubled over and spit, her coughing turning to violent vomiting over the stained linoleum near his feet.

  “Verdammte Sklavin!” he thundered, hand raised to strike

  her, but instead he cuffed the side of her head, sending her sprawling onto the soiled floor.

  Xavier felt himself standing on his toes. What should he do? But then the man hitched up his pants and Xavier saw that a holstered pistol hung on the slick leather belt.

  Xavier resolved to keep quiet, hoping the man would leave.

  Then a faraway bell rang once, twice.

  The counter!

  Sweat broke out on Xavier’s brow. If he returned to the library desk, the man would become aware of him.

  He turned back as the bell rang again, and there was no one beneath the skylights.

  The man and the woman had disappeared.

  Xavier stuffed his fingers into his mouth and moaned.