Trolley No. 1852

by Edward Lee

  Erwin spread out his hands. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. Sometimes I think it must be near Old Greenwich and other times it seems it must be Lower East. It’s the trolley that takes us, see—maybe a ten, fifteen-minute trip, but the route…”

  “What about the route?” I insisted.

  “It’s all this way and that, and up and down, and through alleys I never seen before. It moves through these courtyards that look so old, and, and… Even a tunnel, where there’s no light at all. Gettin’ on by mistake one night’s how I even found out about the place.”

  “That’s very… strange,” I uttered.

  “Well like I first mentioned, it’s a strange place.” Suddenly he looked dreamy even in the smudged darkness. “The women, Mr. Phillips, it’s just one looker after the next, and they don’t wear nothin’ about the house, I ain’t kiddin’ ya.” His whisper grew heated. “And they do anything, and’ll have ya as many times as you can go.”

  “All, as you ensure, for nothing,” I reiterated.

  “For nary a red cent.”

  By now the proposition seemed farcical, but I simply refused to believe Erwin would lie so cockamamily. “In that case, I’d like very much to join you tonight.”

  He seemed to shudder. “I just feel so… guilty, Mr. Phillips—”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” I complained. “Guilty?”

  “It’s hard enough staying on a Godly course, and I do try, but sometimes… sometimes—” He shook his head in remorse. “It’s been more than six months since I’ve… well, you know…”

  Six MONTHS? I thought all too stridently, It’s been more than six YEARS for me!

  Erwin composed himself out of his conflicting sentiments. “I only do it when I have to, but I see I’ve brought you right along into it. Not only are my sins on my hands but your sins, too.”

  I was losing patience now with the fulcrum on which Erwin’s self-perceived “sin” teetered. But I needed him now. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Erwin. Nature, just the same as your god, is what made us men, with the natural proclivities of men, so don’t get yourself in a swiver. Now, when does the trolley come? Surely it’s not the B-Line—”

  “No, no. And it doesn’t come every night, but when it does” —he consulted his pocket-watch with a squint— “it would be very soon.” Another diverting pause cruxed his expression. “But that’s another thing ‘bout this place, Mr. Phillips, another strange thing, I mean.” He stared off into drab darkness. “Time.”

  “Time?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it”—he rubbed his brows—“but each and every time I been, it’s seemed like I been there for hours. I could get on with three or four different girls, too, and when I get out’a there I think it’s got to be noon at least… but then I look at my watch and it’s scarcely four-thirty in the morning or quarter till five.”

  I staved off a chuckle, for Erwin was permitting his oblique sense of abstraction to supervene the much more primal reality that he must not be possessed of much sexual endurance! Then again, how much endurance would I be capable of given the sheer infrequency of my own sexual experience? Laughably little, I suspected, for so long ago it was that’d I’d been married.

  Several more minutes passed, and my current hopes passed as well. The B-Line would be arriving shortly. “Drat,” I said. “It appears that tonight’s not our night, Mr. Erwin,” but no sooner had I spoken the words than Erwin turned with an enthused lurch…

  At the end of the street, like something first semi-tangible slowly materializing from the dark’s secret ether, a bulk shape began to form. Crackling sparks grew less dim (no doubt the sparks of electric transference from the ever-present power wires looping overhead), companioned by a faint and very ghostly circle of yellow light at the shape’s forward-most area which made me think of a dying cyclopean eye. The squeal of bearings caught my ears, then the grate of an air-break…

  Erwin uttered, “This is it.”

  The vehicle’s forward lamp shined so faint it scarcely served a purpose, but finally there came another surge of gas into the closest street-lamp, and this is when I got my first full glimpse.

  It was an older-style trolley, opened all around in a vestibuled fashion (in other words, lacking windows) and was of the antiquated twin-car, double-truck type whereas all city trolleys that I’d seen were single-carred. Flaking yellow paint, quite a murky yellow, covered all of the decrepit vehicle’s side panels.

  “This is most definitely not a city trolley,” I muttered to Erwin.

  “No, Mr. Phillips. It’s a private trolley. It’s not from the city transit system at all.”

  A private trolley…

  At the forward car’s head, I spied the motorman’s station, little more than a cubby; the capped motorman himself stood scarcely moving at the controller handle. In the drear, his face looked dead-pan, bereft of life; indeed, the darkness reduced his eyes and mouth to black slits amid a waxen pallor. Above the frame of his look-out, the car’s identification number could be seen in black-stencil letters: No. 1852.

  The vehicle squealed to a halt. Erwin, in an excitement that seemed touched by fear, grabbed my arm and urged, “The conductor’ll size you up ‘cos you’re new, but don’t worry. He’ll let you on since you’re with me.”

  “Size me up?” I had to question.

  “They don’t let ruffians on.”

  “Oh,” but in a city aswarm with ruffians and every other manner of human flotsam, the policy was to be expected. “But who enforces order, should the conductor mistakenly allow some roysterers aboard?”

  “The motorman,” Erwin answered in a whisper tense with unpleasantness. “I seen it happen once. Hobos, all riled with liquor, jumped on and started a ruckus, but the ruckus didn’t last long.”

  “The motorman’s something of a tough customer, I take it.”

  Erwin looked troubled. “Let’s just say that them hobos are probably still in the hospital.”

  Oh, my, I thought.

  “Come on!”

  The overhead cable sparked and crackled. I followed Erwin up the sheet-metal steps of the first car, and in doing so, I noticed other silent riders sitting among the wooden cross-seats; however, the wee hour’s dimness reduced their faces to smears of shadow. The metal floor tapped at coming footfalls: the boots of the conductor, a short but sure-footed figure, who approached directly, eyed Erwin with a nod, and waved him aboard. “This here’s my friend,” Erwin softly informed. “Not a trouble-making bone in his body, I can vouch for it…”

  The conductor, like the driver, wore a regulation cap and heavy, brass-buttoned jacket as was the fashion. He stared at me, or seemed to, for the car’s irksome darkness forbade any details of his face, much in the same manner as the motorman. My skin crawled, however, in what I can only describe as a most abrupt accession of dread; for whatever unhealthful reason, I imagined I was being evaluated by either a mask of the most pallid parchment or the face of a dead man .

  The moment locked in stasis.

  “How do you do?” I bid with a bit of a stammer.

  The conductor waved me aboard, then returned with lugubrious steps back to the vicinity of the motorman’s station.

  Sparks burst overhead in a brilliant blossom, and then the trolley lurched once and commenced down the nearly lightless street.

  Erwin showed me the way down the aisle; carefully, we stepped over the heavy-iron coupling and passed into the rear car. “We’ve got to keep our voices down,” came his incessant whisper. “That’s why I brung us back here.” I could hardly object; we both took seats at the car’s rearmost section.

  As I sat, I stared astonished into the grim, nighted city. The trolley clattered along the rusted rails to traverse unknown streets of ballast-cobble and past cramped lay-bys of various municipal departments that seemed long out of service. Was it my suspicious fancy or did each successive street-lamp put out less and less illumination? Brick facades and lichen-encrusted stone walls pressed e
ver inward; at one point we crossed what I believe was Amsterdam Avenue but as we did so, the sinister car rose to a clamour as the motorman increased speed, almost as if to pass through the dimly peopled intersection with as much haste as the motor would allow. Along this dismal way, we stopped on several occasions along similarly unfamiliar and quite ruinous corners to pick up additional passengers. As each boarder stepped up, he was assayed by the conductor for what I could only guess were traits of “approval”: the smell of liquor on one’s breath, loose talk, and perhaps even a subjective air of rowdiness would, of course, be disqualifiers. But as each man was allowed to come aboard, I noted quite readily that all possessed likewise bodily characteristics. These were all men of brawn and muscle, wide-shouldered, pillar-legged men of a solid working caste, much like Erwin. The only oddity to be admitted thus far was myself; with shoulders stooped, frail-bodied, and but 146 pounds, I hardly bore any commonality with these strong, ox-necked young men. (As a child, my mother perpetually referred to me as her “little waxbean.” How complimentary…) But it was then the notion insinuated itself—in a manner I cannot explain by any substance—that the conductor was indeed “sizing up” potential visitors to the mysterious 1852 Club in hopes of selecting the most virile, the most sexually potent candidates. I couldn’t imagine what might cause me to make such a conjecture. Two or three times, however, thinner and less-fecund-looking chaps were turned away. So…

  Why on earth would a spindly-form such as myself be let aboard? Evidently the club held much stock in Mr. Erwin’s credulity.

  The car clattered onward for a time, then—

  We were swallowed into darkness.

  It was a musty, dripping tunnel we’d darted into, whose arched walls were eerily webbed by the faintest luminescent fungi. When I turned to look Erwin full in the face, I could make no trace of him. Ahead, in the forward car, did a passenger gasp in sudden startlement?

  “I told ya, Mr. Phillips. There be a tunnel or two.” He chuckled nervously. “Hope you’re not one to be afraid of the dark.”

  “I daresay even a man of the stoutest heart might be timid in darkness this complete,” said I, looking around but seeing essentially nothing save for the foxfire-like etchings. “This is a queer trek indeed.”

  “It’s worth it, though.” He tugged my sleeve just to give me a bearing. “Remember what I said—the women are lookers.”

  “Yes,” I grated.

  “Best-looking one of ‘em all is the madam—Miss Aheb—though she don’t, you know, turn a trick herself. I only seen her once but… her body… It’s enough to make a man bay at the moon.”

  A cruel trust on my part but I couldn’t help but rib my “Christian” friend about his continuing hypocrisy. “By perfect, I’m certain you mean that all that God creates is perfect and therefore exists in a totality of beauty, eh, Erwin? You couldn’t even remotely be founding your observation upon the venal sin of lust…”

  Erwin said nothing in response, until I assured him I was joking.

  “Very funny, Mr. Phillips.”

  I chuckled over several rude bumps in the rail. “But, excuse me, Erwin, did you say the ‘madam’ of the club goes by the name of Aheb?”

  “Yes, a furren name, I s’pose.”

  Furren? I pondered, then, Ah, he means foreign. “It’s actually Egyptian and…” I paused in the clattering dark. “Almost sinister…”

  I could sense him peering at me. “Sinister? You should see her, man. Ain’t nothin’ sinister about her. She’s beautiful.”

  “So you’ve said. It’s simply the name,” I related. “As you know, I was once a professor of history, but my most refined field of study was that of secret ancient mythologies. I’m referring to the mythological queen of a pre-dynastic Egyptian culture known as the Ahebites whose cryptic ruler was a notorious witch-priestess called Isimah el-Aheb. We’re talking circa 5000 B.C., Erwin, which pre-dates the first official hieroglyphs by over fifteen hundred years. The story of Aheb, though very obscure, was similar to the mythologies of ancient Greece—Homer’s Iliad, for instance, or the legends of Zeus and Poseidon—only rather than portraying the conquest of good over evil, we find quite the opposite—fictions, I mean, written either to entertain or to fabulise the inception of humankind.” I raised my finger in utter dark. “Ah, but there are always those who attest that certain fables aren’t fables at all, but fact.”

  This, of course, I in no way believed, but the mythology at large was one that had long held my interest. Whose interest it was not holding, however, was that of Erwin, who merely replied to my dissertation with an unemphatic “Oh, uh, really?”

  I needed to put the pedantry of my bygone university days behind me; after all, I was a man on his way to a whore-house. Common working folk such as Erwin would not be roused in the least by such an arcane mythos. It was merely curious, though, the name of this “madam”: Aheb. How could it not cause me to reflect upon those fascinating older-than-ancient myths which detailed the supernatural revel of the Ahebites and their sacrificial reverence to an immense commune of limbless gods hailed as the Pyramidiles? These hideous deities existed as but pallid hulks of flesh, never moving, only thinking, only perceiving. The Pyramidiles, yes. Their human agent upon the earth was the obscene sorceress Isimah el-Aheb who had enspelled her people to bow down to these revolting cosmic abominations, paying homage to their nether-dimensional bulk by way of enfrenzied orgies and ravenous blood-baths which in turn generated the psychical horror on which these gods so thrived; indeed, it was the carnally beauteous el-Aheb who orchestrated rampant earthly horror in veneration; and to whom the Pyramidiles had blasphemously blessed with the gift of immortality via the sickish mold-green tincture that was but one of their wicked secrets. To her also they’d whispered their arcane manner of writing: a form of gematria, the substitution of numbers for letters. Once learned of all the Pyramidiles’ harrowing secrets, el-Aheb ruled the ancient outlands, to slaughter, pillage, rape, and defile, all in the name of the Pyramidiles, who lived on realms not of this earth or even this solar system, but in the screaming upside-down crevices between space and time; indeed, the Pyramidiles, the Putrid-Flesh Gods; eyeless, brain-filled masses of otherworldly organa, each the size of a mountain and, suspiciously, the shape of a pyramid…

  What an intriguing and ultimately macabre old legend!

  With more iron clatter and a swoosh, the previously unrelieved darkness broke—much to my commendation—as Trolley No. 1852 at last exited the deleterious tunnel and now roved down more dim, tenement-lined streets. Looking behind me, I noted that the overhead power-cables were no longer in evidence, and we seemed to be traveling along railways so long out of use that their heavy wooden ledgers had gone to rot. I could only assume that batteries now provided the trolley its propulsion, for how else could this be without the connexion of the overhead electricity cables?

  “Almost there,” Erwin whispered.

  Through more stone archways the sullen car delved; archways in the most decrepit brick walls; block-rimmed maws agape and garlanded by sickly ivy. Next, we crept through a series of grotesque yet captivating courtyards of what could only be abandoned edifices, each bizarrely interconnected by narrower archways. This was the old city, no doubt, one of several urban nooks left to disrepair and rendered tenantless via the contagion of outside squalor and ruination; truly we were traveling amid the very bowels of New York. Grainy wedges of moonlight cast a feeble pallor over all as broken statues watched the trolley from neglected sconces and rats scurried about fieldstone tiles and garbage-filled fountain basins. But it was in one of these eldritch inner-courtyards that the trolley suddenly slowed, jostled, then squealed to a stop…

  I looked about, nearly at a loss for words. This courtyard stood in no less disintegration than the others: festooned by ivy, verminous with weeds. Rotten fabrics hung from the stone rails of second-, third-, and fourth-story verandas, while numerous once-fine marble statues stood armless, headless, and stained by lichens a
nd bird-waste.

  “What is this place, Erwin?” I whispered.

  “This is it,” he told me. “Don’t be fooled by how it looks outside; I think they do it on purpose.”

  I could only imagine he meant a deliberate subterfuge was at hand, to throw off suspicions of the uninvited, for who would think that any desirous activity could possibly take place behind so unkempt and dismal a facade?

  Erwin and I were the last in line as the passengers all stood up to file in utter silence off the car. When I happened a glance to my pocket-watch, I saw that it was 4:12 a.m. As the queue moved down the aisle, however, I took notice, first, of the trolley’s position; it had stopped mid-yard, yet the rusted tracks continued forward to disappear beneath a great iron-beamed and rivet-studded door set solidly within yet another wide stone arch. Was it the shifting moonlight or my strained imagination that made me believe I saw traces of an oily, ill-coloured mist leaking through the door’s seams? What I noticed next must’ve been still another trick of poor-light: my glimpse forward, past the slowly descending line of debarking passengers, threw my gaze onto the motionless form of the motorman, who remained in his piloting cubby, his broad back to us, and his hand on the vehicle’s controller handle—his hand, I say…

  My stomach knotted.

  His hand, though I only glimpsed it for a moment, appeared as no hand at all but a cluster of rather stout worms wrapped about the controller handle’s end. Just as disturbing as the morphology of the hand was its colour: a bloodless white splotched with ill-toned green…

  When a stiff chill passed, I realised it must either be dirtied utility gloves or some regrettable genetic malady.

  The line dwindled; before I stepped off, my gaze felt preternaturally summoned to my left. There I spied the capped conductor staring right at me through the mask-like deadpan facial expression…

  Gads!

  I deboarded in haste and hurried up to Erwin who was following the others in. A rotten, wood-plank sign hung upon the transom of worm-eaten but iron-strapped door. The letters on the sign appeared branded in char: 1852 Club.