by Brian Hodge
The only way to get to the bottom of the air shaft at 2:30 in the morning was through the bathroom window.
There was no time to wait until sunrise and visit a hardware store in search of do-it-yourself fire escape ladder. By morning, Bauhaus would know I was still loose, and by lunchtime he'd set a better trap into motion.
Likewise, I couldn't go downstairs and start rapping on doors to see if I could crawl through on a lower floor. As far as I knew, the building had no vacancies, and even knocking on an empty apartment door might rouse the curious.
I thought instantly of Freddy the super.
He was not in residence here; I think it was too clean for him. But he maintained a seedy office in the basement near the laundry room. I'd signed a bullshit lease down there. Nobody used the laundry room now; it was like the inside of a glacier, locked solid with ice at the terminus of a frozen tunnel. I recalled a circular power saw that had been sitting on Freddy's desk. If there were power tools among the junk and salvage ferreted away down there, maybe there was something I could use as a rope. Or maybe Freddy had a secret hatch leading into the shaft.
I shrugged into my fatigue jacket, patting the side pocket to make sure my roll of duct tape was still there (Trust me: Nobody in the dope trade lacks duct tape; it has a million uses). The only building noises at this time of night on a weekday were half-hearted–the after-bar-hours domestic punch-outs, TV noise from behind triple-locked doors, the occasional burglary in progress.
I made a crosshatch pattern of tape on the window of Freddy's office door, then planted my elbow sharply into the X, dead center. The tape web sagged quietly into my grasp, laden with fractured glass. In seconds I was in.
Three minutes later, I was out, carrying two figure-eight coils of heavy-duty electrical extension cord, one 25-foot length, and a 50-footer with plugmold outlets every ten feet. Both were sheathed in that groove-textured, bright orange insulation that made the wire more durable and bulked it out to a diameter of about half an inch. It was the strongest, most practical stuff I could find for my needs down in Freddy's fetid garbage dump lair.
After ditching the fifty-footer in my room, I tied one end of the shorter cord to the banister and unreeled it down into the rectangular void separating the stairwells. It uncoiled in snaky twists and turns. I went down two flights, light-footedly so as to keep my business to myself, wound the cord double around my right forearm, and performed a slow pull-up. The anchor banister creaked like the front door of a haunted house (I thought of my missing ghost), the cord went taut and arrow-straight, and my feet met the risers again. I grabbed above the slack and repeated, counting-off slowly to thirty while I dangled there. The cord did not stretch under my 155 pounds. I wiggled around and the only length I gained was due to the insulation taking a firmer bite on the rail, tightening. I stopped before the goddamned banister could come crashing down on me in splinters and chaos. I felt I could trust this stuff to a two-way climb. As if I had a choice.
Back in my room, I knotted the cords together and tied large, pretzel-shaped climbing loops every five feet. I traded my track shoes for a pair of steel-toed, gum-soled boots Drea had advised me to get for hoofing around in the snow. Before pounding my bedroom window open again, I slipped on a pair of yellow leather trucker's gloves (I'd finally learned my lesson after bruising the heel of my hand). It took a bit more violence than usual to chock the window up all the way, and when I'd forced the cramped access full open, I snugged the glove-pulls around my wrists, for climbing.
I peered down into the black nothingness; it was the first time I'd been able to fit my head and shoulders all the way out. Darkness swallowed my breath vapor two feet beyond my nose. I wanted a backup light, in case I did something stupid, like drop my nightstick flashlight into the water I knew was waiting below. I settled on stuffing one of the Army coat's big tub pockets with candles and wooden matches. I secured the baton light to one of my belt loops by threading a shoelace through the ring on its butt. Just call me Tenseng Norkhay.
The eagle-claw feet of the bathtub were permanently bolted to the decaying floor tiles, and the tub was heavy and immovable enough to provide a solid, reliable tie-off. I choke-knotted the cord around the closest foot and fed my line out the window a few feet at a time. A cockroach, irate at my intrusion on his under-the-tub domain, decided to make a run for it and I pulped him into the treads of my boot as soon as he skittered into the light.
It was five minutes to three in the morning. With luck, my presence in this dump would be history by four. And now it was time to find out just how far down the cord reached.
I cinched the waist drawstring of the fatigue coat tight, zipping and buttoning the front flap. It was going to be chilly as well as damp in the shaft. I turned up the collar and sealed it with the Velcro straps.
Then I stepped up onto the far lip of the tub, put my right leg out the window, and backed out into the air shaft.
Heights don't scare me. The dark doesn't scare me. The close press of the shaft is no threat, because I know it's an illusion, and I'm not a claustrophobe. This was going to be rather like urban caving, and part of me thrilled to the fact I was capable of such extreme lengths.
Going down would be the easy part. My biceps and the extensor muscles of my forearms were up to the work. I tipped outward, braced my toes against the waffled metal, eased my weight backward on the line. And slipped.
Five feet of cord skinned through my hands before I fisted leather around rubber and lurched to a lung-compressing halt. Momentum banged my face against the corrugated steel, scattering shock lightning across my inner eyelids. My heart totally freaked, punching blood furiously through my brain along with an assortment of nasty thoughts on my own abrupt termination, like defective cars smashing together in a freeway pile-up. I hung. I pendulumed. The orange insulation squeaked against the windowsill, dropping paint flakes into my hair like chaff. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and tried to orient by feel.
The rust-browned steel mashing and scraping my ear was uniformly moistened with some kind of slime–probably snowmelt and particulate dirt, though it seemed more slippery than plain water. If I was going to play Batman and live, I'd have to step more cautiously. I was going to lose time by being careful. I reestablished my footholds, toeing-in for a solid friction contact with the metal beneath the light coat of lubrication before belaying my full weight backward onto the line again.
My breathing equalized. Calm. Calm. I was okay. I opened my eyes. I saw I had stopped eight or nine feet below the pale, yellowish light shining out of my bathroom window. In the light, in silhouette, was somebody's head, looking down toward me.
"What the hell are you doing hanging around down there, boy?"
Fear lanced through my lungs, chased by impotent anger. It was Bauhaus. The son of a bitch bastard had come to check up on his foiled bust.
I hung silent. What the fuck could I say?
"Got a little present for you," he went on, as though I was sitting in my easy chair, in the light, and not starting to sweat about doing a Chiquita. "It's a gift from your old boss, Emilio–who don't like people doing sneakery behind his back." A musical clinking noise echoed coldly in the shaft. It was a sound I recognized far too readily, from the past hassles of my life. Bauhaus had just flicked open a Manila Folder–one of those knives with the hinged and ventilated brass handles.
He was out of my reach by two body lengths.
"It took longer to finish off Rosie in this place than we thought," he said. "But tonight you finally get your turn."
"What about Rosie?" I husked, my desperation starting to boil over in an unseemly, messy fashion. "Rosie's here?"
"Not no more, boy." Bauhaus grinned. I think. I couldn't really tell in the useless light. Then he sliced through my extension cord. That part I didn't have to see.
The tension on the line vanished. Air rushed past my head, the steel wall tilted madly away, and I fell like a meteor with the wire still fisted up in both hands. My mouth
was wide open. I did a complete backward somersault before hitting the bottom of the shaft at full speed. Splat.
It was not a nightmare. When I cracked my eyes open, I knew I was not laying in bed. Bed was warm.
Cold. Then pain, ramming up to full volume, maxing-out my consciousness. Then wetness, edged with ice. Blunted Perception of my head split open and crammed full of permafrost and spiders and razor cubes of glass. Too much to fit, head bursting, hard, sharp things jammed into my back, pushing me out of shape. Movement a joke. Darkness hurts eyes.
I think something is broken, then I die. Many somethings.
The well-bottom acoustics woke me the second time. The tendons and ligaments tying my head to my trunk felt as if some sadistic surgeon had torn them out, salted and fried them until they shriveled, then stuffed them back in the wrong order and sutured up the entry cut with a staple gun. All around me was the suffocating, empty blackness, no illusion now, and the sound of dripping gunk.
My pulverized right arm was a dully pulsing firebrand of junk. It did not respond to my brain's commands–it was a total disconnect. It hardly hurt at all.
Left-handed, I pawed clumsily for my flashlight, and found the baton bent into a crooked U-shape around my shattered ribs. Useless. My internal organs felt like a bagful of flattened aluminum cans. It seemed to take an hour of darkness to dig out one of my candles, and I lost a handful of matches when a spasm of pain shuddered the shit out of me without warning. I thought of my intestines blowing on impact and loading my pants. I couldn't tell anything past wave after wave of stupefying pain, and when I dropped the matches I cried.
Finally, later, I scratched one alight and held it in my teeth while fishing out a candle stub. My pupils recoiled from the sharp dazzle. More new pain. I burnt my lips, top and bottom. But I did it.
I was propped on my back, facing up, submerged from the navel down in two feet of murky, brown bilge water filling a concrete trough afloat with orts of crap that had all festered to unrecognizability. A loop of extension cord lay curled across my chest. I was tilted at about a thirty-degree angle on top of something like a big packing crate, which had broken my fall and I think my spine. I couldn't feel either of my legs–just blistering green pain starting at asshole level and scorching up through the ceiling of my skull. I thought of Drea, entwining her legs around me. I cried again.
A broad spear of split wood slatting jutted up through the torn right sleeve of my jacket. I could see the fresher-colored wood inside the break. It had dried blood on it. I had been tuned out for quite awhile. I was gone. Emilio's long arm had erased me the way I'd squished that poor fucking roach. I felt like a bug under a dropped safe.
On the opposite side of the shaft, just above the waterline, was what might have been a subbasement window at one time. Now it was blocked up with a riveted steel shutter. Maybe it was Freddy's private entrance. Maybe he crawled down here to geek pigeons or sodomize pre-schoolers.
No rats. No dead cats.
It was pretty clear that any attempt to locomote would turn me facedown into the slime, and I didn't hanker to die that way, thanks. I watched my candle stub burn. After the two additional ones in my left pocket, my light was finito.
Bobbing next to my dead right arm I saw my miniature life raft of nose candy. It was seaworthy, after all. I think my heart gave a thump of hope, but it felt like something else bursting wetly inside me. I gagged up bright red froth.
My body was clocking out and I had to do something.
Gently, I nudged the circlet of wire off my chest to lasso my buoyant package and tow it closer. Every motion caused a dizzying jolt of pain, or threatened to plummet me back into blackout land. I could have manipulated it for a painstaking hour or two, I don't know, but ultimately I captured it and pulled it up one-handed. It weighed two thousand pounds, easy. I tugged down the zipper on my coat and stuffed the parcel where it could not fall back into the water, then I touched the candle flame to an upper corner and watched the four layers of plastic brown and separate, yawning open like a bloodless wound. I stationed the candle on the juncture of zipper teeth, and scooped up a handful of blow, enough to fill Drea's pinky vial to the brim a hundred times. I cupped it into my face and respirated as much as I could before winking out. I needed a clear sensorium.
… gotta make sure you don't inhale none…
Rosie's voice was only in my head as I slid back from Oz. I made a noise that echoed in the vertical tunnel, a life-asserting grunt of pitiful weakness. It was all I could muster.
My candle had abandoned its post, rolled off and gone under. But like I said, the dark doesn't scare me. So what was I afraid of? I feared getting busted, either by iguana-eyed, trigger-happy cops, or by falling four stories and becoming very broken. I'm afraid of betrayal. Of getting shafted, ho, ho, ho.
I used my left hand to feel around beneath the surface for my candle stub. It was easier than trying to wrestle out a fresh one. I came up with several shards of busted wood so waterlogged that they sank as soon as I dropped them back. Then my fingers closed around something long and round, with a knoblike bump at one end, too smooth to be another chunk of the crate I'd obliterated with my body. It was hard and light; I laid it across my chest and struck a new match. It was a porous and glistening bone. An ulna–the longer of the two crossed forearm bones. Once upon a time the bump on the end had been somebody's elbow. I stopped breathing.
"Owww–shit!" The match that had just blackened my fingertips fell and hissed out in the thick brown water. The darkness gushed back in and afterimages of the bone danced on the air. It was the sick ochre color of diseased eyes, and had tough little strings of meat still clinging to it. I slammed my eyes shut and could still see it, hovering, dissolving to yellow motes at the edges; when I opened them again there was only the plunging, time-elongating void… and an ugly catalogue of my friend Rosie's possible fates.
The water moved. It rolled heavily up toward my face, floating the bone free and then receding in a massy, tidal movement, the way a full bathtub shifts when you climb in.
Something big had just changed position in the sump at the far end of the shaft. The deep end of the pool.
I tried to butt past my own pain, and dug for more matches, more light, fast, my breath whimpering out. All I could think of was Rosie, trapped down here with something that made him into a skeleton. Something big.
He might drift in and out of consciousness, moaning. Making weak, pallid sounds nobody could really hear, because nobody paid attention that close. Nobody, at least, who wasn't using a controlled substance to sharpen his senses.
The match sputtered as I touched it to the wick of the second candle. The water was still rippling, and now I could see that the metal shutter across from me was halfway open. It looked like a way out. Screw it, I thought, sudden fear engulfing me to the nostrils and encouraging me to be reckless. My imagination was huffing and straining and doing a great job of making me crazy. But if I couldn't haul my dead ass over there on one arm through a measly two feet of sewage, then I didn't deserve to get out, did I?
I perched my candle on the bloodstained spur of wood. And did it.
I figured my legs would be dead weight, more or less like my pulped arm. I figured wrong. Below the knees I didn't have legs anymore. When I sloshed over sideways to kiss the filthy water, one of them broke the surface and I saw that my thigh ended in a coagulate stump.
The kilo bag wormed from my coat, splashed, and sank. White paste corkscrewed around on the oily surface of the water, like powdered creamer resolving into coffee.
In the flickering candlelight, I hefted my body onto my good arm and looked up into a bullet-shaped, eyeless head that had nosed out of the water between me and the hatchway. It was the girth of a Navy torpedo, and so was the triangular, turd-colored body that uncoiled behind it and sent greasy waves slopping against the walls of the shaft. The shadows lurched as the water lapped against the spur of wood, then disappeared altogether as the candle tumbled and s
plashed.
Too many drugs scampered around in my head too many like a scorpion stinging itself to death in mad circles too many fucking drugs, Cruz!
I screamed for help in the wet darkness then, or tried to scream, coughing up mushy chunks of my lungs barely flavored with what was left of my voice. That's when the blunt face darted in to bite me. Twice. Needle punctures stung me in the kidneys. I yelled as best I could as my hand skidded in the muck, submerging my face. I pushed back up immediately…and then noticed I could barely feel my left arm, my good arm, anymore. All my pain started to blot away behind a pleasing, Novocain numbness that spread gently up toward my eyes to cloud them over.
It could only eat a little bit at a time. I understood that, yeah.
Far above me, miles overhead, a tiny yellow rectangle broke the total blackness as someone hammered up their bedroom window. I tried to shout again, but the numbness caressed my larynx and all that came out was a purring noise. A moan.
"Shut the fuck up!" someone shouted, and the window banged shut again, bringing the real world to an ugly end. None of this was happening, not really, nobody would be that rude because I try not to be a bad guy, you know what I mean?
Maybe it was like the spiders, an illusion. Maybe, if I became the ghost now, I'd be following Rosie's lead and everything would get back to normal again.
The cool water closed over my face so I could not see or hear any more. Normal. The sliding, sinuous weight embraced me. I think I smiled.
Author's Note:
For the record, this story was the first piece of short fiction I completed after the fanfare garnered by "Red Light," and is the genesis of my second novel, which became the most notorious and elusive horror novel of 1990, a source of no small perverse pride for me. The principle difference is that the story version is told via Cruz in the first person, and its events cover space in the novel ranging from Chapter Three to about mid-book. I've spoiled no surprises by including it here, just in case you were wondering.