The Axeman Cometh

by John Farris

  The squeaky-wheeled grocery cart is on an incline now. They're going down. Torchlight revealing nothing but the narrow plywood tunnel. Someone has spray painted what look like political slogans in a middle-European language. Why here? Don thinks of men in cloth caps huddled, smoking tobacco harsh enough to kill the tastebuds, plotting firebombings. The woman sings in a wistfully jocular voice, "Ain't misbehavin'." She knows all the words. Tears come to Don's eyes. He brushes them away, still holding that fool sword. Their footsteps sound more and more hollow. The tunnel ends.

  A damp place, paint peeling from the walls, more huge bolted-together iron pipes feeding out of it than from the chambers of a heart.

  "That way," she says, and Papa walks around her with the torch to better examine a series of rusted iron steps going from platform to platform up into the dark of a shaft through which rain comes down intermittently, revealed in silvery streams.

  "Why, daughter?"

  "It takes you past noddie country, if you know how to be quick and careful. Otherwise, you're in the thick of them. You'll have a sporting chance, anyhow. Well, I'm on my way! Don't look for me back here any time soon. First it's the zoo, then I plan to be unstinting in my efforts to funeralize the late Mr. Hamilton."

  Papa takes off the slouch hat of his sou'wester and grins widely.

  "Our thanks to you, daughter."

  He lights her way back to the lip of the tunnel. Don is already on the stairs, looking up, quivering, impatient. "Come on!" This time he leads the way, footsteps clanging, as Papa follows with the torch.

  "Look out for surprises," the old hunter says, grunting; they both find it a chore going up, straight up, on the treacherous iron stairs. The light is barely adequate. Rain drips on their heads.

  They hear screams, squeals, commotion.

  "That's—something else, isn't it?" Don says, breathing hard, a stitch in his side.

  "Sounds like an ordinary old porker to me. Probably more than one."

  "What—next?"

  "Third floor. Keep moving."

  "I don't know why—haven't kept up at the gym. Lifetime—member. Shouldn't—neglect myself."

  Papa is right behind him, the remains of the torch flaking scraps of hot charred paper at Don's neckline.

  "Running out of light. Another minute or two. Speed it up, Carnes."

  "I'm not quitting. Your old man—in the boat. With his fish. Wouldn't give up—his fish. That's me. I'm not—giving up Shannon."

  "Fourth floor"

  "Listen—"

  "Don't stop."

  "But I heard—I thought I heard—"

  "Yes. The elevator. Just the other side of the stairwell. Go."

  Fifth floor.

  "I know. I smell it too."

  "Fire!"

  "It's either a riot, or a feast. Maybe both. A few more steps, Carnes."

  "God—I'm going to pass out."

  His eyes are fixed on the door at the landing a few steps away. Then he can't see it any more as he stumbles, slowly lifting a cramped leg. Don thinks, melodramatically, that he is losing consciousness. But it is only the torch, sputtering to a finish in Papa's fist. He hears, beyond a thickness of concrete wall, a rusty creaking, as if the elevator is slipping slowly down within its shaft. He drags himself up the remaining steps and falls against the metal door. Papa hauls him to his feet and out of the way.

  "Ready?"

  "Few seconds—catch my breath." Don seizes the cramped muscle below his knee, kneading it desperately. Papa is breathing hard too. Hell of a climb, truly. But they've done it. Too late, perhaps; the elevator may be getting away from them.

  "Inside," Papa urges him.

  "No light. What—will we do now?"

  "Plenty of light," Papa says, cracking the door open. He is right. They are assaulted by howlings, a strong gust of heat and smoke.

  "It's those fornicating noddies. They've set the whole sixth floor on fire."

  Don, hopscotching, unable to put weight on his still-cramped right leg, goes in after Papa. The sixth floor contains the offices of the Knightsbridge Publishing Company, but they are a shambles. Erect shards of glass partitions appear blood-red in the grungy smoke. Fires blaze in half a dozen containers of the sort used by cleanup crews—large metal cannisters on wheels. Sprinklers have come on in one quadrant of the floor. There are animals everywhere, creatures in the clouded air, haphazard in flight or brawling viciously. Common barnyard pigs. Other, fanciful species Don couldn't name even if he'd had the collected works of Shannon Hill with him for reference. The din is amazing. Rap music from a jam box. Musical horns. Alarm bells. Shrieks of terror and laughter. The computerized scream they've been hearing all through the building.

  But they no longer hear the furious trumpet of the bright-blue elephant, which is lying massively and motionless on its side twenty feet away in front of the battered, partly open elevator doors.

  "Elefunk!" Don says, tearful in the smoke.

  "Do you have money?"

  Noddies. A dozen of them, men and women, although Don has to look twice to recognize the sex differential. Men with fervid lips and a certain lean beauty, women who need to shave. They are all thin, tattooed, by one sort of needle or another, luminous as polluted fish except for the spokesman, who is Puerto Rican or West Indian or something, almost a head taller than others in his druggy band. Gold in his teeth and earlobes, hair in bronzy ringlets down to his shoulders. He's wearing a silver lamé jacket and toreador pants. They advance slowly out of the smoke. A third of them with the shakes and mumbles. No threat. But the rest, including the spokesman, are crudely armed, with jagged fluorescent tubes, scissors, the black blade from a paper cutter.

  "Pleeeezzze, some moneys? We doan hurt you. Very much."

  "We don't have time for this," Papa warns unnecessarily. "Give them money."

  Don has his wallet out. There's not much left. Papa takes the cash from him and flings it into the superheated air. The noddies fall all over themselves and the floor, scrambling for wadded bills, as Papa and Don try to edge by them to the elevator.

  "Six dollars? Seven? Thass all?" The spokesman rises up, glaring, snatching one of the dollars from the outstretched hand of a female, who whines at him. He knocks her flat with the back of his hand and brandishes his jagged fluorescent tube. "How much smack will that buy? Huh? You looking like a rich mans to me. Give me more, or I will reep your fockeeng heart out."

  "I don't have any more. Here. See?" Don shows him his wallet. "Empty."

  "You will be empty in the cabeza. I am going to eat your fockeeng brains after I have reep out your fockeeng heart."

  Having nothing else in his favor, Don responds by lifting the toy sword. Most of them guffaw at this little joke, except for one noddie, on all fours, who bites him in the ankle like a berserk terrier. He has no teeth, but his gums are cast iron. Don shakes him off anxiously and backs away. He and Papa hear, despite the uproar, the sound of the descending elevator.

  "Noooo!" Don wails. But the end of the fluorescent tube is inches from his face, slowly forcing him to the wall and away from the elevator doors.

  "Papa! God's sake, do something before this maniac—"

  Papa frowns, then puts two fingers between his teeth and whistles as loudly as if he's calling home.

  One of Elefunk's leafy ears gives a twitch; her trunk moves like a viper in a basket, curling upward into the black smoke. The noddie who has been leaning against Elefunk's flank feels the tremoring in the large body and looks around slowly.

  "Salvador—"

  "Shut the fock up, man; I got work to do here."

  Don dodges a feint toward his face. Papa whistles again. The noddie with the paper-cutter blade makes an ill-advised move from the side. Papa falls into a boxer's stance and begins to weave and bob. Then his right hand flicks out, once, twice, speed and power like the old days when he was heavyweight champ of the literary world; and the noddie goes spinning to the floor with a brightly tomatoed nose.

  Don is
not so quick. The broken tube in Salvador's hand takes a small bite out of his cheek. Don loses his balance and stumbles against Papa.

  "Damn it, Carnes!"

  "Sorry."

  The noddies are circling now, little pinpricks of eyes, clothes that were never new. Pressing in. More broken tubes and paper spikes, some with author's letters still attached, are thrust at them; Don covers his head and face with both arms as an ear is savaged.

  Behind the noddies, Elefunk rises with a certain exhausted majesty, trumpeting like the solo part in a marching hymn. She stands, perhaps, eight feet at the shoulder. Small for an elephant, but not in this place. She is so wonderfully blue she is almost iridescent: like the Gulf Stream, to Papa's artistic eye, on a hot, calm, cloudless afternoon off Bimini. Her head is split above one eye from the battering of the elevator doors that put her down in the first place; blood trickles from the swollen eye. The other eye is so sad you want to cry with her.

  "Give it to them, Beauty! We have an elevator to catch!"

  The trunk uncurls and seizes a would-be runaway, stopping him in midstride, lifting him straight and true right through a ceiling panel of acoustical tile, leaving him up there in a welter of plumbing and ductwork with only his skinny, writhing legs visible. Another noddie is lashed across the butt and double-somersaults over the floor into the thickest cloud of smoke. Blood rolls down one side of Elefunk's face, tears down the other. Papa cheers, then seizes the distracted Salvador by the lapels of his clinquant jacket and begins bumping him with his burly chest, back and back until the trunk of the elephant comes snaking down over Salvador's shoulder.

  "All yours, Beauty."

  Salvador is lifted with a shriek and held suspended for a few moments while Elefunk makes a decision about him. Then she plods across the floor to where a cannister is ablaze and drops him butt-first into it. He fits like a cork in a bottle. He screams and screams.

  "The fire will die from lack of oxygen," Papa says. "But his balls should be well-roasted by then."

  "The elevator, Papa!"

  "I know. Elefunk, help us!"

  The blue elephant, weeping buckets, returns, her large head rolling unsteadily.

  "The doors," Papa says, lifting one floppy ear to speak directly and without interference. Elefunk blinks her good but tearful eye. She has long, curly lashes.

  "For Shannon," Don says passionately.

  The thick metal clamshell doors, heavily dented by Elefunk's battering, are inches apart. Blackness beyond. Elefunk raises her trunk and inserts it into the opening. She trembles. Then she brings all of her strength to bear on the lower door, forcing it down an inch, another inch.

  "Oh, Beauty," Papa says sympathetically, her ear still in his hand. "Thou art Magnificence. Thou art truly the Great One of all tembu. I celebrate thy Strength and Spirit. There is no greater Beast. You will do this thing. You are the best of the many brave creatures of the forest and plains. God knew what he was doing when he made you. A little farther, please. He made many with cunning and heart, but only noble temba has a soul."

  With a shudder and roar the big door slams down.

  "Carnes! Hop aboard!"

  "Papa, it's not there! The elevator's not—"

  "I know that! I hear it moving. It's down there in the shaft, you have to jump!"

  "Oh, now, wait a—"

  "Jump!"

  "I—"

  Something smooth and hard like the fleshy nozzle of a fire hose thumps him solidly in the small of the back and Don goes flying out into the gusty cold void of the elevator shaft, somehow not tumbling, just falling feet first for what seems twice the time for a death sentence. In reality only a couple of seconds pass before he lands, hard but on his feet, on the roof of the slowly descending elevator.

  Don scrambles between greasy vibrant cables, looking back and up as Papa jumps and Elefunk trumpets a farewell. Safe for the moment, Don thinks bitterly of himself, Didn't have the nerve. As usual. Well, shit. When are you going to get it together? Because the noddies were nothing but feckless clowns compared to what he must soon face: the Axeman himself. And how long can he count on Papa's courage and resourcefulness to back him up?

  Still holding on to that stupid toy sword. Almost like a pacifier. He looks at Papa in the meager light from the sixth floor, now more than twenty feet above their heads.

  "What—what do we do now?" Hates himself for having to ask. Use your canoodle, Carnes. He has an inspiration before the winded Papa can reply.

  "There must be a hatch cover; some sort of emergency exit from the—"

  The elevator is moving perceptibly faster.

  "Found it!"

  The hatch is about three feet square. But he can't locate a handle, and around the edges there is grease and grime, the accumulation of decades, hard as old caulking. He would need a pry bar to get the cover off. He looks up in frustration and fear, a trickle of blood on one cheek.

  "Papa, I—"

  Papa's eyes look yellow in the dark shaft. He stares unwinkingly at Don.

  "Use the sword."

  "It's a toy!"

  The elevator is gathering speed; Don has to swallow his heart, rude knocking thing, and swallow it again like a wet apple from a tub. He looks down, then jabs sharply with what is left of the point of the plaything sword to demonstrate his feelings of futility. And somehow he finds a soft spot, the blade slips in between the hatch cover and the elevator roof. He bears down reflexively on the handle of the sword and feels the hatch move up.

  Papa reaches over with both hands and hurls the cumbersome hatch cover away. "Go!"

  Don thinks, Axeman. It's enough to fry the roots of his hair. And he thinks, Shannon. So this it. His moment of truth. He can feel Papa's breath on him, as steamy and intimidating as a bull's breath. He looks down into the elevator for a long moment, but he can't see anything. He swings his feet into the hole, takes a deep breath, lets it out in a full-throated shriek of bravado as he drops.

  The elevator, when Don hits the floor below, seems to go into free fall. Don rolls

  over twice, holding the toy sword, until he comes up against a wall. He is still screaming like an unblooded soldier thrust into battle, adrenaline a bombshell in the brain, a fiery tonic for the survival instinct. He expects the worst—an ax blade flashing swiftly out of the dark, beheading stroke—but is not paralyzed by his expectations. He thrashes everywhere around him with the silly toy in his hand (yet there is weight and a graceful balance to it he has not been aware of before), until Papa comes thumping down in oilskins to join him.

  "Watch it, Carnes! You almost took my arm off."

  "With this?" Don says incredulously. He lowers the sword, breathing deeply, eyes big as doorknobs as he strains to see. The elevator, picking up more speed, is rumbling hell-bent in the shaft, and that's not the worst thing Don is aware of in these moments of developing calamity.

  "Shan! Shannon! Oh God! Papa—she isn't here!"

  "I know that."

  "We're going to crash!"

  "That also is a matter that has not escaped my attention," Papa says, picking himself up off the floor and dusting his knees.

  "You don't have to worry! You can go back to wherever the hell it is you came from! But what's going to happen to me?"

  "You've handled yourself pretty well up to now. You'll be able to handle that too."

  The elevator is buffeted as it falls, there is a high keening sound and some metallic snappings and poppings as if tough cable is parting. A wild, nasty screech of metal wheels on rails. Don senses demolition, jagged edges of shattered floor thrust smoking through all the vital organs of his body; he cups one hand over his testicles, forlornly, and closes his eyes.

  As if from a sudden change of direction, an almost right-angle turn at an unbelievable speed, he is lifted from his feet and thrown weightlessly but violently from one side of the elevator to the other. His forehead smacks the wall, and as he rebounds with a hard grunt of pain all motion ceases except for a gentle rocking that
nevertheless upsets his equilibrium and makes him nauseous.

  "Papa," he mutters thickly, "what happened?" His feet cross and he falls.

  Lying there face-up and gagging a little on the bitterness in his throat, he feels the elevator picking up speed again, and he is almost dead certain they are now going sideways. He is also too weak and shocked to lift a finger. He has broken out in a cold sweat. Their speed is tremendous, but Don hears few sounds: the light creakings of the floor beneath him and, more distantly, far beyond the elevator walls, a surging wind or, perhaps, surf toiling endlessly on a beach. Pleasant. He feels no fear. He cannot remember what fear is like. Is death so uncomplicated? Some warmth creeps up from his feet as if he is a saint at a stake. He closes his eyes. He is not aware of the moment when the elevator comes to a full stop.

  But the opening of the doors jolts him; he sits upright in a flood of daylight.

  "My God! Where—?"

  Someone crosses between him and the light. That familiar burly figure, the turtleneck sweater and white beard shapely as a petrel's breast.

  "It ain't Grover's Corners."

  The elevator shudders delicately, like a great box kite.

  "Better get out of here. We're running late. Probably missed the wedding."

  Don rises slowly. Momentary dizziness. The wedding again? Something heavy in his right hand. He looks at it in the welcome flood of light. It's only the toy sword with the chewed blade. But different, somehow. Certainly a lot heavier. He feels good, holding it. Capable and almost confident.

  "Where's Shannon?"

  "Suppose we find that out."

  Shielding his sensitive eyes with the other hand, Don walks out of the elevator onto solid ground. He assumes. He can't see all the way to his feet. There's a wind blowing, hard; he is buffeted. The air around him seems made up equally of light and fog. Zero visibility. And the barometer must be low, wherever this is: he can feel storm pressure on his skin.

  "What—uh, which way—?" Papa, a few feet from him, has already lost dimension, is dissolving. This is hard on Don's newfound confidence.

  "Just keep up."