Dark Gods

by T E. D Klein

  Already it had grown hot inside the room. I switched the lamp on and off, on and off, with that sense of incomprehension and resentment one feels when a familiar object, something that’s supposed to work, suddenly and mysteriously does not. Well, well, I thought, The Machine Stops. I went to the window, opened it, and peered into the darkness. There were no streetlights to be seen, and the sidewalk below me was almost invisible; it was as if I were looking down upon a courtyard or a river, though I could hear a babble of excited voices down there, voices and pounding feet and slamming doors. Buildings I could see a little better, and all of them looked dead, massive black monoliths against a black sky, with the moon just a sliver on the horizon. Across the water New Jersey was still lit, its brightness reflected in the Hudson, but here the only light came from the files of cars moving tentatively up Amsterdam and Broadway. In the glow of their headlights I could see faces at the windows of some of the other buildings, gazing out as I was, with varying degrees of wonder or curiosity or fear. From the street below came the sound of breaking glass.

  It roused my sense of urgency, that sound. I wasn’t worried about Karen—she’d get home okay—and no doubt old Pistachio, if he hadn’t left yet, would have the sense to sit tight till the lights came on again.

  But Grandfather was another story. For all I knew the old fool was trapped down there in a pitch-black laundry room without a single sound or ray of light to guide him. Perhaps he was unable to locate the door; perhaps he was terrified. I had to get down there to him. Feeling my way to the night table, I pocketed a book of matches from beside his pipe rack and moved slowly toward the hall.

  Outside I could hear the residents shouting to one another from their doorways, their voices querulous and frightened. “Frito!” they were shouting. “Where’s Frito?” Blindly I continued toward the stairs, inching my way across the polished floor. “Frito? Is that Frito?” an old lady called out as I passed. She sounded on the edge of panic. Immediately others up and down the hall took up the cry. “Frito, is it a blackout?” “Frito, do you have a flashlight?” “Frito, I want to call my son!”

  “For God’s sake, stop it!” I shouted. “I’m not Frito—see?” I lit a match in front of my face. It probably made me look like a cadaver. “Now just stay in your rooms and keep calm,” I said. “We’ll get the lights on for you as soon as we can.”

  I felt my way past the elevator, now useless, and went on until I’d reached the top of the stairs, where I lit another match. The first step lay just beneath my foot. Holding onto the metal railing, I started down.

  As a boy I’d been afraid of the dark—or, more specifically, of monsters. I knew they only inhabited the world of movies, but sometimes in the dark it would occur to me that I, too, might be performing, all unwittingly, in a movie, perhaps even in the dread role of victim. There were two things movie victims never did, at least (alas) in my day: they never swore, and they never uttered brand names. Knowing this, I’d hit upon an ingenious way to keep my courage up. Whenever I was forced to brave the darkness, whether in the cellar or the attic or even my own room, I’d chant the magic words “Fuck” and “Pepsi-Cola” and I knew that I’d be safe.

  Somehow, though, I doubted that these words—or any words, in any tongue—would still be so effective. Magic wasn’t what it used to be; I would simply have to put one foot in front of the other and take my chances.

  Echoes of voices floated up the stairwell—cries for assistance, for candles, for news. Others were calling out to friends. At each floor the cries would get louder, diminishing again as I passed on toward the next. While I descended I kept a tight grip on the railing, nervously feeling my way around the landings where the railing came to an end. The eighth floor disappeared behind me, and the seventh; I counted them off in my head. The sixth… The fifth… Passing the fourth floor, I saw a moving light on the stairway beneath and heard footsteps advancing upward. Then the light veered through a doorway and was lost from sight. One floor down I heard Calzone’s voice and saw a flashlight beam receding down the hall. “No, you can’t go nowhere,” he was shouting, “it’s blacked out all the way to Westchester. Con Ed says they’re working on it now. They’ll get it all fixed up before too long.” I hoped he was right.

  As I passed the second floor I began to hear a noise which, at the time, I couldn’t identify: a hollow, rhythmic, banging noise from down below, like someone hammering on a coffin. I couldn’t even tell where it was coming from, unless from the wall itself, for the hammering became louder as I continued my descent, reaching its loudest point almost midway between the two floors—after which, unlike the voices, it began growing fainter again. By the time I reached the first floor it was lost amid the noises from the street.

  They were having a festival out there, or a riot. I could hear shouts, laughter, and Latin music from some battery-driven tape deck. I also heard the shattering of glass, and what I first mistook for gunshots, but which I later realized were only firecrackers left over from the Fourth. Despite the clamor outside, the lobby wore an air of desolation, like an abandoned palace in time of war. As I rounded the stairs I caught a glimpse of its high, mirrored wall and, in it, dim reflections of the rubber plants, the mantelpiece, the sagging, empty chairs. The room was illuminated by a lantern that flickered in the alcove in front. Nearby stood the new security guard, talking to a group of shadowy figures in the doorway. I remember wondering whether he’d be called upon to keep the neighborhood at bay tonight, and whether he’d be able to do so.

  But at the moment that didn’t seem important. Finding the railing again, I continued downward. The lantern light vanished with a turn in the stairs, and I found myself once more in total darkness. Already the first floor’s noise seemed far behind; my footsteps, deliberate as they were, echoed softly from the walls. Seconds later I felt the railing end, and knew I’d reached the landing. Here I paused for breath, fingers pressed against the rough concrete. The air was suffocating; I felt as if I were chin-deep in warm water, and that if I stepped forward I would drown. Digging into my pocket, I found a match and, like a blind man, lit it. Walls leapt into view around me. I felt better now—though for a moment an old warning flashed through my mind about people smothering in locked vaults because they’d lit matches and burned up their oxygen. Silly, I thought, it’s nothing but a basement—and proceeded down the final flight of steps.

  At last my feet touched bottom. I lit another match and saw, ahead of me, the narrow corridor stretching into darkness. As I followed it, I listened. There was no sound. The match burned my fingers and I dropped it. “Grandfather?” I called, in the half-embarrassed voice of one not sure of a response. “Grandfather?” I thought I heard a stirring from farther down the hall, like something being scraped across a cement floor. “It’s okay, I’m coming!” Lighting still another match, I made my way toward the door to the laundry room. Even at this distance I could smell the moist, sweet laundry smell and, beneath it, something sour, like a backed-up drain. Sewer men, I thought, and shook my head.

  When I was still a step or two away, the match went. Blindly I groped for the door. I could hear someone on the other side, scrabbling to get out. At last my fingers found the knob. “It’s okay,” I said, turning it, “I’m here—”

  The door exploded in my face. I went down beneath a mob of twisting bodies pouring through the doorway, tumbling out upon me like a wave. I was kicked, tripped over, stepped on; I struggled to rise, and felt, in the darkness, the touch of naked limbs, smooth, rubbery flesh, hands that scuttled over me like starfish. In seconds the mob had swept past me and was gone; I heard them padding lightly up the hall, heading toward the stairs.

  Then silence.

  I lay back on the floor, exhausted, unable to believe it was over. I knew that, in a little while, I would not be able to believe it had happpened at all. Though they’d left the stench of sewage in my nostrils, the gang—whatever they were, wherever they had gone—already seemed a crazy dream born of the darkness and
the heat.

  But Grandfather was real. What had they done to him? Trembling, head spinning, I staggered to my feet and found the doorway to the laundry room. Inside I lit one last match. The floor shone wet and slippery; the four washers lay scattered across it like children’s discarded toys. There was no sign of my grandfather.

  Hours later, when they pulled him from the elevator stalled midway between the first and second floors—Frito with his crowbar, Calzone holding the light—all my grandfather would say (feebly waving the two little pieces of dark cloth as if they were trophies) was, “I found my socks.”

  ***

  Karen, all this time, was fifty blocks uptown.

  At nine-thirty she and her friend Marcia had been driving home in Marcia’s little white Toyota, returning from their evening class at Lehman. There’d been an obstruction at 145th Street, and Marcia had turned south onto Lenox Avenue, past the Lenox Terrace project and the blocks of ancient brownstones. Though the traffic was heavy tonight, they were making good time; a mile ahead, at Central Park, they would be turning west. The air inside the car was hot and stuffy, but they kept the doors locked and the windows rolled up tight. This was, after all, the middle of Harlem.

  Suddenly, as if some child had yanked the plug, the lights went out.

  Marcia’s foot went instinctively to the brakes; the car slowed to a crawl. So did the cars in front and behind. A few, elsewhere, did not. From somewhere up ahead came a grinding crash and the sound of tearing metal. Horns blared, bumpers smashed against bumpers, and the traffic rolled to a standstill. Beyond the unmoving line of headlights there was nothing but darkness.

  But all at once the darkness was filled with moving shapes.

  “Oh my God,” said Marcia. “Look!”

  Up and down the blackened street, hordes of figures were rushing from the houses, cheering, clapping, arms waving, as if they’d been waiting all their lives for this moment. It reminded the women of a prison break, an end of school, a day of liberation. They saw one tall, gangling figure burst through a doorway and dash into the street directly in front of them. Suddenly, in sheer exuberance, he bounded high into the air, feet kicking like a ballet dancer’s, and sailed clear across the hood of the car, landing moments later on the other side and disappearing into the night. Karen never got to see his face, but there was one image she’d remember long afterward, whenever the blackout was discussed: the image of those two white sneakers dancing high above the beam of the headlights, six feet in the air, as if somehow released, not just from man’s law, but from the law of gravity as well.

  ***

  It was nearly one o’clock, and I still couldn’t reach her.

  I was sitting in Grandfather’s room with the phone cradled in my lap. Beside me the old man lay snoring. I had put him to bed only a few minutes before but he’d already fallen asleep, exhausted from his ordeal in the elevator. There would be no sleep for me, though: I was too worried about Karen, and events outside the window only made me worry more. I heard hoarse shouts, the shattering of glass, and gangs of youths passing unseen in the streets below, bragging to each other about the jewelry, clothes, and radios they’d robbed. On Amsterdam Avenue a crowd had formed in front of the pawnshop, and three dark burly men, naked to the waist, were struggling to tear down the metal security gate that stretched across the window and the door. Others, holding flashlights, were egging them on. There were distant fires to the north, and sirens, and the echoes of explosions. I was almost beginning to think of myself as a widower.

  Suddenly, on my lap, the phone began to ring. (Telephones were not affected by the power failure, being part of a separate electrical system.) I snatched it to my ear before Grandfather awoke.

  “Goddammit, Karen, where the hell were you all this time? I’ve been trying you for hours. Couldn’t you at least have picked up a phone—”

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “Honestly. I haven’t been near a phone all night.”

  Her voice sounded far away. “Where are you now,” I said, “at Marcia’s? I tried there, too.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m up here at the Cloisters.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true—the castle’s right behind me, completely dark. I’m in a phone booth near the parking lot. There’s a whole bunch of people up here, it’s really beautiful. I can see stars I’ve never seen before.”

  For all her seeming rapture, I thought I detected a thin edge of hysteria in her voice—and when she told me what had happened, I understood why.

  She and Marcia had spent the first part of the blackout sitting terrified in their car, watching things go to pieces around them. Store windows were being smashed, doors broken down; people were running past them waving torches. Others hurried back and forth along the avenue in a travesty of Christmas shopping, their arms weighed down with merchandise. Amid such activity those trapped within the cars had been ignored, but there’d been a few bad moments, and help had been slow to arrive. With stoplights out all over the city and traffic tied up everywhere at once, the accident had cost them nearly an hour.

  Even when the line of cars began rolling again, they made little speed, creeping through the dark streets like a funeral cortege, their headlights providing the sole illumination—though here and there the eastern sky across the Harlem River seemed to glow with unseen fires. As they drew farther south the crowds grew thicker, crowds who made no effort to move aside for them. More than once their way was blocked by piles of burning refuse; more than once a fist would pound against the car door and a black face would glare fiercely through the window. Continuing in their present course seemed madness, and when some obstruction several blocks ahead seemed likely to halt them a second time, Marcia turned up the first wide thoroughfare they came to, 125th Street, and drove west in the direction of the Hudson, narrowly avoiding the bands of looters stockpiling food crates in the center of the street. At Riverside Drive, instead of resuming their way south, on impulse they had headed in the opposite direction, eager to get as far from the city as they could. They had driven all the way to Fort Tryon Park, at the northern tip of the island.

  “We’ve both had a chance to calm down now,” she added. “We’re ready to start back. Marcia’s getting tired, and both of us want to get home. We’re going to take the West Side Highway all the way to 96th, so we shouldn’t have any problems. But I swear to God, if we see another black I hope we hit him!”

  I said I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, and made her promise to call me as soon as she got home. I was going to spend the night here in Grandfather’s room.

  After hanging up, I turned back to the action in the street below. Over on Amsterdam the crowd had succeeded in pulling down the pawnshop’s metal gate. The large display window had already been stripped bare; glass littered the sidewalk. Now they were lined up in front of the shop like patrons at a movie theater, patiently awaiting their turn to file inside and take something. It was clear that the ones at the end of the line were not going to find much left. They passed the time by breaking the shards of glass into smaller pieces. The sound reminded me, somehow, of films I’d seen of Nazi Germany. It set my teeth on edge.

  Suddenly there was a cry of “Cuidado!” and the crowd melted away. A minute passed, and then, like twin spaceships from another world, a pair of blue-and-white police cars rolled silently up the avenue, red lights whirling on their roofs. They paused, and from each car a searchlight beam swept dispassionately over the ruins of the shop. Then the searchlights were switched off, and the cars moved on, unhurried and silent. The crowd returned moments later. The sound of breaking glass continued through the night.

  ***

  There were thousands of similar stories that night. There was the story of the man who pulled up before an appliance store in a rented truck and carted off a whole block of refrigerators; and the story of the twelve-year-old black boy who walked up to a white woman on the street and nearly strangled her when he tried to wrench a string of pearls from her
neck; and the story, repeated many times, of mobs racing through the aisles of five-and-tens, stealing ribbons, erasers, spools of thread, shoes that didn’t fit—anything they could lay their hands on, anything they saw. For months afterward the people of the poorer black sections of Brooklyn were forced to do their shopping miles from home because the stores in their own neighborhoods had been destroyed. By the time the blackout was over, nine million people had gone a day without electricity, three thousand had been arrested for looting with thousands more unpunished, and a billion dollars in damages had been lost.

  But amid the statistics and postmortems, the newspaper stories and police reports, there were other reports—“unsubstantiated rumors,” the Times called them—of roaming whites glimpsed here and there in the darker corners of the city, whites dressed “oddly,” or undressed, or “emaciated” looking, or “masked,” terrorizing the women of the neighborhood and hiding from the light. A woman in Crown Heights said she’d come upon a “white boy” thrusting his hand between her infant daughter’s legs, but that he’d run away before she got a look at him. A Hunts Point girl swore that, minutes after the blackout began, a pack of “skinny old men” had come swarming up from the basement of an abandoned building and had chased her up the block. At the Astoria Boulevard subway stop near Hell Gate, an electrical worker had heard someone—a woman or a child—sobbing on the tracks where, hours before, a stalled train had been evacuated, and had seen, in his flashlight’s beam, a group of distant figures fleeing through the tunnel. Hours later a man with a Spanish accent had telephoned the police to complain, in broken English, that his wife had been molested by “kids” living in the subway. He had rung off without giving his name. A certain shopping-bag lady, subject of a humorous feature in the Enquirer, even claimed to have had sexual relations with a “Martian” who, after rubbing his naked groin, had groped blindly beneath her dress; she had a long history of alcoholism, though, and her account was treated as a joke. The following September the News and the Post ran indignant reports on the sudden hike in abortions among the city’s poor—but then, such stories, like those of climbing birth rates nine months later, are part and parcel of every blackout.