Web of the City

by Harlan Ellison

  Rusty felt the sweat that had come to live on his spine trickle down like a small bug. He had made his peace with them, and he was free of the gang. That was it. He had it knocked now. He'd built a big sin, but it was a broken bit now. The gang was there, and he was here.

  The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood—and it was a thing with life and sentience—knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet.

  He came around the corner, and they were waiting.

  “Nobody bugs out on the Cougars,” was all one of them said. It was so dark, the streetlight broken, that he could not see the kid's face, but it was light enough to see the reflection of moonlight on the tire chain in the kid's hand. Then they jumped him…

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai

  KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block

  THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny

  THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake

  HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt

  CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner

  FAKE I.D. by Jason Starr

  PASSPORT TO PERIL by Robert B. Parker

  STOP THIS MAN! by Peter Rabe

  LOSERS LIVE LONGER by Russell Atwood

  HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent

  QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE by Max Allan Collins

  THE CORPSE WORE PASTIES by Jonny Porkpie

  THE VALLEY OF FEAR by A.C. Doyle

  MEMORY by Donald E. Westlake

  NOBODY’S ANGEL by Jack Clark

  MURDER IS MY BUSINESS by Brett Halliday

  GETTING OFF by Lawrence Block

  QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins

  THE CONSUMMATA by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

  CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Donald E. Westlake

  FALSE NEGATIVE by Joseph Koenig

  THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT by Max Allan Collins

  WEB of the CITY

  by Harlan Ellison®

  IN ASSOCIATION WITH

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-111)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: April 2013

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 OUP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Web of the City, copyright © 1958, 1975 by Harlan Ellison.

  Copyright © 1983 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  Renewed © 1986 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “No Way Out” (under the title “Gutter Gang”), copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison.

  Renewed © 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “No Game for Children,” copyright © 1959 by Harlan Ellison.

  Renewed © 1987 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “Stand Still and Die!” copyright © 1956 by Harlan Ellison.

  Renewed © 1984 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  This edition of Web of the City, © 2013 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  www.harlanellison.com

  Cover painting copyright © 2013 by Glen Orbik

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical—including photocopy, recording, Internet posting, electronic bulletin board—or any other information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or the Author’s agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television or in a recognized on-line journal. For information address Author’s agent: Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 171 East 74th Street, New York, New York 10021 USA.

  All persons, places and organizations in this book—except those clearly in the public domain—are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct is purely coincidental. These are works of fiction.

  Print edition ISBN 978-1-78116-420-4

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-421-1

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  Harlan Ellison and Edgeworks Abbey are registered trademarks of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Unnecessary Words

  One: Thursday Night

  Two: Friday Morning

  Three: Friday Night, Saturday Morning

  Four: Saturday Afternoon

  Five: Saturday Night

  Six: Saturday Night

  Seven: Sunday Afternoon

  Eight: Monday Morning, Monday Night

  Nine: Tuesday

  Ten: Saturday, a Week Later

  Eleven: Saturday Night

  Twelve: Saturday Night

  Thirteen: The Days After

  No Way Out

  No Game for Children

  Stand Still and Die!

  Also Available from Hard Case Crime

  The original edition of

  this, my first book, bore the

  following dedication:

  “Whoso neglects learning in his youth,

  loses the past and is dead for the future.”

  —Euripedes

  To my teachers:

  Charby,

  Mother,

  AJ

  But time passes, debts are

  canceled, and sometimes the

  student surpasses the teacher.

  In which case one curses the

  lesson and blesses the knowledge.

  And so, years later,

  I need only rededicate this

  fledgling effort to

  MY MOTHER,

  with love and deep respect.

  WEB OF THE CITY

  INTRODUCTION: UNNECESSARY WORDS

  There’s really no point to writing an introduction to a novel. A book of short stories, sure, okay. A collection of essays, definitely. A scholarly tome, naturally. But what the hell should one have to say about an entertainment, a fiction, a novel? Nothing. It should speak for itself.

  And I intend to let it.

  Even so, I’d like to make one brief statement about the book. Bear with me; I won’t be long.

  There’s a story told about Hemingway—I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it isn’t, it ought to be. The story goes that he was either on his way to France or on his way back from France, one or the other, I don’t recall the specifics of the anecdote that well. He was on shipboard, and he had with him his first novel. Not The Sun Also Rises; the one he wrote before that “first novel” that made him a literary catchword almost overnight.

  Yes, the story goes, Hemingway had written a book before The Sun Also Rises, and there he was aboard ship, steaming either here or there; and he was at the rail, leaning over, thinking, and then he took the boxed manuscript of the book… and threw it into the ocean.

  Apparently on the theory that no one should ever read a writer’s first novel.

  Which would mean—were all writers to subscribe to that theory—we’d never have had One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding or The Catcher in the
Rye or From Here to Eternity or The Seven Who Fled or The Painted Bird or Gone With the Wind or...

  Well, you get the idea.

  I don’t know whether to argue with the theory or not, but I suppose I’m lobbying against it by permitting (nay, encouraging) this reprint of my first novel, Web of the City. It was my first book, written under mostly awful personal circumstances, and I’m rather fond of it. I’ve re-read it this last week, just to find out how amateurish and inept it is, and I find it still holds the interest. I even gave it to a couple of nasty types who profess to being my friends when they aren’t sticking it in my back, and even they say it’s worth preserving.

  So the book is alive once more.

  The time about which it speaks is gone—the early fifties; and the place it talks about has changed somewhat—Brooklyn, the slums. But it has a kind of innocent verve about it that commends it to your attention. I hope, of course, that you’ll agree with me.

  In case you might wonder, I began writing it around the tail end of 1956 and the first three months of 1957. I was drafted in March of 1957 and wrote the bulk of the book while undergoing the horrors of Ranger basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. After a full day, from damned near dawn till well after dusk, marching, drilling, crawling on my belly across infiltration courses, jumping off static-line towers, learning to carve people up with bayonets and break their bodies with judo and other unpleasant martial arts, our company would be fed and then hustled into a barracks, where the crazed killers who were my fellow troopers would clean their weapons, spit-shine their boots, and then collapse across their bunks to sleep the sleep of the tormented. I, on the other hand, would take a wooden plank, my Olympia typewriter, and my box of manuscript and blank paper, and would go into the head (that’s the toilet to you civilized folks), place the board across my lap as I sat on one of the potties, and I would write this book.

  After the first couple of fist fights, they stopped complaining about the noise and let me alone. But Sgt. Jacobowski called me, in his dragon’s voice, “The Author.” The way he pronounced it, it always came out sounding like The Aw-ter.

  The editor who bought the book originally, who took the first chance on me as a novelist, was a wonderful guy named Walter Fultz. He was the editor at Lion Books, a minor paperback house that gave a lot of newcomers a break. Walter is dead now, tragically, before his time, but I think he would have liked to’ve seen how long-lived this book has become, and how the kid he gave a break has come along.

  Lion Books went out of business before they could release Web of the City, and the backlog of titles was sold here and there. Pyramid Books then bought the manuscript.

  It was almost a year later, in 1958, while I was serving out my sentence as the most-often-demoted PFC in the history of the United States Army, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, when this book finally hit print. I was writing for the Fort Knox newspaper, and getting boxes of review paperbacks for a column I was doing, when the August shipment of Pyramid titles came in. I opened the box, flipped through the various products therein, and almost had a coronary when I held in my hands, for the first time in my life, a book with my name on the cover.

  Except, the book was titled Rumble.

  Nonetheless, it was an experience that comes only once in a writer’s life, the first book, and I was the tallest walkin’ Private in the Army that week.

  Maybe I should have taken sides with old Ernie, dumping this book in the Pacific as he dumped that first novel in the Atlantic; but I cannot forget the hot August afternoon in Kentucky during which I realized my life’s dream and became, for the first time, an author.

  And even if Web of the City isn’t War and Peace, you just can’t kill something you’ve loved as much as I love this book.

  So read on and, with a little compassion on your part, you’ll be kind to the memory of the punk kid who wrote it.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  ONE:

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  rusty santoro

  the cougars

  The city lay cool and dim beneath a vaulting sky of high-scudding gray clouds. A gray shroud that covered the corpses of buildings, stiff in brick-and-steel rigor mortis, pale in their eternity of sooty death.

  The heat of the afternoon had slowly passed away, the trembling waves of warmth disappearing like wraiths to be replaced by mugginess and unrest; the sweat had gone back into the pores, the cats back into the alleys, the wineheads back into the bars, the amateurs back to their pads.

  It was evening, and evening was free time, and free time was the time to go! Rusty was abroad in the night.

  His name was Rusty, but it wasn’t really Rusty, and he had cut the umbilicus that bound him to the gang. A half hour before he had faced the gang and snarled, “I told ya a couple months ago I was through, that I was split with the Cougars, an’ ya been buggin’ me ever since to come back. Now you better know what I’m sayin’—’specially you, Candle—that I’m done.

  “That’s my answer. Now I’m splittin’ and I don’t want no trouble.”

  That had been the speech, and those had been the emotions, and that was what had started it, what had set the spider to weaving. The spider was a city, gray and observant and jealous once in a while, though deep inside it didn’t really care at all. But the black widow cannot stop weaving, and the city cannot stop weaving. Alike in temperament, they feast on their spawn.

  It was good to get away from them. Rusty felt the sweat that had come to live on his spine trickle down like a small bug. He had made his peace with them, and he was free of the gang. That was it. He had it knocked now. He’d built a big sin, but it was a broken bit now. The gang was there, and he was here.

  He was no longer Prez of the Cougars, and the road was starting to open up. He’d be able to walk past the fuzz on the corner, and not have the bluecoat stare at him like he was hot or something. He was out and gliding.

  The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood—and it was a thing with life and sentience—knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet. Like it was down, man. A down down bit. What was up?

  He came around the corner, and they were waiting.

  “Nobody bugs out on the Cougars,” was all one of them said. It was so dark, the streetlight broken, that he could not see the kid’s face, but it was light enough to see the reflection of moonlight on the tire chain in the kid’s hand. Then they jumped him.

  He took a step to run. A fist crashed into the side of his head. He felt the brains within him scramble and jumble, and then he went down. The tire chain took him in the small of the back with a crack that numbed both his legs, sent lancets of liquid fire up to his neck.

  He tried to cover, to dummy, folding in like a foetus with head and gut and groin protected, but there were hundreds of them, and they used their feet.

  Metal-toed barracks boots, reinforced motorcycle boots, sod-brogans; they stomped him again and again. His ribs were numbed in a second, his back was a plain of welts and blood. One of them got through his protectively covering arms and caught him on the right cheekbone.

  “Holy Jesus, Mary, god save me…” he murmured softly through bloody lips and they continued working on him.

  It only went on forever.

  Then the sound of a cop’s whistle broke the silence that had been host to only the sounds of stomping and his grunts of pain. The whistle came from far away beyond the veil of foggy pain that swirled in on him, and one last resounding kick took him in the crotch. He screamed like an animal. Then he heard them running away. The whistling grew louder.

  “G-got to, to make it…” he bubbled, trying to rise. He fell back and lay there panting. The pain was so big, man, so big. He crawled to the gutter and slipped over, trying to raise himself on the fire hydrant. He got to his feet and saw that the world had been sawed in half across the skull-top. “Ma—Make it away…” was his plea to the night.

 
He stumbled away, into the alley, and down its stinking length to a hideaway behind the rubbish bins and cardboard boxes. He fell into a sitting position, his eyes closed, and waited.

  The cop hit the scene on the street, and looked around. Deadly all-pervading silence. Gone. They were gone, and he had missed again. Damned juvies!

  The cop checked out. Rusty Santoro lay there, eyes closed, and hurt.

  Then he opened his eyes, for someone was watching him.

  In one of the bricked-up doorways in the alley, slumped down with a ketchup bottle full of Sweet Lucy, lay his father. Eyes red and puffed, his face a mask of interest and stupor intermingled, Mr. Santoro stared brightly at his son. Rusty could tell, the old man had seen it all and had not moved to help.

  Rusty lay there with the pain like a torch in him, barely drawing breath, seeing his father for the first time that week. He lay there gasping and wetting his ripped, bloody lips with a dry tongue-tip.

  “They beat’a hell outta ya, didn’t they?” Mr. Santoro cackled.

  Rusty shut his eyes and let the darkness that marched in behind the irises take him. He swirled down and down, with pain his partner, and knew this was a typical night. It was the same.

  Always the same.

  You can’t get free. Once stained, always stained. The seeds of dirt are sown deeply. And are harvested forever.

  Darkness outside, while his father laughed and fell asleep also.

  TWO:

  FRIDAY MORNING

  rusty santoro

  candle

  pancoast

  There was no doubt about it: they were getting ready to stomp him again. They were going to wait for him in an alley and slice his gut out. That was the way the Cougars did it to a member who left the club. That was the way of it, and no escaping.

  Rusty Santoro knew they were going to get him, if it took forever. They had asked, “You comin’ back?” and he had stalled, trying to find a way out. But now there was no way out. They had jumped him the night before, and the pain was still big in him. Rusty choked as the chisel bit into the leg of wood, sprayed sawdust across his face and T-shirt. He puffed air between his thin lips, continued working, and continued to ignore the boy who stood behind him.