Web of the City

by Harlan Ellison

“Don’t call me ‘man’! I’m your father!”

  “Okay, so okay. Don’t panic. I don’t know nothin’ about Mr. Mestman.”

  “You were in bed?”

  “Like I was in bed. Right.”

  And that had been that. But can you imagine! That bastard Mestman, coming over and squeaking on him. Making trouble in the brood, just when the old man was forgetting the dough he’d had to lay out for that crack-up and the Dodge’s busted grille. Well, nobody played the game with Frenchie Murrow and got away with it. He’d show that creep Mestman. So here he was, and there Monkey was, and—

  “Hey, man, you wanna fall down on some laughs?”

  Monkey did not look up. He turned the page slowly, and his brow furrowed at the challenge of the new set of pictures. “Like what kinda laughs?”

  “How’d you like to heist a short?”

  “Whose?”

  “Does it matter? I mean, like a car’s a car, man.”

  Monkey dropped the comic book. His Mongoloid face came up, and his intense little black eyes dug into Frenchie’s blue ones. “What’s with you, kid? You tryin’ ta bust the scene? You want in the Princes, that it?”

  “Hell, I—”

  “Well, blow, Jack. We told ya couple times; you don’t fit, man. We got our own bunch, we don’t dig no cats from the other end of town. Blow, will ya? Ya bother me.”

  Frenchie got up and stared down at Monkey. This was part of it; these slobs. They ran the damned town, and they wouldn’t take him in. He was as good as any of them. In fact, he was better.

  Didn’t he live in a bigger house? Didn’t he have his own souped short? Didn’t he always have bread to spread around on the chicks? He felt like slipping his switch out of his high boot-top and sliding it into Monkey.

  But the Laughing Princes were around, and they’d cream him good if he tried.

  He left the malt shop. He’d show those slobs. He’d get old busybody Mestman himself. He wouldn’t bother with just swiping Mestman’s crate either. He’d really give him trouble.

  Frenchie coasted around town for an hour, letting the fury build in him.

  It was four thirty by the car’s clock, and he knew he couldn’t do anything in broad daylight. So he drove across town to Joannie’s house. Her old lady was working the late shift at the pants factory, and she was minding the kid brother. He made sure the blinds were drawn.

  Joannie thought it was the greatest thing ever came down the Pike. And only sixteen, too.

  HERBERT MESTMAN

  There was something about orange sherbet that made an evening festive. Despite the fact that no one these days ate real ice cream, that everyone was willing to settle for the imitation Dairy Squish stuff that was too sweet and had no real body, Herbert and his wife had found one small grocery that stocked orange sherbet—in plastic containers—especially for them. They devoured a pint of it every other night. It had become a very important thing to them.

  Every other night at seven thirty, Herbert Mestman left his house and drove the sixteen blocks to the little grocery, just before it closed. There he bought his orange sherbet, and returned in time to catch the evening modern classics program pulled in on their FM, from New York City.

  It was a constant pleasure to them.

  This night was no different. He pulled the door closed behind him, walked to the carport, and climbed into the dusty Plymouth. He was not one for washing the car too often. It was to be driven, not to make an impression. He backed out of the drive and headed down the street.

  Behind him, at the curb, two powerful headlamps cut on, and a car moved out of the darkness, following him.

  It was not till he had started up the hill leading to that section of town called “The Bluffs” that Herbert realized he was being tailed. Even then he would have disbelieved any such possibility had he not glanced down at his speedometer and realized he was going ten miles over the legal limit on the narrow road. Was the car behind a police vehicle, pacing him? He slowed.

  The other car slowed.

  He grew worried. A twenty-dollar fine was nothing to look forward to. He pulled over, to allow the other car to pass. The other car stopped also. Then it was that he knew he was being followed.

  The other car started up first however. And as he ground away from the shoulder, the town spreading out beneath the road on the right-hand slope, he sensed something terribly wrong.

  The other car was gaining.

  He speeded up himself, but it seemed as though he was standing still. The other car came up fast in his mirror, and, the next thing he knew, the left-hand lane was blocked by a dark shape. He threw a fast glance across, and in the dim lights of the other car’s dash, he could see the adolescently devilish face of Frenchie Murrow.

  So that was it! He could not fathom why the boy was doing this, but for whatever reason, he was endangering both their lives. As they sped up the road, around the blind curves, their headlight shafts shooting out into emptiness as they rounded each turn, Mestman felt the worm of terror begin its journey. They would crash. They would lock fenders and plummet over the side, through the flimsy guard railing… and it was hundreds of feet into the bowl below.

  The town’s lights winked dimly from black depths.

  Or, and he knew it was going to be that, finally, a car would come down the—

  Two spots of brightness merged with their own lights. A car was on its way down. He tried to speed up. The boy kept alongside.

  And then the Studebaker was edging nearer. Coming closer, till he was sure they would scrape. But they did not touch. Mestman threw a glance across and it was as though hell shone out of Frenchie Murrow’s young eyes. Then the road was illuminated by the car coming down, and Frenchie Murrow cut his car hard into Mestman’s lane.

  Herb Mestman slammed at the brake pedal. The Plymouth heaved and bucked like a live thing, screeched in the lane, and slowed.

  Frenchie Murrow cut into the lane, and sped out of sight around the curve.

  The bakery truck came down the hill and passed Mestman where he was stalled, with a gigantic whoosh!

  FRENCHIE MURROW

  This wasn’t no game for kids, and at least old man Mestman realized that. He hadn’t spilled the beans to Pop about that drag on the Bluffs Road. He had kept it under his lid, and if Frenchie had not hated Mestman so much—already identifying him as a symbol of authority and adult obnoxiousness—he would have respected him.

  Frenchie held the cat aloft, and withdrew the switchblade from his boot-top.

  The cat shrieked at the first slash, and writhed maniacally in the boy’s grasp. But the third stroke did it, severing the head almost completely from the body.

  Frenchie threw the dead cat onto Mestman’s breezeway, where he had found it sleeping.

  Let the old sonofabitch play with that for a while.

  He cut out, and wound up downtown.

  For a long moment he thought he was being watched, thought he recognized the old green Plymouth that had turned the corner as he paused before the entrance to the malt shop. But he put it from his mind, and went inside. The place was quite empty, except for the jerk. He climbed on to a stool and ordered a chocolate coke. Just enough to establish an alibi for the time; time enough to let Mestman find his scuddy cat.

  He downed the chocoke and realized he wanted a beer real bad. So he walked out without paying, throwing at the jerk a particularly vicious string of curse words.

  Who was that in the doorway across the street?

  Frenchie saw a group of the Laughing Princes coming down the sidewalk, a block away. They were ranged in their usual belligerent formation, strung out across the cement so that anyone wanting past had to walk in the gutter. They looked too mean to play with today. He’d cut, and see ’em when they were mellower.

  He broke into a hump, and rounded the corner. At Rooney’s he turned in. Nine beers later he was ready for Mr. Wiseguy Mestman. Darkness lapped at the edge of the town.

  He parked the Studebaker in his ow
n folks’ garage, and cut through the hedge to Mestman’s house.

  The French doors at the back of the house were open, and he slipped in without realizing he was doing it. A fog had descended across his thinking. There was a big beat down around his neck some place, and a snare drummer kept ti-ba-ba-ba-powing it till Frenchie wanted to snap his fingers, or get out the tire jack and belt someone or get that fraykin’ cat and slice it again.

  There was a woman in the living room.

  He stood there, just inside the French doors, and watched her, the way her skirt was tight around her legs while she sat watching the TV. The way the dark line of her eyebrows rose at something funny there. He watched her and the fog swirled higher; he felt a great and uncontrollable wrenching in his gut.

  He stepped out of the shadows of the dining room, into the half-light of the TV-illuminated living room.

  She saw him all at once, and her hand flew to her mouth in reflex. “What do you—what…”

  Her eyes were large and terrified, and her breasts rose and fell in spastic rhythm. He came toward her, only knowing this was a good-lookin’ broad, only knowing that he hated that bastard Mestman with all his heart, only knowing what he knew he had to do to make the Princes think he was a rough stud.

  He stumbled toward her, and his hand came out and clenched in the fabric of her blouse, and ripped down…

  She was standing before him, her hands like claws, raking at him, while shriek after shriek after shriek cascaded down the walls.

  He was going to rape her, damn her, damn her louse of a big-dome husband, he was going to…

  Someone was banging at the door, and then he heard, ever so faintly, a key turning in the lock, and it was Mestman, and he bolted away, out the French doors, over the hedge, and into the garage, where he crouched down behind his Stude for a long time, shivering.

  HERBERT MESTMAN

  He tried to comfort her, though her hysteria was beginning to catch. He had followed the boy after he had come home and found the cat. Sir Epicure had been a fine animal; quick to take dislike, even quicker to be a friend. They had struck it off well, and the cat had been a warmth to Herbert Mestman.

  First the peeping, then the trouble on the Bluffs Road, and so terribly this evening, Sir Epicure, and now—now—

  This!

  He felt his hands clenching into fists.

  Herbert Mestman was a calm man, a decent man; but the game had been declared, and it was no game for children. He realized, despite his pacifist ways, there were lice that had to be condemned.

  He huddled Margaret in her torn blouse closer to him, soothing her senselessly with senseless mouthings, while in his mind he made his decision.

  FRENCHIE MURROW

  Mornings had come and gone in a steady, heady stream of white-hot thoughtlessness. After that night, Frenchie had stayed away from Mestman and his house, from even the casual sight of Mestman’s house. Somehow, and he was thankfully frightened about it, Mestman had not reported him.

  Not that it would have done any good—there was no proof and no way of backing up the story, not really. A stray fingerprint here or there didn’t count too much when they lived next door and it might easily be thought that Bruce Murrow had come over at any time, and left them.

  So Frenchie settled back into his routine.

  Stealing hubcaps for pocket money.

  Visiting Joannie when her old lady was swing-shifting it.

  And then there were the Laughing Princes:

  “Hey, man, you wanna get in the group?”

  Frenchie was amazed. Out of a clear field of vision, this afternoon when he come into the malt shop, Monkey had broached the subject.

  “Well, hell, I mean yeah, sure!”

  “Okay, daddy, tell you what. You come on out to the chickie-run tonight, and we’ll see you got gut enough to be a Prince. You dig?”

  “I dig.”

  And here he was, close to midnight, with the great empty field stretching off before him, rippled with shadows where the lights of the cars did not penetrate.

  It had been good bottom land, this field, in the days when the old city reservoir had used water deflected from the now-dry creek. Water deflected through the huge steel culvert pipe that rose up in the center of the field. The culvert was in a ditch ten feet deep, and the pipe still rose up several feet above the flat of the field. The ditch just before the pipe was still a good ten feet deep.

  The cars were revving, readying for the chickie-run.

  “Hey, you, Frenchie! Hey, c’mon over here!”

  It was Monkey, and Frenchie climbed from his Stude, pulling at his chinos, wanting to look cool for the debs clustered around the many cars in the field. This was a big chickie-run, and his chance to become one of the Princes.

  He walked into the group of young hot-rodders clustered off to one side, near a stunted grove of trees. He could feel everyone’s eyes on him. There were perhaps fifteen of them.

  “Now here’s the rules,” Monkey said. “Frenchie and Pooch and Jimmy get out there on either side of the road that runs over the cul. On the road is where I’ll be, pacin’ ya. And when Gloria”—he indicated a full-chested girl with a blonde ponytail—“gives the signal, you race out, and head for that ditch, an’ the cul. The last one who turns is the winner, the others are chickie. You dig?”

  They all nodded, and Frenchie started to turn, to leave. To get back in his Stude and win this drag.

  But the blonde girl stopped him, and with a hand on his arm, came over close, saying, “They promised me to the man who wins this run, Frenchie. I’d like to see you bug them other two. Win for me, will ya, baby?”

  It sounded oddly brassy coming from such a young girl, but she was very close, and obviously wanted to be kissed, so Frenchie pulled her in close, and put his mouth to hers. Her lips opened and she kissed him with the hunger and ferocity of adolescent carnality.

  Then he broke away, winking at her, and throwing over his shoulder, “Watch my dust, sweetheart,” as he headed for the Stude.

  A bunch of boys were milling about the car as he ran up.

  “Good luck,” one of them said, and a queer grin was stuck to his face. Frenchie shrugged. There were some oddballs in this batch, but he could avoid them when he was a full member.

  He got in and revved the engine. It sounded good. He knew he could take them. His brakes were fine. He had them checked and tightened that afternoon.

  Then Monkey was driving out on to the road that ran down the center of the old field, over the grade atop the culvert pipe. His Ford stopped, and he leaned out the window to yell at Gloria. “Okay, baby. Any time!”

  The girl ran into the middle of the road as the three racers gunned their motors, inching at the start mark. They were like hungry beasts waiting to be unleashed.

  Then she leaped in the air, came down waving a yellow bandana, and they were away, with great gusts of dirt and grass showing behind.

  Frenchie slapped gears as though they were all one, and the Studelac jumped ahead. He decked the gas pedal and fed all the power he had to the engine.

  On either side of him, the wind gibbering past their ears, the other two hunched over their wheels and plunged straight down the field toward the huge steel pipe and the deep trench before it.

  Whoever turned was a chicken, that was the rule, and Frenchie was no coward. He knew that. Yet—

  A guy could get killed. If he didn’t stop in time, he’d rip right into that pipe, smash up completely at the speed they were doing.

  The speedometer said eighty-five, and still he held it to the floor. They weren’t going to turn. They weren’t going… to… turn… damn… you… turn!

  Then, abruptly, as the pipe grew huge in the windshield, on either side of him the other cars swerved, as though on a signal.

  Frenchie knew he had won.

  He slapped his foot on to the brake.

  Nothing happened.

  The speedometer read past ninety, and he wasn’t stopping. He
beat at it frantically, and then, when he saw there was no time to jump, no place to go, as the Studelac leaped the ditch and plunged out into nothingness, he threw one hand out the window, and his scream followed it.

  The car hit with a gigantic whump and smash, and struck the pipe with such drive the entire front end was rammed through the driver’s seat. Then it exploded.

  It had been most disconcerting. That hand coming out the window. And the noise.

  A man stepped out of the banked shadows at the base of the grove of trees. The fire from the culvert, licking toward the sky, lit his face in a mask of serene but satisfied crimson.

  Monkey drove to the edge of the shadows, and walked up to the man standing there half-concealed.

  “That was fine, son,” said the tall man, reaching into his jacket for something. “That was fine.

  “Here you are,” he said, handing a sheaf of bills to the boy. “I think you will find that according to our agreement. And,” he added, withdrawing another bill from the leather billfold, “here is an extra five dollars for that boy who took care of the brakes. You’ll see that he gets it, won’t you?”

  Monkey took the money, saluted sloppily, and went back to his Ford. A roar and he was gone, back into the horde of hotrods tearing away from the field, and the blazing furnace thrust down in the culvert ditch.

  But for a long time, till he heard the wail of sirens far off but getting nearer, the most brilliant student of Elizabethan drama in the country, perhaps the world, stood in the shadows and watched fire eat at the sky.

  It certainly was not—not at all—a game for children.

  STAND STILL AND DIE!

  Originally published in the September, 1956 issue of Guilty Detective Story Magazine

  It wasn’t pretty, the way they were beating him to death. They were using bricks.

  I’ve been driving a hack in New York ever since I picked up a hunk of shrapnel in my elbow, on the backwash of the Yalu. I’d seen some pretty rough things in Korea, and I’ve seen some even rougher behind the wheel of that cab, but the way they were working that guy over—cool, smooth and without a wasted movement—made my throat dry out.