The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  From the ground floor Edgar was privy to the comings and goings of the night. Since Fergus - the joke that called himself a manager - was aloof, unconcerned, probably brain dead, Edgar's role of watchdog was self-assigned. He felt he helped prevent Kenilworth from actually becoming as seedy as it already looked.

  When he had been younger, he had been called Edder - short for Eddie R. - by nearly everyone. His keen eyes and powerhouse right arm buttressed his fantasy of one day becoming a baseball pitcher for the majors. He favored the Cubs. During World War Two he organized pick-up scratch lot teams among other Army Air Corps guys whenever they weren't being noisomely unbunked in the dark to go dump bombs on Berlin. His wartime parachute jump over friendly waters - abandoning a lame Liberator that decided to start losing gas and hydraulic fluid like a runny nose - brought him a Purple Heart for a busted hip and membership in the Caterpillar Club. His caterpillar pin had green eyes. If you chuted out over enemy territory during wartime, you got one with red eyes, and most likely an Air Medal to boot.

  Television tonight had been the usual hash - sexless fitness nuts anguishing over junior high school crises. Now, The Equalizer, there was a program Edgar enjoyed. It depicted a protagonist in advanced middle age, a grandfather almost, who was strong, sexy, proficient and lucid. One of these days, Edgar thought, it would be nice to purchase a videotape deck so he'd never miss an episode. Indeed, he could save up the ones he'd already viewed. Build a library. When current technology didn't disgust him, it still enthralled him. So many buttons that could be pushed.

  At 73, Edgar had outlived two wives, these being the only two women he had ever spent the night with in his life. Mae Lynn was the first, and he had never really fallen out of love with her; he'd been doomed, thunderstruck from the moment they'd met as teenagers. She saw him off to war and was waiting for him when he returned from the European Theatre. She had been taken by a violent series of sledgehammer heart attacks; he had watched her die on the day before Thanksgiving, 1965.

  His marriage to Glenda had followed within nine months. He needed someone else in the house, someone to relate to over morning coffee, someone to run errands for and react with. No disrespect to Mae Lynn was ever intended. The union with Glenda took a decade to fall apart, and by the time she died of uterine cancer they were only speaking to each other about once a year.

  Since then, Edgar had become a sort of caretaker, watching his friends die. His enemies died too. He settled on trying to make no attachments. Emotional involvement only brought you sorrow when death came to thieve its due. He came to see those who populated his life as biological mishaps. Skinbags with too many factory defects. Ticking time-bombs of death strung like deadly jewels along a time-line of mortared arteries, burst hearts, blown joints, blood more like venom, clots and arthritis, ulcerations and assassinating, infections, sundered bones, exhausted organs and ruined minds. First feeble, then helpless, then dead. Dead as granite, dead as dreams.

  He watched the young man from upstairs pay the hack and enter the building through the Kentmore door. This boy had been a player in the dramatic events of the past weekend. Police cars, Nazi tactics, shouting and madness. Edgar thought that he would not want to be a young person these days. So much more was required of them.

  They killed themselves more, these days.

  Edgar's backbone was ramrod straight, his posture a fringe benefit of being a veteran. His trousers were belted high; his shirt was clean and starched and tucked. He wore slippers, but neatly, with clean socks. He cultivated fastidiousnes. You saw sloppy old people so often, and the assumption was that age made you lax, forgetful, slovenly. He shaved with a straight razor every morning and always came out nickless. He dunked and flossed his dentures every night. Once the Army had taught him how to shine shoes, he'd never forgotten. It was a skill he cherished because it seemed outmoded, now. There was nothing to compare to a good spit-shine. The worst critique to be ventured of his wardrobe was that it was threadbare; pensions only reached so far, even with his frugal accounting. And shirts and trousers were not made so well these days. He could see all that. His eyes were still crackerjack.

  Edgar's wake-up and sleep time rituals had expanded to fill the extra time that came of living alone. Instead of merely watching TV and waiting for either the next pension check or the old Reaper to show up with the new day, he became almost meditatively introspective. He tried to focus more finely on the world surrounding him, to contemplate bigger pictures. He had become attuned to the seasonal rhythms of the building in which he lived. He listened to the sounds the structure made. He could read the olfactory hue of the corridors, or the sounds made by the brickwork contracting in winter, expanding in summer, making soft igneous sounds with the receipt of the first rain of spring.

  Lately the building had been acting oddly.

  The sense impressions Edgar registered seemed queerly garbled, pregnant with hidden information like flyby scoops of some too-distant radio signal. It reminded him of how he felt when he took medication too soon, or drank coffee too abundantly - the tightness in his jaws, the throbbing at his temples, the frustration of useless alertness. The building felt to him like it was wired. Anxious, perhaps. Maybe paranoid.

  He wondered if the steam heating had soured somehow, polluting the air, poisoning the occupants with unlikely hallucinations. Just this morning, while his trusty GE percolator was hocking and splurting, he had noticed his sofa had been scooted out from the south wall about six inches. It was actually a secondhand loveseat, but it accommodated Edgar and his magazines and TV snacks quite adequately. He looked at this anomaly and assumed he had been clumsy in rising from it. Then he noticed that the wall was the same distance further back from the gargoyle spiral of the steam grille, which was mounted to a steel floor plate by six rusty railroad bolts that had been new before the Great War. The sofa had not moved forward. The wall had moved back.

  Edgar had hung a single framed picture on the south wall, a foxed studio pose of Mae Lynn. It had fallen to await him face-down on floor space that had not existed the day before. Fortunately the thin picture glass had not shattered. He lifted it, paused to play back some memory of his first and best wife, and moved to rehang it.

  The nail on which the picture had hung was gone. So was the nail hole. Edgar had spent nine years memorizing the topography of the shoddy paintjob mopped onto his walls by Fergus, that stupid ape. Wall texture trapped dirt and grease and dust in patterns. Those patterns were gone now.

  It was as though the building had forgotten the wall, then remembered it incorrectly.

  He felt the judicial stab of his own age. A lifetime of snide jokes about encroaching senility and Alzheimer's Disease were loudly restated by memory, bleak now, and unfunny. He was an old man, he was alone, he had tried so hard to maintain a dignity that was important to him… and now he was losing it.

  A more conventional senior citizen would have made the nobility of age a weapon to brandish in the sneering faces of young generations. This was not important to Edgar, who rather enjoyed his public face as Kenilworthy's curmudgeon. He was in control of the image he presented; my god, wasn't that the whole point? He did not care for the good opinions of Kenilworth 's shabby, downscale tenantry and so for their pleasure he performed a role of his own conception. No doubt they all thought him a dotty old snotbag. The last laugh was all his own.

  From wartime, he kept to the tenet that the best way to beat an enemy is to get him to underestimate you. What did he care for the good opinion of a bunch of foreigners and dopeheads and tramps like the ones he'd seen during that little Gestapo door-to-door the other night?

  Now that Mrs Rojas, she'd been a nice old woman. For years Edgar had only known her as '207.' Eventually he had broken his own rule and struck up laundry talk with her. She was his kind: stout, upright, a survivor. He had been looking forward to wearing his good silk tie for her someday soon when she up and vanished from the building. Another one of the good people displaced by the march of
time and Kenilworth 's need to grow sleazier. One day she was there in the apartment above him; the next, gone without a trace, a note or a peep. Edgar had suspected the moment the building noise from the second floor shaded differently; the sounds were not hers. Many of the noises Edgar heard, or fancied he heard, were confusing or impossible to interpret. But he knew she had left. Moved on to whatever options elderly women with restrictive incomes might invoke, in their need to escape rat-trap poverty or make their calling address more respectable.

  Damn. The swell of her bodice had been quite nice, too.

  He arched his spine as he walked to the bathroom and succeeded in popping a few vertebrae. He needed to pat water on his face, clear his eyes and cycle down the worry in his heart before it began to resonate and get destructive. His mind was okay. That business with the sofa and the wall space had a rational explanation. That was a prize that age and waiting and patience got you - the time to figure everything out.

  Hell, he thought. If I had everything figured out, then I'd be a teenager.

  Thumps from above. The new tenant, the guy from the cab, was checking in for the night. Previous night, he'd been up till dawn. He had not disturbed Edgar's sleep, but Edgar knew.

  Edgar thought of taking a quick bath to unsweat his pores and clear his head, then decided against it. He had no wish to disrupt his routine that much.

  Like the other apartments bunched into the northeast corner of the building, Edgar's bathroom was aired via a small window opening on to a ventilation shaft. He had boarded his up years back, and badgered Fergus until the gnomelike creature made a house call with a caulking gun and more of his endless supply of white latex paint. From the first Edgar had hated the diseased, industrial odor of the shaft. If it was air he wanted, he'd get it in the living room. He was in a corner apartment, and by opening both casements he could recycle his air in two seconds flat, with the help of Momma Nature, and had no need for the ugly little porthole in his bathroom - something he might shatter with an elbow while showering.

  Outside the wind marshalled fearsomely. Blowing snow tried to bow the windowpanes with a noise like salt sprinkled on to tinfoil.

  When he left the bathroom he noticed a new crack in the wall where Mae Lynn's picture had hung until this morning. It had not been there when Edgar had searched for the missing nail hole. Settling crack, he thought. A blizzard rocked the building. Storms could modify interior walls, sure enough. It was a maroon hairline fracture that ran up from the baseboard in an erratic tributary for about four feet. Best to dismiss it till breakfast, then force the Hunchback of Kenilworth to repair it… with Edgar acting the peppery old man, just nasty enough to spice all the proceedings up. Heh.

  While he prepared for bed and gloated over this future performance, the crack reached upward another foot with a whispery sound like tearing bread. It split into a snaky-tongued fork at the top and spit out a puff of wallboard dust.

  This made Edgar jump, but he rallied fast. Was it an earthquake? Some sort of tremor making the building lurch? Could the blizzard be that merciless?

  He peered close and traced the fresh leg of the crack with one finger. It was wet. Two dots of blood traced divergent paths toward his open palm. Edgar knew blood when he saw it.

  Rationality told him that one of the upstairs sewage lines had burst again. They had frozen and split before, to drain into the lower walls. He had not cut his finger. Then he remembered that the child who had vanished from the third floor had vanished in a wake of blood… and had not yet been recovered. Only blood marked a trail.

  He stopped fearing the erosion of senility. If he could calmly ponder out what was happening right before his excellent eyes, he need not fear going loopy through inactivity. You only got scared of infirmity and absent-mindedness when you had too much time to sit around worrying about it. Right now he was switched on, his brain gearing up to be speedy and analytical.

  While Edgar was congratulating himself, the middle of the crack swelled apart like an exploding vein and a blood-soaked hand reached out of the wall to seize him by the throat. The grip was not a friendly one.

  He made a watery choking rattle. Before he could drag in a breath of shock the hand yanked him forward, breaking his nose against the still-solid wall. He felt a sharp spike of pain as a pointed fingernail pierced his neck near the collarbone, sinking to the first knuckle and cutting loose a geyser of arterial blood that jetted from under his chin to mingle with the free rivulets now squirting from the wall as the crack widened like ripping tissue. Plaster mixed pinkly with wet scarlet, and at Edgar's feet the floor was splattered as though a sponge of blood was being wrung out, dipped and wrung out.

  Fingers oozed from the split, found purchase, and began to pull the rest forth. The hand locked to Edgar's adam's apple was like the teeth of a steam shovel. He was wounded, bleeding, caught fast and at disadvantage. Death was going to cosh him if he struggled like some dope in a monster movie on the late show. He had to turn this around.

  He braced his arms against the wall and wrenched himself backward. With pain he bought freedom. More of the blood-drenched arm followed from the wall but he felt its grip loosen a degree. He saw a leather-jacketed elbow, studs glinting candy-apple through the hematogenous film. He balled his pitching fist and pounded the crook of the arm, once-twice, hitting the vulnerable joint there, three solid hammering hits, four, each impact smashing new pain into his own throat. His head was ripening feverishly with hot concussion and tilted time; he felt humid blossoms of blood warming his chest, flowering adherently and expanding like snaps of scalding grease, each passing second another fireburst in the midst of shellshock and onrushing trauma. His whole network of nerves screamed that he was still alive, but wouldn't be for long unless…

  He twisted and brought his elbow down hard into the bend of the invading limb, as though chopping tough foliage. The fingers on his throat popped free with a meaty click. His voicebox was dented. He could feel it, by damn, feel just how close his own funeral was as the impetus of his sudden release tumbled him ass-first over the hassock next to the loveseat. His head clipped the standing lamp, which hinged floorward and crashed like an axe into a headsman's block. Two of its three bulbs burst with carbon-blue detonations, spitting sparks and glass across the rug. He stopped several splinters and felt pain in his ear, just as he could feel chilly air seeking his esophagus through the puncture in his neck.

  The surviving bulb in the lamp began to blacken the rug fibers, adding thin smoke to the air and a horror movie cast to the upward-slanting shadows.

  It was like watching a thief sneak through a slit in a circus tent, except the barrier had gone the consistency of thick flesh, tucks and folds erupting crookedly and exsanguinating as it was rent. Hands sheathed in rotten leather heaved against the bloody lips of the rupture. The forked arch lanched toward the room's high ceiling as a blood-sodden Army boot kicked out more egress and left a cleated red print on the floor. A shoulder oozed through.

  Edgar seemed to lack adequate time to regain control of his own arms and legs. He was losing too much needed blood. His brain was swimming like boxer shorts on the ring-rinse cycle.

  He saw sharp things.

  Chains and pins glittered, starched in moist organic rot, binding a decayed leather jacket to a denim vest, all of it immersed in the same autopsy dye. Zippers and medals swung, scattering rust-spiced blood droplets. Darker lettering on the saturated jacket read KILLER PUSSY. STONER'S EVIL. What god knew what they meant?

  The attacker possessed no actual face, to speak of. But it grinned, still stuck halfway inside the wall. Then it pulled out a switchblade. The stress of the grin pulled loose a dripping gob of cheek and chin which smacked the floor with a meaty splash, exposing gapped yellow teeth.

  Red drizzle blinded Edgar. It was a torrent now, runneling from the rip in the wall with faucet force, pooling gelidly and coming in an eager tide for his outstretched feet. So much blood.

  The corroded Italian switch opened with
the sound of steel, committing. It was a sound that knocked Edgar back into the real world. If he rolled for his front door he'd get seven inches of bye-bye in the backside. He tried to yell for help. His modified throat would not permit this.

  His pulped nose was a dysfunctional ruin; it forced him to gulp air orally. The creature was nearly free of the rubbery wall. Edgar thought of a film seen long ago. Live birth.

  Cry for help, indeed. Before him, for whatever reason, was an embodiment of everything he thought screwed up in this not-so-brave new world: A knife-waving punk in leathers with a sneer and an attitude. Kenilworth 's grubworm populace condensed into one hideous, wet red amalgam, come to drive him out at last.

  He heard a clogged noise like gargled phlegm. He finally got his eyes open.

  The son of a bitch was laughing at him. Without a mouth, unsleeving its left leg from the spurting fissure in the wall, readying its pathetic little wop toadsticker for its debut taste. Laughing at him.

  Edgar crabbed backward. The interloper lunged for the front door, to block. That was that Edgar had counted on. He rolled fast to one knee, came up running, and in three deft steps made it to the bathroom.

  By the time the thing had slid over to bar escape from the tiny closeted passage, Edgar had unfolded his straight razor.

  He felt his voice betrayed him. The only sounds in his room were his own labored respiration and the shuffling of his slippered feet as he feinted and bobbed. His attacker mirrored, parry, defense, making slick wet noises. To Edgar it was wartime once again, and he intended to be just as unrelenting as he had been in 1942. This would not be the first time he'd used cold steel to speed an enemy to Hell. He had wrapped his shield hand in a towel.