The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  He swung his baton flashlight to bear. The first thing his sight registered was blood, lots of it, smeared all over the walls and floor as though a gallon jugful had been lustily slung by a drunken vandal.

  When the smell hit him, he lost his grip on the sill. A catalogue of profanity slugged up in his mind. His chin thocked hard against the cement overhang; he tasted tooth enamel shavings and his own blood for real. None of his awed words made it into the refrigerated air.

  His fall was arrested by strong arms.

  It took Stallis a second to see this. His jaw felt like it had stopped a good hook that had jarred his gray matter and caused him to drop the flashlight. His eyes teared and the tears froze on contact with the slipstream of iced wind.

  When he cracked his eyes open he felt the skin rupture in papercut slits. Pain slammed his sight dark again. Two seconds ago this had not happened yet. Reflex made him think to claw his.357 from its holster. Another nook of his brain fought to decide whether he should holler protest or thanks at being grabbed by the scruff.

  His toes never got the opportunity to touch the cold crust of ice blanketing the sidewalk. As he was hoisted up he finally got his eyes open and his senses ordered. The smell that had galvanized him was the battlefield fetor of messy death. Those schooled in proximity to the lifeless will tell you there is no smell quite equal to it, and once you know it, you're stuck with it, close as a lover, ominous as the glinting edge of good buddy Mr D's waiting scythe.

  His knees struck the brickwork as he was dragged upward. His scrotum got mashed. His skull was an airtight can with a rubber ball bouncing madly around inside, making dings and dents.

  He saw the face of the person who had dared to mess so physically with a police officer.

  Not a person. Not a face. His hand hurried to draw the revolver.

  Stallis saw a moist visage awash in discharge and blood, looking peeled, or overbaked. Skinless sinews cuddled a good nine inches of jaw in which hundreds of pencil incisors were crookedly seated. At the crown was a pulsing wad of cauliflower brains topped by a froth of bloody white hair. The arms supporting him were naked bone enwrapped in hanks of muscle like a derelict's clothing held together by electrical tape.

  No eyes looked back at Stallis' in the chancey storm light.

  This was not real. It was a ghoulish caricature, ineptly architectured, holding him aloft with strength that was not structurally possible. It was all wrong.

  It was wearing a bloody necktie, loosely knotted at half mast. No body, no legs, just a solid caterpillar column of flayed and oozing flesh all the way to the floor, covered by a red-soaked shirt just as long. The bone haft of a switchblade jutted like an aerial from the thing's right shoulder.

  Stallis had to get to his radio. Call in a Code 34 - officer needs help. He still had not pulled his gun all the way out. If he died in this room the call would be a 10-19. If he blew this obscenity away, he would be asked what was your backstop? You were not supposed to fire a round from your weapon unless you made damned sure it would not pierce whatever waited behind your target, and thus possibly hole some slow bystander.

  Fuck all that jive.

  Stallis freed the Magnum from its roost, cocked on the upswing, jammed it into the breastbone of the creature holding him, and snapped the trigger. The gun went off with a muffled kowkff and remained mired to the trigger guard in the quicksand clay of sternum. It hung fast even after Stallis' grip slackened and fell away.

  Impact. Impact. By the fourth time Stallis' occipital smashed into the casement he was thoroughly insensate. Thin splinters fell from the molding. Bits of glass were embedded in the back of his head.

  The sluglike creature sneezed, causing the revolver to catapult from its chest and skid into a gelid bloodpool on the floor, smoke still wisping from its muzzle. Stallis was propped against the inside wall. His body refused to sit, lolling drunkenly.

  The thing wearing the necktie was confused and slow. It knew it was supposed to be the occupant of this room. It knew the building had intended for it to be this room's occupant. But what was it supposed to do next?

  A skeleton claw rose, badly puppeteered, and closed on the bone handle of the Italian switchblade, feeling it the way a teenager might probe his first facial hair. Yes. Remembered behavior was the cue.

  It unsheathed the switchblade from the meat of its shoulder with a juicy sliding rasp. Then it sawed a jagged, leaking line, ear-to-ear, across the crown of Victor Stallis' head. Bony fingertips immersed themselves, gripping the lips of the gushing fissure, and peeled back firmly. Wet treats aplenty were unveiled.

  The thing could not think. Its drives were tidal, elemental, orts of memory like jigsaw puzzle pieces in an unruly pile. Part of it wanted to coil back into the humid sanctuary of the tunnels. Part of it was hungry. Part was satiated and beset by incomprehensible nightmares - images impossible to assimilate, as strange and alien as telepathic impressions from a different species.

  Another part of it wanted its eyes back. Its fine, clear-seeing, Jew-hating eyes.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Heights did not scare Jonathan. Nor the dark. The close press of the shaft was no threat because he was not a claustrophobe. Its confinement was illusory. The downward rappel was going to take him back to his caving days, during which he had inched down chutes larded in clay mud or wrist-deep in batshit.

  He thrilled to the fact he was going to such cliffhanger lengths. He felt alive to the core and in charge of his own destiny. This was a missed sensation, and welcome.

  Going down would be the easy part. His biceps and forearms were equal to such a short hop. Jamaica watched him tip outward from the bathroom sill and brace his gumsoled boots against the waffled metal. He eased his weight on to the makeshift extension-cord line and it went taut enough to play a solo on.

  'Shh,' he cautioned. Jamaica was hanging on to the cord.

  He anchored with his left arm and felt for the next climbing loop with his right. Almost immediately his toes skidded against the slick, wet surface of the airshaft's lining. This was going to be like a series of short falls from one pretzel knot to the next… and the next was down near his knees.

  Despite his tight grip the free line smoked through his gloved hand with alarming acceleration. He felt air rushing upward. He fisted leather around insulation and lurched to a lung-compressing halt when he hit the next pretzel. Momentum bashed his face against the corrugated steel and flung shock lightning across his inner eyelids. His heart freaked, punching too much blood furiously through his brain, flooding it with an assortment of nasty thoughts about his own abrupt termination, like defective cars smashing together in a freeway pile-up.

  He hung. He pendulumed. He felt nasal blood dotting his upper lip.

  'Jonathan!' Even her aphonic whisper was loud in the vertical tunnel of metal.

  The orange insulation did a hangman's rope squeak against the windowsill and Jonathan's hair collected a chaff of paint flakes. He kept his eyes shut and tried to stabilize by feel.

  'I'm okay, I'm okay- shh!'

  The rusty brown steel that had mashed and scraped his ear open was an inch deep in slime - probably snowmelt and particulate grime from the roof, basted by the building's warmth. It seemed much more slippery than dirty water. If Jonathan was going to play Batman and live, his next step would have to be more cautiously taken. Being cautious would lose him time. Jamaica was watching. He did not want to look bad in front of her, either.

  He re-established his footholds, toeing in to penetrate the goo and make a solid friction bite on the metal before he backed his full weight out from the wall a second time. His breathing equalized. Calm. Calm. He was okay. He opened his eyes.

  He had stopped eight or nine feet below the pale, yellowish light shining from the bathroom window. Jamaica 's head, in silhouette, watched. Her hair was a backlit gray nimbus; no facial expression was visible.

  'The bathtub moved,' she rasped at him.

  He hung steady. Better this time. Af
ter-images of the bathroom window receded and he could see oily droplets wandering groundward, broken loose by the tremors of his passage. It reminded him of the cold, greasy gel in which Spam was canned. It had air bubbles trapped in it and was the color of nicotine. Maybe that was just the yellow light, from above. He backed down and extended his foot, planting it. Katoong.

  A couple more pretzels and he might be able to relax his muscles on the sill of 107's bathroom, right below him. It was the middle of the night and the old anti-Semite had better be snoring by now.

  Hand over hand he lowered himself. Going was smoother where the line had not brushed against the wall and gotten coated. He judged drop and tried to make his boots meet the sill quietly. He hung by cocked biceps, unflexing one buoyant foot of distance at a time.

  His toetips grazed the sill and swept debris. Slowly he swept his left foot across, and heard shavings and crumblings patter into the water below. An unpleasant snapshot came and went, of him hitting bottom and sinking Up-deep into the same soft, sucking paste he had found smeared across the Hip side of his window cardboard. That would be boss.

  Wedging heels against the sill, he walked his hands down the line and rocked back, angling away. His knees popped like carrots snapping. From the darkness within the window, cold air meandered. The sweat on his back chilled. There was no bathroom window here. From the jut of splinters he judged the window had been inelegantly battered out from the inside.

  Jonathan was too enwrapped in his mission to notice, at first, the mortuary taint of opened corpses and aired blood. Below he saw the faintest glints of still water, its depth unguessable. He could feel the pretzel knots constricting all along the line as he hovered. Time to invest in a fast reconnoiter. It took two loops of cord to lock down his forearm this time; his gloves were wet and the line was lubricated. It tried to shimmy through, then tightened. He tilted the nine-volt lamp down for a sneak preview.

  Greenish barnacles of mold edged into peaks on all sides of the shaft, two-dimensional stalagmites appliqu6d to the corroded steel. Jonathan thought of cave paintings. Their luminous peaks gradated from the color of oxidized copper to a battery-acid white just beneath his perch. Random ripple patterns petered out on the surface of the turbid water. Somewhere above him a toilet flushed, booming distantly with a sewer-pipe echo. At the far side of the pool - by his reckoning, the south side - he saw a beachhead of compost. Random garbage, fallen junk and human refuse had piled against one side of the shaft to form a trashberg. Perhaps he could light on its tiny peak to avoid getting dunked and stinky.

  Nearby bobbed Cruz's Hefty bag. A huge air bubble had ballooned one corner into a huge plastic nipple. A shard of wood like a bamboo skewer had rammed through the bag, its top aimed right at Jonathan's ass. He could barely make it out in the wavering light, a hair-fine needle of wet, earthen stuff more mineral than wood.

  He swung the light up. Even at his bad angle it was impossible to miss seeing all the blood in 107. Impact splats ideogrammed the whitewashed walls and a wide widow's peak of red reached toward the sill. The sill itself was wet and crimson, like a bad cherrystain job, and ruddy clots edged broken glass and wood alike. A congealing swath twice the width of a dunked and dragged mop traced an erratic byway of death up and over the rim of the tub, across still-wet tiles and out the wide open door. Hanks of shredded garments and saturated clumps of organic matter despoiled the purity, the abstract symmetry of the sanguine sheen.

  From the belly of the tub a straight razor winked at Jonathan, cocked into an L-shape. It appeared to have been dunked in somebody's heart and thrown to its current roost with considerable force; stringers of gooey crimson glued it to the porcelain.

  Now he smelled it, full kick. A stench that demanded torching to the ground; the tilling of ashes.

  He prioritized rapidly: The decision to look had been his. If he continued taxing his body by hanging and gawking, pretty soon all choices would be stolen. Once he had recovered the trashbag and Jamaica could tell him what they'd won, then he could meddle wherever else he wanted. He had just told Jamaica that if the dead Velasquez kid was afloat down here he would ignore it until Cruz's cache had been salvaged. Rule One. He had to stick to his agenda.

  He lowered away… sincerely hoping that nothing poked any part of a head out of 107 to say howdy-do.

  It got a lot messier a lot faster.

  An attempt to Tarzan closer to the sloping shoreline of silt merely dumped Jonathan dead center. His foot struck the canted surface and skidded as though packed in adipose. He went face-down into the slime, his head missing the pointed stick by about three inches. The lamp swung, submerged and broke surface, making lightning. He had just enough time to slam his mouth and eyes shut before the trashberg crumbled and sank him, arms flailing.

  It was like cold vomit hydrotherapy.

  Jonathan felt clammy ooze infiltrate his clothing, seeking and finding openings, soaking through layers at about the temperature of the Quietly Beer in his fridge. He touched bottom - it wasn't deep - and clawed madly for the fragile support of the trashberg's peak. It went to gelatin in his grasp. He scrabbled and splashed, blind in a concrete slop trough over four feet deep. He thought of pond scum, verdant and suffocating, hiding quicksand. The junkpile flowed away at the thirty degree angle and bristled with sharp edges - glass, split wood, slatting, rusty wire. He sank one boot as deep as it would go, and, once anchored, grabbed for the line. His fingers, packed with oleaginous glop, found a climbing pretzel and clamped.

  He pulled himself up, sucking air, scared.

  He achieved tension on the end of the line and was able to hoist himself free to waist-depth, boots engulfed in the muck of the trashberg. No way he could climb back now. He was slipperier than a fish dunked in motor oil. The only escape option was getting out through 107, which seemed empty, whatever violence it had witnessed now past.

  But still. All that blood.

  Again he chided himself. Cringer, coward, pussy. His ears hurt from clenching his teeth.

  The lamp secured to his belt was still alight. Leakage had not yet subverted it, but the beam was already sputtering. He knew the matches in his pocket were now doused and useless.

  Hurry.

  One-handed he untangled the Hefty bag from where it was gaffed and knotted it through one of the pretzels. Then he fell back against the slick slope, feet mired, arms seeking the corner in cruciform after giving his three pre-planned yanks on the cord. Jamaica hauled up the prize and Jonathan hoped he did not sink further than waist deep.

  The bag spun, blocking the glow from above and dripping on his head. He did not sink but could feel how precarious his footing was. Slowly he moved to get his lamp out of the water.

  The muck roiled in slugging waves, capturing the artificial lamplight like luminescent paint. On the side of the shaft common with the broken window of 107 Jonathan could just make out a fat strip of riveted iron, just kissing the top of the waterline. It might be a welded-up sub-basement window, or maybe Fergus' secret hatchway. Perhaps he crawled down here to geek pigeons and sodomize pre-schoolers.

  The glop beneath his left boot lost all mock of cohesion and gave way faster than hot taffy. His hands scraped the corrugated metal, gathering brown gel all the way, forestalling his immersion for another few seconds. The lamp went under again. Now the waterline cut across, from the bottom of his ribcage on the right to his left collarbone. His left hand sought solidity and fished up several stubs of wood so waterlogged they sank as soon as he dropped them. His fingers clasped something harder, cylindrical, too smooth to be part of the pulpwood he assumed was the basis for the trashberg. An impromptu walking stick to keep him from swallowing more sewage. He got it unstuck without seriously jeopardizing his balance. He felt a knob at one end. In the light he saw it was a bone, porous and glistening. An ulna - the longer of the two crossed forearm bones. Once upon a time the knob had been somebody's elbow. Somebody with arms just a bit longer than Jonathan's. This was not the remains of a dead ra
t or drowned cat.

  He stopped breathing, terror making new grabs at his nerve endings.

  Almost any surplus movement would slip him face-down into the goop again, and he did not hanker to die that way, no thanks. His body was immobile with conflict. What he wanted to do was thrash and holler and get the hell away as fast as his parts could propel him. He was keeping his nostrils from vacuuming up diarrhetic mulch solely by virtue of standing on some stranger's skeleton. Maybe two or three bodies more, beneath that, deciding, right now, whether to reach for the gum-soled boots and the living flesh they packaged.

  He heard the knotted extension cord bonking and feeling its crooked way back down the airshaft. Ten more seconds, and he could grab it, scatter-ass up to the first floor, and just run full tilt past whatever might be lurking there to scare him into a padded cell.

  He dropped the bone. It sank. It had been the afflicted color of diseased eyes, stained by the cloudy water. Tough little strings of cured meat still clung to it. When he shut his eyes he could still see it, dissolving to yellow motes at the edges in his vision.

  The water moved by itself, rolling heavily toward Jonathan's face, slopping his chin and tightly pressed lips. It floated detritus free from the trashberg and receded in a massy, tidal movement, the way a lull bathtub shifts when you climb inside.

  Something big had just changed position in the sump at the deep end of the pool. The water rose to immerse the strip of rivets, then came back for Jonathan.

  His breath was misting free in whimpers now. All he could think of was being trapped down here, his rope out of reach, trapped with something that wanted to make him into a jumble offeces-clotted bones. Something big.

  His coke bang crested. The ice sealing his throat cracked and cleared.

  'Hurry up! Hurry with the lucking rope, goddammit, hey!' Just now he gave not an earthly burp who heard him or what they might think was going on.

  Elsewhere in Kenilworth, someone Jonathan would never meet shouted shut the fuck up in response.