Cellars

by John Shirley

  “Yes?” Maguss’s voice. Cranky, impatient. “Who is it? And why are you calling me at this hour?”

  “Lanyard. I called to tell you I’m returning—”

  “Returning where?”

  “San Francisco. The editorial offices. The next issue has to be put to bed, I’ve got a column to write, and I don’t think there’s any hope that I can get—”

  “I don’t want you back here without that interview, Lanyard.”

  “She refuses to be interviewed.”

  “What? She’s the hottest up-and-coming psychic on the East Coast. It’s in her interest to be interviewed. What is she—”

  “You don’t understand, Mr. Maguss. She isn’t interested in making money off her gift. She has repeatedly refused money, and lately she also refuses publicity. She further refuses to be tested. Says she gives of her gift when she feels it’s right. We had a nice talk about a number of things. She’s opposed to abortion. But we didn’t touch on psychic phenomena. She steered around it, flatly refused to let me record her at all.”

  “It’s probably another gimmick. Playing coy, playing hard to get, attracting publicity by avoiding it. Really, Lanyard. Get on it. Be persistent.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I can’t. You can fire me. I respect her. I’m not sure she has a gift. I’m not sure anymore that the people we’ve been reporting on for ten years aren’t all frauds. Or self-deluding. I’m sorry—uh…” He disliked talking to the old man. Something in Maguss’s voice made him think of his childhood. Sometimes, talking to the old man, even on the phone, he thought he glimpsed things, squirming, at the corners of his eyes.

  “I can hear it in your voice, Lanyard.”

  “What?” Lanyard was shaken. “Hear what?”

  “You’re amorously involved with this woman. To put it politely.”

  Lanyard was annoyed now. Because it was almost true. Madelaine and Lanyard at dinner had allowed their eyes to lock more than once. Madelaine and Lanyard in the cab had allowed their knees to touch, and to remain touching.

  “No,” he said. “You’re quite wrong.”

  “Am I?”

  “I don’t intend to…to harass this woman for an interview. So fire me.”

  “Is that a dare?” Maguss chuckled. “You’re getting restless in this job. We’ll talk about it when you get back here. See if you can come up with a column. Look out the window and have a vision. Look for your childhood in the clouds. You write for Visions magazine. Give us a vision. Cough up the goods.” The rasping chuckle again.

  Lanyard disliked his boss’s sense of humor.

  “All right, then. Good-bye.” Lanyard hung up and turned from the pay phone. Madelaine Springer smiled as he stepped back, startled.

  “How—um—how did you find me here?” he asked, after a moment.

  “Hoping I’ll say it was psychic?” She shook her head. “Nope. I came here looking for you and I spotted your loud red-check tie.”

  Lanyard laughed.

  “You ready to give me the interview now?”

  “No. Sorry.” She held his eyes. “No interview.”

  Somehow, he was relieved.

  “You know something, Mr. Lanyard? I read your magazine today, just a little while ago. First time. Didn’t care for it. Your column was endlessly skeptical—almost snotty—about the supernatural. And the rest of the magazine was exploitatively enthusiastic. It all struck me as false.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Sure, Maguss makes good money sensationalizing hoaxes, maybes, could-bes, and probably-weren’ts. All I make is an unimpressive salary. I think he prints my stuff to give the gee-whiz stuff in the rest of the rag credibility. How do you make your living? You never told me, and more than once I—”

  “I take in sewing.”

  “Very funny. You’re not going to tell me?”

  “I’m an actress. Right now I’m between engagements. I was in a Minder production, Nero. I get unemployment till I luck into another gig. I don’t make money from ‘readings,’ Mr. Lanyard.”

  “I believe you. Look—I’d like to talk to you some more. I mean it. I’d like to talk to you about anything. But they’re announcing my flight—”

  “Write if you get work.” She put two fingertips to his cheek, the lightest touch. She dropped her hand and he shook it, lingeringly.

  Her skin was mildly dusky, her eyes brown-black, dark-lashed. Her nose was gracefully prominent, a counterpoint to the deep in-curve of her cheeks, her dimples; her full, expressive lips were painted dark burgundy, a complement to her wildly curly shoulder-length blue-black hair. She wore snug black Spandex pants, a tight light-green wool sweater, and jade scarab earrings. She was slightly plump.

  She was Lanyard’s type.

  Reluctantly, Lanyard murmured, “Bye.” And turned toward Gate 12.

  “United 256 for Denver and San Francisco now loading at Gate 12…”

  “Lanyard?”

  “Yes?” He turned back to her too eagerly.

  “You won’t be going back to San Francisco today.”

  Once more the faint, electric brush against his cheek. She walked away. He watched her walk away. Grow up, he told himself.

  LANYARD WAS STARING at the orange polyester back of someone’s leisure suit—staring through it, really, having gone into the time-eating brown study that makes waiting in line seem shorter. He looked up, blinking. Bristle-knuckled hands had closed around his biceps. On both sides. “Whuh?” he said, dully, confused, as they pressed him from the line, to the left. One of them bent to pick up his travel bag. “You’re Lanyard, right?” said one of the two men flanking him. He was a beefy man in a suit coat that needed pressing; he had steel-gray hair and a red, pitted face. The other man was tired-looking, wore a black suit and tie; his hair was thinning, he had a slight potbelly, but he was strong. Stronger than Lanyard. They directed him with their sheer bulk and firm squeezes on his arms, managing to look friendly for passersby while conveying a stern message to Lanyard.

  “Sure it’s Lanyard,” the other man was saying. “I just looked at the picture. He’s one of those guys with a hole in his chin. Not many of those guys around.”

  Lanyard winced. It’s a dimple, he thought. Not a hole. Aloud he said, “You guys prepared to explain yourself?”

  “Police,” said the shorter man in the black suit.

  “Lieutenant Gribner wantsuh seeya,” said the larger man, and with his free hand he flashed a wallet badge.

  “Some kind of emergency. Don’t be alarmed.” But his tone expressed no real concern for Lanyard’s sense of well-being.

  “What do you mean, ‘Don’t be alarmed’?” Lanyard said, trying to hold back against their relentless push. They simply dragged him along, and people stared. It was embarrassing. Lanyard let them lead him.

  They took him straight to a patrol car parked in the taxi zone. A uniformed cop waited in the driver’s seat. Lanyard got into the back seat, between the two plainclothes cops.

  “You boys ever take civics in high school?” Lanyard asked, trying to keep the shrillness from his voice. “Think back now. Remember something called the Constitution? The rights of the arrested?”

  The larger cop laughed at him. “You ain’t arrested. Just wannuh ask you some questions. How can we ask you questions when yuh on a plane?” The man actually winked at him.

  “But you can’t just drag a man…”

  “Now, wait a minute,” said the other cop, in the tone of a comedian setting up a joke. “You’re in the position of a man on the Titanic who keeps insistin’ it’s unsinkable as he’s going under.”

  Lanyard was the only one in the car who didn’t laugh at that.

  Absently, he took his glasses from his coat pocket. He put the wire-rims on and looked out the side window, across the cop’s ruddy chin, at the streets. They were driving through Queens, passing row houses, tenements, playgrounds splashed with graffiti. The graffiti was spray-painted, laid on with magic markers and felt pens, most of it in a mystifying,
loosely ornate, hooked, arcane style; Lanyard sometimes thought the future of a city could be read in its graffiti the way a divination is read from tea leaves. He peered through the wet October morning, the rain falling like static, trying to read a slogan written in black spray paint. It seemed to say:

  WATCH UNDERGROUND

  Steam spumed from manholes, plumed from sewer grates. “Sombitch,” the driver mumbled, pounding his horn as the intersection was clogged by pushy cabs.

  “Hit the siren,” said the red-faced man.

  The cabs moved grudgingly aside for the patrol car as the siren whooped hysterically. Lanyard identified with its nervous shriek just then; some internal siren was warbling in him, and to blanket it he asked, “What’s it about? What sort of questions does this lieutenant of yours want to ask? Regarding what?”

  “All I know is it’s regarding a homicide. And we supposed to take you the subway station. Lower East Side. Bleecker Street station onna Lexington Avenue line. I dunno what’s up.”

  “Subway station? You mean police station?”

  “No, I don’t mean police station.” The red-faced cop was irritated. “Did I say police station? I said subway station. Onna way here they called us. Said atta last moment we should take you the subway station and not the police station. They waiting in the subway.”

  “Christ. How long is this going to take? How far is it to this place?”

  “It’s just over the river. You’re an out-of-towner, huh?”

  “What?” The tired-eyed cop. “You didn’t know he was an out-of-towner? Sure, I knew that, pal. Moment I laid eyes on him. Had his bag on the floor. Wasn’t touching him. He wasn’t checking it out. Hell, if we hadn’t come along he probably would’ve had to make a report on a stolen item.”

  “I dunno. Lot of guys, y’know, moved into the city, look like out-of-towners. They used to be. Not anymore. I thought maybe he was going on a business trip to San Francisco.”

  It annoyed Lanyard to be talked about as if he weren’t there.

  They drove beneath overpasses, through tunnels, over a bridge, and into a neighborhood that was alternately staid brownstones and burned-out shells of apartment buildings. A Puerto Rican hot-dog-pizza-barbecue café had an animated neon sign showing a man chasing a pig with a knife. The neon man’s arm raised the knife and stabbed down with it, raised it and stabbed down…

  They stopped at an intersection only because a freight truck was blocking the way. A man walking a small, fluffy white dog noticed the police car adjacent to him and made a great show of bending with a newspaper to scoop up the dog’s waste. The truck passed and they drove through the red light with siren warbling. The man with the leashed dog dumped the dogshit on the street as soon as they’d passed. Lanyard watched him dwindle in the rear-view mirror.

  They pulled up opposite a heavy blue-painted metal fence around the stairs leading into a subway station. Stairs leading down. He began to feel a little scared. He didn’t want to go down there.

  “Lanyard?”

  “Yes?”

  “You won’t be going back to San Francisco today.”

  Okay, Lanyard thought, she was right. But before you get spooked, ask yourself why she was right. Not necessarily a psychic flash. She might have had inside information. She might know someone at the police station. This might be her clever, oblique way of making an impression on him. Maguss could be right about her.

  Lanyard didn’t want to believe that.

  Abruptly becoming briskly official in the proximity of their superiors, the plainclothes cops hustled Lanyard from the car, across the street, and down the greasy-gray metal-edged steps of the subway, needlessly repeating, “Come this way, please.”

  He was escorted through darkness and into the gray light of the platform at the end of a corridor. Graffiti was everywhere. In the half-light Lanyard wondered, for a moment, if the men with him were really cops. He’d only glimpsed the badge. They might be bringing him down here to kill him. They might—

  He was startled by a flash of artificial lightning. The strobing came from the flashbulbs of police photographers at the far end of the subway platform.

  To one side were two vending machines, both of which had been pried open and rifled. There was a passageway chained shut, with a sign that said PASSAGEWAY ACCESS TO UPTOWN PLATFORM CLOSED BETWEEN 7 PM AND 6 AM. The bathroom had also been chained shut. Near the ceiling, the walls were threaded with cracks. Water dripped onto the ancient tracks from the tangle of pipes overhead. The usual musty laundry-room smell of subway stations was tainted with another odor.

  It took Lanyard a few moments, approaching the small crowd at the other end of the platform, to recognize the smell. “Blood,” he murmured.

  And there was also the smell of fresh spray paint.

  The men at the end of the platform, by the smudged blue-tiled wall, parted to let Lanyard and the two cops through. Lanyard found that he didn’t want to look at what it was their circle enclosed. He found himself looking at the graffiti for distraction. Most of it was names. Kids, he supposed, trying to be real, trying to leave their mark in some way.

  “You Lanyard?”

  Lanyard could look away no longer. Nodding, he looked at the corpse on the concrete floor. It was much worse than he’d expected

  He wanted to run from the sight. The roar of fear and revulsion inside him exploded around them, and the air shook with it so that Lanyard was amazed that the others didn’t cover their ears. But then he realized it was a subway train roaring into the station with an incredible clamor that the others acknowledged not at all.

  A woman was spread-eagled on her back. Her blouse had been torn away. The shreds of her hose remained around her ankles, along with bloodied, ripped white underwear. Her skirt had been hiked up around her waist. Her breasts had been symmetrically quartered like fruit sections in a salad. Her solar plexus had been neatly opened and laid back in four sections, exposing intestines and other organs Lanyard was unsure of. Intestines, gray mottled with blue pink and glistening with drops of red, had been extracted, severed, and rearranged in a pattern that reminded Lanyard of a Chinese ideogram.

  Her sternum had been pried apart; her heart, extracted, lay, brown-crusted and barely recognizable, tucked under her right cheek, against her jaw. Her head was tilted to the right.

  Conscious configuration, Lanyard thought.

  A cross within a circle had been cut into the skin of her forehead. Her eyes had been closed with red wax drippings. Lanyard was grateful her eyes were closed.

  The candles still remained, one at each point of the pentagram spray-painted—recently, he judged—on the concrete around her. The pentagram was rough but unbroken, within a magic circle. The pentagram was red, the circle black. Between the five points of the star were figures rather awkwardly inscribed with felt pen. Heavy blue-black felt pen. Figures in Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, ancient Persian—an odd mix.

  One of the red candles was still lit. It flickered leeringly in the wind from the subway train—the train was passing on. Faces flashed by, inspecting the scene with mild interest.

  Blood filled the girl’s mouth. Her hands were open., limp. One hand contained a scrap of paper on which something was written that Lanyard couldn’t make out.

  He felt numb. For the moment he was beyond gagging or crying out.

  God, he thought, I hope she was a murderess. I hope in some way she deserved it. I hope she was a child-beating murderess. I hope she brought this on herself.

  But somehow he knew she hadn’t. He became aware of a small man with mismatched socks—one gray, one white—brown shoes, black trousers too short for him, a chewed downturned pipe clamped in his teeth, a fretful look about him; balding, pinched, the look of a worrier. The little man was asking him a question, over and over again.

  “What?” Lanyard said. “What did you say? “Another train arriving, bringing its racket and its rocking gray bulk. It slowed as the little man pointed at the corpse with one hand—in the other was
a wallet badge. He was a lieutenant. What had the other cops said their lieutenant’s name was? Gribner?

  “This!” He meant the corpse. “This!” he repeated, lifting his shoulders in something like a shrug that seemed to say, Can’t this guy speak English, or what? He gestured toward the corpse again. “What do you know about this?”

  TWO

  Everyone looked expectantly at Lanyard. The train stopped; the station was relatively quiet, for a moment. And then Lanyard became aware of the plaintive yowling of a siren, the drone of cars, the ticking of water trickling through the ceiling onto the platform.

  The train’s motorman said something incomprehensible through the intercom; a Hasidic Jew in a black hat rushed down the stairs and through the turnstile in time to block the train’s closing doors, wedging his body between. He struggled or a moment as the motorman said, “MOVE BACK FROM THE DOORS OR WE WILL NOT GET UNDER WAY.“ Then the Hasid, tucking his beard under his chin to see that it didn’t get caught in the doors, pressed through. The train lurched, groaned, rolled, picked up speed, and moments later the platform echoed with its departure.

  The man hadn’t noticed the cops standing around the body of the woman laid open on the splashily painted concrete.

  Lanyard turned to Gribner. “You accusing me—?” He pointed at the woman’s body. He envisioned a massive misunderstanding; someone fitting his description seen earlier from the platform, knife in hand—a tragic resemblance causing Lanyard to go to the gas chamber, despairingly muttering, “But I was nowhere near there…”

  He was relieved but no less dazed when Gribner said, “No, no—what? You? No. We—when we saw it was the same pattern as the other killing, the subway setting, same symbols on the floor, same kind of cutting, we figured we got a devil worshipper of the old school and you seemed just the man to advise us about that. No offense intended. We need advice on the way they think, the nature of the symbology in the circle here—to help us trace the killer. Look, my name’s Cyril Gribner. I’m in charge of the case. I’m sorry about jumping out at you like that—’What do you know about this…?’” He laughed softly. Sadly.