by John Shirley
Later: the bedroom curtains were closed, the only light a murky blue from a shaded floor lamp. They sat side by side. She looped a leg over one of his and they kissed. It was a good kiss: He lost track of time.
But there was another obstacle he hadn’t foreseen. Suddenly and unreasonably self-conscious, he said: “Does it feel good when I…I mean, if I caress it too hard or too softly—if there’s anything you’d like to tell me, to make it better for you, go ahead and tell me. It makes me feel closer to you, when I know I’m making love to you the way you like it.”
He’d whispered it softly—but it didn’t have the effect he’d anticipated. She froze up, and seemed to be listening, as if hearing a burglar in the next room.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She relaxed a little. “I’d better tell you something. I don’t know how you’ll feel about it, because you’re a skeptic. But I can’t make love if there’s talking. If either of us talk, the words trigger off the Gift, sometimes. There’s so much closeness, when I make love to someone, that if they speak I begin to pick up what they’re thinking. That’s not always a nice experience. I get flashes about things that will happen to them. I have to go into a sort of fanatic concentration on the feeling, and nothing else, otherwise the Gift comes and distracts me.” She lay back on the pillow and draped an arm over her eyes. “I don’t know why they call it a Gift. I’d like to give it back to whoever gave it to me.”
Lanyard was shaky inside. It wasn’t, he realized, because their lovemaking had been interrupted. It was because he believed what she was saying.
“Okay,” he said. And that’s all he said. After that, it was all caresses, and gentle probings, and damp explorations. They made love three times that night, which was three times Lanyard’s average.
But as they lay limp, exhausted, huddled together, something she said made it difficult for him to sleep.
She was drifting into sleep herself. But she spoke for the first time in hours, murmuring dreamily, “When you spoke before, I had to stop it because…I had a flash of you…saw a little kid…following you in a tunnel. This little kid…his head changed, it grew into…the head of a mummy, sort of, long mustache on it…Maybe I picked up something you dreamt…But I had a bad feeling when—oh, I don’t know…But don’t go on the…I don’t know…” Seconds later she was asleep.
But now Lanyard was wide awake.
HE WOKE AT ten AM after about five hours’ sleep. Madelaine was just coming back from the shower, wrapped in a towel. “Good morning, Old Log-Sawer,” she said.
“Yeah…” He grinned weakly, sitting, aware that he probably looked all tousled and pasty-faced. His tongue was coated with a septic film. “Ugh. Can I use your phone? I’m already late on a call. Detective What’s-his-name.”
“Sure—then you want to go out for some breakfast?”
“Absolutely.” He reached for the bedside phone, punched Information, got the number of the Ninth Precinct, and put in a call for Gribner.
“He’s not here,” someone said. “He said you supposed to meet him if you called before noon. You should come immediately to the…lessee…Fairbright Arms at Bleecker and Seventh Avenue. He’ll be in the basement. That’s all the memo says.”
Shit,” said Lanyard, hanging up.
“What’s the matter?” She was applying eyeliner, her face comically elongated as she strained to hold her eyelids still.
“Seems I have to forgo breakfast. Got to go see Gribner.”
“That’s okay. Take a shower if you want.”
He showered, borrowed her toothbrush, but his clothes were even more rumpled than they had been the night before.
He stood awkwardly in the doorway. He didn’t want to leave her, and he didn’t want to keep his appointment.
It’s absurd, he thought. It’s like canceling a honeymoon to take a tour through a slaughterhouse.
But he kissed her briefly, and said, “Bye,” and found his way to the elevator.
DESCENDING IN AN almost identical, but more deteriorated elevator in the Fairbright Arms, Lanyard tried to analyze his growing unease. He felt fairly certain there were a number of people involved in the killings. Maybe an organization. They would want to defend themselves.
They might see Lanyard as a threat.
He was an out-of-towner, and somehow that made him feel particularly vulnerable. But then, everyone was vulnerable in the city. There were snipers. There were people who dropped cinder blocks on other people from rooftops in Times Square. And there were those who stalked.
No way to know who might be waiting around the next corner. Or outside the elevator, in the hall, when the doors slid open.
The doors slid open. Basement level.
Rigid, he stared across the hall and through the doorway into a mist-filled underground room. An unnatural fog half-shrouded four large white, hulking shapes that shivered and growled in the dim chamber.
Lanyard forced himself to take a step closer. There was a sensation in his belly that made him feel as if he’d swallowed live eels.
He looked closer—and laughed. He was looking into a laundry room. The fog was steam leaking from a dryer’s out-vent, where the hose had broken. The white hulking shapes were washers and other dryers, shaking as they went through their cycles. Expecting the fear to leave him, he laughed again at his own foolishness.
But the laughter was forced and brief. The fear didn’t leave him. He turned away from the laundry room, moving reluctantly down the concrete hallway toward the sounds of men’s voices.
The voices were coming through an open door on the right. Lanyard stopped, just before reaching the door. He glanced over his shoulder. A tentacle of steam was curling from the laundry room, curving toward him. He felt small and lost, oppressed by the bulk of the old brick building around him. He clearly heard the rising thrum of a subway train approaching, not far on the other side of the walls, like some great animal growling as it nosed through the underworld. He took a deep breath, and moved toward the furnace room—and stopped.
Someone unseen was pushing a corpse out of the room. The corpse was on its back, strapped into place on a gurney. The sheet over its head had been insecurely fastened. The motion of the gurney made the sheet fall aside, exposing a grinning, bloodless face.
Why is he grinning?
The gurney angled into the passageway and thrust the wobbling head toward Lanyard. It bore down on him like some perverse destiny. Pushing the gurney was a young man in a white uniform. He was chewing gum. The gurney came to a sudden halt. The corpse’s head was adjacent to Lanyard; he glanced down long enough to see that it was a boy about twelve years old. A boy who would never be thirteen.
The boy’s face was a hideous satire of joy.
Lanyard looked away. The young attendant grinned at Lanyard, his expression uncomfortably similar to that on the corpse’s face, and Lanyard felt sure he was stoned. Probably on ’ludes, judging by the idiotic laxness of his facial muscles. “Shit, goddammit, I keep forgetting I gotta pull it and not push it.” He moved to the other end of the corpse and, without bothering to cover the dead boy’s face, bent to pull the stretcher away down the hall.
“Lanyard!”
Lanyard turned. It was Gribner, pipe wagging in his teeth as he spoke. “Lanyard, where you been hiding, tell me that, huh? I’m calling your hotel, I’m chasing around, I’m calling your employer—sure, ignore us and—”
“Let’s get this over with,” Lanyard said firmly, hurrying toward the furnace room. It was easier, knowing the victim was gone.
“I tried to keep them from taking the body before you could get a look, but Forensics said they had to—”
“Don’t do me any favors,” Lanyard interrupted, pushing past Gribner and stepping into the furnace room. The door, opened inward, was held in place by a black rubber chock, and was stenciled in drippy blue on white: FURNISS-NO INTERING.
“No intering?” Lanyard murmured. “Someone was interred her
e, for a few hours”
He was looking at the star-shaped spill of blood on the concrete floor. The blood splash was an asymmetrical star half obscuring the symmetrical pattern of the pentagram spray-painted just beneath the grille of the oil furnace. The furnace was like some malformed troll of gray metal climbing from the cellar floor, the tin pipes curving up from its torso and angling, as if they had elbows, to grip the plaster ceiling.
The room was about thirty by thirty-five, and it was hot. It was sticky hot: Lanyard, still gazing at the stain on the floor, the multicolored spray paint, the overturned candles, put a shaky hand to his brow and wiped away clammy sweat. Maybe the room wasn’t hot. Maybe he was coming down with something. He felt feverish. It had seemed a rather warm day, Indian Summer, perhaps. Too warm to turn on a furnace.
“Sure is hot in here,” said one of the two men standing with Gribner on the far side of the pentagram.
Gribner’s hangdog features creased as he bent, scowling, to peer through the grate of the furnace. “Furnace isn’t on. Maybe it was on, and heated up the place and they turned it off.”
He tapped the squat machine gingerly, then ran his fingers over it, leaving traces in the dust. “It’s cold. I lay you bets it wasn’t used today.”
No one said it, but everyone thought it: So how come it’s so hot in here?
Lanyard felt odd. His skin crawled, and he felt an anomalous pressure behind the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. His eyes stung. The scene became unnaturally grainy, and the air seemed tinted, as if he were seeing the room through a blue filter. He closed his eyes.
And instantly snapped them open again.
“Something the matter, Lanyard?” Gribner asked, mopping his forehead with a white handkerchief. “Looked like you were gonna faint…Too hot in here for you, yes?”
“No, I… Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep…” He turned to look at the furnace. It had come from that direction He’d closed his eyes, and something had seemed to leap through the darkness—the darkness that waits behind the eyelids. It had been something animalistic, and outlined in crackling lines of red-white, as if it were made of electrical arcs. He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes again.
He looked through the darkness behind his eyelids as if he were looking from a lighted room into a dark night. The prospect was black, smeared with retinal afterimages and restless specks of every color; it was like a rain of volcanic ash. Through the ashen landscape something came bounding, four-footed, spectacular—because it had sharp-edged form, a definite shape in a vista of shapelessness. It was a snarling thing made of crackling red lines, a neon outline, but somehow very substantial in its carnivorous presence. It moved too quickly for a clear image—he had an impression of four hugely clawed legs, gaping jaws, ratlike eyes, a body like a great hound—it bounded toward him like an aroused attack dog, jaws gaping—
“Lanyard!” Gribner was shaking him, shouting in his ears. He opened his eyes and looked around. There were only the three other men and the furnace—no red neon hounds bounding toward him. But he stood rigidly, dripping sweat.
Lanyard muttered, “Sorry…I yell, or something?”
“You were shouting and waving your hands in front of your face!” said one of the plainclothes cops loudly—accusingly. Lanyard recognized the big red-faced cop who’d accosted him at the airport.
“Yes…well…”
Gribner stood back from Lanyard, watching him warily. “I feel funny in here, too…Lanyard, where you going?”
“Hm?” Lanyard stopped. “I was going to have a look behind the furnace.”
It had come from behind the furnace.
“We already looked there. Nothing there. In your opinion, was this circle,” Gribner pointed at the pentagram, “made by the same person who made the other one you saw?”
Lanyard glanced down at the smeared floor. The blood puddle was beginning to dry, brown around the edges. In the middle it was dark red, so dark it was almost purple; it reflected the two caged light bulbs glowing glumly overhead. “Well,” Lanyard said. “It’s the same invocation, from what I can see of the lettering, the names they called. I’m no handwriting expert, though, I can’t be sure it’s the same person. I doubt it is. I think it’s a cult. And I think…well, it could be the same cult, though a different killer.”
“So tell me something new. We have forensic evidence to that effect, from the last one…” Gribner began. He fell silent as Lanyard moved toward the furnace again.
Lanyard ducked under a pipe and peered into the sprawling shadows back of the furnace. He couldn’t see clearly. He forced himself to move against the current of his fear.
The concrete wall was pitted, but otherwise ran unbroken from the ceiling to a shallow recess three feet above the floor. The recess was three feet high, two feet wide, three inches deep. It struck Lanyard as the opening of a shaft, plugged by a concrete slab. The plug had a rusty iron ring set into it. Lanyard reached out and, hesitating just a moment, closed his fingers over the ring and tugged hard. The slab made a creek as it tilted outward from the recess and fell against the floor—Lanyard pulled his hand back at the last moment. The slab had broken into three parts. It was perhaps four inches thick. The shaft was open, dark, malodorous—and hot.
Lanyard banged his head on a pipe when he straightened too quickly, suddenly afraid to remain at the opening alone. Holding his head, wincing, he backed away. Gribner came to stand beside him.
“Wunnerful,” Gribner muttered. “You broke a hole in the wall .
But his tone carried no real reproach. He seemed intrigued.
Lanyard blinked—but he was careful not to close his eyes for long. “Gribner, you think the killer lives in this building?”
“If he does, he’s stupid. If it’s a he. Most maniac killers don’t shit in their own backyards. They have some cunning. The boy who was killed lives in the building. No connection with the two women killed, so far as we know. He was picking up some laundry for his mother—it was past midnight. She works late, she says. Kid stays up half the night, I guess. So he was down here picking up the stuff. The super found him this morning—there are signs of a struggle in the laundry room. The way the thing looks is someone grabbed the kid, and the kid fought with them. They knocked some steam pipes loose. The killer hit the kid, lacerating his head—there was a little blood in the laundry room—and dragged him in here, maybe so they wouldn’t be interrupted. Butchered him pretty much the same as the others.”
“What sort of security is there?” Lanyard’s voice sounded weak and far away in his own ears. He couldn’t bring himself to take his eyes off the gap in the wall.
“That’s the thing: Two guys playing cards with the elevator man most of the night at the front door. They say no one came in after midnight. The roof entrance was sealed off long ago. Iron bars on all the windows, not likely he slipped in through a fire escape. Maybe he got in during the day, was waiting down here for hours…”
“Maybe he came in there,” Lanyard pointed at the dark place in the wall.
The red-faced cop stood just behind Lanyard. He spoke up abruptly: “That’s a service gate for a steam main. They used to pump steam around from a central plant to these buildings aroun’ here. My old man used to do that shit for a living. Cleaned ’em out, patched ’em up.”
“You think it connects with other utility tunnels?” Gribner asked.
“Good chance. Sometimes they do. You think maybe the guy went down in some manhole—or maybe a subway tunnel—and came up here?”
Gribner stuck out his lower lip and squinted. “I think that’s a possibility, yeah, sure. That door come out pretty easily. Like it was just hanging in place, looked to me.”
“Easily…” Lanyard nodded, dreamily.
“And all three killings were underground…”
“Three?” Lanyard asked.
“I told you—there was another, but we kept it quiet for a while—before the one you were brought in on. Much the same. Lanyard, t
his cult of yours—any reason it should be underground?”
Lanyard nodded slowly. “Ahura Mazda had two priests, one for the good side, one for the malevolent side of the deity. The priests for the malevolent side had their temples underground…”
“Closer to hell,” Gribner murmured.
They stood staring at the shadow within a shadow where the shaft began, behind the furnace.
Lanyard could feel a current of thick, tepid air issuing from the horizontal shaft. He thought he glimpsed, for a moment, in that rectangular blackness, a flicker of red light.
But he knew—even as Gribner sent out for men with flashlights to probe the tunnel—that nothing would be found but pipes and rat droppings and more tunnels, interminable tunnels leading to cellars beneath cellars.
LEANING BACK ON the couch, his stockinged feet on a footstool, toying with an unlit pipe, Gribner waited for the call from Leibowitz. He had just returned from an exhausting four hours with Harold Cannaber in Research. They’d turned up a few instances of ritual murder—all but one had been solved. The one unsolved case concerned voodoo, which Lanyard assured him had no relevance to the subway killings. They’d searched back issues of newspapers. They’d spoken to various self-styled occultists, two professors of anthropology, and one associate professor of comparative religion. No one admitted having come into contact with acolytes of the religion Lanyard described; no one seemed more than mildly interested in it.
The possibilities were maddeningly numerous. There might he an unknown connection between the three victims; someone might be killing for personal reasons and leaving the ritualistic traces as a red herring.
Gribner’s experience, coupled with cop’s intuition, told him that the victims had been chosen more or less at random. They were all young—the boy had been only twelve years old—and all relatively innocent, though the girls had not, apparently, been virgins. What was it Lanyard had said? All that is necessary is that the victims are young, and what the cultists would consider “infidels.” Anyone not their own religion.
That left millions of possible victims.
