by John Shirley
Miss Chancery raised an eyebrow; but she smiled and nodded. “Sorry if I came off that way. But—I think people are silly who pretend they aren’t completely self-serving. Everyone is, but they cover it up. I mean, why do the saints do things like starve themselves or spend their lives with lepers? Because they want recognition. Maybe from people—but mostly from God. That’s a selfish motive.”
“People who are afraid to be punished for what they do are either afraid of society or God’s vengeance,” Tooley put in. “We have no fear of society. Because of the Strength.”
Madelaine continued to stare at the ceiling, hardly blinking, ghostly pale.
“No fear of society,” Tooley repeated. “But what about God? Let me ask you this—do you believe in God, Madelaine? Do you believe in judgment and punishment for sins? Or in karma perhaps?”
At first Krupp thought she wouldn’t answer. Why don’t they leave her alone? he thought desperately. He wanted to scream it. He sat with a smile frozen on his face, now and then mechanically taking sips of his drink, tasting nothing.
“I don’t know,” Madelaine said, straightening her neck, looking at each of them, one by one, as if she were seeing them for the first time.
Minder was laying out cocaine on a mirror tabled across his lap. Madelaine’s eyes fixed on the cocaine, and she kept her gaze there as she spoke: “When people found out about my Gift, they used to ask me if I could communicate with ‘higher spirits’—they called them things like that. And if I heard something from those ‘higher spirits’ about God. Had I met God? They actually asked me things like that. I couldn’t believe it. I had to say something neutral because I didn’t want to disappoint them. But the flashes I get are incoherent. Sometimes they foretell, and sometimes they’re leaks from someone’s mind. Sometimes I think I get fragments from the afterworld. From my father. I used to like to believe it. It felt like him. But it might have been something out of my unconscious. I never got a glimpse of a higher order. Or of God, or of angels. There were other…other things. Creatures who aren’t exactly in this world. But I don’t know what they are. I don’t think they’re divine. In fact…”
Her mouth buckled. She was going to cry.
Minder set aside the mirror and moved closer to her, put his arms around her. She sobbed against his heavy shoulders.
Miss Chancery rolled her eyes and lit another cigarette. She looked bored.
After a minute, during which Krupp fixed himself another drink, Madelaine quieted. She sat up straight and wiped her eyes. She looked at the mirror.
Long glittering white moraines of cocaine. Two good lines for each of them. The best.
Madelaine had hers first, snorted through a hundred-dollar bill. Then Miss Chancery, then Krupp, then Tooley.
Krupp felt better. For a while. His nerves sang along the cocaine continuum. He was excessively optimistic about everything. His wife was going to let him alone about the money, he felt sure—even though his sonuvabitch brother had told her about it—and the police weren’t going to find out and they had the Strength behind them and even if that thing, that Head Underneath, was the Devil—was that so bad?
Maybe the Devil, like all successful people, had been slandered over the years.
Krupp’s high was roaring, and he rocked along on it. But a strong high brings a strong crash. And when he crashed, the sexual fantasies that had flowered in him like bursting fireworks cooled into a rain of sulfurous ash and he felt leaden, heavy with depression. He wanted more cocaine but he was afraid to ask.
And now the train was moving. They were on their way to the rite.
The lights flashed on and off. Krupp groaned and shut his eyes tight.
The trip to the hidden place took only ten minutes. Krupp used the time to get as drunk as he could, and still stand. His nerves sparked like the third rail. Minder and Tooley and Miss Chancery were quietly talking, laughing, at the other end of the car, braced against its swaying. Madelaine was lying on her side, on the couch, an arm over her eyes.
Every jounce of the subway car made him grit his teeth with irritation. As he drank, the alcohol smoothed his jagged nerves; he became suffused with numbness, except in the hollow place in his gut, the place that was like his personal internal domicile for the Head Underneath. He visualized the Head Underneath in his gut, gnawing him with its lipless mouth. He drank till the image faded.
The drink soothed his nerves, but deepened his depression.
When it came time, he followed the others out of the car, all his attention zeroed in on trying to walk without stumbling. He shuffled along the deserted, twilight-dim subway platform, a little behind the others. Madelaine walked between Tooley and Minder, clearly restrained by them though they made it look as if they were supporting her with comforting arms.
They went to the padlocked men’s room and stood in the cone of light under the funnel-shaped shade on the light fixture above the door. Tooley used one key from a crowded ring of keys to open the padlock, which he pocketed. They went into the men’s room; it was unnaturally, clean for a subway-station restroom. Even the graffiti were gone. A yellow light bulb burned overhead. In the left-hand wall were blue-metal elevator doors. An elevator looked out of place in the tile-walled men’s room. So did the man waiting there for them, a man Krupp muzzily recognized from New York Post photos. Who was the guy? A city councilman? Krupp couldn’t quite place him. He greeted Minder cordially, whoever he was. He was some high mucky-muck—Ah, Jerry Bourbon from the Transit Authority.
Krupp wondered what had become of the workmen who’d installed the elevator here—it looked as if it had been put in recently. It was new to him, anyway. Who had put it in? Surely Minder hadn’t let them live? Unless they belonged.
The damn affair was too big. There were too many dead already. The more people who were killed…the more had to be killed. To be silenced. Damn Minder. Damn Tooley. And Billy Krupp. Damn Billy Krupp?
He laughed, a sharp bark of nervous hilarity, and Miss Chancery glanced over her shoulder at him as if to say, Really, have some taste.
Krupp followed them into the elevator. They went down. He stood close behind Madelaine, so close he heard Minder whispering to her: “We need you, Madelaine. Your Gift means you can be a channel. You can help us with—with something special. We need you and we don’t want you to be an enemy. But we can’t force you to join us. You have to join us of your own free will—as much as anyone has free will. If we threatened you into it, your conversion would be insincere. And we couldn’t trust you, then. Then, well…then He would use His strength and you would be hurt. Hurt until you were dead. Slowly hurt; repulsively dead. Okay? There’s no God that you know of, you admitted that. So who’s to judge you for joining us? Who’s going to say it’s wrong? No one will ever know, I can guarantee that.”
Leave her for God’s sake alone, Krupp screamed inside. A scream that shivered through his spine but never escaped his lips.
“We can’t force you,” Minder was saying, “but we’ll make you a present to His pet, tonight, if we can’t have you with us. You’ve got to change your mind sincerely, inside, because if you pretend, He will know.” His tone was that of an amiable lawyer explaining the terms of a mortgage contract. Just business, nothing personal. But.
The elevator doors opened and they were in the room Krupp had been taken to originally. The leather couch, the big TV. They passed through that room, and entered another, paneled in mahogany, dimly candlelit; the concrete floor was freshly painted with the pentagram, the weird writing they’d taught him. Painted in red.
More than a dozen people stood about the circle. They stood in assigned places, swaying slowly in the slow dance, to lugubrious drums and fuzz-guitar from a hidden tape deck. And there: the jade vase to one side, in the altar niche. Krupp hoped he wouldn’t be assigned a spot standing near the vase, tonight. He hated being near it. He could always hear the papery noises and the squeaking that came from it, no matter how much noise the others made.
> Minder and Tooley and Miss Chancery and Krupp went into the dressing room, next door to the ritual room, to apply the scents and paints. Everyone was solemn. The laughing and the other thing would start later.
Tooley had to help Krupp undress. “You shouldn’t be so tipsy,” Tooley muttered, as he painted Krupp’s sunken breastbone with the signs. “Not now.”
Tooley left the dressing room first, and then the others. Krupp looked up as Miss Chancery, nude and almost little-girl slender, passed him, moving like a ghost to the ritual room. Her blond hair trailed behind her; her eyes had gone wild, and the delicate sneer was no longer on her lips. Still, she held herself as if she weren’t stark naked and painted with wiggly lines, the eyes in the triangle below a dog’s head. She moved as if she wore a gown designed for a Vogue cover. Krupp thought: Smug bitch. He wanted to trip her, to rattle that cruising aplomb; but he didn’t dare.
When he came out of the dressing room, it hit him. The Strength was in the air; he felt it tugging him toward the circle. From the urn came the papery stirrings, the squeaking, and then a low, throaty growling.
He stood just outside the dressing-room door, facing the door into the “orientation room.” To his right, the congregation stood at the candle-flickering circle, whispering the foreign words—words they understood subverbally, if not literally. Krupp didn’t look at them. He knew he could be drawn into it. He knew he would be. But he’d half made up his mind that this time…
He looked up as a rumble went through the walls. Tooley, his outlines wavery, a figure of power, standing with one hand on the urn…There was something about his head, at those moments—you’d look at it and he would look as usual, and then it would be a different head, for just a split second, almost no transition—pop!—the head of a snarling dog, but a dog with the eyes of a man. And then—snap, click—the human head again. And you’d wonder—the vision had been so brief—if you’d seen the other head at all.
Krupp’s eyes adjusted to the dimness; he saw a big man he vaguely recognized as Minder’s bodyguard carrying Madelaine—who didn’t struggle in the least, damn her—in his arms, like a Muscle Beach regular carrying a drowned girl. But she was alive; she opened her eyes as he laid her on her back in the center of the red circle, within the seductive symmetry of the congregation swaying around its edges.
They’re going to carve her, Krupp thought. She’s refused them. So she’s going to be the one.
That’s just the way things are. That’s all.
They held her down and the big man raised the wrought silver cudgel with the beast-head on its knob, so that it flashed for a moment over his naked, sweat-shiny, muscle-rippling shoulders preparing to stun her so that she wouldn’t fight the ritual cutting.
But he froze, cudgel uplifted, when she began to chuckle and shake her head, sitting up and smiling like an actress who’s blown her line and exasperated the director. Her laugh was lighthearted and sane.
“No, it all comes together now,” she said, nodding slightly, not at all as if she were desperate for an out. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m with you, and with you inside. I’m tired of being a freak. I want to live. And I want to make it.”
The bodyguard looked questioningly at Minder. Minder bent and looked into Madelaine’s eyes. She looked straight back at him.
Minder nodded. “Let her go,” he said, smiling like a proud father. “And bring in the other one.”
By the time they’d brought the alternate sacrifice, the Escondido kid, from the chains at the secret pool (the pool where He rested, dormant, dreaming) below the ritual room, Krupp had slipped away. He pulled on his pants, his shoes without socks, his sweater, and deserted the remainder of his clothes.
He was careful not to look at the circle, or the jade urn, as be passed through the ritual room. He stopped for a moment, vacillating, at the door to the room with the elevator, feeling the Strength tugging at him, and drawn by the secret implications in the voices of the chanting congregation. They were tranced; no one looked at him. Except Tooley. Tooley always knew, and Krupp could feel his eyes on him as he walked out. He won’t want to ruin the ritual, Krupp thought. He’ll let me go. Maybe I’ll have time.
He hurried to the elevator. The elevator doors were still open. He flung himself inside, panting with relief, and pressed the Door Close button. It might respond and it might not. Five seconds of nothing, as the chant and the crackle of power built from the ritual room.
The elevator doors slid shut. He held his breath and punched the button that he hoped would take him to the deserted subway station. Another ten seconds of nothing. It won’t respond for me!
Then, a distant click—the elevator rose.
Somehow, he’d been able to live with it, when he’d carved the teen-age girl. And when he’d seen what happened at the group rite. He had almost managed to block from his mind the vision of what lived in the red pool below the ritual room. But there was something deeply, ultimately brutal in Minder’s manipulation of Madelaine. Minder had reached into her and deformed her soul under his fingers. And that was far worse than carving her up on the circle.
Krupp just couldn’t live with it.
I’m with you, and with you inside, she’d said. “They’re not going to get that part of me,” he murmured, shutting his eyes.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER. Where? The typewriter-chattering, phone-clanging back office of the Ninth Precinct police station. A young rookie on office assignment came into Gribner’s cubicle and said, “Lieutenant, there’s a guy here says he read about you, wants to see you, nobody else. Says he knows who’s doing the subway killings.” The rookie shrugged.
“Another crank,” Gribner muttered, hardly glancing up from the report he was reading. And trying to suppress a leap of hope. “What’s his name?”
“He claims his name’s William Krupp,” said the young snot. “The young snot” was Gribner’s mental tag for the rookie; he could never remember the kid’s name. The young snot was moon-faced, with sandy hair and a sandy, bushily uneven mustache; he had a manner of spurious camaraderie, as if they’d been through hell together, that never failed to annoy Gribner.
“So where’s the background on him? He got a file or a Social Security number or—you have anything…?”
“Uh—” The young man sucked at his mustache and gave his head a quick shake, chuckling like a bad actor. “Damn. Procedure is to get all that before coming to you, right? Sorry, I guess I—”
“Never mind, I’ll talk to him now,” said Gribner, feeling shaky with the rising excitement.
He thrust his hands casually into the pocket of his rumpled brown suit-coat and sauntered as unconcernedly as he could back to the interrogation room. The room was locked only from the inside. He turned the knob and went in, annoyed by the scraping of the metal door. (How many times had he requisitioned to have it reset on its hinges?) The gray-walled room contained only a drain in the concrete floor, a steel desk and chair, used simply as an authority prop, and a folding metal chair, on which sat a stubby little man he took to be William Krupp. Seeing Krupp, Gribner’s heart sank. The man had all the earmarks of a crank. The guy had shoes on, but no socks; a sweater on inside out. He had a phony-looking blond toupee, slightly askew. He was roly-poly and nervous, and looked as if he disliked himself; just the type to seek attention and media recognition by pretending connections with a series of famous murders.
He was the third that week.
“Oh-kay, so give me the whole schpiel,” said Gribner, sighing, sitting down at the desk; the desk was empty except for a clipboard and pen in the bottom drawer. He discovered that there was no paper in the clipboard. “Goddamn it.”
He looked up, feeling the pressure of Krupp’s gaze. Krupp sat with his hands clasped on his knees, shaking perceptibly, breathing as if he’d just finished a long run; his face was blotched with red, his forehead sweat-runny. Gribner could smell liquor, and even from where he sat, a yard and a half distant, he could see a residual white dust crustin
g the man’s nostrils. Probably drunk and coked up. Delusions of grandeur, for sure. Gribner shrugged.
The little man cleared his throat. “Um—you’re not Lieutenant Gribner, are you?” He seemed disappointed.
“I’m not? I sure as hell am. So what did you expect? Kojak, maybe?”
“I’m sorry,” Krupp’s hands fluttered. He glanced at the door. “Um—I know where they are. I know who did it. Most of it, anyway. And, I guess it’s going to come out: I did one. About four days ago. In the mezzanine of the West Fourth Street station. I bashed her there and dragged her down to the lower level. It was four in the morning, nobody around…I had a stocking mask on…I tossed the mask on the tracks….” Stuttered, blurted, and out in ten seconds.
Gribner sat up straight. “Why—why’d you take her to the lower level before—uh…”
“He says we got to have it a certain distance below ground….”
Gribner nodded, slowly. Lanyard had said something of the kind. But what made Gribner want to jump up and bang the desk with exhilaration was Krupp’s phrase: “about four days ago in the mezzanine of the West Fourth Street station.” The department had carefully lied to reporters about the actual location of the killing, so they’d have a way to screen out the phonies. Krupp had given the right location, which only half a dozen cops knew. Oh, it could have been leaked. But Krupp knew about the stocking on the tracks. Two spots of the girl’s blood on it. That had been left out of the newspaper reports.
Instead of jumping up and banging the desk in exhilaration, Gribner leaned back, crossed his legs, and, taking his pipe and tobacco pouch from his coat, began to tamp.
“Where,” said Gribner, his voice shaking only a little, “do they hold their… meetings?”
Krupp licked his lips. He turned and glanced at the drain in the floor. The room had once been used as a drunk tank.
“And who else is involved?” Gribner went on, wondering: Should I get the sergeant to do a videotape of the confession? Or I could cell in a stenographer. But it was a delicate moment; bringing other people in on it might jar Krupp into defensiveness. He might clam up and demand an attorney. Gribner needed names.
