by John Shirley
Lanyard picked a direction at random; he allowed himself to be shunted to the left. Funneled down the populous hallway, he felt like a chunk of gravel in a cement mixer’s dispenser, forced down by the weight of the medium in which it was embedded, part of some subterranean foundation for a construction whose purpose was alien to him.
Now he found himself in an underground mall, passing shop fronts of all kinds—clothing stores, gourmet-cheese stalls, hot-dog stands, knish-and-hot-dog stands, fried chicken-and-knish-and-hot-dog stands…
And without warning he was in the grand concourse, standing with his back to a wall, gaping to the right and left, lost and buried. Buried not only under the weight of people, but under their multiplicity of purpose, the fact that they were all strangers to him and all bent on different goals and not one of them really cared whether or not he found Madelaine. He was surrounded by media, sales pitches in the form of photo imagery big as a building on the huge walls of the concourse, and the electronic lettering trying to sell him insurance, the scores of bored leafletters hired to pass out glossy invitations to high-priced massage parlors or camera sales.
Grand Central, stacked level on level, covers forty acres; the main concourse, rows of ornate vaulted arches layered atop one another, high narrow windows, the distant ceiling painted gold with astrological signs, is a great echoing ballpark of a room vast enough to contain a hundred thousand people, and perhaps more, at once. And now, it seemed, at least half that number swarmed the broad floor, bustling every which way. Here and there the floor space was studded with flower stalls, and in the center was an information kiosk with brass fixtures, containing an ornate antique clock. Around the edges of the room were entrances to train terminals, a bar, a bank, and long rows of Off-Track Betting windows.
He thought he glimpsed Madelaine—there! Near the very center of the great, templelike room.
He dashed toward her, shouting, “Madelaine!” his voice lost in the surf sound of footsteps and hidden beneath the Olympian voice announcing Amtrak departures. The human maelstrom whipped about Lanyard, shifted and broke, and she was in sight, twenty feet away. His eyes were blurred with sweat as he ran up to the figure in the tan coat and, puffing, laid his hand on her shoulder; she turned. It was a harridan, a woman probably not as old as she looked, her face sunken and purplish; she wore a curly black wig, its elastic showing clearly at her temples, her toothless mouth opening to cackle, her hooded colorless eyes blinking back tears. “Baby, dat you?” she asked, shrilling over the din like a brake squealing; she reached for him, the fingernails on her shaking yellow hands caked in filth.
Lanyard reeled back, repelled, but also saddened by the look of disappointment on her face as it came home to her that he was not, after all, going to acknowledge her, that she was going to spend another day speaking to no one but herself. He turned away. She was soon lost in the crowd.
TWELVE
Lanyard stood by the window, one of Maguss’s expensive cigarettes in his left hand, a glass of Chablis in his right; he sipped the wine to soothe his jangled nerves, and tried to keep his attention on the traffic moving like luminous flotsam in an underground river, far below. The window of Maguss’s hotel suite was lightly glazed with reflections of city lights, lights softened to vague haloes by a thick, masking fog. The night seemed to have gathered intensely wherever there were shadows, and the lights were muted, as if afraid to anger the darkness.
Looking down into the crevasse between the high buildings to the haze-distorted street, Lanyard felt as if he were gazing into a shaft leading into the bowels of the earth.
Now and then he glanced over from the window when he heard Maguss turning a page. Sometimes he thought that the rustling sound was really Maguss himself; he was such a dry, papery-looking old man.
Lanyard half expected Maguss to close the notebooks, put aside Data Digs reports, and say, flatly, “Carl, your conclusions are utter baloney.”
So he turned sharply on his heel when Maguss said, “Well, Carl—”
“Well?” Lanyard demanded, crushing out his half-smoked cigarette and instantly lighting another.
“I think you’re on the right track. And of course you’re right about Minder. It’s him, all right.”
Lanyard stared. “What do you mean, ‘Of course you’re right’? You talk like you knew all along.” Maguss ignored the remark. “I have found some papers I thought were lost…some letters Joey Minder wrote back when he was a very young man. He wrote the letters to me. Joey and I knew each other well. I was much older than he, almost twenty years older, and I was a sort of father figure to him for a while. He was a teen-ager when we first met. That was in San Francisco and I was publishing Mystic Mages magazine, which was really just a scam so the so-called Mystic Mages could scalp the guileless. Young Joey was a subscriber, and came to see me when his troupe was in town. He was traveling with a carny that had a sort of vaudeville programming to it. I liked him, and I could see that he was intelligent and earnest, and I found myself confessing that most of the Mystic Mages cult was a money scam, if not quite an outright fraud. He was appalled. Then angry. He asked me if I believed in what he called ‘the serious investigation of the paranormal.’” Maguss laughed, his hooded eyes like burnished glass, and then became abruptly solemn. “I said, yes, I believed in it, in principle. But I didn’t know anyone really doing it. He accused me of promoting bunkum and giving psychic research a bad name, and he practically burst into tears. I confess I was moved. I had been offered another job, editing a Sunday supplement, and at that moment I decided to take it.”
He smiled sadly. “He was idealistic then. He has lost most of that, of course. At any rate, we kept in touch, and I published an article he wrote-I had to edit it rather heavily—about an institute for psychic research, an organization which Joey took very seriously. I was a little dubious about them, because they specialized in ‘the study of occult artifacts,’ which is to say objects supposedly invested with supernatural influences. Like the Crystal Skull, various chunks of the ‘True Cross’ that were supposed to heal, and so forth. Joey became obsessed with a jade urn that was purported to contain the head of an ancient Persian priest. A priest in the cult of Ahriman—”
“What?” Lanyard leaned forward attentively.
“I have here a photocopy of a letter Joey sent me. Here, read the part circled in red. He was at this time still with the carny show, of course, but while they played New Orleans he found out about the organization, which had its so-called headquarters there.”
Lanyard read:
Simon, the tedium of the road is more than I can bear. I forecast that very soon I will transcend this grimy, tacky life, and find my way through the Hidden Doors…
Lanyard paused and looked up, forehead creased. “Is he kidding with this stuff, or what? This doesn’t sound like the Joey Minder I know.”
“You’ve got to remember that this was written years ago, Carl. He was a foolish boy, and he had a habit of reading pompous Theosophy texts. He’s evolved a new style for his—uh—show-business connections. Skip ahead to the bit I outlined in red.”
Lanyard shrugged, and found the place marked:
I was disappointed by all the artifacts I examined but one. The one that did indeed emanate a kind of numinous presence was a jade urn, on which, in relief, were figures depicting the Persian god Ahura Mazda in his dual manifestation, and an image of a dog-headed demon which I believe is the Persian demon Ahriman. I was drawn to the urn almost immediately. It was as if I heard it whispering to me. It is sealed at the top, and the archaeologist who found it, a Mr. Soames, claimed that it has never been opened since it was sealed centuries ago.
…There are various estimates as to the date, but its manufacture is generally placed at about 200 AD. It is “emerald” jade, with a few swirls of butter color in it. It seems to be carved of a single piece, two and one-half feet high. Soames refuses to open it, so we cannot confirm as to whether it, indeed, contains the severed head of a priest
in the Cult of Ahriman…
Lanyard paused in his reading. His eyes hurt from lack of sleep. He seemed to be seeing the words as if they were raised from the page, blue lines of scribble floating in the air; and between the lines of twisty script swam miniature black worms, threading in and out, squirming…
…Lanyard closed his eyes and shook his head violently. “I don’t want to read any more,” he said.
“You don’t look well, my lad.”
“And I don’t feel so goddamn well.”
“You’re worried about Madelaine. They need her—so they won’t hurt her.”
“Won’t hurt her?” Lanyard shot Maguss a look that made the old man, usually beyond intimidation, sway back in his seat. “Maguss, she was on the floor clawing herself, dammit! And you’re trying to tell me she’s in good hands?”
“What do you want to do? Go to the police? They could search Minder’s place from top to bottom and find nothing. If you could get them to search. He’s a friend to the police. An influential man. A moneyed man. Now—” He tapped the letter on the table between them. “Now you know how he became a powerful man. It’s all there in the following letters. He became obsessed with the urn. He met a man who had traveled in Persia, who was himself an occultist, and who gave him instructions in the rituals. A gent named Daniel Oswald. Ten years ago, the jade urn came onto the collector’s market. I tried to buy it myself—I thought we could do a feature in Visions about it—but someone else bought it first. Someone who took great pains to remain anonymous. I have reason to believe, however, that it was Minder’s associate Daniel Oswald who bought the urn—he had been born into a large fortune, and he could afford it. Oswald was soon dead, drowned in his bathtub. By accident, supposedly. I think Minder had him killed and stole the urn. The urn is a focusing object, at the very least. It is a link between our world and the entity in question. It could be—”
Lanyard snorted. “Bullshit. Madelaine is the victim of hysteria. And drug abuse. And maybe even brainwashing.”
Maguss smiled superciliously. “Oh, certainly, Carl. Believe what you want. But, after acquiring that urn, Minder’s fortunes turned. He became monumentally successful in less than a year. Let’s put aside the notion that some supernatural entity actually assists those who sacrifice to it. Let’s suppose that, instead, those who perform the ritual achieve success because they really believe they will—perhaps it’s a form of mind over matter. The human brain generates electrical power—that’s a proven scientific fact. Maybe that power can be directed at influencing events in the external world. Hm? Is it so impossible?”
“How can something as diffuse as this ‘mental energy’ would have to be—how could it influence events? Make a man rich, and—uh…”
“If mere mental energy is what it is—well, imagine a person’s life-course through time as the rolling, bouncing of a pinball. You can influence the way a pinball moves by strategically tilting the table, to set up the best shot. That’s all the power we’re talking about does: It tilts the table, the plane, the subjective continuum through which we move, to favor our preferred course. It rolls us a little to the left, or right. Or it causes us to roll into the pit…if we’re the subject of someone’s hostile influence. Which is one reason no one seems to happen on the killers, no one successfully traces what few clues there are—events are tilted, by the power of the sacrifices, to favor the killers.”
Lanyard looked at him, wondering if the old man were serious. “So—they must know by now, since I barged in on Minder’s place, that—uh—I’m suspicious of them.”
“They know with other means. They can feel you out here.”
“So—why don’t they kill me with their ‘power’?”
“They can’t tilt the plane for you so easily. It’s difficult for them to touch you, because you’re charged.”
“I’m what?”
“I told you before. You have the Gift, however repressed. You can Hear. You can See. They might get a nasty shock if they tried to touch you, psychically…But they may well elect to kill you. To simply walk up to you and…” He paused, apparently enjoying the dire pronouncement. “And blow your brains all over the wall with a big fat black gun.”
“And what’s stopping them from doing that?’
“People with the Gift are useful to them.”
“I assume you’re pulling this ‘Gift’ business on me as some means of—uh—manipulating me. You paid me, and I work for you. That’s enough.”
“So then…what do you suggest we do?”
“We’ll have to find their temple. Catch them in the midst of one of their rituals. It’s got to be underground somewhere. Under the city. Maybe in an abandoned subway station.”
“And then call the police once we’ve found it? Possibly. He’s concealed it well. There’s not a trace of emanation I can pick up—”
“Oh, stop with the quasi-mystical claptrap—”
Maguss went on as if speaking to drown out the voice of a babbling child. “So we’ll have to find it another way. Now…I have a name of a gentleman I want you to visit. His name is Jesus.”
“What?”
“Jesus Merino. He lives on Clinton Street, just south of Houston. Lower East Side heroin supermarket. In fact, he is a drug dealer. But he is also—or used to be—a spiritually powerful man. A practitioner of Santeria. In order to see him, you will have to go on some pretense—he prefers not to discuss his ‘religion’ with white people. You’ll have to go to him ostensibly to buy drugs. And then, play it by ear. If anyone would know how to find Minder’s temple, he would. He can feel things moving in the dark places. Here is his address, and the name of a man who will introduce you to him. The man can be trusted. But Merino cannot.”
ONCE BEFORE, IN San Francisco, Lanyard had accompanied a musician friend on a trek through the Mission district to cop drugs. Lanyard had been doing an article on the band; he’d gone along on the connection out of curiosity. “You just gotta have the right attitude when you’re looking, and you don’t buy from anyone off the street,” said his friend Locust. “You got to buy your smack and your coke”—they were looking for both heroin and cocaine because Locust wanted to mix the two to make a “speedball”—from somebody selling out of an apartment. If you buy it off the street and you don’t know the guy, four times outta five they’ll sell you a little taped-shut bag of talcum powder. If they inna apartment, man, then you know they know you can find them if the stuff is a burn. Right?”
“But you said you don’t have a connection lined up. How you going to find the stuff?” Lanyard had asked nervously as they’d sauntered with artificial casualness along the boulevard.
“Oh, you got to think about drugs, and pretty soon their street man, he comes up to you and asks you what kind you want and tells you the prices and then tells you what building it is and you go in. It’s easy, but you got to be thinking about the shit, and lookin’ for it. Because they always know, man.”
And it was the same now, in New York. Lanyard and Jo-Jo, the man Maguss had recommended, were walking down Avenue B, thinking: Where do we cop dope? It wasn’t telepathy that told the street connections what they were after; it was something conveyed in body language, and a sense of seeking in a neighborhood that offers nothing else. Even the whores were farther uptown.
It was a wet afternoon three days before Halloween. There was a cutting wind keening between the tenement buildings and through the trash-choked alleys, from the East River. Lanyard shivered in his leather jacket; Jo-Jo, a hollow-eyed Puerto Rican wearing moldering tennis shoes, a smudged blue ski jacket, floppy corduroy pants, wet at the cuffs, and a black knit cap, walked rapidly and seemed to feel the wind not at all. His jacket was open, his hands balled in the pockets. He stared straight ahead as he spoke. “So, my man, you know you shoon’t come out here widduh piece, you know?”
It took Lanyard a moment to translate; Jo-Jo was telling him he shouldn’t be carrying a gun. “I didn’t think you could see it.”
“They can see it frommuh way you’ hand’s in you’ pocket acrossuh fucking street, man. They suspicious then, they think you rip ’em off for the dope or maybe you the heat or some shit.”
“I didn’t think it was safe to come into this neighborhood without a gun.”
“Safer without one. You askin’ for trouble. For one thing, the cops frisk you, they run your ass to stir for carryin’ a piece.”
“So is this gonna fuck up the connection?” Lanyard asked, trying to sound streetwise.
“I dunno. I dun think so, no. But you be cool when we go see Papa Merino, okay?”
“Okay.” Lanyard shrugged. The streets were uncrowded; loiterers stood just inside, out of the wind, at nameless grocery stores, Chinese restaurants, combination Chinese-Spanish restaurants, and combination Chinese-Spanish and East Indian restaurants. For every business that was operating, three more had shut down; the street was pocked with boarded storefronts, failed shoe-shine parlors, “social clubs,” countless Jewish restaurants, their windows broken in, soggy cardboard and broken glass spread over the counters, over broken stools. Every third building was gutted, the wind whining in its ragged sockets. The street was nervous with windblown scraps; heaps of wine bottles spilled from deserted doorways and vacant lots, exuding a layered stench. They traversed Houston, a four-lane crosstown street, ignoring the lights, dodging cars, and jogged onto the below-Houston extension of Avenue B; the street action was almost dense here; every forty strides were groups in ski jackets or army-surplus gear, each face with its mustache and its darting assessment and its final indifference, standing about rusty oil drums, warming their hands at fires dancing red from the pitted metal. Now and then someone spoke to Lanyard, or made a move toward him, probably thinking: Dumb whiteass; easy to hustle. With buddy-buddy asides, “Hey got your good dope, try it before you buy it, lookin’ good green-tape, get you two for twenny.” But Jo-Jo shook his head in a way that said This one’s mine, and they turned back to rapid-fire conversations in street Spanish.
