by John Shirley
“Carl…” She opened her eyes and looked straight into his. “I have some here for you. I want you to feel it. This is just one of His gifts…Car…Carl, come here and fuck me…”
She wasn’t faking it now; the drug opened up some secret mental orifice; everything repressed was pouring out.
He drew his gun, his hand trembling. “I think, I think I ought to kill you. Because the cops won’t believe. And…if I let you go, you’ll help them sacrifice someone else. I think the right thing to do would be to kill you. To take my chances with the police.”
She was laughing. “Look at your gun—it’s as limp as your dick!”
He looked at the .45. It was bent out of shape; the chamber was crumpled, the snout was bent downward. The Blessed One had taken it from his pocket while he was unconscious, had crushed it and replaced it. It was useless. He let it fall from his fingers; it bounced like a toy on the floor.
He felt drained, defeated. But the hardness was still there between his legs. He found his eyes straying first to her glistening crotch, and then to the syringe in the velvet box. He took a step toward her, and then hesitated. He thought: Why not? Madelaine went to them. She betrayed me. The Gift will drive me mad, anyway. Maguss is a sonuvabitch. Using me. Gribner ignores me. The cops are corrupt bastards. Everyone’s out for what they can get. Why not?
Still, he hesitated.
He listened, inwardly: The Voices were silent.
He gazed at her; she was on her back, on the couch, legs spread, knees cocked, feet flat on the floor, her fingers holding her labia apart…her warm, wet, inviting—
“Never mind the foreplay, Carl…oh, I’m rushing just…Carl: Come here and fuck me.”
Unbuttoning his shirt, he moved toward her. And stopped, frozen, staring.
The squirming black lines were manifesting, and they seemed to pour from her crotch, to fly outward from there.
But his eyes were locked on something else, and his stomach turned flip-flops.
There were four glistening, transparent, rubbery tendrils gradually extruding from her vagina, wriggling like the antennae of silverfish; beckoning, dripping yellow ooze.
He opened his mouth to scream, but his throat was clenched too tight to let the scream out. He backed away from her and just managed to turn, to open the door, to stumble down the steps….
A HALF HOUR later, in the phone booth of an uptown bar, he listened to a clerk telling him, “Mr. Maguss has checked out, but he has left a message for a Mr. Lanyard. Is this Mr.—”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s Lanyard, what the hell is the message?”
Unruffled, the clerk said, “I am to tell Mr. Lanyard that Mr. Maguss has moved to an apartment at 2323 Park Avenue. Number 44B. You are to seek him out there as soon as—”
Lanyard hung up and reeled toward the door of the bar.
Everyone he passed pretended not to notice that he was crying like a baby. He was thinking: They’ve done something awful to Lily Chancery. What are they doing to Madelaine?
GRIBNER, ALONE IN his apartment, packing his wife’s porcelain knickknacks in a box so he could take them to her, paused to answer the phone. “Cyril? This is Morty,” said a tired voice on the other end.
“I’m not going to know your voice after so many years I’m embarrassed to say? I know it’s Morty. So, Morty, did you do what I asked—”
“Cyril, listen, you got to get over here…you got to come over my place. You know those men I told you—that Tooley, that other guy…the new guys on the Transit Authority—”
“Yeah, yeah, what about them, Morty?”
“Some of us tried to have them removed for reasons of special interest. Gaddis at the Times was going to write an editorial backing us up. They found Gaddis dead tonight. Staked out like some kind of skinned animal in the basement of his place on Staten Island. And you know what? They think his kid did it. His nine-year-old kid. They can’t find him…they can’t find the kid, Cyril, and his sister said he—”
“Morty, cool down now.” Gribner was talking to himself: He needed someone to tell him to cool down. He sat down on the couch and took a deep breath.
He looked down at the little white figures packed in newspaper in the cardboard box beside the couch. They looked, at that moment, like tiny corpses in burial shrouds, and somehow it was appropriate that their burial shrouds should be old copies of the New York Post.
“Morty—you’re afraid for your life?”
“You bet your ass I am, Cyril. I’m home alone here. I’m going to the door to take out the garbage, right? I’m on the bottom floor, you remember, and I open the door, and I look out, and the street light’s been busted out. So the block is all dark. And then I see these little kids all crowded on the stoop. They got crisscrossy lines painted on their faces. And I’m hearing these weird noises from my drains. Now you can laugh, but I—”
“I’m not laughing, Morty. Did you call a roller?”
“What am I going to tell these precinct patrolmen? That I’m scared of some little kids? Anyway, I talked to some detectives about Gaddis’s death this evening—they aren’t doing but nothing, Cyril. But nothing. I think they’re infiltrated, Cyril. I think—I know how it sounds.”
“You’re afraid to go out?”
“Alone. I want—I know I sound like an old woman, Cyril—but I want you should come over here and we leave together. Maybe we can collar a couple of these kids.”
“I’ll come. Right now.”
“Cyril…”
“Yeah, Morty?”
“Cyril, don’t take the subway. Even if it’s faster. Take a cab.”
“Morty—ah—okay, I’ll take a cab. Stay in your living room. Don’t go into the kitchen or the bathroom. Or outside. Don’t go where there’s a drain.”
A few moments of quiet. Then: “I guess I don’t have to convince you?”
“No. No, you don’t have to convince me. I’ll be right over.”
He hung up, ran to the coat tree, unslung his gunbelt from the hook and fastened it over his shoulders. He put his gray suit jacket on over that, and went out into the evening.
It was Halloween night, seven-thirty PM It was hotter than it should have been. It was like an August night. And the heat felt funny. And—it felt like it was coming from underneath.
From the streets themselves. Or from beneath them.
THE PARK AVENUE apartment was, so far, sparsely furnished. There were only two chairs, a glass dining table, and an antique clock ticking on the mantel.
Lanyard and Maguss sat across from one another at the glass table, the map spread out between them. Lanyard was almost sober. He sipped black coffee, feeling the first twinges of a headache.
“It has to be tonight, Carl,” Maguss said emphatically, studying the map through bifocals. “They’ll have so much power we won’t be able to stop them. They’ll influence events in any direction they choose. That’s what the power currents are for. In sufficient concentration they can manipulate people directly, like puppets—”
“You’ve almost dropped the mask, old man,” Lanyard interrupted sharply.
He watched Maguss’s seamed face for a reaction. The old man’s eyes opened fractionally wider; that was all. Maguss chuckled acidly. “Maybe under this ‘mask’ I’m really…” He leaned confidentially forward, making his face a caricature of the sinister. “Walt Disney!”
“You hoping for a laugh? Forget it. I’ll laugh at your funeral.”
“And won’t you be surprised when I sit up in the coffin and laugh with you!” Maguss replied brightly.
Lanyard swallowed. “You must have known what would happen when you sent me to Merino. That old man was killed unnecessarily. And I might have been killed.”
“That old man was a heroin pusher and a very successful murderer. Mere death was too good for him. You don’t know him as I did. And no, you were in no real danger from Minder. They want you. You can see the power currents so damn well…better than I. You can find the temple where I cannot. Using your Sight….
Go to the neighborhood circled—” He tapped the map of Manhattan’s substructure, overlaid in blue dotted lines with streets and avenues. A large section of the Lower East Side was encircled in green pen. Red and solid black lines indicated subway tunnels, used and unused, and water mains. Orange lines showed sewage mains. “Plant the explosive in the right place, time it as per directions—it’s as simple as following directions for baking a cake, Carl—and you can bring the streets down on top of them.”
“And maybe cause some buildings to fall? Fires to start? Gas mains to explode? Maybe cause the death of—’
“Maybe, yes. And it’s regrettable.” Maguss nodded solemnly. “But it’s better than letting them go on. Did you hear about this man Gaddis? He was a well-known newspaperman. But that didn’t stop them. No one will catch the boy….There haven’t been any subway killings in two weeks, Carl. You know why? They’re waiting for Halloween. Tonight their power will peak—it is a time of optimum acquisition for them. It’s as if they were buying and selling at the right moment for maximum profit in the stock market.”
Lanyard studied the map. “Why—why a sewage main?”
“The sewage mains, the bigger ones, converge in just this area—here.” He tapped the map again with a withered, tobacco-yellowed finger. “The temple is somewhere in that area. And it is, according to magical ritual, to be a specified depth below the surface. It should be just under the sewage mains. Now, the sewage travels through those mains at hundreds of miles per hour—at a pressure exceeding that of Niagara Falls. If its current struck a man directly, it would smash him apart. It would fill up a large underground room in no time. You’ve got to set the bombs, using your common sense and the maps, and get out fast—once you’ve got the urn.”
“You said you want the urn so you can destroy it. Why not let the explosion destroy it?” Lanyard watched the old man’s face closely.
“Because it would survive. It would protect itself. It has to be ritually destroyed. Bring it to me.”
“Where the hell did you get the plastic explosives?”
“One of the cardinal rules of Life in These United States is that a rich man has almost unlimited access to the tools of mischief, Carl.”
Lanyard leaned back, and tried to sieve the Voices, churning, like background static, in the back of his head. He couldn’t locate a familiar Voice. Only occasionally did anyone from the Other Side speak coherently. An ancient, papery voice whispered, “My joke’s an iron, and the joke’s on you.” Lanyard shrugged. No help there. The power currents weren’t visible, just then. Maguss had shown him how to tune them in—and out.
“I am going to do a stupid thing,” he said thoughtfully, slowly, deliberately. “I am going to do a very stupid thing, because I don’t know what else to do. I’m going to do as you ask.”
FIFTEEN
The street was dark. The cab rolled slowly to a stop in front of Morty’s building on the Upper East Side, Sixty-sixth and York. “Wha’ happened th’ fucking street light?” the cabdriver mumbled. He was black, and tired; the cab reeked of the reefer the driver had stubbed out when Gribner got into the car. “Somebody done busted out the stree’light.”
“Yeah…” The meter said $2.90. Gribner gave the driver a five and a one and said, “Wait here, and I’ll tip you double the fare when we get to the next place. I’m going in to pick up somebody.”
The driver looked around nervously. “Street’s so damn dark, man. I dunno.”
Gribner sighed and gave him another five. “Okay?”
The driver shrugged. “Okay, man. I wait. Don’ be long.”
Gribner opened the door and climbed out. The shadows danced in the heat waves rising from the street. Gribner shifted his shoulders in his jacket; his shirt stuck to him. Sweat. Unnatural heat. And, strangely, the heat made him shiver.
The street was deserted, except for a single big-eyed cat prowling along under the parked cars, weaving in and out of the garbage cans and the squat green plastic sacks of trash. He saw none of the children Morty had mentioned.
Gribner climbed the stoop. He pushed the outer door open-and stopped, staring. The inner door had had a glass pane from waist level up. It was smashed; the glass lay on the carpet in the hall beyond. He pressed the doorbell button for Morty’s apartment. He waited, throat tight, sweat trickling down his cheeks and crawling like spiders along his backbone.
No answer.
He reached through the broken pane; opened the door by turning the inside knob, and stepped through, over the glass.
Some of the glass fragments were edged with fresh blood.
“Morty!” he shouted, the sound coming from him involuntarily. He sprinted down the hall to Morty’s door. It was unlocked. He pushed through, remembering that the apartment had a side door that led into a narrow alleyway.
The front room was dark; a single easy chair was overturned. A .22 pistol, Morty’s, lay on the rug. He picked it up; it was faintly warm. It had been fired. He looked through the old bachelor’s bedroom and kitchen; nothing else was in disarray. But Morty wasn’t around. The side door, in the kitchen, was unlocked. Something glistened on the black-and-white tile floor there. Like a snail’s track, but wider. It shone faintly in the room’s darkness, just a suggestion of phosphorescence. The track, if that’s what it was, led in a smear out through the kitchen door.
Gribner tucked the .22 in his pocket, drew his own .38, and nudged the door open with his foot. He looked up and down the narrow alleyway, below the short flight of wooden steps. No one. But the quicksilver track glimmered faintly on the steps, and down the blacktop alley, toward the street.
Honking sounds from the street. The sound of children laughing. Smashing glass.
Gribner was down the steps and running, puffing, toward the street where he’d left the cabdriver…
…who was being dragged from his car, thirty feet away, by eight grade-school-age children. Two black children, the rest white. One of them wore a skirt of rags; the others were nude, skin painted brightly in signs he recognized from certain cellars, certain subway walls. The driver was limp, his face obscured by blood. There was a cinder block on the driver’s seat, Gribner saw, as he moved nearer—he moved more slowly now, crouching, hoping the children hadn’t seen him yet. The windshield of the cab was smashed through, on the driver’s side; the door hung open. The headlights were broken out. There was an open manhole four feet in front of the car—it hadn’t been open before. The lid lay to one side. Gribner sprinted, seeing the children drag the unconscious cabbie toward the hole. By the time he reached the rear of the cab, they’d dropped the man into the manhole, head first.
Gribner froze in his tracks, listening.
The children, too, were quiet, hunkering around the manhole, listening, their faces illuminated with a ghastly blue light from beneath, a light from the manhole.
From the manhole came the sounds of low growling, then snarling then ripping, then crunching…
As one, the six children burst into hysterical laughter. They joined hands and, tiny genitals flopping on the boys, the girls lifting their rumps, danced around the manhole, chanting something in a language no one alive was meant to understand.
Gribner leveled his gun, with every intention of shooting all of them, right there.
But the shout from behind made him turn—he’d heard Morty’s voice.
He turned and, squinting, made out a dark figure silhouetted against the light from the next block, at the corner. It looked like Morty, proportionately. But the figure was slumped, and it shouldn’t have been possible for him to stand that way, leaning back. Looking closer, Gribner saw the outline of the thing that was holding Morty up. Holding him up for Gribner to see.
A rubbery, glistening thing, skeletally thin, with a misshapen head. So translucent it was almost invisible.
Gribner turned and began to jog toward it. The children’s chanting stopped—he glanced over his shoulder. They were climbing down into the hole, whooping, vanishing one by on
e.
He turned back toward the corner where he’d seen Morty. Morty was gone. The rubbery man was gone, too. But he spotted the shining slime trail on the asphalt, almost in the middle of the street. He followed it. It led to the corner—this one lit, street light intact—and turned left. He followed. The track curved left again at the next corner. He began to run.
Three minutes later, he glimpsed the rubbery man across the highway from him, shimmering faintly in the shadows of the narrow riverside park. The street light for the strip of greenery had been smashed.
Gribner waited for a lapse in traffic, and sprinted the roadway. Getting old, he thought, gasping, hearing his heart pound in his ears.
He dodged between bushes, in the edge of the park, and lost sight of the rubbery thing. It was dark going. He almost tripped on a snoring wino. He circled a park-keeper’s outbuilding and found himself on the sidewalk alongside the river bank. There was a spiked fence beyond the sidewalk; the fence was high as his head. And on the other side of the fence was a drop-off to the East River. Someone was awkwardly recumbent atop the fence, silhouetted gray against the black of the river.
Gribner came closer, breathing hard, shaking as he became certain it was Morty. Morty’s body. Impaled on the fence. Lying on his back, arms akimbo as if crucified. The spikes had gone all the way through his body and punched wetly out from the white shirt at Morty’s belly, and from his throat, and the fence ran red, a puddle stretching across the walk, the hot blood giving up its steam to join the steamy night air.
Gribner got close enough to make sure Morty was dead. Morty’s face was turned toward him, and his mouth was open. The eyes were missing from their sockets. Morty’s eyes were intact, however. They had been moved. They looked out from Morty’s half-open mouth, now.
Gribner sank to his knees, wracked with silent sobs. He rocked there, chanting a prayer he’d learned as a boy, his eyes squeezed shut, the .38 pressed to his chest, flat against his breastbone, gripped in both hands as a mourner of another faith would have clutched a rosary.
“Cyril…” A woman’s voice coming from the right. The voice had sounded like…
