by Paula Guran
The place smelled like rotten meat and sour beer. Now and then, on the walls above the shop doors, rusty public address speakers, between bursts of static and feedback, gave out filtered announcements that seemed threaded together into one long harangue as he proceeded from block to block.
“Today we have large pieces available . . . the fever calls from below to offer new bargains, discount prices . . . prices slashed . . . slashed . . . We’re slashing . . . prices are . . . from below, we offer . . . ”
A police car careened by. Ash froze till he saw it was apparently driving at random, weaving drunkenly through the street and then plowing into the crowd on the opposite side of the street, sending bodies flying. No one on Ash’s side of the street more than glanced over with their painted-out eyes. The cop car only stopped crushing pedestrians when it plowed into a telephone pole and its front windows shattered, revealing cracked mannequins inside twitching and sparking.
Shooting the old guard has fucked up your head, Ash thought. Just stare at the street, look down, look away, Ash.
He pushed on. A hotel a hotel a hotel. Go in somewhere, ask, get directions, get away from this street. (That is not a whore straddling a smashed man, squatting over the broken bone-end of a man’s arm to flick it in the back of that van.) Go into this bar advertising Lifeblood Beer and Finehurt Vodka.
Inside the bar. It was a smoky room; the smoke smelled like burnt meat and tasted of iron filings on his tongue. One of those sports bars, photos on the walls of football players smashing open the other players’ helmets with sledgehammers; on the TV screen at the end of the bar a blurry hockey game. (The hockey players are not beating a naked woman bloody with their sticks, blood spattering their inhuman masks, no they’re not.) Men and women of all colors at the bar were dead things (no they’re not, it’s just . . . ), and they were smoking something, not drinking. They had crack pipes in their hands and they were using tiny ornate silver spoons to scoop something from the furred buckets on the bar to put in their pipes and burn; when they inhaled, their emaciated faces puffed out: aged, sunken, wrinkled, blue-veined, disease-pocked faces that filled out, briefly healed, became healthy for a few moments, wrinkles blurring away with each hit, eyes clearing, hair darkening as each man and woman applied lighter to the pipe and sucked gray smoke. (Don’t look under the bar.) Then the smokers instantly atrophied again, becoming dead, or near-dead, mummies who smoked pipes, shriveled—until the next hit. The bartender was a dark-skinned man with gold teeth and white-painted eyelids, wearing a sort of gold and black gown. He stood polishing a whimpering skull behind the bar, and said, “Brotherman you looking for de hotel, it’s on de corner, de Crossroads Hotel—You take a hit too? One money, give me one money and I give you de fine—”
“No, no thanks,” Ash said, with rubbery lips.
His eyes adjusting so he could see under the bar, in front of the stools—there were people under the bar locked into metal braces, writhing in restraints: their heads were clamped up through holes in the bars and the furry buckets in front of each smoker were the tops of their heads, the crowns of their skulls cut away, brains exposed, gray and pink; the clamped heads were facing the bartender who fed them something that wriggled, from time to time. The smokers used their petite, glimmering spoons to scoop bits of quivering brain tissue from the living skulls and dollop the gelatinous stuff into the bowls of their pipes—basing the brains of the women and men clamped under the bars, taking a hit and filling out with strength and health for a moment. Was the man under the bar a copy of the one smoking him? Ash ran before he knew for sure.
Just get to the hotel and it’ll pass, it’ll pass.
Out the door and past the shops, a butcher’s (those are not skinned children hanging on the hooks) and over the sidewalk which he saw now was imprinted with fossils, fossils of faces that looked like people pushing their faces against glass till they pressed out of shape and distorted like putty; impressions in concrete of crushed faces underfoot. The PA speakers rattling echoing.
“ . . . prices slashed and bent over sawhorses, every price and every avenue, discounts and bargains, latest in designer footwear . . . ”
Past a doorway of a boarding house—was this the place? But the door bulged outward, wood going to rubber, then the lock buckling and the door flying open to erupt people, vomiting them onto the sidewalk in a Keystone Kops heap, but moving only as their limbs flopped with inertia: they were dead, their eyes stamped with hunger and madness, each one clutching a shopping bag of trash, one of them the Chicano street crazy who’d tried to warn him: gold roses clamped in his teeth dead now; some of them crushed into shopping carts; two of them, yes, all curled up and crushed, trash compacted into a shopping cart so their flesh burst out through the metal gaps. Flies that spoke with the voices of radio DJs cycled over them, yammering in little buzzing parodic voices: “This Wild Bob at KMEL and hey did we tell ya about our super countdown contest, we’re buzzing with it, buzzzzzzing wizzzz-zzzz—”
A bus at the corner. Maybe get in it and ride the hell out of the neighborhood. But the bus’s sides were striated like a centipede and when it stopped at the bus stop its doorway was wet, it fed on the willing people waiting at the bus stop, and from its underside crushed and sticky-ochre bodies were expelled to spatter the street.
“ . . . one money sale, the window smoke waits. One money and inside an hour we’ll find the paste that lives and chews, prices slashed, three money and we’ll throw in a—”
He paused on the corner. There: the Crossroads Hotel. A piss-in-the-sink hotel, the sort filled with junkies and pensioned winos. Crammed crammed between other buildings like the Casa Valencia had been. He was afraid to go in.
Across the street: whores, with crotch-high skirts and bulging, wattled cleavages and missing limbs that waved to him with the squeezed out, curly ends of the stumps. (It’s not true that they have no feet, that their ankles are melded into the sidewalk.)
“One money will buy you two women whose tongues can reach deeply into a garbage disposal, we also have, for two money—”
The whores beckoned; the crowd thickened. He went into the hotel.
A steep, narrow climb up groaning stairs to the half door where the manager waited. The hotel manager was Indian, and behind him were three small children with their faces covered in black cloth (the children do not have three disfigured arms apiece), gabbling in Hindi. The manager smiling broadly. Gold teeth. Identical face to the bartender but long straight hair, heavy accent as he said: “Hello hello, you want a room, we have one vacancy, I am sorry we have no linen now, no, there are no visitors unless you pay five money extra, no visitors, no—”
“I understand, I don’t care about that stuff,” Ash babbled. Still carrying the backpack, he noted, taking stock of himself again. You’re okay. Hallucinating but okay. Just get into the room and work out the stress, maybe send for a bottle.
Then he passed over all the money in his wallet and signed a paper whose print ran like ink in rainwater, and the manager led him down the hall to the room. No number on the door. Something crudely, pen-knifed into the old wooden door panel: a face like an African mask, hyena and goat and man. But momentum carried him into the room-the manager didn’t even use a key, just opened it—and closed the door behind him. Ash turned and saw that it was a bare room with a single bed and a window and a dangling naked bulb and a sink in one corner, no bathroom. Smelling of urine and mold. The light was on.
There were six people in the room.
“Shit!” Ash turned to the door, wondering where his panic had been till now. “Hey!” He opened the door and the manager came back to it, grinning at him in the hallway. “Hey there’s already people in here—”
“Yes hello yes they live with you, you know, they are the wife and daughter and grandchildren of the man you killed you know—”
“What?”
“The man you killed, you know, yes—”
“What?”
“Yes they are in you
now at the crossroads and here are more, oh yes—” He gestured, happy as a church usher at a revival, ushering in seven more people, who crowded past Ash to throng the room, shifting aimlessly from foot to foot, gaping sightlessly, whining to themselves, bumping into one another at random. Blocking Ash, without seeming to try, every time he made for the door. Pushing him gently but relentlessly back toward the window.
The manager was no longer speaking in English, nor was he speaking Hindi; his face was no longer a man’s, but something resembling that of a hyena and a goat and a man, and he was speaking in an African tongue—Yoruba?—with a sound that was as strange to Ash as the cry of an animal on the veldt, but Ash knew, anyway, with a kind of a priori knowledge, what the man was saying. Saying . . .
That these people were those disenfranchised by the old man’s death: the old armored-car guard’s death meant that his wife will not be able to provide the money to help her son-in-law start that business and he goes instead into crime and then to life in prison, and his children, fatherless, slide into drugs, and lose their hope and then their lives and as a direct result they beat and abuse their own children and those children have children which they beat and abuse (because they themselves were beaten and abused) and they all grow up into psychopaths and aimless, sleepwalking automatons . . . Who shoved, now, into this room with him, made it more and more crushingly crowded, murmuring and whining as they elbowed Ash back to the window. There were thirty of them in the little room, and then forty, and then forty-five and fifty, the crowd humid with body heat and sullen and dully urgent as it crowded Ash against the window frame. He looked over his shoulder, peered through the window glass. Maybe there was escape, out there.
But outside the window it was a straight drop four floors to a trash heap. It was an air shaft, an enclosed space between buildings intended to provide air and light for the hotel windows. Air shafts filled up with trash, in places like this; bottles and paper sacks and wrappers and wet boxes and shapeless sneakers and bent syringes and mold-carpeted garbage and brittle condoms and crimped cans. The trash was thicker, deeper, than in any air shaft he’d ever seen. It was a cauldron of trash, subtly seething, moving in places, wet sections of cardboard shifting, cans scuttling; bottles rattling and strips of tar paper humping up, worming; the wet, stinking motley of the air shaft weaving itself into a glutinous tapestry.
No, he couldn’t go out there. But there was no space to breathe now, inside, and no way to the door; they were piling in still, all the victims of his shooting. The ones killed or maimed by the ones abandoned by the ones lost by the one he had killed. How many people now in this room made for one, people crawling atop people, piling up so that the light was in danger of being crushed out against the ceiling?
One killing can’t lead to so much misery, he thought.
Oh but the gunshot’s echoes go on and on, the happy, mocking Eshu said. On and on, white devil cocksucker man.
What is this place? Ash asked, in his head. Is it Hell?
Oh no, this is the city. Just the city. Where you have always lived. Now you can see it, merely, white demon cocksucker man. Now stay here with us, with your new family, where he called you with his dying breath . . .
Ash couldn’t bear it. The claustrophobia was of infinite weight. He turned again to the window, and looked once more into the air shaft; the trash decomposing and almost cubistically recomposed into a great garbage disposal churn, that chewed and digested itself and everything that fell into it.
The press of people pushed him against the window so that the glass creaked.
And then thirty more, from generations hence, came through the door, and pushed their way in. The window glass protested. The newcomers pushed, vaguely and sullenly, toward the window. The glass cracked—and shrieked once.
Only the glass shrieked. Ash, though, was silent, as he was heaved through the shattering glass and out the window, down into the airshaft, and into the innermost reality of the city.
John Shirley is an Emmy-nominated author of novels, short stories, TV scripts, and screenplays. More than forty of his novels have been published. Many of his numerous short stories have been gathered in eight collections including the Stoker Award-winning Black Butterflies, which was also listed as a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. As a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others.
Welcome to a very odd street in a small American town where some rather unusual folks with weird—or perhaps alien or who-knows-what-kind-of—magic settle.
In Our Block
R. A. Lafferty
There were a lot of funny people in that block.
“You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.
“Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street’s just one block long and it dead-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”
“Jim, I’ve been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”
“What’s wrong with that, Art?”
“Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it, it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that’s two thousand cartons.”
“Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowadays. They don’t enforce it very well.”
“Jim, that shack’s no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn’t get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”
“Let’s measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it’s bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.
“Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain fiat-top table with no place for a drawer.
“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.
Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”
“I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred-thousand lots.”
“Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.
“No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one.”
Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the rundown building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer. The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door.
A dark, pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter.
“I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said.
“Oh, that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself, make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”
“Wh
at would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?”
“What are you think? I do it of course.”
“Could you type a letter for me?”
“Sure I can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope, and stamp.”
“Ah, let’s see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type.”
“You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time.”
Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. “Why is public stenographer always sit filing her nails?” she asked as Art droned. “But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly.”
“Ah—that is all,” Art said when he had finished dictating.
“Not P.S. Love and Kisses?” the girl asked.
“Hardly. It’s a business letter to a person I barely know.”
“I always say P.S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know,” the girl said. “Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can’t do it when you watch.” She pushed them out and closed the door.
Then there was silence.
“What are you doing in there, girl?” Art called.
“Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I type a letter,” the girl called.
“But I don’t hear a typewriter going.”
“What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.” There was a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds.
