Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Kirby McCauley

  “Her daughter came and took her Monday morning. I doubt if she’ll be coming back.”

  I’d had the same impulse myself last night, when I’d first heard of the incident. I had telephoned my grandfather and asked him if he wanted to move out. He’d sounded angry and upset, but he’d expressed no desire to leave. The Manor, he’d decided, was as safe as anywhere else. A new guard had been hired for the entranceway, and tenants had been told to lock their doors.

  “They haven’t finished with the room yet,” Miss Pascua was saying. “They keep marching through here with their bags and equipment and things. Plus we’ve got the Con Ed men downstairs. It’s a real mad-house.”

  “And Mrs. Rosenzweig?”

  “Ah, the poor thing’s still at Saint Luke’s. I was the one who telephoned the police. I heard the whole thing.”

  “Yeah? Bad, huh?” He sounded eager.

  “Absolutely awful. She said she was fast asleep, and then something woke her up. I guess it must’ve been pretty loud, because you know what a racket the air conditioner makes.”

  “Well, don’t forget, she’s not the one who’s got problems there. Her hearing’s pretty sharp.”

  “I guess it must be. She said she could hear somebody snoring. At first, though, she didn’t think anything of it. She figured it was just Mrs. Hirschfeld in the next room, so she tries to get back to sleep. But then she hears the snoring getting louder, and it seems to be coming closer. She calls out, ‘Elsie, is that you?’ I mean, she was confused, she didn’t know what was going on, she thought maybe Mrs. Hirschfeld was walking in her sleep. But the snoring doesn’t stop, it just keeps getting closer to the bed…”

  Across the lobby the elevator door slid open with an echoing of metal; several old men and women emerged. I was about to stand, until I saw that Grandfather wasn’t among them. He had never been on time in his life.

  “That’s when she starts getting scared—”

  Miss Pascua leaned forward. Above the mantel to my left, the figures in the painting stood frozen gravely at attention, as if listening.

  “—because all of a sudden she realizes that the sound’s coming from more than one place. It’s all around her now, like there are dozens of sleepwalkers in the room. She puts out her hand, and she feels a face right next to hers. And the mouth is open—her fingers slide all the way in. She said it was like sticking your hand inside a tin can: all wet and round, with little teeth around the edge.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And she couldn’t scream, because one of them got his hand over her face and held it there. She said it smelled like something you’d find in the gutter. God knows where he’d been or what he’d been doing...

  My eyebrows rose skyward; I’m sure I must have started from my chair. If what Miss Pascua said was true, I knew exactly where the culprit had been and what he’d been doing. I almost turned around and called out to the two of them, but instead I remained silent. There’d be time enough to tell someone later; I would go to the authorities this very afternoon. I sat back, feeling well pleased with myself, and listened to Miss Pascua’s voice grow more and more excited.

  “I guess she must’ve thrashed around a lot, because somehow she got free and yelled for Mrs. Hirschfeld to come help her. She’s screaming, ‘Elsie! Elsie!’”

  “A lot of good that’ll do her! The old broad’s deaf as a post.”

  “Sure, she’d sleep through anything. Right there in the next room, too. But poor old Mrs. Rosenzweig, she must’ve got them mad with all her yelling, because they hit her—hard. Oh, you should’ve seen her face! And they wrapped their arms around her neck and, do you know, they almost strangled her. She was just lying there, trying to breathe, and then she felt some others yank the sheet and blanket down, then they turned her on her stomach and pushed her face into the pillow, and she could feel their hands on her ankles, hauling her legs apart—the nightgown was actually ripped right up the side—and then another one of them pulled it up over her waist…”

  Miss Pascua paused for breath. “Jesus,” said Calzone, “don’t it make you just want to—” He shook his head. “It musta been the blacks. No one else coulda done a thing like that. I mean, to them one woman’s the same as any other, they don’t care how old she is, or if she’s maybe got a handicap or something, just so long as she’s white. You know, they caught this guy over on 76th Street, in one of them welfare hotels, he was going around with a stocking over his head—”

  The elevator door slid open and my grandfather stepped out. He waved and started across the lobby. Behind me Miss Pascua had interrupted the other’s story and was plunging breathlessly on, as if impatient to reach the climax of her own.

  “And then, she says, there was this soft, scratching sound, real close to her ear. She says it was like someone rubbing his hands together from the cold. That’s when— Well, it sure doesn’t sound like any rape I ever heard of. All she’d keep saying was it felt like getting slapped. I mean it, that’s just what she said.”

  My grandfather had reached me in time to overhear this. “God,” he whispered, shaking his head, “it’s absolutely unbelievable, isn’t it? A woman that age—a poor defenseless blind woman…”

  “And the most horrible thing of all,” Miss Pascua was saying, “she told me that the whole time, with all the things they did to her, they never spoke a single word.”

  Age-yellowed eyes opened infinitesimally wider. Wrinkled heads turned slowly as I passed. The second floor was crowded that day; I felt as if I were striding through a world of garden gnomes: old folks on the benches by the elevator, old folks standing motionless in the hall, old folks in listless conversation round the doorway to the game room. These were the same ones who congregated in the lobby each morning, waiting for the mailman to arrive, and who began gathering outside the dining room hours before mealtime. Now they had drifted up here, unmindful of the heat, to partake of what little drama yet remained from the events of Sunday night.

  I was glad my grandfather wasn’t one of them. At least he still got out. I’d said good-bye to him only a minute or two ago when, following the usual coffee and conversation with Pistachio, he’d retired upstairs for his afternoon nap. I hadn’t told him about my suspicions, or what I intended to do. He would never have understood.

  It wasn’t hard to find where Mrs. Rosenzweig had been living; that end of the corridor had been screened off from the rest behind a folding canvas partition, the sort of thing hospitals use to screen the sick from one another and the dead from those alive. A small knot of residents stood chatting in front, as if waiting to see some performance inside. They regarded me with interest as I approached; I suppose that during the past few days they’d been treated to a stream of detectives and police photographers, and took me for another one.

  “Have you caught them yet?” one of the ladies demanded.

  “Not yet,” I said, “but there may be one very good lead.”

  Indeed, I intended to supply it myself. I must have sounded confident, because they moved respectfully aside for me, and I heard them repeating to each other, “A good lead, he says they have a good lead,” as I made my way around the screen.

  Mrs. Rosenzweig’s door was ajar. Sunlight flooded the room through an open window. Inside, two beefy-looking men sat perspiring over a radio, listening to a Yankees game. Neither of them was in uniform—one wore a plaid short-sleeve shirt, the other just a T-shirt and shorts—but the former, the younger of the two, had a silver badge hanging from his shirt pocket. They had been laughing about some aspect of the game, but when they saw me in the doorway their smiles disappeared.

  “You got a reason to be here, buddy?” asked the one with the badge. He got up from the windowsill where he’d been sitting.

  “Well, it’s nothing very important.” I stepped into the room. “There’s something I wanted to call to your attention, that’s all. Just in case you haven’t already considered it. I was downstairs earlier today, and I overheard a woman who works he
re saying that—”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold it,” he said. “Now just slow down a second. What’s your interest in all this anyway?”

  Above the clamor of the radio (which neither of them made a move to turn down) I explained that I’d been visiting my grandfather, who lived here at the Manor. “I come by almost every week,” I said. “In fact, I even had a slight acquaintance with Mrs. Rosenzweig and her roommate.”

  I saw the two cops exchange a quick glance—Oh my God, I thought, what if these bastards think I did it?—but the attack of paranoia proved short-lived, for I watched their expressions change from wary to indifferent to downright impatient as I told them what Miss Pascua had said.

  “She said something about a foul smell, a sort of ‘gutter smell.’ And so it just occurred to me—I don’t know, maybe you’ve checked this out already—it occurred to me that the logical group of suspects might be right outside.” I pointed through the open window, toward the gaping brown sewage ditch that stretched along the sidewalk like a wound. “See? They’ve been working down there for at least a month or so, and they probably had access to the building.”

  The man in the T-shirt had already turned back to the game. The other gave me a halfhearted nod. “Believe me, mister,” he said, “we’re checking out every possibility. We may not look like it to you, but we do a pretty thorough job.”

  “Fine, that’s fine, just so long as you intend to talk to them—”

  The man in the T-shirt looked up. “We do,” he said. “It’s being done. Thank you very much for coming forward. Now why don’t you just give my partner here your name, address, and phone number in case we have to contact you.” He reached out and turned up the volume on the radio.

  Laboriously the other one took down the information; he seemed far more concerned with getting the spelling of my name right than with anything else I’d had to say. While he wrote I looked around the room—at the discolorations in the plaster, the faded yellow drapes, a lilac sachet on the bureau, a collection of music boxes on a shelf. It didn’t look much like the scene of a crime, except for strips of black masking tape directing one’s attention to certain parts of the walls and floor. Four strips framed the light switch, another four an overturned table lamp, presumably for guests. Beside it stood a clock with its dial exposed so that a blind person could read it. The bed, too, was bordered by tape, the sheet and blanket still in violent disarray. With sunlight streaming in it was hard to imagine what had happened here: the old woman, the darkness, the sounds…

  Snapping shut his notebook, the younger cop thanked me and walked with me to the door. Beyond it stood the canvas screen, blocking out the view, though in the space between the canvas and the floor I could see a line of stubby little shoes and hear the shrill chatter of old ladies. Well, I told myself, maybe I didn’t get to play Sherlock Holmes, but at least I’ve done my duty.

  “We’ll call you if there’s anything we need,” said the cop, practically shutting the door in my face. As it swung closed I saw, for the first time, that there were four strips of masking tape near the top, around a foot square, enclosing a familiar-looking shape.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “What’s that?”

  The door swung back. He saw where I was pointing. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “We found it there on the door. That tape’s for the photographer and the fingerprint guys.”

  Standing on tiptoe, I took a closer look. Yes, I had seen it before—the outline of a crude, five-pointed holly leaf scratched lightly into the wood. The scratch marks extended outward from the shape in messy profusion, but none penetrated inside.

  “You know,” I said, “I saw the same thing a few weeks ago on the wall of the laundry room.”

  “Yeah, the super already told us. Anything else?”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t till hours later, back in the solitude of my apartment, that I realized I had seen the shape in still another place.

  They say the night remembers what the day forgets. Pulling out the crudely bound orange book, I opened it to one of the drawings. There it was, that shape again, in the outline of the flipper-like gauntlets which Pistachio claimed his usurpadores had worn.

  I got up and made myself some tea, then returned to the living room. Karen was still at her Wednesday-evening class, and would not be back till nearly ten. For a long time I sat very still, with the book open on my lap, listening to the comforting rattle of the air conditioner as it blotted out the night. One memory kept intruding: how, as a child, I liked to take a pencil and trace around the edges of my hand. This shape, I knew, is one that every child learns to draw.

  I wondered what it would look like if the child’s hands were webbed.

  Wednesday, July 13

  Certain things are not supposed to happen before midnight. There’s a certain category of events—certain freak encounters and discoveries, certain crimes—for which mere nighttime doesn’t seem quite dark enough. Only after midnight, after most of the world is asleep and the laws of the commonplace suspended, only then are we prepared for a touch, however brief, of the impossible.

  But that night the impossible didn’t wait.

  The sun had been down for exactly an hour. It was twenty minutes after nine o’clock. My grandfather and I were sitting edgily in his room, listening to news on the radio and waiting for the weather to come on. The past three days had been exceptionally hot, but tonight there was a certain tension, that feeling of impending rain. In the window beside us churned an antiquated little air conditioner, competing with the blare of soul and salsa from the street below. Occasionally we could see flashes of heat lightning far away to the north, lighting up the sky like distant bombs.

  We were waiting for Father Pistachio, who was already several minutes late. I had promised to take both of them to an evening flute recital at Temple Ohav Sholom on 84th Street, on the other side of Broadway. There’d be a lot of old people in attendance, or so Grandfather believed. According to his calculations, the “boring part”—that is, the actual flute playing—would be over soon, and with a little luck the three of us would arrive just in time for the refreshments. I wondered if Pistachio was going to show up in his priest’s collar, and what they’d make of it at the temple.

  The radio announced the time. It was nine twenty-two.

  “What the hell’s keeping him?” said my grandfather. “We really ought to be getting over there. The ladies always leave early.” He got up from the bed. “What do you think? This shirt look okay?”

  “You’re not wearing any socks.”

  “What?” He glared down at his feet. “Oy gevalt, it’s a wonder I remember my own name!” Looking extremely dejected, he sat back on the bed but immediately jumped up again. “I know where the damn things are. I stuck them in with Esther Feinbaum’s wash.” He began moving toward the door.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “Downstairs. I’ll be right back.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! Why make a special trip?” I fought down my exasperation. “Look, you’ve got plenty of socks right there in your drawer. Karen just bought you some, remember? The others’ll wait till tomorrow.”

  “They may not be there tomorrow. Old Esther leaves ’em hanging down by the dryers. She doesn’t like to have men in her room!” He grinned. “Anyway, you don’t understand. They’re my lucky socks, the ones your mother made. I had ’em washed special for tonight, and I’m not going without ’em.”

  I watched him shuffle out the door. He seemed to be aging faster, and moving slower, with each passing week.

  “The time,” said the radio, “is nine twenty-five.”

  I went to the window and looked down. Plenty of people were out on the sidewalk, drinking or dancing or sitting on the stoop, but there was no sign of Pistachio. He had said something about bringing me some “new proof” of his theory, and I tried to imagine what it could be. A rabbi with a Costa Rican accent, perhaps, or a Xo Tl’mi-go skull. Or maybe just a photo o
f the back of his own head. I stood there while the wind from the air conditioner blew cold against my skin, watching heat lightning flash in the distance. Then I sat down and returned to the news. Karen would be on her way home, just about now, from her class up at Lehman in the Bronx. I wondered if it was raining up there. The radio didn’t say.

  Nine minutes later it happened. Suddenly the lights in Grandfather’s room dimmed, flickered, and died. The radio fell silent. The air conditioner clattered to a halt.

  I sat there in the darkness feeling faintly annoyed. The first thing that crossed my mind, I remember, was that somehow, perhaps in opening one of the dryers, Grandfather had inadvertently triggered a short circuit. Yes, I thought, that would be just like him!

  In the unaccustomed silence I heard a frightened yell, then another, coming from the hall. They were joined, in a moment, by shouts from down in the street. Only then did I realize that more than just the building was affected. It was the whole city. We were having a blackout.

  Still, even then, it seemed a minor annoyance. We’d had many such episodes before, in summers past, and I thought I knew what to expect. The city’s overloaded current would dip momentarily; lights would flicker, clocks lose time, record players slow so that the voices turned to growls—and then, a few seconds later, the current would come back. Afterward we’d get the usual warnings about going easy on appliances, and everyone would turn his air conditioner down a degree or two. Perhaps this time the problem might be a little more severe, but it was still nothing to get excited about. Con Ed would fix things in a moment. They always had…

  Already it had grown hot inside the room. I switched the lamp on and off, on and off, with that sense of incomprehension and resentment one feels when a familiar object, something that’s supposed to work, suddenly and mysteriously does not. Well, well, I thought, The Machine Stops. I went to the window, opened it, and peered into the darkness. There were no streetlights to be seen, and the sidewalk below me was almost invisible; it was as if I were looking down upon a courtyard or a river, though I could hear a babble of excited voices down there, voices and pounding feet and slamming doors. Buildings I could see a little better, and all of them looked dead, massive black monoliths against a black sky, with the moon just a sliver on the horizon. Across the water New Jersey was still lit, its brightness reflected in the Hudson, but here the only light came from the files of cars moving tentatively up Amsterdam and Broadway. In the glow of their headlights I could see faces at the windows of some of the other buildings, gazing out as I was, with varying degrees of wonder or curiosity or fear. From the street below came the sound of breaking glass.