Pulling A Train

by Harlan Ellison

  The door to the basement was in the rear of the massive tool room area, and he opened it as stealthily as possible. It squeaked once, and he gritted his teeth in fury.

  There was no stairway, but rather a concrete ramp that spiraled down to a furnace room. He could see, dimly, the wall outline of another door. It was in the direction the room had to be.

  He took the spiral at tip-toeing pace, and covered the furnace room in twelve steps. He listened at the door, but could hear nothing through the fire door.

  He began to edge the bolt lock from its track, and found he was having difficulty. He applied concerted pressure till it began to slide, then he knew he must fling it back as rapidly as possible, and shoot the door in its tracks, for if someone was on the other side, the surprise would be lost if they heard the lock slipping.

  He steeled himself, shot the bolt and threw his weight against the door.

  The fire door slid massively, caught, and slid in on its tracks, opening wide to the room. It was the Cat’s den, as he had imagined, but it was empty.

  The dull light of the flickering candle in its broken Chianti bottle told him someone had been there, however.

  And a cigarette burned on the table’s edge.

  He stared at it for a long moment, wondering if Fabia had heard him coming into the factory, or had just run out when the door had squeaked. Then he heard a scuffle behind him, and tried to spin around to face whoever was there.

  An arm as thick as a hawser slid around his neck, lifting him bodily from the floor. He kicked back, and his leg met something soft. He kicked again, and the choking slacked off slightly as a soprano cry of anguish spiraled toward the ceiling.

  He used his elbows, and wiggled his neck in the tight grip, till he slipped free suddenly, and spun and drove the knife into the first obstacle it encountered.

  His blade bit deeply, and he dragged down, opening a widening red rip in the flesh.

  The soprano scream came again, and the dim shape in the shadows careened forward, clutching itself. It fell across the table, and tumbled to the floor, flopping onto its back.

  Deek Cullen looked down; lying with her fingers thrust deep into the slashed breast, feeling her life heart-pump out, Terri died with eyes open.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Just Trust Me, Baby!

  THE WALLS WERE COMING TUMBLING DOWN. The broad from the Settlement House, crazy bitch, she had the cops on him; Fabia had all the dough; Terri and Thumb were dead; and he was on the dodge again.

  How had it all gone so wrong?

  Had it been so slight a time ago that he had been lone top dog on the turf, walking and bopping the way he wanted? It had started wrong with that crazy nympho Pootzie, in the alley, and trying to avoid getting killed and hiding in Demoiselle’s pad, and joining the Cats, and now all this…

  He stood in the basement, and shook his head like a bull that has been struck by the matador and does not know which way is relief.

  Then Fabia came down the steps. She took one look at the slashed body of Terri, and her eyes opened wide.

  “Jeezus,” she said. “I told her to watch for you…you bastard…you dirty bastard…that’s two of them…”

  Deek took a quick step toward her and grabbed her arm tightly. “Listen, I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to beat town, now where the hell’s the dough? I swear to God I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me.”

  The maniacal expression in his eyes, the twist of his lips sent a shiver through the girl. She came toward him almost as if she wanted to get nearer the danger. “Deek, Deek,” she murmured, “why did we have to end like this? We could have been so good together. Just you and me. Just you and me and all that dough, and no one else—”

  Pootzie’s intake of breath signaled her eavesdropping had paid off. Deek spun, still clutching Fabia’s arm, and looked into the far corner of the dark room, where Terri had leaped out to attack him. Pootzie and Terri had arrived together.

  “So you’re gonna cop out on me, huh, Fabia?” Pootzie said. “Like hell you are.” She drew back the pin of the zip gun and came out of the corner.

  “You first, you sonofabitch!” she damned Deek. “You killed her, and she never had a chance. Now I’m gonna do it for you. I’m gonna put it right in the middle of that friggin’ face of yours!”

  She lifted the gun slightly, and drew back the heavy rubber band that would send the pin into the antenna barrel, driving the .32 slug into Deek’s head.

  Fabia slid out of Deek’s grasp, and ducked slightly; Deek was too horribly fascinated by the small black dot of the zip gun’s muzzle to notice.

  The dark-haired girl came up from her crouch suddenly, and the switch blade was in her hand. Without a pause or break in rhythm, she brought the knife up and down, and drove it into Pootzie’s chest. The rubber band jerked violently, the gun hand went up, and the slug buried itself with a rush and a roar in the ceiling.

  Pootzie’s eyes went wide and red, and she stared at the pillar of steel protruding from her chest.

  “You…” she tried to condemn Fabia, and fell on her face, driving the knife deeper into her body.

  Deek was petrified. When it began to wear off, he realized that Fabia DeLuca had saved his life. She had stopped Pootzie from blowing his skull apart.

  “Why—” He began, but she cut him off by throwing herself into his arms. Her mouth came up to his, and his lips parted to receive her tongue. She ground her body against his, and pulled his head closer to her own with a death-grip in his hair. When she buried her face in his shoulder, her voice came to him softly, huskily. “I couldn’t, I couldn’t l-let her do it. I want you, Deek. I want you more than I want the money, or the gang, or any damn thing. I want you, and I want you to make love to me, alone, not with those other pigs around you. I need you, Deek. We can be awful good together. Please, Deek. Please, baby.”

  She ground her pelvis against him, and Deek felt the fury of his passion rising. It would be so easy. And she was the best woman he had ever had. She was hot and cold fire and all the rainbows and warm caves of a lifetime. He could maybe make it with her.

  They’d have to split town; they’d have to hop a rattler and go out West, where they could set up and maybe start some crazy kind of normal life. It might be. It just might be.

  She gasped with unsuppressed anguish, and cried, “Take me now, Deek. Take me on the sofa, Deek. Please!”

  He lifted her, then, and carried her to the sofa. He laid her down and unbuttoned her jeans.

  She rocked and writhed beneath him, and he felt the fires that had been stoked and banked by the day’s torments, bursting forth. They rose higher and higher, and he tore at her feverishly, with insane passion.

  “Oh-hunch…”

  Then she lay silently in his arms, and he felt a great weariness bomb him. His eyes closed and he lay there atop her, still thrust deep within her, sleep coming like a great velvet curtain.

  The pain wakened him.

  He looked up. He was lying on his back. He felt very warm and very satisfied. It might be all right, after all. He would take Fabia, they would bury the bodies under the concrete in the basement. No one would ever find those vagabond girls who had been the sex gang members of the Cats. It would be Outsville, then, cutting fast on a train to nowhere, but cutting fast.

  And maybe, in time, they’d be together more than just with their bodies. She was beautiful, and if they could ever kill the memories that lived between them… it was just a matter of trust.

  Yeah, trust.

  Trust from the day he was born. Trust for the world, and the people in it who had screwed him up and made him screw them up for revenge. It was all trust. Not enough of it.

  But all that would change now.

  Now he had a woman.

  His own woman.

  He would take her and go West, and they’d settle someplace with all that dough, and make good. The pain really bothered him. He couldn’t seem to swallow properly.

  But he trusted
her. That was what counted. She had a bad streak in her, all right, but so did he. He was a hungry type. But they’d made it together. It only took trust, and that would kill any hunger he had.

  Something warm and moist was running stickily down his chest.

  He found the difficulty with breathing was really bad now. He reached up, and touched his throat. His hand came away wet. He looked at his hand. Oh God, no!

  Trust!

  I’m hungry, he thought, I’m so damned hungry to make it, and make it on top. I’m hungry.

  But someone is always hungrier, he mused, going red and dim in the sight, and seeing her there beautiful and dark and holding the knife that had cut his throat.

  The knife that had been a friend to him. A good knife for anyone who needed a good one. His knife.

  It was dark, suddenly. And quiet.

  Nedra at ƒ:5.6

  (An Hommage to Fritz Leiber)

  I’m looking at the pictures, but I don’t believe it. I may just go have my eyes examined, or trade in that goddamned Leica and be done with it, but I don’t—doubly do not—believe it. Listen: it’s so weird, I didn’t simply trust the raw negatives…I actually developed the bloody things, every frame.

  Nedra’s asleep in the bedroom, and well she should be after the monumental bout we staged tonight, and I’m almost afraid to go in and wake her. Oh, hell, it’s just a trick of lighting, that’s all, or something wrong with that damned Leica, or some crap got into the developer. But still…

  Central Park uptown can be a strange and wonderful thing on an early spring day, but it wasn’t a spring day. This was the middle of October, overcast, with the grass frantically struggling to stay green as it was trampled; with the trees whispering how clever they were to be dumping their leaves; with the sky siphoning down from a watery blue to a washed-out orange near the horizon. It was the Park on a day when all the nannies would rather have been in the apartments, with their white shoes off, drinking Pimm’s Cups pilfered from their employer’s home larders and watching The Edge of Night instead of perambulating their charges’ perambulators. A week after the World Series, when the wormy little bookies who had lost their shirts when the Dodgers folded in five had crawled back into the topsoil till football season was under way. A sort of day that idles along, like a rolling hoop, just lightly jouncing over troublesome things like the canine Twinkies on the paths and the creepy gang kids looking for someone to mug, just going its way with an occasional shove or two.

  That sort of day. And the people on the benches were nothing spectacular. Mostly old men and women, taking the sun—what there was left of it—and proud young mamas, showing their offspring to the folks.

  It didn’t look like the sort of day to be getting any good photos, but I decided to leg it around a few blocks of the Park and snap what there was. Overcast, just right, can get you some good candid color stuff. Sometimes.

  Well, I was skirting the benches along in the Sixties, snapping one here and one there, catching a kid trying to stomp a dirty pigeon; catching a woman watching the sky to see if rain was coming and picking her nose at the same time; catching a bum twisted up like a foetus on a bench, with a copy of the Wall Street Journal over him for warmth. Nothing spectacular, but maybe it would look good in the darkroom.

  It was just as I was passing the 79th Street underpass—you know, the part that takes you down to the boat basin—with the October wind snapping off the Hudson, tossing my hair around my head, making me wish I had worn my Aquascutum, when I spotted her.

  Now, let me get this straight with you for a second. I’ve been a professional photographer for twelve years now. I’m thirty-five years old, and I’ve snapped some of the wildest looking women in the game. I’ve had Valerie Perrine and Anne-Margret up on kitchen stools in front of a white cyclorama sheet; I’ve posed Victoria Vetri and Claudia Jennings and Charlotte Rampling and Elsa Martinelli with and without their undies; I’ve done fashion layouts with every courant breathtaker from The Shrimp to Farrah Fawcett; even worked with the mythic lust-dreams like Bettie Page and June Wilkinson and Irish McCalla and Anita Ekberg and Vikki Dougan right at the end of their popularity, before they vanished to wherever the great beauties vanish to; I’ve seen more hundreds of women in the bare, with their vitals exposed, than any other dude with a planar I can think of, excluding maybe Haskins, Avedon, de Dienes, Rotsler, Casilli, and a couple of others. So stunning women aren’t anything that special to me, except maybe something to make a buck off, if I can develop a set on them. What I’m saying is that Lauren Hutton isn’t a coronary arrest where I’m concerned if, as they say, you get my drift.

  I’ve made my living at cheesecake, when there weren’t “art” jobs or fashion layouts handy, and I know damned well what it looks like from every crotch-crazy angle you can think of. So I should have known better…it shouldn’t have stopped me.

  But that’s just what she did. She stopped me flat.

  I just stared at her, sitting there in the afternoon, with the feeble sun overhead, and the bench cool and green under her round bottom, and the skirt up just a bit so I could see her knees didn’t show bones, but were smooth and firm and flesh-colored.

  She was like nothing I’d ever seen before. She was the answer to every cheesecaker’s dream.

  She just looked like she wanted to lie down on the grass.

  With me. With the Good Humor Man. With the park attendant. With anybody.

  You’ve probably seen pictures in magazines of girls like that. They just look more natural prone than supine. They seem to be saying with their eyes and their mouths and the lines of their bodies, “Let me lie down…I want to be horizontal.” Well, she was like that, only more so, only much more so. She looked…well…the only word I could come up with was hungry. Yeah, that was it, hungry. She looked like she hadn’t had a certain kind of meal in a helluva long time.

  She was about five-feet-six, with hair that sent back the weak rays of the sun in a brilliant red explosion. Her hair wasn’t the brassy, carroty red so many women think is hotcha; it was a delicate sort of amber, with highlights of black and streaks of deep crimson in it. It was hair that came down around her shoulders, and which she tossed out of her face with an eloquent twist of her shoulders.

  I couldn’t see what color her eyes were, because they were closed. She was sitting there with her hands in her lap, and her head tossed back and to the side slightly, as though she was sleeping.

  It was a nippy day, and yet she wore no coat. She had on a dark charcoal skirt and a pale blue poorboy jersey that stopped short of her upper arms. She must have been chilly as hell, but she wasn’t shivering.

  I was glad she hadn’t worn that coat, because it gave me an uninterrupted view of her body. Now, ordinarily, in most women, no matter how skimpy or thin the clothing, there’s still a portion of the anatomy you can’t quite shape out in your mind. The under-breasts, the joint of the legs, the slide of the belly to the hips. But this girl was the next best thing to naked. Voluptuous. That was another word for her. Hungrily voluptuous. Voluptuously hungry. Either way, I could see the sharp molding of her breasts against the front of her jersey. I could see the sharp lines of indentation as the legs raced up to wide, rounded thighs, and plunged out of sight beneath her stomach. I could see her all, all of her, and it made me dizzy.

  Have you ever experienced anything comparable? A roller coaster, doing forty push-ups, running a mile and a half in eleven minutes? All of them and others. This girl was the original Circe, the dyed-in-the-cotton-jersey siren.

  I had to pose her.

  I’m not bashful around women—my studio apartment has resounded long and loud to the outraged squeals of outraged models—but there was something about her that made me walk softly, on the balls of my feet, toward her.

  Almost as though I’d tripped an electric eye as I approached, she sat up, and stared at me openly. I was stopped cold again. Her eyes were the most fantastic things I’d ever seen. They were like the first movement of
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq D’Or transposed from sound to solid. They were like two green-hot chunks of emerald, bathed by the heat of an exploding sun, and smoldering, smoldering. They were all the invitations and all the ecstasies and all the open accusations of a woman who wants to make love no matter what the cost. They were alone in their category. They were more than merely eyes. Eyes see…these spoke.

  “Hello,” she said.

  The voice couldn’t have been more right for her had it been taped and recorded in the Muscle Shoals sound studios, with all the acoustical tricks of an echo chamber built into her vocal cords. The voice came at me and cracked me across the mouth. When that girl said hello, so help me God, I bit my lip.

  “Hi…I’m, uh, my name is Paul Shores. I’m a, uh, photographer, and I’m, uh, I was watching you. Has anyone ever—”

  She smiled, and it was the most complex smile I’d ever seen; working up from one corner of her very red mouth, and quickly overwhelming me; two rows of perfectly white teeth, with the little canines peeking out sharp and pointy. The smile brought two spots of color to her cheeks, and they looked almost unnatural in the setting of fine alabaster flesh. Her face was a composite, a study in red and pale pink. The kind of complexion they meant when they said peaches-and-cream, with none of the sick look of soggy peaches.

  She finished my sentence for me: “Has anyone ever told me I was pretty enough to model? Yes, Mr. Shores, any number of times, and any number of people.”

  The smile continued, as though, in some innocent, gentle, heartwarming way, she was mocking me, and I was so embarrassed I felt myself blushing. I quickly turned to leave, without even excusing myself.

  I got one step away, and I felt her hand slip through my arm. “I’d love to pose for you,” she said. I looked down at her.

  She was serious, godammit! Absolutely serious about posing for a total stranger.

  “But why?” I asked. “You don’t know me from Ad—”