Cool small fingers slide in among his own.
“Now you’ve met yourself, you’re ready to meet him,” she says. “He’s one of us, too. Part of you and me. Something incomplete we need to finish with.”
Weegee—the “alleged” Weegee —can’t argue with her. He knows all too well who she’s talking about:
That evil, out there in the night. The one with a practical joker’s name.
“Where?” he says numbly.
“Not far. Right down here in the Bowery, under our noses. Up on the El.”
9
The Best People Go to Heaven
There’s no rearview mirror in the coupe, and now he knows why. He must have glimpsed himself once, long ago, and torn it out, starting in on the hard, steady labor of denial.
He speeds along a black and almost empty street, past boarded-up liquor and Optimo cigar stores, decrepit brick tenements, shuffling figures wrapped is rags, a few startled souls picked out in his headlamps as if his is the first light they’ve ever seen, blinding them like cave creatures.
Suddenly, Tara issues an order.
“Turn here.”
He throws the wheel hard to the right into a sharp, spiraling turn that takes him down some impossible concrete chute, his headlights scraping down and down over a dead gray wall that looks like raw dirt, with twisted strands of roots or maybe frayed electric cable poking out of it. After an implausibly long time the spiral straightens out, depositing him on a long dark avenue, and he finally spots something he recognizes.
Skeletal metal rises ahead of him, black columns lining the avenue, joining overhead.
The El.
Odd, there’s no moon or stars tonight, only a weird light the likes of which he’s never seen. The whole city seems to be melting, shimmering beneath the humid sky that’s like the moist ceiling of an underwater cavern pressing down.
In the morning, he knows, the sun will shine through these tracks in beautiful black and gold patterns, giving meaning to the lives of forgotten men. He’ll be asleep then, in the morning, but it means something to him to know that others will see it.
If that morning ever comes. …
Now he’s zooming through the aisle of metal columns; they’re like corroded iron trees lining the avenues of an eerie, broken-down industrial estate. The complicated ironwork seems to continue overhead and on either side for an infinite distance.
The police radio has been dead for a while, though Tara is guide enough. But suddenly the classical station, barely a whisper anyway, dies out too. The signal is lost under so much metal, so much earth. Ugly static pours from the speakers till Tara turns it off. He finds her movement reassuring, because it has occurred to him that he might lose her too.
“Just up ahead.” Weegee spots a staircase, iron treads rising up to the level where the trains ride the trestles.
He brakes the car alongside the stairs, still in the shadows of the girders.
He quickly loads the Speed Graphic. Then he gets out.
Tara follows silently.
There are no cars, no people. Where are the inevitable spectators he’s so used to? Nowhere to be seen. He longs for the vapid parties he occasionally covers, socialites and dancers, smiles and fast friends, quick kisses in the dark, the simultaneous pop of the flash and the cork, as the champagne spills from the stem of the bottle, spills like the light from his bulbs, or the flood of images pouring through his mind as he slows his step and hesitates at the foot of the staircase with its switchbacks.
The camera draws him upward.
At the first switchback, Weegee looks down. A column blocks his sight of the car. The street seems wreathed in a newly risen mist. Weegee grows dizzy on the stairs. Gravity always claims you in the end. The dead fall down, death doesn’t move, it lies down forever while other crimes scurry off into shadows, fugitive, leading to pursuit and threatening shouts, guns fired, all that busy activity of life. That’s how he knows he’s alive, that whatever this long night is, it isn’t death. Maybe Tara’s right after all. Maybe this place is just a photograph or a heap of them, collaged together, linked only by the eye that took them. Wherever that eye may be now, the images live on.
“Go on,” chides Tara. “Up.”
Yes, up. Don’t pause to look back. Up to the open air, the stars, the bustle of trains and life. Leave the car behind, catch a homeward train and be out of here, recover the disguises and the rubber boots another time.…
At last, after many turns, he gains the platform.
It’s dark, striped with shadows, empty. Except for something pink resting on a bench.
Weegee moves closer.
The focus is always six or ten feet, even for close-ups.…
The pink object resolves itself into an innocuous cakebox. That’s all. An innocent thing, tied up with a string, left behind by a sleepy purchaser. Just a cakebox, whether forgotten or abandoned. Weegee’s curious about what it contains. Maybe it’s canoli or creampuffs or crunchy chruscik. Anything but a human head.
Approaching the box, Weegee imagines calling the cops to announce his find, without telling them of its innocence.
How they’ll laugh, opening the box to share the pastry right here on the tracks in the dark! Now that’ll be a picture, a bunch of cops with crumbs and frosting, or powdered sugar on their faces and fingers, caught in his flash like guilty kids raiding an icebox.
At the box, Weegee defiantly, resolutely snaps the string and lifts the lid.
It’s empty.
The weighted wooden shaft catches him slantwise across the neck and skull and sends him crashing down.
The Speed Graphic—his talisman, his demon, his identity—skitters away, across the platform. He feels all his power going with it.
Despite the immense pain lighting up the inside of his skull like God’s own flashbulb, Weegee manages to crawl a few feet and turn, but he’s never felt so vulnerable, so lost. Without his camera, what can he do? He’s nothing without it. Sights come and go in the darkness—he illuminates none of them, understands and communicates nothing.
It is his time to die, isn’t it? He’s outlived his usefulness.
His right eye is swimming in blood, the left one bulging as if ready to pop from the socket. He looks up to see how it will end.
Evil stands at the edge of a shadow, half in darkness, half in light. There’s something of each of them in the figure and something that just looks wrong.
The Cakebox Murderer wears a fantastic suit contrived of mismatched odds and ends. On his head is an air-raid warden’s metal helmet fastened under the chin. His face is swathed in thin muslin. His eyes are covered with welder’s goggles. His torso is bulked out with layers of cloth, canvas, and rubber. Several pairs of pants balloon around his legs. Strapped to his shoes are blocks of wood wrapped in cloth to make him look taller and to soften his steps. But none of this is the strangest part.
In one rubber-gloved hand he holds his nail-studded bludgeon.
In the other, a crusted hacksaw.
But those are easy enough to believe in.
It’s something else that mystifies Weegee.
He struggles to rise, but slumps back, dizzied and weak.
The Cakebox Murderer slowly advances. As he separates fully from the shadows, Weegee figures out what it is that looks so damn strange about him.
Everything about him is reversed. Where his hacksaw should reflect highlights of the platform lamps, it throws off black sparks. Where the folds of his absurd costume should gather in shadow, instead they envelop faint dustings of light. He drinks in the light and turns it to darkness, and casts back darkness like another kind of light. This is a creature that vanishes in daylight—a monster that glows in the dark.
The sort of thing that would haunt a photograph.
Weegee murmurs helplessly, “Tara.…” He looks painfully around for her form—
There she is.
The Speed Graphic is in her hands.
Somehow he can t
ell that the stupid kid has the focus set on infinity.
Tara’s expression is invisible beneath the camera poised expertly in front of her face. But Weegee knows she’s smiling for the first time that night.
“Say cheese!”
The Cakebox Murderer spins and hurls himself at her, a blur of reversed edges, moving faster than she’s prepared for. Weegee cries out, but too late. The bar crashes down, crunching into the camera, shattering the bulb and the metal reflector, totaling the case, turning the lens to crushed ice, wrecking the film inside. The twisted metal drops from Tara’s bleeding hands. She stares down at it, her face blank with terror, absorbed in the loss. He remembers her saying, I came out of it. And now that God is dead.…
But the Human Head Cakebox Murderer lives. He raises his bar again, covering her in his luminous shadow. She stares up in paralyzed submission —
And Weegee screams. Not with his mouth, but with his eyes.
Searing white light pours over the monster. Shadows leap into sudden intensity, seeming to set the platform on fire. The murderer’s hue shifts from light to dark, dark to light, searing in places. The creature turns, throwing up its arm to ward off the flash that comes pouring out of Weegee’s eyes. But the light ignites the smoked-glass lenses; they focus the rays inward, cooking out the sick brain, cauterizing whatever vile impulses drive him—
The monster howls, its shadow now a stain of almost total blackness, down in the depths of which Weegee barely sees Tara cowering—but safe.
The light fades slowly from Weegee’s eyes, and he thinks, She was right. It was me all along, and not the camera.
The camera is a small pile of slag but he doesn’t need it now. It can’t rule him. And the creature cannot frighten him or anyone now. It totters blindly about, groping at air, its costume in rags, seared to ashes, blistering, blackened.
Weegee finds the strength to stand. He pushes past the creature, intending only to grab Tara and run, but Weegee misjudges his force and the murderer trips on his clumsy clogs, falling sideways, flailing. The madman catches the railing with his gut and goes over.
The sound the body makes hitting the street is a familiar one. Still, Weegee leans over the railing to make sure of it.
It’s dark in the depths beneath the track, and he’s somewhat blinded himself. Hard to tell exactly what he’s seeing. But somehow it’s not nearly as dark as it’s been. A subtle light is growing all around him, buzzing between the girders, as if the light from his eyes had leaked into the sky and set off a chain reaction.
He backs up laughing. “Dawn!” he shouts. The trestles and tracks and ironwork angles are threatening to turn to gold. He turns to find Tara, to share it with her. Dawn is coming to the city!
But he’s alone on the platform. Nothing remains of the struggle but a small sprinkling of shattered glass. He kneels and touches a finger to it, sees the stuff glisten with the imminent light; on an impulse, he puts it to his tongue, and grins. Not glass.
Sugar.
It tastes the way he feels. It tastes like the pictures he’ll take from now on.
Right then and there, he resolves to cut the wires of the police radio in his car. He’s through with chasing ambulances, through with being haunted. He’s been saturated with the tears of women and the sight of impoverished children sleeping on fire escapes. From now on, he’ll do all his shooting by daylight. He’ll sleep only at night.
He looks up through the girders at the pinkening sky, and wonders.
What if night never comes?
THE HORROR WRITER
There were figures in the yellow wallpaper.
Moving figures.
He knew it, despite what anyone else said they saw. The wallpaper was in his bedroom. His wife had chosen it. Today a contractor was coming over to give an estimate on repapering the room.
The doorbell rang. Its chimes resounded in his skull like the bells of a Black Mass. His wife had chosen the chimes too. They played the theme from the first movie made from one of his novels. He would ask the contractor about also replacing those.
The man on the doorstep was one of those hideously inbred locals, his features a sludge of genetic debris. Hardly able to keep his eyes on the man, the Horror Writer fixed his gaze on the tall wrought iron fence in the distance that surrounded his property.
“Mister Prinze …?” said the contractor, obviously a bit confounded. It was not that there was any mistaking the Horror Writer’s famous face. No, it must be the intensity of his certitude. Yes, that was it. The Horror Writer’s unswerving moral vision in the face of the terrible evil around him—evil that would have overwhelmed a lesser mortal—must have impinged, however dimly, on the contractor’s dull mind.
“You okay, Mister Prinze?”
The Horror Writer roused himself. This was no time for hesitation or inaction. If he was ever to surmount the accursed forces that had gripped his world, he would have to move fast.
“I’m fine,” he said gruffly. “Let’s look at the room.”
Opening the bedroom door with the contractor by his side, the Horror Writer recoiled in shock.
The figures were much more pronounced today, their warty faces contorting into obscene leers at his presence as they scampered around in their two-dimensional space. If they were ever to escape into the world of mankind—
“This the room?” said the contractor, brushing past the Horror Writer, his primitive senses oblivious to the menace contained within.
It was all the Horror Writer could do to step into the bedroom with the ignorant local. He had to take the risk, though—
“Ayup, I remember when Miz Prinze picked this pattern out. We didn’t spare no expense, no sir. Seems a shame somehow to change it now, while it’s practically brand-new.…”
What a fool he had been! How could he have forgotten? This was the very same dupe who had hung the original wallpaper. Dupe? No, of course not! This man was in collusion with his wife! Together, they had conspired to paper his bedroom with this transdimensional portal, knowing that at the proper cosmic moment it would open, sucking him through to an eternity of torture!
The Horror Writer resolved to test his theory, although he had no real doubts.
“I want this paper stripped off. Not a shred of it must remain.”
“Stripped? That don’t seem strictly necessary, Mister Prinze. Mighty big job, and a waste of time to boot. We’ll just put the new paper up on top of it—”
“Get out! Get out of my house right now!”
The Horror Writer hustled the stunned man down to the front door.
“What kind of fool do you take me for? I can read your every thought! Get back to your bestial otherworld masters! Tell them I won’t be taken so easily. I’ve got powers! I know who to contact! I’m not alone against you!”
The contractor picked his cap up off the ground and dusted it before repositioning it atop his head.
“I know you’re busted up about your wife, Mister Prinze, but that ain’t no reason — “
“Get out! There are still places beyond your reach!”
The contractor shook his head, climbed into his truck and drove away.
The Horror Writer would sleep on the couch from now on.
There were many other steps he could take.
* * *
His cat was missing.
He had called it for an hour that morning, but it had not come.
He knew his enemies had taken it, to use against him.
Hostages to fortune, that’s all loved ones were.
Or what was worse—traitors!
Now, against nigh-insurmountable odds, he was forced to search for the animal.
He wondered if he should dig a grave for it in advance.
Arming himself with a stout walking stick and a long sharp kitchen knife, the Horror Writer began a search of his property.
The cat was not in the garage. Nor was it in the barn. But in this latter place, the Horror Writer detected signs of a struggle: some c
lawed wood, disturbed straw, the half-eaten corpse of a field mouse. Yes, his enemies had taken the cat. Somehow they had gotten past his pentagram and abducted it, probably while he slept and his will was weakened. The animal was probably beyond his help now. Yet still he had to search. He owed it to the dumb beast. Often, they deserved more loyalty than your fellow humans, who would stab you in the back as soon as you looked away.
Haunted woods loomed on three sides of his property, their trees gruesomely contorted like gassed Jews at Auschwitz. He avoided getting within the grasp of their limbs.
By the fence, on the southern side that bordered a neighbor’s lot, he found the talisman under a Druidic oak, and knew his doom was closer than he had thought.
The fetish was a small bundle of rabbit fur. Inside were bones and gristle. Probably the remains of his cat—
“Those owls are amazing, aren’t they?”
The Horror Writer shot erect with his heart pounding.
Beyond the fence stood his neighbor. By the man’s side was his dog. The beast was a huge sheepdog. Its eyes gleamed with more-than- canine intelligence. Saliva drooled from its curled lip. Its teeth looked razor-sharp.
A strong offense would be his best defense, he knew.
“Owls? What owls? Kind of strange to be talking about owls in the broad daylight, isn’t it?”
His neighbor gestured toward the fetish. “That’s an owl’s leftovers you’ve got there. They always wrap it up in a neat bundle. Really something, nature, huh?”
The Horror Writer tossed the bundle down as if it had burned him. “That’s what you’d like me to believe, I’m sure.”
His neighbor shrugged. “Just the truth.” The man turned to go.
At that moment the dog whined and made a move toward the fence.
The knife leaped into the Horror Writer’s hand. “Keep that hellhound away from me! I know what she’s done!”
The neighbor patted the dog’s head as it scratched behind one ear. “Old Tina? She wouldn’t hurt a fly? What’s the matter with you, Stefan? Get a grip on yourself. You’ve been acting kinda crazy lately.…”
Little Doors Page 12
