Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  After having coffee in a small shop off Fifty-second Street, Ralphie walked the streets aimlessly. He knew that he should go to the public library and get a new card, but he felt too restless today. His mind was too agitated to read, even though it was one of his only pleasures. When he had been a child, living with his uncle, the old man had taught him the wonders of books, and Ralphie had educated himself in his uncle’s library. When the old man died without a will or an heir, Ralphie was turned out on the street, a victim of New York State Probate Court at the age of seventeen, with nothing. A string of odd jobs leading nowhere, combined with his crippled leg, had beaten him down until he didn’t seem to care anymore. He identified with the desperation of characters from Dostoevski and Gogol, the self-inflicted terror and pain of characters from Hawthorne and Poe. The world had been different when those writers had lived, he often thought, and people knew how to feel, and think, and care. In the city, Ralphie wondered if people even cared about themselves anymore.

  Evening crept into the streets, and Ralphie worked his way toward Times Square, watching the faces of those he passed on the crowded sidewalks. Some said that it was an unwritten law that you did not look at anyone you passed in the city, but Ralphie knew that was untrue. Everyone looked at everyone else. Only they did it furtively, secretly, stealing glances at one another like thieves. They walked behind masks of indifference, like Gogol’s “dead souls,” playing the parts assigned them in the mindless dollhouse of the city. It was like a disease, thought Ralphie, which had infected us all.

  Down Broadway, he turned left at Forty-second Street, already ablaze with the flashing lights and colors of the theaters and porn shops. The crowds of tourists and theatergoers mingled with the panhandlers, the hustlers, and the legions of blacks and Puerto Ricans carrying suitcase-sized radios at full volume. Dealers hung in doorways or strutted and leered at passersby. The sidewalks were speckled with trash and dark wet patches that could be any number of things. In the middle of the block, Ralphie entered the glass, satin-lined doors of the Honey Pot, to be swallowed up in the sweaty darkness and loud music of the bar. The lyrics of a song pounded at him, and he listened to the words without wanting to:

  I want to grab your thighs . . .

  I want to hear your sighs . . .

  M-m-m-make luuuuuv to you! . . .

  Ralphie shook his head sadly to himself, took off his coat, and walked past the bar, which was already half-filled with patrons. Behind the bar was a light-studded runway, backed by a floor-to- ceiling mirror, where the girls could watch themselves while they danced. Brandy was strutting back and forth across the runway, wearing only a pair of spike heels and a silver-sequined G-string. She was short and lithe, with stringy dark hair, boyish hips, and pendulous, stretch-marked breasts that seemed absurdly large for her small frame. She half walked, half pranced to the beat of the music, causing her breasts to bounce and loll in what to Ralphie was a most unerotic manner. Once in a while she would smile at the patrons, or lick her lips and pout, but it was an empty, hollow gesture. Ralphie had seen all the girls pretending to like the customers and he hated the whole game, hated that they were trapped in it, as was he. Empty exchanges, devalued emotions, flensed of meaning and feeling.

  When he reached the end of the bar, his boss, Mr. Maurice, spotted him. “Hey, Ralphie boy! You’re early tonight . . . ”

  “Hello, Mr. Maurice. You want me to start anyway?”

  Maurice, a broad-shouldered, overweight, and balding man, smiled and shook his head. “Naw, there ain’t nothin’ out there yet. Go on in the back and get a coffee. I’ll call ya when I need ya.” .

  He dismissed Ralphie with a turn of the head, resuming his conversation with one of the new dancers, who was sitting on a barstool by her boss, clothed only in a bra and panties.

  “Okay,” said Ralphie, walking into the darkness beyond the bar, and through a door to the girls’ “dressing” rooms, to a small alcove where a coffee maker and Styrofoam cups could be found. As he poured the black liquid into his cup, someone entered behind him. Turning, he saw it was Brandy, completely nude, going to the dressing room.

  “Hi, Brandy . . . How are you?”

  The girl looked at him and smiled, but said nothing, then disappeared behind the door. She treated him as all the girls did—like a mascot or a pet dog. Funny, he thought, but he had never grown accustomed to the way people treated him. Just because he was a short, dough-faced cripple didn’t mean that he had less of a need for warmth and a little caring . . . Ralphie shook his head slowly, embarrassed that he could indulge so easily in selfpity. He walked from the back room to one of the vacant tables farthest away from the bar, sat down, and sipped his coffee. A half hour passed under the haze of cigarette smoke and the sheets of loud music as Ralphie ignored the laughter and the whistles from the bar patrons. His thoughts kept returning to the Broadway local, and that abandoned station—there was something about the place that would not leave him. It was as though there were something down there, waiting. Waiting for him, perhaps . . . He knew it was a crazy thought, but it felt so strong in him that he could not get rid of the idea. He had felt something, damn it, and he had to know what it had been.

  Maurice appeared by his shoulder, slapping him in mock friendliness. “S’after eight . . . ya better get out there and bring in some rubes, huh? Whaddaya say, Ralphie boy?” Another slap on the arm.

  “Yeah, okay, Mr. Maurice.” He stood up from the table and pulled on his coat, wrapped his scarf about his neck. Ralphie hated his job, but it was by far the best-paying gig he’d ever had. If he didn’t need the money so badly, he would have quit long ago.

  Walking past the bar, he saw that Chrissie was dancing now. She had long legs which seemed too thin when she wore a dress, but looked all right when she was nude. Her face was long and thin, making her eyes look large and forlorn. She was not what you would call pretty, but she had, as Maurice phrased it, “a big rack,” and that was what the guys liked.

  He pushed through the glass doors and felt the wind sting his face, the brilliance of the lights cut his eyes. Even in the cold November night, there were thousands of people, mostly men, out looking for warmth—or whatever could be passed off as the same. Ralphie held open the door to the Honey Pot and began his spiel, the words so automatic that he never thought of them anymore: “All right, fellas! No cover, no minimum! Take a peek inside! We got the best show in town! Young girls for you! All nude, and that means naked!”

  He would pause for a moment, and then repeat his message to the ever-changing surge of topcoated bodies. Sometimes he would stare into the men’s faces, especially the ones who listened to his patter, the ones who slipped through the open door with heads bowed as if entering a church. He always saw the same things in their eyes. Our eyes betray us always, he thought, and he saw in their expressions a searching for something, for something lost and becoming unrecognizable. He also saw sadness. Sadness and shame.

  On and on, he repeated his litany of the flesh, until the night had whipped past him and the traffic thinned out, the pedestrians disappearing. Maurice came up behind him and tapped his shoulder. “Okay, Ralphie. Nice job, let’s pack it in, baby.”

  He entered the bar, walked past the hunched row of men. They were the hangers-on, the ones who closed the bars, the loneliest of the lonely. This last crowd watched Jessie work through her final number, wearing only a pair of gold-glitter platform heels as she swished her hips and played with her blond pubic hair. She had an attractive face, but it was flawed by her empty-eyed stare, her artlessly constructed smile.

  Ralphie sat at the back table after getting a cup of coffee from the back room. As he used its heat to warm his hands before sipping it, more thoughts of the Broadway local ripped through his mind, and he feared that he was becoming obsessed with it. There were whispers and giggles behind him as the girls were emerging from the dressing room, putting on their coats, and preparing to leave. They filed past him, ignoring him as they always did, but th
is night the gesture seemed to eat at him more than usual. He knew that he should have become accustomed to the treatment, but he never did. The strange thing about it was that for the first time he felt himself disliking them, almost hating them for their lack of compassion, of simple, honest feeling. And that scared him.

  Finishing his coffee, he left the bar, not saying good night to anyone, and no one seeming to notice his departure. Out in the Broadway night, fleets of cabs battled for one last fare, and the fringe people of the dark hours huddled in doorways and on street corners. Ralphie descended into the Times Square station, dropped a token through the stile, and held the railing as he went down to the platform. He was thinking that he should quit the Honey Pot, knowing that he had hung on there so long only because it was easier than looking for something better, or even taking courses during the day so that he could be qualified for something with more of a future. But that would mean getting out and interacting with the people of the day, and that might mean more pain and indignation. At least the people of the night considered him almost invisible, and did not actively hurt him. But they did hurt him, he thought, only to a lesser degree. To everyone, Ralphie was a loser, a hunched-up, bummy-looking clubfoot. He was one of the semi-human things that inhabited the shadowy parts of all cities, one who did not think or feel, but only slinked and scrabbled and hustled for an empty existence.

  He would show them someday how wrong they were, he thought.

  A rattling roar filled the station as the local rumbled to a stop. The train was a sooty, speckled nightmare covered with spray- paint graffiti—an old, dying beast. Its doors opened and Ralphie stepped inside, moving to a hideously colored turquoise seat. The air in the car was heavy with the smell of cheap wine and vomit, but the only other passenger, a dozing, fur-coated pimp in a droopy-brimmed hat, did not seem to notice. Ralphie took a seat near the doors and stared at his reflection in the smeared glass window across the aisle.

  Penn Station. Twenty-eighth Street. Twenty-third. The night train hurtled down the tunnel, and Ralphie felt his pulse quickening. Would it happen again? Would he see that station with no name? The questions dominated his thoughts. Eighteenth Street. Then Fourteenth. Sheridan Square was next, and the train seemed to be going slower already. He hoped that it was not just his imagination.

  When the train stopped at the Square, several passengers boarded. Two were teenaged girls wearing almost identical suede jackets with fur collars and Calvin Klein jeans with butterflies embroidered down the legs. Rich girls out slumming, thought Ralphie, as one of them looked into his eyes and smiled. He felt something stir in his heart, and smiled back at the pretty young girl.

  “You’re kind of cute,” said the girl. “Come here often?”

  Ralphie couldn’t believe what she said. He could only stare for a moment. “What?” he asked dumbly.

  The girl giggled and nudged her friend, who looked at Ralphie, then whispered loudly to the first girl, “Hey, watch it, you’re getting Quasimodo excited!”

  They both laughed, and Ralphie looked away, feeling something shatter inside, breaking and turning to dust. The train was moving again, and he wanted to ask them why they had acted that way, but his thoughts were racing ahead as he sensed the train approaching that secret place once again. There was something new smoldering in his heart; it was a new feeling, still unrecognized. He looked past the reflections in the glass into the rumbling darkness, and suddenly it was happening again.

  He felt a slowness come over him, and he looked to the other passengers, the pimp and the two girls. Why didn’t they feel it too!? He could feel the train itself struggling to get past that place, that station with no name. Watching and waiting, Ralphie sensed something tugging at the fibers of time itself. There came a flicker of light beyond the car and, for an instant, an illuminated rectangle. The image burned into his mind: the single bulb, the cold yellow tiles, the empty platform.

  And then it was gone.

  The train seemed to be regaining its speed, the sound of the girls giggling and the wheels clacking. How could they not have seen it? Felt it? He stood up, grabbing the center pole as his vision fogged for a moment, and he fought the sensation that he was going to black out. He swayed drunkenly, fighting it, still looking out the windows. Then the train was jerking to a halt, its doors opening at Houston Street.

  Forcing his legs to move, Ralphie limped from the car and stood on the concrete platform, rubbing his forehead. The vertigo had passed and the cooler air of the station seemed to help. The doors whooshed shut, and the local clattered from the station, leaving him alone, staring down the black shaft from which he had just come. It was so close, he thought. It could not be far from where he now stood . . .

  There would be no trains for fifteen minutes. He had the time. He was alone in the station, and no one saw him ease off the platform and slip down to the tracks. The electrified rail was across the roadbed and he could easily avoid it, but ahead of him the black tunnel hung open like a mouth waiting to devour him. Driven by the need to find the abandoned station, he walked forward into the darkness, trying not to think of what it would be like if a train rushed him ahead of schedule.

  The tracks curved to the left and soon the lights from the Houston Street station were completely obscured and Ralphie was moving in total darkness. There was not even the dim eye of a signal semaphore to give him direction, and he felt his stomach tightening as he moved clumsily, keeping his left hand in touch with the cold, slightly moist, slightly slimy wall of the tunnel. He lost all sense of time, becoming engrossed with the darkness, the uneven roadbed, and the dead touch of the wall. He felt more terribly alone than he had in his entire life, and he knew in his gut that he was walking to a place where no man had ever walked before.

  Something was taking shape ahead of him, rimmed by faint light: he saw that it was the outline of a support girder along the wall. Another came into view, and then another. With each step the light grew stronger, and he could see the shine of the rails ahead of him. The wall curved to the left again, and he was upon the place: a rectangle of light suspended in the darkness. It looked unreal, like a stage devoid of props and actors.

  He pressed forward and pulled himself up over the edge of the platform, instantly aware of a coldness about the place which transcended temperature. It was a chilling sense of timelessness that touched his mind rather than his flesh. Looking about, Ralphie saw that the platform was not deep, nor were there any exit stairs. Only a seamless wall of cold tiles trailing off into the shadows beyond the perimeters of light from the solitary bulb.

  He knew that it was into the shadows he must walk, and as he did so, he became more acutely aware of the silence of the place. The mechanical clop of his elevated heel seemed so loud, so obscenely loud. He should have felt fear in this place, but it was replaced by a stronger emotion, a need to know this place for whatever it was. Then there was something touching his face. Out of the shadows it languished and played about his cheek like fog. It became a cold, heavy mist that swirled and churned with a glowing energy of its own, and it became brighter the deeper he probed it. He could sense a barrier ahead of him, but not anything that would stop him, but rather a portal through which he must pass.

  He stepped forward . . .

  . . . to find himself standing upon a narrow, rocky ledge, which wound across the sheer face of a great cavern. Above him, like the vault of a cathedral, the ceiling arched, defined by the phosphorescent glow of mineral veins. To his right a sheer cliff dropped off into utter darkness; to his left was a perfectly vertical wall. Ralphie followed the narrow winding path, each step bringing him closer to an eerie sound. At first it was like a gently rising wind, whispering, then murmuring, finally screaming through the cavern. An uncontrollable, eternal wailing.

  Ralphie recognized the sound—it was the sound of utter loneliness. It was a sound made by something totally alien, and simultaneously all too human. It was a sound that, until now, he had heard only in the depths of his
own mind. Such a primal, basic sound . . . He became entranced by it, moving closer to its source, until he saw the thing.

  The ledge had widened ahead of him, becoming a ridge that sloped gently upward to another sheer cliff face. Affixed to the face of the cliff, upon a jagged outcropping of rock, by great shining chains was the thing. Even from a distance it looked monstrously huge. Its arms and legs gave it a vaguely human form, but its true shape was amorphous, indistinct. There was a shimmering, almost slimy aspect to its body as it writhed and strained against the chains that bound it to the rock.

  Moving closer, Ralphie now saw a bird thing perched upon a piece of the jagged rock, balancing and swaying, and batting the air with its leathery wings. It was skeletal, reptilian, its head hideously out of proportion to its thin body. All curved beak and yellow, moon-pool eyes.

  The creature paid no attention to Ralphie’s approach, continuing with its task in dead earnest—savagely tearing out the chained one’s entrails. With each rooting thrust of the bird’s beak, Ralphie heard the wailing fill the chamber louder than the last. One foul creature feeding upon the other. Ralphie watched the nightmare for a moment and knew it for what it was.

  The thing on the rock must have perceived Ralphie’s recognition, for it turned away from the cause of its agony long enough to look down at Ralphie with fierce white eyes. It regarded him with a coldness, a calmness, which seemed to say: So you have come at last . . . .

  Ralphie looked into its eyes, human and yet inhuman, seeing the eons of suffering, millennia of pain and loneliness. And deep within the eyes he could also see the disillusionment, the brooding coals of hate and retribution waiting to be unleashed.

  There was a sensation of betrayal which radiated from those monstrous eyes, and Ralphie could feel a bond with the tortured figure on the rock. Watching it, Ralphie saw it change. Less amorphous now, a head and face appeared vaguely. The emotions in its eyes seemed to alter.