Dark Cities

by Christopher Golden

  “Fucking empty!” Jon echoed.

  He picked up a case of the empty bottles, turned and hurled it down the steps. The cardboard box dulled the thump and the sound of glass shattering inside, but it was loud enough to make us all flush with guilty amusement.

  The drugs racing through me, I shoved the nearest stack of cases over, toppling them onto the stairs.

  Jon and Leigh looked at me in shock, then started whooping. Jon patted me on the back and yelled something about getting fucked up. Or maybe that was me doing the yelling.

  They led the way out of the stairwell and into the hall. Mollie took my hand again. She cocked her head and even soaring on whatever she’d given me, I could see she was looking at me differently. What I couldn’t tell was whether or not it was good differently or bad differently.

  She kissed me, and from the hunger in it, I had my answer.

  * * *

  The room thumped with the music. The walls breathed with it. The lights were dim and though all of the windows were wide open, the gyrating bodies were sheened with glistening sweat. Side tables were laden with top-shelf booze and clean glasses that seemed to appear without being replenished by anyone I noticed. Coolers full of beer on ice stood in corners. The drugs, though… they were never on display. They manifested in people’s hands as if summoned from the ether. I saw one girl, maybe seventeen, pull a small vial of cocaine from the unruly bun of her hair.

  “This is fucking amazing,” Mollie said, dancing with me. Holding my hands and gazing into my eyes.

  The apartment had seemed like one big room with a bathroom and small bedroom off to one side, but as we burned up the small hours of the night and we kept dancing and drinking, I realized we’d moved into a different room, and that the place must be larger than I’d first imagined. The sweaty little box we’d started in had given way to a much bigger space, and the music kept shifting styles, sometimes improbably as hell. Somebody put on Frank Sinatra, and then something older, a heartbreak ballad from the 1920s or 1930s, followed by a screaming bit of party blues from the sixties. Whoever had been picking the music had to be on even better drugs than we were. Mixing it up like that only ever worked with a group of people as wasted as we all had gotten by then.

  I had no idea of the time. Once in a while I’d glance out the window, expecting to see the edge of dawn creeping into the sky, but the old building had been swallowed by modern New York, so I wasn’t sure if we’d even notice the sun come up.

  Whiskey burned my throat. I blinked, coming to my senses for half a second, wondering how much time I’d lost. How much of that whiskey I’d had to drink. Feminine hands caressed my stomach, fingers stroked the front of my pants, nails scratching, stirring the most familiar of all urges. Blond hair whipped around her face as she danced, but Mollie wasn’t blond.

  Frowning, I stumbled back from her, glancing around in search of Mollie. I spotted Jon and the bartender. Leigh, I reminded myself, though I forgot her name again a moment later. So fucked up by that time.

  The dancing bodies made strange shadows on the wall, undulating darkness. The music had shifted and I stumbled amongst the dancers, shoved a couple aside. The woman wore flowers in her hair and a gypsy skirt. Her partner wore a suit with thin stripes and a wide lapel, a long sloped hat. I turned to stare but the hat had vanished. The lights flickered and I turned to glance at the walls, where gaslight burned inside sconces, little flames casting odd shadows of their own.

  I spotted Mollie with another guy, tall and dapper. Bow tie undone. They had taken a small mirror off the wall and were snorting lines of something off the silver glass. Coke, maybe. I had no way to know.

  “Hey,” I said into her ear as I moved up beside her and took her by the hand.

  Her eyes were glassy, her pupils dilated so large they were nearly all black. She kissed me, pushed her fingers through my hair and pulled me close so she could deepen that kiss. She ground herself against me and I flushed with the best of hungers. Kissed her back, put a hand on her ass and pressed my hard cock into her so she could feel what she had done to me.

  Then she was kissing the other guy. Dapper fucking Dan. His hand slipped down her pants and I saw her shudder with pleasure. She reached for my hand as if she wanted me to stay, but I’d never been good at sharing. I started to back away and she paused Dapper Dan and shot me a disappointed look.

  “I should go,” I mumbled. Blinking. Unsteady on my feet. I shook my head to clear it but was unsuccessful. “Come with me?”

  She seemed to be considering it. Took one step toward me. Then she stopped and swayed, nearly fell over. Dapper Dan caught her.

  “I don’t think I can,” Mollie said, a look of surprise on her face.

  Hammered and high, stung by her, I staggered away. In the haze, I tried to focus on the room around me, searching for an exit. I didn’t recognize the art on the walls and for a few seconds it seemed to me that the music filling the apartment had strings and horns, some baroque composition that these people would never have chosen as their evening’s dance soundtrack. These people, men in black tie and women in elaborate gowns.

  Bile burned up the back of my throat and I bent for a second, leaning against the wall, feeling the texture of the wallpaper under my hand. I blinked, trying to breathe, and looked around. What the fuck had Mollie given me? I’d never had hallucinations before, but now… what else could that have been?

  I weaved amongst the dancers and the drinkers, all of them just as trashed as I was by now. Their eyes looked hollow to me, their smiles false masks. Were they all so shallow, or was I just pissed at myself for being lulled by nostalgia into forgetting how much Jon had changed over the years? This wasn’t the life I wanted, but should I hold it against these others, who had never been my friends?

  I just wanted out. The party around me seemed like it might go on forever, and that was all the revelers wanted. There seemed so many of them now—impossibly many—the room impossibly large, people crushing against me as I tried to find my way out, searching for Jon along the way. Bitter as I was, I needed to tell him I was leaving.

  What room was I in? How had I made my way there?

  Girls dressed like flappers did the Charleston in the center of the crowd. I spotted them for a second and then they were gone, my view obstructed by human flesh. By a strange masquerade of unfettered joy and depravity in equal measure.

  I found myself in another room. Then another. Each seemed new to me. I bumped into a table laden with champagne flutes, spilled several glasses and saw that there was confetti on the floor, as if tonight had been New Year’s Eve and I had somehow missed it, though months had passed since then.

  A dancing couple collided with me and herded me into a narrow corridor, thick with other human flesh. A doorway presented itself, the door hanging half open, and thus I discovered Jon and Leigh by accident in a bathroom complete with brass fittings and clawfoot tub. She snorted a line of cocaine off the sink while he worked her panties down, reaching for his own zipper.

  The temptation to close the door, to just go, dragged at me. Instead I knocked hard, slid into the bathroom, and turned my back so as not to get a glimpse of them. In my peripheral vision I could see their faces in the mirror above the sink.

  “Timmy, what the fuck?” Jon barked. “Give us a minute, okay?”

  “Take all night, man. I just wanted you to know I was leaving.”

  Leigh didn’t care. She didn’t know me. She did another line.

  “You fucking pussy!” Jon cried in dismay. “This is the best party ever! I’m never leaving this goddamn place!”

  I hesitated. Wrecked as I was, unable to focus my vision, I still managed to worry about him. I shook my head to clear my thoughts, wondering if he’d be all right.

  He sneered at me. “What do you want, cab money?”

  I went cold. We’d never talked about the night of that Red Sox game, but apparently he remembered it as well as I had.

  “Fuck yourself,” I spat.r />
  I reeled out of there, stumbled down the corridor and into another room. My vision blurred again and I saw those gaslight sconces flickering on the walls. They couldn’t have been there. The building might be old, but surely such things were not legal now. I went to my knees and someone stepped on my hand. My head pounded as dancers swirled past me. Some of them wore masks, as if I had accidentally stepped into some nineteenth-century masquerade ball.

  Darkness edged in at the corners of my vision and my head lolled forward, dreadfully heavy even as the rest of me seemed to lighten, to drift and float. Someone shoved me and I managed to crawl enough to find a wall. A window. I sucked in the cold air breezing in from outside and then I glanced out at a city that could not have been, a Manhattan without skyscrapers.

  I puked out the window, body rigid as vomit poured out of me. I heaved a second time, and then a third before I could catch my breath. The cold air felt good but did not clear my head. With the back of my hand, I swiped a sleeve across my mouth and then the world turned to shadow again.

  Someone slapped my face, more than once.

  I tried to focus, barely managed, and saw it was Mollie. She hadn’t poured all of the beer and whiskey down my throat and she hadn’t made me take the damn pill from her little plastic baggie, but she had been the one to give it to me.

  I was on the floor again. My hand closed around her wrist and I dragged her down there with me. “What the hell did you give me?”

  I slurred the question, but she understood.

  “It was just Ex!” she said, extricating herself from me. “Just Ecstasy. But there’s something else… something…”

  Mollie took my face in her hands and shook my skull, forced me to meet her terrified gaze. “We have to leave.”

  Upon that we could agree. But her eyes held something other than urgency. They were full of fear.

  “What… what’s happened?”

  Mollie slapped me hard. “Look around, Tim. Jesus, look!”

  She slapped me again and my mind sharpened just a little, the fog clearing. I slid my back up the wall beside the window and blinked, sucking air into my lungs. What I was seeing could not be. I tell myself even now that it had to be the drugs, that there must have been something in that pill, or in the whiskey I’d been drinking at the party. Some of the revelers were as I’d seen them before, wasted shells, club kids or young professionals blind drunk, having the party of their lives. Others were true husks, barely shadows of people. They might have been ghosts, but in that moment I felt sure they had begun just like the rest… like me and Jon and Mollie and Leigh, young and searching for meaning and identity in a city that denied both, desperate to feel something other than the uncertainty of new adulthood. They’d found this party just like we had, and they’d surrendered themselves to it.

  Mollie took my hand. “Come on. I’ve got to find Leigh.”

  I flashed on the bathroom. The lines of coke on the sink. The sneer on Jon’s face. What do you want, cab money? Fuck them.

  “We have to go,” I said, echoing Mollie’s own words.

  She’d taken my hand, but now it was me dragging her. Mollie protested, but not much. Fear became her engine. I kept shaking my head, forcing the fog to clear from my thoughts, keeping my vision from fading. And yet it did. Whatever moment of crisp clarity Mollie had given me, I lost it quickly. The husks had their masks on again, looked just like the rest of the revelers, but I had seen them now. All around us were faces from other eras, clothing from decades past. The music shifted with the décor as we shoved through dancers and drinkers and people smoking all manner of things.

  Fear suffocated me. It felt like a kind of madness, seizing me, building up in me like steam in a kettle. Just when I thought I might scream, Mollie and I pushed our way through the throng and into the room where we had first entered. I recognized the door. Seeing we meant to leave, several of the dancers reached for us, snagging our clothing. One girl kissed me, her mouth tasting of burnt smoke and herbs. We yanked ourselves free, and I felt so grateful that I could no longer see which of the revelers were new arrivals and which were only shadows.

  The door resisted at first, but Mollie put her hand over mine and something about that moment of contact, the warmth of her touch, must have given us both a bit more clarity. The knob turned, the door opened, and we stumbled into the hall. As the door slammed behind us, muffling the thumping hip-hop we’d heard on our arrival, Mollie pulled me into the stairwell and we picked our way carefully past the cases of empty beer bottles we’d knocked over earlier. She’d given up on Leigh, no longer determined to go back for her.

  Until we reached the street.

  The sky had lightened slightly, deep indigo to the west but to the east I could see the soft glow of impending dawn. I glanced around, grateful that the street seemed the same as the one we’d left behind. The modern buildings dwarfing the ugly brownstone.

  “We have to go back in,” Mollie said, standing beside me. She’d let go of my hand at some point and I hadn’t noticed.

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Tim, we have to. I can’t leave Leigh in there. And what about Jon?”

  What do you want, cab money?

  I shook my head and staggered across the street. Whatever clarity I’d achieved had started to wear off and now the alcohol and drugs crashed back into my system like adrenaline had built a dam and now it had let go.

  Some time later—I don’t know how long, but there were people out jogging and walking their dogs and the yellow edge of the sunrise had just touched the eastern edge of the city— Mollie shook me awake. I’d passed out in a shoe store doorway across from the brownstone.

  There were tears on her face.

  “She’s gone,” Mollie said. “I went up and I knew it the second I got to the top of the stairs. The cases were gone, the ones you guys smashed. Just gone. No broken glass, no boxes, nothing. And the music had stopped.”

  “That’s…” I started to say impossible, but bit down on the word.

  Mollie had knocked on the door, hammered on it, until she heard someone swearing on the other side. She’d pleaded for it to be opened and when at last her pleas were answered, she found herself confronted by an old man holding his stained robe closed with one hand while he cussed her out and threatened to call the police.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “It can’t… where have they gone, Tim?” Mollie asked, wiping at her tears, afraid for her friend.

  I thought about all of those different rooms, the view from the window, the shifting music and clothing I had seen.

  “The party’s moved on. Go home, Mollie.”

  “But Leigh and Jon…”

  “They got what they wanted. They moved on, too. So should you.”

  Mollie stared at me, frowning at first in shock and then in revulsion. She took a step back, moved off the curb and then froze at the blaring horn of a taxi. She waited while it slid by, the cabbie stabbing his middle finger out his window as he passed. Then she hurried off.

  I watched her until she reached the end of the block, where she turned a corner, shoulders hunched, and disappeared. I never saw Mollie again, but the memory of her face is vivid in my mind. Her eyes, especially. The disappointment that shaded them in that last instant, when she glanced at me while the taxi drove past. I had not turned out to be the person she thought I was.

  As for Jon, I took my own advice. I let him go. The city had claimed him. Changed him. So fuck that guy, y’know?

  But.

  I’d let him go.

  Which meant it had claimed me, too.

  Maybe it gets us all, in the end.

  THE STILLNESS

  by

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  At first Donald thought only the man was familiar—just another of the street performers who would keep up a pose until somebody dropped them a coin. Last week he’d played a businessman arrested in the act of dashing somewhere with a briefcase as dead white as hi
mself, and now he was portraying a dignitary painted just as pale. A robe or at any rate a sheet was draped over his shoulders, and he held a book of which not only the pages were white in front of his stern set face. Even his eyes looked excessively colourless. Donald was watching him between two books in the shop window when Mildred jangled hangers on a rack of dresses. “What’s so interesting out there?”

  “I was trying to think what that fellow is supposed to be.”

  “A statue, I imagine,” Mildred said like the teacher Donald was often reminded she’d been, and tramped across the bare boards to plant her hands on her wide hips. She might almost have been squeezing out the perfume that her capacious russet one-piece costume exuded. “The one they moved,” she said.

  Now Donald knew what he’d been struggling to recognise. The street had featured an actual statue until the town centre was redeveloped. He went to the bookshelves and found an outsize dog-eared paperback of local photographs. “Here he is,” he said, squinting at the inscription on the plinth, which showed that the subject had died almost a century ago. “Samuel Huntley, educator and mayor.”

  Mildred kept her hands on her hips to mime patience as he took the paperback to the window. While the photograph was frontal, the man in the street had his left side to the shop, but Donald thought the pose was exactly the same. He was trying to identify some detail that seemed odd when Mildred said “Are those books in order? That’s how books ought to be.”

  He supposed his wife might have told him not to let Mildred talk to him like that, if he’d had a wife to tell about his day. He’d had his fair share of liaisons, but by now he was too fond of his own ways to become involved with anyone else, and his relationship with Mildred quite amused him. As an accountant he’d observed how some of his colleagues would create work in order to seem busy, but he’d never met another one like Mildred. He assumed she meant to convince herself she was still active, though he suspected she wouldn’t own up to the trick. He took his time over restoring order to the bookshelves while he watched to see the human statue perform its routine, but while people loitered until Donald felt like urging them to throw a coin, nobody paid.