Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  Though it was early afternoon, the cellar was almost pitch-dark. Groping and fumbling his way up the stairway, the only light he had by which to orient himself was from the narrow little rectangular windows set into the foundation at ground level. The accumulated mud and grit of years had spattered the panes with a brown scurf and rendered them nearly opaque. All that penetrated them now was a pale gray diffusion of light.

  Warren groped and fumbled across the cluttered dirt floor, winding his way through a precarious tangle of crates and barrels. Furiously, he swiped the filaments of broken cobwebs from his hair and pushed forward to the stone stairs leading up into the house.

  At the top of the stairs he pushed the door open a crack and peered out, uncertain what he might encounter there. Since it was barely two P.M., he expected Suki to be home, puttering in her kitchen or, possibly, even still asleep upstairs. The house, however, was strangely still. The solitary mewling of a cat somewhere in the upper reaches only served to emphasize the silence.

  Then there was the smell. When he poked his head through the door, it struck him with almost palpable force. Like walking into a wall. There were times when he imagined that the smell was inside him, in his head, so sharp and pervasive that it permeated his skin and clothing. No amount of soap or scrubbing could cleanse him of it. It was a smell he had committed to memory. Thousands of miles away from it, he could summon it up and replicate it in his head, dismantle it into its component parts: mildew and rot, old threadbare fabric, clogged drains and broken plumbing, food decomposing on unwashed dishes, cat urine, and the sweetish fetor of uncollected trash. A vast medley of putrescence and mold.

  She was not in the kitchen when he walked in there. Nor was she upstairs in her bedroom still asleep. She was nowhere in evidence, and, when he called out to her several times, the sound of his voice, tremulous and childlike, echoed back to him through the dusty vacancies. Something about it made him strangely uneasy. It was not her style to be out in the daytime, in broad daylight. She was a nocturnal creature. She shunned the sun, only feeling comfortable beneath streetlights and the moon.

  It irritated him that she was not there to greet him after his long absence, particularly since his trip home had scarcely been pleasant. It had been fraught with peril and risk and there’d been a few close calls. Worst of all was the loss of his beloved Mother, and then he’d had to come home on a deliberately circuitous route that had taken him on dirty uncomfortable buses as far west as Schenectady and as far south as Atlantic City. All to evade what he felt certain was a police tail just behind him.

  In addition to which, he had a deep, unsightly scratch on his face that had begun to fester beneath the Band-Aids he’d hastily applied after his brief scuffle with the hapless young man who’d been imprudent enough to offer him a ride. Now to return home after twelve weeks only to find there was no one to greet him was just about the last straw.

  Warren started to prowl through the house, all the while growing increasingly infuriated with Suki’s absence. What right had she to be out at this time? Immediately, he suspected treachery. Perhaps she’d spoken to the police, had told them all she knew, then went off with them to some undisclosed “safe house” where she’d reside in perfect safety until they’d have him in custody. By the time he’d climbed up to the little attic room beneath the cupola, he was seething.

  Eyes blazing, he banged into the room, half expecting to find her there. When he didn’t, it pleased him in that it served to heighten his sense of betrayal. He could imagine the most elaborate forms of treachery going on behind his back just then.

  When he’d entered, he came fast through the door, as if intending to surprise a thief. But there was nothing there — nothing but the old familiar symmetry of light, shape, and shadow.

  Sun streamed through the cupola glass overhead and the room was beastly hot. He stood there for a time, fists clenched, breathing hard and feeling a bit at a loss. The moment, with its anger and disappointment, cried out for some sort of action. What form exactly, he didn’t know.

  When at last he could accept the fact that he was alone, he started to move quickly about the room. First in short, fierce thrusts, snarling half-turns, as if still challenging the disagreeable state of things presented him there at that moment. His eyes ranged avidly over the place. Something about the appearance of things, something vague and intangible, felt altered. It was not alteration in some minor way, either, but in some large, irrevocable way that he found threatening.

  The more he spun and thrust and jerked about, like a child blindfolded in a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, the more he was gripped with the growing conviction that something significant had occurred in his absence. And yet, for all of its significance, whatever it was, it remained to him stubbornly elusive.

  He recalled having fled the room that day several months ago. Suki had awakened him, informed him there were police on the street out in front of the house. He had gone in haste, he recalled. The room that he left was in a state of great disorder. The room as it appeared now was a model of decorum. The bed had been made. The various odds and ends of his clothing — socks and underwear, discarded sneakers — generally strewn about, were nowhere to be seen. Left in their place was an order he was not accustomed to. More than anything, it was this that filled him with a growing sense of estrangement.

  In the next moment his eye glimpsed a corner of the closet. It was the single closet in the room and the door of it stood slightly ajar. The quick glimpse he had of the interior was just a narrow wedge of it, the part just visible where the door hung open. Gazing at it, he knew at once there was something awry.

  He stood there baffled by the peculiar unfamiliarity of the image, his head tilted sideways as if to see it from another perspective. It was then that it occurred to him that the closet was empty.

  Something inside him seemed to snap. In the next moment, he lunged at the door, yanking it open. He’d not been mistaken. The closet, nearly full to capacity when he’d left, now stood cold and bare. All of his clothing was gone. The plain pine bar from which shirts and trousers had hung was stripped, the wire hangers on it clanging lightly against each other.

  A rickety wicker chair stood within arm’s length. Warren grabbed it, dragging it across the uncarpeted floor and banging it down beneath the ceiling light fixture. Scrambling up onto it, his hands tore at the frosted globe of the fixture as he struggled to unscrew it from its cheap brass housing.

  Then, suddenly, the globe was off in his hands, dust rising slowly from inside it. He turned it upside down and shook it. From within it, the desiccated husks of moths and flies drifted languidly down onto the floor beneath the chair. Other than that, the globe was empty. But there was no need for him to dismantle the fixture to know that. He’d known it the moment he’d scrambled up on the chair, or, possibly, before that when he’d had his first glimpse of the empty closet. He knew what he’d sought there was gone. And he knew who took it. In point of fact, he’d been evicted and all of his belongings confiscated.

  A rosy flush flamed across his throat and cheeks. There was a sense of uncomfortable congestion in his chest, as if he had to cough badly. When he tried to cough, it was more like a scream that emerged, a kind of strangled yawp that finally broke from his mouth.

  When he leaped from the chair, he gave the peculiar impression of being in flight. The recoil of the leap sent the chair hurtling backward, crashing against the wall. Clattering down the stairs, muttering obscenities, he could still hear it echoing through the empty house.

  Suki Klink toddled up the walk to her house on Bridge Street. She hummed an old Irish jig as she went. The wind blustering at her back propelled her along, billowing her multifold skirts about her. The night’s pickings had been exceedingly good. The rusty old shopping cart with its wobbly wheels that she pushed before her was filled to overflowing with the assorted treasures gleaned from her rummagings. Aside from the usual complement of old magazines and plastic deposit bottles, she’d als
o managed to salvage from dozens of trashcans about the terminal several pairs of discarded shoes; a macramé holder for hanging plants; a beaded cushion, punctured and nearly eviscerated of its soiled stuffings; a vase of plastic poppies; a tire iron; and a red rubber enema bag. In the days ahead, she would manage in her canny way to convert it all to cash.

  Through the bitter, blustery early morning, she could hear the wind soughing out of the west over the choppy waters of the Verrazano inlet. She watched it lean heavily on the old azaleas and frozen rhododendrons around the porch, cuffing them harshly and rattling their dry branches against the house.

  On the little entryway beneath the copper overhang, she paused to fish the keys out of her rope bag, still humming in tune with some lively air she heard through the earphones of her Walkman. Plucking the key out between two bony fingers, she squinted an eye, then stooped to find the keyhole. Going through her head just then was an enticing vision of the pot of coffee she intended to put up the moment she got in.

  In her bag, along with the assorted siftings and debris of the night’s forage, were a couple of rolls and some crusts of bread she’d scavenged from Zaro’s inside the terminal. She knew a woman there, an old black lady, who always saved her some leftovers.

  Just as the door squealed open on its hinges, a blast of wind at her back shoved her forward into the dark and a pair of hands closed round her throat. She felt herself being dragged headlong into the house, the tips of her shoes scuffing over the bare floors, the wires from her Walkman tangled around her neck and head. The wheels of the shopping cart squealed madly as it broke from her grip and caromed across the floor, banging into something just ahead and overturning its contents.

  As she struggled for air, her arms flailed wildly against the black, heaving shape that dragged and kicked her and sprawled all over her as she tried to fight back. The darkness had gotten darker. Nearly strangled by the viselike grip round her throat, the inside of her head felt inflated, as though engorged with trapped blood and about to explode.

  Just as she thought she would lose consciousness, a blow to the pit of her stomach emptied her lungs. A bolus of half-digested food shot into her mouth and geysered out between her lips, spreading over her chin and clothes as she crumpled into a heap on the floor.

  A shaft of light suddenly flooded the room.

  “Bitch!” Warren stood above her, straddling her, kicking her arms and legs. “Bitch, Bitch!”

  She tried to protect her head from the hard tip of his boot. “Lay off! Lay off!” she screamed, flailing her arms feebly in the air before her.

  He stooped down and wound the wire of the Walkman tight around her throat. “Bitch. I oughta squash you.”

  “Lay off. I can’t breathe.”

  “Where the hell is it? What the hell did you do with it?”

  “With what?” A bubble of saliva swelled at her lip.

  “Don’t give me that shit. You know what.” With one hand he lifted her head by the neck and kept banging it up and down on the floor. “Come on! Give! You’re lucky I don’t cut your fucking head off.”

  She tried to answer but he’d put his foot down on her windpipe and in that fashion had pinned her squirming to the floor. “Where’s what?” she gasped.

  “My stash. My fucking goods upstairs. You know what I mean.” He clenched his fist and thrust it in her face. “If you sold that stuff …”

  By then her face had purpled and she was gagging.

  When she could no longer talk, she gestured with her hands. The message got through and he lifted his boot, holding it an inch or so above her throat.

  “Downstairs,” she gasped, wiping vomit from her lips with the back of her hand. “The tunnel.”

  “Where in the tunnel?”

  “The barrel. The barrel.”

  “Which barrel, for Chrissake?”

  “The small one.”

  He gripped her by the throat again and shook her hard. “It better be there.” His eyes flashed at her, questions fluttering in and out of them. “What the hell you think you’re doing, taking my stuff? Goddamn you — don’t you ever …” The fist rose again, threatening to come down.

  She rolled frantically away from him across the floor. He followed quickly, still kicking her as she went.

  “Had to hide it.” Her eyes, watching his boot tips, rolled in her head. “Had to hide it. Police all over the place. Had to hide it. Hide your clothes.”

  “Police were up there?” His fist went limp in the air. “In my room?”

  “Searched the place,” Suki panted. She watched fear creep back into his eyes and seized the offensive. “Had to hide all your stuff. Lucky I was here. If they’d found it …”

  She could see fright and suspicion in his eyes and it pleased her. She wiped her befouled chin with the back of her sleeve. “Crazy fool. You nearly killed me.”

  For a moment he appeared contrite and she thought she had him back under her thumb. But in the next moment, he was swaggering again, brandishing the fist beneath her nose. “From now on, there’ll be some changes here.”

  “Changes?”

  “I’m in charge now. I run things in this house.”

  “Sure.” Suki’s eyes narrowed. “Sure, sonny. Sure.”

  “I don’t care about no fucking police. Don’t you ever touch my stuff again. I don’t even want you in that room again. You stay outta that room now. Hear? Stinking old bitch.”

  He turned and slouched off toward the basement.

  After he’d left, she lay there for a time on the floor, recovering her breath. Her mind was whirling. She could hear him moving through the cellar below her, kicking crates and boxes aside. The noise echoed hollowly in the space beneath the floor. Though she was not cold, she started to shake. Shortly, the shaking grew violent and uncontrollable until she was virtually convulsed with it. When at last she tried to rise from the floor, her legs buckled like wax beneath her.

  It was several hours later on upper Fifth Avenue. In the cold winter light of dying afternoon, the sun still hung fiery in the west, while the pale white disc of the moon was already visible in the east. The frozen air had the quality of clarity so typical of winter light.

  Across the way from 860 Fifth, Ferris Koops stood, hunched up in his trenchcoat and shivering, but scarcely aware that he was cold. The sunlight slanting sharply west had set the facade of the building ablaze with reflected light. The young man’s eyes were riveted to a line of windows on the fourteenth floor. He watched them, transfixed with an odd, rather vacant, smile. At that moment in the corner window of 860 he imagined he saw the face of a small boy peering out toward the park.

  It brought him back nearly sixteen years and filled him with some vague, half-forgotten sorrow. He was there himself in the window now, gazing out at the encroaching twilight.

  Ferris had not been to 860 for weeks. The need, the strong craving had not been upon him until sometime late that afternoon, when he felt suddenly impelled to go back there. This need came to him in the form of a terrible certainty that whatever he’d had there, whatever had been precious to him for so long, had all been suddenly withdrawn. The idea of such a loss filled him with panic.

  When at last he reached there, late in the afternoon, running, half-stumbling most of the way, anticipating the worst, what a relief to find that everything was all still there, just as he’d left it weeks before. Nothing had changed — the building, its proud facade, the line of windows on the fourteenth floor, and especially the little corner window. It was all still there.

  He felt better at once. He almost laughed aloud. He felt his old self again. But hadn’t things always been that way? Whenever he’d had this feeling before, this sensation of impending loss, estrangement, dissociation from himself, there would be the panic until he could struggle and battle his way back to himself. One moment he was Ferris, and the next he was not anyone. He was a void. He was air drifting on a current, whatever grip he’d had on reality grown even more tenuous.

 
; Then, when he’d return there and stand outside, across the way from 860, it would all come back to him again with that reassuring rush of warmth. He’d gaze up at the corner window and see the face, his own haunted elfin face peering down at him, and everything would be all right.

  And so it was that afternoon. Nothing had changed. Everything was still the same. Everything in its own cozy, familiar groove. Everything, that is, except one small detail. Ferris had noticed it at once. The old doorman (he didn’t know his name, but they’d always seemed to acknowledge each other’s presence) was gone. Ferris didn’t know the man but felt some strange, unaccountable affinity with him. There’d been something jolly about the corpulent figure brightly clad, swelling importantly in green and scarlet at the front doors. For Ferris, it brought back sad, sweet memories of Christmases past. He had no way of knowing that the old doorman had recently retired. Now with the fellow gone, Ferris experienced a keen sense of personal loss.

  Ferris was upset. But long before he’d come there that day, he’d been upset. He’d read in the newspapers that the police had reason to believe that the man, the one they called the Shadow Dancer, was back again in New York.

  Ferris had read about this early in the day, with a sinking sense of impending doom. Ever since this man had made his way to Ferris’s front door, Ferris had felt a deepening sense of communion with him. For each individual the Dancer had slain, Ferris felt guilt and shame, as if in some way he might have been able to prevent it. As vile and repugnant as the man and all of his activities were to Ferris, still he couldn’t deny the inescapable attraction this monster held for him.

  In his mind, Ferris was convinced that he was the only person who knew the true identity of the Dancer. Certainly he’d been the only one canny enough to have tracked the fellow to his lair. Not only that, but hadn’t he stood guard over the place at the lower tip of Manhattan in an attempt to prevent further senseless slaying? And what was the reward for all of his good work? The police had picked him up and attempted to charge him as a suspect in these ghastly murders. He, Ferris, who would never knowingly hurt a fly. What a god-awful mess he’d made of things.