Web of the City

by Harlan Ellison

  What a stinking mess he had made of things. His sister was dead, all because he had gotten her into the Cougie Cats, and his mother was sick. He had alienated everyone in the neighborhood. His record at school was ruined and Carl Pancoast would be perfectly justified in having nothing further to do with him. He had beaten up strangers, that Mirsky kid, and people he knew. And where was he? Nowhere.

  “G-give—up—bas…bastard…?” Boy-O croaked from the floor. His face was pale, still, and his eyes, despite their junkie weirdness, were filled with pain. Rusty dug his hands into the fabric of his jeans, pulling at the flesh of his thighs. Damn it, damn it, damn it! He had to make Boy-O talk.

  He rose, to start again, and the terror-filled eyes of the junkie filled his world. They filled his world and they gave him an idea, a new idea, a payoff idea that had to mean success. Because if it didn’t, he was finished.

  He bent down, slapped away the feebly moving arm of Boy-O, offered in resistance, and began searching the junkie. After he had found three dozen little white packets of dust in pockets, and another half dozen in hidden flaps in the clothing, he realized that he would have to strip the junkie down.

  It took him longer than he thought it would, for the pusher dredged up a supply of strength from somewhere, and caused him trouble in removing the filthy rags that were pants and shirt and jacket. But finally, Rusty had the junkie lying naked to the flesh on the basement floor. He took the dope and the clothes and put them high up on a pile of furniture in the farthest corner of the basement.

  Boy-O watched it all with mounting fear. Every few seconds his eyes strayed to the dead-silent furnace. It was summer, and no one would come down here to the basement, but if Rusty tried to shove him in there—

  “Wh-what’re ya g-gonna… do…?”

  Rusty sat down again, back to the coal bin and crossed his arms. He shook his head. “Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. I’m gonna sit and wait.”

  Boy-O was bewildered. What was Rusty talking about? He was confused and in pain and bewildered, but he knew one thing: he would never talk. Because if he talked, just as sure as the street was hell, he would lose his junk, and that would be the end of him.

  He had to have his junk to live.

  And Rusty knew that, too. Unfortunately.

  Cold had come crawling. It was bitter. Not only the cold of the moist basement floor, but the cold from within. Boy-O was shivering, lying huddled like a foetus, knees drawn up and hands thrust into armpits for what little warmth there might be. His face, beneath the grime, was strained and peaked, and his lips quivered. Nerves in his upper arms and temples jerked spasti-cally, giving him a constantly moving, restless appearance. He moaned softly from time to time and every few minutes a shudder would run down his body.

  He was not cold from the air. He was junkie cold. He was dream-dust miserable. He was cut off from the dirt that counted and Rusty watched as he got worse. Much worse. The first hour it hadn’t been so bad, till Boy-O had realized what Rusty was trying to do. Then he had started to crave it more than he would have ordinarily. He had hungered deeper than ever. It had been a long time since that spoon had been out, that dust had been soaked down, that needle had hit the big vein on the inside of his arm. He wanted!

  “Gimme! Gimme!” Boy-O half-rose up from the floor, his mouth stretched flat on his face, in a weird grimace. His scream rattled across the hollow basement and Rusty got up himself from the floor as Boy-O tried to rise, tried to fall to the pile of furniture where the dope was secreted. He grasped the junkie by his forearm and thrust him back. Boy-O’s flesh was clammy with sweat, his limbs quivered. He was a ghost human, warped out of shape and sanity. Rusty quivered as much, inside. But he let the feelings within him wither. Boy-O would sweat away the monkey till he squawked and gave out the poop Rusty needed.

  The junkie fell back, lay in a sweating heap, his head buried in his thin arms. His black hair was tumbled out of its crude duck’s-tail, and lay in a triangular shape over him. His body shook, his sobs climbed in intensity. “Oh god, god, gimme, don’t be a b-bastard, gimme some, gimme a shot, g-gimme a pop. Please, I swear to god I don’t kn-know nothin’, please ya gotta, ya g-gotta help me, HELP ME—” his voice rose out again, ending in a high, womanlike screech. He clawed at his face, dragged bloody furrows down his cheeks. He was going insane from lack of the stuff.

  But he was not ready to talk. Rusty waited, his mind closed to the screams, his eyes shut to the hideous sight that had been Boy-O, writhing in the dirt.

  It took only four hours.

  Rusty had to club the junkie twice, both times when Boy-O had struggled erect and tried to grab a packet from the furniture pile. The second time he almost made it, grasping a broken chair in his hands and swinging it full at Rusty. The chair connected with Rusty’s head and for a long minute everything fuzzed out gray at the edges of his sight. He stumbled in and clinched with the suddenly strong junkie and by sheer weight forced him back.

  The chair came up again and grazed off Rusty’s shoulder, sending a bright lancet of pain down through his left side. The pain in his head was growing. He could see infinitely brilliant pinwheels of fire cascading down and down and then suddenly it ebbed away, and he brought up a knee straight to the junkie’s groin.

  Boy-O went down, slobbering, crying, begging for a mainline pop. Rusty sank back, drawing grateful lungfuls of air, fighting away the nausea the pain brought him. He shoved all furniture up out of reach then, and waited.

  It took only four hours.

  Finally, Boy-O dragged himself across the floor and a crooked finger touched Rusty’s shoe. “Help me.” His voice was weak, a catch in the throat, a mere whisper, a pleading.

  Then, “Okay. Okay, I’ll t-tell ya. I’ll let ya know, just gimme a shot, man, please, just one…” he sagged off into a gasp and his teeth chattered. His body shook with the effort to stay on one elbow.

  “First talk. Then we’ll see,” Rusty said. He despised himself. Boy-O was a wreck.

  “M-Morlan’s his name. Emil Morlan. He lives uptown. I get it through a feeder—guy supplies me an’ a pusher in Cherokee country. I n-never met this Morlan, but I f-followed the feeder once.” His mouth was a black line and the sweat was big as grapes on his upper lip. The dirt ran streakily on his face. It mixed with the blood and smelled.

  “Where’s he live? What’s the address?”

  “You’re killin’ me, please a shot! A shot, for Christ’s sake, I’m beggin’, beggin’ ya!”

  “The address. Now. Quick!”

  “Y-yeah, yeah. He lives up on Central Park West.” The junkie gave a fashionable address. “Fifteenth floor.”

  Rusty moved closer. “Now you tell me, man, all this runnin’ around I been doin’, and everybody no-talk, and them threats I got to shut up—all that came from you. Right?”

  Boy-O did not, could not, possibly would not answer.

  Rusty waited. The shakes claimed Boy-O once more.

  Trembling, he answered, finally, “Yes, god it’s s-s-so bad, so bad, help me! Gimme a pop, p-please.”

  Rusty plowed forward inexorably, “You were behind it.”

  “Yes, yes, I said yes, what ya want from me?”

  “Why? Tell me why—”

  Boy-O’s eyes rolled up and his filth-caked fingernails bit into his palms. He bit his tongue, for the snakes had come… in a moment the screams, if he didn’t get a pop.

  “Answer me,” Rusty said.

  Boy-O sucked air and said, “That night the Cherokees were high on tea, I’d b-brought ’em a big bundle and they got high an’ went to crash the dance. We was afraid after it was over that you was gonna tell the cops they was on pot, and throw me in the can, an’ Mr. Morlan, too. So they told me to get some p-people to keep you away. We din’t know, you know, we was a-afraid you was gonna go ta the cops, cause you was sad or somethin’.”

  It was just as Rusty had supposed. Rusty repeated the address on Central Park West and Boy-O nodded. “Fifteenth floor?” Again,
Boy-O agreed, then his eyes closed.

  Rusty threw the pusher his clothes and the packets. He watched as Boy-O dug in a pocket for his spoon, cigarette lighter, needle. He watched for a while, and as Boy-O sank back with tight lips, a god-living expression of peace passing over his planeless face, he said softly, “If you’re lying to me, I’ll kill you, junkie. S’help me god, you’ll die.”

  Then he took a length of rope from around a pile of newspapers, and bound the junkie to the furnace pipe that ran across the floor. He shoved a portion of a furniture-covering rag into the junkie’s mouth, and left him there. Along with the switchblade. Buried in the arm of an old chair—

  —broken at the shank.

  Forever.

  A gelatinous sky, quivering with indignation at having been left to shimmer above the city. Dark as a muddy river, but moving, with storm clouds that would burst before morning, with stars that disdainfully denied all knowledge of Earth or city or the boy huddled in the bushes watching the glass and stone front of an apartment building. A city almost on the verge of sleep, with the smell of gasoline fumes in the nostrils of its inhabitants, with the clamor of late-evening beer hall denizens, with the transient swoosh of cars and buses tooling the streets to a hundred thousand destinations.

  Rest and peace, of a sort, to all the inhabitants of the city, but not to Rusty Santoro. He crouched watching, waiting for a break, a nameless something to happen that would allow him to bolt across the street and gain access to the building. In his path lay a bush, a street, a door and a toady doorman, pledged with wages, steeped in snobbery, dedicated to keeping “the riff-raff’ away from the door.

  Over the door, on a plate glass as clear as the light of the stars, in black script, the words SAXONY HOUSE sprawled contentedly. It was money, this place. And on the fifteenth floor, where no light showed, lived a man named Emil Morlan, a man who made his living not at stocks, or insurance, or services of a general nature, but by the dissemination of death.

  Rusty Santoro waited, a leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned fury, waiting for that goddamned break so he could go up and talk to Mr. Morlan.

  Oh, he wanted to talk so badly. He wanted to talk about the city Morlan did not know, about the gutters and the fat women and beer-bloated husbands, and kids in the streets, and a girl who had died in a nasty way. He wanted to talk, and he prayed to god he would not have to use his fists, because all that was through, please dear Lord, let it be through at last. But he knew it would come to that. It had to because if it wasn’t Morlan, then it was another link along the way, and when he needed the way to find the link, the only help he had lay at the ends of his arms.

  He studied the front of the building, the way the architect had fused the beauty of granite with the flamboyant extremes of glass to make a wonderful façade. He studied it and thought of the future he had left behind, trailed into the slush of the gutter. Was it only a few weeks ago he had been so eager to learn the potentialities of a slide rule and protractor? Too late now. All gone like the fog of a Manhattan morning. All gone, but the man in the camel’s hair coat was still alive.

  This building. A camel’s hair coat fitted this place just right. Was this the end of the trail? Seemed like.

  A fat woman with a fur coat thrown over a pale blue silk nightgown, her feet thrust into mules, came clattering out of the elevator inside the building, in Rusty’s sight, and the doorman opened the glass door for her.

  Rusty could not hear what they said to one another, but the woman reached into a pocket of the coat, brought out a bill and handed it to the doorman. She pointed off in the direction of lights far down at the corner, and Rusty saw a drugstore’s sign glowing. The doorman nodded, touched the brim of his cap reverently and strode off in the drugstore’s direction. The fat woman stared after him for a moment, then went back inside. The elevator door was just closing on her as Rusty got to his feet—ignoring the cramp in his legs—and strode quickly across to the building.

  He was inside in a moment and looking around the lobby for a stairway. The door was a shiny metal one, and before it had sighed pneumatically closed, he had three-stepped to the third floor. He paused there to catch his breath.

  The climb to the fifteenth seemed much longer than he had imagined it would be. But once there, a great calm came stealing in through his nostrils and he sank down on the top step. He lay back, feeling the cold of the stone landing against his neck and hands.

  He had reached the top. He was sure of that. This was the place where he would finish the tragedy that had begun with Dolores in the alley behind Tom-Tom’s shop. He felt certain, deep inside him, that when he left this building, it would be between cops, his hands manacled, his life ended. Because—clear as hell, no doubt at all, sure as god made little green apples—he was going to beat the man in the camel’s hair coat to death. Now, if Emil Morlan wore such a coat, that was it. A stupid way to figure it, he knew. A stupid way to arrive at conclusions, and no damned motive for this Morlan to kill his sister (hell, with his money any broad in the city was available, what did he want with Dolores?), but the search had been a long one, and the word was that she had been killed by a man in a camel’s hair coat, and the track had led here, so that was the way it would be.

  Why?

  It all seemed so stupid, suddenly. He had only one man’s word about it. The Beast. He had tracked a path of dope-peddling from Mirsky to his father to Boy-O and now to Morlan. But what did one have to do with the other? Anything? Sure, it had to, but why? There was no coherency here at all.

  Thoughts swirled darkly and his mind tumbled them back and forth as he tried to discover some rationale. But it always ended up with Morlan and the need to end it all.

  The elevator sighed open and he heard heavy footsteps beyond the metal door to the fifteenth floor. He pushed himself up and took a long step to the door. It opened a crack at his pull, and he saw the tastefully decorated hall. He saw the single door to the apartment that covered the fifteenth floor, and he saw the man who applied the key to the ornate lock.

  The man wore what Rusty had come to hope he would not wear.

  In the summer, a man would be crazy to wear a camel’s hair coat.

  ELEVEN:

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  rusty santoro

  morlan

  Rusty caught him low in the small of the back, just as the door swung inward. He hit him with his bad shoulder—the one Boy-O had injured with the chair—and the pain washed Rusty anew. But the force of his drive from the back stairway sent the man spinning forward, to crash into the wall of the apartment’s hall. Rusty stumbled forward after him, grasping the door by the huge center-set brass doorknob and thrust it closed. It was pitch dark and Rusty fumbled for a switch, found it, clicked it on.

  The man had fallen over and was just starting to rise, supporting himself on the wall, as Rusty clipped him again. The man caught it behind the ear and lost his balance. His short, sharp exclamation of agony was cut off as his face hit the polished tile of the hallway floor. He rolled a few inches and lay on his stomach, the camel’s hair coat bunched around him. He struggled on palms to rise. He could not make it and slumped down, breathing heavily. One hand went to his head, feeling the spot where Rusty had hit him.

  Rusty used his foot to roll the man over.

  He had a thin, pale face, with deep hollows under the eyes. His hair was thinning and brushed straight back from his high forehead. A birthmark purpled his cheek almost at the left corner of his lips. His eyes were green and smoked with pain. Rusty had seen the expression in those eyes in other eyes, too often lately, for it to escape him. He bent down and brought the man to his feet with difficulty. The man struggled in Rusty’s grip, but Rusty was as tall as the other, and held him fiercely.

  “You don’t give me no trouble, Mr. Morlan, an’ we’ll be okay.” He hauled him across the hall, into the darkness of the living room. As Rusty struggled across the room, he knocked against a floor lamp and quickly switched it on with one hand, regai
ning his hold before the gray-haired man could break away. All the way across the room he maintained a precarious grip on his companion.

  The strength was flowing back into the man’s body, and suddenly he shoved Rusty from him, at the same moment hurling himself sidewise.

  Rusty tried to grab him, but the gray-haired man eluded the boy’s attack, and ran into a bedroom off the living room. He slammed the door and Rusty heard it lock.

  Suddenly Rusty realized how scared he was and what he was doing. If this man—and it was certain this was Morlan—called the police, they would arrest Rusty for housebreaking and assault. He went to the door of the bedroom and put his ear against it. He could hear vague sounds of movement from within.

  There was no keyhole in the door.

  He didn’t know if he could do it, but he had to try breaking in that door, before Morlan could use the phone. He stepped back and took a run at the door. He hit it with his good shoulder, and even so felt the pain down his side. The door held and he was thrown back violently.

  He tried it again.

  He hit it from closer up, harder, and this time he felt pressure ease as the door strained on its hinges.

  Again, and this time he heard the faint crackle of wood preparing to splinter as the center panel of the door began to buckle. Still nothing from the man within.

  He smashed against the door for the fourth time and it crashed inward before him, slamming against the inner wall. The brittle metal of the lock itself had snapped. Pieces of metal hit the floor with soft clatters, and Rusty was shot through into the center of the bedroom.

  He had been wrong. The man within was not calling the police. The phone stood unattended on the nightstand. The gray-haired man was standing half-turned toward Rusty, trying to extricate something from a messy tangle of papers and stray objects in a wall safe.