The Shaft (29 page)

    Cry for help, indeed. Before him, for whatever reason, was an embodiment of everything he thought screwed up in this not-so-brave new world: A knife-waving punk in leathers with a sneer and an attitude. Kenilworth 's grubworm populace condensed into one hideous, wet red amalgam, come to drive him out at last.

    He heard a clogged noise like gargled phlegm. He finally got his eyes open.

    The son of a bitch was laughing at him. Without a mouth, unsleeving its left leg from the spurting fissure in the wall, readying its pathetic little wop toadsticker for its debut taste. Laughing at him.

    Edgar crabbed backward. The interloper lunged for the front door, to block. That was that Edgar had counted on. He rolled fast to one knee, came up running, and in three deft steps made it to the bathroom.

    By the time the thing had slid over to bar escape from the tiny closeted passage, Edgar had unfolded his straight razor.

    He felt his voice betrayed him. The only sounds in his room were his own labored respiration and the shuffling of his slippered feet as he feinted and bobbed. His attacker mirrored, parry, defense, making slick wet noises. To Edgar it was wartime once again, and he intended to be just as unrelenting as he had been in 1942. This would not be the first time he'd used cold steel to speed an enemy to Hell. He had wrapped his shield hand in a towel.

    Back at the wall a skinny black cat squeezed through the bottom of the gap, seeming startled that its transit had gotten it bloodied. It crouched behind the steam coil, in the space that had not been there before, and began to meticulously lick itself clean. Every so often its golden eyes would flicker up to keep track of the fight going on near the bathroom.

    Edgar saw at once that his opponent was blind. The bathroom light jabbed into the vacant concavities of two empty sockets, crusted but eyeless. It was tracking him some other way.

    He put up his towelled forearm. He'd learned the move decades ago and instinct had not deserted him. If the enemy strikes and sinks his knife into your forearm, you could twist your wrist and trap the blade momentarily between the bones, buying you an instant to deliver your own
coup de grace
. He made another preliminary jab. The thing in the biker jacket ducked, though sluggishly, as if remote-controlled.

    It tried to come a step nearer, its reek cumbering the confined space. Edgar fought against taking an equivalent step backward; he did not want the bathroom wall against his butt. He slashed laterally and the Swedish edge split air a millimeter from the monster's naked jawbone.

    It recoiled, reeling back just a hair. That meant it feared the razor. Edgar could win.

    Now they danced, commencing the serpentine weaving that lays groundwork for serious stab wounds: The swift flash of honed metal, penetration and damage, victory for one of two. The mocking grin remained to dominate the lower quadrant of the thing's head but it was not a grin. It was the absence of skin and muscle, the permanent mirth of a deathshead's dentition. Edgar thrust and withdrew, snaky-quick. His opponent tossed his switchblade lightly from one hand to the other. Webs of tacky blood seemed to join the hands in midair. Showoff.

    Edgar tried to carve in low and was detoured. Then the zombiatic thing fisted its weapon, blade extending from the pinky finger end - the worst possible position in which to hold a knife in combat, Edgar knew, since it severely restricts the angle of a good strike. He saw the long black nail on the pinky finger of the knife hand as it rose high for a downward blow, a killing charge. Seeing that move, Edgar felt the contest was his.

    With a strangulated yell he rushed forward, trapping the attacker's knife overhead with his towel hand. With the other he ribboned the stomach in brutal slashes, making Xs over and over. The squared tip of the straight razor bit easily into rotted clothing and putrescent tissue, cleaving and splitting. Slops of fluid glurted forth deep brown, chased by spirals of ripe green bowel.

    He saw the festering visage alight, all bugs and bone, eyeless pits, bloodskin and gassy rot, the insectile bristle of dead hair, the skeletal grin fixed forever. His hand was engulfed as he dug in and gutted his adversary. He heard the switchblade clatter uselessly to the floorboards.

    
I got you.

    The thing grabbed a tight fistful of Edgar's hair. He realized it was not panting with effort, nor gasping in death. It wasn't breathing at all.

    Edgar's grip on the razor weakened. It hung in the voided trench of evacuated stomach, sunk deep, doing as little harm as it had seconds previously.

    Edgar's feet left the floor as he was lifted. He felt his slippers drop off. He squirmed and it did not change history one smidgen. The skull-grin unhinged. Then came pain, warm and far away, slamming to maximum as Edgar's throat was bitten out, the gristle of his Adam's apple spit free to bounce around the tiles of the bathroom.

    The towel fell and piled up on itself, drinking blood. Edgar kicked.

    The cat watched the rolling knot in the bathroom; it might be a toy to be chased for sport.

    Edgar's last cogent thought was the burning wish that his unhuman assailant was not a Jew. For motivations entirely irrational, Edgar had always been very vocal about despising Jews ever since moving in to 107. Privately he knew that Jewish people were no better or worse than the human race at large. But he made it part of his Kenilworth persona to hate them,' and it was a role he partook with as much gusto as his self-imposed status as night watchman for the ground floor.

    He dearly hoped he had not been done in and beaten by a Jew, even a living dead Jew.

    Edgar hit the floor, dead as spoiled cabbage. His fell drove the switchblade deep into the meat of his shoulder but he would never feel it.

    The sounds of Edgar's leaking corpse were all that came to violate the abrupt silence.

    Then the intruder began to tremble. It reached quaking claws to steady itself against the narrow walls of the bathroom corridor as its moist jackstraw framework rocked and rolled with the rush of its victory. Clabbered mucoid paste voided from the raw hole of the esophagal tube in thick, pumping spasms. A sweat of free blood shuddered forth to lubricate the parched facial tissue; it ran moist, yet steamless and cold. Old blood. Used blood. It dyed the cracks and runnels in the hideous face like ink on spoiled leather, then dripped to similarly tint the actual leather of the decayed biker jacket. Unabsorbed speckles glittered in the bad light.

    Imbuded in wet red, the jacket nevertheless creaked when the intruder bent stiffly, using dead man's hands in fingerless gloves to gather up its own slithering offal. The load was messy and undisciplined; it was heaped back where it came from and shreds of the jacket were crudely knotted to keep it there. The zipper was oxidized to uselessness, frozen fast in rust. The jacket remained slashed to tatters in front. A few more knots and it would be damned stylish.

    Cautiously, the intruder bent one more time, as though aware it could fold this way so many times before falling apart into a goulash of rent meat fiber. It used its long, coke-snorting pinky fingernail to spoon out one of Edgar's eyes. Spaghetti tendons trailed behind. It was duly plugged into an empty socket, where it displaced a squirt of ochre pus and swivelled until the pupil faced front, expanding suddenly with new visual signals.

    The intruder only took one eye. Only one was needed for seeing.

    It stepped over Edgar's corpse and entered the bathroom to pry the plywood loose from the boarded-up airshaft window. Feeding time, now.

    But first it stooped one more time, using the stump of one mealy finger to scrawl EAT ME in the coagulated red still thick on its newest victim's forehead.

    

    

    The sheer cold left Jonathan breathing hard, and tonight he was panting better than a pair of hound dogs. The Garrison Street corridor was a wind tunnel of blowing snow; the mean temperature, far enough below zero to keep the snow particles hard and stinging as dermabrasive grit. The act of respiration, let alone locomotion, sapped core energy. Forget coherent thought or politeness to strangers. He began to sympathize with the elemental nastiness of Chicago natives.

    The cabbie wanted to drawl about the weather. Stupid asshole, of course it was cold enough for Jonathan. That was like sticking a loaded gun in somebody's mouth and going,
scary enough for ya?
He tossed a ten at the idiot and did not hang for change. He had to close the back door of the cab twice and thought he might have heard the driver mutter some sexual epithet between slams.

    
Fuck him. Maybe he'll die tonight.

    Jonathan had snorted coke twice more between quitting time and snagging the taxi at Bash's place. In the Rapid O'Graphics bathroom he emptied the drinking straws into one of those black plastic 35-millimeter film cans that were all over the office. The little black cans, with their firm-snapping grey caps, were one of those items Jonathan had always thought should have more uses. When you bought film you kept them, then never found anything to do with them and ultimately trashed them so that they didn't hang around to frustrate you. They seemed invented for drug applications. He remembered the guys and dolls at the U. of Louisiana frequently kept a sociable amount of pot on hand in such containers.

    He tapped out each straw carefully, not letting any of the contents go to waste this time. He was thankful. The blow had helped him navigate the day at Capra's. He almost had to cop a second container, so he sniffed the top-off then and there.

    He'd treated himself to a second blast in Bash's bathroom, after dinner. He ruminated on how people who repaired to the lavatories to do drugs always wound up seeing themselves in mirrors as they performed.
Hi there you devil you - snukk, snorf - ahh, nice day - sneef, schlork - how about dem Cubs?

    There is no more vocal expert than a rookie.

    The coke helped blunt Bash's apparent middle-class sellout. Fine. Bash-man could enjoy his broadening tushie and toast his status as a brand new Butt Person by letting Camela jab a 24-karat circle pin through his ballbag.

    Jonathan realized why you chopped lines with a razor blade. Coke chunks in your nose could hurt. They could also fell out to spatter your shirt like big white cornstarch boogers. By the fourth or fifth session he felt professional. No drug tyro, was he.

    He still had most of his little can of coke left. This stuff beat coffee all to Hades; even Terminal Turbos.

    He hit the eiderdown, so to speak, as soon as his door was bolted. He slept soundly for about two minutes, then augured awake with his heart racing. He smelled sweat, unlovely and oilbound, oozing from his pores. There was a sporadic commotion below him - hard to tell whether this was building noise or storm noise. It stopped soon enough. Noise above, like someone walking around in Cruz's room, but it ceased too soon to tell, as well. He decided to shower off before conking out, and got out of bed to remove his clothes.

    All quiet, above and below, as he padded into the bathroom.

    It was late enough that a decent feed of hot water was all his for the hogging. The steam did him good, the spray tenderized his clenched back muscles, and he emerged pink and scrubbed and toasty, his eyelids drooping and his legs insisting on the horizontal. For good measure he drank a bolt of milk from the fridge. Drowsiness in a cup. More white stuff.

    The towel he wore was one of the purloined Holiday Inn numbers, also white. Perhaps this was some subtle conspiracy.
Doing coke before bedtime was probably a stupid idea. Nahh. Let it wait
.

    He was two steps from the bed - hell, in this room you were only two steps from anything - when Jamaica knocked on the outer door of the airlock. Jonathan did not have to guess at who this late visitor might be. Still clad in his towel he admitted her, saying nothing, which was itself an indictment.

    'Hi there.' She made a point of smiling tightly. 'I brought back your Overkill shirt.' To play the
uberfemme
now was not a winning strategy. She breezed into the room. By now she knew the drill with the various doors, and where to try sitting down. Jonathan, for all the guilt he wanted to disburse, could not help watching her cross the room. It was that kind of walk.

    Tonight she wore acid-wash jeans tight enough to make his groin ache. Flat-heeled soft leather boots. A crisp sweatshirt with BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL stencilled in glitter, gold on burgundy. She shed a bulky brown bomber jacket with tufts of aged wool at the collar and a flaking insignia depicting the Flying 8-Ball Squadron, Euro Theatre, crew of the B-24 Sweet Eloise.

    'You know,' she said, 'when I was little, my mother told me the way to get boys to think I was fascinating was to get them to talk about themselves. It worked, too. Then I discovered a much quicker way to get boys interested in me. Then I got, like, more mature. I decided to mix both approaches, and that worked out pretty okay. It beat busting my buns to capture a diploma, you hear what I'm saying?'

    'You want something to drink?'

    'Beer's fine. Some more of that special coffee you made would be great.' She knew the things driving him to act impervious and icily polite. She was already cold enough tonight. 'Jonathan - listen to me. I do what I do and I rarely put up with shit about it. Normally I wouldn't bother to come over here and -'

    'Never mind.' He waved a hand, the classic gesture of striking down an imaginary barricade of bullshit. 'I'm just being a jerk. It's my night to be a jerk. I know what you do.'

    That brought a hopeful smile forth. Not happy, but pleased for now. 'What say we skip the part where we argue?' She extended her hand in good fellowship, mustering a comically military set of jaw.