The Shaft (51 page)

    So good, this feeling.

    The cat senses deep in its brain that there is no wakening from this dream. With a growing urgency, it begins to seek a way out. In another moment it will be frantic.

    Cruz was staring directly at the gangbox of mail drops when all the thin metal doors sprang open at once to regurgitate their contents.

    The instant the front door and windows had ceased to exist, the omnipresent noise of the blizzard outside dwindled. In the sudden and engulfing quiet Cruz could hear movement, massive, elemental movement, like tectonic plates warming up to work some creative topography. The floor buckled and shoved him closer to the ceiling. He kept his balance but banged his injured arm one more time. His vision was beginning to lag visibly whenever he turned his head to follow something.

    Flyers, crap mail and coupon books hit the slanting floor like a thrown deck of playing cards. From the slot numbered 307 - Cruz's apartment - a shiny object fell to clatter floorboard and slide according to the changing whims of gravity in this insane place.

    It was, Cruz saw, Emilio's platinum straight razor.

    It might as well have been Emilio himself. Just add blood and he inflates to full size, eyes afire with vendetta, rips out your fucking heart and slaps you in the face with it.

    Cruz's brain did a fast rewind that made him dizzy. Bauhaus had showed up. Emilio had been here, too. How had he been lucky enough to miss that number?

    Was Emilio still here, and headed for the front door, as Cruz had been before the door decided to take a time out?

    He moved like a landlubber on a rolling deck to retrieve the razor. It was the only thing that had ever appeared in his mailbox in which he held the slightest interest. He did not receive such deliveries at home.

    When he lifted it closer, his thoughts of the thing with Jonathan's eyes dissipated. He had seen the razor growing right out of the flesh of its hand. This was not that razor. Definitely Emilio's.

    His body informed him that he could not stay on his feet very much longer. He had already done enough coke to bring on the wheezing, the pallor, and he had finally passed out. That he was up and moving now only meant an intermission.

    He levered open the razor. There was blood on it, on the chain, on the blade, on the handle, all over it. That was all he could see before the power quit and he was thrown headlong into mineshaft blackness.

    The dark was sudden and total. No daylight; not even the pale radiance of snow or the sickly green of the decay on the face of the thing with Jonathan's eyes.

    If the razor had not been a last-ditch gift from whatever remained of the original Jonathan, Cruz would consider it such, knowing straight mortal history would never give a shit either way.

    He groped toward where the front door had been and imbedded the razor, plunging deep and hacking himself an emergency passage, hoping that the skewed rules remained in force for ten seconds more.

    In the darkness, sinking his arm into that wet incision was like feeling up the innards of a beef carcass. He pushed his good arm in as far as he could. When he hit shoulder depth, he felt cold.

    Cruz got a grip on the outside edge and began to feed himself to the hole he had sliced open. Tepid fluids splurted into his face. He got a mouthful of what he fancied to be the gooey yogurt slime. He got his chest in as the floor lurched behind him and tried to snap his leg.

    This was crazy, he thought as he pulled himself into the moist tissue, feeling it trying to heal, to close and seal him up forever. This was nuts. This was something you did on a gameshow so they gave you cash.

    This was a major shitstorm, and he was sucking it up both nostrils. Poor Rosie.

    A slit of brain-numbing white. Like looking into the sun. He pulled himself toward it.

    The freezing cold attacked the moisture on his hand. The stinging pain was almost a relief; an affirmation of life. He came through, his effort akin to a one-armed pull-up from a tar pit. The snow welcomed him with blinding brightness and pain and soul-killing cold.

    He had no idea where he had emerged. Everything was inundated in glacial pack, and the blowing snow reduced eyesight range to his own hand in front of his own face. He watched it ice up in an instant.

    When he tried to clench his fist it cracked. His wounds from the elevator reopened and red declared itself against all the whiteness.

    Somewhere within a five-block radius was Weedwine, the Bottomless Cup, and Jamaica, tapping her foot and thinking all this rendezvous business was strictly James Bond time. She probably had a cup of hot coffee and a newspaper; read what evolved newswise in the real world during more personal adventures.

    Behind Cruz the fissure lanced upward and its peak was finally lost in the fogbanks of whirling snow that hid the top of the building. He had started a crack that tried valiantly to split the entire Kentmore face of the structure. The viridescent glow was just barely discernible. You had to be right next to the building to see it emitting from the fissure. Cruz wanted away from it, and thus never saw it.

    Each step away from Kenilworth sank Cruz to the knees in new snow, a bog of adherent crystals that mired his boots and sought to abrade his eyes until they were opaque and unseeing. He slung his free arm ahead, an animal trying to bludgeon down nature. He waded, emplanting each step and dragging himself forward to the next, the bee-like swarm of blowing particles skinning into his eyes with a malevolence more than a mere turn of climate.

    Everything outside of the building was buried in snow to regulation cemetery depth, plus a few feet extra. Insurance, perhaps, that the corpses here would never rise.

    Cruz whanged his arm hard on a streetlamp pole. Affixed above was a sign sealed up in a caul of ice. He was pretty sure this was the corner of Kentmore and Garrison. Pretty sure.

    The stone pole rose like a giant stalagmite of ice, a straight, true fang. By hugging it Cruz could keep the blow out of his eyes for a few crucial seconds.

    The moment he squeezed them shut they flooded with harsh tears and froze solid. When he peeled the ice away, skin came with it. New dots of blood froze instantly around his eyes.

    He had to sit down.

    This was dangerous going. You could get lost ten feet from your own stoop, if the blizzard was enough. The wind chill factor could knock the cold down to sixty or seventy below zero under the right conditions. That could steal your core heat in a matter of minutes. Or your body would run out of water trying to generate warmth. You would dehydrate to nothing about the time your fingers and toes released themselves to the anesthetic of frostbite. Tissue crystallizes and dies, becoming the same autopsy color as the bleeding walls of the building.

    Cruz used Emilio's razor to hack at the snow near his waist. The platinum edge punched through crust to softer layers of pack. He had heard of people hastily carving themselves little igloos and waiting out storms of half this ferocity.

    When he sat, he had to rest. He had slashed himself clear of the building. That was what mattered. The blizzard was just an inconvenience; everyone in Chicago treated blizzards that way. Minor setback.

    The coating of bloodslime he had gained by oozing through the moist fissure linked up and scabbed solid. Every movement of his broke ice.

    More than anything, he had to rest before he could continue beating the odds.

    He regretted the loss of his dogtags. Without them no one would know who he was. No identity. Emilio's razor was scant compensation, even though it had saved his life.

    This is called irony, he thought.

    Ever since Chiquita's death Cruz had feared that his last' sight, before dying, would be Emilio's razor.

    He turned out to be right. But he was no longer afraid.

    Cruz dreamed of being nothing, a thing with no identity. Like water, clear and pure and guikless. There would not even be clothes to be found, come spring and the thaw.

    The worst blizzard of the decade did not ease off until after dawn of the following day.

    

    

    Amanda Roberti took one look at the blizzard through the cameo glass of her front door, and made a face. No mail run today, she thought.

    Mail was important to Amanda. She generally made two trips a day to the Oakwood station, knowing that the postal workers were there around the clock, sorting and bagging and filling each PO box as new material came into their grasp. Amanda ran a mail-order clipping service out of her home, and mail was her lifeline.

    The downside was that there was no social life to be derived from her job, as other people, even postal workers, seemed to enjoy as a fringe benefit of a normal life.

    Snow was piling up on her front porch. Even through the latched storm door she could feel the pulse of the cold, its insistent invitation to come out and suffer.

    Behind her a branch crackled in the fireplace. Earlier in the fall she had collected all the twigs and deadwood from the trees in her backyard, hoarding them beneath a tarpaulin on the back porch for firemaking. The fireplace was modest but the tiles were vivid; it lent both heat and light to her tiny living room.

    Most of the upstairs was given over to the stacks of paperwork that defined her job. Magazines in Chicago and New York remunerated her nicely for keeping an open eye and a ready pair of scissors. Amanda Roberti was one woman who was never short on newspaper.

    She slept in the downstairs bedroom. She lived downstairs and worked upstairs. She appreciated the clearcut separation of job and…

    
What social life?
she asked herself again.

    Her own ghost, in the translucent reflection of the cameo glass, helped her ask.

    She had tilted back the lace drape on the cameo door with a pencil, since her nails were still wet. Sculpted nails, perfect polish, undercoat plus lacquer - who had the time to make their nails so perfect? Only people who were never seen.

    The only color the glass held was the color of her eyes, a striking cornflower blue. Cruz had noticed them right off. Amanda had forgotten Cruz.

    Twenty-nine years old, and already so much gray in her curly black hair. It was a family thing. All the kids were lull of gray by thirty. Her younger sister, Jenna, had gone white before she was out of high school. Her hair was full and healthy, but it was totally white. Jenna was sometimes called Jean the way Amanda was called Amy, a name she hated, and one that nonetheless stuck through most of her primary education.

    Amanda got the grades. Jenna got the dates.

    Each of them had been given a home by their parents - a catch was, of course, that it was a home near where they lived, over in Russett Run. Jenna had sold hers as soon as the papers cleared, taken the cash and fled to Colorado. Occasionally she phoned from Boulder or Denver or someplace she had side-tripped. The calls petered out. Now Amanda usually got a call on her birthday. Jenna hadn't bothered to show up for the last three Christmas to-dos.

    Amanda's house represented a certain security and stability. She had her backyard and her porch and her driveway. She did her nails perfectly. Seams always lay straight when she made her expeditions to the market or the post office or her parents' house. Here she had her job and her books and her fireplace and hot tea to keep the cold at bay. Cable TV was her window to the world. Installation had been a Christmas gift from her parents. When she got a car she would make the first payments with the help of her parents.

    She was a spinster, almost thirty, and sometimes she thought that Jenna wasn't so crazy after all.

    She dreams of getting away. At her age she has begun to admit to herself that dreams don't necessarily represent future reality. She needs to get away. That realization has done little, thus far, to buttress her resolve.

    This state was not entirely her fault. She was attractive and had gone out with men. That had started happening later. College was as horizon-expanding as high school had been insular. No cliques, no hierarchies were to be found at the university. In college everyone started at zero.

    She had not slept with a man until she was twenty-one. She did not sleep with another for more than a year. Then came a furious compensatory catch-up. Two more years. Then college was over.

    
Why were men so fucked up?
She'd asked Jenna that once, after an evening brandy.

    'Because people don't always act in the roles you cast them in,' Jenna had told her.

    Amanda thought about that one for a while. She liked to invest time in consideration. Weighing her options.

    It was when she thought of her bed as a spinster's bed that she got flushed and wanted to break something.

    She finally decided the problem did not rest with her. It was Chicago. So difficult to meet kind, eligible men here.

    Especially in dog weather like this.

    Tea mug in hand, she watched the storm. Snow blew and whiteout ruled. No features, no details; it was impossible to see the huge apartment building down at the corner, which she knew to be red brick. Invisible now. She could easily fool her eye into believing the building had vanished entirely from this world. Nothing out there.

    Steam from the mug fogged a tiny oval on the glass.

    Her parents were no help, asking constantly who she was seeing, dear. The question waited like a live landmine in every phone call, every outwardly casual conversation. Goddamned if she was going to let them intimidate her into picking up with the wrong partner. When circumstances conspired to force an introduction, her parents usually hated the guy she was with. They never forgave her for 'losing' one they had actually liked, a couple of years back.