Authors: Ernest Hebert
“You better get used to the idea. You’ll probably have to kill a Shadow too.”
“A Shadow? I’m going to be a Shadow. Shadows don’t kill each other,” I said.
“No, but Souvz kill Shadows.”
“But I’m not a Souv.”
“You will be.”
“How can I be a Souv and a Shadow?” I said.
“Politics. It’s in your complexion. You can go either way with skin color like that. If I work it right, you’ll join both gangs. The truth is you’ll be my spy. Secretly you’ll still belong to my A-Y-G organization. You’ll have to learn the Souvien language. Think you could do it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try, as long as I don’t have to go to school.”
“Say hick, hike, hock.”
“Hick, hike, hock. What does it mean?”
“Nothing, it’s just practice for learning foreign languages.”
Ten minutes later, I saw a purple glow ahead; Royal clicked off the flashlight. The cave opened up into a spectacular cavern amazingly well lit. Dozens of women stood at easels furiously brushing oil paints. A portrait of Juan Valdez on his burro. A burgerscape featuring Big Macs. Jesus carrying his cross. A tractor-trailer truck. A three-foot-high DOS cursor. In the background, some boring der-der-der music played.
“Mass-production art, for banks and boardrooms,” Royal said.
“The walls shine,” I marveled.
“These are the Catacombs of Manhattan. There’s some kind of naturally occurring luminescent crystal in the rocks, and they augment it with electric lighting.”
“It’s like the mother ship.” I could see the Alien in my mind’s eye, clearer than ever, his long, thick, snakelike body, smooth scales in place of skin, his face like that of a man, resembling somewhat (I realized now for the first time) Doctor Hitchcock.
“What are all these women doing painting?” I said.
“They’re raising money for their cause.”
“What cause?”
“Feminism,” Royal said. “Feminists live down here.”
“Who?”
“Females that are pee-ohed.”
“I get it,” I said, but actually I didn’t.
A minute later a middle-aged woman wearing a blue dress appeared. She was tall with Italian features in her face, auburn-colored hair, and a pleasant orange complexion, which I later found out was the result of eating too many carrots.
“Hello, Web,” she said, as if we were old friends.
I felt a little shy in front of her, and I could barely mumble a soft hello.
“Web, this is Marla, a great sculptor. But she has other talents, not the least of which is hypnosis.”
Some of the women painters set up their easels in front of us, and they started to paint my portrait. I worked hard at acting natural. Royal stood off in the background, his eyes blazing with excitement.
Marla turned to Royal. “I came all this way to try to help Web. Why here?”
“It makes a good set. Just like home, eh, Marla?” Royal said.
“Always some hurt in your humor.”
“Humor without hurt is not funny. Can we get started?” Royal barked at Marla.
“All right, stay out of the way. Web, find a place to sit where you feel comfortable.” Marla wasn’t afraid of Royal, but I could tell that she was at his mercy. I wondered if she was one of the people he was blackmailing.
I sat cross-legged on one of the big, glowing rocks.
“Let me see your hand.” Marla’s voice was soft and soothing. I held out my hand, and she took it in her own. She had long, thick fingers and callouses on her palms. With her touch, I felt a little jolt. Maybe Marla had been sent by the Alien.
“Look into my eyes,” she said. I looked. “What do you see?”
“Worms. Maggots. They’re all wiggling.”
“Look deeper into my eyes. Tell me what is there.”
I looked into the wine of her eyes, and deep inside I saw the body. “A man. Maybe he’s dead, or only sleeping.” I was distracted by the sound of the women painting. The scrapes of their brushes sounded like the tongues of snakes scraping eyeballs. “Where are all the men?” I asked, and I knew now that I was getting hypnotized, because my words didn’t seem to come from me. A second later I was outside the chair, up on the ceiling looking down. Below, naked and dripping with black muck, tied spread-eagled to the rock was Xiphi.
Marla turned to Royal, “He has a thing for men.”
“Under the circumstances, what else would you expect?” Royal said.
The voices of Royal and Marla were full of echoes, and their bodies sort of flattened out as if they were projections on a screen. I imagined that they had been run over by the subway train.
“What men do you speak of?” Marla asked Xiphi.
“The men in this cavern, I mean the men who are not in this cavern, the men who went away,” Xiphi said.
“Is he under?” Royal asked.
“I think so. Hard to say,” Marla said.
“Web, you under?” Royal slapped Xiphi’s face, but I felt the sting.
I don’t know what Xiphi said, but Royal broke out in gales of laughter. “What a sense of humor that boy has got.”
“He can’t reach back if you keep interrupting,” Marla said to Royal.
“He’s going to do important work for me, and I have to know where he stands. Will he betray me?”
“It’s too early for that question,” Marla said. “Web, tell us what’s on your mind at this moment.”
“I’m wondering . . . wondering . . . where are the men?” Xiphi said.
“He’s stuck on that,” Royal said.
“Shut up,” Marla said to Royal.
“Okay, okay, forget it. You used to be good-natured.”
“That was before
I
was betrayed, remember?”
“Don’t be bitter, just exercise your powers, for us, the dear little children of the Children of the Cacti.”
“Now, who’s bitter?” Marla let go of Xiphi’s hand and put her hands on his shoulders. “I will tell you where the men are, and you will tell me where you are. Where are you?” Another good question, in a voice that seemed to be coming out of a drainpipe.
“I’m running. I’m in the woods. He won’t catch me. Not this time.” Xiphi stopped talking. I watched trees in Xiphi’s mind flash by. “Now I’m lying on my stomach, and there’s a note pad pressed against my back, and I can feel the handwriting . . . the handwriting . . . the scratching of the handwriting.”
“Who, Web? Who? Name him!”
“The Alien,” Xiphi said.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Good.”
“Bad equals good,” Xiphi said. “Where are the men? All of them. Where are the men?” I tried to see into Xiphi’s mind, but a burning, fiery mist obscured my vision and drove me back.
A few seconds went by while I retreated from Xiphi’s mind, and when I came out of it, the women painters had stood up and, gathered like a chorus of comedians, were reciting a poem.
Authorities condescend to descend,
to retrieve a murderer or a drug dealer,
one of their own, a Juan of their own.
They probe with dogs, which, like desperadoes,
go into our stew pot.
The others remain above us:
the gays, the loonies, the drunks, the druggies,
the youths, the sex perverts, the misanthropes,
the special cases: aging draft dodgers;
veterans from various foreign conflicts;
distraught tigers on the lam from their compulsions;
Wall Street tycoons who lost their dough;
savings and loan officers with no interest;
men of the cloth
who have gone homo or hetro or just plain buzzy;
humanists who have mislaid their humanity;
jilted Jacks; Jill killers; just plain Bills;
Royal Durochers, Langdon Websters, and ordinary Dicks.
A list with no end of men . . . mend . . . amen.
The men who frequent the Catacombs
like to get in and get out
and while they speak often of going deep,
in practice they stay in the medium ranges.
. . .
the medium rages . . . the medium rages
.
Nothing here for them: no profit, no bribes,
no Society to defend or to tear down.
No corruption, no eruption.
We, the permanent residents,
canvass the darkness and darken the canvass.
The painters sat down, returning to their work, and Marla began to pace in slow circles around me. “Now, Web, tell me where you are at this moment.”
“I am in the muck,” Xiphi said.
Marla kept firing questions off, like gunshots, although afterward Royal said that Marla didn’t talk all that much, and he himself never said a word.
“Ask him if he’ll betray me.” Royal slapped Xiphi’s face. I felt the hurt. I wanted to cry. “Stick cocaine up his nose, and watch him sneeze,” Royal cackle-cried with laughter.
“Shut up, Royal! Shut up!” Marla snarled, then turned to Xiphi and said softly, “Now you must tell me about this man, the one you saw in my eyes.”
Royal butted in, panting like a running dog as he spoke. “Will he betray me? Will he betray me?”
I shouted down from my perch on the ceiling, “I’d like to try some of that stew, I’m pretty hungry.”
Marla snapped at Royal, “You shouldn’t have cut in, you broke his train of thought. Fool! You shouldn’t. . . .”
“I can hear children crying,” Xiphi said.
“Wait, he’s off again,” said Marla. “What do you see, Web? What do you see?”
Xiphi didn’t answer. Mist was closing in, a hot, white fog. I couldn’t see Xiphi or Royal or Marla anymore. But I could hear their voices.
“He’s a long way off,” Marla said. “He’s listening to the future.”
“They changed the music on the tape,” Royal said.
At this point one of the painters interrupted. “Yes, we do that periodically, and in between you can hear the babies. That was what the young man heard.”
“What babies?” Royal said.
“The weeping of cocaine babies from the infirmary,” the painter said.
I heard a series of doors being shut, and then a scratching sound, a thousand old-style fountain pens scratching at my eyes—scratch, Scratch, SCRATCH. I could not close my eyes. Through the tongue scratch of a snake bending to lick my face I could see Xiphi. He was hanging from the ceiling like a bat, watching me. I was back on the rock.
“He’s blocking,” Marla said. “I don’t know if he’ll ever come out of it.”
Xiphi dropped from the ceiling, muckling onto my throat like a vampire. In that split second, we were one and the same being.
Later, out of the cave and back on the tracks, jogging, I could tell that Royal didn’t want to talk.
“What did I say?” I asked.
“You ran off at the mouth.”
Royal picked up the pace, and I had to pant to keep up. We passed under the harsh glare of an underground lamp, a naked bulb covered with a metal mesh.
“You’re lying to me,” I said.
“I know what’s good for you, so don’t you cross-examine me.”
“I’m losing respect for you, Royal. You’re scared to tell me.”
“I’m not scared of anything or anybody, least of all a squish like you.”
“You’re scared, you’re yellow, you’ve got chicken soup running through your veins.”
Royal stopped in the middle of the tracks. A train was coming. “See that nook in the wall?”
“I see it.” The train was bearing down fast.
“I’m going to yell a secret you told Marla, and then dive for the nook. If you dare to listen, you’ll dive last. If you’re a coward, you’ll dive first and never know.”
The next few seconds went by in slow motion. The train bore down at fifty miles an hour. Royal shouted in my ear, “You’re a . . .” and he stopped. The train kept coming. I waited to be run over. The train loomed before me, huge as an idea. Royal shouted, “killer!” I didn’t move. Royal tackled me, we both flew in the nook, and the train sped past.
“I guess you saved my life for real this time,” I said. “Tell me who I killed.”
“You tell me.”
“Somebody before I came out the muck?” I guessed.
Royal just exploded with anger. “Listen, you didn’t kill anybody. Just remember that.
I’m
the killer,
I’m
the responsible one. You . . . you’re just an idiot. Stupid idiot.” Royal tackled me, and we fought, only this time Royal wasn’t fooling around. He smashed my face time and again with his fists.
“You can’t hurt me,” I wailed, “you can’t hurt me, you can’t hurt me.”
It wasn’t until the sound of the train was gone, and he’d stopped hitting me, that I realized he was crying. “Get up, frog,” he said, then picked up his sunglasses, which had fallen in our fight, put them back on, and pulled me to my feet. We started walking again. My elbow was scraped. My nose was bleeding, and I’d have a black eye and a swollen lower lip in the morning.
We slept that night on a grate in a tunnel. Royal said he was punishing himself for losing his temper. It was hot and hard on the grate, and I didn’t sleep well. I had a bad dream. Father was trapped in a mine. He was calling me to save him, but I couldn’t get to him in time. Half a mountain fell on him. Somehow I walked right through the rubble to freedom. I woke and told Royal my dream.
“Web, never tell people your dreams. You’ll just bore them.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s go, it’s time for your initiation into the Shadows.”
We took a subway back to the South Bronx. It was exhilarating to be out of the tunnels into the open air. The weather was cool, cloudy. For a second I thought I could smell the dragon’s breath of the expressway, unseen above us. Down here on the local street, cars went by; people yelled swears from open windows to people with heads sticking out of other open windows who responded with swears of their own. I saw a man with a patch covering one eye and a sack over his shoulder. It took a second before I remembered him as the fellow who had given me directions to Dali Street. I called to him, wanting to thank him. He stopped, and turned in my direction.
But he wasn’t looking at me. Behind us were Nox and Bik and about a dozen other Shadows, guns drawn. A second later something strange caught my eye. A manhole cover in the street seemed to flip over, as if pushed from below.
“Oh-oh,” Royal said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Gunfight.” Royal pulled the pistol from his shoulder holster. “It’s every boy for himself.”
Suddenly River Rats started foaming out of the manhole. I spotted Terry and Aristotle, all of the Rats. Apparently Royal had found Terry and broken into the suburban market, selling the Rats guns.