Dhalgren (54 page)

A long time later, a long way away, someone whistled.

While Denny said, "Come on," everybody moved.

The doors flapped.

They ran across the street; scorpions were running up the alley. "In here!" was steps down and a metal door in the Emboriky's side. Kid thought: Grains struggling through the stricture of an hour-glass. He watched Denny three steps before him, paused when Denny paused (at the bottom of more steps) quickened after him (Worlds within worlds: I am in a different world.) At the first landing, Denny motioned the others ahead, glanced to make sure Kid was still behind him (Plans, completed and synchronized, sketched floor layouts, schedules for the changing guard—he hadn't seen anyone who looked that intelligent), then pulled a heavier chain from his neck and wound two lengths around his fist. "This way." The others' footsteps faded above them as they went from the army drab stairwell through a doorway.

Kid pulled his orchid from his belt loop (the loop, worn from the blade, snapped) and fitted his wrist into the harness. "What's in here?"

"Nothin'," Denny said. "I hope."

The short hall ended on a room full of cardboard boxes. (The wrapping paper in Apartment 19-A. Why?) They had fallen from half-stacked shelves, they covered the floor; they had been pushed into piles and had fallen again.

"What are we doing, huh?" Kid asked.

"Keeping our asses out of trouble," Denny said. "They wanna run around and get shot at, you got more brains than that. The store's eight stories high. Covers the whole block. We figure there's maybe ten, fifteen people in here. I think we're on the mezzanine." He glanced back again. "I hope."

They stepped out into darkness that became three-quarter dark. Kid sniffed. Something had burned in here too. His arm brushed hanging plastic. They snuck through racks of shower curtains, into bathmats and accessories.

"Sure this is the mezzanine?"

"The railing should be over there."

"You been in here before?"

"Keep it down," Denny said. "No. But I talked to somebody who has."

"What—" Kid whispered: "What is Nightmare trying to do in here?"

Denny looked back again. "You think he knows? This is a run!"

They reached towels. By an overturned counter, they walked across mounds of terrycloth. The cool, charred dark stopped at a glass balcony rail with a brass bar. There was light up from below; leaning out ("Hey, watch it," Denny said, "somebody might be down there.") Kidd could not see its source.

There're people in here, Kid thought. There're people in here, walking around with guns! He looked over the balcony, down at counters and the paths between where grey ribbons of light lay over riotous indistinguishables.

Some one, some two scorpions ran out among them.

Denny took Kid's shoulder.

Three more, like mazed mice, zagged through the aisles.

"Hey, what the hell do you people think you're—" shouted by somebody who sounded like he was in a stairwell.

Five heads, deployed among lingerie and watchbands, swiveled. Two of the scorpions went on like flash bulbs— a rooster and some sort of baby dinosaur.

Kid pulled back from the light. Denny was looking up, suddenly aware that they both now had shadows swinging across the ceiling.

"Douse your God-damn lights!" which was Nightmare.

The gun-clap filled the double story. The echo settled.

Some flat reflex that held neither fear nor excitement took him back from the rail (for a moment he saw Denny's excited, frightened face) among the dark displays. Then Denny was behind him.

"Hey, they got in! Hey, they God-damn got in—"

"Mark?" A woman. "Mark? Mark, what's down there…"

"You get back! Did they get in? You didn't see—"

Echo botched all meaning in a fourth, fricative voice.

Someone nearer tried to interrupt: "What are you—? Why don't you—? Hey, look…"

"I saw their lights! For God's sakes, I saw their lights! Somebody called out, too. I saw…"

Draped plastic dragged Kid's shoulder. And the woman standing behind it shook the rifle at them, said, "Hhhhhhhhaa…" and started walking backward.

Mutually, Kid thought, paralyzed with terror.

But Denny wasn't paralyzed. He grabbed his shield projector and disappeared in light.

Neither was the woman. She staggered backward, in the sudden glare and fired somewhere between them. The rifle gave a breathy
crack,
and Kid recognized her green dress: it was the woman, Lynn, he'd sat next to, his last visit to the Richards'. Now, squinting, and screaming, she held up the rifle to block the light. On the handle, lit by Denny's shield, in four-color decalcomania, Red Rider smiled at Little Beaver, surrounded by a yellow lariat. The air-pump rattled. A bee-bee in the eye, he mused: And lunged.

He thought she would throw the gun at him.

But she held it, and when she didn't let go on the second jerk (the blades of the orchid clicked on the barrel he grasped), he turned it hard and kicked her. She jerked her twisted hands away, shook them, turned. He smacked her shoulder with the rifle butt, and she dodged in darkness.

He turned, mainly to see what Denny was:

A ten-foot blob of light, colorful and disfocused, ran into itself like an amoeba erupting.

It went out, and Denny's hand came down from his neck. Kid pushed the bee-bee gun at him. "What the hell," he whispered, "are you supposed to be?" The fear made him laugh.

Waving the gun, they stalked through the mezzanine shadows.

"Huh?"

"Your shield."

"Oh. About a month ago, something happened to it. I shorted something, I guess, and the projection grid—it's plastic—melted or something. So it comes out like that. I sort of like it."

"What did it used to be?" They turned past bolts of fabric.

Denny gave a confidential whisper. "A frog."

With the woman, Kid thought all of a sudden, did that really happen?

People were screaming again. Below, Nightmare cried, "Hey, man, look at that!" and his excited laugh.

They went into a stairwell: it was pitch-black. Three steps down Kid said, "Wait up—"

Half a flight down, Denny asked, "What happened?"

"My sandal strap broke. I lost my sandal." Listening to Denny's breathing, Kid felt around with his feet, on the step above, on the one below.

Denny suddenly stopped panting and said, "Hey, thank you."

"I can't find it," Kid said. "Thanks for what?"

"I guess you saved my life."

"Huh?"

"That woman. She would have shot me if she got a chance."

"Oh." Kid's toes stubbed the wall. "It wasn't anything. She would have shot me too." He thought: a bee-bee gun? Fifteen-year-old Denny was very young all of a sudden. "Damn thing's got to be around here somewhere."

"Lemme make a light," Denny said and made one.

Kid moved to see if his sandal was under his shadow. "Maybe it fell over…" He glanced across the bannister. "Look, never mind… put that out, will you." The luminous amoeboid collapsed. The stairwell filled up with darkness, to his eyes, and over. "Can you hear anything?"

The pulsing blot on the black said, tentatively, "No."

"Come on then." Kid started down.

"Okay," was whispered in front of him.

—shot me if she got a chance: would she have if she recognized me? Or would I have wrested the rifle if I hadn't recognized her? (He collided softly with Denny's shoulder.) He thinks I saved his life. What—because he saw light—are they doing out there? Shoulders bumping, they walked into the silent first floor.

Denny stepped between racks of twilit tweed and corduroy.

Kid glanced at the figure standing just beyond the doorway beside him (which was, of course, a dressing mirror, in a wooden stand, slightly tilted so that the reflected floor sloped) and—in a gym locker-room, that opened onto the field, someone had once thrown snow at his naked back.

Looking, he re-experienced (and remembered) the moment from that Vermont winter. Then forgot it, looking at the reflection, trying to recall, now that he had stared for a third, a fourth, a fifth second what had struck him first. He raised his hand (the reflected hand raised), turned his head a little (the head turned a little) took a breath (the reflection breathed); he touched his vest (the reflection touched its khaki shirt) then suddenly raised his hand to knuckle his chin (the reflection's knuckle dug into its full, black beard) and blinked (its eyes blinked behind black plastic glass frames).

The pants, he thought, the pants are the same! There was a white thread snaking across the black denim of his thigh. He (and the reflection) picked it warily away, suddenly arching his naked toes on the carpet (the tips of the black engineer boots flexed), then once more raised his hand toward the glass. He opened his fingers (reflected fingers opened), the string dropped (the string dropped).

Between gnarled knuckles and gnawed nails he looked at the smooth undersides of fingers thinner than his own. (He's taller than I am, Kid thought inanely, taller and stockier.) He reversed his hand, to look at his own palm: the yellowed callous was lined and lined again, deep enough for scars. Between his fingers he saw the backs of fingers with only the slightest hair, only the faintest scar above the middle knuckle and a darkening at the left of the first joint. The reflection's nails, though without moons save the thumbs, were long as his adolescent dreams, and only slightly dirty. He glanced down at the other hand. Where his was caged in blades, the reflection held—his notebook? But the correspondence (he recalled the church clock with its broken hands) was too banal for relief. Wanting to cry, he gazed full at the face, which, mirroring him twitch to twitch, for all its beard and glasses (and a small brass ring in one ear!) gazed back, with confusion, desperation, and sadness.

The combination was terrifying.

"Hey," somebody said, "what you staring at?" grabbed the top of the mirror from the back, and yanked it down. It swiveled between its posts. The lower rim struck kid's shins.

Kid reeled.

"You pickin' your pimples?" Copperhead grinned across the glass, flat now like a table.

Astonished and angry, Kid lunged forward and brought his free fist down against the mirror's near edge. The far rim tore from Copperhead's loose fingers, scraped his chest, cracked his chin. The mirror drifted down again.

Roaring and clutching his jaw, Copperhead danced between the clothing racks. "Now what the fuck did you… Arggg! Oh, my fuckin' tongue, I think I bit… Ahhhh!…" The third time he looked up, he just blinked.

Kid gulped air.

A triangle of glass slipped from the frame, broke again on the rug. Beyond shatter lines he saw himself, barefoot and beardless, gasping and rubbing the chains on his chest. At his hip the orchid flickered. Some feet behind, Denny, holding something in his arms, watched.

Kid turned in quarter-light.

"I got some…" Denny looked at Copperhead, who rubbed and glowered. "Over there, they got shoes and boots and things. I brought you—" he hefted the armful—"these."

"Huh?"

" 'Cause you lost your shoe." Denny looked at Copperhead again.

Kid said: "You pickin'
your
pimples now?" Then he laughed. Started, it raced at hysteria. He was frightened.

A laugh, he thought, is a lot of clotted barkings. He laughed and leaned against a table covered with shirts, and motioned Denny to come.

"You only wear the right one, huh?" Denny dumped the shoes—boots mostly—on the table.

Kid picked up two, three—they were all right ones. He laughed harder, and Denny grinned.

"What are you guys making all the God-damn noise for?" Nightmare called across the aisle. "Will you cut the God-damn hollering?"

Kid choked back both his laughter and his fear, picked out a moccasin boot of soft, rough-out black.

Denny watched gravely while Kid, holding the edge in one hand—waving his orchid for balance—pushed in his foot.

Denny said, "That's the one I liked too."

Kid laughed again. Denny, higher, sharper, laughed too.

"I guess we scared them all upstairs," one girl said to Nightmare.

"You bastards over here making enough noise to scare anybody," Nightmare said.

"Hey," Kid said, "if I broke any of your teeth, I'm sorry. But don't fuck with me any more, hear?"

Copperhead mumbled and rubbed his scantly bearded jaw.

"All this shit going down, and the two of you got into it?" Nightmare rubbed his shoulder.

"Nightmare," Denny said, "the Kid saved my life. Upstairs, up on the balcony. Somebody came at us with a gun, shot at us as close as you are to me. The Kid just grabbed the barrel and pulled it away."

"Yeah?"

A heavy scorpion behind Nightmare said: "Somebody was shootin' down here too."

"You goin' around savin' peoples' lives?" Nightmare said. "You got guts in you after all. Told you he was a good kid."

Kid flexed his toes. The boot gave like canvas. Fear kept lancing, looking for focus, found one: he felt vastly embarrassed. A bee-bee gun, he thought, from some scared woman I ate dinner with, read a poem to! He put his booted foot on the floor.

Denny looked hugely happy.

Nightmare pushed Copperhead's head to the side to examine it. "I wouldn't mess with the Kid if I was you. First time I saw him, I didn't like him either. But I said: If I ain't gonna kill him, I ain't gonna mess with him. That'd be best."

Copperhead pulled away from Nightmare's inspection.

"There was something about him," Nightmare went on. "You nasty, Copperhead, but you dumb. I'm tellin' you this 'cause I'm smarter than you and I thought you'd like to know how to act. The Kid's smarter than you too."

Behind teeth clamped and filled with tongue, Kid thought: does he want him to kill me, huh?

"He just grabbed the gun," Denny repeated. "By the barrel. And pulled it away."

"I'm gonna carry this on back to the place," another white scorpion said, lugging a marble slab on which crouched a large, brass lion; the blacks all seemed so silent, a reversal of his usual experience. The lamp shade kept striking the boy's pimpled, unshaven chin. "I always wanted one of these."