The Shaft (35 page)

    He hung. He pendulumed. He felt nasal blood dotting his upper lip.

    'Jonathan!' Even her aphonic whisper was loud in the vertical tunnel of metal.

    The orange insulation did a hangman's rope squeak against the windowsill and Jonathan's hair collected a chaff of paint flakes. He kept his eyes shut and tried to stabilize by feel.

    'I'm okay, I'm okay- shh!'

    The rusty brown steel that had mashed and scraped his ear open was an inch deep in slime - probably snowmelt and particulate grime from the roof, basted by the building's warmth. It seemed much more slippery than dirty water. If Jonathan was going to play Batman and live, his next step would have to be more cautiously taken. Being cautious would lose him time. Jamaica was watching. He did not want to look bad in front of her, either.

    He re-established his footholds, toeing in to penetrate the goo and make a solid friction bite on the metal before he backed his full weight out from the wall a second time. His breathing equalized. Calm. Calm. He was okay. He opened his eyes.

    He had stopped eight or nine feet below the pale, yellowish light shining from the bathroom window. Jamaica 's head, in silhouette, watched. Her hair was a backlit gray nimbus; no facial expression was visible.

    'The bathtub moved,' she rasped at him.

    He hung steady. Better this time. After-images of the bathroom window receded and he could see oily droplets wandering groundward, broken loose by the tremors of his passage. It reminded him of the cold, greasy gel in which Spam was canned. It had air bubbles trapped in it and was the color of nicotine. Maybe that was just the yellow light, from above. He backed down and extended his foot, planting it. Katoong.

    A couple more pretzels and he might be able to relax his muscles on the sill of 107's bathroom, right below him. It was the middle of the night and the old anti-Semite had better be snoring by now.

    Hand over hand he lowered himself. Going was smoother where the line had not brushed against the wall and gotten coated. He judged drop and tried to make his boots meet the sill quietly. He hung by cocked biceps, unflexing one buoyant foot of distance at a time.

    His toetips grazed the sill and swept debris. Slowly he swept his left foot across, and heard shavings and crumblings patter into the water below. An unpleasant snapshot came and went, of him hitting bottom and sinking Up-deep into the same soft, sucking paste he had found smeared across the Hip side of his window cardboard. That would be boss.

    Wedging heels against the sill, he walked his hands down the line and rocked back, angling away. His knees popped like carrots snapping. From the darkness within the window, cold air meandered. The sweat on his back chilled. There was no bathroom window here. From the jut of splinters he judged the window had been inelegantly battered out from the inside.

    Jonathan was too enwrapped in his mission to notice, at first, the mortuary taint of opened corpses and aired blood. Below he saw the faintest glints of still water, its depth unguessable. He could feel the pretzel knots constricting all along the line as he hovered. Time to invest in a fast reconnoiter. It took two loops of cord to lock down his forearm this time; his gloves were wet and the line was lubricated. It tried to shimmy through, then tightened. He tilted the nine-volt lamp down for a sneak preview.

    Greenish barnacles of mold edged into peaks on all sides of the shaft, two-dimensional stalagmites appliqu6d to the corroded steel. Jonathan thought of cave paintings. Their luminous peaks gradated from the color of oxidized copper to a battery-acid white just beneath his perch. Random ripple patterns petered out on the surface of the turbid water. Somewhere above him a toilet flushed, booming distantly with a sewer-pipe echo. At the far side of the pool - by his reckoning, the south side - he saw a beachhead of compost. Random garbage, fallen junk and human refuse had piled against one side of the shaft to form a trashberg. Perhaps he could light on its tiny peak to avoid getting dunked and stinky.

    Nearby bobbed Cruz's Hefty bag. A huge air bubble had ballooned one corner into a huge plastic nipple. A shard of wood like a bamboo skewer had rammed through the bag, its top aimed right at Jonathan's ass. He could barely make it out in the wavering light, a hair-fine needle of wet, earthen stuff more mineral than wood.

    He swung the light up. Even at his bad angle it was impossible to miss seeing all the blood in 107. Impact splats ideogrammed the whitewashed walls and a wide widow's peak of red reached toward the sill. The sill itself was wet and crimson, like a bad cherrystain job, and ruddy clots edged broken glass and wood alike. A congealing swath twice the width of a dunked and dragged mop traced an erratic byway of death up and over the rim of the tub, across still-wet tiles and out the wide open door. Hanks of shredded garments and saturated clumps of organic matter despoiled the purity, the abstract symmetry of the sanguine sheen.

    From the belly of the tub a straight razor winked at Jonathan, cocked into an L-shape. It appeared to have been dunked in somebody's heart and thrown to its current roost with considerable force; stringers of gooey crimson glued it to the porcelain.

    Now he smelled it, full kick. A stench that demanded torching to the ground; the tilling of ashes.

    He prioritized rapidly: The decision to look had been his. If he continued taxing his body by hanging and gawking, pretty soon all choices would be stolen. Once he had recovered the trashbag and Jamaica could tell him what they'd won, then he could meddle wherever else he wanted. He had just told Jamaica that if the dead Velasquez kid was afloat down here he would ignore it until Cruz's cache had been salvaged. Rule One. He had to stick to his agenda.

    He lowered away… sincerely hoping that nothing poked any part of a head out of 107 to say howdy-do.

    It got a lot messier a lot faster.

    An attempt to Tarzan closer to the sloping shoreline of silt merely dumped Jonathan dead center. His foot struck the canted surface and skidded as though packed in adipose. He went face-down into the slime, his head missing the pointed stick by about three inches. The lamp swung, submerged and broke surface, making lightning. He had just enough time to slam his mouth and eyes shut before the trashberg crumbled and sank him, arms flailing.

    It was like cold vomit hydrotherapy.

    Jonathan felt clammy ooze infiltrate his clothing, seeking and finding openings, soaking through layers at about the temperature of the Quietly Beer in his fridge. He touched bottom - it wasn't deep - and clawed madly for the fragile support of the trashberg's peak. It went to gelatin in his grasp. He scrabbled and splashed, blind in a concrete slop trough over four feet deep. He thought of pond scum, verdant and suffocating, hiding quicksand. The junkpile flowed away at the thirty degree angle and bristled with sharp edges - glass, split wood, slatting, rusty wire. He sank one boot as deep as it would go, and, once anchored, grabbed for the line. His fingers, packed with oleaginous glop, found a climbing pretzel and clamped.

    He pulled himself up, sucking air, scared.

    He achieved tension on the end of the line and was able to hoist himself free to waist-depth, boots engulfed in the muck of the trashberg. No way he could climb back now. He was slipperier than a fish dunked in motor oil. The only escape option was getting out through 107, which seemed empty, whatever violence it had witnessed now past.

    But still. All that blood.

    Again he chided himself. Cringer, coward, pussy. His ears hurt from clenching his teeth.

    The lamp secured to his belt was still alight. Leakage had not yet subverted it, but the beam was already sputtering. He knew the matches in his pocket were now doused and useless.

    Hurry.

    One-handed he untangled the Hefty bag from where it was gaffed and knotted it through one of the pretzels. Then he fell back against the slick slope, feet mired, arms seeking the corner in cruciform after giving his three pre-planned yanks on the cord. Jamaica hauled up the prize and Jonathan hoped he did not sink further than waist deep.

    The bag spun, blocking the glow from above and dripping on his head. He did not sink but could feel how precarious his footing was. Slowly he moved to get his lamp out of the water.

    The muck roiled in slugging waves, capturing the artificial lamplight like luminescent paint. On the side of the shaft common with the broken window of 107 Jonathan could just make out a fat strip of riveted iron, just kissing the top of the waterline. It might be a welded-up sub-basement window, or maybe Fergus' secret hatchway. Perhaps he crawled down here to geek pigeons and sodomize pre-schoolers.

    The glop beneath his left boot lost all mock of cohesion and gave way faster than hot taffy. His hands scraped the corrugated metal, gathering brown gel all the way, forestalling his immersion for another few seconds. The lamp went under again. Now the waterline cut across, from the bottom of his ribcage on the right to his left collarbone. His left hand sought solidity and fished up several stubs of wood so waterlogged they sank as soon as he dropped them. His fingers clasped something harder, cylindrical, too smooth to be part of the pulpwood he assumed was the basis for the trashberg. An impromptu walking stick to keep him from swallowing more sewage. He got it unstuck without seriously jeopardizing his balance. He felt a knob at one end. In the light he saw it was a bone, porous and glistening. An ulna - the longer of the two crossed forearm bones. Once upon a time the knob had been somebody's elbow. Somebody with arms just a bit longer than Jonathan's. This was not the remains of a dead rat or drowned cat.

    He stopped breathing, terror making new grabs at his nerve endings.

    Almost any surplus movement would slip him face-down into the goop again, and he did not hanker to die that way, no thanks. His body was immobile with conflict. What he wanted to do was thrash and holler and get the hell away as fast as his parts could propel him. He was keeping his nostrils from vacuuming up diarrhetic mulch solely by virtue of standing on some stranger's skeleton. Maybe two or three bodies more, beneath that, deciding, right now, whether to reach for the gum-soled boots and the living flesh they packaged.

    He heard the knotted extension cord bonking and feeling its crooked way back down the airshaft. Ten more seconds, and he could grab it, scatter-ass up to the first floor, and just run full tilt past whatever might be lurking there to scare him into a padded cell.

    He dropped the bone. It sank. It had been the afflicted color of diseased eyes, stained by the cloudy water. Tough little strings of cured meat still clung to it. When he shut his eyes he could still see it, dissolving to yellow motes at the edges in his vision.

    The water moved by itself, rolling heavily toward Jonathan's face, slopping his chin and tightly pressed lips. It floated detritus free from the trashberg and receded in a massy, tidal movement, the way a lull bathtub shifts when you climb inside.

    Something big had just changed position in the sump at the deep end of the pool. The water rose to immerse the strip of rivets, then came back for Jonathan.

    His breath was misting free in whimpers now. All he could think of was being trapped down here, his rope out of reach, trapped with something that wanted to make him into a jumble offeces-clotted bones. Something big.

    His coke bang crested. The ice sealing his throat cracked and cleared.

    'Hurry up! Hurry with the lucking rope, goddammit, hey!' Just now he gave not an earthly burp who heard him or what they might think was going on.

    Elsewhere in Kenilworth, someone Jonathan would never meet shouted shut the fuck up in response.

    The swaying end of the extension cord hastened down. A Greek chorus. A safety line from God his ownself. Jonathan backslid and sloshed clumsily.

    When he mopped his eyes clear, he was looking into a bullet-shaped, eyeless head that had nosed out of the water between him and the hatchway of riveted iron. It was the girth of a Navy torpedo and so was the triangular, turd-colored body that uncoiled behind it, slopping greasy waves against the walls of the shaft. Shadows danced as the water surged to bury the trashberg.

    Too many drugs scampered through Jonathan's overloaded brain too many like a scorpion stinging itself to death in mad circles too many fucking drugs, Jonathan!

    He screamed for help in the wet darkness, grabbing the bottom-most climbing pretzel at last, pushing off from the trashberg and slamming bodily into the opposite wall. He spun as the blunt face backed into a striking curve and darted in to bite him.

    Twice. Hot pain stapled his kidneys to his lungs.

    He had a deathgrip on the line and did the fastest unbraced pull-up in sports history. He dealt the thing a firm kick in the snout. It back-pedaled in the thick water.

    He hit the shaft with a noise louder than the Notre Dame cathedral bell tolling the half hour. His boots slipped but he was moving fast, driven by the most primal motivation known to the human species. In seconds he had hooked one forearm over the sill to 107. Waiting glass sliced open his fingers. New blood introduced itself to old. He winced but who cared. It hurt but who thought pain was going to stop him?

    Which struck him as peculiar… because from the waist down, he was dead air. He could no longer feel his legs ascending. He wobbled on the line.

    A pleasing, novocained numbness rose to squelch his signals. He hung by one arm on the sill and tried to collate this new data. All he could vocalize was a drawn-out
uhh
noise. I've become the ghost, he thought. Cruz's ghost, moaning in the night. An inky-black cloud of sedation pushed upward, gently, toward his eyes, to mist them over.

    The lamp's bulb shorted out with a snap.