The stairs were steep as some Tibetan peak, and with the red curtain back in place and the door shut behind me all I could do was feel my way down with my hand and my heels, keeping my piece out ahead of me, tilted at what I guessed was the angle of the staircase. I tried to breathe soft so I could hear any noises coming at me, but all I heard was the rusty-nail whine of boards under my feet. My free hand traced the rough brick wall at my side. The air stood stock-still and stank of mold and decay and growing things—and again I caught that whiff of something black and familiar under the rest. I reviewed my life up to this point to see if I could find another moment when I’d been so totally in the dark, in every possible sense of that phrase. Nothing came to mind. I tried to forget the unbreakable gloom and focus on what my fingers, feet, nose and ears were telling me about this passageway. Not much, was the answer. I thought about the lighter in my coat pocket but, even in the silence I didn’t especially want to light myself up like a beacon.
I guessed at how many strata of the city I might be passing through—down past the tangle of power lines and the phone lines and all that electrical spaghetti the Consolidated Westinghouse boys were always tearing out of the streets, past the steam pipes and the gas lines. Down past the subway lines, too, I figured. Down to the level of the sewers, the wet rotten breeding grounds of rats and roaches and who-knew-what else.
Things like Mr. Menace?
Had I really bought all that wild nonsense Hally Thersis and Evelyn Night or whoever she wanted to be had told me about the Tartarus Syndicate and the Big Boss? Aides Clymenus, aka Mr. Menace. Not just a gangster, not just an ice-hearted man with all the brutal power bad money can buy, but a genuine monster, a beast who could end a man’s life with a few words? A thing that could kill people without killing them? All of that was the waking nightmare chatter of a straight-jacket candidate.
And here in this grave-smelling pitch black, I found myself believing every syllable of it.
There was Damia Nyx, after all. Damia Nyx who should’ve been stretched out on a slab with her hands over her fine chest and two powder-burned holes in her. Damia Nyx who I’d seen half an hour ago drinking wine and rolling her eyes in the queer bliss of Mr. Dapper’s company.
As a precaution, I added a little pressure to the .38’s trigger. Not that my longtime pal had done me much good so far … But that was something else I didn’t care to think too much about.
Some other smell joined that cellar damp now, something like the miasma of smoke in the club, but stale, dead. It made my head bob and sink like a buoy in rough seas.
The stairs ended abruptly and there was water pooled under my feet on what felt and sounded like a cobblestone floor. I paused, listened: a slow, steady dripping somewhere ahead, and that was all. I might’ve been in my own tomb for the all the icy silence around me.
Yet another thing not to think too much about.
I decided to risk a look with the lighter, so I fished it out of my pocket and gave it a flick.
The flame cast a second’s worth of yellow light, turning everything around me the color of old newsprint, and then my fingers went numb and the lighter clacked to the floor at my feet. I should have cut and run then, gotten the hell out, but for a minute I stood frozen there, turned into a statue by what I’d seen in that eye blink when I’d chased the shadows back. There’s no rational way a man could’ve seen as much as I did in that flashbulb instant, but nothing about the world I’d entered was in any way rational and the picture lingered complete and vivid in my brain like an afterimage singed into my eyes by lightning.
Bodies, the pale yellowish-white color of spoiled milk, twisting and writhing all around me like worms in a bucket. Couplings of men and women, groups of three, clusters of four, their flesh entangled, their wasted bodies bent and crouched and merged in ways that made my stomach roll over. I saw a shape dangling from chains, saw three other figures gathered about it, moving their teeth. I could still feel the ragged wall at my left but it seemed like they were all around me, flailing and flexing—and all in total silence, as if I’d wandered into the silent movie of some madman’s nightmare fantasy. Even in that instant, I recognized faces in the throng—Radamanthus, and Damia Nyx—and I finally understood that odor, the one I’d caught beneath the cellar smell and the smoke.
Sooner or later, most of us learn the peculiar perfume of carnality.
Somewhere in that awful jumble of writhing bodies was the woman I’d called Miss Gray and Miss Night. I’d spotted her pretty face pressed close to some anonymous flesh, but in the wink of my lighter I hadn’t seen so much as a twinkle of doubt or grief in her bottomless black eyes. Only a kind of naked hunger that outstripped the nudity of her body by a mile.
Then the darkness slammed down on me like a lid and I couldn’t see, hear, feel anything. I couldn’t trust the crazy picture in my head. In the dark I felt—hell, I knew—I was completely alone. The silence practically insisted, and while that odor of sweat and flesh hung on, it suddenly smelled old, the kind of stink that clings to a worn-out mattress.
I stood there breathing deep, squinting at the black, sweeping my gun back and forth, waiting for even a hint of motion, ready to squeeze off as many rounds as I could before they took me down. I thought I might close my eyes when I did, to keep from seeing anything the muzzle flash might show.
Nothing.
No movement, no mutters or moans of the sick revelers, only that steady plink … plink … plink of water, someplace else.
I knew they’d seen me, their red rats’ gazes had leapt all over me in the instant the lighter’s flame had lit the place up, but the rush I’d expected didn’t come. I backed up the hallway, going how I’d come, or hoping I was—the wall still dragged along under the fingers of my left hand but I didn’t much trust even brick walls down here. My gun flicked back and forth in front of me like the tail on an angry cat. I couldn’t move too fast for fear I’d tangle my feet up in each other and go down in a heap. Probably lose my gun if that happened, and I’d almost surely lose any last tiny shred of my sense of direction.
An arm, soft and cool as a fall breeze, slipped around my waist, from behind. An invisible hand traced its way up my chest and stroked my chin. I couldn’t see it but I knew it was hers—Damia Nyx’s. My knees threatened to buckle under me. I poked the darkness ahead of me with the gun, impotent to protect myself.
“Leaving so soon, Frankie?” Her voice was right in my ear, her mouth must’ve been close enough to nibble my earlobe, but all I could feel was that wandering hand. It felt like some kind of vile reptile but I didn’t want it to stop. “Someone here would be terribly disappointed if she didn’t get to play with you before you flew the coop on us, Mister Detective. Wouldn’t you, sweetheart?”
“I’d never forgive myself,” another voice answered. I knew it even though it didn’t sound anything like the voice of the woman I was falling in love with.
The voice I’d just heard sounded as impervious to love as a lump of frozen rock. I’ve never much believed in a soul, but I was sure I hadn’t heard one in those words.
I pulled the trigger, pulled it, pulled it again. Fire blazed, stark and white, blinding after the blackness. The thunder of the first shot echoed on and on in my skull, hammering away anything else. I pulled the trigger until the hammer slammed down on empty chambers. I pulled the trigger until some unseen fingers wormed around my hand and worked the gun out of my grip, easy as that.
I fought to blot out any thoughts of what all those hands were doing on my body, those lips. I struggled not to imagine Mr. Menace in his chamber somewhere not far from here, smiling blackly at what he and his puppets had waiting for me. I did all I could not to feel their devilish ministrations. And I tried not to like it. Whatever else anyone thinks about me, I want that much known: I tried not to like it.
The last of my gunshot deafness faded away—I could hear that endless dripping again. The denizens of these tunnels swarmed me like ants, and still they didn’t make a sound. Not one damn sound.
Despite the total darkness, I closed my eyes.
I may’ve made a few noises of my own, there in the black.