The Word 4

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Text File | 1995-01-20 | 17.0 KB | 425 lines

012 typed by Freak of NFA =============================== Continues from The Word issue 3 =============================== Three days before the end of the mix, Tell left Studio F to urinate. He now used the bathroom on the sixth floor for this purpose. He had first used the on on four, then the one on five, but these were stacked directly above the one on three, and he had begun to feel the owner of the sneakers radiating silently up through the floors, seeming to suck at him. But the men's room on six was on the other side of the building, and that seemed to solve the problem. He passed the reception desk on the way to the elevators, blinked, and suddenly he was in the third floor bathroom with the door woozing softly shut behind him instead of in the elevator car. He had never been so afraid. Part of it was the sneakers, but most of it was knowing that he had just dropped three to six seconds of conciousness. For the first time in his life his mind had simply shorted out. He had no idea how long he might have stood there if the door hadn't suddenly opened behind him, cracking him pain- fully in the back. It was Paul Janning. "Excuse me Johnny," he said, "I had no idea you came in here to meditate." He passed Tell without waiting for a response (he wouldn't have got one in any case, Tell thought later; he was completely incapable of speech, his tongue frozen to the roof of his mouth), and headed for the stalls. Tell was able to walk over to the first urinal and unzip his fly, doing these things only because he thought Paul would really enjoy it if he freaked out. Paul had seemed to take Tell's horrified rejection in stride at the time. But times changed. Tell flushed the urinal and zipped his fly again (he he hadn't even bothered to take his penis, which had shrunk to roughly the size of a peanut, from inside his underwear). He started out... then stopped. He turned around, took two steps, bent, and looked under the door of the first stall. The sneakers were there, now surrounded by mounds of dead flies. So were Paul Janning's Gucci loafers. What Tell was seeing looked like a double exposure, or one of the hokey ghost effects from the Topper TV program. First he would be seeing Paul's loafers through the sneakers; then the sneakers would seem to solidify and he would be seeing them through the loafers, as if Paul were the ghost. Except, even when he was seeing through them, Paul's loafers made little shifts and movements, while the sneakers remained as immobile as always. Paul left. For the first time in two weeks he felt calm. -+- The next day he did what he probably should have done at once, he took Georgie Ronkler out to lunch and asked him if he knew anything strange about the building which used to be called Music City. Why he hadn't thought of doing this earlier was a puzzle to him. He only knew what had happened yesterday had vcleared out his mind somehow, like a brisk slap or a dashing of cold water. Georgie might not know anything, but he might; he had been working with Paul for at least seven years, and a lot of that work had been done at Music City. "Oh, the ghost, you mean?" Georgie asked, and laughed. They were in Cartin's, a deli-restaurant on 6th Avenue, and the lace was noon-noisy. He bit into his corned beef sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and siped some of his cream sode through the two straws poked into his bottle. "Who told you 'bout that, Johnny?" "Some Janitor," Tell said. His voice was perfectly calm. "You sure you didn't see him?" Georgie asked, and winked. This was as close as Georgie could get to teasing. "Nope." He hadn't. Not really. Just some sneakers. Sneakers and dead flies. "Yeah, well, everybody used to talk about it," Georgie said, "how the guy's ghost was haunting the place. He got it right up there on the third floor, you know. In the john." "Yes," Tell said. "That's what I heard. But the janitor wouldn't tell me any more, or maybe he didn't know any more. He just laughed and walked away." "It happened just before I started work with Paul. Paul was the one who told me about it." "He never saw the ghost himself?" Tell asked, knowing the answer. Yesterday, Paul had ben sitting in it, shitting in it, to be perfectly vulgarly truthful. "No, he used to laugh about it." Georgie put his sandwich down. "You know how he can be sometimes. Just a little m-mean." If forced to sat something even slightly negative about someone, Georgie developed a mild stutter. "I know. But never mind Paul, who was this ghost? What happened to him?" "Oh, he was just some dope-pusher," Georgie said. "This was back in '72 or '73, I guess, befoer the slump." Tell nodded. From 1975 until 1980 or so, the rock industry lay becalmed in the horse lattitudes. Kids spent their money on video games instead of records. For perhaps the fiftieth time since 1955, the pundits announced the death of Rock and Roll. And, as on other occasions, it proved to be a lively corpse. Video games topped out; MTV checked in; a fresh wave of stars arrived from England; Bruce Springsteen suddenly became all the things the newsmagazined said he was ten years before. "Before the slump, record company execs used to deliver coke backstage in their briefcases before big shows," Georgie said. "I was concert-mixing back then and I saw it happen. There was one guy - I don't want to say his n-name because he's dead, dead since 1978 - who used to geta jar of olives from his label before every gig. The jar would come wrapped up in paper and pretty bows and ribbon and everything. Only instead of water, the olives came packed in cocaine. He used to out them in his drinks. Called them b-b-blast-off Martinis. "I bet they were, too," Tell murmured. "Well, back then everybody thought Coke was a good clean high. It didn't hook you like Heroin or f-fuck you over so you couldn't work. And this building, man, this building was a regular snowstorm. Pills and pot and hash too, but mainly cocaine. It was the big fashion drug. And this guy-" "What was his name?" Georgie shrugged and worked on his sandwich. "I don't know. But he was like one of the deli delivery boys you see going up and down in the elevators with coffee and doughnuts and b-bagels. Only instead of delivering coffee-and, this guy delivered dope. You'd see him - this is what I heard, anyway - two or three times a week, riding all the way up and then working his way down. He'd have a topcoat slung over his arm and an alligator skin briefcase in that hand.. He kept the overcoat over his arm even when it was hot. That was so people wouldn't see the cuff. But I guess sometimes they did a-a-anyway." "The what?" "C-C-Cuff" Georgie said, spraying out bits of bread and corned beef and immediately going crimson. "Gee, Johnny, I'm sorry." "No problem. You want another crea soda?" "Yes thanks," Geirgie said gratefully. Tell signalled the waitress. "So he was a delivery-boy," he said, mostly to put Georgie at ease again - Geirgie was still patting his lips with a napkin. "That's right." The fresh cream soda arrived and Georgie drank some. "When he got off the elevator on the eigth floor, that briefcase chained to his wrist would be full of dope. When he got off the ground floor, it would be full of money." "Best trick since lead into gold," Tell said. "Huh?" "Nothing. Go on." "Not much to tell. One day he only made it as far as the third floor. He made his deliveries, went into the men's room, and someone o-offed him." "Shoe him?" Tell asked, thinking dubiously of silencers - in the movies they made a sound very like that of the pneumatic elbow-joint on the men's room door. "What I heard," Georgie said, "was that someone opened the door of the stall where he was s-sitting and stuck a pencil in his eye." For just a moment Tell saw it as vividly as he had seen the crumpled bag under the conspiritor's restaurant table, a yellow Eberhard Faber #2, sharpened to an exquisite black point, sliding forward through the air and then shearing into the startled black well of a pupil. He winced. Georgie nodded. "Ut's probably not true. I mean, not that part. Probably someone just, you know, stuck him." "Yes." "But whoever it was sure had something sharp with him alright," George said. "He did?" "Yes, because the briefcase was gone." "When the copy came and took the guy off the toilet, they found his left hand in the b-bowl." "Oh" Tell said. Georgie looked down at his plate. There was still half a sandwich on it. "I guess maybe I'm f-f-full," he said, and smiled uneasily. -+- On their way back to the studio, Tell asked, "So the guy's ghost is supposed to haunt... what, that bathroom?" And suddenly he laughed, because gruesome as the story had been, there was something comic in the idea of a ghost haunting a men's room. Georgie smiled. "You know people. At first that was wat they said. When I was working with Paul, guys would tell me they'd seen him in there. Not all of him, just his sneakers under the stall door." "Just his sneakers." "Yeah. That's how you'd know they were making it up, or imagining it, because you only heard it from guys who knew him when he was alive. From guys who knew he wore sneakers." Tell, who had been an eleven-year old kid living in rural Pennysylvania when the murder happened, nodded. They had arrived at the building. As they walked up towards the elevatord, Georgie said, "But you know how fast the turnover is in this business. Here today and gone tomorrow. I doubt if there's anybody here who was working here then, except maybe a few janitors, and none of them would have bought from the guy." "And he was probably one of those guys who you never even noticed if you didn't buy from him." "Yeah. Unless you were a c-cop. So you hardly hear the story anymore, and noone ever says they see the guy." They were at the elevators. "Georgie, why do you stick with Paul?" Although Georgie lowered his head an the tips of his ears turned a bright red, he did not really sound suprised at this abrupt shift in direction. "He takes care of me." Do you sleep with him, Georgie? Something else he couldn't say. Wouldn't, even if he could. Because Georgie would tell him. Tell, who could barely bring himself to talk to strangers and never made friends (except maybe for today), suddenly hugged Georgie Ronkler. Georgie hugged him back. Then they stepped away from each other, and the elevator came, and the mix continued, and the following evening, at six-fifteen, after the wrap and Janning's curt goodbye (he left with Georgie trailing behind him), Tell stepped into the third-floor men's room to get a look at the owner of the white sneakers. -+- Talking with Georgie, he had remembered what he had forgot- ten. Something so simple you learned it in the irst grade. Telling was only half, Showing was the other half. There was no lapse in conciousness this time, nor any sensation of fear... only that slow steady deep drumming in his chest. All his senses had been heightened. He smelled chlorine, the pink disinfectant cakes in the urinals, old farts. He could her the hollow click of heels as he walked towards the first stall. The sneakers were now almost buried in the corpses of dead flies. There were only two at first. Because there was no need for them to die until the sneakers were there, and they wern't there until I saw them. "Why me?" he asked clearly in the stillness. The sneakers didn't move and no voice answered. "I didn't know you, I never met you, I don't even take the kind of stuff you sold. So why me?" One of the sneakers twitched. There was a papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker - it was the mi-laced one - settled back. Tell pushed the door open. One hinge shrieked in properly Gothic fashion. And there it was. Mystery guest, sign in please, Tell thought. The mystery gues sat on the john with one hand dangling limply in his crotch. He was much as Tell had seen him in his dreams, with this difference: there was only the single hand. The other arm ended in a dusty stump to which several more flies had adhered. It was only now that Tell realised he had never notices Sneaker's pants (and didn't you always notice the wat lowered pants bunched up over the shoes if you hapened to glance under a bathroom stall? Something helplessly comic, or just defenceless, or one on account of the other?). He hadn't because they were up, belt bucked, fly zipped. They were bell-bottoms. Tell tried to remember when bells had gone out of fashion and couldn't. Above the bells, Sneakers wore a blue chambray workshirt with an appliqued peace symbol on each flap pocket. He had parted his hair on the right. Tell could see dead flies in the part. From the hook on the back of the door hung the topcoat of which Georgie had told him. There were dead flies on its slumped shoulders. There was a grating sound not entirely unlike the one the hinge had made. It was the tendons in the dead man's neck, Tell realized. Sneakers was raising his head. Now he looked at him, and Tell saw with no sense of surprise whatever that, except for the two inches of pencil protruding from the socket of the right eye, it was the same face that looked out of the shaving mirror at him every day. Sneakers was him and he was Sneakers. "I knew you were ready," he told himself in the hoarse, toneless voice of a man who had not used his vocal choards in a long time. "I'm not," Tell said. "Go away." "This is where you're supposed to be," Tell told tell, and the Tell in the stall doorway saw circles of white powder around the nostrils of the Tell sitting on the john. He had been using as well as pushing, all right. He had come in here for a short snort, someon had opened the stall door and stuck a pencil in his eye. But who comitted murder by pencil? Maybe only someone who comitted the crime on... "Oh, call it impulse," Sneakers said in his hoarse and toneless voice. And Tell - the Tell standing in the stall doorway - under- stood a great many things at once. This had been no premaditated murder, as Georgie had seemed to think. The killer hadn't looked under the stall, and Sneakers hadn't flipped the latch. Or maybe... "It was broken," the thing finished in its toneless husk of a voice. Broken. Yes. The killer had been holding a pencil in one hand, probably not as a weapon but only because someties you wanted something to hold, a cigarette, a bunch of keys, a pen or pencil to fiddle with. Tell thought maybe the pencil had been in Sneaker's eye even before either of them knew the killer was going to put it there. Then, probably because the killer had also been a customer who knew what was in the briefcase, he had closed the door again, left the building, got... ell got something... "He went to the hardware store five blocks over and bought a hacksaw," Sneakers said in his toneless voice, and Tell suddenly realised it wasn't his face anymore; it was the face of a man who looked about thirty, and vaguely Indian. Tell's hair was gingery-blonde, and so had this man's been at first, but now it was a coarse and shineless black. "Sure," Tell said. "He got it in a bag and came back, didn't he? If somebody had already found you, there'd be a big crowd around the door. That's the way he'd figure. Maybe cops already, too. If no one looked excited, he'd go in and get the briefcase." "He tried to cut the chain first," the harsh voice said. "When that didn't work, he cut off my hand." They looked at each other. Tell suddenly realised he could see the toiled seat and the dirty while tiles of the back wall behind the corpse... the corpse that was, finally, becoming a ghost. "You know now?" it asked Tell. "Why it was you?" "Yes. You had to tell someone." "Telling is shit," the ghost said, and then smiled a smile of such sunken malevolence that Tell was struck by horror. "The only things that matter are showing... and eating. Eating would have been better." It was gone. Tell looked down and saw the flies were gone too. He needed to go to the bathroom. Suddenly he needed to go to the bathroom very badly. He went into the stall, closed the door, lowered his pants and sat down. He went home that night whistling. A regular man is a happy man, his father used to say. Tell supposed that was true. The End ------------------------ This story was written by Steven King and was published in the book "Dark Visions", ISBN 0-575-04711-9 (3.99). ------------------------