Riverworld and Other Stories

  Then, he’d be padding around naked, passing the mirror a dozen times and avoiding looking in it. When he forgot and did look into it, he’d give it the finger. It gave him the finger back, but it never did it first. It tried, but Red was the fastest finger in the West.

  By the time he’d turned the old TV set on, he’d hear a banging at the door. That’d be old Mrs. Nilssen, his widowed landlady. Mrs. Nilssen would cry out in her seventy-year voice that she wanted to talk to him. Actually, she was a drunk who wanted a drink. After a few, she’d want to lay him. Mrs. Nilssen, poor old soul, was desperate, and she figured that as ugly as he was he’d be grateful to have even her. A couple of times she’d been almost right. But he didn’t want any of her desperation. He could just barely handle his own.

  After he’d yelled at her to go away enough times, she’d go. Then he’d sit down at the desk he’d bought at the Goodwill and with another beer by his elbow compose his poetry. He’d look out the window from five stories up on the hill and see other windows looking up or down at him. Somewhere beyond them was the bay and the great bridge over which Jack London and Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain and George Sterling had once ridden in carriages. He knew that the bridge hadn’t been built in their day, but it was nice to think of them rolling across it. And if the bridge had been built then, they would have crossed on it.

  He had his own bridge to cross. This was finishing the poem which he had titled The Queen of Darkness. He’d started it twenty years ago when he was twenty-five. He’d written it on yellow second sheets and envelopes and grocery sacks and once, out of paper and funds, on the dust on his desk. The dust had inspired him; it’d kindled the greatest lines he’d ever written. He got so excited he went out and got drunk, and when he got back from work the next day, he’d rushed to the desk to read them because he couldn’t remember them. They weren’t there. Wouldn’t you know it, old Mrs. Nilssen had cleaned his room. This was the first and last time; the cleaning was only an excuse to look for the bottle that she was sure he’d hidden. She thought everybody had a hidden bottle.

  He’d never been able to reconstruct the lines, and so he’d lost his chance to get his start as a major poet. Those lines would’ve launched him; it wouldn’t be anything but Excelsior from then on. At least, it was nice to believe so.

  Now, after a couple of millions of lines, Red had to admit that he couldn’t even play in the minor leagues of poetry. His stuff stank, just as the sewers stank. Actually, it was the sewers that had ruined his poetry, though in the beginning they were his inspiration. He was going to write something as good as, maybe better than, Thompson’s “City of Dreadful Night.” Maybe as good as Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Then, ugly or not, he’d be invited to the colleges and the salons to read his poems, and the women would fall all over him. But, no, his candle had gone out in the darkness and the damp and the stink. That white wavering beauty, the muse that he had imagined moving toward him, then away, beckoning him on into distant tunnels, there to show him love and death, had died. Like a minstrel show at a Black Muslim meeting.

  Still, there were times when he thought he saw her dimly, a flicker, at the far corner of the dark canal.

  4.

  “What the hell you thinking of, man?” Ringo said.

  “I can’t eat now. Let’s have a few drinks first.”

  This was fine with Ringo. They walked through the crowd, which gave them plenty of room, to The Tanglefoot Tango Tavern. This was half-full of winos and pushers, and the other half was narks and a drunken preacher from the Neo-Sufi Church down the street. The Reverend Hadji Fawkes saluted them as they came in. “Is there a God in the sewers? Does he walk in the coolth of the smell?”

  “Not since last Tuesday, Rev.,” Ringo said and pushed Red on ahead. Red wanted to talk; a religion that promoted intoxication as The Way was interesting. So did the other customers, as long as Fawkes bought drinks for them. But Ringo wasn’t having any of a white man’s faith, free booze or not.

  They sat down near the jukebox, which was playing “Show Me the Way to Go home,” one of the church’s official hymns. They ordered a pitcher of beer apiece and a couple of hamburgers for Ringo. Seeing Red’s expression, Ringo told the waitress, “Take it easy on the catsup.”

  “How’s the poetry going?” Ringo said, though he could care less.

  “I’m about to give up and write a book. One on the myths and legends of the sewer system of Golden Gate City.”

  “Man, that’s spooky,” Ringo said. “You don’t believe any of that shit, do you?”

  “The Phantom of the Sewers? Why not? He could be just some wino that went ape and decided to imitate Lon Chaney. There are lots of places he could hole up, and anyway he doesn’t have to spend all his time haunting the tunnels. He could live part of the time upstairs, maybe he’s right here now, standing at the bar, drinking, laughing at us.”

  Ringo looked quickly at the customers at the bar and said, “Naw. Not them.”

  “Has the Phantom ever done anything to hurt anybody, besides scare them half to death? And with what? A Halloween skull mask and a black robe? I don’t think someone threw acid in his face and it ate his face off so the skull shows. That’s right out of the old movie, Ringo.”

  “I seen him once, anyway,” Ringo said. “He was poling a long shallow boat along, standing up in it, his robes fluttering in the wind, he was near-one of the big fans, and his eyes was big and white, and his face was half gone. That was scary enough but what really made me take off was his passenger. It looked like a heap of … something, a heap that was pulsing like a toad. It had one round eye, no lid, which was staring at me.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t believe in that crap,” Red McCune said.

  “What I say and what I believe ain’t always the same thing.”

  “Lots of people are that way,” Red said. “It sounds like the Phantom made friends with the Terrible Turdothere.”

  He grinned, but the grin was only to show that he wasn’t serious. If Ringo thought he was serious, he’d never go down into the sewers again. There’d go his job and his seniority and his pension and his World War Two souvenirs. There’d go his satisfaction and contentment, too, because Ringo liked his job. No matter what he said about it, he liked it.

  Every bat to his own belfry.

  “I don’t know,” Ringo said slowly. “I ain’t seen the Phantom since, and nobody else has either as far as I could find out. Do you suppose that the Phantom was hypnotized by the Turdothere and it had commanded him to take it to its secret lair where it could eat the Phantom?”

  They were silent for a while as they watched the horror films on the picture tubes of their minds. These were the latest in a long line: Dracula Squares Off at the Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Golem Meets the Giant Spirochete, Abbott and Costello Versus the Daughter of Mr. Hyde and the Hyena Woman. When the monsters got tired of eating people, they ate each other.

  As background music, the jukebox, now off the religious kick, was bellowing country music: “A Farmer’s Daughter It Was Who Give Me Two Acres Last Night.” An old man, screaming that he was the long-lost heir to the Rockefeller fortune, was being carried out the back door into the alley. Another old man was coughing up blood under a table. His cronies were betting drinks, from his bottle, for or against his ever taking another drink.

  The myth of the Turdothere went like this. It wasn’t a Mad Scientist that created the Turdothere. In the old days it would have been, but people didn’t believe in a Mad Scientist any more. The faith in their existence was gone. They were as extinct as Zeus or Odin or maybe even God.

  It was The Mad TV Writer that was the new menace. The name was Victor Scheissmiller, a man who had really lived. Everybody had seen his picture in the newspapers and magazines and read about him in them. He wasn’t something made up.

  It was true that he had gone mad, his mind off-course like Wrong Way Corrigan’s airplane. After eighteen years of writing contest shows, children’s
shows, westerns, cops-and-robbers, science-fiction series, and soap operas, he blew the tube on his mental set. There wasn’t any warranty, and he didn’t try to trade in the old mind. He disappeared one day, last seen climbing down a manhole. The note he left behind said he was going to create a monster, the Turdothere, and release it on the world. After it ate up all the sewer workers, it would emerge from a storm sewer and devour the whole population while they sat hypnotized before their TV’s.

  The surface people thought it was a big joke. The tunnel people laughed about it when they were above. But when they were below, they did a lot of looking over their shoulders.

  Nobody had seen Victor Scheissmiller in the sewers, but some had seen the heaving stinking mass of the Turdothere with its one glass eye—Scheissmiller’s own, some said. Some workers said that it was the Turdothere that had killed their buddies and cut off the head, legs, and arms. But those who’d seen the thing said it had no teeth. It must gum its victims to death, or maybe it stuck a tentacle of crap down their throats and choked them. Then it wrapped itself around them and dissolved them in its juices.

  How did it keep alive when only a few people had disappeared in the sewers? Easy. It ate rats, too. And it was probably a cannibal; it ate crap, too.

  It grew even larger then, and it could become a colossus, since there was no end of this kind of food, unless the plumbers went on strike. Its main body, though, was supposed to be in a sort of skeleton, old bones put together by Scheissmiller. There were nerves of thread and catgut and a condom swelling and shrinking like a heart, pumping muscatel from a bottle for its blood, a jar of vaginal jelly for a liver, cigar butts embedded in the body drawing oxygen through it. And so on.

  Others said this wasn’t correct. The thing was a 300-pound mass of nothing but living crap, no bones or bottles in it, and it flowed along and changed shape like The Brobdingnagian Bacillus That Desired Raquel Welch. (Later retitled I Bugged the Body Beautiful.)

  Everybody agreed, though, that it had one glass eye which it used to spot its victims.

  “Mostly it’s made of dead human hopes,” Red said.

  “What?” Ringo said.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Red added. “Look who’s here!”

  Ringo jumped up with a scream, upsetting a pitcher of beer, and he whirled around, crying, “Oh, no! It’s not here!”

  “So you don’t believe?” Red said, sneering. “No, Ringo, it isn’t the Turdothere. It’s Inspector Bleek himself.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Ringo said. He sat down and tried to hide his shaking by gripping Red’s pitcher with two hands and pouring out a glass of beer. He didn’t make it.

  Bleek drew up a chair and thrust his ugly face across the table as close as he could get it to Red’s face. “I just got the coroner’s report from the cops,” he said. “Ernie was raped, just like those other two boys.”

  Ringo ordered two more pitchers. Red was silent for a while, then he said, “Was it before or after they were killed?”

  “Before,” Bleek said.

  “That tears it,” Ringo said. “I’m quitting. If I’m gonna be butchered by a sexual pervert, I’m gonna do it up in the sunshine.”

  “With all the security you got?” Bleek said. “I was afraid you two guys were thinking of quitting, which is why I am here. Hang on, old buddies. Tomorrow the police are going to conduct a massive manhunt through the entire sewer system. They need guides, so you two can help, if you want to.”

  He put his arm around Red and squeezed his shoulder.

  “The Public Works Department expects every man to do his duty. Besides, there’ll be camera crews down there tomorrow. You might get to see yourself on TV.”

  How could anybody resist that?

  5.

  The hunt took four days, and it turned out just like Red McCune expected it to. Lights blazed, men yelled, bloodhounds bayed. The darkness moved in after the lights moved on, the men got hoarse and fell silent, the hounds smelled nothing but sewer gas. The hounds didn’t know what they were looking for, anyway. Nobody had a glove from the Phantom to let them sniff or a dropping from a thing that was all droppings. And the Sewer Slayer, as the papers and TV called him, was out for lunch. Whoever and whatever he was, he was no idiot.

  “See?” Red told Ringo.

  “There’s plenty of places to hide, secret exits, alcoves and old tunnels that’ve been bricked off, and stuff like that,” Ringo answered. “Anyway, how do we know he wasn’t hiding under the water? The Phantom of the Opera walked underwater while he breathed through a tube.”

  What they did find was a Pekingese dog that’d been tortured to death and three human fetuses, all looking like Martians that had crash-landed. The usual.

  They also found the rats, or maybe it was the other way around. This was when the hunters started having a good time. After trudging for miles through dark wet stinking places, getting tired and half-nauseated and bored, and in a killing mood, they had something to kill.

  The rats had been running for hours ahead of them, and now there was a wagon train of them, about four hundred furry gray pioneers cornered by the Indians. Most of them had swum through canals during their flight and so looked like dust mops that had been rained on. Their eyes shone red in the beams, like little traffic lights, STOP they said, and the men did halt for a minute while they looked the squealing heaving mass over. A flashlight caught a blur that leaped down from a ledge at the far end of the chamber. It was three times as big as the others, and its one eye seemed to have its own glow. It was not gray but white above and black below.

  “That must be their leader,” one of the cops said. “Lord, I’m glad they’re not all that big!”

  The shooting and the clubbing started then. The .38’s and the .45’s and the shotguns boomed, deafening everybody in a few seconds. The rats blew up as if they were little land mines. Most of them ran back and forth instead of making a run for it through the humans. They’d heard that a cornered rat always fights, and they believed it. The skeptics among them dashed through the hunters, biting a few hands and legs. Most of them were smashed with saps or flashlights but a few got away.

  Ringo jumped in with the others, swinging a Samurai sword from his collection. “Banzai!” he’d cry, and when a rat leaped at him and he cut off its head in midair, “Ah, so!”

  Beyond him Inspector Bleek, a big grin on his face like a Halloween pumpkin’s, fired a six-shooter into the horde. It was an heirloom from his great-grandfather, who had conquered the West with it. Its barrel was long enough and wide enough to make an elephant proctologist happy. It flashed out .44-caliber bullets which mowed the rats down like they were grandfather’s Indians.

  In his other hand he held a big Bowie knife. Red wondered if he meant to do some scalping when the last stand was over. Red crouched down against the wall. He wasn’t afraid of the rats but he didn’t enjoy killing them either. He wanted to hang back mostly because he knew the bullets would start ricocheting. Sure enough, one screamed by, just like in a Western, and another followed it, and then some cop yelled that the rats were firing back. Later it turned out he’d been stunned by a bullet which just touched his forehead, and in his stupor he thought sure the rats had got hold of some guns.

  The men started ducking but they kept on shooting. After a while, a man was hit in the leg, and the hunters started to come to their senses. The explosions died like the last of popcorn in the pan, the echoes feebled away, and there was silence except for the running waters behind them and the faraway baying of the hounds. Their owner wasn’t risking his valuable property around anything so unreliable as rats.

  The blood ran down the slanting apron of concrete to the channel for a minute. Then it stopped, like an oil well gone dry, go home, boys, I’m out of dinosaurs.

  The only survivor was a big old rat, the Custer of the 7th Underground Cavalry. He climbed over and slid down body after body, dragging his hind legs, which were missing their feet, his goal the waters.

&nb
sp; “He’s sure got slanty eyes,” Ringo said, and he leaped, shouting, “Banzai!” and his sword cut off the rat’s head.

  “Goddamn it!” Bleek said. “I wanted to do that!”

  “I did that because I admired the son of a bitch,” Ringo said. “He’s got guts. He deserved an honorable death.”

  “You’re crazy,” Bleek said. He looked around, waving his Bowie as if it were a baton and the orchestra had gone on strike.

  “Hey!” a cop said. “Look at that!”

  In a corner was a mass of bodies and pieces of bodies. They’d been hosed against the wall and piled up by a stream of bullets. Everything in it seemed to have been killed three times at least. But it was stirring and then it was quaking, and cracks appeared, and suddenly the giant rat they’d glimpsed when the massacre began erupted. Only it wasn’t a rat. It was a cat, snarling, his one eye as bright as a hotrodder’s exhaust, his back curved as if he was a bow about to shoot himself at them. Despite the blood that streaked him, his coloring, white above and black below, showed through.

  “Why, that’s Old Half-Moon!” Red said.

  “Who the hell’s Half-Moon?” Bleek said.

  Red didn’t say anything about his being a legend of the sewers. He said, “He’s been around a couple of years at least. When I first saw him, he was just an old alley cat. But he started getting big because rats make good eating. Look at him! He’s been through a hundred fights above and two hundred below! One eye gone and both ears chewed apart. But he’s a terror among the rats. I saw him take on ten one time and kill them all.”

  “Yeah?” Bleek said. He took a few steps toward Old Half-Moon. The cat crouched as if to spring. Bleek admonished him with his knife but he stopped.

  “I think he’s become pals with the rats,” he said. “He’s their leader. After all, you are what you eat, and he eats nothing but rats, so he must be half rat.”