Black Leather Required Read online

  The rust-browned steel mashing and scraping my ear was uniformly moistened with some kind of slime–probably snowmelt and particulate dirt, though it seemed more slippery than plain water. If I was going to play Batman and live, I'd have to step more cautiously. I was going to lose time by being careful. I reestablished my footholds, toeing-in for a solid friction contact with the metal beneath the light coat of lubrication before belaying my full weight backward onto the line again.

  My breathing equalized. Calm. Calm. I was okay. I opened my eyes. I saw I had stopped eight or nine feet below the pale, yellowish light shining out of my bathroom window. In the light, in silhouette, was somebody's head, looking down toward me.

  "What the hell are you doing hanging around down there, boy?"

  Fear lanced through my lungs, chased by impotent anger. It was Bauhaus. The son of a bitch bastard had come to check up on his foiled bust.

  I hung silent. What the fuck could I say?

  "Got a little present for you," he went on, as though I was sitting in my easy chair, in the light, and not starting to sweat about doing a Chiquita. "It's a gift from your old boss, Emilio–who don't like people doing sneakery behind his back." A musical clinking noise echoed coldly in the shaft. It was a sound I recognized far too readily, from the past hassles of my life. Bauhaus had just flicked open a Manila Folder–one of those knives with the hinged and ventilated brass handles.

  He was out of my reach by two body lengths.

  "It took longer to finish off Rosie in this place than we thought," he said. "But tonight you finally get your turn."

  "What about Rosie?" I husked, my desperation starting to boil over in an unseemly, messy fashion. "Rosie's here?"

  "Not no more, boy." Bauhaus grinned. I think. I couldn't really tell in the useless light. Then he sliced through my extension cord. That part I didn't have to see.

  The tension on the line vanished. Air rushed past my head, the steel wall tilted madly away, and I fell like a meteor with the wire still fisted up in both hands. My mouth was wide open. I did a complete backward somersault before hitting the bottom of the shaft at full speed. Splat.

  It was not a nightmare. When I cracked my eyes open, I knew I was not laying in bed. Bed was warm.

  Cold. Then pain, ramming up to full volume, maxing-out my consciousness. Then wetness, edged with ice. Blunted Perception of my head split open and crammed full of permafrost and spiders and razor cubes of glass. Too much to fit, head bursting, hard, sharp things jammed into my back, pushing me out of shape. Movement a joke. Darkness hurts eyes.

  I think something is broken, then I die. Many somethings.

  The well-bottom acoustics woke me the second time. The tendons and ligaments tying my head to my trunk felt as if some sadistic surgeon had torn them out, salted and fried them until they shriveled, then stuffed them back in the wrong order and sutured up the entry cut with a staple gun. All around me was the suffocating, empty blackness, no illusion now, and the sound of dripping gunk.

  My pulverized right arm was a dully pulsing firebrand of junk. It did not respond to my brain's commands–it was a total disconnect. It hardly hurt at all.

  Left-handed, I pawed clumsily for my flashlight, and found the baton bent into a crooked U-shape around my shattered ribs. Useless. My internal organs felt like a bagful of flattened aluminum cans. It seemed to take an hour of darkness to dig out one of my candles, and I lost a handful of matches when a spasm of pain shuddered the shit out of me without warning. I thought of my intestines blowing on impact and loading my pants. I couldn't tell anything past wave after wave of stupefying pain, and when I dropped the matches I cried.

  Finally, later, I scratched one alight and held it in my teeth while fishing out a candle stub. My pupils recoiled from the sharp dazzle. More new pain. I burnt my lips, top and bottom. But I did it.

  I was propped on my back, facing up, submerged from the navel down in two feet of murky, brown bilge water filling a concrete trough afloat with orts of crap that had all festered to unrecognizability. A loop of extension cord lay curled across my chest. I was tilted at about a thirty-degree angle on top of something like a big packing crate, which had broken my fall and I think my spine. I couldn't feel either of my legs–just blistering green pain starting at asshole level and scorching up through the ceiling of my skull. I thought of Drea, entwining her legs around me. I cried again.

  A broad spear of split wood slatting jutted up through the torn right sleeve of my jacket. I could see the fresher-colored wood inside the break. It had dried blood on it. I had been tuned out for quite awhile. I was gone. Emilio's long arm had erased me the way I'd squished that poor fucking roach. I felt like a bug under a dropped safe.

  On the opposite side of the shaft, just above the waterline, was what might have been a subbasement window at one time. Now it was blocked up with a riveted steel shutter. Maybe it was Freddy's private entrance. Maybe he crawled down here to geek pigeons or sodomize pre-schoolers.

  No rats. No dead cats.

  It was pretty clear that any attempt to locomote would turn me facedown into the slime, and I didn't hanker to die that way, thanks. I watched my candle stub burn. After the two additional ones in my left pocket, my light was finito.

  Bobbing next to my dead right arm I saw my miniature life raft of nose candy. It was seaworthy, after all. I think my heart gave a thump of hope, but it felt like something else bursting wetly inside me. I gagged up bright red froth.

  My body was clocking out and I had to do something.

  Gently, I nudged the circlet of wire off my chest to lasso my buoyant package and tow it closer. Every motion caused a dizzying jolt of pain, or threatened to plummet me back into blackout land. I could have manipulated it for a painstaking hour or two, I don't know, but ultimately I captured it and pulled it up one-handed. It weighed two thousand pounds, easy. I tugged down the zipper on my coat and stuffed the parcel where it could not fall back into the water, then I touched the candle flame to an upper corner and watched the four layers of plastic brown and separate, yawning open like a bloodless wound. I stationed the candle on the juncture of zipper teeth, and scooped up a handful of blow, enough to fill Drea's pinky vial to the brim a hundred times. I cupped it into my face and respirated as much as I could before winking out. I needed a clear sensorium.

  . . . gotta make sure you don't inhale none. . .

  Rosie's voice was only in my head as I slid back from Oz. I made a noise that echoed in the vertical tunnel, a life-asserting grunt of pitiful weakness. It was all I could muster.

  My candle had abandoned its post, rolled off and gone under. But like I said, the dark doesn't scare me. So what was I afraid of? I feared getting busted, either by iguana-eyed, trigger-happy cops, or by falling four stories and becoming very broken. I'm afraid of betrayal. Of getting shafted, ho, ho, ho.

  I used my left hand to feel around beneath the surface for my candle stub. It was easier than trying to wrestle out a fresh one. I came up with several shards of busted wood so waterlogged that they sank as soon as I dropped them back. Then my fingers closed around something long and round, with a knoblike bump at one end, too smooth to be another chunk of the crate I'd obliterated with my body. It was hard and light; I laid it across my chest and struck a new match. It was a porous and glistening bone. An ulna–the longer of the two crossed forearm bones. Once upon a time the bump on the end had been somebody's elbow. I stopped breathing.

  "Owww–shit!" The match that had just blackened my fingertips fell and hissed out in the thick brown water. The darkness gushed back in and afterimages of the bone danced on the air. It was the sick ochre color of diseased eyes, and had tough little strings of meat still clinging to it. I slammed my eyes shut and could still see it, hovering, dissolving to yellow motes at the edges; when I opened them again there was only the plunging, time-elongating void. . . and an ugly catalogue of my friend Rosie's possible fates.

  The water moved. It rolled heavily up toward my face, fl
oating the bone free and then receding in a massy, tidal movement, the way a full bathtub shifts when you climb in.

  Something big had just changed position in the sump at the far end of the shaft. The deep end of the pool.

  I tried to butt past my own pain, and dug for more matches, more light, fast, my breath whimpering out. All I could think of was Rosie, trapped down here with something that made him into a skeleton. Something big.

  He might drift in and out of consciousness, moaning. Making weak, pallid sounds nobody could really hear, because nobody paid attention that close. Nobody, at least, who wasn't using a controlled substance to sharpen his senses.

  The match sputtered as I touched it to the wick of the second candle. The water was still rippling, and now I could see that the metal shutter across from me was halfway open. It looked like a way out. Screw it, I thought, sudden fear engulfing me to the nostrils and encouraging me to be reckless. My imagination was huffing and straining and doing a great job of making me crazy. But if I couldn't haul my dead ass over there on one arm through a measly two feet of sewage, then I didn't deserve to get out, did I?

  I perched my candle on the bloodstained spur of wood. And did it.

  I figured my legs would be dead weight, more or less like my pulped arm. I figured wrong. Below the knees I didn't have legs anymore. When I sloshed over sideways to kiss the filthy water, one of them broke the surface and I saw that my thigh ended in a coagulate stump.

  The kilo bag wormed from my coat, splashed, and sank. White paste corkscrewed around on the oily surface of the water, like powdered creamer resolving into coffee.

  In the flickering candlelight, I hefted my body onto my good arm and looked up into a bullet-shaped, eyeless head that had nosed out of the water between me and the hatchway. It was the girth of a Navy torpedo, and so was the triangular, turd-colored body that uncoiled behind it and sent greasy waves slopping against the walls of the shaft. The shadows lurched as the water lapped against the spur of wood, then disappeared altogether as the candle tumbled and splashed.

  Too many drugs scampered around in my head too many like a scorpion stinging itself to death in mad circles too many fucking drugs, Cruz!

  I screamed for help in the wet darkness then, or tried to scream, coughing up mushy chunks of my lungs barely flavored with what was left of my voice. That's when the blunt face darted in to bite me. Twice. Needle punctures stung me in the kidneys. I yelled as best I could as my hand skidded in the muck, submerging my face. I pushed back up immediately. . .and then noticed I could barely feel my left arm, my good arm, anymore. All my pain started to blot away behind a pleasing, Novocain numbness that spread gently up toward my eyes to cloud them over.

  It could only eat a little bit at a time. I understood that, yeah.

  Far above me, miles overhead, a tiny yellow rectangle broke the total blackness as someone hammered up their bedroom window. I tried to shout again, but the numbness caressed my larynx and all that came out was a purring noise. A moan.

  "Shut the fuck up!" someone shouted, and the window banged shut again, bringing the real world to an ugly end. None of this was happening, not really, nobody would be that rude because I try not to be a bad guy, you know what I mean?

  Maybe it was like the spiders, an illusion. Maybe, if I became the ghost now, I'd be following Rosie's lead and everything would get back to normal again.

  The cool water closed over my face so I could not see or hear any more. Normal. The sliding, sinuous weight embraced me. I think I smiled.

  Author's Note:

  For the record, this story was the first piece of short fiction I completed after the fanfare garnered by "Red Light," and is the genesis of my second novel, which became the most notorious and elusive horror novel of 1990, a source of no small perverse pride for me. The principle difference is that the story version is told via Cruz in the first person, and its events cover space in the novel ranging from Chapter Three to about mid-book. I've spoiled no surprises by including it here, just in case you were wondering.

  Sedalia

  Due east of Nalgadas Butte, Case could see dinosaurs silhouetted against a sunset the tint of a bruise. He snubbed his filter-less Camel against the instep of one boot and dropped it amid the scatter of dead butts at his feet. It smoldered cantankerously. He'd been standing for a long time, just watching.

  As he watched, a Mamenchisaurus the length of two tractor trailer trucks eased up from relieving itself on the alkali hardpan. It switched a thirty-foot neck around to check its business, then promptly faded from view like a fuzzy TV image dissolving into static. The loose pyramid of million-year-old dinosaur shit remained completely corporeal. It was so real heat shimmer curled up from it. Case was accustomed to the stench. A professional, was Whitman Case.

  While the big 'dine frizzed into vapor, a bug-eyed Coelophysis materialized not ten feet from where Case was loitering. The ostrich throat gulped in surprise as it attained solidity. It spotted Case, did a double-take like a cartoon character, and scampered away on spindly bird legs. It was the riotous color of an amoebic slide at an Iron Butterfly concert. It would be hungry for eggs or perhaps a bite-sized salamander, if it lasted long.

  Good hunting, Case thought. He would not have tipped his hat even if he had been wearing one. Too damned hot.

  If Whit Case resembled a Marlboro Man it was purely by accident; he felt as incongruous as the notion of a herd of ghost dinosaurs might have been, two years back. Nowadays people accepted the 'dines as part of the same world of betrayal, death and taxes as the one upon which they treadmilled the ole nine-to-fiver. Explanations for the phenomenon had not been instantly apparent, although a corral of academics fell all over themselves proposing theories. The sole halfway sensible explanation had been posited by a man named Seward, and he hadn't even been accredited. He told people why the 'dines had come back in simple language. All the rest had gone crazy with tabloid fever: Dinosaurs were skinks mutated by atomic radiation. From UFOs. From Russia. From Russian UFOs. They were automatons manufactured by corporations hungry to profit from mass panic. They were military biowar accidents.

  They were almost overlooked in the mad dash for publicity. Case thought all the scholars and profs and degree chimps suffered from terminal vapor lock of the sphincter. Unlike the big momma 'dine that had just unleashed a megaton of extremely real–though antediluvian–reptile poop to the east of Nalgadas Butte. A bilingual pun, thought Case. Christ, we've been hanging fire in one place so goddamn long the convolutions in my fucking brain are smoothing out.

  He wished he could be as smart as that Seward fella. Intelligent people probably weren't so bored all the time. He tapped out his next Camel. Nothing to do out here except wait, smoke, watch the sun ebb. Sentry the 'dines as they winked in and out, keep them grouped. Wait, smoke some more, cough, ask the drive mojo if they could press forward, onward with the dawn, and if the mojo said no again today, then wait some more, fuck your hand and try to make the day pass quickly so you could ask the mojo again tomorrow.

  Aguilar had humped it up the geologic formation the drovers had named the Stirrup. Said he was searching for the limestone plateau where legend had it that a 'dine drover had scattered his mental marbles permanently by playing endless hands of twenty-one with the shade of Jack the Ripper, betting his soul or his life, Case had forgotten which. Aguilar had not stuck around camp, knowing that the mojo, whose name was Ernesto "Shack" Cocoberra, would just say no again today. So off he rode, without even asking.

  Maybe Aguilar was going crazy waiting, too.

  Droving had been a lost American craft until the 'dines had resurged. Who cared if they were totally real or not, so long as a profit might be turned from herding them?

  The big beasts had rescued Case from the fallout of his third firebombed marriage and a coke habit which, fiscally speaking, had begun to resemble the jackpot of the state lottery on one of those days when nobody had picked the right numbers for awhile. He had not known how appealing
a cold-turkey switchoff could be until his droving contract had been bonded. He'd been required to pass urine and blood tests, and had skinned past. Only just.

  He had replaced the whoopee dust with Camels and contemplation. The hole left in him by Pearl never closed.

  The hornet buzz of Aguilar's trailbike came razzing across the flats. Like Moses, he had come on down. Probably with no news of spirits. And at dawn Shack would gravely inform all hands that they had to stay right where they were for one more thrilling day.

  If your honor was intact, the waiting wasn't so bad.

  Case waited to swap the usual words with Aguilar. In about an hour there would be microwave chili and seven card stud, and a fire around which the oldest stories and the rawest jokes would be repeated one more time.

  With a wet water balloon squeegee noise, a Triceratops pressed through into the real world, its golden disc eyes glazed from the transfer. It pawed dust and wandered off, making the earth tremble. Case sniffed the languid air. Nothing like fresh dino waft to hand-cancel your appetite.

  Below, in the bowl of the valley, a thousand or so dinosaurs milled around in varying states of corporeality. Excreting. Mating. Waiting, like Case.

  What started out as a Time Magazine cover screamer had become a growth industry. Case's current profession was a byproduct of the Sherlockian equations that had come out of that fella Seward's mind. And the happenstance that first set Seward to his brainwork had occurred at a rundown Texaco station in the middle of Riverside, California.

  The best thing about Lloyd Lamed's antique pop machine was that it really kept the bottled soft drinks ice-cold. Lloyd had just taken a good swig off of his Dr. Pepper when the Tyrannosaurus Rex crushed his Texaco station. It jammed its grinning, leathery skull through the roof of the garage, nearly uprooting the entire building, and its confined thrashing took out louvered metal doors and cinderblock walls like toothpicks and cardboard. It kicked down the office. It wiped out the Ladies Room with its fat cable of tail.