A City Dreaming (6 page)

Hari Kumar Stockdale was many things: He was a lover of nineteenth-century adventure stories. He was a frequent wearer of hats. He had once seen service on a whaling ship. He could not use chopsticks.

He was a very hard man to kill. Inside of his jacket pocket was a gravity knife, a four-inch handle with a blade much larger, and then it was outside his pocket, and then it was open. If M knew Stockdale at all, and M did, this was one of the happiest moments of his life, playing Aragorn in the dim outskirts of reality. Worth the trip, you had best believe. And he proved himself up to the challenge, neatly dodging the goblin's attack, pivoting and responding in a fashion that left the green-skinned creature bled white and tumbling, gracelessly, into the train tracks.

The remaining hobs shrieked and faded back the way they had come.

“You don't really carry that everywhere, do you?” M asked.

“Only when I leave the house,” Stockdale said.

“Where are they going?” D8mon asked, sounding a bit worried. It belatedly occurred to M that he didn't really know D8mon all that well, knew him to get a drink with maybe, but not to stand back-to-back against the rising tide.

“To fetch us some tea and scones, I would think,” M said. But just in case he was wrong, they overturned a couple of the nearby benches, barricading themselves along the platform.

There was a horn blast that made M think of a hanged man shitting himself, and then they rolled out of the darkness four deep, carrying knives and chains and planks of wood with nails sticking out of them. They hooted and they hollered and they screamed madness in their gutter speech. Stockdale held his blade aloft, looked ecstatic to be doing so. One of the goblins came closer than it ought, and Stockdale's counterfeit Caliburn struck a second time, and the thing screamed and fled backward, missing an ear and much of its face.

“The blood of Edward the Black runs in my veins!” Stockdale bellowed. “William the Marshal and John Churchill! Chandragupta and Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur! I am Hari Kumar Stockdale, and I will die with my boots on!”

M was happy that someone was having a good time. The pack, the scrum, perhaps even the mob of goblins, were now wary of the barricade and of the flashing blade that hid beyond it, contented themselves by skating back and forth just out of reach of melee weapons and shouting.

D8mon pulled an iPod out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, pointed skyward. It crackled and sparked for a quarter of a second, and then there was a sound like a MIDI thunderclap and a streak of light seared the chest of the foremost redcap, before dovetailing and hitting two more behind him. The rest scattered back into the darkness.

“Not bad,” Stockdale said.

“Thank you,” D8mon said. “I wish I'd brought my laptop, then you'd really have seen something.”

“What's the hourglass read?” M asked.

D8mon looked over his shoulder for a minute. “There's less sand in the top half than previously.”

“Lovely.”

“They seem to have slacked off, at least.”

But then the platform began to, if not shake, at least resound loudly enough that one could be forgiven for thinking it was shaking. The thing that lumbered into the torchlight did so on its own two feet, rather than gliding along on a set of wheels. The thing did not seem graceful enough to remain upright, had it been roller-skating, though it made up for its lack of agility by being huge and muscled and mean-looking. It was twice the height of M at his shoulders, its skin was the black-green of a bad bruise, its tusks, somewhere between walrus and elephant-size, jutted out from its jowls. In one hand it carried a club fully the size of a normal man, knotted and warped as the thing's skin, thick metal apples on chains hanging from the business end.

“If you were thinking of saving the day in some heroic and unexpected fashion,” Stockdale said to M, “now would be the time to do so.”

M took a deep breath, smiled, and hopped up over the barricade. “Bill!”
he said, strutting forward toward the monstrosity. “I haven't seen you since the ten-year reunion, back in '08!”

The ogre cocked his head at M, a task made somewhat difficult by the fact that its skull seemed to be attached directly to its overbroad shoulders. Its club hung forgotten in his off hand. After a moment it croaked an unintelligible response.

“And how the hell have you been? You were planning to set up a distillery in Inkinshire, if I remember correctly—double malt, you'd promised me. How'd that end up going?”

Bill made the sort of sound which, were it coming from your car, would suggest you needed to have your brake pads replaced.

“And Madge? How is Madge these days? I hope you held on to her, she's a good egg if ever there was one!”

Another shrill squeal of a similar type.

“I hate to make a break for it, Bill, what with us not having seen each other in so long—but my train's just a moment or two out, and it would be a damn shame if I missed it.”

Bill grunted something that sounded rather regretful.

“Don't suppose you could do me a solid and keep this riffraff off our backs? Bad element, you know. Not to be trusted and so forth.”

Bill nodded and smiled, exposing crooked green teeth the size of M's hands. Then it turned and let out a bellow that flickered dark the nearby torches, and began to wade back the way it came, its club swinging lustily.

Things screamed in the dark.

M returned to the other end of the barricades and the astonished looks of his comrades. “Confidence is nine-tenths of everything,” he explained.

The screams grew louder, so loud that they nearly drowned out the arrival of the train, which had the facade of a Gothic church, and no windows.

“Where's it going?”

“Gotta be better than here,” Stockdale said, holding the door until his companions could enter.

But as M took a seat and looked back the way he had come, he saw that above the door was a stained glass panel reading, “Abandon all hope . . .” and he thought to himself,
Fuck.

•  •  •

The Alighieri Special was in a state of furious decay. The standing bars were bent, most of the seating had been torn out, and there was trash everywhere. The lights flickered on and off. The scent of urine was almost overpowering. It was somewhat worse than your average L train.

“Happy Valley Station, next stop,” a voice said.

“Rapists' Corner, next station,” it said again a few minutes later.

“Your Mother Never Loved You, change for the 4 train, the B train, and the Long Island Railroad.”

“That's a bit much, don't you think,” D8mon asked, licking his lips.

“Isn't it just?” Stockdale commented.

The doors closed, the train began to pull away.

D8mon lit his last cigarette and tucked it into his smirk. “They'll have to do better than that.”

But of course, they did.

A few stops later M's cell phone began to emit a loud, bleating shriek, as if transmitting from an abattoir. Stockdale's began to do the same a moment later. For some strange reason D8mon's iPhone began to play a remix of a Katy Perry song. D8mon swore that he didn't have any Katy Perry on his iPhone, but no one believed him. By the next stop, all of their electronic devices were behaving in ways contrary or at least unrelated to their normal functions. M's phone showing something that seemed like a pornographic snuff film involving humanoid bunny rabbits, though M did not look at it long enough to be sure. When the door opened next, they tossed their mobiles onto the platform. M half expected something to rise up and catch them—severed hands of the hell-caught dead—but nothing did. M did not suppose he'd be so lucky if he stepped outside himself.

The urine smell was replaced with rotting flesh, and then cotton candy, and then rotting flesh again. The voice coming over the loud speaker began to tell the story of a child being tortured and eaten, a few sentences each stop (“and then they sharpened their knives against her sternum, and then they nibbled at the corners of her clavicle”). M ignored it, and eventually it stopped. For a very long time afterward the names of the station were the only thing that could be heard, and mostly they seemed straight from an unpublished H.P. Lovecraft story, consonants crammed inconsiderately against one another.

“Grand Army Plaza, next stop.”

D8mon perked his head up all of a sudden. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” M said.

“The conductor said Grand Army Plaza.”

“I heard him.”

There was no need to observe that this was the first stop in however long they had been on the train that existed in the reality they came from. Grand Army Plaza Station was deserted but looked like it always did, like it had a thousand other times that M had seen it. Part of his soul died when the door closed.

“Next station will be Franklin,” the speakers announced.

“I'm going to take it,” D8mon said, standing up swiftly. “It could be our last shot.”

M didn't move. “It's a trick,” he said.

“What?”

“Franklin doesn't come after Grand Army Plaza.”

“Of course it does,” D8mon said, wanting it to be true enough to speak with certainty.

“It does not.”

“You're out of your mind.”

“If you're heading downtown, then it goes Franklin, Eastern Parkway, Grand Army, Bergen. If you're heading uptown, it's the reverse. But either way, Franklin does not come after Grand Army Plaza.”

“They're trying to fuck with you,” Stockdale said.

“They already have,” D8mon insisted. “Don't you get it? This is hell, right here, the three of us stuck smelling piss for the rest of eternity.” And after he said it, he stood up, took a few steps toward the door, and wrapped his hands around one of the poles.

“Hell is not an existentialist play,” M said, “it involves knives and hot poker sodomy. Do not get off this train.”

“D8mon,” Stockdale repeated, “do not get off this train.”

The train started to slow down. D8mon was still standing at the doorway, wide-eyed. “How long have we been here?”

“I don't know.”

“Could it be years?” D8mon asked. His eyes were blinkered. His pompadour, however, was still immaculate.

“It could be centuries,” M said, and if you didn't know any better he seemed very much to be losing his temper. “And it doesn't matter—because hell is eternity, my friend, and it's an eternity with needles in your eyes, and I assure you what we have at the moment is preferable.”

D8mon reached into his pocket and came out with a small caliber handgun, the kind of thing that might be used to rob a convenience store. The way he held it, M got the sense D8mon hadn't had a lot of practice. Then again, you don't need a lot of practice to shoot two friends at close range. “If you don't have the balls to make a move, that's your business,” he said. “But I'm not going to spend the remainder of forever stuck in a subway car.”

“You'd rather be blowing razor-blade chewing gum?” M asked, but he put his hands up, to show that he had no intention of obstructing the man.

Stockdale looked like he was going to say something, but then he too shrugged and leaned back against the wall. D8mon was a big boy. He could make his own mistakes.

The train opened, and D8mon took a few steps closer to it, till he was skirting the exit. Then he whooped loudly and leaped onto the platform.

The doors shut sooner than they should have, or at least sooner than M thought they did on normal trains, like a trap closing, or a coffin. D8mon was quickly lost from sight.

M sat back down. Stockdale did also. M began to silently rethink his policy on bad decisions.

“Eastern Parkway, Grand Army, then Bergen?” Stockdale asked.

M didn't answer. The names of the stations went back to being incomprehensible or horrifying and often both.

•  •  •

The door opened. “Last stop,” said a voice from the speaker.

They sat there a while, a long while, still half fearing it was a trick. Finally an attendant came on and asked them politely to leave, and they allowed themselves to be ushered off.

The Nexus was bright and very clean and seemed to be built mostly of crystal. It was vast beyond comprehension, but somehow its vastness was
not intimidating. Smiling travelers moved by swiftly but without any sense of hurry, commuters on their way somewhere, youthful travelers with bright eyes and heavy backpacks on their way anywhere. On a board stretching upward to the sun every conceivable destination flickered past, the letters rattling over one another loudly. They found their way to an information kiosk, where a pretty young woman in a sky-blue outfit smiled at them. “Can I help you get somewhere?” she asked pleasantly.

M looked at Stockdale. Stockdale looked very tired. M thought he probably looked the same.

“Crown Heights,” M said.

The attendant smiled and nodded and gave them directions. It was a straight shot, she said, thirty minutes to Nostrand.

They found their platform, the train arriving not long thereafter. They found a seat. Half an hour later the doors opened on reality, for whatever that was worth. It was morning. M and Stockdale found their way to a nearby breakfast joint, had a bite to eat, smoked three cigarettes each, and then went home to sleep.

No one ever saw D8mon again. No one has seen him yet, at least.

M found himself on Washington Avenue late one rainy afternoon toward the beginning of December. He often found himself on Washington Avenue in the late afternoon and often afterward found himself inside a dimly lit little cave called The Lady, and then up at the counter, and then down on a stool. And why not? An establishment where a person will serve you alcohol in exchange for money? That was a good idea, to M's way of thinking. M could see how it had caught on.