Halloween and Other Seasons (19 page)

“Uh, yeah, Nick.” Lansing nodded curtly and left.

The eighteenth floor was completely gutted for renovation, and he went there gratefully, happy to be alone. But soon the emptiness of the floor and the strange shadows cast by the boxes and crates lying around began to get to him. He heard noises, and imagined a dancing foot, a legion of dancing feet, kicking things around, marching right up to him—

He swung around as the elevator door suddenly opened. Nobody got off. After a moment the doors closed again, and the arrival light over the opening went out. There was dusty silence for a moment, and then as Lansing turned to get back to work something moved.

He distinctly saw it, a severed foot scooting around a crate by the elevator, and out of sight. He began to shake and his body went numb, as if two giant icy hands had grabbed him. There was a scratching sound, and then the sound of a moving ballet slipper.

Lansing went rigid. The shuffling got louder, and then he saw a foot with a slipper on it appear from behind the crate.

Suddenly the elevator doors opened again, and the foot ran behind a box. Morelli stepped out into the room.

“Hey kid,” he said, and then he saw Lansing standing frozen. “What’s wrong?”

“The foot!” Lansing said.

“What?”

“Don’t you hear the dancing?” He felt as if he would faint.

“Kid, go home early. Right now. Whatever’s wrong, flush it out and come back tomorrow ready to work. I don’t want a sick guy on the job, makes me look like a lousy foreman. Believe me, you don’t look so good.”

“I—” He nodded. “Okay.”

He got in the most crowded subway car on the train and looked straight ahead all the way home. He was afraid that if he looked down he would see the foot in front of him. He thought he heard the rap-shuffle of it walking, but he refused to look. There was a light kick at the cuff of his pants just before his stop, but still he gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead.

He ran to his apartment and bolted the door, stuffing towels underneath the sill. He heard tiny footsteps outside. He slammed the windows shut, and double-locked the window leading to the fire escape, pulling down the shade. He sat on the bed in the corner of the room and pulled up his knees, closing his eyes tight.

There was the squeak-shuffle sound of a ballet slipper dancing.

He went to the window, sweating, and peeked out under the shade. An old man had set his hat on the ground in front of the building, and was doing a soft shoe dance.

Lansing yanked up the window and screamed at the old man, who quickly moved off. He pulled the window back down and went back to the bed.

Shutting his eyes, he tried to think of the girl and the train. But only the image of his mother came to him, dancing her hand in front of him, waiting for his baby smile, then the fist—

Something was kicking around in the closet, and then the closet door opened.

The foot was in the room. Lansing opened his eyes and saw it skitter under the bed. It began to kick things around, moving shoes around, jumping up and kicking at the bottom of the mattress.

He screamed and stood quickly up as the foot leaped onto the bed. It disappeared under the covers; Lansing could see it moving around underneath them.

He pulled frantically at the bolts on the door, missing and then finally unlocking them. He threw open the door. He heard the rumple of bedclothes behind him, as the foot kicked the covers aside to follow him. He ran down into the street and toward the subway. Looking back once over his shoulder, he saw the foot walking leisurely, keeping up with him about a half a block behind.

He heard the soft shoe again. It was the old man; he had set his hat down by the subway entrance, and was dancing. Lansing ran past him, kicking the hat as he did so; the old man stopped his dance and yelled after him.

Desperate, Lansing jumped the turnstile, and turned back to see the foot running underneath it. He began to scream, and the startled crowd moved aside in a swath to let him pass. A transit cop, seeing him, began to follow.

He ran down the stairs two at a time to the lower level, and along the platform of the express track. The foot was behind him. There was a roaring in his ears; he looked back to see the transit cop in the distance, an express train coming in, and the foot a few feet behind him, taking great springing jumps into the air. He tried to duck as the foot leaped onto his back, kicking him over the edge of the platform onto the tracks in front of the train. He landed on his back between the two tracks. Wild with terror, he looked over to see the foot stamping at him, and with a convulsive effort he rolled over the track to his right to safety as the train screeched toward him. But then, he realized with horror, the foot was stepping on his left leg, holding it down over the track, pressing it down as the train passed.

There was the shriek of steel on steel and then blackness.

~ * ~

He awoke in the hospital to the sound of Morelli’s voice. The foreman was hovering over him.

“Thank God, he’s coming around,” Morelli said. “Hey kid, how you feel?”

“I…okay, I guess,” he replied. He tried to push himself up to a sitting position and discovered that there was nothing to push with on his left leg but a stump.

Morelli moved quickly to help him sit up. “Hey kid,” he said, obvious concern in his voice, “I’m really sorry about what happened. I keep thinking about fooling you that day with my pants leg pulled down over my shoe and it makes me shiver. That didn’t freak you out, did it?”

“No. No, I’ll be all right,” he said. “You were just kidding around. That had nothing to do with it.”

Morelli looked relieved. “That’s great. I was really worried about it. You know, you were really lucky, kid. There was a cop right there when it happened, he said if you hadn’t moved at the last second you’d have been cut in half or mashed to a pulp. In fact, they might have been able to do something with your foot if…”

Lansing immediately became alert with fear. “What happened to my foot?”

“They…well, they couldn’t find it. It’s really weird.”

Lansing said nothing; and then suddenly the vision of his apartment left open, with the clippings of the girl, sprang to his mind. “What happened to my apartment? I left it open—”

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I locked it up for you. It was dark when I went over so I just shut the door. And don’t worry about your job, either, I’ll see you get it back when you get rehabilitated. There’s no reason why you can’t come back to work with…the way you are.”

Lansing’s mind was racing. “Thanks, Nick. I mean it. I…think I’d better rest now.”

“Sure, kid,” said Morelli. “I’ll come back to see you tomorrow.”

In the quiet of his room a sudden peace came over Lansing. It was incredible how it all fit so neatly together. He almost shivered with pleasure. He had killed the girl, and she had gotten her revenge; she was dead and he was alive. She had taken his foot, but he could live without it; he would learn to work and do everything else with it. And he would always have that secret knowledge of what he had done and that he had survived it. He began to smile to himself and drew his knees up, resting gently on the stump of his left leg, rocking slowly. I’ve beaten them, he thought, and even the image of his mother’s fingers dancing before him didn’t bother him now.

And then he heard the shuffling.

It was very faint at first, very far away, as if it were way down the corridor or outside his window on the street below, but it began to grow in volume. A cold shiver went through him, but then he suddenly remembered the dancing old man outside the subway station, only a few blocks away. He gradually relaxed. It must be someone like that—maybe even the same old man—shuffling up and down the halls of the hospital serenading the patients. He thought of how foolish he’d been before, letting it all get to him. It was not bad sounding, although it needed a little work on coordination. It got louder; obviously the dancer was working his way down the corridor and would reach his door in turn. He settled back against the pillows and thought of looking through his trouser pockets for loose change so that he could give it to the old man. He began to get a little drowsy.

The sound was very loud now; the dancer had reached his closed door and was tapping a beautiful, slow waltz. A smile came to Lansing’s lips.

“Come in, old man,” he called as the door inched open; he would now be able to see who was dancing so he could compliment him. The door opened all the way as the waltz ended.

There was no one there.

There was a squeak-shuffle and Lansing began to scream hysterically as two severed feet came into the room. They stopped before his bed and began to dance again, a fast-paced tap dance this time. Lansing screamed and screamed but no one came to help him. One foot, a graceful, feminine one, was covered with a ballet slipper and was doing most of the work, while the other, the foot of a man in a workman’s boot, seemed to be getting better as it followed the other’s example.

The dance ended, and after a short interlude for applause, another began.

Lansing, screaming and screaming, knew that the dance, the beautiful unending dance, would always be for him.

LIBERTY

By Al Sarrantonio

There’s a story they tell in Baker’s Flats that tells you everything you need to know about the town. It seems there was a Swede named Bergeson who moved in without permission from the town elders. He came from out East, and he was a little naïve because he assumed that since this was the United States, and that he was now a United States citizen, that he could go anywhere and do whatever he liked. Seems he believed all that business they fed him in Europe about this being the land of True Freedom and Golden Opportunity, and like any other poor fool who isn’t getting what he wants where he is, he packed up and got on a ship that sailed through the cold waters and came to America.

This was 1885, the year those Frenchmen were putting up that Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. I know because I was helping them do it, working for five cents a day and drinking four cents of it at McSorley’s. I like to think that this Swede, Bergeson, got a good look at it half finished, because that’s just about where Liberty stands in this country.

Anyway, to make a long story shorter, because I’ve got other things to tell, they found this Swede staked out on his land in the sun, naked, blue eyes wide with surprise more than fright, because he was a big man and wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. They found his legal deed to the land he owned stuffed in his mouth, and a circle of bullet holes outlining his chest where his heart had beat. There were seven holes, just as there are seven elders of the town of Baker’s Flats, and the story they tell is that these town elders went and killed the Swede Bergeson and made a solemn oath doing it, a pact if you will, that they would take it to their deaths and conspire against anyone who conspired against them.

That’s the story they tell, and I know the story because I came out West with the Swede, running from the law and the half-finished liberty that statue represented, looking for my own freedom, and eventually, unlike the poor Swede, finding it, which constitutes the rest of my story.

As I said, the Swede was a naïve man, but he was a good man at heart, and when he told me the story of the land he’d purchased out West, the farm waiting for him in a town called Baker’s Flats, a place so new and untamed that there wasn’t a sheriff; was, in fact, no real law for three hundred miles to any compass point, only seven town elders who constituted the law and meted out justice; well, when he told me these things in McSorley’s Bar, in New York, the night I met him, and I watched his blue eyes imagining the clear, hot plains, and the freedom they promised, we made a pact over the ale I bought him (because there is nothing in the world better than McSorley’s Ale for pact making) that I would go out West with him, and that we would fulfill our dreams together. He would have his farm, and his wide-open spaces, and his America, and I would have—well, a chance at real liberty.

We laid out by freight that very night. The Swede insisted on taking a coach train and showed me his money, which would pay for two passages, but I told him no, and told him as much as I could of my reason for it, and he was wise enough (though so naïve in other things) to see my point.

Our car was a cold one, but the Swede was used to the cold, even to the point of giving me his coat when he saw the distress I was in, his big, open face splitting into a smile as he said in his thick accent, “Take it. If two men can share a dream, they can also share a coat.”

The night passed slowly. We kept the car door slid open partway, because the Swede wanted to see the moon, which had risen white and stark over the east.

“The East,” he said, “is where stars rise, and the moon too.”

“But the West,” I answered, “is where we’re going, and where your face should be.” So I threw open the door on the other side of the car, and we looked out there together.

We talked about a lot of things that night, about our hopes and dreams for a better life, and he showed me the Colt and the Winchester he’d bought “for the Wild West,” as he called it, and somewhere, just as the sun was pushing the sky from purple to blue, he said the thing I had been hoping to hear, the thing that made me trust him as I’d hoped I could: “You don’t have to tell me what you’re running from. I don’t believe you did it.” And with that he lay down and turned his back on me and slept, and I sat looking out to the west, knowing my chance at liberty was safe.

We traveled a week by rails, till Reading, Pennsylvania, by boxcar, and then by first-class coach. The Swede insisted, showing me the roll of money he had saved and convincing me what I already knew: that the telegraphs weren’t likely to have my picture up on the wall out here yet, and so, this far from New York, I was no longer a wanted man. I balked a little at him spending his money on me, but only a little, because to tell the truth, I was getting sick of the bum’s life and craved a little cleanliness and a good cigar, and the Swede provided all this and good food to boot. And so on through St. Louis and then out to the territories, where the land got flatter but where, the Swede said, he could smell his new farm calling to him. I remember that day because it was the day he first showed me the picture he had of his wife and young daughter, and they were as blond as he was. The girl would be strong when she got older, and they would both join him when he was settled. I half wished, seeing the picture of that pretty blond girl, that she were here already.