HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

just stood there a bit taking in the tired scene: old regulars guzzling
their paychecks, couple of Westies talking loud at the bar.
What was to miss? When he brought my beer, Feeney nodded
toward the low-lighted rear.
“Back booth. That Carlos guy.”
That was him all right. Cuban or Puerto Rican I’d guess,
sallow with thinning black hair plastered down, new snowfall of
dandruff on the shoulders of a suit I’d be ashamed to steal.
Carlos looked like he started worrying in the womb. His eyes
never stayed on you but darted about nervously, grubby hands
with nails bitten down to the quick, stubbing out a cigarette in
an already crammed ashtray. But alive, breathing like me with
his nose buried now in a pint of ale.
“You’re Carlos.”
“Danny Morris? About time.” He swallowed more ale and
smacked his lips. “Runs like this I can at least get a decent
drink. By the way, nice clean job on Lenihan.”
“You work for Ender?”
“Courier and conductor.”
There was a familiar stamp on Carlos I knew from way
back. “You got a cop look.”
“Used to be. Undercover narcotics. You know, buy and
bust, now and then dealt a little on the side. Goodbye job and
pension.” Carlos finished his pint and checked his watch. “So
what’s it to be, amigo? You with us?”
Somehow the Yes stuck in my throat long enough for
Carlos to frown with impatience. “Come on, Danny boy. We
get lots of nobodys, but Ender says you’re special.”
Half in hell already but I had to know something for sure.
“He said Lenihan’s there now.”
“Sure he is. We get lots of Lenihans.” A shade of boredom
like Ender’s flitted over his wary narc expression. “Charley’s
the usual pain in the ass.”
“Usual?”
“He’s an explainer like all the rest. They sit there alone
telling the walls how nothing was ever right for them or their
own fault, or how they could’ve done so much more if they had
the breaks, and how their husband or wife dragged them
down—get the picture? They spent their lives doing that number;
why should now be different?”
Carlos leaned back with a sigh. “They never knew anything
else, like me, except I know it was me flushed my life down the
john. They were all scared to die but more afraid to live when
they had the chance.”
Lenihan gone to his reward. I finished my beer, thinking
okay, if my own life was a washout, at the end I got something
right. “Screw it. Let’s go.”
“Good man.” Carlos led the way past the bar but I tapped
him at the door. “Wait outside. Want to say goodbye.” I leaned
over the bar, my hand out to Feeney. “So long, Clary. Won’t be
around for a while.”
Feeney held onto my hand. He’s second generation, and
now and then he just knows things as if he had the Sight. “Slan
leat, Danny. I’ll be telling Father Reilly.”
That really touched me, how he’d said goodbye in the old
language. I remembered a few words of it from my dad. “Slan
agat, Clary. God bless you in the morning.”
From Ninth to Twelfth Avenue isn’t far. We ended up at
the door to a run-down warehouse—locked, but whatever
Carlos did, we had no trouble getting in. Not an impressive
road to Hereafter.
“This is where Timmy got whacked,” Carlos told me. “I
collected him myself. Nice guy,” he added as he led me through
the dust and shadows to a rust-stained metal door. “Just too
trusting. Here we are.”
We went down into a sub basement and then more subs
underneath, each older and dimmer than the last. Past abandoned
pipes, rotting asbestos and ancient machinery solid
brown with rust. The last one had a bare dirt floor and feeble
oil lamps along a passage more like a carved-out tunnel, always
downward until it opened out into a space so vast I couldn’t see
where it ended, if it did. The near part was gloomy enough
under a cold bluish light.
“How big is this place?’
“Big as it needs to be.” Carlos kept moving. “Walk faster,”
he snapped. “I don’t spend any more time down here than I
have to.”
As we went on toward wherever, I heard a blurred sound
that grew louder until I recognized human voices, hundreds of
them. “What’s that?”
Carlos clued me. “Like I told you, the explainers. That’s
what they do.”
“Just yak at each other all the time?”
“At the walls. You heard ’em for years in Feeney’s.
Nobody listened then; they don’t now.”
It grew darker, but as we moved on I made out men and
women sitting or standing alone, no two together but all of
them babbling urgently as if their whole existence depended on
someone somewhere finally understanding—
“ . . . he always beat me up bad when he was drunk, and I
took it and took for years, what was I to do, until Harry come
along, and, Jesus, it was only right after all Walter done to me
that Harry and me would want each other. At the trial I said
Harry killed Walter, the cops forced that out of me. Harry said
I done it but it was both of us. Okay, I bashed Walter’s head in,
but what else could I do . . . ?”
Someone I recognized sat on a stool turned away from
anyone close so he wouldn’t have to make any contact, I guess.
Tony Fiore who used to collect for loan sharks in the ‘hood.
Not a made Mafia guy but very persuasive at two hundred and
twenty-five pounds. Broke a lot of arms and kneecaps in his
time, but in this place Tony had shriveled to the nothing he was
inside—
“. . . I didn’t mean to lean on Hickey that hard, no way I
meant to kill him, but he was a month behind and smelled of
what he was drinking up when he should’ve been paying, and I
was sick of his bullshit, so . . . ”
The worst, frightening thing about them all—they never
stopped, these miserable leftovers. They were like tape loops
spinning out their pathetic excuses and then, no pause at all,
starting all over. None of them looked much like people any
more but what Ender said they’d made of their lives, warped
with decay. This place was a human garbage dump for people
like abandoned cars, rusted and gutted. It was hell, and all I
H .P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R 39