The Light at the End Read online

  “Now in,” said the voice, and Vance plunged the point into his navel.

  “Now out.” The blade slid away with a puckering sound.

  “Now in.”

  Officer Vance was slopping viscera all over his boots by the time Robert finally lost his mind. The young man bolted from his seat and attacked the end door, pissed himself and didn’t even know it. The door slid open almost by itself, and he staggered out into the space between, wind and thunder pounding at him as he screamed,”HELP ME! HELP ME! OMIGOD, YOU GOTTA . . .”

  Then the last of the empty 34th Street platform disappeared, and he was screaming at a wall in total darkness. His hands gripped the metal chain guardrail and clung to it with everything he had.

  Robert dimly heard the door slide shut, and leaned against it with a sigh of relief. The sound of Vance mechanically disemboweling himself could no longer be heard, and that was good, because if Robert had had to listen for one more second, he would have jumped.

  Jumped . . .

  Robert looked down. Even in the dark, even half-insane, he could tell that the ground was moving by very quickly. The part of his mind that still worked weighed his chances of survival. Not too good. He began to cry.

  Oh, Jesus Christ, they’re dead, they’re all dead, I’m gonna die! His thoughts tumbled all over each other like the bodies behind the door. The floor, split down the middle, wanted to rip his legs off and eat him alive; but he was losing his grip on the chain and the world. His strength was slipping away; he was sagging, sagging . . .

  The door rattled in front of him. Not the door, behind which the cop was still carving himself like a Christmas turkey and the walls were wearing William’s face. Not that one.

  The other one.

  The one that led to another car.

  The one that led to escape.

  Robert half fell across the platform, grabbing hold of the door latch and pulling. A crack appeared. He gibbered and extended its dimensions, struggling to his feet. . .

  . . . just as the dark train entered the 28th Street station, flooding him once more with light...

  . . . just as a rat the size of his foot squeezed through the crack, chittering in its own obscene tongue. Robert shrieked and booted it right into a pillar, slamming the door shut abruptly. He imagined that he could hear a thousand furry, filthy little bodies slamming against the other side, trying to reach him.

  Then, beyond imagining, he felt the red eyes boring into the back of his head. The window went cold, and he recoiled from it. The door slid open without resistance. And a hand . . . ancient, horrible . . . reached out for him.

  Without hesitation, he jumped.

  Robert experienced a moment of remarkable freedom, of triumph. Then he hit the first pillar and his neck snapped, mercifully, like a twig. He was dead before most of the damage was sustained.

  It was the best he could have hoped for. Under the circumstances.

  It was taking a joyride on the dark train tonight, cold steel slicing through the underbelly of Manhattan. Just as it had twenty years before, and twenty years before that, when the whole system of subterranean labyrinths was fresh and marvelous, before the taking-for-granted and the turning-to-shit. The more things change, the more they stay the same, it thought, savoring the brute constancy of humans and their achievements, no matter how far through the ages they slithered.

  It was over 800 years old, and didn’t look a day over seventy-five.

  Someone was giggling and whining in the conductor’s booth: crawling with spiders that nobody else could see. The ancient creature was amused, as usual. Boundlessly, terribly amused.

  The dark train barreled down corridors of endless night, heading toward 23rd Street and beyond. In the engineer’s booth, Donald Baldwin stared vacantly out at the tunnel, fingers locked on the throttle, cigarette butts stuck to the spilled Pepsi and blood at his feet. In the light from the tunnel walls, the meaty expanse of his throat twinkled and gleamed. And the controls cast bright reds and yellows on the shiny wet spots and streaks in his clothing.

  As they approached 23rd Street, Don Baldwin’s dead fingers pulled back on the throttle, and the dark train began to slow down.

  Way at the front of the downtown platform, Rudy Pasko was defacing subway posters. Evita’s eyes became two blackened pits. Blood rolled from the corners of her mouth in bold streaks of Magic Marker. The microphone stands had been turned into an enormous penis. And in large jagged letters, on either side, Rudy wrote:

  SHE EATS THE POOR

  AND MAKES SHELLS OUT OF HER LOVERS

  There was no joy in it. Rudy scowled at his handiwork for a moment, then moved down to see what he could do with Perdue’s Prime Parts. A cigarette dangled from the arrogant slash of his mouth. His eyes were dark, set back with mascara in the pale, bony face. There was an unpleasant tic around the right socket: too much speed, too much pent-up rage and despair. His hair was a bleached blond rockabilly pompadour. He was dressed entirely in black: tight jeans, artfully ripped sweatshirt, spiked wristbands, leather boots.

  Like Peggy Lewin, Rudy’s latest romance had come to a less-than-spectacular conclusion. Unlike Peggy Lewin, Rudy had not been drained of all blood and flung from a speeding subway. Also unlike Peggy Lewin, Rudy harbored no sugary illusions of love. Only nasty ones.

  Which was why he had the terrible fight with Josalyn. Which was why she threw him out of her apartment. Which was why he woke up his so-called best friend Stephen in the middle of the night, threatening suicide or murder or worse. Which was why he waited, alone, for the RR train to come, while Steve the Sap was no doubt putting some coffee on the burner.

  Curiously, now that he was alone, Rudy’s mind was almost completely silent. He stared at the twins in the poster, Smilin’ Frank Perdue and this enormous fucking sheep, and cracked up. The fight was forgotten. He thought only of those two ridiculous mammals, and how to enhance their appearance.

  Rudy was applying a business suit to the sheep’s likeness when the dark train rumbled into 23rd Street with a ratlike squealing of brakes. He shrugged, beyond caring, and quickly added a pinstriped tie. “A masterpiece,” he proudly proclaimed.

  The dark train ground to a halt and glared at him with its two blank eyes. Rudy took a last drag of his cigarette and chucked it onto the tracks. He leered at the man in the driver’s seat, slipped him the finger.

  Donald Baldwin leered horribly back.

  The doors opened, and Rudy noticed that there were no lights on the train. Then a very bad rush hit him with alarming force, and he staggered back a bit, puzzled.

  It’s nothing, he told himself. It’s nothing. Let’s go.

  He moved toward the open door, and the hair started to prickle on his arms. Rudy felt himself tightening up involuntarily, but he didn’t know why. His steps grew suddenly timorous, uncertain, and then the second rush hit him like a fist to the belly.

  “Jesus!”He doubled up slightly and stopped, just staring at the blackness inside the car. What’s happening? his mind wanted to know. He hung there, frozen.

  The doors started to close. Purely by reflex, Rudy jumped forward and grabbed for the opening. The doors flew open at his touch, and he hustled inside. The doors closed. Rudy watched them, panting. He pressed his face to the glass, took a last look at the Perdue twins. Suddenly, they weren’t very funny anymore.

  Something moved behind him, and he turned.

  The dark shape stood in the middle of the aisle, winking at him with luminous eyes. “How do you do,” it whispered, and light sparkled on the long sharp teeth.

  As the dark train resumed its terrible, downward roll.

  BOOK 1

  The Writing on the Wall

  CHAPTER 1

  Light struggled gamely against the storefront window with the words MOMENTS, FROZEN embossed on its filthy surface. If Danny’d ever scrubbed the sucker, the light just might have prevailed. But New York City grit is feisty, pernicious, and only a few diffused beams clawed their way into the
shop.

  Inside, Danny Young was thumbing through old movie posters, as usual. There was a little dust on Marilyn Monroe’s showgirl thigh; he brushed it lovingly away. Her angelfood face was so luscious, so tragic, that he found himself lost there for a moment, his four eyes gazing into her own.

  He pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up on his nose, ran a hand through his quietly receding hair. He was a tall, gangly man who seemed flash-frozen in 1968: flannel shirt, Grateful Dead T-shirt beneath it, jeans that were a threadbare excuse for a thousand-odd colorful patches. His love of the fantastic, of make believe, was stamped all over his long, clownish features. He couldn’t tell you what he had for breakfast yesterday, but he could tell you every bit player’s name in the original Thief of Baghdad: a movie made before he was born.

  “Oh, Marilyn,” he moaned, bending close to her, romantic. “I would have respected your intelligence! I would have given you serious, challenging roles! I would have done anything . . .”

  She smiled tenderly, understanding.

  “. . . to have you smile at me that way in real life!” He peeked around the room, a bit guiltily, though no one else was there, then he pulled the poster toward him and gave Marilyn a large wet smack on the lips.

  And, of course, someone walked through the door.

  “Oops!” Danny cried, dropping her like a hot potato. He flipped quickly ahead to a shot of King Kong and looked up, embarrassed, at his customer.

  Only it wasn’t a customer. At least, the odds were against it. It was Stephen Parrish; and while Stephen was a regular to the shop, he rarely, if ever, bought anything. He mainly just liked to hang out and talk, obsessively, about the strange concerns of young media freaks: movies, music, comics, books, and video.

  Danny liked Stephen, even though the kid didn’t know when to stop sometimes, and his dress was a weird blend of punk and preppie that came off looking silly as a six-legged beagle. True, he’d stopped combining LaCoste shirts with spiked wristbands; but he still seemed perpetually out of place, as if he were followed through life by the caption, What’s Wrong With This Picture?

  It was sad, but Danny could forgive him. Some good ideas always got batted around, and Stephen definitely knew his trivia. Every once in a while, Danny even saw some dollars out of the bargain.

  But this morning, Stephen looked pale and haggard, not well at all, from Danny’s perspective. It’s been that way ever since he started hanging out with that graffiti asshole, the pseudo-poet with the blackeye-liner . . . what’s his name?

  “Have you seen Rudy?” Stephen asked suddenly, as if in answer.

  “Nope,” Danny replied. “But have you seen this?”

  He reached into the next rack of posters and pulled out a beautiful coup: Dwight Frye as Renfield in the original Dracula, climbing up from the ship’s hold with crazed eyes and a lunatic’s laughter.

  Ordinarily, this would have made Stephen’s eyes pop open. But Stephen just muttered, ”This doesn’t make sense,” and went right back out the door.

  “Nice seein’ ya!” Danny called after him, then shrugged and scratched his balding head. “Wonder what’s up his ass,” he mused. Probably Rudy, three times a night, came unbidden from out of the blue. It made him laugh, but it wasn’t really very funny.

  It was depressing, in fact.

  “Oh, well,” Danny sighed, turning his attention back to Renfield. “I suppose we’ll just have to ask The Master, won’t we, if we want to know why Stephen is hunting a rat.”

  Renfield’s eyes, twinkling with secret knowledge, reflected on the thick glass of Danny’s spectacles. And faintly, in the back of the shopkeeper’s mind, played that mad and discomfiting laughter . . . .

  Stephen Parrish moved briskly down MacDougal Street, eyes scanning the sweltering crowd. Ninety-five degrees out and stickier than a bitch in heat, but the sidewalks were still crawling with life. Tourists, students, frustrated artists and burnouts: all parading through the Village like there was nothing better to do, sweating their silly asses off.

  We’ve probably got everybody in the western world here today, Stephen thought, except Rudy.

  So where the hell is he?

  There were several conflicting tides rolling through Stephen right then. The one that had stayed up all night for nothing was tired and pissed. The one that worried throughout was worrying still. The forever-voice of Reason was recycling old, lame explanations. And other voices, which made no sense, demanded to be heard nonetheless.

  Rolling in separate directions like that, his thoughts were taking him nowhere. He crossed Bleecker Street with the traffic, saw nothing useful, and decided to just sit in the park for a while. Maybe I’ll run into him there, he thought. Or somebody who’s seen him.

  But I doubt it.

  Sweat gathered in the short dark hair around his temples, ran in rivulets down his back and sides. He kept close to the wall, in a thin band of shadow. It helped, but not much.

  There was a pizzeria on the corner. An extra large bottle of Coke, with ice cubes all over it, danced in the back of his mind. Stephen moved toward that cold vision, smiling a little. For a moment, thought gave way to more basic biology.

  Then he passed the newsstand, and the Daily News headline screamed out for his attention. He stopped dead, staring. The Coke was forgotten. And something far colder flooded him with a terrible, dawning realization.

  It was raining Frisbees in Washington Square Park, but Stephen didn’t notice. Even when one zipped by an inch from his ear, he remained oblivious.

  Same went for the kids who were illegally whooping it up in the dry fountain; the cops who had to chase them out, even though they were roasting themselves; the jazz trio in one corner, the guitarist whacking off his Les Paul in another; the stand-up comedian surrounded by his howling, hysterical audience; the loose joint salesmen, rip-off artists, roller-skating homosexuals in tights, and would-be intellectuals of every shape and description. Not even the promise of a thousand ripe halter tops, dancing in the sun, could pull Stephen away from the nightmare.

  He took another absent swig of his beer and read the article again.

  8 DIE ON TERROR TRAIN

  Subway Ride Through Hell

  Leaves No Motives, No Clues

  “Police today are at a loss to explain the deaths of 8 people found slaughtered on a downtown RR train this morning. Nor can they explain why the victims—five youths, a transit patrolman, the motorman, and one unidentified man who appears to have been eaten by rats—all died in such horribly different ways.

  “And the lone survivor—the conductor of the train, whom TA spokesman Bernard Shanks declined to identify—has been hospitalized for ‘complete psychological collapse.’ The man, who was taken from the scene of horror at 5:17 this morning, is not currently regarded as a suspect.

  “A police spokesman stated that ‘we are still looking for a motive in what is certainly the most bizarre, horrible tragedy in recent memory . . .’”

  There was more, but Stephen had already gone over it ten times in the last twenty minutes. All to no avail. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find the black hole that appeared to have swallowed his friend.

  And yet he knew that it was there.

  “Dammit, Rudy,” he moaned, low in his throat. “Where are you? What happened?” He felt dizzy and weak, and he wanted to cry; but the tears, like the answer, refused to come. He was no closer to the answer than he’d been at 5:00 this morning, when the coffee was just beginning to grow cold.

  CHAPTER 2

  Joseph Hunter was hunched up behind the wheel of his delivery van, his muscular frame fighting for air space in the cramped cab, just waiting for the light to change. Midtown traffic being what it was, he’d been stuck on the same block of 38th Street for the last ten minutes. Fucking gridlock, he thought to himself. If I don’t get out of here soon, I’m gonna drive right over somebody’s car.

  There were a lot of cars blasting by on Fifth Avenue. Joseph watched them wearily, trying
to guess which one would be blocking the intersection when the light changed. “Who will die?” he asked them, indifferent. A black Volvo’s brakes squealed with terror.

  His beeper went off.

  “Oh, God damn!” he growled, reaching down quickly to silence it. He hated the thing, its insipid meep meep meeping sound. Like the alarm clock, the telephone, the school bells of his youth: it was the shrill, insistently whining voice of civilization itself. He hated the way that it dug into his side, clinging to his belt like a blood-bloated parasite, nagging like the world’s tiniest Jewish mother.

  Most of all, he hated the fact that his livelihood depended on it.

  Joseph shut the beeper up with a slap of his hand, unclipped it from his belt, tossed it contemptuously onto the dashboard. He was just reaching for his Winstons when he heard the scream.

  He glanced immediately at the rearview mirror. When she screamed again . . . it was a woman . . . he pinpointed her: pretty, fashionable, middle-aged, waving her arms and running up the sidewalk toward him. She screamed again.

  Joseph whirled around, trying to figure out what was going on. Then he saw the skinny black dude flying through the crowd, clutching something that might have been a football to his chest. Except it wasn’t.

  It was the woman’s purse. And she’d never be able to catch him, no matter how loud she screamed.

  “Son of a bitch,” Joseph mumbled under his breath. He threw the van in park and jumped out, the door slamming shut behind him.

  All the way to the curb, he couldn’t stop thinking about his poor crippled mother and the punks that messed her up. He couldn’t stop thinking about how much he hated New York, the human garbage that infested its streets. His mind was moving rapidly . . . much more rapidly than his feet. He pushed himself to go faster.