Posted by AlOmega on October 15, 2000 at 15:22:55:
This I could change with a little alteration into a Halloween story. Its macabra enough.....
Enjoy
Bolting upright, Sarah found herself awake, sweating as if summer was beating its thrombus of heat once
again. But it was winter not summer. What had wakened her? The sounds of alert city life crept under the
door and through the windows attempting to gather her in its clutches once again. But the clock rang
silently its 4: AM and dawn was still two hours away. Why?
Deep inside she knew. The city was alive seeking her. It didn’t know her but it wanted her. Quickly she
dressed - nondescript but sufficient to handle the cold. She had to get out.
The City had eyes.
It watched her from the glass squares set into its walls, walls that were sheer cliff faces of mortar and brick.
She held her breath, waiting for them to blink. No, not eyes, only windows. She kept walking.
And the street was not a tongue, a long black ribbon of asphalt flesh that would roll her into the city’s hot
jaws at any second. The parking meter poles were not needle teeth, eager to gnash. The City would not
swallow her here in front of everybody. The City kept its secrets.
And the people on the sidewalk - how much did they know? Were they enemy agents or blissful cattle?
That man in the charcoal-gray London Fog trench coat, the Chronicle tucked under his elbow, dark
head down, and hands in pockets. A gesture of submission or a crafted stance of neutrality?
The blue-haired lady in the chinchilla wrap, her turquoise eyeliner making her look like some psychedelic
raccoon. Was the lady colorblind or had she adopted a clever disguise? And were her mincing high-heeled
steps carrying her to a mid-level townhouse or was she on some municipal mission?
That round-faced cabby, his black mustache brushing the bleached peg of his cigarette, the tires of his
battered cab nudged against the curb. Were his eyes scanning the passerby in hopes of a fare, or was he
scouting for plump prey?
Sarah tugged on her belt, wrapping her coat more tightly around her waist. The thinner one looked, the
better. Not that she had to rely on illusion. Her appetite had been buried with the other things of her old
blind life, ordinary pleasures like window shopping and jogging. She had once traveled these streets
voluntarily.
Best not to think of the past. Best to pack the pieces of it away like old toys in a closet. Perhaps someday
she could open that door, shed some light, blow off the dust, oil the squeaky parts, and resume living. But
for now, living must be traded for surviving.
She sucked in her cheeks, hoping she looked as gaunt as she felt. The wisps of breezes that tiptoed up the
street - more carbon monoxide that oxygen - wasn’t even strong enough to ruffle the fringes on the awning
above that shoeshop. But she felt as if the breezes might sweep her across the broken concrete sending her
tumbling and skittering like a cellophane candy wrapper - sweeping her toward the City’s throat.
She dared a glance up the forty-story glass tower to her right. Eyes, eyes, eyes, more eyes. Show no fear.
Stare the monster in the face. It thinks itself invisible. Be invisible to it.
What a perfect blatant masquerade. The City was rising from the earth, steel beams and guy wire and cinder
block assembling right before their human eyes. Growing bold and hard and reaching for the sky, always
bigger, bigger, bigger. How could anyone - everyone - be so easily fooled?
Forget it, Sarah. Maybe It reads minds. And you don’t want to let it know what you’re up to. You can
keep a secret as good as It can.
She turned her gaze back down to the tips of her leather shoes. There, just like a good city dweller is
suppose to do. Count the cracks. Blend in. Be small.
Ignore the window front of the adult bookstore you pass. Don’t see the leather whips, the rude plastic rods
that gleam like eager rockets, the burlesque mockery of human flesh displayed on the placards. And the
next window, plywooded and barred like an abandoned prison. “Liquor” hand-painted in dull blue letters
across the dented steel door beside it.
All to keep us drugged, dazed with easy pleasure, Sarah knew. If it let us have our little amusements, then
we wouldn’t flee. We’d stay and graze on lust and drunkenness, growing fat and sleepy and tired and dull.
She flicked her eyes to the sky overhead, ignoring the sharp spears of the building tops with their antennas
for ears. The low red haze meant that night was falling. The City constantly exhaled smog, so think at times
that the sun barely peeped down onto the atrocities that were committed under its yellow eye. Even from
the vigilant universe, the City kept its secrets.
Sarah felt only dimly aware of the traffic that clogged the streets. No, not streets - the arteries of the City.
The cars rattled past with raspy breath and an occasional growl of impatience. In the distance, somewhere
on the far side of the city, sirens wailed. Sirens, or the screams of victims, face to face with the horrible
thing that had crouched around them for years. Cold and stone-silent one moment; alive and hungry the
next.
Can’t waste pity on them. The unwritten code of City life. Inbred indifference. Ignorance is bliss. A
natural social instinct developed from decades of being piled atop one another like cold cuts in a grocer’s
counter. Or was the code taught - learned by rote - instilled upon them by a stern Master who had Its own
best interests at heart?!
And what would Its heart be like? The sewers, raw black sludge snaking through its veins? The hot gas
furnaces that whistled in Its basements. Leaking steam pipes corroded and dripping chemical ecru. Or the
far-flung electrical plant, a Gorgon’s wig of wire sprouting from its roof, sending its veins into apartments,
stores, office towers, and factories so that no part of the City was untouched.
Or was It as she suspected, heartless? Just a giant meat-eating cement slab of instinct?
She had walked ten blocks now. Not hurriedly, but steadily and with purpose. Perhaps like a thirty-year-old
woman out for a leisurely stroll, headed to the park to watch from a bench while the sun set smugly over the
jagged skyline. Maybe out to the theater, for an early seat at a second-rate staging of .... anything actually.
Anything to keep It from thinking of someone trying to escape.
No. Don’t think about it.
She hadn’t meant to, but now that the thought had risen from the murky swamp of subconsciousness, she
turned it over in her mind, mentally fingering it like a mechanic checking out a carburetor.
No one escaped. At least no one she knew. They all slid, bloody and soft and bawling, from their mothers’
wombs into the arms of the City. Fed on love and hope and dreams.
Fed on lies.
She had considered taking a cab, hunching down in the back seat until the city became only a speck in the
rearview mirror. But she had seen the faces of the cabbies. Too robust, too thick-jowled. Such as they
should have been taken long ago? Oh, no. They were in on it.
And she shuddered at the thought of stepping onto a city bus, hearing the hissing of the air brakes and the
door closing behind her like a squealing mouth. And delivering her not to the outskirts, but to the belly of
the Beast. They were City buses, after all.
Walking was the only way. So she walked. And the night fell around her, in broken scraps at first, furry
shadows and gray insubstantial wedges. Lights cam on in buildings around her, soft pale globes and amber
specks and opalescent blue stars and yellow-green window squares. Pretty baubles to pacify the masses.
She felt the walls slide toward her, closing in on her under the cloak of darkness. Don’t panic, she told
herself. Eyes straight ahead. You don’t need to look to know the scenery. Sheer concrete, double doors
drooling with glass and rubber, geometrical orifices secreting the noxious effluence of consumption.
She thought perhaps she was safe. She was thin. But her sister Therese had been thin. So thin she had been
desired as a model, wearing long sleek gowns and leaning into the greedy eye of the camera, or preening in
bathing suits on mock-up beaches in high-rise studios. So wonderfully waifish that she had graced the covers
of the magazines that lined the checkout racks. Such a fine sliver of flesh that she had been lured to Los
Angeles on the promise of acting work.
They say she’d hopped on a plane to sunny California, was lounging around swimming pools and getting to
know all the right people. Sarah had received letters in which Therese told about the palm trees and open
skies, about mountains and moonlit bays. About the bit part she’d gotten in a movie, not much but a start.
Sarah had gone to see the movie. She’d sat in a shabby, gum-tarred seat, the soles of her shoes sticking to
the sloping cement floor. There she’d seen Therese, up on the big screen, walking and talking and doing all
the things that she used to do back when she was alive. Therese pale and ravishing and now forever young
and two-dimensional.
Oh, but putting her in a film could be easily faked, just like the letters. A City that could control and herd a
million people would go to such lengths to keep its secrets. All she knew was that Therese was gone -
gobbled up by some manhole or doorway or the hydraulic jaws of a sanitation truck.
And she knew others who had gone missing. Out to the country, they said. Away on vacation. Business
trips. Weddings and funerals to attend. But never heard from again. Some of them overweight, some
healthy, some muscular, some withered.
So thin was no guarantee. But she suspected that it helped her chances. If only she was light enough that
the sidewalk didn’t measure her footsteps.
She’d reached unfamiliar territory now. A strange part of the City. But wasn’t It all strange? Alien caves,
too precise to be man-made? Elevators, metal boxes dangling at the ends of rusty spiderwebs? Storm grates
grinning and leering from street corners? Lampposts bending like alloyed praying mantises?
The faces of the few pedestrians out at that hour were clouded with shadows. Did the white-arrow tips of
their eyes flick ever so slightly at her as she passed? Did they sense a traitor in their midst? Were they
glaring jealously at her tiny bones, the skin stretches taut around her skull, her meatless appearance?
The smell of donuts wafted across her face followed by the bittersweet tang of coffee. Her nostrils flared in
arousal in spite of herself. She looked into the window of a deli. Couples were huddled at round oak tables,
the steam of their drinks rising in front of them like smoke from chemical fires. They were chatting,
laughing, eating from loaded plates, reading magazines, acting as if they had all the time in the world. They
had tasted the lie and found it palatable.
She tore her eyes away. They traded pleasure for inevitability. Dinner would one day be served; and, they
would find themselves on the plate. The Main Course. Pale legs splayed indignantly upward, wire mesh at
their heads for garnish. Well she had no tears to spare for them. One chose one’s own path.
Her path had started about a year ago, shortly before Therese left. Not left, was taken, she reminded
herself. Sarah’s understanding had started with the television set. The TV stood on a Formica cabinet
against the sheetrock wall of her tiny apartment, flashing color images at her. Showing her all the things she
was being offered. Brand-new sedans. Dental floss and mouthwash. The other white meat. The
quicker-picker-upper. The uncola.
Television made things attractive, appealing. The angle of the lighting, eye-pleasing, color schemes,
seductive layouts and product designs. And all with faked people with straight teeth cutting white lines
across handsome tan faces. But behind those rigid smiles was the Fear. Fear masquerading as vacuousness.
Threatened puppets spouting monologues, the sales pitch of complacency.
She’d found other clues. The police, foe example. Never around when one needed them. Delivery vans
with unmarked sideboards, prowling at all hours. Limousines long and dark-glassed, advertisements for
conspicuous consumption. Around-the-clock convenience stores and neon billboards. A quiet conspiracy in
the streets unobserved among the bustle and noise of daily life. Everyone too busy grabbing merchandise to
stop and smell the slag-heap acid of the roses.
But Sarah had noticed. She’d seen how the City grew, stretching obscenely higher, ever thicker and more
oppressive and powerful. And she had made the connection. The City fed Itself. It was getting bloated on
the human hors d’oeuvres that tracked across its tongue like live chocolate-covered ants.
When one knew where to look, one saw signs of Its life. The pillars of filthy smoke that marked the
exhalations, the iridescent ribbons of Its urine that trickled though the gutters, the sweat of the City clinging
to moist masonry. Then there was the gray snowy ash of Its dandruff and the chipped gravel of Its sloughed
dead skin. And the crush of the walls, squeezing in like cobbled teeth, outflanking and surrounding Its prey.
And all the while spinning the serenade of sonic booms and fire alarms, automobile horns and fast-food
speakers, ringing cash registers, and clattering jackhammers.
Sarah had bided her time, staying cautious, not telling nary a soul. After all whom could she trust? Her
neighbors might have had an ear pressed to the wall. The City employed thousands.
So she had hid behind her closed door, the TV turned to face the corner. Oh, she had still gone to work
leaving every weekday morning for her post at the bank. It was important to keep up appearances. But once
home, she locked herself in and pulled the window shades. She turned on the radio, just in case the City was
using Its ears, but she always tuned to commercial-free classical stations. Music to eat sweets by.
Her workmates had expressed concern.
“You’re nothing but skin and bones. You feeling okay?”
“You’re getting split-ends, girl.”
“You look a little pale. Maybe you should go to the doctor, Sarah.”
As if she were going to listen to them with their new forty-dollar hairstyles every week and retirement
accounts and lawyer husbands and City Council wives and pantyhose and wristwatches and power ties and
deodorant. Sarah could only smile and shake her head and pretend. Took care of the customers and kept
her accounts balanced.
And she had plotted. Steeled herself. Gathered her nerve and slung her handbag over her shoulder and
walked out of the bank after work and headed downtown. She kept reminding herself that she had nothing
to lose.
And now she was almost free. She could taste the cleaner air, could feel the pressure of the hovering
structures ease as she drew nearer to the outskirts. But now darkness descended and she wasn’t sure if that
brought the City to keen-edged life or sent It fat and dull into dreamy slumber.
She passed the maw of a subway station. A few people jogged down the steps into the bright throat of the
tunnel. She thought of human meat packed into the smooth silver tubes and shot through the intestines of
the City.
She walked faster now, gaining confidence and strength as hope spasmed in her chest like a pigeon with a
broken wing. She could see the level horizon, a beautiful black flatness only blocks ahead. Buildings
skulked here and there, but they were short and squat and clumsy. The road was devoid of traffic, the
deadend arms of the City. The street lights thinned, casting weak cones of light every few hundred feet.
Her footsteps echoed down the empty street, bouncing into the dark canyons of the side alleys. The
hollowness of the sound enhanced her sense of isolation. She felt exposed and vulnerable. Easy meat.
Her ears pricked up, tingling.
A noise behind her, out of step with her echo.
Breathing.
The spiteful puff of a forklift, its tines aimed for her back? A fire hydrant, hissing in anger at her audacity?
The sputtering gasp of a sinuous power cable?
Footsteps.
A rain of light bulbs, dropping in her wake? The concrete slabs of the sidewalk, folding upon themselves
like an accordion, chasing her heels? A street sign hopping after her like a crazed pogo stick?
No. Not now. Now when she was so close.
But did she really expect that the City would let her simply step out of Its garden?
She ducked into an alley, even though walls gathered on three sides. Instinct had driven her into the
darkness. But then, why shouldn’t It control her instinct? It owned everything else.
And now It moved in for the kill, taking Its due. Now she was ripe fruit to be plucked from the chaotic
fields the City had sown, a harvest to be reaped by rubber belts and pulleys and metal fins.
She stumbled into a garbage heap, knocking over a trash can in her blindness. She fell face-first into greasy
cloth and rotten paper and moldering food scraps. She felt a sting at her knee as she rolled into broken
glass.
She turned on her back, resigned to her fate. She would die quietly, but she wanted to see Its face. Not the
face It showed to human eyes, the one of glass panes and cornerstones and sheet metal. She wanted to see
Its true face.
She saw a silhouette, a blacker shape against the night. A splinter of silver catching a stray strand of distant
street light, flashing at her like a false grin. A featureless machine pressing close, its breath like stale gin and
cigarette butts and warm copper.
Its voice fell from out of the thick air, not with the jarring clang of a bulldozer or the sharp rumble of a
tractor trailer rig, but as a harsh whisper.
“Gimme your money, bitch.”
So the City had sent this puny agent after her? With all Its great and awesome might, Its monumental
obelisks, Its omnipotent industry, Its cast-iron claws, Its pressurized fangs, It sent this?
The City had a sense of humor. How wonderful!!
She thought of that old children’s story “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”, how the smaller ones offered up the
larger ones to slake the evil troll’s appetite. She laughed, filling the cramped alley with her cackles. “A
skinny thing like me would hardly be a mouthful for you,” she said, the words squeezing out between
giggles.
She felt the City’s knife press against her chest, heard a quick snip, and felt her handbag being lifted from her
shoulder. The straps hung like dark spaghetti, and the City tucked the purse against Its belly. The City,
small and pale and - human(?). Now she saw It. The human machine had a face the color of bleached rags,
greasy gray mop strings dangling down over the hot sparks of eyes. Thin wires sprouted above the coin-slot
mouth. Why, he was young. The City eats Its young.
“You freakin’ city folks is all nuts,” the machine said, then ran into the street, back under the safe, sane
lights. Its words hung over Sarah’s head, but they were from another world. A world of platinum and
fiberglass, locomotives and razor blades. The real world. Not her world.
And as the real City awoke and busied Itself with Its commerce and caffeine, It might have seen Sarah
sprawled among the rubble of a run-down neighborhood, flanked by empty wine bottles and used condoms
and milk cartons graced with the photographs of anonymous children. It might have smelled her civet
perfume, faint but there, which she had dabbled on her neck in an attempt to smell like everyone else. It
might have heard the wind fluttering the collar of her Christian Dior blouse, bought so that she could blend
in with the crowd. It might have felt the too-light weight of her frail body, wasted by a steady diet of fear.
It might have tasted the human salt where tears of relief had dried on her cheeks.
It might have divined her dreams, intruded on her sleep to find goats at the wheels of steamrollers,
corrugated snakes slithering as endlessly as escalators among gelatin hills, caravans of television antennas
dancing across flat desert sands, and a flotilla of cellular phones on a windswept ocean of antifreeze, an owl
and a pussycat in each.
But if the City sensed these things, It remained silent.
The City kept Its secrets.
AlOmega